The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

  I should have had the courage to demand service, even at the risk of reaffirming in Ling his belief that Communism was a necessary evil invented to sweep away decadent capitalists, like me.

  I knew, above all, that comfort was essential if we were to push on and have enough energy to spare at the end of our journey to carry out a meaningful investigation and mapping of the high plateau.

  The morning was cold. One by one we abandoned our tents, slowly stretching out to our original shapes and sizes. I felt wretched after a night of battling the discomfort of sleeping on a plastic mattress a half-inch thick in a narrow bag, not to mention the backbreaking gymnastics of fumbling everywhere for the flashlight, shoes, zipper, and then the tent flap just to crawl out bent in two to relieve myself in the cold of night. The only compensation was the immense Himalayan sky, its stars dazzlingly bright, the Milky Way afire, while I felt infinitely small as I went through the humiliating routine of having to answer the call of nature. Yes, man is a fallen angel and the mu that linked us to the heavens has long been cut.

  Were it not for the rays of the sun that dispelled the cold and gloom of the night, we wouldn’t have had the will to continue. Why bother, anyway? The source of the Mekong had gotten along perfectly well unknown to all, misplaced on maps; why spoil everything now? Curiosity is too likely to backfire; ever since the Industrial Revolution, man has been putting his nose into nature to find out how this and that worked and how it could be modified, enlarged, or destroyed.

  Over the years, the Chinese have been wiser in their approach to technology: from festive fireworks we made the cannons, from mustard we made the deadly gas bombs; from the poppy we made opium and sold it back to them. From the tiniest sweet particle of all, we made the atom bomb. Technology has, of course, given us many benefits, particularly in the medical field—but also longer lives to further expose us to crowding and pollution. “You realize, Jacques,” I would say to provoke him, “medicine is the work of the devil; excellent health, eternal youth, and a long, long life are its goals, when we are here for the opposite reason, to learn how to die.”

  How I wished there were some sort of genetic engineering that would allow us to transcend our mortal bodies and do away with the illusion of the senses. Maybe the Buddhists are right, and our life is not so much of this world as beyond the speck of dust the world illuminates. Nirvana is the world snuffed out and fused with the absolute.

  Everything packed up, we collected our Mars bar wrappers and stray dirty Kleenexes, the yellow film boxes, the plastic bags, the corrugated cardboard crate, the empty pork tins, the cocoa wrappers, the plastic Pepsi bottles, the glass beer bottles, the bits of string and ribbon, the label offering a guarantee for the tent, and the silver plastic pill holder: the habitual droppings of a brief overnight stop in the wild, reminders of a society in which nothing ever comes from the spot where it is destined to be consumed, but must be wrapped, bottled, boxed, packaged, labeled, and protected so it can travel, and, most important, so it can sell. Some say we live in a consumer society, but actually we live in a society of profit, in which the sale of goods and services is the ultimate goal. Whether or not the goods and services are ever consumed is a matter of secondary consideration. Much is thrown away, but what counts is not that, it is that everything has been sold in the first place.

  As we drove off I couldn’t help pondering the finality of any society. What did the nomad expect of life? Did he dream of enormous herds, of becoming rich? Did he look forward to retirement? Was he obsessed with youth or age? Or were his obsessions linked to religion, and to fulfilling his karma and achieving fruitful reincarnations, in much the same way I longed for bliss ever after in the next life?

  “Lives of all beings are like bubbles on water,” according to the Tibetan proverb. Yet Tibetans are basically optimistic.

  Of Happiness and Sorrow it is man who decides.

  Only good fortune and the length of life we cannot control.

  This proverb from Kham is an apt illustration of the positive, realistic approach of most Tibetans. Another saying goes:

  Eaters and drinkers win.

  Weepers lose.

  The mystery surrounding Tibet, its remoteness and inaccessibility, has brought many Europeans to imagine that there are monks and wise men there who hold the key to the problems of the world. The letters of Tibetan sages (since proven to be fakes) were the pillars of Gurdjieff’s teachings. The Theosophical Society also used Tibetans as an alibi. Today, in New York, Colorado, Scotland, France, and many other places, there are hundreds of simulated Tibetan monasteries to which thousands flock each year in search of answers to the problems of existence.

