by Paul Theroux
He returned to the car trembling.
“They are full,” he said.
“What now?”
“The guest house.”
Miss Sun was sobbing quietly.
We drove across a rocky field. There was no road. We came to a boarded-up house, but before we could get out, a mastiff bounded into the car lights. It had a big square head and a meaty tongue, and it was slavering and barking. It was as big as a pony, something like the Hound of the Baskervilles, but vastly more sinister.
“Are you getting out?”
“No,” Mr. Fu said, hoarse with fear.
Beyond the crazed and leaping dog there were yaks sleeping, standing up.
There were more dogs. I could take the yak-meat diet; I could understand why the Tibetans didn’t wash; I found the cold and the high altitude just about bearable; I could negotiate the roads. But I could not stand those fierce dogs. I was not angry or impatient. I was scared shitless.
“There is a guest house,” Mr. Fu said, grinning at some dim lights ahead.
It was a dirty two-story building with bars on the windows. I guessed it was a prison, but that was all right. We checked for dogs, and while Miss Sun threw up next to the car, we went inside. A Tibetan sat on a ragged quilt on the floor, gnawing raw flesh off a yak bone. He was black with dirt, his hair was matted, he was barefoot in spite of the cold. He looked exactly like a cannibal, tearing shreds of red meat off a shank.
“We need a room,” Mr. Fu said in Chinese.
The Tibetan laughed and said there was no room. He chewed with his mouth open, showing his teeth, and then with aggressive hospitality he pushed the bone into my face and demanded I take a bite.
I took out my “List of Useful Tibetan Phrases.”
“Hello. I am not hungry,” I said in Tibetan. “My name is Paul. What is your name? I am from America. Where are you from?”
“Bod,” the cannibal said, giving me the Tibetan name for Tibet. He was grinning at my gloves. I was cold—it was way below freezing in this room. He gestured for me to sit with him on his quilt, and in the same motion he waved Mr. Fu away.
It is a Tibetan belief that all Tibetans are descended from a sexually insatiable ogress who had six children after copulating with a submissive monkey. It is just a pretty tale, of course, but looking at this man it was easy to see how the myth might have originated.
He batted away Mr. Fu’s identity card, but he took a great interest in my passport. Then he put his juicy bone down and fingered the pages, leaving bloodstains on them. He laughed at my passport picture. He compared the picture with my gray, frozen face and the wound under my eye. He laughed again.
“I agree. It’s not a very good likeness.”
He became very attentive, hearing English spoken, like a dog listening to footsteps in the driveway.
“Do you have rooms?” I asked. I held out a picture of the Dalai Lama.
He mumbled a reply. His shaven head and big jaw made him look ape-like. I switched to Chinese, because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He took the picture gently.
“One person—six yuan,” he said, clutching the portrait.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Mr. Fu said, abasing himself.
“Tea, tea,” the cannibal said, offering me a tin kettle.
I drank some salty, buttery tea, and as I did, a truck pulled up outside. Twelve Tibetans, women and children, entered the room, went into the corridor, threw quilts on the floor, and fell on them.
I paid my money, got my bag from the car, and found an empty room on the second floor. The light on the stairwell had shown me what sort of place it was. Someone had vomited on the landing. The vomit was frozen. There was worse farther on, against the wall. It was all icy, and so the smell wasn’t bad. It was very dirty, a bare cement interior that was grimmer than any prison I had ever seen. But the real prison touch was that all the lights were on—not many of them, but all bare bulbs. There were no light switches. There were howls and murmurs from the other rooms. There was no water, and no bathroom. No toilet except the stairwell.
Not far away I heard Miss Sun berating Mr. Fu in an exasperated and whining sick person’s voice. I closed the door. There was no lock. I jammed an iron bed against it. There were three iron bedsteads in the room, and some reeking quilts.
I realized that I was shivering. I was cold, but I was also hungry. I ate half a jar of Ma Ling orange segments, and a banana, and I made tea from the hot water in the jug I had brought. I was light-headed and somewhat breathless from the altitude, and also nauseated from the frosty vomit in the corridors. Just as I finished eating, all the lights went out: midnight.
