Waiting Land , livre ebook

Other books by Dervla Murphy available from The Overlook Press:
FULL TILT Ireland to India with a Bicycle
EIGHT FEET IN THE ANDES
Copyright
First published in 1987 by
The Overlook Press
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
Copyright © 1967 by Dervla Murphy
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-591-3
To Brian, Daphne, Robin and Peter with love
Contents
Other Books by Dervla Murphy
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1 The Iron Road to Rexaul
Chapter 2 Kathmandu
Chapter 3 Descent on Pokhara
Chapter 4 Under Machhapuchhare
Chapter 5 Tibetans on Trek
Chapter 6 Animal Spirits
Chapter 7 Conflicting Views
Chapter 8 A Thief and a Goddess
Chapter 9 Purifying Spirits
Chapter 10 On Foot to Langtang
Epilogue
Index
Prologue
My six months among the Tibetans in 1963 had shown me that many refugees do not deserve the haloes with which they have been presented by sentimental fund-raisers in Europe or America. But by the time one has been disillusioned by Tibetans one has also been captivated by them; though unpleasant individuals and events may demolish the idealised version there remains an indestructible respect for the courage, humour and good manners that mark most Tibetan communities.
Before leaving India, early in 1964, I had determined to come back to the Tibetans as soon as possible. However, refugee situations can change quickly and by the spring of 1965 conditions in India had improved so much that nothing really useful remained to be done by an untrained volunteer, and I felt that it would be wrong to inflict on the Tibetans yet another aimless ‘Tib-worshipper’. But then came an item of news from Nepal concerning a recently-formed refugee camp in the Pokhara Valley, where 500 Tibetans were living as family units in 120 tents with only one Western volunteer to help them. It was considered that here I would at least not be in the way, even if my limitations prevented me from achieving much, so on 5 April 1965 I flew from Dublin to London to prepare for the journey to Nepal.
In contrast with my January 1963 departure from Ireland that flight seemed sadly drained of adventure; but my wanderlust revived next day when I went to the Royal Nepalese Embassy to apply for a visa. There I was presented with a leaflet headed ‘A Guide to those who intend to visit Kathmandu, capital of Nepal’, and with a booklet poorly printed in Kathmandu for the Department of Tourism entitled Nepal in a Nutshell . The leaflet announced with rather touching inaccuracy that, ‘The best months to visit the valley are February–April and September–November. The rest of the months are either very wet or too cold’; but the booklet truthfully claimed that ‘The cold season is pleasant throughout Nepal with bright sunshine and blue skies’ and at once I warmed to this bewildered country which couldn’t make up its mind how best to sell itself to fussy tourists. Then, reading on, I found a still more endearing statement to the effect that ‘The fascination of Biratnagar lies in its picturesque spots and industrial areas. Biratnagar has some of the largest industrial undertakings in Nepal’. Somehow it is difficult to believe that those travellers who are fascinated by ‘industrial undertakings’ would ever go to Nepal to gratify this particular passion.
On the booklet’s first page Tibet was referred to as ‘the Tibet Region of China’ a politic ‘siding with the boss’ which would have infuriated me were I not so aware of Nepal’s terror lest she should herself soon become ‘the Nepal Region of China’. Merely to glance at a map of Asia reveals the uncertainty of the kingdom’s future; it is a slender strip of land squeezed between Chinese-controlled Tibet and a decreasingly neutral India, and already a mysteriously-motivated Communist army is arrayed along its northern frontier. Some experts argue that the Central Himalayas are themselves defence enough against any army and that a south-bound Chinese invasion force would always have the good sense to skirt Nepal; but the Nepalese Government has not forgotten how cunningly Tibet was subdued within a decade and at present Nepal’s diplomats and politicians are almost dizzy from their efforts to placate simultaneously both East and West.
