Description
Somewhere in the Tsangpo gorge, a river falls over a ledge. For more than a century, British surveyors, Tibetan lamas, Japanese kayakers, and at least one American in a climbing harness believed something else about that ledge: that if you could get close enough, a door would open in the rock. Ian Baker’s book is about measuring the ledge. It is also about believing in the door. That the two projects are incompatible is something he knows perfectly well and never quite admits.
The Heart of the World braids together expeditions made between 1993 and 1998, most of them into Pemako, a remote crescent of southeastern Tibet where the Yarlung Tsangpo carves a trench deeper than the Grand Canyon before turning south into Assam. Tibetan Buddhist tradition considers Pemako a beyul — a hidden land seeded by the eighth-century sage Padmasambhava, accessible in four graded layers (outer, inner, secret, and innermost). Baker wants the innermost, yangsang, the place where the practitioner’s consciousness and the terrain dissolve into each other. His material objective, which grows heavier as the book progresses and National Geographic money arrives, is a legendary waterfall at the bottom of what explorers dubbed the Five-Mile Gap. In November 1998, he gets there. The falls turn out to be real and (by the sort of numerical coincidence Baker cannot resist) approximately 108 feet high.
Baker writes with the lavishness of someone who has read too many nineteenth-century naturalists. Ferns ripple. Granite glitters with mica. Fresh snow graces upper slopes. The style can be lovely but tips, at its worst, into a kind of wetted jewelry — every sentence dressed up in its saffron, its mist, its aromatic juniper. When the expedition at last reaches the falls, the National Geographic cameraman prompts his friend Ken to exclaim on cue: “The glittering goal of so many explorers!” Baker records the staging without commentary. The reader is left to notice.
Evasion of this sort runs through the book. Baker is aware, again and again, of the contradiction baked into his enterprise. He knows that a contract with the Geographic Society converts Tibetan sacred geography into product; that his guides are feeding him what earlier guides fed Kingdon Ward and Bailey; that when the Monpas shoot a goral off a cliff for meat, the Buddhist rite afterward is as much costume as absolution. His best traveling companion, the scholar Hamid Sardar, names the paradox in a single line when an American filmmaker asks how one reaches yangsang. “Knowing there’s no key is the key,” Hamid says, and returns to cleaning his camera. The book should end there. It doesn’t. It descends anyway, produces a range finder, and measures the water.
The measurement scene is unexpectedly affecting, partly because Baker briefly permits himself honesty. The range finder cannot hold a reading; the waterfall has no edges. “How can one presume to measure water?” he thinks. A few pages later he is arguing in public that this is the largest waterfall on any major Himalayan river. He wants both the dissolution and the trophy. Nothing in his Buddhist training, for all its sophistication, gives him a way out of wanting that.
What Baker is better at than he knows is the ordinary texture of such journeys. The porter with a scar across his face. The one-eyed Khampa is rigging a cable bridge above whitewater. The drunken village official who commandeers the loads. The nun Ani Rigsang, bathing in a hot spring threaded with green snakes. These figures arrive, do something briefly, and leave the page. It’s the opposite of the book’s stated interest — the veiled goddess, the dakini ciphers hidden in lichen — and it’s where the writing breathes. I wish he trusted it more. The Tibetan women in particular tend to be beguiling or raven-haired before they become people. One reads past these phrases as one reads past the spare tire in a jeep: equipment from another expedition.
A quieter book lives inside this one, and it’s a book about endings. By the epilogue, the Chinese have erected a memorial in Tsachu, begun relocating villagers, and started surveying for a hydroelectric dam that would submerge the gorge and drown the falls Baker spent years finding. He mentions this almost in passing. He is back in New York by then, watching a trumpeter swan on a millpond, trying to write a conclusion. The swan becomes a figure for Dorje Pagmo, and the book closes with wings lifting from water. It is the tidiest ending he could have chosen, and the least truthful. The real ending is the dam.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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