The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

  Quite apart from the prospect of our getting lost, we faced another equally disquieting peril. Lack of oxygen has two slightly contradictory effects on the body. It produces a feeling of euphoric lightheadedness and at the same time a sense of total exhaustion. Turning over in my sleeping bag left me panting, and the halting remarks of my companions revealed they were as tired as I was. Jacques had a headache, and possibly to cheer us up or to get rid of it, he continued to elaborate on pulmonary edema and all that stuff about foam in the lungs. He also explained why he had not brought along those miracle plastic inflatable chambers invented to save mountaineers. All you have to do is put the victim of pulmonary edema inside the plastic body bag and pump up the bag, except that, as Jacques explained, the device could be as harmful as it was supposed to be helpful, and it could, in fact, kill the user if pumped up too much. We dozed off, finally, as Jacques elaborated on the chemical composition of the diuretics that he hoped would save our lives instead.

  I coughed just to see if I had any foam in my lungs and fell asleep to visions of hundreds of miles of straight roads zipping by.…

  4

  THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

  It was raining when I awoke to take stock of the “golden prison” in which we had slept. It comprised six rows of barracks huddled behind a great wall. Between the buildings, in pools of mud, small black pigs snorted as they played around. Several Chinese in dark blue Mao suits lingered gloomily here and there. Were they prisoners or police? I couldn’t say, but I thought they could quite probably be both—exiled policemen. Madoi was certainly no promotion for anyone used to the bustle of, for instance, downtown Shanghai.

  At 14,760 feet, Madoi is close to being among the highest settlements in the world, the record going to the town of Wenchuan (16,732 feet), located in western Qinghai. Madoi certainly qualifies, on the other hand, as one of the most sordid. One long cement road, bordered by penitentiary-like walls, intersected two equally grim side streets, along which were located a petrol dump, a desolate state theater or propaganda hall, a large satellite dish linking it with headquarters in Beijing and Xining, three shops, two Muslim eating houses, and a very large cemetery in honor of the Chinese who died here, no doubt “liberating” Qinghai from itself.

  As we waited in the freezing dawn for a semblance of breakfast, Sebastian and Ling and I had the opportunity to talk with a Chinese “civil servant.” Nearing sixty, the man was from Shanghai and had been exiled here some thirty years ago for political reasons. When asked if he planned to return to Shanghai, he announced that he would love to but could not, that he had become accustomed to the altitude and the cold healthy air and felt he would surely die if he went back. Lacking the antibodies to survive the bacteria of the lowlands, Chinese who have spent a very long time on the Tibetan plateau do run a serious risk if they give up their exile. Thus it is that many find themselves obliged to serve life sentences in Qinghai—ironically, for reasons of health.

  * * *

  Having arrived by dark of night, we were shocked by the scenery as we drove out of town onto the small dirt road. Gone were the green pastures and rugged mountains. I felt a strange inner desolation looking out upon the higher reaches of the bleak Qinghai plateau. Around me stretched a huge plain dotted with low, rounded, sandy hills partially covered with dry scrubby grass, and among which a thousand mirror-like ponds reflected the immeasurable sky above. Here, close to the source of the Yellow River, the land was a flat watershed, with rain collecting in pools and ponds merging into mostly salty lakes. Unfolding before us was a preview of the bleak no-man’s-land for which we were headed, a windblown world shunned even by the nomads themselves.

  It was hardly surprising that somewhere nearby lay the mythic source of the Yellow River, for this was clearly one of the poles of the earth, the summit before the sky—the last step up and, if one turned around, the first one down heading to the sea. Here in marshes and bogs, lakes and ponds, percolated the water of the roof of the world that would slowly run down to form the great rivers that irrigate the whole of Asia.

  As we drove I became increasingly fascinated with the endless vistas of pools and lakes vibrating in the heat waves of the morning sun. I understood how one could easily get lost here, not just because of the sameness of everything, but because of the deadly bogs. Lacking in any definite drainage, the water of the high plateau, where it didn’t form a pond, created labyrinthine marshy wastelands.

