Escape From Kathmandu

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “What is it, then,” I said, feeling like I was waiting to hear a judge sentence me.

  “Nothing, George, really. Nothing. Relax. It’s just that my friends Gaubahal and Daubahal have just opened a new jungle camp down in Chitwan, and they need customers to get it going. You know, a place like Tiger View, only cheaper. They’ll give us eighty percent off if we go down there for a week.”

  “No,” I said. “I hate the jungle.”

  “Me too,” Freds said, “but Gaub and Daub have got a really cute place right on the border of Chitwan National Park, a bunch of new bungalows and viewing towers and all that. All we gotta do is eat and drink and lounge around watching birds and animals and all.”

  Dread began to fill me. “No way.” Of course I knew he was leaving something out. I wasn’t sure what, or why, but I knew it. The last time Freds had asked me for a favor, things had worked out such that I could still fit my whole body through one of the sleeves of my shirt. I knew I wasn’t ready for whatever he had in mind this time.

  “Come on, George. You look like you could use the R and R. I’m gonna do it, and it’d be a blast to have you along. They’ll take us on elephant rides and everything.”

  “No way. Not a chance.”

  II

  SO I WENT VACATIONING in Chitwan. We were picked up bright and early by a Land Rover already stuffed with West Germans who insisted they were not Germans but Bavarians, and the driving team took us west and south down onto the Terai, the lowlands of southern Nepal that are part of the Ganges plain. I used to enjoy drives in this direction, toward Pokhara and the wild west of Nepal; but now all I saw were roadside villages in ruins, with hungry faces staring in our windows.

  We arrived at the end of the road, deep in the boonies, and were met by our camp administrator Daubahal, who was looking worried. Apparently the camp’s Jeep was out of commission. The camp was on the other side of a shallow but wide river, and without the Jeep we were cut off from it, and without a place to spend the night. Crossing the river in the Land Rover was out of the question; it would have drowned. Daubahal, a small intent Hindu, conducted an anxious conversation over a walkie-talkie, and after an hour or so a line of elephants appeared on the other shore, drivers seated behind their heads. They forded the river slowly, at one point going shoulder deep. “How great,” Freds said. “We’re gonna cross on elephants.”

  So we were. The elephants were made to kneel, and we climbed up the rubbery skin of their bent legs onto enormous wooden saddles strapped to their backs. These saddles were actually square platforms, with wooden railings held up by wooden posts at the four corners. We sat with our legs wrapped around the posts, arms hanging over the railings, four to an elephant—not counting the drivers, who whacked the elephants when we were aboard to get them to rise, then climbed up their trunks and swung into position behind their heads. And we galumped into the river.

  It was the first time I had ever been on elephant back, and I was impressed by how high we were—say twelve or fifteen feet—and by how irregular our motion was. The platform had no flex, and our elephant’s gait tossed it around unpredictably. I learned that as elephants walk they put a leg forward, and hold it as stiff as a post as they move over it; then when the leg is somewhere past the vertical they let go and the leg gives abruptly at the knee. The platform’s corners, sitting on the creature’s four shoulders, rise slowly and then drop with the breaking knees, in a rhythm that I couldn’t discern. It was random motion, as if we were on a little raft and waves were rolling under us from every direction. If you were prone to seasickness it would have given you trouble, and an hour of it was likely to give anybody back pain for the rest of the day.

  So we made our way into the Chitwan jungle, moving under tall trees that Daubahal told us were saal trees. These were about forty or fifty feet tall, and spaced fairly far apart. Below them the groundcover was relatively sparse. It wasn’t like the jungle I had imagined, Amazon or Congo-type thick lush greenery; but it was pretty thick, and fairly green, and enough for me.

  We hove into camp around sundown and found it a pleasant circle of new wooden bungalows, with gravel pathways and flowering bushes and an elephant mounting platform and a mess hall with a big bar, which everyone descended on happily. It was the first time I’d ever seen a bar decorated in African Queen style where it didn’t look completely bogus, and we sucked down mai tais and fruit punch kamikazees until it seemed like a real good idea to have come down here, and went to bed by lantern light. Freds and I shared a bungalow.

