At the Top of the World

By Linnea Larsson

There is a wild land high up through the Himalayan Breach between Tibet and Nepal named Mustang where warlords rode and ruled and Western visitors were not welcome.
This is a story of an American girl and an English boy who disappeared up through that breach into the Himalayan Mountains, a story of Khampa warriors who raided across the undefended, unmarked border between Mustang and Tibet. This of the Chinese and, too, of the fighters for whom lifes final victory was the taking of Chinese with them into death. And also of the beauty, the silence, the stench of fear, the crack of rifles, the gleam of blood, the feel of death beneath ones blade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 10, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469107646

Linnea Larsson

Linnea Larsson was born, raised and went to school in Coeur d’Alene in North Idaho. After school she moving East and later traveling for several years abroad. She lives now in Springfield, a town of 1200 people, in Up State New York. She runs Tintagel a rare book store. She has one daughter, Guenever, who is married and lives in the Washington D. C. area.

Book preview

Chapter 1

It was a third of a century ago now. Lyndon Johnson was in the Whitehouse. American servicemen were dying in Southeast Asia. I was in Delhi, India. Before that, three, four years before, some person with a tenuous connection with the British Embassy in Katmandu, Nepal, a professor associated with some esoteric research project got an amino acid analyzer brought into Katmandu. The thing was as big as half a room, came initially with a nice white coated man from the Beckman Company, and it spat out long sheets of neatly charted amino acid peaks and valleys all through the night. Well, of course, the man from Beckman had to go back to New Jersey, or wherever it was he’d been dragged in from, and about then, the thing broke down. Katmandu is a long way from nowhere. The gleamingly impressive machine sat there, as imposing as ever, polished by local help, always, every day, as shiny as new and useless. It was an old model by the time I saw it, the newer ones are more compact, quicker, easier to use when they are working, and a lot more complex. I would never have offered to try to get one of the newer ones working.

I was officially with the American embassy in Delhi on a rarified project designed mainly, I suppose, to keep U. S. biochemists off the welfare roles. All of us in Delhi had heard about Katmandu’s amino acid analyzer. A lot of people wanted to use it. The closest repairman was in Europe. I had once, in New York, worked with two PhDs dubbed MooreandStein, the men who had developed the first amino acid analyzer. And now it was summer, before the first monsoon, and hot in Delhi. A trip up the Katmandu looked pretty good.

I was put up in Katmandu by the British council and his wife. I spent half a day with the embassy’s famous machine and sent an order to New Jersey for five millimeter O-rings, a few amino acid standards, and set out to enjoy the cooler air, the local color and the famous English institution of high tea.

An English professor, Larry Baker-Smith, was glad to see me. He was lonesome, for one thing. We had a common language in that English dialect academic scienteese. And Larry had spent three years planting potatoes and peanuts in soil containing radioactive fertilizers, trying to label something or other on the eatable legumes. I suppose it might have been very sound work. But Adrian Johnston, the British council, had a problem blowing up and that interested me more. In any case, a few days after the washers and standards arrived, when I was looking for something unknown to run through the machine, I found out that for three years, Larry Baker-Smith’s native assistant had been lunching out of the carefully bagged and labeled potato and peanut samples. Each and every bag had been marked clearly with a skull and crossbones, POISON had been written on them in big red letters, in English, French, and Hindi, and every one of the bags was carefully dated and labeled. And every one of them was empty.

I ran through a few more standards, and there wasn’t much for me to do but clean out my desk. I did spend half a day tracking down a hand held counter. But by then the assistant had cleared out. It would have been a two day walk to his village. He may glow in the dark, if he does, he won’t glow through his clothes. It was pretty low level stuff that Larry had been using on his garden patch.