  The preceding year, while on my quest for the horses of Nangchen, I had been galloping across what seemed like a grassy plain when our Khamba guide shouted for me to bear to the right. I did so but failed to pass the word in time to my companion, Caroline Puel, who was galloping happily ahead of me down the center of the valley.

  I watched when her horse suddenly began to flounder and sink in what appeared a stretch of solid grassland. In a distance of four paces her horse was immobilized, with mud nearly up to its stomach. It took a long time to haul it out without breaking its legs. These bogs are extremely hard to detect, in that they don’t support a distinctive vegetation. Although I had chosen, this time, to travel in September, after the rains, to avoid these pitfalls, it had been raining continuously, and the dry season, if one in fact existed, was not yet in sight.

  As we drove among the lakes here and there bespeckled by flotillas of ducks, of which the most spectacular were a Tibetan variety with pheasant-like golden feathers, I suddenly sighted to our left a small herd of kiang. I made the driver stop and flagged down the second vehicle, pointing toward the animals.

  Jacques slipped out of his seat and set off slowly to stalk them with his camera.

  The kiang belongs to the family of wild equids, which includes all the various types of zebras and the rare wild asses of Africa and Asia. In Africa, one subspecies of wild ass, E. a. atlanticus, has just become extinct, and the two others are officially endangered. In Asia wild horses are more abundant. They are divided into two groups, the Equus hemionus and Equus kiang.

  The Hemionus comes in six varieties, ranging from the Syrian wild ass to the Mongolian and Gobi dziggetai. They are different from the African wild asses in that they produce a sterile offspring when crossed with domestic donkeys.

  The kiang are a subspecies of wild ass, of which so far only three types have been roughly identified, due to a lack of any formal study: the eastern kiang, which inhabits the region we were traveling in; the southern kiang, found south of the Brahmaputra River; and the western kiang, found in Ladakh. They are all native to the Tibetan plateau.

  I spent several days without success tracking down kiang in the wild regions of eastern Zanskar in 1981. I had had to wait until 1992 to see my first animals in the wild while crossing western Qinghai in winter. Man-shy, the exotic creatures are forced down to lower altitudes in the cold season. We now had before us seven kiang who seemed not at all upset by our presence.

  For over half an hour we observed them as they alternately walked and galloped in single file. At fourteen hands (fifty-six inches) they were as tall as the local saddle horses. They had a very light and long fleecy yellow winter coat with three brown oval patches each; one along the neck, one over the body, and one covering the rump and the thighs.

  As Jacques approached them, they shifted their position, slowly rising to a crest over which they eventually galloped out of sight. Once kiang were seen in the thousands, but since the Chinese People’s Liberation Army began to kill them for food their numbers have substantially decreased.

  We found this encounter a good omen as we carried on ever deeper into the maze of lakes and hills, occasionally catching sight of a snow-crested peak in the distance. We were now fully launched onto the plateau of Qinghai, a territory that has proven more difficult to explore than the remotest jungles of the Amazon and New Guinea. At some point four hundred miles from where we were lay our goal.

  Crossing two more passes, we ran into trouble when the road turned into a pool of mud and we joined a long line of government truck
s buried up to their axles. A bulldozer was attempting to move the trucks, but it seemed hopeless, as each attempt simply plowed the mud into worse traps, in which the vehicles inevitably sank again. Rocking and pushing our jeeps, we managed to blaze a trail on the side of the road and finally to move some three miles to the head of the line of paralyzed vehicles.

  Once again, we encountered solitary black tents, as yaks in the hundreds roamed the plateau like bison on the plains. Occasionally we caught sight of a distant rider rounding them up like cattle. We were in the “Wild West” of Asia, the land of Tibetan cowherders. The horses here were related to the fine breed with enlarged lungs that I had studied the previous year.

  Horses are very much like people: They all look alike until you get to know them. I have acquired over the years an “eye for horseflesh,” as the colonial phrase goes. From a distance I can size up the finer points of a horse’s conformation. It’s a sort of sixth sense, but one that can be acquired and improved. Since my meeting with Sebastian’s cousin Loel and my first “horse hunting” expedition in 1992, I had become obsessed with Tibetan horses.

