Kingdoms in the Air Page 4
As shadows lengthen, aproned Tibetan women begin filling the four tiers of brass butter lamps that ring the base of the stupa, a signal for me to unfold my legs and wander over to the observation platform that overlooks the valley and watch the sunset. But it’s the northeastern view that most engrosses me, out across the city, beyond the knob of otherworldly Bhaktapur and the honey-colored sweep of terraced fields, toward the valley’s rim, four thousand feet above, where, were it another season, one could reasonably hope to see the clouds opening and closing on the high peaks, the illusion of ideal worlds appearing and disappearing.
Here’s the story of Swayambhu and it begins with a geologic fact: Once upon a time, the Kathmandu valley was a vast shimmering lake cradled by its present-day bowl of mountains, where the first Buddha pitched a lotus seed. Eighty thousand years later, the darn thing blossomed magnificently, rising out of the water as big as a chariot wheel, a thousand-petaled flower bursting with rays of light: Swayambhu, the light of the self-created. For the next however many aeons, the first tourists, gods and kings, crowded onto the surrounding mountaintops to marvel at the paradisiacal radiance of Swayambhu, adding to the future Nepal’s growing expat community of deities, since plenty of the drop-bys determined the lake-filled valley with its dazzling lotus to be a pretty good place to settle down. Then one day another Buddha, Manjushri, showed up and smote the valley rim at its lowest point with his sword, creating the Chobar Gorge at the valley’s south end, through which drained the lake. But the immutable light of Swayambhu remained, its lotus transformed into a hillock upon which, sometime around the fifth century, Buddhist monks began to build a stupa, burying the god-sent light beneath a stone slab to protect it from the dark age that humans have dwelled in ever since.
A fine tale, of course. Another cartoon-colored, hallucinogenic panel in the frescoes of Kathmandu. And yet what did the sage Dubby Bhagat tell me? “It’s the mythology that keeps this country together—the stories, the narratives of the people.” Even the ruins of a nation exhale its stories.
I stare off across the luminous nightfall of the world’s most exotic valley to observe another Swayambhu levitate in the east above the storybook kingdoms of Bhutan and Sikkim, a glistening white stupa that swells and completes itself and becomes the full moon, and I suddenly recall that the wonderful Spanish phrase a dar luz—literally, “to give light”—means to be born. Buddha is 2,541 years old today, which is about how many butter lamps, now lit, encircle the shrine, the spectacular birthday cake of Swayambhu, innumerable tiny petals of flame winking in homage to the awakened self, like the starlight within jewels, or within Kathmandu’s ancestral heart, a mystery so consolingly beautiful that you never want to have to explain it, or hear it explained.
The night turns milk-blue, ghostly, vaporous. The city animates light, and amplifies everything within a life. The self crackles in the ether like a sheet of electricity, and the celebrants flow back down the hill to suffer the contentments of mortality, having communed however briefly with the dreaming mind of god.
Darkness, said Martin Luther King, cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that.
PART THREE
The Land of Lo
(2001)
The Land of Lo
One hundred and fifty million years ago, when there were not yet Himalayas to climb or die on, the air currents bouncing our little plane were a sea breeze, moderate or not, and these mountains lay darkly within the ocean floor, a chain of eggs from an underworld serpent, unimaginable in their greatness, and no one to imagine them anyway except the gods.
But in the expansive geologic minute, eighty million years later, the Indian subcontinent shuddered into wakefulness and began to butt its crown into the vast landmass of Central Asia. Where the plates met, the earth’s crust folded upward, ever upward to the present day—Everest’s summit rose three inches last year alone—thrusting snow peaks through seabeds and into the stars, forming a virtually unbroken axis fifteen hundred miles long. Only in a few places along this axis from Pakistan to Burma did the Asian continent’s rivers breach the dam of the Himalayas, creating in one such place—like a cosmic ax-chop eighteen thousand feet deep between the Annapurna massif and Dhaulagiri—the second-deepest gorge in the world, cut by the Kali Gandaki River, which is where we found ourselves flying this early morning in May, the sheer flanks of the gorge thrusting far above our wings.
