To the Ends of the Earth

by Paul Theroux

  I was hanging on to the door handle. My head was jammed against the front seat. I was afraid that if I let go I would be thrown out the opposite door. I thought I heard Miss Sun screaming, but the car noise and the wind were much louder.

  This went on for perhaps seven seconds. That is an achingly long time in a skidding car; terror has everything to do with time passing. I had never felt so helpless or so doomed.

  So I was surprised when the car finally stopped. It was on its side. Only the deep gravelly sand had prevented it from turning over completely. I had to push the door with my shoulder to open it. The dust was still settling. The rear tire on my side of the car had been torn off, and I could hear it hissing.

  I staggered away to be as far as possible from the Galant and saw Mr. Fu and Miss Sun gasping and coughing. Miss Sun was twitching. Mr. Fu looked stunned and sorrowful because he saw the damage to the car. All its chrome had been torn off, the grille was smashed, the wheel rim twisted, the doors smashed, and we were fifty yards from the road, sunk in desert gravel. It seemed incredible that the sun was still shining.

  Mr. Fu laughed. It was a cough of blind fear that meant, God, what now?

  No one spoke. We were wordlessly hysterical that we had survived. Mr. Fu tramped over to me and smiled and touched my cheek. There was blood on his finger. I had got out of the car not knowing whether I was hurt—I suspected I might have been. But I checked myself. My glasses had smashed and dug into my cheek, but the wound was not bad—anyway, not too deep. I had a bump on my forehead. My neck ached. My wrist hurt. But I was all right.

  It infuriated me that this had happened on a dry road, under sunny skies, so early in the trip. Now we were stuck, and it was all because of the incompetence of Mr. Fu. He had been driving too fast. But it was also my own fault for having said nothing.

  Mr. Fu had unpacked a shovel and was digging around the car. What good was that? We could not go anywhere on three wheels. It seemed hopeless. I debated whether to grab my bag and start hitchhiking, but in which direction? Mr. Fu had got himself into this mess; he could get himself out of it. I could not imagine how this car could ever be dragged onto the road. I looked around and thought: This is one of the emptiest places in the world.

  We took turns digging for a while, but this merely seemed a cosmetic endeavor, unearthing the car. And the more we saw of the car, the more wrecked it seemed.

  Some brown trucks were laboring slowly down the road. We had passed them hours ago.

  “Let’s stop them,” I said.

  “No,” Mr. Fu said.

  Chinese pride. He shook his head and waved me away. He knew they were Tibetans. What a loss of face for him if these savages witnessed this piece of stupid driving. He had no excuses.

  “Come back,” Mr. Fu said. “Help me dig.”

  But I did not turn. I was waving to the approaching trucks, and I was delighted to see them slowing down. It was a three-truck convoy, and when they parked, the Tibetans came flapping slowly through the desert, laughing with pleasure at the tipped-over car and Mr. Fu on his knees digging. There were seven Tibetans. They looked very greasy in their old clothes, but I was reassured by their laughter and their squashed hats and their broken shoes: their ordinariness gave them the look of rescuers.

  I dug out my “List of Useful Tibetan Phrases” and consulted it. I said, “Tashi deleg!” (Hello—Good luck!)

  They returned the greeting and laughed some more.

  I pointed to the car. “Yappo mindoo.” (That is not good.)

  They nodded and replied. True, they were saying. That’s not good at all.

  “Nga Amayriga nay ray,” I said. (I’m an American.)

  They said, “Amayriga, Amayriga!”

  I looked at my list again and put my finger on a phrase. I said, “Nga Lhasa la drogi yin.” (I am going to Lhasa.)

  By now one of them had taken the shovel from Mr. Fu, and another was digging with his hands. One was unloading the trunk—pulling boxes out, unbolting the spare tire. Several of them were touching the wound on my face and going tsk, tsk.

  “Want a picture of the Dalai Lama?” I said.

  They nodded. Yes, yes!

  The others heard. They said, “Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama!”

