Page 35 of The Sky Beneath Us
We’re climbing more steeply uphill now but, rather than slowing down, Themi’s pace has quickened.
If I hadn’t already been gasping for air by the time we reach the lip of the valley, I’d have gasped again at the sight that awaits us. The mountains seem to lean apart a little, as if making room to cradle this beautiful spot in their arms. The valley is a sheltered bowl, nourished by the tumbling stream, stretching away from us to meet a rocky headwall at its far end. At the lower end, where we now stand, the water becomes dispersed, meandering among white river stones, creating a broad meadow where swathes of purple candelabra primulas grow. The waters braid themselves together again into a single channel, turning the water-driven prayer wheel before rushing over the valley’s lip to cross the path and carry on their way to join the larger river far below.
As we pick our way across the river stones, the years seem to fall from Themi’s shoulders, and I catch a glimpse of the much younger woman who came to this place as a child and would have brought her own daughter, Poppy, here too. When we stop besidea low wall, she perches there, lifting her face to the sun, and smiles, closing her eyes, lost in her memories, while Pema and Dipa wander on, foraging for mushrooms growing beneath the birch trees in the most sheltered spots. I sit down beside her, thankful to be able to rest and breathe a little more deeply, taking stock of our surroundings. There are several small stone huts in the valley, where yak herders have come to graze their animals on the fertile meadow that stretches up the valley sides to meet the steeper scree. The faint clanking of yak bells drifts down to us from above and I shade my eyes to try to make out the herd among the distant scrubland of juniper and grasses. A pair of eagles soar against the endless blue of the sky, spiralling on the air currents between the mountains. And we stand among a tapestry of flowers, just beginning to open their petals to the sun after the recent cold snap.
A sense of peace washes through me as my muscles release tension born of anxiety and stress. They’re tight with a coldness as well, which has more to do with something internal, I think, than with the chill Himalayan air. I feel my heart tentatively begin to open too, where it’s been frozen for so long by fear and loss and sadness: not just from my current preoccupations with the pandemic and what it’s doing to my family, but from years of loneliness and emptiness.
Like Themi, I close my eyes for a while, absorbing the warmth, letting it soak through me, and what Mum said to me at the start of my journey comes back to me:Try to find out a bit more about where Violet went. And while you’re at it, try to find out what’s happened to the fearless, audacious girl you once were, Daisy.
Well, I’ve managed to find Violet’s family – my family too, now – and in doing so I’ve gained a whole new perspective on the world. In following Violet’s journey, putting one foot in front of the other just as she did, I’ve reached a place where I can see the sky beneath me. I’ve both lost and found more than I ever thoughtpossible. I’ve left behind the person I’d become, and while that’s frightening, it’s liberating too.
I open my eyes to find Themi scrutinising me closely. I smile and say, ‘Thank you for bringing me to this beautiful place.’
She nods, her expression shrewd. As if she’s been reading my thoughts, she says, ‘You are beginning to find what you came looking for, I think?’
I laugh. ‘Is it that obvious? Am I such a cliché? Another tourist coming to try and find myself in this foreign land? Looking for answers?’
She shakes her head. ‘My mother often used to say that life is not about finding yourself – it’s about creating the person you want to be. Life doesn’t always give us answers. She taught me we have to accept there are some things we can’t understand, and in the end our lives will be defined by what we do with that fact – how we accept it and pick ourselves up, facing reality and adapting to it, rather than denying or ignoring it. Violet made a life for herself here, even if she had to do it the hard way, and she gave me a future that I could never have had if she’d returned to Britain. She gave me freedom. And the hardships were worth it because they gave Violet her own freedom too.’
We’re both silent for a moment, lost in thought. Then Themi continues, ‘It’s never easy, making changes, is it? It takes quite a bit of work because, as we Buddhists know, the natural human way is to cling blindly to the desires and beliefs that make us suffer. Wishing life was otherwise keeps us stuck. Accepting where we are and focusing on finding the goodness in every day can go a long way to getting us out of that downward spiral of suffering. Life can be very overwhelming, and that’s especially true right now, while the virus is making things so hard for everyone, everywhere. But we can still choose to be like those eagles up there.’ She nods towards the distant birds, just flecks in the sky now as they circlefar, far above us. ‘If we can let go of the thoughts that are keeping us trapped, stop fighting with them and struggling against them, we will soar upwards, where the currents take us.’ She pats my hand. ‘Come, let’s walk again. I want to show you something.’
I follow her as she threads her way up a faint track, deeper into the valley. Every now and then she pauses to point something out to me: the tiny white stars of a saxifrage growing through a cushion of emerald moss; the hoofprint of a musk deer in a patch of damp sand where it’s come to the river to drink; and, as we begin to climb higher towards the scree, the droppings of a snow leopard, matted with the hair of its prey.
Perched on top of a boulder, a large bird squawks a warning as we draw near. Its plumage is extraordinary, an iridescent peacock-blue. ‘Danphe,’ Themi says. ‘The Nepali pheasant.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ I say.
‘Beautiful, but slow. Tasty food for snow leopards and wolves. Easier to catch than deer and mountain goats.’
‘There are wolves here too?’ I ask, casting an anxious glance towards the rocky heights above us. Are those grey shapes just boulders, or predators silently watching us?
She nods, unperturbed. ‘They follow yak herders coming through the mountains from the Tibetan plateau. Sometimes when they’re hungry in the winter they come right to the edge of Phortse looking for food.’