I put on my gloves, my hat, my extra sweater, my coat, and my third pair of socks and thermal-lined shoes, and went to bed. I had been cold in my life, but I had never worn a hat with earmuffs to bed before. I had a quilt over me and a quilt under me. Even so, I could not get warm. I could not understand why. My heart palpitated. My toes were numb. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be Chris Bonington, climbing Menlungtse near Everest. After a while I could see moonlight behind the thick frost on the window.
In the middle of the night I got up to piss. I used an enamel basin that I guessed was a chamber pot. In the morning the piss was frozen solid. So were the rest of my orange segments. So were my quails’ eggs. Everything that I had that could freeze had frozen.
I had hardly slept, but I was gladdened by the sunlight. I found some peanuts and ate them. I ate my frozen banana. I visited the cannibal (he looked even dirtier in daylight) and drank some of my own tea with him. He did not want Chinese tea. He made a face as if to say, Disgusting stuff! How can you drink it?
The frail warmth of the morning sun only made the place worse by wakening the stinks on the stairs and in the corridors. There were dark clumps and little twists of human shit throughout the building. In this heavenly country, this toilet.
Mr. Fu was up and fussing. He said Miss Sun was not at all well. And he felt sick, too.
“Then let’s go,” I said.
“Breakfast first.”
“Oh, God!”
Another late start. But this time I did calculations on my map, estimated the distances between towns, figured an average speed, and felt much better until I remembered the tire.
“Did you get the spare tire fixed, Mr. Fu?”
He had said that he would do it this morning, before breakfast. Although Amdo was a dump, there were garages here, and it was the only place of any size for miles.
“No. Better to get the tire fixed in Nagqu.”
That was over a hundred miles away.
Mr. Fu took the wheel. A few miles down the road he stopped the car and clawed at his face.
“I cannot do it!” he shrieked. In Chinese it sounded like a pitiful surrender.
It was another attack of the wobblies. I welcomed it; I soothed Mr. Fu as he crept into the back seat. I slotted Brahms into the cassette player and drove south, under sunny skies.
I was feeling wonky myself. I had a bump on my head, a neck ache, and a deep cut on my face from the car crash. My right wrist hurt, probably a sprain, from my holding on during our careering. And the altitude affected me, too—I felt light-headed and nauseated, and my short walk in Amdo had given me heart palpitations. But this was nothing compared with Mr. Fu’s agony. The color had drained from his face, his mouth gaped, and after a while he simply swooned. Miss Sun also went to sleep. Crumpled together on the seat, they looked like poisoned lovers in a suicide pact.
There were no more settlements until Nagqu, nothing except the windswept tableland, and it was so cold that even the drongs, the wild yaks, were squinting and the herds of wild asses did nothing but raise their heads and stare at the badly damaged Mitsubishi Galant. After a few hours the road ran out and was no more than loose rocks and boulders, and more wild asses. The boulders clunked against the chassis and hammered the tires. We had no spare tire. We were ridiculously unprepared for Tibet, but I did
not mind very much. I felt, having survived that crash, that we had come through the worst of it. There is something about the very fact of survival that produces a greater vitality. And I knew I was much safer as long as I was driving. Mr. Fu was not really very good at all, and as a nervous new driver, he had no business to be in Tibet.
On some hillsides there were huts flying colored prayer flags. I was cheered by them, by the whiteness of whitewashed huts, by the smoke coming out of the chimneys, and by the clothes that people wore—fox-fur hats, silver buckles, sheepskin coats, big warm boots. Miles from anywhere I saw a mother and daughter in bright, blowing skirts and bonnets climbing a cliffside path, and a handsome herdsman sitting among his yaks, wearing a wonderful red hat with huge earflaps.
Mr. Fu was very annoyed that there was nowhere to eat at Nagqu. He was stiff and cranky from the altitude, and reluctant to stay, but I pestered him into finding someone to fix the spare. This was done in a shed, with fires and chisels; and while this primitive vulcanizing went on, I walked around the town. John Avedon’s In Exile from the Land of Snows (1984), which is mainly an anti-Chinese account of the recent turmoil in Tibet, and pleasantly passionate on the subject of the Dalai Lama, claims that Nagqu is the center of the Chinese nuclear industry. The gaseous diffusion plants, the warhead assembly plants, and the research labs have been moved here from the Lop Nor Desert. Somewhere in this vicinity—though you’d never know it from looking at it—there was a large repository of medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles. But all I saw were yaks.