Adrian Johnston’s problem was with a young couple who had gone off together trekking. The first I heard was all hush hush, it was diplomatically very touchy. I wasn’t supposed to know anything. Bits came out in nervous conversation at breakfast and tea. The trekkers were married. The next day they didn’t seem to be married. She was American and only sixteen. He was a British subject. In that part of the world British Subject can be anyone from a Gurkha with a fine war record to a pothead kid who flunked out of Cambridge. With only the uncertain radio of a two seated airplane parked in the thin air on a tiny, mountain circled air strip, through several translators, news is slow and uncertain. The next installment had her still American and now twenty-four years old. He was from England and twenty-six. They had started off sometime before, with Nepalese trekking permits, to hike up through the Himalayan Breach.

They are coming out on the morning flight, Adrian told me. He had been to the embassy and had come back for me. I had known something was about to happen. The American ambassador had flown up two weeks before from Vientiane. Packing cases and messages had kept the ambassador and Adrian ill tempered and anxious late into the nights. Still, I think, the exact timing was a surprise, had been found out that morning as the flight was being boarded, when the air plane pilot radioed back from the grassy field on the other side of the mountains in Pokhara.

Flights from that airstrip are always late. Adrian got up unhappily, found papers in his brief case, and glanced over them. her name is Katherine Finney. He looked at me and waited and when I didn’t respond he went on, From Seattle, Washington, we think. You’re from somewhere near there?

I told him I was from Wisconsin.

Well, then. You’re not busy this morning?

I shook my head.

You can talk to her while I help him. They might be, well, two months up there. His voice trailed off. Two and a half. He looked at me again. The car is waiting.

Kat came off the small air plane first. She came down the ramp onto the tarmac ahead of several Indian traders and moved away from the plane and stood there, looking dully ahead at nothing.

Trevor was the last one off. He straightened as he came through the low door, looked right, left with a self-conscious frown, then walked steadily down the steep steps with an almost military bearing and went to stand on the far side of the traders, far from the girl, apart from everyone, to wait for the luggage to be off-loaded.

Adrian said as an aside, If they’re married, shook his head, and moved toward the young man.

I looked from the boy to the girl then started for her. She was average height. Her face and hands were white, white and red at the same time, the sunburned skin of a newborn. Her cheeks were thin, her fingers bony, her red blond hair gleamed in the sunlight. And her clothes were dirty, so dingy I could only guess at their original color.

Beyond the small knot of traders, Trevor shook Adrian’s hand. The young man’s face was covered with a filthy, matted beard. His forehead was brown, it looked like leather, and above, his hair stood straight up, greasy and stiff.

The ruck sacks were tossed down. Katherine took two steps and reached for hers. I said, Let me. I’m from Wisconsin. That’s supposed to make you feel at home.

She smiled at me tightly.

There’s the car. I pointed.

We followed Trevor and Adrian toward the gate.

She was looking at me miserably, and I tried to smile.

You’re arresting me?

I almost laughed. No, heavens. I’m a biochemist. You’re so top secret I don’t even know what you’ve been doing. He’s the British council. I could be wrong, but I don’t think he’s empowered to arrest anyone.

She squinted hard at me, and I noticed how sunken her eyes were, how blue, how dark against her skin. We were almost at the car, and she said, Good, and turned her face away.

I handed the ruck sack to the driver, and the four of us stood awkwardly waiting to get in the car. Kat had at least tried to scrub herself and wash her clothes. From several feet, I could smell Trevor, body odor, rot, spices, smells I don’t even know. Adrian stepped back, away from him. For a couple of honeymooners, he whispered my way and again shook his head.

Both Kat and Trevor frowned at that and each took a step backward, as though to be farther apart. By the time we were unloading at the Johnston’s compound it was obvious to all, they were not speaking, not even looking at each other.

And yet once.

Nineteen-sixty-seven. Katmandu was a fairyland at the top of the world. A city open to anyone, anyone at all. The Camp Hotel had beds for twenty cents a night. Hash was legal, food was cheap. And at your embassy, you could get your checks from home and really, people didn’t get hepatitis from dirty needles, not people you knew. Or if you knew them you didn’t know their names. It was a land of dreams, Delhi Belly, sometimes, but nothing serious, nothing tragic. Nothing real.