She lifts the hem of her skirt in order to scramble more easily over a pile of rocks. ‘This is where some of the blue poppies grow, the ones Violet showed Betty Sherriff. No flowers to see at the moment, it’s still too early and that cold spell will have set them back even more this year. But look, here are the first leaves starting to sprout.’ She shows me the tiny, hairy blades just beginning to unfurl where the sun warms the earth. ‘They’ll grow to be this high in about a month’s time.’ She gestures to her mid-thigh level.
We climb higher until we reach a point where the scree begins, giving us a viewpoint over the whole of the valley. Themi sits down on a lichen-crusted boulder, spreading her apron over her lap. I take a seat next to her. She nudges me. ‘Look,’ she says, her face crinkling into a smile as she points her gnarled forefinger towards the ground at our feet. ‘That’s what I really wanted to show you.’
I see the bud of a tiny blue flower huddled between the stones, hidden away, nestling in a low-growing coronet of spiky leaves, determined to lift its face to the sun. ‘Meconopsis horridula,’ Themi says. ‘It’s a rare type of Himalayan poppy. Keeps to the high places and never grows big. I was up here with my mother when she first discovered it. But she said we must keep it a secret because she knew people would come and take it from here otherwise. Others have found it elsewhere since, but only we know it’s here in the Valley of Flowers.’
I touch it gently with my forefinger, marvelling at how something so beautiful and fragile can survive in such a tough, inhospitable environment.
Then Themi says quietly, ‘I named my daughter after it. Poppy. Of course, her father insisted she had to have a proper Sherpa name too, so we called her Nima because she was born on a Sunday and Nima means “sun”. But to all of us, she was always Poppy. Violet absolutely adored her, as only a grandmother can.’
‘What happened to her?’ I ask softly. I’ve scoured Violet’s journals for any mention of how she lost her granddaughter, but she stopped writing them in the late 1970s. I’m guessing whatever became of Poppy may lie behind that silence.
Themi gazes into the distance, her eyes not focused on the landscape stretching out below but on something else, something only she can see. ‘The same thing that has happened to so many of our families. Mount Everest. You see, Daisy, that mountain is both a blessing and a curse for the Sherpa people. It changed our livesand our fortunes when people around the world realised it could be conquered. But it’s the Sherpas who are the key to climbing it. They find the routes, fix the ropes, set the ladders across the ever-changing crevasses in the ice fields. They carry the oxygen and the supplies up to the camps higher up the mountain, allowing climbers to survive in the death zone. They’re paid well for this work, of course, but they risk everything in order to try and improve life for their families.’ She sighs, reaching out a finger to stroke the face of the tiny blue flower in the stones alongside us.
‘My Poppy grew up in the village surrounded by her Sherpa family and friends,’ she continues. ‘Even though we were outsiders, everyone had accepted Violet into the community, and they just sort of adopted me as one of their children. I’d married a Sherpa – my husband, Tshering – so when Poppy came along, she was completely assimilated, despite being half Scottish. She was loved by everyone, but she had one particular friend, a little boy called Lhakpa. They were inseparable. As they grew up, they trained together with my husband to learn how to climb. Poppy was always an adventurer, like her granny Violet. She loved the thrill of being able to see the world from a different angle, hanging from an ice cliff or scaling a rock wall. Her dad always said that, technically, she was the best of all of them. She had an instinctive feel for the mountains.
‘Eventually, Poppy and Lhakpa became husband and wife. When I’d married her dad, we had a very small and quiet ceremony as I was from the outside. But when Poppy and Lhakpa were married we had a big traditional Sherpa wedding, which went on for days. People came from all around, dressed in their finery, and we celebrated and danced. It was one of the happiest days of my life. Violet’s too, she always said. I think she sometimes felt a little guilty that she’d denied me an easier life in Europe, although it was never something I wanted, but on that day, she felt all the hardship hadbeen worth it to give her daughter and granddaughter so much relative freedom and a sense of belonging in a community of equals.
‘A year after the wedding, Pema arrived. That was another great day in all our lives. Violet was old and frail by then, but she loved being a great-granny. She’d rock Pema to sleep in her arms, singing the songs she remembered from her Scottish childhood.’
I smile, remembering the songs I’d grown up with – those same songs, I bet.
‘Like so many Sherpas, though, Lhakpa wanted a better life for his wife and child. He was already a strong climber and he’d accompanied his father and brothers on expeditions, along with my husband. They were a tight-knit team, and became known as some of the very best Sherpas. Lhakpa’s dad was what they call an “icefall-doctor”. That’s a Sherpa who has specialised knowledge of finding the way through the Khumbu Icefall, the very dangerous area just above Everest Base Camp where the glacier flowing down the mountain meets the valley. Even though it’s moving in slow motion, it crumples and breaks, making it a complicated and hazardous start to every climb. Lhakpa learned how to be an icefall-doctor too, because that way he’d be paid more. And so he’d leave Phortse at the beginning of each climbing season to go and live in a tent at Base Camp, where, early every morning, while the other climbers were still asleep, he was part of the team who went up on to the icefall to work out that day’s safest route through it, fixing ladders and ropes for the other climbers to use.’
Themi pauses as a sudden gust of chill wind whisks a strand of hair loose from her braid, into her eyes. She tucks it behind her ear, then continues.
