The Lady and the Panda (14 page)

At seven o'clock, on one of her first nights, an international lineup of guests occupied E. A. Cavaliere's immense, “haphazard” living room. Ruth Harkness stood before the fire, holding, as usual, her cigarette and her drink, served neat. The scarcity of evening wear in her luggage was not apparent, for she possessed a knack for throwing together dashing outfits, and she had stowed away one knockout—an embroidered, padded Japanese dressing gown. This night, as the only woman entertaining a buoyant and eclectic crowd, she was in her element.

The lavishness of the affair was business as usual for Cavaliere, a man of about sixty who was as generous as he was social. Small and dapper, with gray hair and blue eyes, Cavaliere was a courtly bohemian who spoke eight languages, including Chinese. He declared that, after thirtysix years in this country, he felt more Chinese than Italian. He lived his life as he pleased, keeping a White Russian mistress and befriending a wide assortment of characters, many of whom he came into contact with in the course of his work as the province's postal commissioner. Cavaliere had created a world of comfort and refinement, and guests arrived in a steady stream from the rugged lands that stretched for hundreds of miles around Chengdu. Pilots, explorers, ambassadors, officials, speculators, musk merchants, and even missionaries came to stay.

The cultured and kind E. A. Cavaliere.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

In this wilderness outpost, his home was an elegant oasis, filled with fine food, wine, and song. “Kay” had two fine Victrolas and an impressive library of albums, heavy on opera. He was partial to Italian composers, and particularly savored the recordings of Enrico Caruso. On a given evening the whole Chinese estate might echo with the beauty and power of the tenor's voice as he sang of the sorrow that twilight brings in the haunting “O Sole Mio.”

Cavaliere never turned a traveler away—or hardly ever. Harkness discovered at the outset that some sharp instinct on Cavaliere's part had prompted him to send Russell packing weeks before. For everyone else, though, the generous Italian had the room and the resources to entertain in high style. The constant airlift service of the pilots of the CNAC kept him well provisioned with fare from the wine cellars and gourmet markets of the world.

The pilots were grateful to Cavaliere on two fronts: they always found free quarters with him, and, rather amazingly, Cavaliere also fixed their planes. A mechanical savant who loved to tinker, he proved himself one of the most able aviation mechanics the men had ever known, though as a gentleman, he never accepted payment.

Kay had settled Harkness and Quentin Young in large, beautiful rooms off a sunny courtyard filled with dahlias, zinnias, and flowering trees. He provided Harkness with her own dedicated rickshaw boy, who was always at the ready outside her door. And he arranged all her banking, including postal orders to the towns on her route so she wouldn't have to carry much cash in the bandit-riddled territories. It took her no time to feel that she knew her host well—within days, he was already “dear Cavaliere,” a man whose doting friendship would not end once she was out of his house and on the road to the border.

Cavaliere couldn't have been more different from the expats she had disliked elsewhere in the country. He seemed in harmony with China and possessed a European's shrugging acceptance of human nature. He also knew firsthand about the terrain in this mystical part of Asia, where
the green Sichuan Basin met the snowcapped mountains marking an ever-shifting border between China and Tibet. Here the hot winds of the plains barreled into the mountains, condensing the moisture and shrouding the world in a dreamy mist. From his living room, warmed by a fire, Kay could serve a tumbler of strong spirits to guests like Harkness and paint a vivid picture of this exotic land so little known to the outside world. In fact, he did sit with her at length, cautioning her about the savage beauty of this lost part of the world.

Not far beyond the ramparts of Chengdu existed land, mile upon mile of it, that was uncharted and filled with peril. The mountain chain that separated the Sichuan Basin from the Plateau of Tibet was crowded with unnamed peaks, among the steepest and tallest on earth. The mountains of Tibet were formed tens of millions of years before in some spectacular slow-motion collision between landmasses. Sheer, breathtaking, and punishing, the jagged ridges of the Qionglai Shan could reach heights of twenty-five thousand feet. There were wet, dense, nearly impenetrable walls of bamboo; deep, plummeting gorges; bone-numbing cold. The Chinese had marveled at this forbidding place for millennia. “It is more difficult to go to Sichuan than to get into heaven,” the poet Li Po, who would become one of Harkness's favorites, had mused.