  Horses, not dogs, are man’s best friend. But what does that actually mean? What is the difference between a wild and a tame horse?

  The answer is a strange one. Tame animals tend to be smaller and to live shorter lives than their wild brothers, and tame species tend to look infantile and neotenic—that is to say, less advanced in their development, having proportions like those of young animals, with larger heads and clumsier bodies than wild adults.

  Who first tamed horses, and how and where was it done? We really don’t know. The more important question is: Which horse was the first to be tamed? Today all the horses in the world are tame, with the exception of the “wild” Przewalski horse, which itself exists now only in captivity.

  Although closely related to the domestic horse, the Przewalski horse has certain substantial differences of appearance, character, and also chromosomes. It has 2n=66 instead of 2n=64 chromosomes, yet it can mate with domestic horses and produce fertile offspring. In matters of appearance, its neck shows a marked break in its curvature, whereas its tail has short donkey-like hair toward its roots, as opposed to the long hair of domestic horses. The nose of the Przewalski is white, like those of asses and donkeys, and last but not least, it has a very pugnacious character.

  Some scholars believe that our modern domestic horses derive from crossbreeds of the Przewalski, but others strongly disagree. As we drove on, little did I imagine that in the coming year we would discover a living fossil, an unknown breed of Tibetan horse that might help solve some of the mystery surrounding the earliest domestic horses.

  What is certain is that domesticated animals changed man’s world. The oldest stone carvings found in the Tibetan highlands of Ladakh depict men, accompanied by dogs, shooting ibex with bows and arrows. These earliest inhabitants of the highlands were hunter-gatherers whose best friend and ally in tracking down game was the dog.

  Later came the domestication of cattle and horses; nobody knows which came first, but it seems likely that sheep were first, then bovines or cows, and horses last of all.

  As we drove across the plateau I kept my eyes peeled in hopes of seeing a giant wild yak, its huge stature making it the tallest of the bovine family. I had once had a strange encounter with wild mountain yaks in Bhutan, but they are smaller than the giants of the high plateau, which I had never seen.

  It was 1968. My party and I had been climbing for two days up the 13,320-foot Ruto-la pass, one of the most rugged passes in central Bhutan. Dwarfed by giant Douglas firs, hedged in by rhododendron bushes, I was happy to emerge at last into a vast clearing where I decided to pitch our tents for the night. No sooner had we arrived than a small herd of magnificent yaks crashed out of the forest and invaded our camp. Impressed by their size and their striking jet-black robes, I immediately went for my camera. Full-blooded yaks are rare in Nepal and Bhutan, and I had not yet been to Tibet. “Whose yaks are they?” I asked. “They belong to the king.” I took the reply at face value and understood that the king would have only the best of animals. I was dressed in a bright red down jacket, and seeing a yak close by I gave my camera to Tsering, my Tibetan companion, and asked him to take a photograph of me and the yak; whereupon I approached the giant beast, then turned my back to him to face the camera.

  Alas, I have lost the photograph of the yak and me, the beast huge and black and me small, in bright red with a blissfully ignorant smile. The yaks did indeed belong to the king, like the tigers and gazelles and all the other wild creatures of Bhutan.

  The tallest giant wild yaks of Qinghai stand eighteen hands (seventy-two inches), which makes them truly enormous, as tall as the tallest of dray horses, and much, much heavier—some are claimed to be as much as twenty hands (eighty inches) tall. Colonel Przewalski was charged by one and managed to kill several. Today, for fifty thousand dollars, one can get a permit from the Qinghai Mountaineering Association to kill a single animal, but success in the effort is hardly guaranteed.

  How did man tame the great yaks if the American Indian was never able to tame the bison? Although I am no expert, it seems possible that man has never actually tamed any animals at all, and that friendliness to humans results from a natural proclivity. It is in this that dogs differ from wolves; the tame yak, as big as he may be, is simply a different breed from his wild cousin. Our sheep and cows were perhaps just born amiable to man, as are the reindeer of Lapland and Siberia that are “tamed” simply by separating them from the herds in which they live, and the elephants that Indians train for life in only two or three weeks away from the wild.

