The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

  My heart sank. I felt guilty. I knew that on more than one occasion, I have been accused of insensitivity; had I hurt the young man’s feelings? But why was he so obstinate? What about the wind? What if our tent disintegrated? Anyway, couldn’t he lead his horses to graze on the other side? Or was it that there was something I didn’t understand, such as a matter of grazing rights? Communication is difficult at times even when two people are presumably speaking the same language.

  There are so many things I have failed to understand in other people. I apologized, excused myself, and reluctantly agreed to ford the Mekong yet again. By now the river and the banks had lost their red color, and the water ran a silty gray among the gray pebbles.

  The reluctant muleteer selected a stony site just on the edge of the river to unload our beasts of burden. With a mechanical rigidity that betrayed the punishment his seat had suffered, Jacques dismounted, falling to the ground with his boot caught in the stirrup. I too felt the rigors of the ride as I stood tottering on firm ground to help him up. Sebastian jumped out of the saddle of his tall mare. The three of us cut a bizarre, yet not unfamiliar image, with our broad-brimmed felt hats, our chaps and boots, holding the reins of our weary horses. It was an image that for many centuries has been commonplace all over the world among the descendants of those barbarians whose ranks we had joined: the civilization of Equus caballus.

  How much man owes the horse we will never be able to say exactly. Both as a weapon and as the spearhead of civilization as we know it, horses have, throughout history, been magical and powerful creatures.

  The horses of both Alexander and Cortez were legendary and were actually venerated and adored by the tribesmen of India and Aztec warriors they helped to vanquish. Equus caballus, that elegant extension of man’s arrogance, was a noble conquest that bred chivalry in our societies, yet at the same time carried man farther from home than he should have ever ventured. If the alliance between man and dog has proven a sad one for wild game, the alliance of man and horse has proven devastating for millions of humans.

  Our tents pitched, the horses out to graze, I reconciled myself with our young muleteer by giving him one of those gadgets that, like the green glass beads Cortez used as bribes, were so avidly sought by the natives. How I despised myself for that easy way of dazzling a fellow human. My only excuse for such behavior was that the same gadget, a little solar flashlight, also fascinated me. That man could capture the sun in daylight and return the light by night was, without any question, indeed a marvel that bordered on the supernatural.

  Although possessed of perfectly adequate intelligence for most things, I still don’t fully understand the miracle of technology that allows an impurity implanted in a silicon chip, when excited by a photon, to release electrons nonstop without wear or tear. The muleteer had more reasons than he knew to be amazed, and we were now friends again.

  As the natural light slowly faded, leaving us alone in the dark to listen to the gurgle of the waters of the Mekong, we all gathered in our mess tent around a candle that caused the walls to dance with giant black shadows. Now we felt united in our common cause. Rid of the two drivers, who were perhaps too streetwise for their own good, our young cook and Ling had suddenly become much more personable.

  The cook busied himself lighting a fire in the open and we were soon drinking that noble American drink: chocolate. It was the Olmecs, once the greatest horticulturalists on our planet, who first made a sweet hybrid of the bitter wild bean they called cacao, just as they took a tiny common grass and by some miracle of genetic engineering blew up its seeds to make the great grains of corn upon which so much of the globe relies for survival today. The Olmecs also conceived of zero before the Arabs had heard of Allah, devised a sophisticated calendar, and—we now know—invented the earliest form of Mayan writing, those strange symbols that scholars have struggled so long to decipher.

  What had the nomads of Nangchen invented? Had they learned how to capture the sun in a small black box? Had they discovered how to transform grass into grain? While the answer is no, they invented and discovered nothing, what they have accomplished is a way of life so successful that their numbers inevitably increased to the point that they had to send their sons north, south, east, and west at full gallop to conquer new horizons.

  The tundra, the world’s highest, most unpleasant place, had produced those “real men” who, as the Tibetan saying goes, “do not live in comfort, just like goats do not live on level plains.” According to history as written by the “civilized” world, the barbarians who issued forth from the same nameless steppes that now surrounded us have done pretty well for themselves, flashlight or no, and their lives and values are a challenge to the rest of us. Are we in the West real men no more? Has a life of comfort overtaken all else as the byword of our hedonistic consumer culture?

  For years I had wondered what we were made for. Were we made for comfort or discomfort, for hardship or for pleasure? The prominent anthropologist Marshall Salins claims that Stone Age men worked less than four hours a day in order to eat, that they lived a life devoid of undue strain or worry, not even bothering to store meat or fruit, even when they could. They lived day to day without much concern for tomorrow. This image of Stone Age man is very different from that of the inhabitants of the heart of Tibet—nomads who brave hail daily in summer and steel themselves against bitter cold and snow in winter.

  Could it be that just as each of us has in our character a lazy side and a hardy side, man is made for both the good life and the hard life? Or, could it be, just as races arose from adaptations to the environment—some humans evolving with brown skin and others with white or yellow—that maybe there are people who are given to comfort and other people who are hardy and despise it? Are the Khamba, who call themselves a race of kings, not just a group of the latter? Known to the Chinese as wild barbarians, they are driven by an ardor and strength that for centuries bowled over their neighbors, the comfort-loving societies of the lowlands.

  Many have claimed that the two-pronged revolution of the late Stone Age was comprised of nomadism and agriculture, producing Abel, the honest, nomadic pastoralist, and Cain, the greedy landowner and jealous farmer.

  I, for one, am a strong believer that man, just like his brothers in the animal kingdom, has both a built-in genetic expectation of life and many genetically determined patterns of behavior. It is clear to me, for instance, that man hates boredom. Moreover, according to Carlton Coon, the grandfather of modern anthropology, hunter-gatherers have no hobbies—because they are never bored.

