A few more days, the north-west gales blowing them along, brought the expedition to the Bayan River—two shallow channels compared with the formidable river it had been in 1872—in which Przhevalsky discovered two new species of loach. In mid-September he intersected the line of his first Central Asian expedition at Dzun-dzasak. The chieftain was not as forthcoming as he had been seven years before when Przhevalsky’s sacks of meal were talismans for his people. Others who had helped Przhevalsky were dead—Kambe Nantu, the Lhasa ambassador to Peking; Chutungdzamba, the guide to the Mur Usu; the young Wang of Kuku Nor. Przhevalsky had to offer fifty liang (over four pounds of silver) and threaten a firing squad before he induced a guide to come to Tibet. Only Kambe Lama, the local ecclesiastical dignitary, offered to help; Przhevalsky left half a ton of specimens and supplies at his kherem, so that the camels’ load could be lightened to a mere two hundredweight for the rarefied air ahead.
Przhevalsky left Tsaidam for the mountain ‘giants that guard the inaccessible world of the plateaux beyond the clouds, unwelcoming to man in the climate and nature and still utterly unknown to science’, well prepared. For once his camels were fit. No European in modern times, discounting the amateur abbés Huc and Gabet, had come so far; even the Indian pandits sent by the British had so far surveyed only southern and western Tibet—not until the following year does a pandit seem to have joined a Mongol caravan from Lhasa to Tsaidam. The dream of reaching Lhasa from the north seemed about to come true, Przhevalsky was confident: ‘… the darkness will not long continue and the mighty force called the spiritual energy will break down all barriers and will take European travellers the length and breadth of the mysterious land of Buddhism.’
Over 200,000 square miles of plateau—the northern and most desolate of Tibet’s three zones—were still a virtual blank on the map. An area never lower than 14,000 feet, of arid, freezing winters and cool, wet summers, eroded and made uninhabitable by perpetual gales, its waters undrained except for those that broke through to the eastern gorges, the plateau was the largest and most hostile unexplored region outside the polar circles. At first Przhevalsky thought the hostility of the climate overrated: he was after all a Russian, used, unlike the Indian pandits, to thirty degrees of frost in winter. He was glad to be back in the guresu gadzyr, the land of wild animals, drenched by the Indian monsoon in summer, dried out by the gales in winter, which turned the yellow grass to dust and dispersed the snow. Fabulous numbers of game mammals and birds existed on the poorest of flora. Buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides), potentilla, and what is now known as Przewalskia tangutica persisted up to 15,000 feet, above which only the occasional clump of sharp-bladed reeds could live.
Przhevalsky moved west until he reached the Nomokhun valley, which gave an easy ascent over the first range, the Burkhan Budda. At the fortress of Nomokhun Khoto, whose architect had been beheaded by the governor of Hsi-ning for building the walls too high, a message reached him from Dzun-dzasak, urging him to wait. Przhevalsky was sure that this was a Chinese trick and ignored the message. In a letter that never went farther than Hsi-ning, he complained to Koyander that he could not get a guide until he had threatened to kidnap the chieftan of Dzun-dzasak himself. ‘The measure of my patience is finished … For God’s sake, can’t you force the Chinese authorities to act more openly? Either let them forbid me to travel in their domains or stop their tricks.’
Russia and China were on the brink of war. Ch’ung-hou, sent to retrieve the Ili Valley, gave way to the bullying of a committee headed by Milyutin and Girs. Although the Tsar and Gorchakov were afraid of British and French reaction, the committee cajoled Ch’ung-hou into surrendering much of the valley, agreeing to an indemnity and to surrender valuable trading rights. Milyutin had no fears: ‘Asiatics will attribute generosity or even justice solely and simply to an incapacity to hold what has been taken,’ the British ambassador reported him as saying. Ch’ung-hou returned to China after signing a treaty which left the Chinese court and government no option but to repudiate it. Ch’ung-hou was sentenced to beheading for his incompetence. General Tso mobilized his troops, and Chinese diplomats sounded out the Turks, the Japanese and the English. Only China’s certainty that these ‘allies’ would prove as predatory as Russia put a stop to a grand alliance against Russia. Colonel Gordon, who had crushed the Taiping rebellion and whom China regarded as her only friend in Europe, was invited by Li Hung-ch’ang to advise the government. Gordon’s eccentric but wise counsels and Li Hung-ch’ang’s awareness of China’s coastal vulnerability pulled them back from the brink of war. The Chinese prepared to send a new diplomat to Petersburg ‘to look into the tiger’s mouth for the food it has swallowed’, though with no sanguine hopes. Diplomats in Peking and Petersburg feared the worst for Przhevalsky, marching on the forbidden city of Lhasa at such a critical time, tempting the Chinese to wipe him out. No wonder that General Tso, the chieftain of Dzun-dzasak and the governor of Hsi-ning were proving so unhelpful.
