By fifteen he had filled three volumes of a ‘World Wide Stamp Album’ with postal issues from mythical countries such as Frandia or Doland, Slobovia or Kunstland East and West. Each country had its own complicated history – ‘of invasions, federations, liberations’. Each, in some way, expressed his ‘romantic’ yearning for the remote and exotic, or the private concerns of his family and friends. Then he started going to football games; he set his sights on college, and he stopped making stamps.
There followed ten conventional years - not so conventional by the standards of his home town – but conventional enough for a middle-class American boy coming of age in the Sixties with a contribution to make in the arts. He wanted to be a painter and painted enormous abstract expressionist canvases in the manner of de Kooning. He graduated in architecture at Cornell. He travelled to Europe; looked in on the Warhol Factory; learned to dye and weave textiles; smoked marijuana; did yoga; took an interest in Gurdjieff; and was always falling in and out of love.
After leaving Cornell, he came to New York where he lived in a sparsely furnished apartment in Brooklyn Heights and got a job as an architectural designer in the office of the architect Richard Meier. But the scale of the city dwarfed and depressed him. He felt apart from the pushy exhibitionism of its artists. His love affairs were unhappy and he retreated back into his shell, back to the introverted world of his childhood - and its stamps. One day he happened to show his stamp album to friends who encouraged him to continue it. He did so — and left the United States.
In February 1972, he packed his watercolours and a stack of perforated papers and flew to Holland where a friend had rented a cottage ‘behind the Dike’ (Achterdijk) near a village not far from Utrecht. Immediately he set to work on the stamps of a ‘Dutch’ country called Achterdijk.
During the Vietnam years, young Americans flocked to Holland as they had flocked to Paris in the Twenties. But for Donald Evans Holland was not a hippy heaven of easy sex and easy drugs. He felt reborn there; and, one day, after stamping an antique envelope with the postmark ‘Achterdijk,’ he addressed it to an imaginary correspondent, ‘De Heer Naaktgeboren’ (Mr Naked-Born) – which was a surrogate name for himself. He loved the flat wind-blown landscapes of Holland and the high varied skies. He liked the open-mindedness of the Dutch, and paid them the compliment of learning their language. He liked the abstract beauty of Dutch brickwork; the compact scale of the architecture; and, from the seventeenth-century masters, he appropriated certain techniques, of drawing and watercolour, that were perfect for his stamps.
Donald Evans lived, off and on, in Holland for his five remaining years – in lofts, rented rooms, and tiny apartments. He was, by temperament, hypochondriac: when it was found that his chest troubles were caused by a vestigial third lung, he had it removed and recorded the event, from his hospital bed, with the stamps of twin kingdoms called Lichaam and Geest, which means ‘Body and Soul’. He was also liable to bouts of wandering fever; and he even invented a capital city called Vanupieds (Barefoot Vagabond) to describe his habit of roaming around the world. Many artists moan about being chained to their studios, but Donald Evans could set up in a railway waiting room. Perhaps the very portability of his work states his contempt for the arts and pretensions of settled civilisation – the nomad’s contempt for the pyramid.
His colour sense was as faultless as his draughtsmanship. A set of his stamps sits on a page like butterflies in a case. And, needless to say, he loved butterflies and came up with a country for them – Rups, which is the Dutch for ‘caterpillar’. He himself said he had no originality, and that he preferred to work from photographs or given images: yet one flat panorama of Achterdijk has the ‘breathed-on’ quality of a sepiawash landscape by Rembrandt. His art was so disciplined that it was patient of receiving anything that happened to attract him — zeppelins, barnyard fowls, penguins, pasta, a passion for mushroom hunting, Sung ceramics, shells, dominoes; drinks at the Bar Centrum; windmills that were ‘abstract’ portraits of friends; the vegetable market at Cadaques, or a recipe for pesto from Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Cooking: his way of recording the pleasures of food and drink reminds me, somehow, of Hemingway.
He never set foot in Asia, but as a boy he had been fascinated by camel-trains and caravansaries and had invented desert countries for his stamp album. Later, he liked reading British travel books about the Middle East and, to create a country called Adjudani – the Persian for ‘Jewish’ – he borrowed images from Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs. To my delight, he also borrowed an image from me - the photo of a Timurid tomb-tower taken in an Afghan village on the Russian frontier.