  They dropped what they were doing and surrounded me as I pulled out the roll of portraits I had brought for just such an emergency. They were tough men, but they took the pictures with great gentleness and reverence, each one touching the paper to his head and bowing to me. They marveled at the pictures, while Mr. Fu and Miss Sun stood to the side, sulking.

  “Everyone gets a picture,” I said. “Now you have a nice portrait of the Dalai Lama. You are very happy, right?”—they laughed, hearing me jabber in English—“And you want to help us. Now let’s straighten that axle, and get the wheel on, and push this goddamned car back onto the road.”

  It took less than half an hour for them to fix the wheel and dig out the car, and then, with eight of us pushing and Mr. Fu gunning the engine, we flopped and struggled until the car was back on the road. As the wheels spun and everyone became covered with dust, I thought: I love these people.

  Afterward they showed me little pictures of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama on the sun visors in the cabs of their trucks.

  “Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama,” they chanted.

  Mr. Fu thanked them in Chinese. It meant that he had to swallow his pride to do that. They didn’t care. They laughed at him and waved him away.

  It was now early afternoon. It had all been a shock, and yet I was encouraged because we had survived it. It seemed miraculous that we were still alive. But Mr. Fu said nothing. When we set off again, he seemed both dazed and frenzied. His glasses had broken in the crash, and I could see that he was wild-eyed. He was also very dirty. Miss Sun was sniffing, whimpering softly.

  The car was in miserable shape. It looked the way I felt. I was surprised that it had restarted; I was amazed that its four wheels were turning. That is another way of saying that it seemed logical to me, a few minutes after we set off again, that a great screeching came from the back axle. It was the sort of sound that made me think that the car was about to burst apart.

  We stopped. We jacked up the car. We took a back wheel off to have a closer look. The brakes were twisted, and pieces of metal were protruding into the rim. At low speeds this made a clackety-clack, and faster it rose to a shriek. There was no way to fix it. We put the wheel back on, and while Mr. Fu tightened the nuts, I looked around. I had never in my life seen such light—the sky was like a radiant sea, and at every edge of this blasted desert with its leathery plants were strange gray hills and snowy peaks. We were on the plateau. It was a world I had never seen before—of emptiness and wind-scoured rocks and dense light. I thought: If I have to be stranded anywhere, this is the place I want it to be. I was filled with joy at the thought of being abandoned there, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

  “I think it is heating up,” Mr. Fu said, after he had driven a hundred yards down the road.

  He was breathing hard and noisily through his nose. He slammed on the brakes, ran around to the back wheel, and spat on the rim. It wasn’t frustration. It was his way of determining how hot the hub was.

  “It is very high here!” he cried. There was dust on his face. His hair was bristly. His color had changed, too. He looked ashen.

  After that, we kept stopping. The wheel noise was dreadful. But that was not the worst of it. Mr. Fu’s driving changed. Usually he went fast—and then I told him clearly to slow down. (No one will ever make me sit still in a speeding car again, I thought: I will always protest.) Mr. Fu’s overcareful slow driving unnerved me almost as much as his reckless driving.

  This did not last long. We came to a pass that linked the Tanggula Shan with the Kunlun Shan. It was a Chinese belief that in a valley nearby there was a trickle that rose and became the great brown torrent that ended in Shanghai, the Great River that only foreigners know as the Yangtze. The river is one of the few
geographical features that the Chinese are genuinely mystical about. But they are not unusual in that. Most people are bewitched by big rivers.

  This pass was just under seventeen thousand feet. Mr. Fu stopped the car, and I got out and looked at a stone tablet that gave the altitude and mentioned the mountains. The air was thin, I was a bit breathless, but the landscape was dazzling—the soft contours of the plateau, and the long folded stretches of snow, like beautiful gowns laid out all over the countryside, a gigantic version of the way Indians set out their laundry to dry. I was so captivated by the magnificence of the place I didn’t mind the discomfort of the altitude.

  “Look at the mountains, Mr. Fu.”

