Bruce
Chatwin - Qu'est-ce que je fais là ?
"On Yeti Tracks
This April,
having spent the hottest part of the year in the
Central Australian desert, I felt the urge to get
out of that tired red country and clear my head
among some mountains. I had always wanted to walk
in the valleys around Mount Everest and remember,
as a boy, going to a slide-lecture of the
Hillary-Tensing climb and forming a very vivid
impression of rivers rushing with snowmelt, bamboo
bridges, forests of rhododendrons, Sherpa villages
and yaks. I wanted to see the Tibetan Buddhist
monasteries that lie on the Nepalese side of the
frontier. As for the Yeti, I wanted to explore, at
first hand, that nebulous area of zoology where
the Beast of Linnaean classification meets the
Beast of the Imagination.
From Sydney, I
called my wife and told her, firmly, to meet me in
Nepal.
'I can't,'
Elizabeth said in a dispirited voice. Her
favourite aunt was having her ninetieth birthday
party in Boston.
'The offer's
open,' I said. 'Call me if you change your mind.'
'I've changed
it.'
The Everest
region is known as Khumbu Himal and to reach it
you must either trek for a week over three high
passes, or fly to Lukla where the airstrip tilts
off the mountainside at an angle of 250. The
weather was foul: a series of cyclones in the Bay
of Bengal had made nonsense of the forecast. Twice
we took off, ran into turbulence, and returned to
Kathmandu. On our third try, the pilot nosed the
plane under a purplish cloudbank, threaded along a
forested valley, and finally approached the runway
from below rather than above.
The passengers
cheered as we bounced onto the gravel; the bags
were chucked clear and, as the plane reloaded, we
took our first gulps of thin air. Sir Edmund
Hillary could be seen striding about shaking hands
with a film crew. High above, I heard a cuckoo,
not a kookaburra, calling. Then Elizabeth, who is
also an amateur botanist, pointed to a tree with
huge white flowers that seemed to hang out of the
clouds.
'Look!' she
called. 'Magnolia
campbelli.'
A dashing young
Sherpa pressed forward and introduced himself as
our sirdar. His name was Sangye Doije - which
means 'Thunder-lion' He moved with a certain
military precision; and in his peaked Cap, his
waisted green tunic, boots and breeches, he could
have played the role of a Kalmuck lieutenant in a
pre-war Soviet movie. He was always cheerful,
always resourceful, and had the habit of prefacing
his statements with 'I have something to say', and
of closing with 'That is all I have to say'.
The cook was his
old school friend Nima Tashi, who was a wizard at
sticky cakes and whose left cheek was scarred with
a yak-horn cornada. The third Sherpa, Pasang Nuru,
was forever whirling prayer-wheels. Lastly, the
cook's boy, Tham, a Magar from Central Nepal, was
a shy doe-eyed boy of infinite sweetness and
theatrical temperament, who wore a scruffy red
knitted cap as if it were Pulcinello's.
Mountain Travel,
the organisation which had made our paltry
arrangements as well as those of the Everest
Expedition, had promised us ten porters. But most
Sherpas were off planting potatoes and, anyway, we
were better off with three yaks or rather, three
dzoms, which are a cross between a yak and a cow.
We strolled
around Lukla while they loaded up. Woodsmoke
drifted placidly from the houses; the windows were
painted in bright Tibetan colours; the fields were
knee-high in green barley, and there were apple
trees in flower. Behind the village we saw the
remains of a crashed Twin Otter, whose fuselage
served as a latrine, its wings as a goat-fence,
and its engines as an ornament to the Buddha Lodge
Hotel. At Lukla, the windsock is also a
prayer-flag.
On coming back I
pointed to a hermitage high on the mountainside
among red rhododendrons.
‘Who lives there
?' I asked Sangye.
'One nun.' He screwed Up his face, and grinned.
'But now not a nun because she make a baby.'
'Who was the father ?'
'One monk.'
The cloud
cleared as we started Up the road to Namche
Bazaar. The road was about three feet wide. The
wind soughed in the pines ; the river echoed in
its gorge; the mountains glittered and the
dzom-bells clanged. Sangye and Pasang whistled
between their teeth, thwacked the animals on the
rump, shouted, 'DZOM ! DZOM !' and we all felt the
exhilaration that comes at the start of a journey.
'Sherpa' means
'Easterner' in Tibetan ; and the Sherpas who
settled in Khumbu about 450 years ago are a
peace-loving Buddhist people from the eastern part
of the plateau. They are also compulsive
travellers; and in Sherpa-country every track is
marked with cairns and prayer-flags, reminding you
that Man's real home is not a house, but the Road,
and that life itself is a journey to be walked on
foot.
Sangye said that
each thread blown from a prayer-flag was a prayer
blown straight to Heaven.
Every half mile
or so, we would pass a wall of stone slabs, each
one carved with the mantra Om mani padme Hum - 'Om
! Jewel in the Lotus ! Hum !' (The jewel in
question is Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Infinite
Compassion, while the Om and Hum represent the
Height and Depth of the Universe.) Sangye was very
anxious we should walk round these prayer walls in
a clockwise direction, that is, to follow the Way
of the Heavens - 'Or else,' he said, 'everything
will go wrong.' When Elizabeth forgot, he smiled
and said, 'Never mind ! Not so many OMs on' that
one !'
We stopped for
the night at Phakhding in a grove of pines beside
the river. In the next-door camp was an expedition
of British Army officers, one of whom wore a
T-shirt reading
'The Falkland
Islands are beautiful and British'. Another
officer said the War had been a 'necessary bit of
blood-letting, what ?'
'Idiots,' I said
to myself, as I rolled over to sleep.
Around ten next
morning we stopped at the tea-house of an old
Japanese solitary - a character from the travel
diaries of Bashô, with a long wispy beard and
baggy red trousers that shone with dirt. He was
hoeing his vegetables and, while his boy made the
tea, he came over to talk. He was an expert in the
grafting of fruit trees. In Japan he had worked
for the Government forestry service and had come
here, on retiring, eight years ago.
'I had no
children,' he said. 'I had no house. Why should I
not come and live among these mountains ?'
Bruce
Chatwin - What am I doing here