Even where the mountains could be breached, bandits and fierce tribes served as human barriers. In 1925 the famous American botanist Joseph Rock had witnessed men impaled, others hung up and disemboweled alive, and severed heads used as decorations for barracks. By repelling the outside world, the region had sheltered many mysteries within, including what was now the most sought-after animal in the world. The enigmatic panda roamed across this front, which was neither China nor Tibet. A no-man's-land absent from maps and beyond the reach of law.

Panda hunter Dean Sage wrote of “winds that howled wintrily through the crags, and chilled us to the bone,” of mountains that “seemed fairly to hurl their jagged peaks against the sky,” of trails up mountainsides “about as steep as it was possible for a man to climb,” and of the backbreaking work of “thrashing through bamboo jungles of unbelievable
density,” of “wading through snow” and “creeping over ice-covered ledges.”

For Harkness, always tantalized by the forbidden and forbidding, the dark descriptions would only have sent her imagination galloping and sharpened her determination. And who knew? Beyond all the danger just might lie a magical dominion. If Western experts were mystified, all the better, for past the realm of science lay that of spirits and poets; beyond calculation was belief. Many Chinese artists and thinkers held that in these mountains were glimpses of the infinite. Even Western climbers, now increasing in number, had often reported experiencing a spiritual ascent along with the physical one.

This borderland and all of inner Tibet—“the Roof of the World,” as Victorians had dubbed it—had by now gained a reputation for possessing a sacred dimension unknown in the West. Explorers claimed to have witnessed the queerest phenomena—Alexandra David-Neel, the intrepid Parisian who had spent years there, chronicled lamas who had perfected something called
lung-gom,
the ability to fly while in a trance state, and monks who could produce great body heat in freezing temperatures through the practice of
tumo.
Writing for
National Geographic
magazine in 1935, Dr. Rock described the shamanistic rapture of an oracle in Tibet who displayed seizurelike convulsions when possessed by a deity, his face turning purple, blood oozing from his mouth and nose. While in this state, the man took a strong Mongolian steel sword and, Rock reported, “in the twinkling of an eye he twisted it with his naked hands into several loops and knots.”

At the approach to Buddhist Tibet, in the folds of these mountains, there was a wrinkle in time and space. Distances could not truly be measured in miles or kilometers. In such a place, a traveler might be tempted to believe in the Tibetan legend of Shambala—a mystical realm hidden away in the mountain passes, where even the air was different— bringing clarity to thoughts and spiritual feelings. The story was persistent, told in many cultures, in many lands. It was even the center of the world's first paperback book,
Lost Horizon.
In 1933, the author James Hilton foretold the calamity of World War II, “the Dark Ages,” which
would “cover the whole world in a single pall.” And he wrote of the sweet utopia of Shangri-La, which would remain immune to it all.

The rest of the world did seem to be going mad, with the threat of war growing and the global economy deteriorating. Yet there was a glimmer of hope in this sheltered land that existed on a higher, more benevolent plane. For Ruth Harkness, it was no fantasy. In this place, she would discover for herself “a beautiful forgotten world.”

IN CHENGDU
, it was time to finalize plans.

Quentin Young, in consultation with an elderly, gray-bearded servant of Cavaliere's, hired sixteen coolies and Wang Whai Hsin, a happy, quirky cook whom Harkness loved from the start.

The most important decision was where exactly they were going. Since panda country was all around them, Harkness discussed possibilities with Cavaliere. He agreed with the advice of Jack Young—that she should travel southwest along an old trade route toward Kangding, then called Tatsienlu, and make more than a week's journey still southward from there. This was the area that had provided the Roosevelt brothers with their panda and, before them, that famous panda skin of Père David's.

