24 July 1869
I have marked the date of this entry with great confidence, but I must confess the secret to you, Ethel admit that M—and I can no longer be certain if it is a Monday or a Friday. We are fortunately much more competent at telling the time by the sun and shadows, though I suppose even a child could perform this task with sufficient instruction.
I could not write last night owing to a storm. All of yesterday we marched on the Nirpani, or Waterless, path, which has gained a reputation for being treacherous. For long sections, it is less than half a foot in width. A stumble and we would have fallen down a thousand feet or more. I did not find the track particularly difficult.
We came across a waterfall, whose presence on the “Waterless” path M—could not explain. He has walked this route many times before, as a bearer and guide for pilgrims and traders, but does not think to warn me of what lies in wait.
Saw no animals except goats. No birds. Spectacular views. Mountains brightened by filaments of cirrus clouds in unexpected colors: salmon, violet, crimson, gold. We encamped by the Kali River at sunset. The dreadful storm arrived soon after. I had to hold on to the posts of my tent to keep it from collapsing.
We will reach Garbyang tomorrow. Then: Tibet.
M— is certain I will escape detection because I look like a native. He speaks as if this is a compliment. Ethel, do you remember how often Mother called me Mongrel? Once or twice you protested when she cast a slur upon my appearance within your earshot. You claimed a kinship with me that I did not deserve or earn, I who did not even see you die. Your husband told me that toward the end of your life, you were in
such pain that your lips curled into a permanent frown, but he also said no weakness emerged in your character. In the face of the hardships you endured, my own challenges with the weather and wilderness appear unworthy of setting down on paper.
*
A month after her fiftieth birthday, Katherine Westcott walked on a mountain track that was as narrow as the snake king coiled around Lord Shiva’s blue-tinted throat. She was dressed in an ankle-length Tibetan robe inconvenient for the demands of her day but preferable to the corsets and petticoats she had to wear in London or Darjeeling. Over her long gray hair she had tied a bonnet picked up from the ground on a previous journey through Tibet. It was a ghastly thing, the bonnet, lined with fur that must have been white when it was sewn and was now brown and fell out in tufts that remained threaded in her hair like wilted jasmine. But she was willing to wager it had talismanic powers after a ruffian servant had failed to harm her within a week of it coming into her possession. The bonnet lent her appearance an air of frail bones and unseeing eyes, but she could still match the pace of the young man who accompanied her.
The path was tedious. They had to climb up stairs carved out of rock, numbering in the hundreds, only to descend twenty steps or more, then undertake yet another ascent. The folks who lived near these parts called the track Nirpani, or Waterless, on account of the lack of springs for the traveler, though below them coursed the Kali, the roar of its swift waters a taunt to the thirsty. If one peered over the cliff, the river would appear as molten silver, but neither Katherine nor her companion were keen to risk a fall.
“Careful,” Mani said, turning to watch her ascend the steps.
“I don’t need you to tell me that,” Katherine said, waving him forward. She spoke sharply, discerning in his tone his fear that her feet, flecked with purple veins where the blood ran cold, wouldn’t carry her much farther.
Mani smiled as if he approved of her mild rebuke, and ran his hands over his scalp, shaved before they started their march three weeks ago and already covered with an outcrop of short, bristly hair. His skin stretched taut over his frame, emphasizing, on his face, the hollowness of his cheeks, but in sharp contrast, the muscles on his arms were thick and firm owing to the nature of his employment. He claimed to be eighteen, looked younger, acted as if he was much older, and received Katherine’s inquiries about his home or family in silence, only stating that he intended to renounce the world soon and become a monk. She suspected he had agreed to accompany her (a woman! ) because she had spent a year at a monastery in Kalimpong studying Buddhist scriptures.
“It’s going to rain, mother,” he said now, gesturing at the opaque, gray clouds rising above distant peaks like a groundswell of the ocean.
“This is why we have a tent,” Katherine said with more conviction than she felt.
It had fallen on Mani to carry the tent, though she expected him to sleep outside come rain or snow. If Mani thought this arrangement unjust, he had not said so. In keeping with their disguise of mother and son, he addressed her as mother with the reverence of a devotee paying obeisance to his favorite goddess—perhaps a hint of mockery smudged his courteousness, but she who was no one’s mother didn’t care to dwell on it.
