Discovering Mustang

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Last night, Peter Athans, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, spoke to a full house at Benaroya Hall about his experiences in the "forbidden kingdom" of Mustang. Mustang is a region just north of Annapurna in northern Nepal. Travel by Westerners to the remote region was forbidden until 1991, and is still strictly regulated.

Athans is a Seattle-area mountaineer with seven summits of Everest under his belt. Besides being an outstanding climber, whose efforts to save other climbers were recognized by Jon Krakauer in his book Into Thin Air, he is engaged in on-going humanitarian activities in Nepal.

Speaking without notes, pacing back and forth across the stage, he began his illustrated lecture by reciting Shelley's sonnet, Ozymandias, illustrating the Buddhist concept of the impermanence of all earthly endeavors, which he then reminded us is always balanced against the unchanging nature of nirvana, of eternity. Athans has spent years conversing with Tibetan Buddhist lamas and philosophers, and appears to have integrated many Buddhist principles into his own view of life.

The photos and film clips he showed of his expedition's work in 2007-08, climbing to and exploring cave dwellings cut deeply into the dangerously friable sandstone cliffs of Mustang, were dazzling in their beauty. He described how thousands of years ago the area was occupied by a pre-Buddhist society, a society that later Buddhist missionaries labeled as "uncivilized" and dominated by black magic. Buddhism ultimately prevailed, and tried to eradicate the teachings of the earlier society. (Mounds of dumped manuscripts from those days were discovered in one cave, and are being restored and protected by local workers.) Athans disputes the Buddhists' traditionally dismissive characterization of the older society. The wall paintings found in the labyrinthine caverns he explored show the close relationship between the religious civilizations that existed both before and after the Buddhist victory.

The lecture was exciting to me, as I plan to trek through a region on the other (southern) side of Annapurna in October. The two regions are quite different in climate. The area I will be visiting, like the Khumbu region of Everest, receives sufficient precipitation to be forested and rather lush in vegetation in the lower altitudes. The Mustang area, on the northern side of the Himalayas, is dry desert, like parts of the Southwest in the U.S., and very much like the Ladakh area of India -- also north of the Himalayas -- through which I trekked in 2005. Both regions, however, share -- as does the Everest region -- an intense Tibetan Buddhist culture and religion, in contrast to the Hindu culture of much of Nepal.

Peter Athans reminds us how much there is to learn about any area on the face of the earth, if only we have the time and the willingness to make the effort. This point is especially true in long-settled areas, such as Nepal, where civilizations are layered, one upon another, each leaving artifacts and other clues -- both physical and as traces in the present day society that superseded them --of their daily lives and aspirations.

All human endeavors are impermanent, as Buddhism and Ozymandias, remind us. But we can find eternal truths in studying the traces that they leave behind.