On 13 April I spent two very interesting and instructive hours at the Nepalese Embassy’s New Year party. Nepal in a Nutshell had informed me that ‘The State was integrated by King Prithvi Narayan Shah the Great in 1769’, but now I began to realise that Nepal’s nationhood is a very artificial thing. For all the tempering influence of a London social function it was soon clear that the various groups to whom I talked represented a basically tribal society which has only recently acquired the ill-fitting political garments of a modern state. The mistrust, jealousy and dislike of one ethnic and religious group for another showed through repeatedly, and it was interesting to compare the suave, astute Ranas and the ambitious, slightly arrogant Chetris with the inarticulate but gay little Gurungs and the poised, cheerful Sherpas of Tibetan descent. One wonders if there will be time to weld all these dissimilar tribes into a truly united nation before either the Chinese or the Americans annihilate every ancient Nepalese tradition. It seems regrettable that any such welding process should be considered necessary, but perhaps only thus can Nepal hope to preserve her independence.
The flight to Delhi was a mixed experience. We left London Airport at 4.15 p.m. on 21 April and, as always, I resented the slickness of flying and felt too nervous to sleep. As we flew over Erzurum and Tabriz I remembered ‘the old days’, when I had cycled on Roz through that region, and inevitably I experienced an acute sense of anti-climax.
Then came an uncannily beautiful descent to Teheran. At a height of five miles the engines were suddenly switched off and we began to glide soundlessly down, down, down through the darkness; to look out then and feel the silence and see the gigantic length of wing in a faint shimmer of moonlight gave me the fairy-story illusion of being carried along by some monstrous, softly sailing moth.
Here I disembarked for Auld Lang Syne and unmistakably I was back in Asia, where air hostesses mix their passenger lists and then fly off their nests in a delightfully unprofessional way. At European airports hostesses are trim machines who rarely muddle anything and scarcely register on a passenger’s mind as fellow-beings: but here they are girls who flush with anxiety and snap angrily at each other because all the passengers bound for New York were very nearly sent to Hong Kong.
When we emerged on to the tarmac two hours later the sky was paling above the mountains and, as we climbed, the stark symmetry of Demavand soared high and proud above hundreds of lesser peaks a flawless blue cone against a backdrop of orange cloud; and immediately beyond stretched the Caspian, its metallic flatness oddly surprising at the base of the mountains.
One has to admit that just occasionally flying provides beauty of a quality otherwise unattainable. Below us now a scattered school of porpoise-shaped cloudlets lay motionless and colourless in the void; and down on that plain which Roz and I had traversed en route to Meshed several tiny lakes were looking weirdly like pools of blood as they reflected the pre-sunrise flare. We had regained our normal cruising altitude when a crimson ball appeared so suddenly above the horizon that it seemed to have been flung over the earth’s rim by an invisible hand and momentarily I was too taken aback to recognise this object as the sun. Then it climbed so rapidly that one could see it moving until the sky above the horizon was pale blue, shading off, because of our altitude, to an extraordinary navy blue at the zenith.
We soon turned south, and now the Great Desert below us was covered in cloud so that one looked down on a limitless expanse of grotesque white softness, in which were visible broad ‘valleys’ and narrow ‘gorges’ and ‘mountains’ that threw shadows as real mountains would in early sunshine the whole ‘landscape’ exquisitely distorted and eerily immobile, as though all that vapour were frozen solid.
At 5.45 a.m. we touched down at Palam Airport. In a desperate effort to retain some grip on reality I had kept my watch-at Greenwich Mean Time, but now I put it on to 10.15 a.m., before staggering out into the dusty glare. Luckily the day was ‘cool’ (only eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit in the shade) though coming from forty-four degrees in London I can’t say it felt particularly cool to me.
As the rickety old airport bus rattled and blared its way along the narrow road to New Delhi I was conscious of an extraordinary sense of peace. When we were approaching Connaught Circus, through the usual tangle of loaded cyclists, ambling buffaloes, sleek cars, lean pedestrians and bouncing, Sikh-driven ‘chuff-chuffs’, I tried to define what I was feeling but could only think of it as the peace of poverty. People may jeer at this phrase as romantic nonsense, yet to arrive suddenly in India after a fortnight’s immersion in an affluent society does induce a strong sense of liberation from some intangible but threatening power. One is aware of man being free here, at the deepest level, as he cannot possibly be in societies where elaborately contrived pressures daily create new, false ‘needs’, and wither his delight in small and simple joys.
At Dharamsala, where I had previously worked in the Tibetan Refugee