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PrintWriter of the Lost Art
Like a real-life Indiana Jones, Wilson resident Broughton Coburn leads a team of explorers into the formerly forbidden Kingdom of Lo in upper Mustang, Nepal. There, in the reaches of Snow Leopard Cave, they make a mose unexpected discovery.
Broughton Coburn
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After a flight halfway around the world, a five-day trek to a remote village, and a month of exploration, the fate of the expedition hung in the balance as Broughton Coburn dangled from a rope high on a Himalayan hillside. He was rappelling over a crumbling cliff, on a chance tip from a shepherd, looking for a cave where the man had sought shelter from the rain about eight years earlier.
Coburn had followed the sheep and goat herder on a serpentine trail over a ridge, past the ruins of ancient hermitages, to a precipitous overlook. He lowered himself some sixty feet to the edge of the cave, which he found guarded by a set of snow leopard tracks. He raised his torch, and on the back wall his eyes seized upon the holy grail he had been seeking: a mural twenty-five feet wide, depicting the lives of the Mahasiddhas, mystical yogis said to have engaged in magical feats from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries.
Before he could inspect the mural closer, a giant boulder came careening toward him. To escape, he leapt into the gorge a thousand feet below and swam through icy waters until landing in the arms of a helpless, yet stunningly gorgeous, woman, who drove him to safety in Kathmandu.
Okay, so maybe the last part sounds a little far-fetched, a little Hollywood (the gorge wasn’t quite that deep). But in a valley where the actor Harrison Ford owns a home, there is a real-life Indiana Jones in our midst. He is the mountain-scaling, leather fedora-wearing Coburn, a Harvard-educated, New York Times-bestselling author whose cave explorations in Nepal were featured in a National Geographic television special, “Secrets of Shangri-La.”
Coburn and his team did, in fact, discover the mural, in what has come to be known as the Snow Leopard Cave, on a 2007 expedition to the formerly forbidden Kingdom of Lo in upper Mustang, Nepal. Of his many trips to the region—experience that stretches back decades—the mural discovery stands out as particularly exciting. It features fifty-five panels, exquisitely painted and preserved intact, a window into ancient Buddhist culture.
“I was especially astounded to see the phenomenal level of attention, skill, artistic sensitivity, and religious devotion that most certainly went into the creation of these remarkable masterpieces,” Coburn says, adding that the work is “even more extraordinary when one considers that [the site] is located at an elevation of fourteen thousand feet and is covered in snow for five months of the year.”