  I myself have searched Tibet for some lost, secret, complex recipe for happiness, only to discover that real happiness is as simple as the Khamba proverb says it is: It’s a choice, it’s what you make out of what you have.

  By contrast, Sakyamuni, that sophisticated prince born in the stifling Terrai jungles of Nepal, the living Buddha, observed that life was pain. His was a rather pessimistic approach. He believed that the only way to conquer pain was to control desire, along the famed eight-fold path, the middle road of right desires and aspirations. In the end, Lord Buddha concluded that life was hardly worth living, and that the best we could hope for was to live out as quickly as possible our present and future lives until we reached nirvana—the snuffing-out of existence.

  Weepers lose, say the Tibetans, and I, for one, agree. I prefer to join the eaters and drinkers. As another Khamba saying would have it:

  If one is without soup on earth

  What use is having a ladle in heaven?

  Bumping along, still in the same horrible steel box on wheels, I was far from the exhilarating nirvana I yearned for, yet I was fascinated with the world we moved in now. The red and green mountains had vanished, the ground was covered with a short, dark, bristly moss, with the earth lumped as if raked and broken into uneven sod. The very top of the roof of our planet is a place where water and earth haven’t yet decided to separate. Here and there appeared tranquil pools reflecting an immense sky supported on the distant waves of snow-covered peaks. We finally reached a barren flat land that I recognized to be some sort of aquatic no-man’s-land between two watersheds. We were entering the upper valley of the Dam Chu.

  Dutreuil de Rhins and his companion Grenard are the only foreigners I know of who ever traveled across the upper Dam Chu, although there remains a chance that this was also the route taken by the ill-fated and dazed Susie Carson Rijnhart after she had lost her firstborn child, barely one year old, to the cold of the tundra, and after her husband had disappeared, swept away by a torrent or possibly murdered by brigands.

  The American wife of a Dutch missionary, she suffered an ordeal that is one of the most harrowing in the annals of Tibetan exploration. Determined to preach the gospel in the holy city of Lhasa, the Rijnharts set out from China with the intention of crossing the whole of eastern Qinghai and most of Tibet. They soon ran into trouble, however, when their guides abandoned them, taking many of their supplies. Next, their infant son, born en route, fell ill and died, and they were refused entry to Tibet and forced to retreat eastward, across Qinghai, possibly up the Dam Chu. Their new guides also ran away and they were attacked by bandits who stole their horses. Faced with a long and hopeless odyssey on foot, Mr. Rijnhart finally left his wife and attempted to swim across a swift, freezing torrent to seek help from the nomads. Susie Carson Rijnhart never saw her husband again. Alone she eventually made it to Sichuan.

  Westward as far as the eye could see, there stretched a seemingly endless plain dotted with lakes and ponds through which meandered “the marshy river,” the Dam Chu. Grenard wrote in 1894 that this “must be the longest arm of the Yangtze River, up which should be found the source of this river and not to the West as believed.”

  At the time I had not yet read Grenard’s account, nor was I aware that a Chinese professor, Mr. How Man Wong, of the China Exploration and Res
earch Society in Hong Kong, had set out recently—that very year, in fact—to travel up the Yangtze looking for its source. He found it in “a little pond” at the head of the Dam Chu on the very plateau upon which we had just emerged.

  Based on our own reckoning, Jacques, Sebastian, and I searched the terrain around us, convinced that the source of the Dam Chu must be close to where we had entered its broad valley.

  The GPS gave us an altitude reading of 16,568 feet. Looking at the patches of sky mirrored in the pools reminded me of those cloudscapes one sees flying at high altitudes as night approaches. What stretched before us was a union of elements in which clouds and mountains, sky and water, were essentially indistinguishable.

  On close examination it was evident that in the long months of winter the entire valley must be frozen under ice and a thin film of slowly moving snow, but that in spring and early summer it was transformed into one huge marsh, or dam. The Yangtze is the fifth-longest river in the world, and the longest in Asia. Twenty miles across near Shanghai and the sea, its vast basin is populated by three hundred million souls—one-third of the population of China.