In normal times, no one who is happy and secure and respected leaves home without someplace to go and some reason for going. I never knew why Kat left Seattle and the university. There was a man; I think that that was part of it. And if it wasn’t, it should have been. It was the time too, of course, the age, the freedom.

Freedom is a funny thing. Affluence is a funny thing. And that is what makes freedom, of a kind: affluence. Kat’s parents had lived through the Depression and fought a war. Her parents’ parents had crossed the plains and mountains and lived through a war and fought a depression. But Kat had grown up knowing that she could finish college. She grew up knowing there would be food and clothes and cars and vacations. She had lived through an unnatural time with no major war nor depression or migration. She lived without thinking, expecting that her world would continue and that she would thrive. Yes, Kat’s parents, their parents, had fought to live, but she had grown up in a new world, and to her, it had always been there, it was the only world that she knew.

It is a strange world, really. A time between, perhaps. The goal is not survival, that battle has been won and Kat was free. Kat, Trevor, thousands like them were free. Older people asked where they were going. Older people whose paths had been set by their times, people who had never had to choose, watched indignantly and asked, where are they going?

An Eastern god. The Kama Sutra. Free love. Peace. Peace for all people and all time. Yes, no one said it, but, yes, they knew it wasn’t a new dream. What it was, was the only thing left, the only mission they had. And what they wanted, needed, was a binding crusade that no one could deny and that no one could escape. A war. A real war, to the last man war. A war every twenty years. Starvation. Migration. Any disaster at all.

In a poor country, no man with money will wear rags. To someone living on the edge of starvation, money, and its power, is too strong a god to mock and cast aside. Only those, like Kat, like Trevor, who had never known hopelessness could float through poverty and find it fun. Only those who had never thought survival could drift through starving cities seeking truth. Perhaps only those who never had to fight, have to. Kat had drifted into the Camp Hotel, drifted up from India on a shaking bus full of Hindu pilgrims and a few unshaven Occidentals wearing dirt and sandals, one effecting even a skirt like dhoti, and without a thought she had booked a bed at the Camp.

Trevor was at the Camp Hotel, too. He had flown up India Air, from Bombay where he had just completed two years as a British VSO, British Volunteer Service Overseas, and was taking a tour of the subcontinent before returning to England. Trevor was at the Camp, but he wasn’t in a bed in a dorm, he had a room with a bath. There were better hotels in Katmandu, Trevor ate in them sometimes, used the pool at the Saltee, but, like the mountains around, the Camp Hotel was a thing to do. Trevor had been to the temples, had smoked in one once, he had photographed the market and even bought a few beads. But he changed his money where the rates were best, which wasn’t in a dim shop two flights up from a winding, muddy street, but at the desk of the Annapurna Hotel, which is now the Hilton. It wasn’t as colorful as the floating crap game of the streets, but the rates were better and the rupees were real. Several vendors in the main street carried Time and Newsweek. Trevor purchased the Guardian when he changed his money at the Annapurna and sometimes the Economist, if they had a recent copy. And if he wasn’t at the Camp doing what people at the Camp did, he was at the Camp doing what he had come to do.

What he had been raised to do. Kat never knew Trevor. She met him, they talked, they laughed, they loved even, but Kat never knew Trevor nor Trevor Kat. Trevor had gone out to India, as he had gone to Oxford, as he had gone to Charter House, as his father had gone to Charter House and Oxford and to India, like his great uncle, as he knew without thinking his sons would go. And perhaps they will.

His life was run by a British clock with hands that moved, but time that didn’t change. He was the second son of a second son and his uncle’s home, the family home, stood in its park, the village respectfully on the edge, and around the home, within the home the world changed, and yet a laborer still touched his cap convulsively when Trevor passed on the lanes, the laborer still thought he knew his place and Trevor knew his, peers of England were still seated ahead of peers of the Kingdom, second sons still went to Charter House and Oxford and sometimes still out to India.

