peter hesselbach

PLATE 55 (continued): Editior’s note: The expedition excavated the corpse thought to be Peter Hesselbach that morning. “We are all curiously numb,” noted Ian Brockman in his journal. “None of us wish to reflect yet on what happened to us here, or what we feel about having finally found Peter. It certainly isn’t elation.” In Peter’s jacket, a small package was found, wrapped in an impermeable pouch of yak intestine, containing Peter’s diaries. The trapper known as Valtur then smoked and salted the body to prevent it from decomposing on the return journey out of the marshes. It took the expedition several weeks to return to the Buryat village they had departed from; the weather was bitterly cold and they were frequently trapped in ice.
In their spare moments, MacRupert and Brockman started trying to decipher Peter’s notebooks. Ian Brockman found these “apocalyptic” and “disturbing”: “. . . he [Peter] seems to have slowly unraveled once he reached this land, tormented by visions and spirits, memories of the gulag, nightmares of the death camps. Yet, there remains the sense that he was being simultaneously rebuilt as a darker and stranger version of himself, something no longer entirely human.” [Ian Brockman was to become obsessed with Peter’s transformation in Buryatia, perhaps because he felt it echoed his own, but on a much larger scale. Like Allen Ginsberg and his “voice of Blake“, Brockman spent many years after his return to England attempting to recover the rapturous visions he’d experienced in the Siberian marshes, dabbling in Buddhism, Theosophy, Gnosticism, Sufism and many other religions, at one point in the early seventies even becoming involved with EST.]
MacRupert recorded a quite different reaction: “. . . oh, what ecstasies he [Peter] found! Visions of mountains and rivers, of faraway places where the hekura dwell, dancing with the spirits of animals and trees, at last soaring high above the marshy world with gods themselves, unfettered, travelling to and from the place where all things are created and destroyed, the forge of the great spirit!” That said, even Brockman noted at the time that he “found it impossible to mourn Peter; instead I rather envied his strange descent into the land of vision.”