The two of them were at the very edge of the maps men had made. Lines that traced villages, towns, mountains, and rivers, ended here, and Tibet, a space that appeared as smooth and white as a pearl, began. The river that corkscrewed below them split the land into Kumaon and Nepal. On the Kumaon side, where they now marched, the rugged mountain slope was gray-hued and barren, excepting the occasional green bursts of shrubs, dewdrops on their bare branches crystallized into startling ice flowers in the shade of overhanging rocks. Across the river in Nepal, trees sheathed in creepers directed their branches toward the water. Wild goats balanced precariously on rocks to feast on the shrubs growing out of every cranny.
Katherine paused to catch her breath, and Mani stopped too, sticking his little finger in his ear to scratch some itch he couldn’t seem to reach. Then he patted a boulder. “Come, sit,” he told her. “Get some rest.” He wiped his fingers against his coat and, from his sack, brought out a long strip of dried meat, tore it in two, and offered her the bigger portion. Such a gesture would be unimaginable in an expedition group where servants had their own food and utensils and rules of caste and class and religion; they wouldn’t dare sit next to their English masters, or speak to them, as Mani did. “Take it, mother. You need the strength,” he said, and she accepted without looking at him. “Why did the monks in Kalimpong agree to teach you?” he asked, having determined perhaps that he knew her well enough now to inquire about private matters. “Usually they don’t even speak to women.”
“You’ll have to ask them.”
“They must have given you a reason.”
“Maybe they taught me because they’re kind. Learned. Devoted to prayer.” Katherine chewed the meat, which was salty and tough. “Witty too.”
Dark clouds loomed over them like demons threatening to possess their souls. Mani’s manner reminded her of the way natives inquired into each other’s affairs without shame or embarrassment. Accompanying her ayah as a child, Katherine had heard about the pustules on a teacher’s scrotum, and a maid who had children with three different neighbors, her husband surprised none looked like him but never suspecting his wife of infidelity. The native’s curiosity, and appetite for gossip, were galling, but perhaps without malice.
“The monks knew I wanted to visit Lhasa,” Katherine said now, “but that I didn’t even make it to the Tibetan border because a British officer refused to let me pass. They must have felt sorry for me. I imagine they were also impressed that a foreigner, even if only a woman, knew about Buddhism and wanted to learn more.”
“But what’s the reason for your interest in our books when you have the Bible?”
Katherine clicked her tongue in annoyance; really the boy ought to know his place. “Why do you want to be a monk?” she asked.
“It’s a kind of freedom,” Mani said as thunder rumbled in the distance. “To belong to the whole world and not just a village. To pray for everyone on earth instead of just me, or my family.”
His freedom sounded like servitude to her. At the Kalimpong monastery, she had hoped for deliverance—but for herself. She had imagined that being around monks who forsook every desire known to man would calm her restive mind, but that hadn’t come to pass.
The first raindrop brought Mani to his feet. Katherine returned her half-eaten ribbon of meat to him and he folded the whole of it into his mouth. Then he helped her hoist her sack, and she said, “The young monks in Kalimpong were not at all like how I imagined monks to be. They made each other laugh, even during the debates about Buddhism they held every afternoon in the courtyard. Or as they polished stone floors—you must have seen how difficult that task is. They have to drag a large rock, wrapped in sheepskin, from one end of the room to another. They would be bathed in sweat from the effort. Still, they were always cracking jokes.” Mani, his cheeks swollen with meat, couldn’t speak, but pointed his thumb at his own chest as if to say he could be witty too.
They walked in silence, the clouds sprinkling raindrops, a choppy wind hissing in their ears, Katherine remembering her time in Kalimpong. Her sister had been alive then, even if bedridden in Edinburgh. Katherine had written to Ethel about the Buddha’s gospel, and the monks at the monastery who were sometimes only six or seven and already learning to be indifferent to life and death but not gossip, asking her if it was true that she was going to marry a Bhutanese prince visiting Kalimpong and wasn’t he much younger than her? Ethel found these letters so delightful she convinced her husband to share them with one of his friends who ran a small publishing house in London. To everyone’s surprise, including Katherine’s, Letters from the Foothills of the Indian Alps had done well, bringing her a hint of fame, and suspicion too—how could a woman travel alone without a husband, or chaperones?