The Indian who ran the Camp Hotel smiled servilely and sent Trevor’s shirts to be washed and starched and accepted the tip and thrust his own umbrella upon Trevor when it rained. The Indian, like the help at home, knew his place and Trevor knew his. Trevor was Sir at the Embassy where he claimed his mail. He changed money, and he was Sir again. The Indian who ran the Camp stood when Trevor came in through the door, and if things were changing, life was change, things have always changed. There are limits to change, and Trevor sent his shirts out to be washed and starched and thanked the native who gave him his mail. Without seeing the man he thanked him, and sometimes he went to breakfast at the Saltee Hotel where the teapot was silver plate and cloaked in a calico cozy.

Kat had never seen a tea cozy. She picked up that artifact of a colder climate with a strange look and an uncomfortable giggle. And Trevor saw her giggle and shook his head and didn’t know at all what was strange or amusing. But that was later, of course. Still they haven’t met.

Trevor was sipping tea from a glass at the long table in the Camp Coffee Shop, and Kat slid onto the bench beside him and ordered a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Trevor smiled. Almost without looking at her, he smiled. She saw the slight assured twist of his lips, saw the near smile was about her, not with her. His hair was a little too short, too perfect. His shirt a little too sharp. The smile too smug. She turned away.

Kat’s sandwich came. Trevor watched her break it carefully down the middle. Her hands looked soft, her nails unpainted and smooth and filed. Her face was scrubbed, and her hair held neatly back from her face by a ribbon, a ribbon that matched a clean, unwrinkled dress of some kind of American fake cotton.

From where do you come?

Kat looked at him and answered. She liked his precision, she liked his accent, and she smiled. There was something almost military in the way he sat with his tea, and she liked that too. And Kat was young, barely of age herself, she had come from a land that wasn’t of age, or, at least, didn’t feel itself of age. And behind Trevor were Oxbridge and Scott and Kipling and an empire too, and he was young and in a lean Scot’s way, good looking and he laughed at himself and at her, and all of that she liked.

And he thought she was cute, the pert American openness, he told himself, without recognizing even that there was a condescending smugness in the thought. You eat peanut butter and banana sandwiches at home?

Kat’s mouth twisted uncertainly, her eyes grew round.

The lights dim. The crowd hushes. The curtain opens. A play, a movie, tells you when it begins, but that isn’t so in life. Kat had been on the road for a year. She had a year of chance encounters behind her, and she had no way of seeing the lights, of hearing the hush, the few last nervous coughs.

That was the beginning and Trevor watched her without knowing that when finally she was gone from his life, he was gone from that strange mountain kingdom. When finally he was back in the world that he had thought until then was really his world, nothing he had known before could ever again be the same.

Chapter 2

First allow me to show you Katmandu. The Katmandu of then. The Katmandu that Kat saw and Trevor saw, the fairyland at the top of the world.

During the next three or four days Kat and Trevor rode their rented bikes to the temples near the old city, then farther away to Patan, out to the Tibetan refugee camp. It was late August. The monsoons should have been ending, and in the mornings the sky was clear and bright, but the afternoons were washed by warm rains that left Kat and Trevor soaked and the paved paths an inch deep in mud and refuse.

There is a lot to see in the Vale of Katmandu. Near the Camp is the old Royal Palace with its monkey gods and the police station guarded by gory Kalo Bhairavi, the god of terror, and the bazaar with men selling blankets and vegetables and copper pots and hand woven rugs and strings of tiny seed beads imported from Czechoslovakia. There are little boys who will take you to the black market and dope and fake dollars and women. There are beggars. The tantric Buddhist pagoda with sex carved in every combination, every permutation, every position stands on a busy intersection.

Half an hour by bike along the jarring stone paved road is Swayambhunath or, to most Western visitors, the Monkey Temple. Up the carved steps and prayer flags flutter on streamers from tall steeple like chacluas that look down on the world from Oriental eyes, and brass wheels send prayers out onto the high mountain breeze.

