The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

  Tibetans are a very polite people, and the tolerance they preach may give an illusion that they are submissive. In reality, the Tibetans simply ignored the Chinese and continued to live and pray the way they always had. The Chinese, Tibetans knew, were arrogant, obstinate, and narrow-minded, yet also corruptible and weak. No one in Tibet has ever taken the Chinese very seriously, considering them as a whole a nation of merchants concerned only with making money.

  Both sides continue to stick to their guns, to the point that the Tibetan deadlock will be broken only by mass invasion and colonization. On the “roof of the world,” the Tibetans clearly have the upper hand. Today, the China of big business has goals other than to seek military control over the remotest parts of Tibet. They seem to have figured out that business is better conducted with a willing population. The Tibetans have greeted warmly offers by the new Chinese entrepreneurs to buy Tibetan wool, meat, and hides, and to exploit the mineral wealth of their land.

  In addition to its mineral and oil resources, Tibet’s many highly valued medicinal products are of interest to the Chinese, whose pharmacopeia is one of the most complex in the world. Even if we in the West are skeptical about rhino horns being an aphrodisiac, millions of Chinese are willing to pay so much for them that rhinos around the world are being exterminated.

  The highlands of Tibet harbor hundreds of medicinal plants, animals, and insects. Of the animals, the fluff from the antlers of Himalayan deer is sought after as another general aphrodisiac. Far more unusual and amazing is that very mysterious creature, half-animal, half-vegetable or, more precisely, half-insect, half-mushroom, which, in Chinese medicine, is said to cure every type of ailment including impotence.

  The Tibetans call it the “grass bug” because it’s a caterpillar in winter and a grass in summer. Anyone in his right mind would dismiss such a creature as an error of primitive science, which is what I did, saying it was all nonsense, until someone thrust one of the little horrors into my hand. There in my palm was a yellow caterpillar, legs and eyes and all; yet coming out of its head was a green blade of grass.

  Cordycet finensis was the expert finding when I returned and displayed my naïve ignorance to a European scholar. It is a special parasitic fungus that grows on the head of several types of caterpillars. In the end, the fungus kills the unfortunate host and lives on by itself as a kind of grass.

  That such a thing exists does make one marvel. At one yuan apiece, the Chinese chemists have sent thousands of Tibetans into the mountains looking for the strange insect-fungus. It is found generally at very high altitudes among the short grass to which it bears a resemblance. Western biologists have found that the strange “creature” is very rich in vitamin C.

  There are no solid statistics, yet the export of such remedies is projected to be a multimillion-dollar business for the Chinese, while providing an alternate source of income to impoverished Tibetans.

  The business boom that exploded in China in the early 1990s has in some ways extended to Tibet, yet not enriched the Tibetans. In Lhasa dozens of Chinese “business restaurants” entertain the new Chinese millionaires—for the most part, wool, leather, and medicinal herb merchants—whose expensive cars are parked outside.

  * * *

  Having nothing to do in Moyun, we began to consolidate our baggage for our thrust up the river. We all felt relief at the news that the Japanese scholars were far away, investigating what satellite maps show as the shorter of the two branches of the upper Mekong, yet we were nevertheless anxious to push ahead ourselves. When, by ten the following morning, there were no horses in sight, I became seriously worried. Should we plan to strike out on foot? To do so we would need porters, and even had there been able-bodied men available, I knew that Tibetans are loathe to carry other people’s bags.

  I was really getting desperate when I heard the jingle of bells, and a small herd of horses came into view. It was an odd bunch, some small, some tall, and only a few were fine specimens of the Ghegi do-ta, the local variety of the excellent Nangchen breed.

  Needless to say, there was a bit of competition among us for the best mount. The horses came with their saddles—not the fine silver variety we had seen but the killer types made out of rough wood, with wicked protuberances and jagged edges that would soon make us suffer.

  When I asked if there were any saddle carpets to reduce the damage to our anatomy, the answer was no.