Her mother had asked Katherine this question when she first sailed to the East at the age of nineteen, utilizing a small portion of the inheritance Father had left her. Ethel had said Katherine could look for a husband in India, but it was curiosity alone that prompted Katherine’s return to the country of her birth, which she remembered only in jagged fragments. On that journey, she discovered that the traveler’s life, without responsibility or attachment, suited her. Watching the gray ocean from a ship rocked by furious waves, or the emerald of paddy fields as her shoes sank into mud, she felt anchored to the universe by some vital force she couldn’t describe. Since then she had explored the Orient at every opportunity and, in all those years, she hadn’t troubled herself with the task of letter-writing. Weeks passed before she even remembered she had a sister. But fate, that impertinent burglar, had connived to repair their frayed bond with Ethel’s illness.
Katherine had written to Ethel during her second attempt to reach Lhasa too. This time her journey had begun on the banks of the Mekong in Burma and concluded in a town in eastern Tibet from where she could glimpse the sacred peak of Khawa Karpo. Her good fortune ran out there after her thieving servant revealed her identity to soldiers, who escorted her back to the border. They could have hurt her or killed her. Instead they were polite. The bonnet she had picked up from the dust during that expedition must have acted as a charm and saved her.
On her return to London, Katherine published the letters written during her expedition, and miraculously this compilation too did well, despite Katherine confessing in the preface that the letters had been delivered to Ethel by her own hand, there being no post fit for purpose in Tibet. The second book firmed her reputation of being a female explorer, as exotic and dangerous as a Bengali tiger or an African elephant. Katherine welcomed such acclaim as a woman explorer could be expected to receive—never on a par with men. But in her letters she portrayed herself as modest and religious and insisted that even on a mountain she dressed like a lady.
Then Ethel died.
Katherine had been in Calcutta at the time, planning a third tour to Tibet. In the bright heat of grief that scalded her flesh, she thought she would never write again. She didn’t want to enter into a correspondence with Frederick about her travels, though she wasn’t averse to sending her husband notes requesting money or expressing gratitude for supporting her financially. Frederick brooked no ill will against her for her absences, or her indifference to household matters. Some said he encouraged her to travel so that he could entertain a certain fine-looking cousin in her absence, but that didn’t strike Katherine as a great calamity. She had married him at the late age of thirty-five, when her inheritance was dwindling.
She missed Ethel’s funeral, but guilt made her return to London. She set about making her home with Frederick, as if God would forgive her once she had remade herself into a good wife. She visited Ethel’s husband and her nieces often, and they responded politely but not with warmth. She longed for Tibet, but didn’t admit it. Instead she sought the thrill of entering a new world by writing fiction for the first time.
Her novel, only loosely inspired by Walter Scott’s Waverley, told the story of a misguided English boy in India who befriends a prince and has to choose between his friendship and country when the prince rebels against the East India Company. It was published quickly and enthusiastically, but received with disdain. An unsuccessful addition to the world of fiction, wrote a reviewer, and Katherine, her face flushing with indignation now as these red-stained words drifted toward her like feathers torn from a bird’s wing, wondered if her keenness to become the first Western woman to reach Lhasa was spurred by pride and notions of revenge, or by her desperation to be far from a world that she cared for but little. In London she was forced to acknowledge the lack in her life, the absences that furnished her dreams with the shape of the sister she had lost, the mother who had never known how to love her, and her own failure to be a successful addition to society. But—and here she breathed deeply and exhaled as if to recover full command of her nerve—she had never yearned for what others wanted, not the comforts of children and marriage or cashmere and diamonds. Her place was here, in movement, in desolation. (And if the publication of her letters had given her a taste for fame, a possibility that her name might remain on earth after her last breath, was that so wrong?)
Mani was watching her again, with concern. She reverted her gaze to the path that slanted down toward the river. One step in the wrong direction and her foot would find no purchase. Her heart fluttered, but she charged ahead.
An hour, or two, passed. Darkness seemed to descend along with them. Raindrops pattered down, confining her vision to no farther than a few feet. Thunder rattled the mountains and shook a few boulders loose, rendering their passage even more unsafe. Her bonnet channeled the rainwater into two rivulets that ran down her cheeks.
“Mother, why don’t you take my hand?” Mani asked.
Katherine shook her head, though the slope was far more precipitous than she had imagined. She wondered if her ambition would be her downfall, as some in London had prophesied. What was she thinking? A woman in the winter of her life scaling the steps of the Potala Palace?
