The Last Days of the Mountain Kingdom

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Outside Magazine September 2001

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The Last Days of the Mountain Kingdom
Dateline: Nepal, 2001. The royal family has been murdered. Maoist guerrillas prowl the countryside, fomenting agrarian revolution. Kathmandu has succumbed to general strikes and indiscriminate bombings. And everybody's got his own pet conspiracy theory. Is this in the Himalayas, or the next Asian apocalypse in the making?

August 10, 2001: Symmes reflects on the cease-fire.

By Patrick Symmes


	Three masked Maoist militiamen, the author's guides to a guerilla rally in western Nepal.

December 5, 2001: Climbing teams push on with expeditions despite violence.

November 28, 2001: U.S. State Department cautions Americans about travel to Nepal.

November 26, 2001: King Gyanendra declares a state of emergency as cease-fire comes to a bloody end.

It is in the nature of communist revolutions, many scholars have noted, to screw up a good cappuccino. Lying on the hotel bed my second morning in Kathmandu, I find that the medicinal properties of caffeine have assumed heroic proportions in my jet-lagged brain. There was airport Nescafé in New York and London, anemic hotel java in New Delhi, and watery airborne muck everywhere in between. Now, all I really want from life is some strong coffee. While I wait for room service to deliver the cure, I try the phone number one more time. I've dialed it for a day with no results. The telephone system in Kathmandu is inexplicable. I can't tell if I'm getting no connection, or no one is answering, or I'm dialing the wrong number.

More About Nepal

For Laird's firsthand account of the chaotic days following the massacre, click here.

To see more of Seamus Murphy's remarkable photographs from Nepal, click here.

If someone ever does answer, that person is supposed to know where the guerrillas are. The insurgents, elusive revolutionaries from the hills, call themselves Maoists. Nobody paid attention when this hard-line faction of communists declared a "people's war" back in 1996. The guerrillas were almost without weapons, and did little more than organize propaganda rallies for poor farmers in Rolpa district and other remote western zones of Nepal. But they've earned a reputation for severity—banning alcohol, cutting off the hands of hashish dealers, and forcing village gamblers to eat their decks of cards. And last September the revolution entered a new, militant phase. A thousand guerrillas appeared from nowhere to blast their way into Dunai, the remote western town that served as the gateway for Peter Matthiessen's trek into Inner Dolpo in The Snow Leopard. The pace of attacks has picked up since then: This April the Maoists stormed two remote police outposts—known here as POPs—in the western towns of Rukumkot and Dailekh. The posts were overrun at night by hundreds of guerrillas hurling homemade hand grenades in human-wave attacks. Seventy police officers were killed, some of them executed after they had surrendered. On July 7, another 39 were killed in three simultaneous attacks in Lamjung, Gulmi, and Nuwakot districts, west of Kathmandu. Smaller skirmishes are now a weekly event, as the Maoists drive the government out of whole swaths of the countryside, stripping the dead and the prisoners of rifles, ammunition, and shoes. With up to 5,000 full-time fighters, and as many supporters in part-time militias, the biggest problem the Maoists face is having more recruits than equipment.

Most Western tourists and trekkers, including the 40,000 Americans who visit Nepal each year, have dodged the sharp edge of this unsheathed war. But that grows harder every day. In February, a Chinese development worker, the first foreigner, was injured when Maoists raided a dam project to steal dynamite. Still, in Kathmandu, there is denial.



	Kathmandu-based photojournalist Thomas Laird's exclusive photograph of the royal funeral pyres blasing on the Aryaghat (steps) of the Pushapati Temple, above the Bagmati River, in central Kathmandu. The shot was taken at 1:00 on the morning of June 3, 28 hours after the massacre. The three pyres are those of Prince Nirajan (far left), younger brother of Crown Prince Dipendra; Queen Aiswarya (center); and King Birendra (far right).

I punch the digits on my phone, and this time someone answers. "Sorry, sir," the voice replies in trembling, terrible English. "No Maoists." He doesn't know what I'm talking about, he's never heard of the Maoists, there's nobody here by the name I'm asking for. I leave a message and hang up. A couple of minutes later, there's a knock on the door. It's room service with the cappuccino, which smells of everything good. I take one sip, and the phone rings.

It was then, with the heavy cup still in my hand, that words began to drift toward other meanings, that reality began to melt into new and unstable forms. Like Alice, I'd swallowed a potion that would take me into a Wonderland, a kingdom of retrocommunism unlocked by secret handshakes and punctuated by thousands of clenched fists. Time would now flow backward, the 21st century giving way to Year Zero, Boeings yielding to bows and arrows, video night in Kathmandu becoming firelight in mud huts. The forecast for the glorious future would look a lot like 1950. It is the same voice on the phone, but different. His English and his attitude have suddenly improved. "You want to meet the Maoists?" he asks. Voices argue in the background, and then he announces that it is time for a journey. He can't say what kind of a journey it is, whether it will be to the east or the west, into the Himalayas or down to the subtropical plains. He can't say how long we will be gone. He won't even tell me who he is.

I write down an address. "You must be there in 15 minutes," he says.

This is impossible, but we try. I run downstairs, rip photographer Seamus Murphy from the lunch table, throw money at the front desk, and we walk out with only the clothes we are wearing, spare socks, and the contents of our knapsacks.



	Ascending the trail into the Maoist heartland in the Rolpa Hills beneath a banner advertising the upcoming rally.

The taxi creeps through the crushing traffic of Kathmandu, swerving around bicycle rickshas and sacred cows sleeping in the stream of Toyotas. We turn along the Royal Palace, a Himalayan Elsinore surrounded by spear-point fencing that serves not to keep danger out, but to trap it inside. (The massacre of the royal family is less than two weeks away.) Our driver turns down Durbarmarg; we cross a bridge, enter a neighborhood that foreigners never visit, and are dropped on a busy sidewalk, 20 minutes late. I watch the passing stream of humanity, sari-clad shoppers and topee-topped deliverymen, students in jeans and dusty construction workers in sandals. They are remnants of a Nepal that is already fading away.

A young man in a tan shalwar kameez—a Pakistani-style long shirt over pants—steps out of the traffic. His eyes are burning in his brown face, and his smile is a trick. "Hello, sir," he says. "Come with me." Without waiting, he folds back into the flow of people, walking fast. The rabbit hole opens up, and we, soon to be followed by the entire nation, fall in.

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