In the stony ravines Przhevalsky’s horses lost their last shoes. But they crossed the Dynsy Pass with its obo, the cairn to which each pious traveller should add a stone in gratitude for his safe passage. It was a new world: immense herds of kulan and yak grazed unalarmed. As before Przhevalsky shot so many that most of the meat had to be abandoned. The expedition was followed by crows and vultures and, at a distance, by a strange, furtive Mongol who collected the meat and stored it under stones. The Cossacks caught him when he was sleeping off a feast of game and dragged him to camp for questioning before letting him go.
The rarefied air slowed them down. Snow began to fall, and hail the size of cedar cones rained down. The next range to the south-west was already under snow, even below the pass. Winter was unusually early. Przhevalsky swung farther west, to avoid his 1872 route and to find better pasture. He crossed the range and came down to the Shuga River; here he lightened his load by burying a yak skin and a kulan skin beneath the boulders (where the skins may well lie to this day). It was a strange Eden. Kulans trailed inquisitively after the camels; the yak did not even bother to get to their feet. Storks and cranes had not yet migrated. Przhevalsky stopped for a day of slaughter, but found the quarry too tame to give real sport: ‘… after killing a score or so you get almost completely indifferent, particularly to kulans and antelope; wild yak are still attractive because this animal sometimes charges the hunter …’ In a matter of minutes he killed at least eight bharals (blue goats) which appeared on a crag through the blinding snow. He was invisible to his prey; they leapt in panic over a ravine. He fired twenty-one bullets and stopped only when his Berdan was too hot to hold. ‘It was,’ Przhevalsky admitted with unwonted embarrassment, ‘just like a slaughterhouse.’ He kept the five best skins and some of the meat. Four men took a whole day to prepare them.
The Shuga River flows back north into Tsaidam: Przhevalsky had to turn south across a range he named Marco Polo, climbing to over 16,000 feet before coming down to the plateau again. The guide began to falter. Przhevalsky ‘punished’ him and put him under guard. But physical force was useless on the wretched idiot that Dzun-dzasak had foisted on the expedition. Przhevalsky had to make his way by trial and error over passes to the Napchitai Ulan Müren, a tributary of the upper Yangtse Kiang on which his last approach to Lhasa had terminated.
There were camel footprints on the sandbanks of the Napchitai, sure signs of a pilgrim’s caravan ahead of them. But October was drawing to a close; Przhevalsky was a month late. In two days eighteen inches of snow fell, obliterating these tracks and all fodder. The camels tore open their saddles and ate the straw. (Przhevalsky had to re-upholster the saddles with yak hair.) The horses were on iron rations of barley. Dung, on which the expedition relied for fuel, was buried beneath the snow. Tibet was every bit as hostile as it had been in 1872. For several days the expedition was holed up in its tent and the ger Przhevalsky had bought in Tsaidam. Wild yak were migrating down to the upper Yangtse: a sure sign of a bad winter. The Mongol guide groaned and pr
ayed (even though the Cossacks ‘were eager to a man to go on’). Przhevalsky looked at him in disgust. ‘No wonder,’ he wrote, ‘such people die by the dozen in pilgrim caravans.’
At first he considered following the wild yak to more temperate valleys; then he boldly decided to head straight to Lhasa, south-west into the mountains. Snow blinded the sheep; the camels’ eyes had to be washed with strong tea and a lead poultice. Sunglasses were no use to the men; the Cossacks tried blindfolds of blue cloth, and the Mongol tied a yak’s tail hairs around his eyes. The sun, when it re-emerged burnt their faces while the wind froze their backs. Once more they found that there was not enough oxygen to burn fuel and water boiled at so low a temperature that tea, which took two hours to boil, tasted insipid and meat would not cook. Somehow they reached the Kuku Shili range where reedy marshes gave the camels food, and also provided cover for a new race of bear. Przhevalsky watched a wolf pack follow a bear, seizing marmots as the bear scraped them from their burrows.