Mr. Fu drove us out of Nagqu—perhaps a face-saving gesture, because a mile outside town he stopped the car and clutched his eyes.
“I cannot do it!”
And he slumped in the back seat.
I was happier than I had been since starting this trip on the Iron Rooster. I was driving, I was in charge, I was taking my time, and Tibet was empty. The weather was dramatic—snow on the hills, a high wind, and black clouds, piled up on the mountains ahead.
Today, below the snowy and majestic Nyenchen Tanglha Range, nomads rode among their herds of yak, and the road was straight through the yellow plain. That tame road contributed to my feeling of well-being—it was wonderful to be in such a remote place and yet to feel so secure. Mr. Fu and Miss Sun were asleep in the back seat. There were no other cars on the road. I drove at a sensible speed toward Lhasa and watched the birds—hawks and plovers and crows. There were more gazelles, and once a pale yellow fox bounded across the road.
There was a sudden snowstorm. I went from a dry sunny valley, around a corner, into a black slushy one, the large cottony flakes whipping sideways. Mr. Fu, who was terrified of snow, mercifully did not wake. The snow eased; it became a dry flurry in a valley farther ahead, and then the sun came out again. Tibetans call their country “Land of Snows,” but in fact it doesn’t snow much and it never rains. The gales pass quickly. The Tibetans are not bothered by any of this. I saw children playing in the sudden storm.
I had wanted at the outset to reach Lhasa quickly. But now I didn’t mind a delay. I would gladly have spent more nights on the road, provided it was not in a place like the dump at Amdo.
Damxung looked promising. It was at a bend in the road; there was an army camp nearby, and half a dozen one-room restaurants. We stopped and had four dishes, which included wood-ear fungus and yak meat, and Mr. Fu revived enough to accuse the serving girl of overcharging him—or rather me, since I paid the bill.
There were six soldiers in the kitchen, wanning themselves, but they fluttered away when I tried to talk with them. Travelers in China had sometimes told me that they were harassed by soldiers or officials. This was never my experience. When I approached them they always backed away.
I found Mr. Fu spitting on the wheel to see whether it was overheated. He was kneeling, spitting, smearing, examining.
“I think we should stay here,” I said.
We were watched by a small boy who had a playing-card-sized picture of the Dalai Lama tucked into the front of his fur hat. When I peered at him he ran away and returned without the picture.
“We cannot stay here. Miss Sun is sick. Lhasa is only one hundred and seventy kilometers.”
“Do you feel well enough to drive?”
“I am fine!”
But he looked terrible. His face was gray. He had not eaten much. He had told me he had a pain in his heart. He also said that his eyes hurt.
“This wheel is not hot,” he said. “That is good.”
He gasped and gave up at a place called Baicang, saying he could not do it. I took over, and in a pretty place on a riverbank called Yangbajain, we entered a narrow, rocky valley. It was the sort of valley I had been expecting ever since Golmud. I had not realized that this part of Tibet was open country, with flat, straight roads and distant snowy peaks. But this valley was steep and cold, and half in darkness it was so deep. A river ran swiftly through it, with birds darting from one wet boulder to another. I saw from my bird book that they were thrushes, and the commonest was the White-winged Redstart.
When we emerged from this valley we were higher, and among steep mountainsides and bluer, snowier peaks. We traveled along this riverside in a burst of evening sunshine. Farther south, this little river became the mighty Brahmaputra. The valley opened wider, became sunnier and very dry; and beyond the beautiful bare hills of twinkling scree there were mountains covered with frothy snow.
Ahead was a small town. I took it to be another garrison town, but it was Lhasa, for sure. In the distance was a red and white building with sloping sides—the Potala, so lovely, somewhat like a mountain and somewhat like a music box with a hammered gold lid.