  “I don’t feel well,” he said, not looking up. “It’s the height.”

  He rubbed his eyes. Miss Sun was still whimpering. Would she scream in a minute?

  I got in and Mr. Fu drove fifty yards. His driving had worsened. He was in the wrong gear, the gearbox was hiccuping, and still the rear wheel made its hideous ratcheting.

  Without warning, he stopped in the middle of the road and gasped, “I cannot drive anymore!”

  He wasn’t kidding. He looked ill. He kept rubbing his eyes.

  “I can’t see! I can’t breathe!”

  Miss Sun burst into tears.

  I thought: Oh, shit.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  He shook his head. He was too ill to contemplate the question.

  I did not want to hurt his pride, especially here at a high altitude, so I said carefully, “I know how to drive a car.”

  “You do?” He blinked. He was very thin. He looked like a starving hamster.

  “Yes, yes,” I said.

  He gladly got into the back. Miss Sun hardly acknowledged the fact that I was now sitting beside her. I took the wheel and off we went. In the past few hours the ridiculous little Nipponese car had been reduced to a jalopy. It was dented; it made a racket; it smoked; and the most telling of its jalopy features was that it sagged to one side—whether it was a broken spring or a cracked axle I didn’t know. It had received a mortal blow, but it was still limping along. I had to hold tight to the steering wheel. The sick car kept trying to steer itself into the ditch on the right-hand side of the road.

  Mr. Fu was asleep.

  Miss Sun, too, was asleep. I pushed in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 and continued toward Lhasa. I liked this. I liked listening to music. I liked the fact that the other passengers were asleep. I loved the look of Tibet. I might have died back there on the road, but I was alive. It was wonderful to be alive and doing the driving.

  There were no people here that I could see. But there were yaks grazing on some of the hillsides—presumably the herds of the nomadic tent-dwelling Tibetans who were said to roam this part of the province. The yaks were black and brown, and some had white patches. They were ornamented with ribbons in their long hair, and they all had lovely tails, as thick as any horse’s. In some places, herds of Tibetan gazelles grazed near the road.

  Mr. Fu slept on, but Miss Sun woke up, and before I could change the cassette, she slipped in one of her own. It was the sound track of an Indian movie, in Hindi, but the title song was in English.

  I am a disco dancer!

  I am a disco dancer!

  This imbecilic chant was repeated interminably with twanging from an electric guitar.

  “That is Indian music,” I said. “Do you like it?”

  “I love it,” Miss Sun said.

  “Do you understand the words?”

  “No,” she said. “But it sounds nice.”

  At about four we were almost out of gas. Mr. Fu said he had spare gas in the trunk, in big cans, but just as I noticed the fuel gauge, we approached a small settlement.

  “Stop here,” Mr. Fu said.

  He directed me to a shack, which turned out to be a gas station—old-fashioned gas nozzles on long hoses. It was, like all gas stations in Tibet, run by the People’s Liberation Army.

  “We should get the tire fixed, too.”

  Mr. Fu said, “No. They don’t fix tires.”

  In Xining I had asked Mr. Fu to bring two spares. He had brought one, and it was being used. So we were traveling without a spare.

  “Where will we get the tire fixed?”

  He pointed vaguely down the road, toward Lhasa. It meant he didn’t have the slightest idea.

  I walked over to the soldier filling the tank.

  “Where are we?”

  “This is Wudaoliang.”

  Names look so grand on a map. But this place hardly justified being on a map. How could a gas station, some barracks, and a barbed-wire fence even deserve a name? And the name was bad news, because Wudaoliang was not even halfway to our destination, which was Amdo.

  As if to make the moment operatic, the weather suddenly changed. A wind sprang up, clouds tumbled across the sun, and the day grew very dark and cold. My map was flapping against the car roof. It would be night soon.

  “When will we get to Amdo, Mr. Fu?”

  “About six o’clock.”

  Wrong, of course. Mr. Fu’s calculations were wildly inaccurate. I had stopped believing that he had ever been on this road before. It was possible that my map was misleading—it had shown roads that didn’t exist, and settlements that were no more than ruins and blowing sand.