One learns immediately that any traveler’s tale of Mustang begins with the cruel and ubiquitous wind. The tectonic instability of the Himalayas expresses itself in occasional earthquakes, but the clash of atmospheric forces is a daily affair, especially during the monsoon season, when the subcontinent’s moisture-laden low pressure systems slam headlong into the Himalayas’ southern face, and the arid high pressure systems of the Tibetan plateau push and push against the northern slopes. In this breach—the Kali Gandaki Gorge—the isobars of wind pinch like an ocean current through a narrow cut in a barrier reef. Planes flying up the gorge from Pokhara, in the southern foothills, to Jomsom, on the northern slope, leave shortly after sunrise or not at all. Any later, and the surge of subcontinental winds tossed by high-altitude thermals and pop-up squalls make the flight reckless, if not impossible.
“There are a hundred thousand ghosts flying in those Kali Gandaki winds,” Nepal’s aviation pioneer, the Swiss pilot Emil Wick, once remarked. It is, however, one of the world’s most spectacular and thrilling flights, needling between two of the highest mountains on earth—a flight where you never see much sky but look up, at the snowfields, or out, at the waterfalls and rhododendron forests on the vertical hillsides. Down changes moment by moment, from treetop level to plunges measured in thousands of feet. The flight takes less than forty minutes in a De Havilland Twin Otter STOL. To walk the same distance takes a week, up and up out of the dripping, flowered forests into the Himalayan rain shadow, a land so barren and unforgiving that the Lobas themselves—the indigenous people of Mustang, called Lo in Tibetan—describe their own geography as the desiccated, bleached carcass of a horse, the wind trumpeting through its rib bones on an endless heap of rocks.
Despite Mustang’s harsh enchantment, we would ride from Jomsom for thirteen days, to the Tibetan borderlands and back, and rarely think otherwise.
Past Dhaulagiri’s sinister icefall tumbling out through a ceiling of charcoal clouds, the Twin Otter begins its nauseating descent toward Jomsom’s landing strip, and in the sudden pitch downward, I stop thinking it’s so hilarious that my seat belt is attached to an eyebolt by a bungee cord. No sooner are we out of the plane with our gear than it reloads with trekkers and traders and pilgrims and begins to taxi for the return hop to Pokhara, the orange windsock above the terminal offering a limp salute. Though we are a hardy group, we are not professional mountaineers, and we stand stunned, astounded, there on the apron, gaping at 23,166-foot Nilgiri, rocketing into the heavens from the opposite side of the airstrip and glazed with brilliant sunlight, as close as most of us will ever get to a Himalayan summit. Then the cloud bank to the east shifts, revealing the back side of the Annapurnas and a cornice the size of a supertanker, hung on the crest of a frozen tidal wave. The miracle of the Himalayas is this: Every time you look, every second you look, you are seeing the mountains, trying to believe the mountains, for the first time. There is no sense of Oh I get it, no internal message of Been there, done that. For once in your life, the newness is eternal.
And for the sunny, frontier town of Jomsom, so, apparently, is change. The airport’s paved apron, begun two Decembers ago, would be completed in five days, allowing turboprops to land. Then, the construction crew tells us, the government will begin to build a road up the gorge from Pokhara to Jomsom, which will eventually continue on to Lo Manthang, the traditional capital of Mustang and Asia’s only surviving walled city, already connected by a Chinese-sponsored road to the Tibetan border. The project, though, has more than enormous financial and technical diff
iculties to overcome. The mule skinners, who freight cargo between China and Pokhara, and pack trekker’s gear up and down the old salt trade routes through Mustang, have objected. So have the agencies and individuals who don’t want mass tourism in the kingdom, although the Nepalese government was mulling the idea of lifting Mustang’s restricted status and lowering its seven-hundred-dollar entrance fee. And so, most significantly, has New Delhi, which abhors the doomsday possibility of Chinese troops trucked across Mustang and down through the Himalayas to the Indian border.
