The Lady and the Panda Read online

  She passed through the more-than-hundred-mile stretch that contained the great gorges of the Yangtze, where rough cliffs rose straight up from the water for a thousand feet. She could sit for hours as the boat chugged through these breathtaking channels—the very same that eighth-century poet Li Po had described as the countless folds of hills— and watch the changing panorama of jagged cliffs set in deep shadow, veiled in clouds and mist, or awash in the amber of the setting sun.

  Along the way, there were flimsy, crooked little peasant huts that seemed no bigger or more secure, she said, than swallows' nests perched precariously on the little ledges of rock. She passed terraced fields of rich green for mile upon mile, flooded rice paddies, old women balancing painfully on bound feet as they pulled along tethered geese or pigs or goats. Cows carried baskets of coal. It seemed as if every inch of soil that could be tilled was. One of the panda hunters, Dean Sage, had noted that the people here managed to farm on the kinds of cliffs that would make goats “think twice before climbing.”

  One day at dusk Harkness looked out from the deck to the shore. To her, it was always a magic time, for she said, “as evening falls, there is a strange feeling of nostalgia for something unknown.” In the deepening darkness along the banks she spotted “a reed hut, in the distance.” It “blended with earth, sky and water, with only a point of yellow light showing through the flimsy structure and a wisp of smoke to make you know that it was home—to someone.” The little light kindled a longing. Here, in the half-light where the impossible takes place and day meets night, the dwelling place of one family became as elemental as the earth and sky and water around it. Harkness wrote: “China gets to you, my dear.”

  “I wonder when, and sometimes if, I will ever get back to America,” she told Perkie, not with dread but with some mystical affirmation. Death and eternity, and the thought of belonging, were on her mind, not in the least because she now had possession of Bill's ashes. Young had taken them from the bronze urn and transferred them to a more portable cardboard container, which he placed inside their steel cash box. “I have told Quentin,” she wrote to Perkins, “if any thing happens upcountry to me that I want to be put away there.” She was quite clear about her wishes. Should she die while out on expedition, her body—and no doubt her soul—would stay forever in China.

  IN YICHANG, HUNDREDS of miles west of Shanghai, Harkness and Young transferred to the Mei Ling, which would ferry them into the great cliff city of Chongqing, then known as Chungking. The 150-mile portion of the Yangtze they were approaching was notoriously dangerous, a stretch that Sage said “boils a tortuous course through a deep, cañon-like channel, which it has cut in a rugged, mountainous country.”

  As usual, though, Harkness was only feeling more and more secure, no matter what they confronted. Part of it had to do with Quentin Young. On board the boats, or wandering ashore, she was obtaining a most promising preview of his field persona. “It will not be a matter of surprise to me if Quentin is some day one of the men with the power and thoughtful intelligence to help in the shaping of his country's destiny,” she wrote.

  Her opinion was shared by an important group. Everywhere, dogs, pigs, cats, even roosters would sidle up to Young looking for attention. The mascot aboard the Whangpu, for instance, a little calico cat, would seek him out, crawling up onto his shoulders, rubbing against his ears and playing with his hair. “He seems to have a rare and strange attraction for any animal,” she wrote. “There are some people—not many— who understand animals and are almost able to talk to them in some silent fashion.”

  She decided during the river trip to turn over all the expedition's finances to him. This way he would not have to ask her for money each time the coolies were to be paid, or when the bill was due at an inn. He would carry the cash, doling it out as needed. It was an enormous gesture of trust—and an interesting one. Up-country with Quentin Young, who by any Western standard of the day would have been expected to be her subordinate, she did nothing but treat him with respect, viewing him as a full and equal partner.

  She came to another conclusion too, a point of honor for Young: even if she could not bring a live giant panda out, it was essential for him to accomplish his goal. He had taken this expedition on for very little money so that he would have the chance to shoot a panda and present it to the Nanking Museum. She perceived it as a matter of nationalistic pride to him. With natural history museums in the United States displaying stuffed giant pandas, China, obviously, should have its share too.

  Harkness insisted on one proviso: the panda hunting had to follow the trapping, not because of any hierarchy, but she just couldn't bear to take part in killing an animal.

  She never could have fit in on a traditional expedition like that of the Dean Sage party, which had skinned its trophy in only an hour, indulging in a grilled giant panda “sirloin steak” the next night for supper.

