The Lady and the Panda (17 page)

The small group would spend the first evening of its trek on the roof of Lao Tsang's home, departing in the morning with the old hunter's son-in-law, Yang. For two days they battled their way upward along cliffs and through thick bamboo and beautiful spruce forest. The ancient Lao Tsang was as talkative as he was agile, keeping up a constant dialogue over the long miles. At sundown they camped outside, packed so tightly together on a rock ledge that Harkness awoke during the night to find Yang's head on her feet and Lao Tsang nestled against her stomach.

In the morning, she opened her eyes to a sunrise of spectacular beauty, with fog lifting in ghostly wreaths from the valley below. Harkness would later write of coming into consciousness in that moment. There was, she said, the “miracle of the sun coming over the mountains—and then it was time for that other miracle, trying to put on a pair of pants in a sleeping bag.”

The team was looking for fresh signs of giant panda, and, for efficiency, it was decided that the foursome would split up into two teams— Yang and Harkness, Young and Lao Tsang. The day was arduous for the American as she lurched over fallen trees, struggling to advance through the never-ending stands of bamboo, which can grow taller than a man, and in patches are dense enough to shut out sunlight. It created what Harkness described as “a perpetual twilight even when the sun is high at noon.” In addition, the altitude made it hard for her to catch her breath. She took it all like a soldier, until she realized she had no matches to light a cigarette, and then she nearly cried.

By the end of the day, the only reward was some panda dung Harkness had discovered. New droppings, which would indicate the recent presence of an animal, would smell like fresh-mowed grass, but these desiccated, nearly odorless specimens were too old to be of any use. The
team moved on, heading for new ground westward in the beautiful peaks and valleys of Chaopo, or what was then called Tsaopo-go.

Harkness was in for the roughest hiking yet. Her predecessor, Bill Sheldon of the Sage expedition, would maintain that his youth—he was in his early twenties—and his recent employment in a rain-soaked logging camp in Washington were the only reasons he had been able to cope with the terrain. Nevertheless, he often found himself crawling on hands and knees or falling thirty-five to fifty feet, feeling lucky he hadn't tumbled in areas where a misstep would have sent him crashing more than two thousand feet. Others in his party were not so fortunate. Sage's wife wrenched a knee early on, and another member had a mild heart attack. It was always a possibility that Harkness could die out here, but if she sustained even a relatively small injury it would halt the whole operation, and she might never get the chance to return to complete her mission.

Over the course of three hours of snaking around barriers, the team dropped twenty-five hundred feet, mainly down a boulder-strewn dry creek. It was here that the heavy hobnailed boots, which had seemed ridiculous in Shanghai, began proving their worth.

The party met a medicine digger of the Qiang people who was awestruck by Harkness, having never seen a foreigner before. Everyone had questions. Turbaned herb hunters, in their traditional brilliant blue gowns, knew these mountains in a way that no one else could. The diggers lived a reclusive existence, tapping into a fantastic side of nature, gathering such strange items as the “grass-worm”—a short ambercolored stalk made up of a predatory fungus and its prey, the captured caterpillar itself.

Most of the panda lore dispensed by the root digger's party was culled from evidence left behind: shredded bamboo stalks, pressed vegetation where they had lain, and scattered dung. Like many others from the area, these men claimed that pandas ate iron pots and pans. It was a popular tale, inspired, no doubt, by pandas chewing on food-encrusted cookware left out at camps. The hungry and strong-jawed animals would end up puncturing the thick iron as they gnawed.

The travelers enjoyed the talk, and after a lunch of hard-boiled eggs and sardines eaten near a tall stone watchtower in a tiny village, they went on, passing little shrines set out to the spirits of the mountains.

The terrain became even more difficult to negotiate, especially with temperatures nearing a hundred. By the afternoon, Harkness was unraveling. Her blue sweater had torn, and Bill's cut-down riding breeches began to fight her, simultaneously bunching up and tugging downward. Despite her efforts to hold them up with scarves tied about her thighs, at one point, the pants actually fell down to her ankles. As usual, Young looked neat, clean, and pressed, nimbly leaping from spot to spot.