  Very quickly we discovered that the local Tibetans had learned a lot from the Chinese in matters of business. In rapid succession I was presented with a dirty old coat, a bed cover, and a rotting piece of felt at prices that would have made a Hermès salesman wince. What to do? The problem was only partially solved by using our foam mattresses over the wooden frames in a rather clumsy combination that did little to reassure Jacques, who could only barely make out the head from the tail of his shaggy pony.

  It was well past noon when, at long last, feeling like Alexander the Great riding Bucephalus out to conquer Asia, I jumped on my pony and led our caravan through the breach in the wall of the little fortress. Where exactly were we going? How long would the rest of our journey take? It was anybody’s guess.

  Slowly our seventeen ponies, prodded on by three hired muleteers, made their way south to the nearby Mekong.

  I took a deep breath. This was what I had come for, the pleasure of riding out onto the vast open plains. The wait had been long, too long perhaps, but now we were off, heading out ever deeper into the no-man’s-land of that last large blank space on the map of Tibet.

  10

  CRY WOLF

  The first miles turned out to be something of a rodeo, as one of the ponies took fright at the drumlike banging of the two steel cases it was carrying. Bolting, it charged across the steppe throwing one case and dragging the other for yards until it too came untied. No sooner had this pony been caught and reloaded in a lengthy process than another one lost all its bags as its girth slipped. We congratulated ourselves for our foresight, as we now replaced here and there weak old yak-hair ropes with nylon webbing Sebastian had brought from New York.

  With only three men to care for seventeen horses, we were badly understaffed. Custom dictates one muleteer for each three to four pack animals. (I use the word muleteer here for lack of a better word in the English language.) In our day of air travel we tend to forget that horse and mule trains were once the principal means of transport for traveling off the beaten path, and a mule train must have muleteers, whose job it is to shout and throw stones to keep the pack animals moving. They must also constantly load, unload, and secure ever-shifting baggage, shoe the beasts (the nomads of Nangchen shoe only the forelegs), and act as a veterinarian if necessary. Moreover, they feed the horses grain and set them out to graze, and, last but not least, chase all over the countryside to round up in the morning those that have strayed overnight.

  How, I wondered, would our three men cope? They were under the direction of Topgyal, the young man I had met in the black tent beside the fort at Moyun. Topgyal was probably twenty or so, but he was unable to say exactly how old he was. I am always surprised that so many Tibetans, like some Mexican Indians, have trouble telling you their own ages or even the number of children they have. This is not linked to ignorance, a bad memory, or anything like that, for they know exactly how many children they have, just as they know every one of their yaks by sight and name. It is just that numbers, large numbers especially, are meaningless to them for being very rarely used.

  Just as we would rather count our sheep than name them, they prefer to name rather than number. Tibetans are in so many ways our opposites, yet once upon a time in Paris, London, and New York, one’s telephone had named, not numbered coordinates, as did houses and rooms. All this is now over: cars have numbers; houses, flats, and rooms have numbers; children have numbers, as do, in certain lands, streets and provinces. Westerners take it for granted that 544 East Eighty-sixth Street #14W, New York, New York 10028, is the description of exactly where someon
e lives. But we like to forget that at death, aside from our passport and our Social Security numbers, a series of dates on our graves (yet more numbers) may be our only epitaph.

  * * *

  We had hardly left Moyun when we found ourselves wading across the bright red waters of the Dza Nak, a truly exhilarating experience. Beneath us was the grandest river of Southeast Asia, the river whose name had echoed for so long in our minds and conversations as to have taken on the identity of an old acquaintance. I prodded my horse through the water, a little black bristly animal called Numbo, which means “blue.” Splashing ahead we crossed the Rubicon; on the other side of the river we would enter a new world.

  Gone was the road and its rail-like, compulsory itinerary. We were now blazing our own trail to follow the river itself. How many had set out like us in pilgrimage up the Mekong? Would we join the hundreds of millions who had walked its banks without ever seeing its source?