  According to yet another of their many proverbs, these three hundred million Chinese ought to think three times or more each day about the place where we now stood: “When you drink water, think about the source.”

  After the Amazon, the Niger, and just behind the Rio de la Plata, the Yangtze is one of the rivers of the world with the greatest flow of water: almost twenty-nine thousand cubic yards per second on average, with a high of fifty thousand tons of water per second. With this water bound for the sea comes five hundred thousand tons of sand and earth per year.

  Today, even the simplest fields of learning have been elevated to the status of science, and hydrology and its various forms of hydrometry are vastly expanding disciplines. I knew perfectly well that there were people in those fields far more competent than Jacques or Sebastian or I—people better suited to meet the challenge we had set for ourselves, including all those experts who had pondered for years the intricacies of river flow, flood control, still waters, storage basins, and subterranean reserves and levels. They were all people who should have been here long before us but had never made it.

  This, of course, raises a few questions about experts in the modern world. In Tibet an expert is a man of wisdom. “Wisdom is like having a thousand eyes,” goes a Tibetan proverb, by which estimate we were, in matters of hydrology, practically blind. I had taken a brief crash course that taught me just enough to know how little I knew, and to appreciate how hard it was not only to determine the source, or sources, of a river, but to make all the detailed calculations required for measuring the flow of the tributaries.

  The trouble about men of wisdom today is that they have all become professional men; people who are used to being paid for their knowledge. In Tibet the idea that one should pay a person to acquire his advice, counsel, or scholarship is truly shocking. It would be like paying people to tell the truth or refusing to help those in danger.

  Wise men are much respected in Tibet, and in exchange for this esteem they give out their knowledge for free, in keeping with the proverb “The wise are the servants of all.” This applies to doctors, veterinarians, and scholars in every field, none of whom ever charge for their services or advice. They are treated with great consideration and given the best food; horses are sent to fetch them, and they have access to every privilege. In Zanskar I met a doctor (the lumbo of Karsha) who, because he was so successful, was obliged to give up medicine, in that it left him no time to care for his fields and feed his family.

  In the West the wise are nobody’s servants. On the contrary, they tend to be masters of the masses who are their servants, if not their slaves. We pay for their slightest word or deed: for a rubber stamp, a prescription, three words of advice or a recommendation. Knowledge in the West is a commodity bought and sold, patented and licensed. It is no longer a matter of intelligence, enthusiasm, and a sharp brain, so much as a matter of money. The poor can’t buy knowledge, and those who aren’t any good at selling what knowledge they have are also losers in a society in which we have abolished the privileges of rank, only to raise the privileges of those who know something. Trade unions, syndicates, and professional associations have grown up to protect the monopolies of knowledge. Laws are passed making the services of the wise compulsory. One has to have an architect to build, a doctor to heal, and, as we discovered all too soon, many would feel that we should have had a professional hydrologist along, were we to dare seek the source of the Mekong.

  This didn’t bother us, for it begged the question: Why had no hydrologist found the source before we came along? Many specialists are mountain-shy. What with the popularity of ecologists and all the polluted water in the West, several international organizations of highly paid “experts” have looked to Tibet and Qinghai on maps and pronounced this highland region the “water tower of Asia.” In several recent articles concern has been voiced about the “management” of this great water reserve, and Western experts who have never seen the region have tried to figure out how many millions of tons of water are stored in the marshes and lakes of the great northern plains of Tibet, the Changthang, and its extension in Qinghai.

  Beyond any doubt there is a large reserve of water on the high plateau, but the groundwater is insignificant compared to the amount of annual rainfall. We tend to forget that all water on earth comes from the sea. Where our water supply is concerned, rainfall is what counts, and surprisingly, only a small portion of what falls as rain actually flows back down rivers.

  Here again, hydrologists have been at work calculating how much of the water that falls on a given river basin ever reaches the sea. The waters of the Colorado River, for example, represent only 11 percent of the annual rainfall on the river’s basin; the rest evaporates, is used in irrigation, or is simply drunk by humans and animals. Some rivers in northern Qinghai and most of those in adjoining Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) never reach the sea at all, in that 100 percent of their flow evaporates or disappears into desert sands or flows into lakes without exits.

