The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

  “Gold and silver are cheap in Tibet,” remarked Father Huc in 1866, who was shocked, on the other hand, by the cost of simple manufactured objects such as silver-sheathed wooden bowls.

  The saddle of the young Khamba before us, along with its carpets, was obviously worth a small fortune, as was the silver and gold straight sword in his red belt. The sword was similar to those of the ancient Gauls of France, and to the swords of the Scythians, as described by Herodotus.

  I asked the young man how far we were from Moyun, our destination. He was vague, saying it was very far but that we were not far from Dayun, another place where, we gathered, there was a sort of government farm. Seeing our driver smoking, the young man asked for a cigarette, and then jumped into his saddle and sped off, seemingly heading for nowhere.

  Bumping along again over the hardened tufts of marsh grass, we eventually reached a lone tent guarded by four aggressive Tibetan mastiffs. Two children ran out to see us. From the elder I learned the name of the valley and the tribe grazing its yaks there—Dam Chu Ka Se. The road now turned, heading north toward a line of distant crests.

  Here we encountered a lone broken-down truck, and then, right afterward, we saw a masonry wall in the distance: Dayun, the so-called government farm. Drawing up to the gate we realized that it was, in fact, an abandoned military station with a walled-in barracks set beside a large broken satellite dish.

  There were no Chinese in residence. I confirmed with the locals that we could not make Moyun before nightfall. Taking in the little outpost, I began to grasp the pains the Chinese had gone to in order to subjugate Nangchen. Outposts like this one, at 15,750 feet, are among the world’s highest settlements.

  The struggle for Kham had been to the bitter end. By the end of the war, in 1959, the only population to remain behind and fall into the hands of the Chinese were the old, the sick, the young, and mothers with small children. All others, including many young women, had taken to the hills to fight, until they were gradually forced to retreat farther into the uninhabited plateau and eventually into Tibet.

  I had heard many accounts of this struggle, but perhaps one of the most tragic was the fate of a group of nomads who had decided to flee before the Chinese advance. Misdirected, they had traveled not south toward Lhasa or east, but north. Without enough food, they had veered into the heart of the Changthang, the great open void of the northern plains, where their bones still litter the tundra today, a monument to the unhappy disarray that assailed these remote communities when suddenly confronted with the Chinese “invasion of locusts.”

  The tragic end of those nomads who died for having fled down a road to nowhere was actually a repetition of another terrible saga that occurred in Tibet in 1910.

  That year the Chinese, under General Chung Ying, invaded Lhasa and southeastern Tibet. The general and his army were ruthless, killing all those they encountered. Panic spread among the simple folk of southern Kham, who, as one would expect, began to abandon their villages and flee before the enemy. Thousands of refugees took to the road, many of them pious believers in the teachings of the lamas and in the holy texts that spoke of the valleys of Pemakoe as a sacred paradise on earth, a holy land suddenly seen in those times of hardship as a land of asylum and plenty. Thus, thousands fled for the great gorge of the Brahmaputra leading to tropical Tibet, a poor region of monkey-eating aboriginal tribes that few Westerners have any knowledge of at all. The climate there is hot, damp, and humid, and is unsuitable to most Tibetans.

  Two years later, in 1912, George Bailey sneaked across the border from Assam into tropical Tibet, uninvited and without a passport. On his daring expedition to explore the gorge of the Brahmaputra, he found on his way, lying on the roadside or huddled in caves, the skeletons of the thousands who had died in flight of hunger and exhaustion in Pemakoe. As in the case of the nomads who years later wandered about until they dropped in the frozen wilds of the great Changthang, the refugees had encountered nothing but isolation and death.

  Slowly we rose above the valley floor while dark black clouds formed a somber lid closing over the great plains, whose silvery pools were now brighter than the sky. Here and there diagonal rays of golden sunlight burst through the obstructed heavens to spotlight patches of rusty grassland. On the slopes the marsh grass gave way to a more silken herb, as we neared a pass that would lead us at last into the watershed of the Mekong.