  Mr. Fu had no map. He had a scrap of paper with seven towns scribbled on it, the stops between Golmud and Lhasa. The scrap of paper had become filthy from his repeatedly consulting it. He consulted it again.

  “The next town is Yanshiping.”

  We set off. I drove; Mr. Fu dozed.

  Miss Sun played “I Am a Disco Dancer.”

  After an hour we passed a hut, some yaks, and a ferocious dog.

  “Yanshiping?”

  “No.”

  In the fading light and freezing air this plateau no longer seemed romantic. “This country makes the Gobi seem fertile in comparison,” a French traveler once wrote. It was true. Moonscape is the word most often applied to such a place, but this was beyond a moonscape—it was another universe entirely.

  There were more settlements ahead. They were all small and all the same: huts with stained whitewashed square walls, flat roofs, and red, blue, and green pennants and flags with mantras written on them, flying from propped-up bush branches. As these prayer flags flapped, so the mantras reverberated in the air, and grace abounded around them. There were more yaks, more fierce dogs.

  “Yanshiping?”

  “No.”

  It was nearly dark when we came to it. Yanshiping was twenty houses standing in mud on a curve in the road. There were children and dogs, yaks and goats. Several of the dogs were the biggest and fiercest I had ever seen in my life. They were Tibetan mastiffs—their Tibetan name means simply “watchdogs.” They lolloped and slavered and barked horribly.

  “There is nowhere to stay here,” Mr. Fu said, before I could ask—I was slowing down.

  “What’s the next town?”

  He produced his filthy scrap of paper.

  “Amdo. There is a hotel at Amdo.”

  “How far is Amdo?”

  He was silent. He didn’t know. After a moment, he said, “A few hours.”

  Hotel is a nice word, but China had taught me to distrust it. The more usual Chinese expression was “guest house.” It was the sort of place I could never identify properly. It was a hospital, a madhouse, a house, a school, a prison. It was seldom a hotel. But, whatever, I longed to be there. It was now seven-thirty. We had been on the road for ten hours.

  We continued in the dark. It was snowier here, higher and colder, on a winding road that was icy in places. There was another pass, choked with ice that never melts at any time in the year because of the altitude, another seventeen-thousand-footer.

  Mr. Fu woke and saw the snow.

  “Road! Watch the road!” he yelled. “Lu! Lu! Looooooo!”

  The altitude put him to sleep, but each time he woke he became a t
errible nag. I began to think that perhaps many Chinese in authority were nags and bores. He kept telling me to watch the road, because he was frightened. I wanted to say, You almost got us killed, Jack, but to save his face I didn’t.

  I often mistook the lights of distant trucks on the far side of this defile for the lights of Amdo. There was no vegetation at this altitude, and the freezing air was clear. In the darkness I saw these pinpricks of light.

  “Is that Amdo?”

  “Watch the road!” Mr. Fu’s voice from the back seat set my teeth on edge. “Lu! Loooo!”

  Now and then he would tap me on the shoulder and cry, “Toilet!”

  That was the greatest euphemism of all. It was usually Miss Sun who needed to have a slash. I watched her totter to the roadside and creep into a ditch, and there just out of the wind—and it was too dark even for the yaks to see her—she found relief.

  Three more hours passed in this way. I wondered whether we might not be better off just pulling off the road and sleeping in the car. Midnight on the Tibetan Plateau, in the darkness and ice and wind, was not a good time to be driving. But the problem was the narrowness of the road. There was nowhere to pull off. There was a ditch on either side. If we stopped we would be rammed by one of the big army trucks that traveled by night.

  Toward midnight I saw the sign saying Amdo. In the darkness it seemed a bleak and dangerous place. I did not know then that it would look much worse in daylight.

  “We are staying at the army camp,” Mr. Fu said.

  To save face, Mr. Fu changed places with me and drove the last twenty feet to the sentry post. Then he got out and argued with the sentry.