  And for a while things seemed what they claimed to be. We vacationed in the jungle. As a fellow professional in the Nepali tourist industry I felt a little sorry for Daubahal, who functioned as our social director. Up in the Himal there is a lot to do just getting from place to place; here, we were here, and there was nowhere else to go. You couldn’t wander off by yourself, because it would be easy to get lost in the jungle, and something out there might trample or eat you. The Jeep was out of commission, so we couldn’t drive around on the little dirt tracks that someone had cut into the bush at one time or another. And the camp’s viewing tower had for some reason been built a good distance away from the circle of bungalows, so that getting to it at night would be a risky business, and they had no lighting system anyway, so you wouldn’t have been able to see any nocturnal activity even if you had ventured across to it. Since there was nothing to see from it by day, it stood there unused.

  That left elephant rides. Every morning we were awakened at dawn, and given a pre-breakfast elephant ride around the jungle. It was like spending hours on a somewhat dysfunctional painted metal horse in front of a K-Mart, one that bucked hard and irregularly. No one over the age of five likes to ride those things even when they’re working right, and often even little kids begin to wonder mid-ride if it is a really fun activity or not. An hour of it would tell them.

  Supposedly we were doing this to look for animals, but the truth is that most wild animals are shy creatures, and will run away if they hear you coming. So riding an elephant is not the best way to sneak up on them. And in fact we never saw a living thing. Except, that is, for an occasional rhino. Apparently their hearing and eyesight are poor, and judging by their expression, their IQ is no great shakes either; one look at a rhinoceros and you know immediately why the dinosaurs are extinct. It didn’t take a comet to kill those guys off.

  The rhinos we came across didn’t like our elephants, and the elephants didn’t like the rhinos. Whenever we sighted one the elephants would stop, and the rhinos would lumber out of their mudhole baths, then stand and squint at us. We would all go really silent, and the drivers would gently urge their beasts in the direction of the rhino, and there we would be, within twenty or thirty yards of a truly bizarre rubberoid creature, something like a cross between a tank and Mr. Magoo, with a dinosaur’s face and a deeply suspicious expression, looking just as out of place as if he’d been dragged up from the bottom of the sea and dropped there in the grass. No sound but the clicking of camera shutters. It was almost worth the elephant rides to see something as strange as that.

  Then the rhino would lumber off, and we would continue jouncing across seas of grass, back to the camp for a welcome breakfast and a return to bed. After a big lunch we would sit around, watching Daubahal squirm, and he would hunch his shoulders, and consult his clipboard, and finally raise his ballpoint as if he had just had an idea, and say brightly “Okay! For afternoon—elephant ride!” And everyone would groan loudly and complain about kidney injury or the lack of chiropractic coverage in their insurance, and most would refuse to do it, spending the afternoon in the bar drinking like sensible folk.

  But Freds of course loved the elephant rides. And he often talked me into coming along. It wasn’t all that hard, actually, because as a fellow tourist handler really I felt sorry for Daubahal. You tend to take it personally when clients groan and scoff and retch at your planned activities. So we would climb the stairs of the mounting platform and step on bo
ard, and ride an elephant around the jungle all afternoon—aimless, uncomfortable, bored.

  But I have to admit there were moments. We learned that the Chitwan jungle had distinct zones; a lot of it was saal forest, but then there were denser knots of smaller brush and trees; bamboo thickets; open stretches of elephant grass, which was aptly named, as it looked like ordinary grass, but fifteen feet tall (Freds said, “When I buy a house in suburbia I’m gonna plant this stuff, can you imagine?”); and a number of open gravel zones, seamed by shallow rivers. Occasionally we’d come across a rhino, or see a spotted deer running away. Once we caught a glimpse of a jackal. Colorful birds flashed by, including one blue and bronze thing that looked like it was made of jewels. And down by one of the streams, imprinted deep in the sand, were the perfect tracks of a tiger. A cat-print as big around as my outstretched hand. “Holy moly,” Freds said, leaning over till he was almost falling off. “That’s one big tabby, eh?” The Bavarians took photos of the prints; that was as close as we were going to come to a tiger at our camp, and looking down at the prints, I wasn’t sorry.