The guide led them up a ravine which ended in an impasse where the horses and camels stumbled and fell. Przhevalsky gave him a little food and sent him off to find his own way, if he could, back to Tsaidam. The expedition was stranded in the Kuku Shili; only after Cossacks had roamed in search parties was a pass discovered. Over unnamed ranges they found their way to the upper Yangtse, the Mur Usu, some 200 miles upstream from the point they had reached in 1872. Przhevalsky was back on one of the three main pilgrim routes to Lhasa from the north, which followed the river into the Tang La range and then crossed into the temporal domain of the Dalai Lama. The river was deep, wide and still unfrozen. There were hundreds of wild yak that had not yet migrated downstream. Przhevalsky took the two Zaysansk mongrel dogs that had survived and went to hunt yak. The dogs had learnt to ignore all but rifle shots and then to run and hold down the wounded yak cows, so that Przhevalsky could walk in and kill the animal with a volley of explosive bullets. He would then take the tail, a piece of meat and part of the hide. ‘My brass cartridge cases,’ he recorded, ‘scattered in plenty over the mountains and valleys of northern Tibet, will remind the natives for many years, when they chance upon them, that Europeans have travelled and hunted here.’
After two days’ hunting he went up the river to find that sand and wind had obliterated the path. The Mur Usu plunged into gorges; he had to reconnoitre a detour. Starvation and lack of oxygen told on the camels and horses: four died. Przhevalsky threw away another four packs, all the skins collected since leaving Tsaidam. The expedition sheltered in a cave, immobilized by headaches and nausea, weighed down with wind-borne filth, suffocated by the smoke from the fire. When they were on the move again, the Cossacks had to walk and carry the horses’ loads; at night they had only a thin tent to protect them. They walked past human skulls; once they met the body of a Mongol pilgrim, his staff, bag, clay cup and packet of tea by his side, the corpse half-eaten by wolves.
Eventually they reached a tributary of the Yangtse, the Toktonai, fordable only in winter, and from there they made their way to the river known in Chinese as the A-k’o-ta-mu, which rises in the Tang La mountains. The river led them up a gentle gradient to a pass just under 17,000 feet. They saw no animals, but sighted the first human beings since leaving Tsaidam over 300 miles away. These were Yograi tribesmen, known in Tibetan as the Sokpa, a nomadic tribe, often bandits, who recognized neither the governor of Hsi-ning nor the Dalai Lama. It took Przhevalsky’s men eight days to cover the seventy miles to the pass, weakened by storms, starvation and the death of more pack-animals. The Yograi watched them; some galloped up, offered sheep for sale and asked for tobacco. ‘The only suspicious thing,’ observed Przhevalsky, ‘was that these Yograi kept asking us to show them our rifles and then argued heatedly about something.’ None of Przhevalsky’s men spoke Tibetan; none of the Yograi spoke Mongol.
As they crossed the pass by a glacier, Przhevalsky put a bottle on the obo; the Cossacks fired a salvo and yelled ‘hurrah!’ in the Tibetan tradition. A group of Yograi came up behind them. They picked a quarrel with Abdul and within seconds there was hand-to-hand fighting between Cossacks and Yograi, who were armed with matchlocks, catapults, spears and swords. The moment they opened fire, Przhevalsky responded with his high-velocity rifles. The Yograi fled, carrying their wounded and leaving four dead. That night the expedition camped in a defensive ‘square’ while Yograi horsemen patrolled the ridges above them. The next day they marched in battle order through a ravine which, Przhevalsky saw through his binoculars, the Yograi were ambushing. The party had almost no provisions left, and could not retreat to Tsaidam. They marched on for a mile, the Yograi watching; then they saw that Yograi on foot were blocking the exit from the ravine, while horsemen were waiting to charge from above. Przhevalsky made his men take careful aim and fire at the Yograi from 700 and 1,200 paces. The tribesmen, whose arms were no match for modern carbines, picked up their dead and wounded and vanished. The expedition came intact on to the plains and bathed in the hot mineral springs they found. Przhevalsky reflected: ‘Unenviable, but extremely interesting was our position at the time. On one hand a little bunch, just twelve Europeans; on the other, a whole horde of inimical savages. One was crude physical strength, the other moral strength. Moral strength had to win, and won.’