  In taming the yak the Tibetans secured the services of the most versatile and useful animal in the world.

  To begin with, one can ride a yak, and in many parts of Tibet a good riding yak (preferably without horns) is worth three times the price of a horse. Surefooted, able to sniff out and avoid crevasses on glaciers, immune to snow blindness, capable of bulldozing its way through snowdrifts, the yak’s ponderous, heavy gait provides a remarkably smooth ride. Tibetans make yak saddles with stirrups and all, and yak races are held in many parts of the land. As a beast of burden a yak carries twice the load of a horse. Being ruminants, yaks have it all over horses in that they need not waste hours grazing. They hurriedly guzzle their daily ration of hay in the morning and then spend their time on the road chewing their cud. Among the many other benefits of the yak is its meat, delicious when fresh, dark red due to the abundance of red blood cells that catch the little oxygen available at high altitudes; and, according to many experts, healthier to eat than beef. Alas, most Tibetans eat it dried once the cold thin air has reduced it to a fiberglass-like, ropy substance. Yak wool is used by Tibetans to make their tents, their basic rope, the awnings of monasteries, bags, and the soles of boots. Not only do yak hides make shoes and other apparel, but sewn together and drawn over willow branches they make up the hulls of coracles, the only boats found in Tibet. As if this were not enough, one can drink Dri’s (female yak’s) milk. And, of course, Dri butter serves as fuel to light up tents and honor the statues of holy shrines when not being eaten in a variety of ways. Dri cheese, so hard a hammer can’t break it, is sucked and chewed upon for hours by Tibetans; a good food, it keeps for a century when dried and smoked, and is occasionally fed to horses when the grass is running out. Of all these services to man, none compares to the greatest gift the yak offers, its dung, which Tibetans burn for warmth in the extreme winter cold of the high plateau.

  There are several varieties of yak in Tibet, and although they have not been rigorously studied, there are at least three major families: the square-headed yak, the long-nosed yak, and the miniature yak. I am certain closer examination will reveal many more breeds, not to mention the various hybrid yaks crossed with regular cows, animals called Dzo (the female is called Dzomo).

  Like all herders, the Tibetans have hundreds of words to describe different cattle according to the
ir markings, their horns, and their general appearance. And in Tibet, the road to heaven, or rather to fruitful reincarnations, is paved with yaks. Those yaks whose lives are offered up to the divinities cannot be butchered, and are singled out as sacred by a red woolen collar. They live in peace, unmolested until they die of old age, bringing merit on their owners.

  The great central highlands of Tibet are yak country, and it is the herds of yaks that determine the seasonal migration of the nomads. Unlike other cattle but like reindeer, the yak has a singular capacity to digest mosses and lichen; it was designed with freeze-proof feet and legs, and special reduced sweat glands to further prevent freezing. The yak even has a stomach specially engineered to store fat for the long winters with little food.

  In spite of the myriad benefits of the yak, Tibetan herders on the roof of the world couldn’t survive on yak alone. There is little else available to them in the highlands, just a few grasses that can be made into salad, and the odd wild onion added to the more abundant stinging nettles (at a foot high, the tallest plant in the tundra), which make a delightful soup. Beyond these scant greens, there is nothing else to eat but that which the nomads can hunt, such as wild sheep and gazelles. The Tibetans never eat fowl, kiang, or horseflesh, as do their Mongol and Chinese neighbors.

  Thus it is that, in order to survive, the nomad herders of Tibet depend on trading with their lowland cousins, who sell them the barley they need to balance their diet. This interdependence of nomads and barley growers is what gives Tibet its special character and what determines the nature of Tibetan politics.

  “You must understand,” I found myself explaining to Jacques, “Tibet is, in a way, a human zoo. Locked away from the rest of the world, protected by the high altitude, Tibetans for centuries thrived untouched and undisturbed by their lowland neighbors. Many valleys are so isolated and remote that they harbor tribes with a unique specific genetic heritage. There are Tibetan tribes with beards, Tibetans with Western features, and some with Mongol features. There are even tribes that look like American Indians—in other words, a whole variety of people yet to be fully studied and recorded.”