The rain quelled the sound of their footsteps. It seemed to Katherine that the earth was moving, sliding under her feet like a reptile. The river sounded closer. But it was a thousand feet below, or had they already descended that far down the mountain? The path seemed to have evened out.
“See the gorge?” Mani shouted to make himself heard over the rain. “Once we pass through it, there will be an incline where we can camp.”
The rain lashed down on her with such force she felt she was drowning.
“Waterfall,” Mani said. “Here the track goes under a waterfall.” “I thought this was meant to be a waterless path,” Katherine said after they had arrived on the other side, unable to convey the full extent of her irritation on account of her chattering teeth.
“Only when the weather is dry,” Mani said. “In the rain, waterfalls are common—I warned you about this several times, mother.” Katherine reminded herself that she ought to trust him. Mani had walked on this path before and crossed the Lipulekh Pass to reach Mansarovar and Lhasa. Besides, she had hired him on the recommendation of the deputy collector of Almora, whom Mani had accompanied to the Tibetan frontier the previous year. She had been unlucky with servants in the past, but thus far the deputy collector appeared to be correct in his appraisal of Mani as an honest attendant.
A perfect gentleman, the deputy collector. Handsome too. No doubt the last Englishman she would see for months. She had neglected to tell him her journey would take her to Lhasa, and instead given him cause to believe she would be conducting an ethnographic investigation of tribal settlements by the border. If made aware of her plans, the British government would have claimed that a diplomatic problem would likely arise from her presence in Tibet and refused yet again to grant her permission to explore the country. For the same reason, she hadn’t informed the Royal Geographical Society about her tour. The men in the Society didn’t admit women as fellows, and believed the female of the species was too incompetent to contribute geographical knowledge. She couldn’t plead with these risible men for permission or support. Fortunately, for money she once had her inheritance, and now she had Frederick, and he didn’t require an accounting of expenses to open his wallet.
Katherine walked past the gorge to the slight rise where Mani set about pitching her tent. Holding a sack over her head as if it was a parasol, she gave him instructions that he dutifully obeyed. Perhaps he preferred not to argue with her, as lone servants were liable to do on such journeys, because his heart was set on monkhood. Perhaps it was because of the substantial fee she had promised to pay him on their return to Almora, a quarter of which he had already collected as advance. In any event, he hadn’t protested when she told him of the true nature of her journey.
Now he finished setting up the tent and blinked the rain out of his eyes. She waved him off. Inside the tent, she wrapped herself in her camel-hair blanket, the only item of bedding in her sack that wasn’t soaked, and sat down on the damp ground. Ingeniously sewn inside the blanket were watertight pockets in which she carried money, and small notebooks and pencils sheathed in oilskin. Hunger strung up her innards in tight knots, but in this rain flint and steel wouldn’t yield sparks however forceful the strike.
The emptiness in her stomach was a mild inconvenience compared to the fullness of her bladder. She couldn’t wait for the downpour to stop. She shrugged the blanket off her shoulders and prepared to be drenched again.
Katherine fell asleep sitting upright, her damp hair spread over her shoulders, her exhaustion so great the discomfort of her position ceased to matter. A storm was raging outside, but the wind and thunder sounded dull. A few moments or hours later, she woke up with a start, her breath locked in her lungs, the lid of a coffin above her eyes. Oh, death has come for me, she thought, too soon yet also too late. She saw Ethel, and called out to her. Then it occurred to her that the storm had caused her tent to collapse, and its canvas was bearing down on her face, smothering her. A temporary impediment that could be easily resolved—unlike death. Still, these days, on too many mornings, she opened her eyes uncertain if she occupied the world of the living or the dead; only a thin curtain appeared to separate the two, and it was as if she drifted between these realms in her sleep.
She crawled out, the canvas heaving, something snapping, ice sticks jabbing her in the eye; but from where? She would have a word with Mani today. Such poor workmanship was unacceptable.
Once outside she dusted her knees and elbows. The wind had cleared the clouds in the sky. Rich shades of crimson tipped the edges of the horizon. Almost dawn, but she could have done with a few more hours of sleep. Her head ached as if nails were being hammered into her skull. She touched her scalp and realized the rainwater she
__________________________________
From The Last of Earth by Deepa Anappara. Used with permission of the publisher, Random House. Copyright 2026 by Deepa Anappara. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