Now he was in Tibet proper. The thermometer rose above zero, the skies cleared. But the camels were distressed, for the stony, marshy ground suited only yaks and mules. Tibetan nomads on the Tan Chu and San Chu brought mutton, butter and dried curds to sell to the Russians. Przhevalsky even found an interpreter: he had caught up with three Mongols on their way to Lhasa, one of whom was Dadai, who remembered Przhevalsky from 1872 in Tsaidam, the two others being lamas. They told Przhevalsky that there was uproar in Lhasa over his approach: Tibetan militia had been mobilized to guard the border, from the Tang La to the first settlement, Nagchu Dzong. Przhevalsky was suspected in Lhasa of coming to preach Christianity or to kidnap the Dalai Lama. The populace were forbidden on pain of death to sell him supplies. Twelve officials were on their way to turn him back.
Sure enough, fifteen miles north of Nagchu, at the foot of Mount Pumza, Tibetan soldiers asked the expedition to halt and await directions from Lhasa. They were polite and helped the Russians find a camp site with good water and grazing. The expedition was exhausted and glad of a rest. But Przhevalsky saw his dream of reaching Lhasa, only 160 miles away, fading. To shoot his way through would only provoke a bloody demise for the whole expedition. In any case, the Mongols told him, the Lhasa track was impassable to camels and the expedition would have to hire yaks in Nagchu. The Mongols moved on; Przhevalsky was stranded without advice or interpreters. He watched the Tibetan yakherds on the Tan Chu and deplored their ‘repulsive uncleanliness’ in morals and person. He thought them inhospitable, hypocritical in their piety and greedy in their dealings. The Mongols had only confirmed this impression, shared by most European travellers of the time with the emphatic exception of Desgodins, that the Tibetans had ‘souls like soot’. The lamas were sodomites, the women whores to Przhevalsky’s way of thinking. He did however find the Lhasa nobility ‘as beautiful as Europeans’ and thought Tibetan husbandry efficient and yak milk tasty.
After eighteen days, with Tibetan militia in front of him and vengeful Yograi behind him, guarded by just two mongrel dogs, amused only by shooting lammergeier vultures and poisoning the more wary Himalayan vultures, Przhevalsky at last had news from Lhasa. He was ordered to leave. Przhevalsky refused unless he could meet the governor of Nagchu and have the order signed by the Chinese amban (governor-general) in Lhasa. The officials did not know whether to fear Przhevalsky’s aggressiveness or their superiors’ annoyance the more. In the end the Nagchu governor, Chigmet Choi Jor, dressed in sable skins, turned up with his suite. Przhevalsky pleaded the laws of hospitality and the oneness of God; the governor implored Przhevalsky to keep the peace and go. He was unmoved by the threat that Russians would tell the whole world of the Tibetan’s unfriendliness.
Eventually Przhevalsky agreed to turn back if he could have a written certificate of this order; the Tibetans then composed the following, which was read out in Tibetan, translated into Mongol and then conveyed to Przhevalsky by Irinchinov:
Tibet is a country of religion and certain people have come there from countries outside at various times. But those who do not have an established right to come, by the unanimous decision of the princes, lords and people, are refused entry and, on pain of death, are ordered to keep out … Now at Pong Bun Chung … in the Nagchu district on the 13th. of the 10th. moon, intending to come to Tibet, have appeared Nikolay Przhevalsky, his deputy Eklon, his deputy Shvyykovsky [whose name was still on Przhevalsky’s passport] with ten servants and soldiers; we have carefully explained the above circumstances and they have said that if we give them a written certificate that they may not enter they will go away; otherwise they will set off tomorrow for Lhasa. Whereupon we have asked them to go away, like anyone who does not hold an established right.
To this were appended eleven signatures of leading ecclesiastical and civil figures around Nagchu. Lhasa, less than a week’s journey away, was suddenly infinitely remote; but Przhevalsky’s disappointment evaporated, leaving only diffidence and disgust. The Tibetans refused to bring letters sent to Lhasa for the expedition or to let a Cossack ride to Nagchu for supplies. All that Przhevalsky obtained were a few anecdotes of Lhasa he had heard from the three Mongols, and some studies of Tibetan faces, secretly drawn by Roborovsky. The Tibetans were reluctant to sell food; they believed Przhevalsky’s silver was iron temporarily transmuted by sorcery, and only threats of violence induced them to part with a sheep or some dzamba. Luck again saved the expedition. A caravan of Tibetan traders taking religious wares, herbs and sugar north to Hsi-ning arrived at Nagchu; with them came the three Mongols on their way home. The Mongols helped Przhevalsky buy or exchange ten horses, some dzamba and some cheap ‘wooden’ tea, moto-tsai. Dadai, who was the nephew of Chutungdzamba, also agreed to guide the expedition back to Tsaidam for forty liang.
The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia Page 16