Trevor watched the monkeys for a time and then said, Down some places in India, the monkeys get out of hand, and the city fathers catch as big a clutch as they can, load them into a bullock cart, and haul them out of town and open the cage.

What do you VSO types do in India, anyway?

He looked at her, and his brow wrinkled, and he didn’t know what kind of answer she expected. Do? You mean, like teach?

Well. She moved her shoulders and wiggled her head. But, why?

Someone should teach them, I should think.

White man’s burden?

Wasn’t that Kipling?

Kat didn’t know, and she shook her head again. Why don’t they teach themselves?

When a school has an Englishman teaching it advertises that. In the better schools they rather expect one of us to be teaching English. And, too, we were here for so long. It’s tradition, to come out to India.

Your father was here?

He helped relieve your man Stilwell, I believe.

Kat frowned a little. She had been an English major after all. And she had been born too late to remember a general named Stilwell.

A great uncle was here for a time too. Well, East Pakistan, really. I got out of Oxford. It seemed the thing to do, to come out for a time.

Kat was standing almost nose to nose with an adolescent monkey that had perched himself on the head of an Oriental Buddha. Who feeds these guys, anyway?

Who feeds the beggars?

Kat looked at him. The people here aren’t Chinese. Why do the gods have slanty eyes?

Trevor didn’t know. The Buddha had come from Patna in the north of India. Trevor knew that, and he knew that Kat knew it also, and he shrugged at her question.

Probably Swedish Jesuses have blue eyes, she said.

The monkey on top the Buddha hissed at her. Kat stepped back. The monkey hissed again and she moved farther away. And then the monkey jumped off the statue and came at her, hissing and grabbing at her skirt.

Trevor caught her hand. It was the first time that he had touched her, and he took her hand and pulled her away toward the steps, and the monkey was still hissing and bounding toward her.

Half way down the steps, the monkey stopped.

He could have caught you had he really wished. They were at the bottom of the steps, and Trevor still had her hand. He held it awkwardly, a little away from his side. For three or four seconds he held it, and then on the pretense of adjusting his camera strap, he let her hand drop. It had to be a game, he said, examining his camera so he would not have to see her.

Still, his teeth looked sharp.

He glanced her way. The Bodhnath Temple?

Its a thousand years old, Kat said half an hour later when they had ridden to the Tibetan temple.

What is?

Bodhnath Temple, she told him.

Nonsense.

That’s what she said.

Who said?

That girl. Miss Rana. The one in the Government Information Office.

An official. That explained a lot. These people. They tell you what they think you want to hear. He rubbed his brow and looked around. Parts, fourteenth or fifteenth century. Maybe.

Kat watched him. He was standing straight as a West Point graduate, surveying the worn walls, and she smiled at the pretense.

The next day they rented bicycles again and rode out to Lalitpur, or, as Westerners know it, Patna, where parts of the old temple may really predate Christ.

In the thirteenth century, the Kublai Khan of myth and history impressed the local Newar wood carvers from Patna and took them to the far corners of his empire, to whereever he wished palaces built. And still, today, there are wood carvers in Lalitpur, and their work decorates all of the lentils and doors and eaves.

During Kublai Khan’s time, there were great movements of peoples and ideas across borders and continents. The pagoda was brought into Nepal about this time. Or perhaps, the pagoda was first made in Nepal and was taken away.

History in Nepal, as taught and told, seems long on legend and short on fact. The people of the Katmandu Vale are a mixture of Mongolians migrated in from the north and Indo-Aryans pushed up from India. Religion is a mixture of Tibetan Lamaistic Buddhism and Indian Hinduism. The vestal virgin, the living Goddess of Katmandu, is chosen by Hindu priests from among the daughters of Buddhist families.

The king, the shah—a Persian title conferred by a Mogul Indian emperor on Rajput descendants who ruled the Gurkha people of the Vale of Katmandu in the midseventeenth hundreds—conquered