Harkness, trying to keep up with the lanky athlete, could only watch as his red cap moved farther and farther away till she lost sight of it altogether. A long while later, at the bottom of an incline, perspiring and breathless, and with no Quentin Young in view, she gave up the pursuit, sitting down to light a cigarette with newly procured matches. Just then, Young popped out and teasingly claimed to have had time to take a nap as she descended. Harkness asked him how he had ever learned to negotiate the rough, rocky terrain with such fleetness. He replied that it was by observing blue mountain “sheeps.” Whatever frustration she might have felt disappeared: Harkness found Young's occasional slips in plurals nothing short of charming. The two shared a smoke and a good laugh before setting off again.

Harkness felt like a “sissy” in dealing with the log bridges that the porters crossed so nimbly.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

There would be many more physical trials for Harkness before the day was done. Over and over again, the team crisscrossed the strong running mountain streams, which despite providing them with cold, clean drinking water also made travel so troublesome. The slippery “bridges” were merely knotty logs spanning the water. Harkness found herself growing more and more wary with each crossing, until she became, as she said, an absolute “sissy” about them.

By dusk, after having traveled thirty arduous miles, they reached their destination. Festooned with Tibetan prayer flags and ringed by lighted huts stood a crumbling castle, said to be five hundred years old. It was bleak and imposing, set high on a barren hillside. Its massive walls, ramparts, and towers were made of stone, giving foundation to a wooden structure three stories high, with whitewashed walls, dark wood beams, and a belt of balconies. Although truly Tibetan, having been constructed in the early days of the ancient Wassu kingdom, it looked like it had arrived straight from the Alps. At once stern and magical, the castle was a perfect setting for a Grimm story.

Exhausted, Harkness and Young made their way inside, past the flags whose every snap in the wind was believed to transmit a prayer heavenward. The vast fortress became a maze of dark passageways and uneven stone steps. The team lighted lamps, stumbling around until they found sizable rooms fit for encampment. Using just about every blanket and oil sheet she had, Harkness partitioned off a private space for herself, hauling out the well-used little basin to wash up. Cool soapy water washed away the sweat and dirt, especially from her blistered feet. For a fresh outfit, she was a bit stuck. All of the nicer things were by now soiled, so she would have to rely on her knack for making simple things elegant. As temperatures in the mountains descended quickly with the night, she fashioned an ensemble from Bill's long woolen underwear and the sheepskin coat that Su-Lin had given her.

Bathed and dressed, Harkness and Young made themselves a dinner on the portable stove: thick cornmeal bread and corned beef from a tin. As they sipped wine, Young kept Harkness spellbound with a saga of adventure from mysterious Tibet. He told her of a secret place, a spectacular, uncharted lake that he and his brother believed they had discovered. Harkness and Young vowed to map the lake as their next mission, and in that instant their hopes and their lives were entwined. The pact was impulsive. They laughed at themselves for planning a second venture before the first was finished. Harkness felt deliriously happy.

At some point, they decided to do a little exploring in the vast labyrinth of the stone castle. It was a sorry old hulk. Soldiers had harvested wood from its ancient walls. For countless years the elements had been punishing, wind and rain penetrating deep inside the ruin. Still, poignantly, there were great touches of life and art left intact. These were possessions of the lamas that had held no interest for the marauding army. The chants written on Tibetan prayer wheels and prayer flags silently endured. Serene Buddhas perched on lotus leaves in bright, colorful paintings kept company with many other gods.

The two adventurers came upon a hidden compartment. As they entered the chamber, their light brought to life an astonishing carnal scene. It was, to Western eyes, a playground of statues and paintings in which lusty gods romped in erotic abandon. The depictions were so graphic that they had shocked earlier Western visitors who had seen them. The botanist E. H. Wilson had described the “erotomania,” in which “phallic worship holds unblushing sway,” as “hideous and disgustingly obscene.”

