To a Mountain in Tibet(7)
But she secretly recoiled. Animals were always close to her. Even on her wedding day she had led a pet Dalmatian on a silk leash. In India she thrilled to the adventure, but hated the killing. Sometimes, torn by disloyalty, she hoped his bullet would miss. All this he never knew. Back in England, the low Tudor walls of our house sprouted a stuffed wildlife that made me dizzy with excitement as a boy. Five leopards and two bears gaped from the walls or spread over the floor. A chital master stag with three-foot antlers hung above one stairway; a wolf grinned in the back lavatory; from upstairs passages the gentle eyes of chausingha and chinkara gazelles enchanted my sister Carol. Hugest of all, the taxidermised head of a bison over-hung one fireplace. My father had felled it at some risk, with a single hard-nose cartridge to the brain. ‘A fine old bull, 17 years old,’ he recorded, ‘though the horns unfortunately were much worn. No grazing teeth at all. Covered him with brambles, and returned to camp singing sweetly.’ In time the great beast threatened posthumously to tear down the fireplace wall, and was exiled to the garage. From there, years later, somebody stole him.
Yet my father, I suspect was not a born hunter. Once or twice in his journal he simply doesn’t fire, just watches the animal move splendidly away, and cannot explain himself. In middle age, although living in the Sussex countryside, he gave up shooting altogether. He preferred to walk in the woodlands and observe the calls and flight of birds. He would return glowing to report a cock pheasant glittering by a sunset field, or the zigzag trajectory of a snipe. The Indian trophies remained on the walls, although my mother never cared for them. But she knew better than I what they meant to him, and she never hinted her misgiving, so that in my adult eyes they became her secret gift to him.
My father neither boasted nor apologised for them. Compared to the monotonous inevitability of the abattoir, he might have said, the sporting rifle was a fine thing. In his journals he wrote that the jungle taught him three lessons: patience, endurance, and the ability to survive disappointment. In time he would need them all.
The Indian foothills steepen near the Nepalese border, and the people change. The mustachioed, mahogany faces of trackers and beaters that stare from my father’s snapshots are replaced by paler, trimmer men. Towards sunset, as Iswor and I approach the village of Kermi, we are overtaken by youths indistinguishable from Tibetans, by broad-faced women with centrally parted hair and shining pigtails. I had expected the Bhotia inhabitants, low caste and isolated, to be poorer than the Thakuri, but instead the village looks happier, its stone houses built firm against the hillside, Maoist slogans dimming on their walls, and the men who greet us are alert and soft-spoken. The Thakuri downriver, it seems, pride themselves on caste, but it is the despised and stranded Bhotia who are forced into greater trading enterprise. Or so Iswor tells me.
Close by the village, to my astonishment, we cross a stream whose waters flow warm against our hands, and bluish smoke drifts in the gully above. Curious, we follow the path up, and soon the stink of sulphur rises above green-tinted rocks. A young woman is bathing in the strange river, naked to the waist, and turns from us unperturbed. We reach a clearing where the stream is boiling hot to the touch. The frames of rotten beds stretch over it, and the banks are scattered with palliasses of disintegrated brushwood, burnt yellow by the fumes. In January, a farmer tells us, villagers come out and sleep for nights on end above the vaporous river–it boosts their health in winter, they say–then bathe each morning in the freezing springs nearby.
We camp a mile beyond, where Ram, the cook, who has long preceded us, pitches my tent. This regimen will be repeated many nights. Ram, who has the lungs of a mountaineer, disappears every morning over the track ahead of us, until we discover him at evening on level camping ground, with our tents pitched and a crude supper on the boil. Tonight too he has found a Thakuri horse drover who will accompany us to the frontier: a shaggy, silent man named Dhabu, who rarely takes his eyes from me. We eat all together in a half-built stone hut where they lay out their sleeping bags among a litter of aluminium pots and pans. Iswor lights candles in the crevices of the walls, while Ram serves up noodles and tinned tuna from an ancient gas stove labelled ‘Quality 3’.
At sunset the temperature plummets and a wind blows through the empty window frames and snuffs the candles one by one. But we are in high spirits, everyone glad of Dhabu’s grey stallion cropping the weeds outside. Like my father, I am happy in these solitudes, sleeping in the pure air above the great river. Iswor and Ram, fellow Tamangs, talk non-stop in the soft Nepali that I strain hopelessly to understand, while Dhabu crouches in the darkest corner, tongue-tied, watching me. As the candles gutter, their faces darken and simplify. I rouse myself at last and go out to my tent, where I empty my backpack and try to write by torchlight. Instead, withdrawn into my sleeping bag, oblivious of the rock under my spine, I drop into sleep.
Hours later, I am woken by a snuffling and nudging at the canvas against my head. Crawling from my sleeping bag, too tired to be alarmed, I open my tent flap on a huge, stooping head with red-tasselled ears. Somebody’s yak has wandered down from Kermi in the starlight, lost.
CHAPTER THREE
Overnight the rain has cleaned the earth, blowing lightly up the valley from the east, then receding at dawn. From the track below rise the shouts and whistles of traders, driving their packhorses towards Simikot. I emerge from my tent to a sky washed clear. The wind has gone. Birds are singing in the shrubs. Ahead the river winds between mountain spurs that recede and overlap ever fainter, before misting away through gullies dense with deciduous forest. The water sounds below like smothered talking. Files of solitary pines patrol the hilltops above. And the last horizon to which the river points–far away under high cirrus cloud–seals the sky in a glistening, snow-lit wall to which we are unimaginably going.