  There are many oddities about the flow of a river. Some rivers have more water in winter than in summer, others have the same flow all year round, and still others flow only during certain hours of the day, drying up when snow water freezes on the high summits. The Mekong’s flow varies considerably between winter and summer. In summer it rises with the added monsoon rains in Southeast Asia and the snowmelt from the Tibetan highlands.

  The great rivers that flow off the Tibetan highlands are unique in that many of them possibly existed before the Himalayan chain rose up to block their passage. Such rivers as the Arun and the Kali Gandaki actually managed to cut their way straight through the Himalayas. To do this they had to carve some of the deepest gorges in the world. On the other hand, both the Brahmaputra and the Indus had to make great detours in opposite directions around the Himalayas before being able to cut through the mountains at either end of the great chain.

  Ever since 1959, when I had walked along the banks of the bubbling Dhud Khosi (Milk River) that flows down from Everest, I have been fascinated by Himalayan rivers. At first I was surprised by the speed of their flow, then by the depth of some of their gorges. The Kali Gandaki flows 19,600 feet beneath the summits of the nearby Annapurna range on one side and the Dhaulaghiri range on the other. This is one of the world’s deepest clefts, and one I followed in 1964 on my way up to Mustang. Later, in 1986, I tried to travel down the great gorge of the Brahmaputra, another contender for the world’s deepest canyon, lying between Mount Gyala Pheri and the 25,446-foot-high Namche Barwa. Here the Brahmaputra flows nearly three miles below the peaks, whose summits are only seven and a half miles apart on either side of the river. This gorge is so steep that neither George Bailey in 1912 nor the famed botanist Kingdom Ward in 1935 was able to follow its course. Neither was I in 1986.

  Many other gorges have remained a mystery to this day. In fac
t, the longest unexplored gorge is possibly that of the Mekong itself. To my knowledge no one has yet been able to follow the river all the way up or down through its gorge across Tibet. I well understood why when in 1995 I drove a short way up this gorge to Chamdo, just south of where the Mekong leaves Nangchen to enter Tibet, and found myself suspended on a ledge three thousand feet above the river as it flowed down into a huge rocky gorge so steep as to seem man-made.

  Although we constantly see photographs of cars overturned and houses destroyed by floods, most of us are unaware of the true force of rivers. Water weighs a ton per 1.3 cubic yards; the Seine in Paris averages four hundred tons a second, one hundred times less than the Congo, yet that represents the compacted mass of five jumbo jets per second. Virtually nothing can obstruct the force of a river, and huge mountains are continuously eroded and ground away by them at great speed. Every year where the Himalayan streams open out onto the Indian plains in the foothills of Nepal and Bhutan, dozens of villages are literally swept away when the current changes direction, as it frequently does at random and without warning.

  There was no fear of any such calamity where we now stood, for the plain was so flat that the Dam Chu meandered slowly among the maze of pools. As we drove on, intermittently losing the track we were trying to follow, and frequently getting bogged down in pools that cut across our route, we began to see ahead of us in the distance the familiar beetle-like outline of black tents. The upper basin of the Dam Chu in summer provides excellent grass so that here, at altitudes close to 16,500 feet, thrives a large community of nomads from the Ghegi tribe of Nangchen.

  As we approached, a man riding a fine white mare galloped up toward us. We stopped, and he dismounted, revealing an elegant silver saddle inlaid with gold. His horse, moreover, was adorned from nose to tail. A red rectangular prayer flag fell over its forehead from a silver-threaded leather bridle with bright red tassels of yak wool. The saddle rested upon an ornate orange, white, and blue saddle blanket embroidered with dragons. The high pommel and the raised rear rim of the saddle were embossed with religious designs—the endless knot, the parasol, the wheel of life—of gold plating. An elaborate crupper of braided strands of different-colored leather was hitched under the horse’s tail, while the tail itself ended in seven or eight braids intertwined with colored ribbons fastened to each other so as to present a flat matlike surface.