  Here, the Mekong was running through low-lying red mounds where it had cut its bed. Looking west we could see where these became hills and parted as the river reached the flat vast plateau just a few miles upstream. Now we trotted and galloped on the grassy banks until I slowed the pace for Jacques. In the rear, he caught up and explained that he had already fallen off his horse twice. I admired his courage—as in everything else, he was discreet and never made any fuss. As briefly as possible I tried to give him a few hints about how to stay in the saddle, aware that only practice could teach him what to do. After about an hour my lower anatomy was already protesting the lack of adequate cushioning, but I had only myself to blame, and all I could do was shift positions or stand in my stirrups to make up for the discomfort.

  The sun beat down mercilessly on our broad hats. Its deadly ultraviolet rays, unfiltered in the thin air, could, in less than an hour, strip one’s flesh raw.

  * * *

  Only those who have known the confinement of middle-class virtues, middle-class houses, and middle-class horizons can fully appreciate the nobility of the great open spaces of our planet. There is nothing I loathe more than mediocrity, the hallmark of our Western civilization, which long ago lost the dynamic enthusiasm of our ancestors the Greeks. I am, among so many others, a product of a dying way of life, and, however much I have clung to the Concorde, to the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and to nuclear submarines and lunar probes as desperate proofs of the worth of our civilization, I can’t help feeling that all these achievements are barely any better than cacophonous rock music, which is an excellent example of what’s wrong with us, reeking as it does of secondhand mediocrity blown up in the name of commerce, and wildly publicized to mask the dismal reality of a culture that, in the final analysis, has little else to do but build museums and turn a blind eye to its ghettoes. If our society is so middle-class and second-rate, it is because we have lost faith in those ideals that greeted the twentieth century as the age of enlightenment.

  At the beginning of this century the development of science and technology presaged a world of plenty from which want and disease would be banished forever. Now that the century is all but over, we see that we have used machines, instead, to build atomic bombs and spread war—and, more insidiously, to spread the exploitation of man by man, by paving roads deep into the farthest regions to sell merchandise, the destructive forerunner of the low-grade hedonism that can rapidly destroy traditions and cultures.

  Over the years, I had felt compelled to seek here, at the ends of the earth, a vision of that paradise destroyed by our own brainless technologies. Yet was I not a party to the very evil I was trying to get away from? If truth be told, the original sin is travel, and my greatest transgression thirty-eight years of travel to Tibet.

  As the great thirteenth Dalai Lama said, first comes the merchant, then the missionary, and lastly the soldiers. New goods, new ideals, and finally, the destruction of what was.

  I certainly understood that all that I liked in my surroundings—ideas, customs, people—had been the product of hundred of years of incubation. The most interesting attribute of a people, and of a nation on the whole, is its uniqueness, which is of necessity born of isolation and which originates in even the smallest features of a culture. Thus, it is not only food but also pots and pans, language, art, and science that distinguish one group of people from another. The sale of one aluminum pot across a cultural boundary is, therefore, just as bad as the borrowing of a foreign word, in that tools and technology are as important in determining the cultural identity of a people as are rituals and customs. Imagine an Eskimo in a centrally heated home fetching his TV dinner from the freezer as he performs the walrus dance on his wall-to-wall nylon shag carpet in basketball shoes!

  I have concluded that the ultimate enemy is the traveler, the tradesman of trinkets, the seeker of photographs—all those who, with their deadly small contributions, in the end destroy magical worlds it took centuries to create. If there is a central source of such pollution today, it must be the sale of airline tickets. Just as the consumption of ice cream by Eskimos—real ice cream, not made with whale oil—must signal the end of their culture, a continued shrinking of the world through air travel will guarantee a similar fate for other such isolated peoples.

  I rode on, and my bitter thoughts were soon accompanied by a pernicious stitch in my side. I dismissed the pain, blaming it on the saddle and on the violently jarring trot of Numbo, with whose stamina and bad character I was just beginning to be acquainted.

  Clouds had once again slowly invaded the horizon, turning day into near-night. Yet another storm was brewing, but now we no longer had the refuge of our tin box on wheels, and we would really feel the elements.