  “Look, a kiang,” Sebastian said. As keen as a fox, he had spotted most of the wild animals we had seen so far. Indeed, there was before us a small herd of kiang, grazing peacefully. No sooner had we spotted them than a wolf crossed our trail and a herd of gazelles scattered over a nearby ridge like raindrops on a windscreen.

  Then the magic began: The whole of the rolling grasslands that rose to the rocky fringe of the nearby mountains was crawling with animals. Kiang right and left, their long wintery coats aglitter with the crude light that always precedes the inevitable hailstorm; wolves, foxes, wild goats, and more. Tibetan gazelles like quicksilver rushing here and there, stopping in little clusters to eat nervously. Hundreds of animals all visible in a landscape that offered no shelter, no place to hide, no bushes or tall grass, nothing but a painted décor over which the animals roamed or darted, eyeing each other, living in a cautious fragile harmony. I felt as if thrown back to the birth of time, and that I was but an animal among animals, part of a fantastic community of the children of Mother Nature.

  I had had this feeling only once before, in the Terrai jungles of Nepal. It was at dawn, and I was strolling alone in the dry, boulder-ridden bed of a great river that cut through the forest of sal trees. A dense jungle surrounded me, and there among the boulders, out in the open, were dozens of deer, a jackal, a lone wild bull, all come to drink, some walking peacefully home, others simply enjoying the morning sun as I was. A vast congregation of those other beings for which each morning the sun rises, the dew falls, and the day unfolds.

  I had never been to the Serengeti, but now I had no need to go there, as the landscape here was no more or less than an immense garden made to support life.

  The moment was one of great intensity, and even Ling and the drivers were overcome by the magic of the place. We were embarrassed when the rude roar of the motors started again and we continued our way up along the approximation of a trail, hoping we were on the right track. Suddenly, we were at the top of the pass. I stepped out to take an altitude reading (16,535 feet) just as the first gritty grains of hail whipped my face. We baptized the place Kiang pass, but we soon recognized it to be the “Dzana-Loung-Mouk-La” that Dutreuil de Rhins had traveled through one hundred years before us.

  * * *

  On April 8, 1894, approaching from the south as we had, after having crossed the Dam Chu and crunched over the frozen marshes, Dutreuil de Rhins and Francis Grenard, along with their Russian mercenaries, their Muslim servants, and several local horsemen, climbed up this same pass in a small caravan of weary ponies.

  We had the satisfaction on crossing the Dzana-Loung-Mouk-La of reaching one of the goals we had set out to attain. From this pass 5250 meters high flows the Loung-Mouk-Tchou, the most occidental of the origins of the Mekong. The joy of such a discovery, which is enough to make any good explorer forget the hardships of travel, was increased in our case by the knowledge that the humble thread of water, now immobile under ice, was soon to break its bonds and run across mountains and plains towards French territory, establishing between us and our homeland from which we had not heard for so many months, a link both imaginary and real.

  Grenard, who wrote these lines when back in France after the death of his companion, went on to add, “Once we had well established the sources of the Mekong, Dutreuil de Rhins intended to join the north road to Si-ning [Xining].”

  How well, or indeed whether, they had “established” the sources of the Mekong remains somewhat of a mystery. Abandoned by their guides in the very pass on which we now stood, the explorers carried on in the company of three pilgrim mon
ks they had encountered by chance. The maps Grenard published showed that they didn’t spend so much as a day in the region, but on April 8 marched on halfway down the Lungmo River. (Grenard referred to it as the Loung-Mouk; the proper Tibetan spelling is Lung-sMog.)

  The geographers were quite naturally exhausted and worried. They had been on the road for an amazing three years. They were running out of money, and their horses and yaks were unfit to continue. According to Grenard’s testimony, the ground was partially covered with snow.

  * * *

  It was freezing cold as we crossed the pass, and night was about to descend on us. We had to find a place to camp and find it quickly.