The deities seemed proud of their desires in this sect of Tibetan Buddhism, in which tantric sexual rituals were added to the menu of spiritual practices. Harkness, who loved the “frankness” of the East, was captivated. Something must have stirred in Young too, for in this secluded galaxy of lust, their intimacy became sensual, their bodies slipping into an embrace.

Taboos never mattered much to Harkness, except maybe to make things more desirable. She was living life to the fullest, with every sense
heightened. Closing her eyes that night in a castle at the edge of panda country, she couldn't hope to find in sleep a fantasy any more beautiful than her waking life. “Time turned backward in a dream—or was it that other world of feverish activity that was illusion?” Harkness wrote.

ON THE FIRST MORNING
there, while Harkness still slept, Young tenderly rigged a sheet to keep the sun out of her eyes. But the very next day, he was off early before she awoke. Engaged to one woman in Shanghai and sleeping with another in Sichuan, perhaps he felt the conflict of warring emotions.

Harkness was serene and sated. Contentedly puffing a classic yardlong Chinese pipe, its thimble-size bowl filled with rich native tobacco, she happily passed the three days of Young's absence. Having run out of cigarettes, her only crisis had been one of nicotine, a problem she found easy to solve with the purchase of a pipe from the villagers.

The solitude gave her time to reflect on their relationship, which of course was shockingly “mixed” for its time. But the issue had fascinated Harkness since her days on the
Tancred
when she met a beautiful Dutchman who was one-quarter Javanese. Clearly Chinese and Americans came together sometimes, Emily Hahn and the poet Zao Xinmei being a famous example. But there were other pairings of a less public nature. Harkness wrote home when she reached Shanghai about meeting sophisticated, well-traveled young “halfcaste” Chinese who would turn out to have names like Angus MacPherson. She made friends with an American woman who was married to a Chinese man. Harkness referred to her as “Mrs. Chun Tien Pao,” reporting that she was fascinating but unhappy. There were rooms for ancestor worship in her large house, Harkness noted, “where she kowtows before the tablets with the rest of the family.” Still, both whites and Chinese were horrified by such marriages. “Anglo-Saxons have rendered a signal service to civilisation, not only by maintaining the
prestige
of the white man all the world over, but by guarding the unmixed purity of their race,” wrote the French poet Abel
Bonnard in a book about his travels,
In China,
published in 1926. A society of “half-breeds” is disgusting, he said, bringing with it a “debasement of the soul and confusion of the mind.”

Harkness did not agree. Young was handsome and kind. People— native and foreign—respected him. He was capable and honorable and smart. She was a young widow far from the gossip mills of Shanghai, farther still from New York. Her husband had been dead for eight months, and away from her for two years. She had never felt so physically alive, so strong, so sure of herself. Her impulses must have felt as pure and potent as those tantric gods seemed to have ordained.

ON NOVEMBER 2
, despite a cold rainstorm that carried the threat of snow, Quentin Young arrived full of good cheer from his scouting sortie, while luggage and mail were delivered from Wenchuan. Around the fire that night and into the next day, Young and Harkness ate pancakes and read letters. Dan Reib had sent an encouraging note and Harkness was delighted to hear from Cavaliere, who addressed her as “Dear Sweet Tender Lady.” If she received news of the outside world, she didn't mention it, though, as they holed up in the castle, FDR was being reelected to a second term.

It was time to strategize for the final push. The expedition now counted twenty-three, which included, to Harkness's amusement, Ho, little Ho, and old Ho, as well as three Dzos, and many Wangs, Whangs, and Yangs. The staff was large enough that they could afford to dispatch a member once again to Guanxian, this time for material to make traps. They planned to send runners on a regular basis to Wenchuan for supplies and mail over the long months they expected to be in the field.