But with or without a road, Jomsom thrives, its guesthouses and cafés filled with windburned Germans and Australians and Israelis. As a destination, Jomsom is a way station or the end of the road for trekkers on the Annapurna circuit coming down from Thorung La pass. Or a staging area for expeditions like ours up to Lo Manthang, fifty linear miles and three centuries away, and a rendezvous point for thousands of Hindus making a pilgrimage to the sacred cave of nearby Muktinath, many of them affluent Indians who stay in the comfort of a five-star hotel built on a mesa above the town. As a political entity, Jomsom is the seat for Mustang’s elected governor, the liaison between the government in Kathmandu and Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista, the twenty-fifth raja—or, as he is commonly but incorrectly called, king—of the autonomous region of Mustang. As a cultural and ecological entity, Jomsom, and all of Mustang, is regulated by the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP), a Nepalese nongovernmental organization funded by the royal family’s King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation. ACAP’s influence, as evidenced by its sign forbidding the use of plastic bags in Mustang, was a benign force to be reckoned with by both foreigners and locals, a sort of Big Didi watching over the land and its creatures.
Breaking the spell of Nilgiri, we transfer the elation of our arrival from the snow peaks to the gleaming smiles of Ang Tsering, who will be the trip’s sardar, Chhundi, the cook, and their crew of Sherpas, already organizing our mountain of gear. The Sherpas, who live in the Solu-Khumbu, the Everest region of eastern Nepal, have never been to Mustang either, though they share a Tibetan lineage, language, and religion with the Lobas. A reunion takes place: Laird and his wife, Jann, seasoned trekking guides throughout the Nepalese high country, have worked with the cheerful Ang Tsering and Chhundi before and they have joined the expedition at the Lairds’ request, their competence essential to our success on the trail. In the whirl of activity, hasty introductions are attempted. There are seven of us queris, including my own wife, Cat; Mark, our friend from Santa Fe; and the Bangkok Bachelors, Captain Jack, a Vietnam vet, and Michael, a former Peace Corps volunteer in the terai, friends of the Lairds who arrived in Kathmandu from Thailand two nights earlier like beaming monkeys, stewed in whiskey and well ingested with recreationals. With Ang Tsering and Chhundi are four porters—Ang Dawa, Ang Naru, Chaapten, and Biri. By my count, the expedition has expanded to fourteen members, including the central government’s liaison officer—Raju, we’ll call him—who attached himself to us in Pokhara, since it is illegal to journey into Upper Mustang or any restricted area without some variety of cop shambling along. We stroll up Jomsom’s one rocky street to a nearby guesthouse for tea. The time is 6:40, with the fullest of days ahead of us.
In the courtyard of the guesthouse, we concentrate on the serious business of repacking our duffel bags for the mules that will carry our kit up through the gorge to the Tibetan plateau. Although the Sherpas will tote the kitchen on their backs in Mustang, ACAP, for environmental reasons, and local mule skinner politics, for reasons of survival, discourage the use of trekking porters, so common to Himalayan expeditions. With the gear reshuffled, we face a four-hour wait for the horses to be brought in from the countryside. Laird and Jann disappear on errands; the Bangkok Bachelors are laid out under the blanket of their hangovers; for Cat, Mark, and myself, the stress of traveling halfway around the world, the four-thousand-foot jump in altitude from Pokhara, and the adrenaline of arrival have made us squirrelly and disoriented and so we head out into the crisp, sun-blasted air of Jomsom for a calming stroll.
The road out of town is lively, an Old West mix of animals, villagers, and pilgrims—horses and mule trains, goats and shepherds, solitary dhzos like shaggy Texas longhorns, self-involved schoolchildren, porters hauling lumber north into the desert, shopkeepers on their stoops, orange-robed sadhus off to Muktinath, a toylike Chinese tractor hauling a wagonload of laborers. We pass a Nepalese army outpost and its mountain warfare training school, a sleepy bivouac unconcerned about the Maoists shooting up police stations to the south and west. The Kali Gandaki, out of sight below the airstrip, now parallels the road, its khaki-colored water foaming across rapids. Ahead, a perfectly reliable steel-girded suspension footbridge spans the fast-rushing river, leading to the more serene streets of Old Jomsom, its mud-walled houses and government offices, and over we go but slowly, holding my wife by the hand, since swinging bridges give her vertigo and usually, now in fact, she has to be dragged across them, eyes closed or at least averted from the imaginary fall.