  As we drove down the other side of the pass, we came upon the nascent Lungmo Chu, a trickle that drained the rolling grass-covered mountains where, as on the south face, gazelles and kiang grazed in great number.

  Of course I mustn’t mix here the chronology of events of 1894 with the knowledge and hindsight that subsequent history has afforded me. For me, the pass was still nameless, and so was the river. It was getting dark, and we had to stop very soon.

  It was then that I sighted a black tent on a ledge above the river. Driving on a few hundred yards we found an ideal campsite overlooking the torrent. I called for the driver to stop.

  We hurriedly pitched the mess tent, panting from the altitude and looking apprehensively at the dark sky. Hail had not yet fallen and the ground was dry.

  In minutes our large mess tent was up, and the small ones were pitched in its shadow. The drivers parked the jeeps side by side, and the nearby nomads came over to see us. They were a little man with a thin, weather-beaten face, accompanied by his daughter and son, both short with broad friendly features. Their eyes were aglow with amazement as they stared at our vehicles and came forward to touch the magical cloth of our tents, that silklike nylon so different from the homespun wool they wore.

  “Chu di la ming kare re?”

  What is the name of the river? Thus I found out that we were beside the Lungmo Chu, and later had it spelled out for me as Lung sMok-chu—the river claimed by Grenard to be the westernmost branch of the Mekong.

  Had he and de Rhins been right?

  Excitedly, I sprang the question, the one I had been formulating in my mind for months, the big question that maybe this man could actually answer.

  “Dza-chu chu-go kare re?” Where is the head of the Dza River? Where is the source of the Mekong? Such a banal question, yet one unanswered for a century.

  Would the man point up to where we had come from, at the foot of the pass to the source of the Lungmo Chu?

  “Ya la…” the man pointed northwest over the darkened ridge on the other side of the river beside which we were camped. “Ya la, ta rempo mindu…” Over there, not very far.

  “Nyma katseu dro gogiduk?” How many days? I asked.

  The man hesitated. He was not sure, but he repeated, “Ta rempo minduk…” Not far …

  We were nearing our goal.

  That night our spirits were high. Tomorrow, if all went well, we would at long last reach the end of the road. From there we would follow the river on foot and horseback to its bitter end.

  For a long time we sat talking about the animals we had seen, the vision of paradise lost still vivid in our minds.

  Before going to sleep I walked to the edge of the cliff above the roaring stream. The sky, as if by magic, was now limpid and the stars were unbearably bright and near. Once more I found myself in harmony with nature, bemused by my own insignificance and marveling at the grandeur of the universe, at the metronome of time, and the creation of the stars and planets and all those autonomous creatures great and small that lived under the same immense dark canopy.

  I thought of the animals shivering like us, like us shrouded in darkness. Did they all live in fear as the wolves strode about and the foxes and jackals prowled?

  I slept well, able at last to put aside the constant irritation of all the anxieties that had been attendant to the venture from the start. Now, maybe naïvely and a little prematurely, I believed that all would be well. I had even momentarily forgotten that out there somewhere was a crew of Japanese scientists seeking perhaps the same objectives as we were.

  9

  MOYUN

  The following morning, September 13, we broke camp under the curious gaze of a small crowd of nomads and began the steep descent to the valley floor.

  We trailed the Lungmo stream, as it got bigger, to a ledge; off to our left we could see a vast gray stony riverbed two hundred yards wide—the Dza Nak, or the Black Mekong, in which meandered a broad torrent flowing out of the west.

  There was no need to be a great geographer or even to ask the local nomads to understand that the Lungmo Chu was but a minor affluent on the south bank of the main branch of the Mekong, whose stony bed ran on for miles out of sight toward the west.