  Time had come to make camp. Hastily, with a look toward the sky, we dismounted—no need to search for a campsite here, as the whole tundra was one great place on which to pitch one’s tent.

  I was loosening the girth of my saddle when, like an electric shock, I felt a deep pain down my side. There was no escaping it; bent in two, I could hardly straighten up. I gasped for breath, and instinctively I knew what was the matter. I cursed my fate and was suddenly terribly depressed. I had a kidney stone and with it, the pain that some compare to childbirth. I had to lie down.

  By now, rushing over the shallow hills, carrying with it the momentum of miles of running and jumping ever faster, a gale-force wind struck as I collapsed to the ground.

  There was nothing to break the full fury of the gale, as the others struggled to put up the vast mess tent. With whiplash reports, the tent material flogged about like a jib gone mad. I raised myself to join in the fight, and, though we managed to hoist the frames, it seemed clear that the entire contraption would soon be torn down or blown away as the wind howled ever faster and ice-sharp pellets of hail came at us horizontally, stinging our hands and faces.

  The three muleteers, Ling, the cook, Sebastian, Jacques, and I managed to enter the tent, holding it down with our weight while leaning against the windblown bulging walls. I was afraid that the thin material might, at any moment, burst under the strain.

  Even so, we couldn’t help laughing as we battled against the unruly green material, our gasps mixing with the howling wind. Momentarily, I had overlooked the pain, but then it struck again so violently that I retched in agony.

  Deep inside me I felt a flutter of panic. At 15,500 feet, exhausted, cut off from all possible hasty retreat, I knew I could die of exhaustion or heart failure, were the pain to last two or three days, as is often the case. Suddenly everything was transparently clear. To be running around at such an altitude at my age was to court disaster, and I had gotten what was coming to me. Again and again I had been warned of the risks, advised of the dangers. Again and again I had flaunted my arrogant disbelief that anything bad could happen to me.

  Why? Why now? Was it the water I had drunk, and the jogging in the saddle that had loosened the stone in my kidney? The needle-sharp jabs that doubled me over were so strong that again I retched from sheer inability to stan
d the pain any longer. The wind was howling, and I, embarrassed, had to lie down at the feet of others, their backs to the walls, grabbing on as best they could to our tent, lest the wind blow it clear over the horizon.

  “Colique néphrétique,” I muttered to Jacques, my only hope. What a good idea to have a doctor along. We had a full medical kit, but I knew that even the strongest pain relievers weren’t always effective for my condition. Nothing could be done, in any case, until the storm had passed. It was dark outside, and all we could hear was the roar of the wind, the hissing of the hail, and the crash of thunder.

  Calm to the point of annoyance, cool, and collected, Jacques had sounded quite unreasonable when he told us about his fear of lightning. I hadn’t paid much attention to him, but, of course, as always, he was right. The tallest plant around was the tiny ten-inch stinging nettle, making anything that stuck out above that a perfect target. To make matters worse, some claimed that we were at the “electric pole” of our planet and that here, over the high plateau, the buildup of electricity in the air was phenomenal. Rumor or fact, all we knew was that every day we had witnessed one or more flash hail- and thunderstorms.

  To our amazement, when this one had passed, the tent was still standing and only I was down, lying in a heap on the tent floor. Jacques gave me various painkillers and some other medicine, explaining that because of the altitude and the risk of pulmonary edema, he had to be careful with what he administered. I was too weak to comment. I decided to sleep where I was and I asked for my sleeping bag. I ate little and drank from the flask of murky water we had boiled and stored the previous day.

  As I fell asleep I prayed for deliverance. Needless to say, I slept badly, woke, and slept again, and went out more than once to answer the call of nature, stepping over the sleeping bodies of the muleteers in the front chamber of the large tent. The sky was clear, and though I don’t recall seeing a moon, the distant hills were aglow, covered with snow or hail, forming a bone-white frosted border holding up a sky alight from the brightness of a million stars. Staked to the ground our horses grazed or slept all around me.