Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)

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Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)


	A half-restored portion of Mural at Lo Manthang's Thubchen Gompa (Thomas Laird)

IV. THE UPPER GORGE
TEN YEARS AGO, in a conversation with Mustang's King Jigme, Laird heard a bit of information that seemed extraordinary. The raja mentioned that, since a recent flood, at certain times of the year it was now possible to ride a horse through the upper gorge of the Kali Gandaki. Laird and two other Americans were the first foreigners to traverse its cavernous depths; the following year, Laird guided Peter Matthiessen through its labyrinth. Now we are attempting to be the third party of Westerners to enter the upper gorge, with its swift water and countless river crossings.

Mesmerized by the naked planet, we slog on to Chele, the end of the dry-weather route; anyone continuing north must climb out of the canyon here on the main trail to Lo Manthang. For us the village is nothing more than a bridge of rotten planks suspended across the river, the town itself out of sight on the mesa above. Before us yawns the portal to the upper gorge: to our left a dislodged block of canyon wall as big as the top third of a skyscraper, to our right a sheer red-rock face rising out of the river, and between them the river itself, burrowing ahead until the opposite walls seem to clap together overhead, as if we are about to enter a subway tunnel. The sky itself has been reduced to a blue serpent held overhead in the jaws of the gorge.

We splash into black glacial water. Again and again we ford the ice-cold river, so many crossings that I lose track after 35, and Mahendra sings to calm his nervousness. The column of our enterprise is so long and winding and in different time zones that it's not until the next day that we learn that one of our porters was unsaddled as his horse dropped off the bar into the river, and was nearly swept away. The next morning we expect another long haul through the second half of the gorge to the village of Tange, but within an hour even the Lobas are amazed when the canyon flares open in front of us, providing the strange sense that we have exited an Earth-size small intestine into the large intestine, which will shit us out who knows where. The lower gorge was as biologically dead as it was geologically lush, but here in the high canyon the air stirs with the satin rustle of feathers—ravens, and now eagles and hawks, gigantic lammergeier condors and vultures. Four blue sheep study our progress from a low palisade.

To describe Tange and other equally remote hamlets in Mustang as neglected would be politically accurate but metaphysically inadequate. Even "lost" would not be enough. The humanity here is like a seed in a prelapsarian garden, borne by the wind an unfathomable distance from its source, to root in complete oblivion. Tange's 140 souls might as well be living on Mars.

Like ghosts, we appear from an unseen world, strolling self-consciously through the seemingly deserted village, its skyline of flat rooftops shaggy with eaves of cut brambles capped by firewood. In a tiny square at the heart of town, we shock a group of women and their ragamuffin children. Greetings are exchanged, the silence broken. An elderly man turns a corner into the square and straightens up, blinking through mended eyeglasses at this apparition of queri in the middle of town. His name is Temba Lama, he's 60 years old, the village headman, and now a hostage of our curiosity. No, he says, when we ask if life in Tange has changed much since the opening of Mustang—the village is ten people smaller, but everything else is the same. A lot of foreigners have come, the villagers get to see strange things, but no, he says, "Nobody's done anything for us up here. We're just raising our food and tending our goats just like before." Before, I guess, would be the year 1500.

But the length of polyurethane irrigation hose we follow to the back side of town, and an empty Chinese beer bottle, whisper of the arrival of the world. The wind reverses itself, blowing out of Inner Asia and into our bones. Cold and tired, we make our way



	King Jigme on parade (Thomas Laird)

back toward our bivouac and are admiring a mare and her week-old foal when Tashi, the owner of the horses, comes to lean on the stone wall of the pen with us and watch the foal dance and wobble on matchstick legs. Unlike the village women in their wraparound wool bukkhoos, Tashi dresses like a Westerner, in chinos, a collared shirt, cheap running shoes.

He asks for a cigarette, and when I give him a pack his demeanor turns warm and playful. Behind him, the sunset pries open the skies, and the snow peaks of Dolpo shine like a row of wolf's teeth.

"In my idea," Tashi declares, "life before tourists came was better. You guys came up here and ate all the eggs, so the price of eggs went up. You guys came with more horses eating more corn, and the price of corn went up."

But the problem's complex. Although the price of wheat has more than tripled in ten years, the trucks now coming from China to Lo Manthang—about 30 last year—bring lumber and kitchen utensils, stoves and beer, but mostly they bring rice. Chinese rice has become so cheap—half the price of Kathmandu's—that Lobas are eating two meals of it a day. It was now so inexpensive, in fact, that many of the wheat and barley fields surrounding Lo Manthang lay fallow and abandoned; it made more sense to buy from China.

"You guys have toilet paper—that's what money is now," says Tashi, smiling and amiable despite his jeremiad. "But for us 100 rupees is a big thing. You just gave me cigarettes that cost 30 rupees, so I'm obeying you big-time."

My sudden ownership of this man causes mirth among the growing crowd, but I'm at a loss for how to respond. All I really have to give him is my attention, which he guzzles. "Your money is very big," he says without bitterness. "That's why you can come here and roam around. Look at our clothes—they're torn and dirty. We're poor people working really hard here, and I look really old."

"How old are you?"

"I'm 44."

"You look 45," I say, because it must end this way, with a joke, with everybody laughing, with good-natured backslapping and handshakes of gratitude for the moment, however brief, when we connected, because nothing here can be exchanged honestly, or permanently, except memories and goodwill.

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