At the edge of town, we cross back over the river and sit upon a pedestal of rocks at road’s end, gazing up the valley, the spare pastureland hugging the west bank filled with herds of goats that move in the distance like swarms of dark brown bees, the vast expanse of the Kali Gandaki’s rubble-strewn bed and graveled floodplain, a thousand-lane highway rolled down between canyon walls, a slumbering monster undulating extravagantly across its Mississippi River–size bed, the bald, tormented hills beyond rising to the Tibetan plateau, and to the east and west imposing twin fences of twenty-thousand-foot peaks that box the northward thumbing of Mustang into China.
What we are about to do—ride horseback up the canyon—wouldn’t be possible in another month, when the monsoons win their elemental battle with the Himalayas, and the river turns furious, its torrents swelling across the glacial plain, expanding to a hundred times its dry-season level and forcing travelers to the harrowing footpaths along the cliffs. Even now, on the eve of the rains, riders bound for Lo Manthang exit the canyon early for the trails over the high passes at Chelli, avoiding the overnight journey through the fabulous but virtually impassable upper gorge of the Kali Gandaki, but we are going through the gorge as well.
I had grown up riding horses, spent much of my life around them, have owned them, broken them, foaled them, swam with them, fallen with them, watched them die unnecessary deaths, but up that canyon, and on the loose-rock walls above it, I was about to find out that I had never really known before just what a horse can do, or what I would be willing to do on a horse, or the insanities that could be enacted by horse and rider.
Up-Canyon to Kagbeni
Time to mount up, but where are the horses?
Laird knows. The horses—the king’s horses, mind you; Laird has cut some sort of deal that will end badly—have been brought down from Lo Manthang, where they have grazed and galloped all their horsey lives in agrarian bliss, never having to bear the insult of sharing the road with a diabolic machine. Their handlers—Mahendra, the king’s horseman, and his young round-faced assistant, Tomay—are afraid that an encounter between the horses and one of Jomsom’s Chinese tractors will not go well, and they wait for us on the northern edge of town.
The wind, which started to make its presence felt around mid-morning, bowls powerful gusts at our backs, churning dust into the air. Across the river past the Jimi Hendrix Rooftop Restaurant, our horses cluster on the dirt lane near the second bridge, standing in the precious shade of neem trees planted on the bank above them. The king’s horseman begins the inexact science of sizing us up and assigning mounts. Laird and I are the only experienced riders in the group; the Bangkok Bachelors, unadulterated greenhorns, are cocksure they can manage anything they are required to straddle. Our grimacing wives are overtly brave but secretly panicked. In her incipient life as an equestrian, Cat, with a mere two hours’ credit on a lazy trail ride in Florida, is nevertheless game to bond with her pony, a d
oe-eyed white mare that she is hoisted upon, Mahendra on one side lifting, untangling her swing leg from the saddlebags, and Tomay on the opposite side counterbalancing the saddle and, if necessary, catching, since our heavy day packs skew our balance.
“What’s her name?” my wife asks, settling her backside into the Tibetan carpets spread over the broad wooden frame of the saddle. Mahendra says a word that sounds like cow. “Cow? Oh no!” Leaning to pat the mare’s neck, she rechristens her Cowgirl. Apparently invigorated by her new name, Cowgirl takes off, shoving her way through the pack toward the empty road ahead. Dashing forward, Mahendra grabs the reins from her fists and we are all instructed in Loba horse-talk. The command Cho! or tchew!, a phonetic cousin of Whoa!, means Move it! Go! The same double-click of the tongue that Westerners use to tell a horse Giddyap is the Loba command for Stop! The information is of course counterintuitive. Our brains absorb the lesson but our tongues are readily confused and the horses, neither bilingual nor mind readers, are doomed to be continually puzzled by our desires.
Mahendra hands the reins back to my wife. Cowgirl plods ahead. “Stop!” yells Cat. Cowgirl won’t. We yell at Cat to click her tongue, pull harder on the reins, but now the stubborn horse has a stubborn, advice-resistant rider, and Tomay ties Cowgirl’s lead rope to a rock so we can finish mounting the rest of the expedition.