  And then one afternoon, galumping home at sundown, we came to a clearing by one of the streams and could see a range of hills to the north, one of the first thrusts of the Himalayas, mere green hills but probably ten thousand feet tall for all that, and as I jolted along it occurred to me that I was on the Indian tectonic plate while that range was on the Asian plate, and I could sort of see it, sort of feel the collision (an up-and-down bump and grind), and the last rays of the sun turned the air a dark smoky red, and bronzed the elephant grass, and Freds looked at me with his crazed grin, and a bone-jarred little glow filled me. I could have been stuck in traffic on an L.A. freeway at that very moment, and instead I was in the middle of Asia, on elephant back in the jungle. I couldn’t help grinning back at Freds.

  So, aside from the damage accruing from twelve hours on elephant back in only three days, there really was nothing wrong with our vacation in the Royal Chitwan Jungle Camp. Compared to what Freds had put me through the last couple of times we had traveled together, it was lightweight indeed. Naturally this made me extremely uneasy. Suspicion and unfocused dread grew in me nightly as nothing in particular happened. The tiniest incidents fueled my alarm—Freds disappearing for an afternoon, for instance. Or the sight of him talking to one of the elephant handlers. “Freds, I thought you said you don’t speak Nepalese.”

  “I don’t, George, I speak Tibetan.”

  “And that elephant handler is Tibetan, I suppose.”

  “Right.”

  A Tibetan elephant handler. Think about it.

  I did, one night in the bar, and it made me nervous. To stave off nameless dread I drank kamikazees, and soon I felt better. Then it seemed I felt a little too good, and I staggered to our bungalow and crashed.

  I don’t know how much later it was that Freds roused me, by rolling me out of my bed onto the floor. Sometime in the middle of the night; I was still drunk, so much so that I couldn’t remember where I was. But when Freds said “Come on, George, I need your help,” I had enough of my wits about me to cry “No!” and try to crawl under the bed.

  But Freds dragged me out. Unfortunately I had retired with my clothes still on, and he jammed my feet into my boots. “Come on,” he said in an excited whisper. “We just need you to look after Sunyash for an hour or so whilst Dawa and I check out this cave we’ve found.”

  “Sunyash?”

  “You know, the biggest elephant.”

  III

  I DID NOT KNOW the biggest elephant. But when Freds dragged me out to the mounting stand I recognized her, having spent several hours on her back getting well acquainted with her—with the loose wrinkled gray skin that slid back and forth over her massive shoulders as she lumbered along, and the pink splotches on the back of her neck, and the dozen strands of hair on her head, each as thick as a pencil lead. An impressive beast, and very well handled by her driver Dawa, who was already in position, seated on her neck with his bare feet hooked behind the tops of her ears. Elephant drivers control their charges with an iron rod that looks a lot like a fireplace poker, except it is sharper at the business end. Many of the drivers at the camp used their rods ruthlessly, whacking the elephants on the left or right side of the head to get them to change direction, and poking them with the sharp end to make them go forward when they were reluctant; some drivers drew blood on every trip. There were a couple that were gentler, however, and Dawa was one of those; he drove Sunyash by talking to her, or at the most kicking her lightly with his heels. I had never seen him use his rod.

  Now he and Freds conversed in Tibetan, and suddenly I could see even in the dark that he looked Tibetan; he looked like the Khampas of Shambhala. Suddenly it finally penetrated that Freds had said something about investigating a cave.

  “Freds,” I said as we lumbered off. Though I was sobering fast I had to hang on tight to the platform railing, my saddle-sore legs wrapped around a corner post. “What are you doing to me this time.”

  “Nothing, George. Just a ride. Besides, when have I ever done anything to you?”

  I wanted to hit him, but couldn’t spare a hand. “You stuck me in a snow cave for a night on the south summit of Everest,” I said angrily. “You made me crawl in the Kathmandu bureaucracy for a month! You used me for a bridge.”

  “Not on purpose. Besides tonight ain’t gonna be like that.”

  “Tell me what’s happening or I’ll jump overboard right now.”

  “Now don’t be hasty, I was just about to tell you, as soon as we got good and away from camp.”

  “So spill. What’s this about a cave.”