As a boy, too, he had dreamed of the South Seas. Now he dreamed up a coral archipelago – Amis et Amants – a ‘French’ colony populated by happy, friendly, amorous blacks: the stamps of one issue, titled Coups de Foudre, show a row of storm-blasted coconut palms, each painted in a different colour combination to suggest the different thunderbolts of love. Or there were the Tropides – tiny islands in Vermeer-like dots and dashes. Or the arctic country of Yteke, named after a Dutch dancer friend who could only perform in a cold climate.
He had no literary gifts himself. Sometimes he thought of writing - or of getting someone else to write - an accompanying text; but in the end he preferred to leave each stamp as a window into his world, and the rest to the imagination. His favourite modern writer was Gertrude Stein - perhaps because he learned from her the value of the variant within the repetition. In a ‘commemorative’ issue painted in her honour, he inscribed a set of stamps with texts from her Tender Buttons, the prose poem of 1914, which was first published by another Donald Evans, an American poet.
By common consent, the art of the drop-out generation is a mess – and the art of Donald Evans is the antithesis of mess. Nor is it niggling. Nor is it precious. Yet I can’t think of another artist who expressed more succinctly and beautifully the best aspirations of those years: the flight from War and the machine; the asceticism; the nomadic restlessness; the yearning for sensual cloud-cuckoo-lands; the retreat from public into private obsessions, from the big and noisy to the small and still. On one of his Gertrude Stein stamps he inscribed these haunting lines from her Valentine to Sherwood Anderson which could also serve as his epitaph:Let us describe how they went. It was a very windy night and the road although in excellent condition and extremely well-graded has many turnings and although the curves are not sharp the rise is considerable. It was a very windy night and some of the larger vehicles found it more prudent not to venture . . .
1981
8
TRAVEL
ON YETI TRACKS
This April, having spent the hottest part of the year in the Central Australian desert, I felt the urge to get out of that tired red country and clear my head among some mountains. I had always wanted to walk in the valleys around Mount Everest and remember, as a boy, going to a slide-lecture of the Hillary-Tensing climb and forming a very vivid impression of rivers rushing with snowmelt, bamboo bridges, forests of rhododendrons, Sherpa villages and yaks. I wanted to see the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries that lie on the Nepalese side of the frontier. As for the Yeti, I wanted to explore, at first hand, that nebulous area of zoology where the Beast of Linnaean classification meets the Beast of the Imagination.
From Sydney, I called my wife and told her, firmly, to meet me in Nepal.
‘I can’t,’ Elizabeth said in a dispirited voice. Her favourite aunt was having her ninetieth birthday party in Boston.
‘The offer’s open,’ I said. ‘Call me if you change your mind.’
‘I’ve changed it.’
The Everest region is known as Khumbu Himal and to reach it you must either trek for a week over three high passes, or fly to Lukla where the airstrip tilts off the mountainside at an angle of 25°. The weather was foul: a series of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal had made nonsense of the forecast. Twice we took off, ran into turbulence, and returned to Kathmandu. On our third try, the pilot
nosed the plane under a purplish cloudbank, threaded along a forested valley, and finally approached the runway from below rather than above.
The passengers cheered as we bounced onto the gravel; the bags were chucked clear and, as the plane reloaded, we took our first gulps of thin air. Sir Edmund Hillary could be seen striding about shaking hands with a film crew. High above, I heard a cuckoo, not a kookaburra, calling. Then Elizabeth, who is also an amateur botanist, pointed to a tree with huge white flowers that seemed to hang out of the clouds.
‘Look!’ she called. ‘Magnolia campbelli.’
A dashing young Sherpa pressed forward and introduced himself as our sirdar. His name was Sangye Dorje — which means ‘Thunder-Lion’. He moved with a certain military precision; and in his peaked cap, his waisted green tunic, boots and breeches, he could have played the role of a Kalmuck lieutenant in a pre-war Soviet movie. He was always cheerful, always resourceful, and had the habit of prefacing his statements with ‘I have something to say’, and of closing with ‘That is all I have to say’.