  How de Rhins and Grenard missed this, I cannot say, except to speculate that the whole upper valley in which we now stood was no doubt covered in snow when they arrived in April 1894. The Lungmo River, being, at this place, steeper and faster than the main branch of the Mekong, must still have been visible, while the Mekong was icebound, its course not discernible in the snow fields. And indeed, on the fifteenth of April, Grenard wrote that the ice of the Mekong had broken up and that the river was carrying ice floes. If this was the case, why had Grenard not defended their discovery when it was later challenged?

  I was puzzled but also very relieved, for we now were certain that the source of the Mekong lay to the west of the Lungmo River as the nomads had indicated.

  On reaching the banks of the Mekong, the trail turned downstream heading for Moyun, our long-awaited destination. We drove for about an hour along the grassy banks before reaching a small cement bridge, a striking reminder of civilization, and obviously the very first bridge to cross over the Mekong on its long road to the sea. There the river was a familiar red, the same color it had been at Zadoi some sixty miles to the west.

  It was two o’clock when we came in sight of Moyun.

  Set back a mile from the river, lying on a green grassy ledge and backed up against rounded red hillocks, Moyun seemed like Fort Apache or some other prop from a movie of the American West. It was enclosed by a simple twelve-foot-high defensive wall of packed red earth, three feet thick. A solitary opening perforated the structure, and there was no door or gate. The garrison was abandoned. Inside, set before a small grassy parade ground, were two rows of typical barracks and an eight-foot, broken-down satellite dish, once the indispensable link with distant military headquarters. Our two vehicles came to a stop. We were at road’s end. It had taken us three days to cover a mere ninety miles. If all went well, we would now begin our final thrust up river on foot and horseback.

  I was elated. Since leaving Xining I had been anxious to get out of our jeeps. Encapsulated in a suffocating metal cage, between driver and door, cooped up with Sebastian, Jacques, and Ling, I found that our very proximity had caused us to ignore each other as we gaped through the square glass windows like a bunch of television addicts. From here on things were to be for real, three-dimensional with wind and cold thrown in.

  As I got out and stretched I heard the unmistakable voice of a drunkard and saw coming toward me three men wearing unbuttoned dirty Chinese military jackets. The oldest of the three was talking loudly and slurring his words.

  Only two of the thirty cells in the run-down barracks were inhabited. It seemed the garrison had been abandoned a long time ago, yet here were these Tibetan administrators of sorts, and their wives and several children. One little girl, about three years old, perhaps, had the matted hair of a veteran Rastafarian and a smile worthy of Leonardo da Vinci.

  I approached the three men with caution, but the drunk seemed relatively amiable after his initial surprise at my speaking Tibetan.

  “Would we be able to find horses?” I asked. I then explained we were out to find the “Dza-nak chu-go,” the source of the
Dza Nak. I received a vague affirmative grunt, upon which Ling came up and, in his rasping high-pitched voice, delivered what I imagined to be the very same request in Chinese.

  Then I asked the question that had been on my mind ever since Xining. Had they heard of or seen the Sino-Japanese team? They had. In fact, the men had passed through less than eight days ago, but the party had not gone up the Dza Nak but out to the Dza-Kar, the northern and shorter branch of the two prongs of the upper Mekong, according to our satellite map.

  I immediately relayed the good news to Sebastian and Jacques. I was thrilled to the point of being light-headed—it seemed that now nothing could stop us from being the first to make it to the source.

  My joy was short-lived, however. What if the Dza-Kar, the white Mekong, was in fact the longest branch? Or what if the Japanese group had switched from one to the other, cutting across the ridges that separated the two branches of the upper Mekong?

  For the moment I had other matters to attend to. One look at the damp, rundown barracks made me decide to pitch our tents inside the walled compound. Our drivers and cook, however, set about establishing themselves in one of the dismal cells.

  We set up camp and moved our gear from the jeeps into the mess tent. We were totally exhausted, which came as no surprise since the GPS showed we were at 15,243 feet. We had been banged around on the road for six full days, and I for one think it less taxing to spend twelve hours in the saddle than to sit in a car all day.