  “Well, you know the tunnel system that we used when we made our attack on Chhule? That is one big tunnel system, bigger than you might expect, and there’s a whole lot of it under Kathmandu itself, but with all the recent construction there most of the entrances have been built over or blocked up. That’s making trouble for the folks in Shambhala, because they’ve been using the tunnels to transport things and get down to Kathmandu unseen—”

  “Wait a second,” I said, feeling kamikazees slosh around inside me in a sickening way. “You’re telling me that there are tunnels from Shambhala all the way to Kathmandu?”

  “Oh yeah! Yeah! There’s tunnels everywhere under the Himal. And a big network under Kathmandu.”

  I tried to comprehend this.

  “But now they’ve got a problem with the Kathmandu exits all getting blocked up,” Freds said, “and they want to relocate an old opening down here in the Terai. This one was pretty much forgotten in the last few centuries, and Dawa and I have been cruising around a little trying to find it, and we think we have, but damned if it isn’t right next to Tiger View.”

  “Right next to Tiger View.”

  “Yeah that’s one of the big expensive camps over in the park, like Tiger Tops. There’s a little rock outcropping just to the south of this Tiger View camp, and there’s a cave there that Dawa is pretty sure is one of the entrances to the tunnel system. So we need to check it out at night.”

  “Aren’t there a lot of tigers around Tiger View at night?”

  “Yeah, but Sunyash will keep them away.”

  I sighed. “Freds, why am I here?”

  “To do good on this earth, George. That’s why we’re all here.”

  “I mean why am I here with you tonight? Why did you bring me along?”

  “Dawa and I are gonna check out this cave and make sure it’s the tunnel entrance, and while we’re doing that we need someone to stay with Sunyash so she doesn’t wander off. It’ll be simple.”

  I was feeling too queasy to answer for a while. Finally I said, “You lied to me. You said this was just a vacation.”

  “Well, I thought I’d better leave this part out so you wouldn’t worry. Think of it as a treasure hunt.”

  “A treasure hunt at night, in a jungle with tigers. On the back of a stolen elephant.”

  “She ain’t stolen, we
’re only borrowing her.”

  I gave up.

  Sunyash continued to crash through the forest, under the canopy of saal trees. There was a half moon up, so there was a bit of light—shapes black on black, and the occasional moonbeam defining eerie trees and drooping vines. Sunyash made too much noise for us to be able to hear anything else, but when Dawa stopped her to have a look around, the sound of the night jungle wrapped around us like a good soundtrack: creaks, rustles, insect chirps, the distant cry of a bird, the low cough of an animal. It was much junglier than in the light of day, and the knowledge that tigers were making their nocturnal rounds added an edge that wasn’t there when the sun was out. Freds was probably right in saying that no tiger was going to stick around while an elephant walked by, but still, it made me nervous.

  On we rocked for a long time, so long that I almost fell asleep. Then Freds nudged me and I saw a glow off to our right; “Tiger View,” he said. “Those are the lights they put on so they can see tigers.”

  “Ah.”

  “We’re getting close. It’s somewhere up here.”

  “Fine.”

  Through the dark we moved. I settled in over my post and railing.

  Eventually Dawa brought Sunyash to a halt. At first it looked the same as anywhere else to me, and then I noticed that there in the moonlight was a small dark hill—a stony knoll covered by shrub, with several small saal trees growing out of its top. The spotlights from Tiger View were still nearby, but now behind us—between us and our camp, I judged.

  Freds and Dawa slid off Sunyash. “Hey!” I said.

  “We’re tying her to this tree,” Freds said up to me. “Keep your feet on her back so she knows you’re there. We’ll be back as soon as we can, probably won’t take more’n an hour.”

  “Hey!” I protested. But they were gone. I was left alone on the back of an elephant, in the middle of the jungle at night. Classic Freds operation, here. Still, as nervous as I was, it struck me as minor compared to the situations he had thrust me into before. I settled down with my boots placed firmly on Sunyash’s broad back, and she settled down before a clump of bamboo to indulge in a midnight snack, and drunkenly it seemed to me that I was getting out of this one pretty cheaply. It wasn’t even that cold. I was used to going outside at night in Nepal and immediately freezing, but down here in the Terai it was only a bit cool and clammy, and I was sitting right on top of a pretty effective heater at that. So I put my chin on the rail and tried to ignore the night jungle noises, and catch some z’s.