One of the more terrifying obstacles — this, at eleven thousand feet — are the fierce guard dogs of the Tibetan refugees who inhabit their heights. "In Tibet, where wolves and brigands prosper, the nomad's camps and remote villages are guarded by big black or brindle mastiffs. Such dogs are also found in northern Nepal." Matthiessen successfully fights off an attack by a slavering mastiff and pushes on.
The book is a self-portrait of Matthiessen the pilgrim, but also a portrait of George Schaller, a scientist, skeptic, and part-time misanthrope whom Matthiessen takes pains to enlighten. He teaches him the tenets of Zen Buddhism, and then "I tell GS of the Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhardt and Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, and Saint Catherine of Siena, who spent three years in silent meditation: 'All the way to Heaven is Heaven,' Saint Catherine said, and that is the very breath of Zen, which does not elevate divinity above the common miracles of every day."
In a treacherous part of the mountains he reflects on the possibility of dying in this dangerous place — and he accepts the idea: "Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to 'win my life by losing it,' which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment."
Toward the end of the journey, the snow leopard unglimpsed yet still inspiring his pilgrimage, missing his family and friends, Matthiessen receives a batch of mail from home. Wishing to be at one with the landscape and people around him, he deliberately does not open them; he puts them in his pack, to be opened when this journey is over. If the news is bad, he says, there is nothing he can do to leave any earlier from this remote place. "And good news, too, would be intrusive, spoiling this chance to live moment by moment in the present by stirring up the past, the future, and encouraging delusions of continuity and permanence just when I am trying to let go, to blow away, like that white down feather on the mountain."
In our present overconnected, hyperactive age, this is a salutary book and worthy of its predecessors: Bashö, Wordsworth, Thoreau.
14. Travel Feats
SPEAKING OF "THE WINTER JOURNEY" — SIX weeks of complete darkness and low temperatures (minus 79°F) and gale-force winds — an experience of which gave him the title for his book The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard reflected on dangerous feats in travel. "Why do some human beings desire with such urgency to do such things regardless of the consequences, voluntarily, conscripted by no one but themselves? No one knows. There is a strong urge to conquer the dreadful forces of nature, and perhaps to get consciousness of ourselves, of life, and of the shadowy workings of our human minds. Physical capacity is the only limit. I have tried to tell how, and when, and where. But why? That is a mystery."
Maybe there is an answer. When I was preparing to write the introduction to the American edition of Alone, Gérard d'Aboville's account of his single-handed journey rowing across the Pacific, I pressed d'Aboville on his reasons for making this dangerous voyage. He became silent. After a long while he said, "Only an animal does useful things. An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful — not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do."
What separates some feats from others is the way the tale is told. Sir Richard Burton's book about how he, an infidel, traveled to Mecca in disguise is a classic. After Joshua Slocum sailed around the world alone, he wrote a good book about the experience; so did Tschifelly, in Tschifelly's Ride, the story of his trip on horseback from Argentina to New York. Breaking out of a POW camp in Kenya and climbing Mount Kenya would have been a hilarious anecdote, but Felice Benuzzi wrote a detailed account of the feat, and so did Gérard D'Aboville after he rowed across the Pacific Ocean.
Now and then a great feat is forced upon the traveler, as with Captain Bligh's open-boat voyage of 4,000 miles with eighteen men after the mutiny on the Bounty, or Shackleton's heroic rescue of his men, which necessitated his traveling almost a thousand miles through the Southern Ocean in a freezing lifeboat. But these epics of survival were unintentional.
There are many other notable travel feats: a man windsurfed across the Atlantic (M. Christian Marty, in February 1982); a woman windsurfed across the Indian Ocean (Raphaeila Le Gouvello, sixty days in 2006, 3,900 miles, from Exmouth in Western Australia to the island of Réunion); a man skied down Everest in 2000 (the Slovenian Davo Karnicar), and a woman did it in 2006—Kit DesLauriers, who has also skied down the highest peaks on every continent, including Antarctica. Kayakers have gone everywhere, across oceans, around Cape Horn, and made ambitious circumnavigations (Japan, Australia, New Zealand). Some of these are admirable, even heroic journeys, and some are stunts; I am mainly interested in travel feats that have resulted in memorable books.
A Disguised Infidel Penetrates Mecca
IN HIS Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853), Sir Richard Burton claimed he was "the only living European who has found his way to the Head Quarters of the Moslem Faith."
He did it for a reason common to travelers setting off: he was, among other things, "thoroughly tired of 'progress' and of 'civilization'; curious to see with my eyes what others are content to 'hear with ears,' namely Moslem inner life in a really Mohammedan country; and longing, if truth be told, to set foot on that mysterious spot which no vacation tourist has yet described, measured, sketched and photographed."
As with his long trips through Africa and the American West, Burton was happiest when he was in a remote place. "Believe me, when once your tastes have conformed to the tranquility of [desert] travel, you will suffer real pain in returning to the turmoil of civilization. The air of the cities will suffocate you, and the care-worn and cadaverous countenances of citizens will haunt you like a vision of judgment."
The trip, Burton says, took nine months, but in reality it took much longer, because he needed to be fluent in Arabic, knowledgeable in all aspects of Islam, and well versed in the Koran. This had taken years, while he had been a soldier in India from 1842 to 1849. He also needed to be circumcised. This he accomplished, probably in India, before the trip, when he was about thirty. He said that "external" physical evidence that he was a Muslim was essential.
One of the pleasures of the book is that Burton delights in his disguise, as the Afghan dervish Mirza Abdullah. "Little did he suspect who his interrogator was," he remarks of a slave dealer. And he flirts with a pretty slave girl, telling her how beautiful she is. ("They were average specimens of the steatopygous Abyssinian breed, broad-shouldered, thin-flanked, fine-limbed, and with haunches of prodigious size.")
She says, "Then why don't you buy me?"
So as to make himself seem a humble haji (pilgrim), Burton travels in the lowest class on the ship, quietly mocking his fellow passengers. Though he speaks of the rigors of the trip, the discomforts and the heat, he seldom complains. He is on a mission. Three months after he sets out, in the month of July ("sickening heat"), he arrives in Medina and visits the Prophet's tomb.
He moves on to Mecca with the other pilgrims, and achieves the objective of the trip, pretending to pray while examining the enormous stone known as the Kaaba, the heart and soul of Islam, forbidden to the unbeliever.