But for Harkness, in 1936, the first choice wasn't meant to be. The Kangding plan unraveled quickly because of logistics. The only road in this direction was “a government monopoly,” restricted to official vehicles and a single sanctioned bus that was supposed to make the run once a day. Harkness had piles of gear, at least thirty pieces of cargo, which would not fit on the bus.

It was decided that she was better off heading northwest instead, to the Qionglai Shan range. All recent panda successes had come out of the northwest, in what was known as Wassu land or Wassu country. That was where Floyd Tangier Smith had set up hunters, and where Bill Sheldon of the Sage expedition felt he had found “the best wildlife country in Western China.” The region was much easier to reach, with the line of the mountain chain slanting toward Chengdu at its northern portion,
and beginning just sixty-two miles (one hundred kilometers) from the city.

Throughout this time, Cavaliere threw one dinner party after another. “If I spend everything I have—what an experience it will have been— even till now,” Harkness wrote home. “Can you imagine having left my few dollars in investments, and having a few miserable pennies every month when I can have this?”

With everything set, Cavaliere orchestrated another gathering. This one included, along with “the usual assortment” of guests, W. H. Campbell, a blue-eyed and very British representative of the League of Nations; a “charming” German engineer; and a glum American pilot.

Right away, the German bore in on Harkness; he couldn't understand what such an urbane and sophisticated creature was doing in this outpost. As they dined, he interrogated her about her plans. Still wanting to keep a low profile on the expedition, Harkness answered vaguely about having come for the hunting. She couldn't have picked a worse cover. Hunting was the German's passion, and he wanted details on her shooting ability and the arms she had in her possession. Realizing that she wouldn't be able to sustain the ruse—of all the equipment for the trek, the guns had interested Harkness the least—she confessed. She was headed deep into the mountains in pursuit of the giant panda.

The German—and everyone else, for that matter—was truly baffled. The whole gathering erupted in protective objections from the men. Oh, you'll never come back alive, the pilot warned, backing up his prediction with gruesome tales of other would-be explorers who had vanished in this unforgiving land. The
China Press
had reported on the warlike people here: “Any man who ventures into their territory may expect to depart therefrom in two sections. It is no wonder that the Lolo country is represented by a blank space even on the best of maps.”

Wearily, Cavaliere informed the guests that, if he could, he would prevent Harkness from setting out. He had told her it was “foolhardy” to go on. But it had done no good.

Only reinforcing the skepticism of her dinner companions was Harkness's behavior one night. Irate over animals loosening the gray tiles of
his roof, and hearing footsteps above, Cavaliere, in the middle of a party, ran outside with a gun. Taking aim at the culprit, he shot dead a small silver cat, which skidded off its high perch, fell, and crumpled on the walk. Harkness, who was so dedicated to her own cats that she often took them on exotic vacations with her, ran inside the house in tears.

AT THE WESTERN GATE
of Chengdu, a ragtag caravan emerged from the curtain of dust rising in the hazy sunshine. It was made up of sixteen coolies, the rounded form of Wang Whai Hsin, the raven-haired Ruth Harkness (already wearing her blue cotton expedition suit and bamboo rope-soled sandals in place of her walking oxfords), and the dashing Quentin Young, who, throughout the expedition, “was smart in his wellcut breeches, his red-topped socks and little cap that matched.”

It was eight-thirty on the morning of October 20, and the streets were already choked with travelers. Sichuan, the largest province in China, matching the size of France, had one of the densest rural populations in the world. That was obvious from the foot traffic coming and going to market, the peasants pushing wheelbarrows heavily laden with goods like stones or salt, pigs, and even people. Through this steady stream of humanity, the Harkness expedition aimed itself away from the heat of Chengdu and toward the snowy mountains of Tibet.