The cook was his old school friend Nima Tashi, who was a wizard at sticky cakes and whose left cheek was scarred with a yak-horn cornada. The third Sherpa, Pasang Nuru, was forever whirling prayer-wheels. Lastly, the cook’s boy, Tham, a Magar from Central Nepal, was a shy doe-eyed boy of infinite sweetness and theatrical temperament, who wore a scruffy red knitted cap as if it were Pulcinello’s.
Mountain Travel, the organisation which had made our paltry arrangements as well as those of the Everest Expedition, had promised us ten porters. But most Sherpas were off planting potatoes and, anyway, we were better off with three yaks – or rather, three dzoms, which are a cross between a yak and a cow.
We strolled around Lukla while they loaded up. Woodsmoke drifted placidly from the houses; the windows were painted in bright Tibetan colours; the fields were knee-high in green barley, and there were apple trees in flower. Behind the village we saw the remains of a crashed Twin Otter, whose fuselage served as a latrine, its wings as a goat-fence, and its engines as an ornament to the Buddha Lodge Hotel. At Lukla, the windsock is also a prayer-flag.
On coming back I pointed to a hermitage high on the mountainside among red rhododendrons.
‘Who lives there?’ I asked Sangye.
‘One nun.’ He screwed up his face, and grinned. ‘But now not a nun because she make a baby.’
‘Who was the father?’
‘One monk.’
The cloud cleared as we started up the road to Namche Bazaar. The road was about three feet wide. The wind soughed in the pines; the river echoed in its gorge; the mountains glittered and the dzom-bells clanged. Sangye and Pasang whistled between their teeth, thwacked the animals on the rump, shouted, ‘DZOM! DZOM!’ and we all felt the exhilaration that comes at the start of a journey.
‘Sherpa’ means ‘Easterner’ in Tibetan; and the Sherpas who settled in Khumbu about 450 years ago are a peace-loving Buddhist people from the eastern part of the plateau. They are also compulsive travellers; and in Sherpa-country every track is marked with cairns and prayer-flags, reminding you that Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.
Sangye said that each thread blown from a prayer-flag was a prayer blown straight to Heaven.
Every half mile or so, we would pass a wall of stone slabs, each one carved with the mantra Om mani padmē Hum — ‘Om! Jewel in the Lotus! Hum!’ (The jewel in question is Avalokiteśvara, the Buddha of Infinite Compassion, while the Om and Hum represent the Height and Depth of the Universe.) Sangye was very anxious we should walk round these prayer-walls in a clockwise direction, that is, to follow the Way of the Heavens – ‘Or else,’ he said, ‘everything will go wrong.’ When Elizabeth forgot, he smiled and said, ‘Never mind! Not so many OMs on that one!’
We stopped for the night at Phakhding in a grove of pines beside the river. In the next-door camp was an expedition of British Army officers, one of whom wore a T-shirt reading ‘The Falkland Islands are beautiful and British’. Another officer said the War had been a ‘necessary bit of blood-letting, what?’
‘Idiots,’ I said to myself, as I rolled over to sleep.
Around ten next morning we stopped at the tea-house of an old Japanese solitary – a character from the travel diaries of Bashō, with a long wispy beard and baggy red trousers that shone with dirt. He was hoeing his vegetables and, while his boy made the tea, he came over to talk. He was an expert in the grafting of fruit trees. In Japan he had worked for the Government forestry service and had come here, on retiring, eight years ago.
‘I had no children,’ he said. ‘I had no house. Why should I not come and live among these mountains?’
After crossing the torrent of Bhote Khosi, the track then zigzagged up a cliff and we had our first view of Everest to the east. Streams of snow were blowing off the summit. On ahead was Khumbu Ylha, the Sacred Mountain of the Sherpas, rearing its triangular peak above a throne of puffy white clouds. We kept passing short, brown, bandy-legged men bent double under loads of rice and millet which they were carrying to the Saturday market at Namche.
‘Lowlanders,’ said Sangye contemptuously. ‘From five days down.’