  Young was managing everything like a seasoned professional and with a style all his own. Arriving at the forbidding cliffs of the fivehundred-year-old city of Chongqing on October 11, they had stayed on board overnight to reorganize. As they headed out late the next afternoon, they were surrounded by a mob of desperately poor coolies. Aggressively jostling one another, they fought for the work of transporting the expedition's equipment up the frightfully vertical pathways cut into stone and leading from the shore to the high city. With mounting combativeness, the men shouted angrily, closing in around Young and Harkness. Young had a revolver with which he could easily have threatened the group. Instead, standing so tall over them, he made a joke. Though Harkness could not comprehend the words, she did understand when the faces of the angry men turned into grins. With the situation defused, they and their luggage were bundled and carted upward, along the steep and narrow footpaths. Harkness and Young rode in plush sedan chairs, set on poles and carried aloft by coolies, up the precarious route.

  Darkness was falling by then, which meant they would arrive at the gates of Chongqing at just the right moment to experience its great wonder. Harkness, having been slowly carried step by step up a dim, ancient stone path, emerged at the top only to be overwhelmed by a fantastic vision—a riot of neon lights, signs, banners, and the crowded streets of a busy, modern metropolis. It was a wild electric Broadway, she said, “here at the end of the world.”

  Harkness loved the vivid intensity of Chinese urban life—including the scents that most foreigners dreaded. “The smells of a Chinese city are indescribable,” she wrote from Chongqing, “the incense, the food cooked on charcoal in the streets, just the burning charcoal itself in the dusk—and of course the odor, horrible at times, of the open sewage.”

  Once they settled in, they encountered other, less pleasant, surprises. First, their accommodations were with, as Harkness delicately put it, “some goddam missionaries.” She grumbled, “How I hate the breed.” There was much about their lives and beliefs to rub her the wrong way, especially their attitude toward the Chinese. She saw so many poor Chinese, their children wretched with disease, running eyes, and open sores; their animals so ill, the sight of them turned her stomach—all kinds of problems that Western medicine could cure. Half the people in China at that time would never reach the age of thirty, and preventable diseases were to blame for three quarters of the deaths. “When I see missionaries here living in a style that rich people can't afford at home, in point of servants at least, with a home leave, expenses paid, and then to learn that they [give] no free medical service at all—it is not a pretty picture,” she said.

  Then word came in of a rival panda-hunting party, way ahead of her own. Unbelievably, it was being led by Gerry Russell.

  Rather than sailing to America, he had formed plans in secret, waved Harkness off on her boat, then grabbed a plane the next day to start his own expedition, beating her to Chengdu by weeks. He must have been making those arrangements for some time before his departure, sneaking behind Harkness's back.

  “He is trying to best me at my own game,”
she fumed. And considering his comfortable lead, he had a good chance at it. She would discover later that upon landing in Chengdu he had even gone straight to Dan Reib's friend Cavaliere with an old letter of introduction Harkness had secured at the time their expedition was to be a joint one. “I think it was a bit unsporting of him when he saw me off in Shanghai not to tell me that he was flying here the next day to go after Panda too,” Harkness wrote home. It made her want to “wring his redheaded neck.”

  Russell hadn't come all the way to China for nothing—with or without Ruth Harkness, he decided, he would head into the high country.

  The more she thought about it, though, the less it got to her. “A little competition will make it more exciting,” she said. In her well-loaded arsenal, her top weapon was Quentin Young. “I have the much better chance of getting the beast because I have the best man in China for the purpose,” she reasoned.

  Always generous in spirit, even to those who wronged her, Harkness conceded, “I can see Jerry's [sic] side to a certain extent.” He had come an awfully long way only to be turned back. It was the deceit of it all that would never sit well with her, though. She could not fathom how a “socalled gentleman's so-called sense of honor” could have allowed such dishonesty. What she didn't know was that the worst was yet to come.

  WHEN IT CAME TIME to leave Chongqing two days later, Harkness and Young did so in style. Reib had arranged a Standard Oil company car to ferry them two hundred miles over rough and rocky roads to Chengdu— a windfall in this tract where transportation was so hard to secure.

  THE FIRST GLIMPSE of Chengdu late the next day was staggering. Completely protected by formidable stone walls, forty feet high and just as thick, the great two-thousand-year-old city was an impenetrable fortress constructed against threatening barbarians. Entry was negotiated through massive gates positioned at the four points of the compass, to its Tibetan neighbors the four sacred directions. At the very frontier of Chinese civilization, it was a portal between ancient and modern worlds, serving as a staging area for wanderers, soldiers, and merchants.

  To Harkness, Chengdu would for a time feel like the center of the world. She would be landing now in a home that couldn't exist anyplace else on earth. It was a sprawling walled estate, within the walled city, that was part Chinese pavilion, part Italian villa. Behind the grand front gate trimmed in gold Mandarin characters were many tile-roofed buildings overlooking lush, landscaped courtyards. Once the residence of the provincial governor, it had enough bedrooms to accommodate one hundred guests comfortably. During Harkness's stay, several of them would be filled. And nearly every dinner would be an event.

  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.