“Hey!” I said. “Did I say you weren’t serious?”
“No. But you don’t believe it, do you.”
“I believe that you believe it, Freds.”
“He really is a tulku! I mean I’ve seen proof of it, I really have. His ku kongma, which means his first incarnation, was as Tsong Khapa, a very important Tibetan lama born in 1555. The monastery at Kum-Bum is located on the site of his birth.”
I nodded, at a loss for words. Finally I filled up our little cups, and we toasted Kunga Norbu’s age. He could definitely put down the chang like he had had lifetimes of practice. “So,” I said, calculating. “He’s about four hundred and thirty-one.”
“That’s right. And he’s had a hard time of it, I’ll tell you. The Chinese tore down Kum-Bum as soon as they took over, and unless the monastery there is functioning again, Tsong Khapa can never escape being a disciple. See, even though he is a major tulku—”
“A major tulku,” I repeated, liking the sound of it.
“Yeah, even though he’s a major tulku, he’s still always been the disciple of an even bigger one, named Dorjee. Dorjee Lama is about as important as they come—only the Dalai Lama tops him—and Dorjee is one hard, hard guru.”
I noticed that the mention of Dorjee’s name made Kunga Norbu scowl, and refill his glass.
“Dorjee is so tough that the only disciple who has ever stuck with him has been Kunga here. Dorjee—when you want to become his student and you go ask him, he beats you with a stick. He’ll do that for a couple of years to make sure you really want him as a teacher. And then he really puts you through the wringer. Apparently he uses the methods of the Ts’an sect in China, which are tough. To teach you the Short Path he pounds you in the head with his shoe.”
“Now that you mention it, he does look a little like a guy who has been pounded in the head with a shoe.”
“How can he help it? He’s been a disciple of Dorjee’s for four hundred years, and it’s always the same thing. So he asked Dorjee when he would be a guru in his own right, and Dorjee said it couldn’t happen until the monastery built on Kunga’s birth site was rebuilt. And he said that that would never happen until Kunga managed to accomplish—well, a certain task. I can’t tell you exactly what the task is yet, but believe me it’s tough. And Kunga used to be my guru, see, so he’s come to ask me for some help. So that’s what I’m here to do.”
“I thought you said you were going to climb Lingtren with your British friends?”
“That too.”
I wasn’t sure if it was the chang or the smoke, but I was getting a little confused. “Well, whatever. It sounds like a real adventure.”
“You’re not kidding.”
Freds spoke in Tibetan to Kunga Norbu, explaining what he had said to me, I assumed. Finally Kunga replied, at length.
Freds said to me, “Kunga says you can help him too.”
“I think I’ll pass,” I said. “I’ve got my trekking group and all, you know.”
“Oh I know, I know. Besides, it’s going to be tough. But Kunga likes you—he says you have the spirit of Naropa.”
Kunga nodded vigorously when he heard the name Naropa, staring through me with that spacy look of his.
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “But I still think I’ll pass.”
“We’ll see what happens,” Freds said, looking thoughtful.
II
Many glasses of chang later we staggered out into the night. Freds and Kunga Norbu slipped on their down jackets, and with a “Good night” and a “Good morning” they wandered off to their tent. I made my way back to my group. It felt really late, and was maybe eight-thirty.
As I stood looking at our tent village, I saw a light bouncing down the trail from Lukla. The man carrying the flashlight approached—it was Laure, the sirdar for my group. He was just getting back from escorting clients back to Lukla. “Laure!” I called softly.
“Hello George,” he said. “Why late now?”
“I’ve been drinking.”
“Ah.” With his flashlight pointed at the ground I could easily make out his big smile. “Good idea.”
“Yeah, you should go have some chang yourself. You’ve had a long day.”
“Not long.”
“Sure.” He had been escorting disgruntled clients back to Lukla all day, so he must have hiked five times as far as the rest of us. And here he was coming in by flashlight. Still, I suppose for Laure Tenzing Sherpa that did not represent a particularly tough day. As guide and yakboy he had been walking in these mountains all his life, and his calves were as big around as my thighs. Once, for a lark, he and three friends had set a record by hiking from Everest Base Camp to Kathmandu in four days; that’s about two hundred miles, across the grain of some seriously uneven countryside. Compared to that today’s work had been like a walk to the mailbox, I guess.
The worst part had no doubt been the clients. I asked him about that and he frowned. “People go co-op hotel, not happy. Very, very not happy. They fly back Kathmandu.”
“Good riddance,” I said. “Why don’t you go get some chang.”
He smiled and disappeared into the dark.
I looked over the tents holding my sleeping clients and sighed.
So far it had been a typical videotrek. We had flown in to Lukla from Kathmandu. My clients, enticed to Nepal by glossy ads that promised them video Ansel Adamshood, had gone wild in the plane, rushing about banging zoom lenses together and so on. They were irrepressible until they saw the Lukla strip, which from the air looks like a toy model of a ski jump. Pretty quickly they were strapped in and looking like they were reconsidering their wills—all except for one tubby little guy named Arnold, who continued to roll up and down the aisle like a bowling ball, finally inserting himself into the cockpit so he could shoot over the pilots’ shoulders. “We are landing at Lukla,” he announced to his camera’s mike in a deep fakey voice, like the narrator of a bad travelogue. “Looks impossible, but our pilots are calm.”
Despite him we landed safely. Unfortunately one of our group then tried to film his own descent from the plane, and fell heavily down the steps. As I ascertained the damage—a sprained ankle—there was Arnold again, leaning over to immortalize the victim’s every writhe and howl.
A second plane brought in the rest of our group, led by Laure and my assistant Heather. We started down the trail. For a couple of hours everything went well—the trail serves as the Interstate Five of the region, and is as easy as they come. And the view is awesome—the Dudh Kosi valley is like a forested Grand Canyon, only bigger. Our group was impressed, and several of them filmed a real-time record of the day.
Then the trail descended to the banks of the Dudh Kosi river, and we got a surprise. Apparently in the last monsoon a glacial lake upstream had burst its ice dam, and rushed down in a devastating flood, tearing out the bridges, trail, trees, everything. Thus our fine interstate ended abruptly in a cliff overhanging the torn-to-shreds riverbed, and what came next was the seat-of-the-pants invention of the local porters, for whom the trail was a daily necessity. They had been clever indeed, but there really was no good alternative to the old route; so the new trail wound over strewn white boulders in the riverbed, traversed unstable new sand cliffs, and veered wildly up and down muddy slides that had been hacked out of dense forested walls. It was radical stuff, and even experienced trekkers were having trouble.
Our group was appalled. The ads had not mentioned this.
The porters ran ahead barefoot to reach the next tea break, and the clients began to bog down. People slipped and fell. People sat down and cried. Altitude sickness was mentioned more than once, though as a matter of fact we were not much higher than Denver. Heather and I ran around encouraging the weary. I found myself carrying three videocameras. Laure was carrying nine.