Namche is a small town built in terraces around the bowl of a valley, like the seats of an Ancient Greek theatre. Its merchants traffic in every kind of leftover from mountaineering expeditions: Spanish quince paste, French packet soup, Swiss crampons, German oxygen cylinders, freeze-dried cheesecake from the U.S.A., and British bully-beef. The market began at sunrise and, from our campsite, sounded like a swarm of bees. I saw a party of monks arriving to buy provisions. Most of them were wearing European cast-offs – the yellows, reds and oranges of high-altitude gear corresponding to the orthodox colours of Tibetan Lamaism.
Before leaving for Thame Monastery, we visited the town gompa, which is the equivalent of the parish church. In the courtyard an aged lama was chatting to a scrawny Tibetan already loaded up with buffalo-skins. The man was a smuggler. To reach Tibet he would have to avoid the Chinese Army, cross two glaciers, and climb a pass of 19,000 feet. The lama was about to bless him. He needed it.
Inside the gompa we were shown into a dusky room lit with flickering butter lamps and frescoed with the bestial or benevolent Tibetan divinities, whose identity we tried to puzzle out. We saw a rather down-at-heel statue of Guru Rimpoche, the legendary proselytiser of Tibet. I then paused in front of a bull-headed, thousand-armed Demon and said, facetiously enough, that anyone who believed in such a creature was in a fit state to ‘see’ the Yeti.
All along the track to Thame there were clumps of blue iris and gentians the size of sapphire studs. Soon we came to a lovely wood of birch trees, leafless as yet, with peeling orange bark and beards of jade green lichen festooned from their branches. We passed through stands of pale pink rhododendrons and, as we ambled along, I asked Sangye Dorje whether he believed in the Yeti.
‘I do,’ he said, and went on to explain how there were two kinds of Yeti: the mih-teh which killed people, and the dzu-teh which killed only animals.
‘But Yeti’, he added sombrely, ‘is also some kind of God.’
He promised that when we got to his own village, Khumjung, he would introduce me to a woman who was actually attacked by the beast. Usually, he said, a person who looked into Yeti’s eyes was doomed to die: but she had been the exception.
Nima Tashi and Tham had gone on ahead to cook lunch. We found them boiling rice and lentils in the ruins of a water-mill and, while we waited, we lay on the turf and watched the cumulo-nimbus playing games to outwit the sun. Later, in the village of Thome (which means ‘Way Up’) we ran in with some novice monks coming back from market. They were all singing at the tops of their voices. The smallest was walloping out the rhythm on an oil-can, and a wizened old monk followed wearing purple rags and a sou‘wester.
‘Ask him’, I said to Sangye, ‘whether he has ever seen the Yeti.’
‘Not I,??
? the old man smiled. ‘But my aunts did.’ His two aunts had been pasturing their sheep when the whole flock suddenly poured off the mountain with the Yeti in pursuit.
‘How did it look?’ I asked.
‘Bigger than a man,’ the monk said, ‘with terrible yellow eyes, arms almost touching the ground, red hair growing upwards from the waist, and a white crest on top.’
‘Likely story,’ murmured Elizabeth.
I thanked the monk and walked on ahead with one of the novices. His name was Pama Jhablan. He was sixteen, and had a head of bootbrush hair and an extremely determined expression. He spoke excellent English, having lived for seven years in Darjeeling, which he seemed to think was some kind of Gomorrah. He said he would never kill a living thing, NEVER, NEVER, not even if a monster attacked him. The idea of taking a woman was NOT POSSIBLE, and he looked forward to living his whole life in the mountain monastery.
‘All my life,’ he repeated with some insistence. ‘IN PRAYER.’
It was snowing when we got to Thame Og. There were a few rough stone houses reminding you of houses in the west of Ireland, and mounds of yak dung in the potato fields. We spent a freezing night at 12,500 feet and, at sunrise, climbed to the monastery, which lay perched on the side of a cliff. My friend Pama was there to show us the preparations for the Mani Rimdu Festival. He thumped the great drum. Then he allowed me to handle the skin of a ‘fish-monster’ which I had seen strung up among the dance masks: it was, I believe, a pangolin.