I had never felt happier, rolling into a town. I decided to pay off Mr. Fu. I gave him my thermos bottle and the remainder of my provisions. He seemed embarrassed. He lingered a little. Then he reached out and put his fingers on my cheek, where there was the wound from the crash. It was scabby, the blood had dried, it looked awful, but it didn’t hurt.
“I am sorry,” Mr. Fu said. He laughed. It was an abject apology. His laughter said, Forgive me!
Lhasa
IT IS IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS THAT LHASA IS NOT A CITY. IT IS a small friendly-looking town on a high plain surrounded by even higher mountains. There is very little traffic. There are no pavements. Everyone walks in the street. No one runs. These streets are at twelve thousand feet. You can hear children yelling and dogs barking and bells being rung, and so it seems a quiet place. It is rather dirty and very sunny. Just a few years ago the Chinese bulldozed the Chorten, a stupa which formed the entrance to the city. It was their way of violating Lhasa, which had always been forbidden to foreigners. Even so, it is not crowded. The Chinese badly damaged Lhasa and hoped to yank the whole thing down and build a city of fine ugly factories. But they did not succeed in destroying it. Much of it, and some of its finest shrines, were made out of mud bricks—easily broken but cheap to replace, like the Buddhist statues that were made anew every few years, or the yak butter sculptures that were expected to go rancid or melt in order for new ones to be fashioned. The whole of Buddhism prepared the Tibetans for cycles of destruction and rebirth: it is a religion that brilliantly teaches continuity. You can easily see the violence of the Chinese intention in Lhasa, but it was a failure, because the Tibetans are indestructible.
Lhasa is a holy place, so it is populated by pilgrims. They give it color, and because they are strangers themselves to Lhasa they don’t object to foreign travelers—in fact, they welcome them and try to sell them beads and trinkets. Chinese cities are notorious for their noise and crowds. Lhasa has a small population, and because it is flat it is full of cyclists. To me that was a complete surprise. I had expected a dark, craggy city of steepnesses and fortifications overrun by Chinese and hung with slogans. I found a bright little war-torn town full of jolly monks and friendly pilgrims and dominated by the Potala, which is an ingenious and distracting shape.
Half the population of Lhasa is Ch
inese, but those who are not soldiers tend to stay indoors, and even the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army keep a low profile. They know that Tibet is essentially a gigantic army camp—the roads, the airports, and all the communications were a military effort—and they know that the Tibetans resent it. The Chinese feel insecure in Tibet, and so they retreat into a sort of officiousness; they look like commissars and imperialists but their swagger is mostly bravado. They know they are in a foreign country. They don’t speak the language and they have not managed to teach Chinese to the Tibetans. For over thirty years they maintained the fiction that the official language of Tibet was Chinese, but then in 1987 they caved in and changed it to Tibetan.
The Chinese imply that they have a moral right to run the Tibetans’ lives, but since the late seventies, when they began to despair of political solutions to Chinese problems, they have felt more uneasy about being in Tibet. They have no right to be there at all. The Tibetans themselves would probably have found a way to tax the rich families, get rid of exploiters and raise up the Ragyaba—the scavenging class and corpse handlers—and free the slaves (slavery persisted into the 1950s). But the bossy ideology of the Chinese compelled them to invade and so thoroughly meddle with the country that they alienated the majority of the population. They did not stop there. They annexed Tibet and made it part of China, and however much the Chinese talk about liberalizing their policies it is clear that they have no intention of ever allowing Tibet to become a sovereign state again.
“It feels like a foreign country,” Chinese friends of mine confided to me. They were bewildered by the old-fashioned habits and clothes, and by the incomprehensible rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, celebrating the sexual mysticism of the tantric rites, and the hugging and fornicating statues illustrating the mother-father principle of yabyum, and the big, toothy, goggling demons that Tibetans see as protectors. Even with the Chinese watching closely and issuing decrees and building schools and initiating public works, Lhasa is a medieval-seeming place, just like Europe in the Middle Ages, complete with grinning monks and grubby peasants and open-air festivals and jugglers and tumblers. Lhasa is holy, but it is also a market town, with pushcarts and stacked-up vegetables and dirty, air-dried cuts of yak that will keep for a year (grain keeps for fifty years in the dry Tibetan climate). The most medieval touch of all is that Tibet has almost no plumbing.