  For my part, I love the adventure of the hunt because of the sheer pleasure it produces. There is no outdoor exercise quite as exciting as stalking and then riding after an animal. I was twenty-three when I realized that, as I galloped full tilt after a wild bear, I had suddenly gone wild myself, struck by something that I could define only as “basic instinct,” something akin to discovering that without a teacher one knows how to make love. Tracking game is utter delight, and something I believe we were made for.

  So what of the nomad and his dull routine of watching cattle ruminate?

  I put myself to sleep, ironically, bored of counting sheep, and I dreamt instead of things more exciting, like galloping at full speed on the plains behind a herd of fleeing gazelles or, better still, chasing on horseback after a beautiful Amazon—the ultimate of all chases and the authentic pursuit of true happiness.

  Once a year the nomads of Nangchen live out this amazing chase. The prettiest marriageable girls are decked out in all their finery, covered in turquoise and coral, silver and amber, their braids shiny from butter, their finest silk blouses tucked over their breasts, the belts of their chubas loosened to allow them to sit astride their ponies.

  Young men and boys of another valley or tribe look over these beauties, often the daughters of their traditional rivals, even their enemies. Then, suddenly, the game begins, the chase is on. The rules are as simple as they are shocking to our modern Western
ideals. The boys choose their lucky victims, and on their side the girls appraise their suitors and make choices of their own. The girls gallop off, with the boys in hot pursuit. Men and women are on equal ground, their success depending often on the swiftness of their horses and their agility as riders.

  To pursue and be pursued—the ultimate game of tag, the most popular game on every playground around the world, and in every bedroom.

  The instinct for the chase is a basic instinct without which mankind could not have survived as long as it has. Today, now that man can feed himself without it, he is naturally bored. In the slums of our cities, boredom leads to crime and to another form of the chase, in which both predator and prey are humans, and the battle is not for procreation, like the chase on the fairgrounds of the upper Dza, but for life itself.

  11

  WHERE BEGINNING ENDS

  In a tent there is no escaping dawn, no need for a clock. When I emerged into the wind, the clear sky announced a glorious day. It was September 17.

  As I looked to the south I saw a lone rider in the distance. Ten minutes later I could say for sure he was coming our way. In this great void his slow approach was a little unnerving. By the time we had eaten our breakfast of chocolate and biscuits, with a little cheese brought from France, the rider was at last upon us.

  He slowed the pace of his gray horse and cautiously moved around our camp examining our tents and kit bags. He smiled and then addressed our chief muleteer. I could not understand what they said to each other, but the muleteer translated, saying that he had not seen or heard of our runaway horses, which had been frightened off by the wolf. I gathered that the man’s tent was somewhere out there behind a hill.

  The man didn’t dismount, but, shifting a cap on his head, he smiled again, took one last amused look at us, and was off, disappearing from sight just as he had come.

  Perhaps more than anyone we had encountered he symbolized for me the fugitive aspect of life on the open plain—a world of isolation in which families must live apart because of the territorial imperatives of their herds. He was of a people whose solitary existence, in which families see little of anyone but themselves, was nevertheless constantly tempered by the awareness of others nearby and by their prerogatives and limitations. Whereas those of us who live in crowds are certainly familiar with urban solitude and loneliness, bred of our reluctance to talk to strangers, here all encounters are seen as a happy event.

  Slowly we broke camp and set off on our long march west. Our chief muleteer explained that in two days’ time we could reach the source of the Drug-di chu-go, one of the two local springs that we believed might be the source of the Mekong. It lay, he said, in the shadow of Dragon Mountain.

  The day began well under a radiant sun. Crossing the gravel bed of the Mekong once again, we followed the northern bank and came upon a tributary that I believed might be the Mekong’s longest northern branch, one that probably took its source in the Sag-ri Mountains, the “rock pile” hills.

  I wanted to ascertain the volume of its flow. This was made easier by the fact that the tributary joined the main river in the center of the vast gravel bed. Both waterways ran down the same slope and, therefore, had approximately the same speed and flow.

  First I measured the breadth and depth of the tributary where it encountered the main stream of the Dza Nak, coming from the east. It was a little less than one-third the width of the main river and shallower by a foot. There was no mistaking that the main river still lay to the west.

  I was taking readings of our position from the satellites (a frequent ritual that bordered on modern magic) when from out of nowhere appeared a monk dressed in a flowing gown with a bright yellow elongated cotton hat.

  What a monk was doing on the edge of the northern tributary of the Dza Nak that morning nobody knows. He seemed to be connected to the herd of sheep that grazed nearby on the bristly short marsh grass of what was now a dry swamp, a vast bumpy expanse of churned-up hardened sod.

  I asked the monk the name of the tributary (“Jalgo chu”) and bade him write it down (rGyal-rgo). Was it up this tributary that lay the Sag-ri source? He said no, further confirming that the sources lay farther up the main river to the west.

  Progress in the sun was difficult, and we tried to shorten our way by roughing it over the turned-up surface of the dry marsh.

  Lack of oxygen is known to cause certain people to hallucinate—they see and hear things that don’t exist. Worse still, high altitude, in depriving the brain of oxygen, has a whole series of odd side effects, among them the erosion of willpower. Suddenly, everything appears futile, useless, and trivial. Why, after all, climb to the summit? Many mountaineers have turned back without being able to explain themselves—for no other reason perhaps than that they suddenly saw their entire endeavor as childish, ridiculous, not worth the trouble.

  Such were the thoughts that now overwhelmed me. Why go any farther? The Japanese expedition had no doubt found the source ahead of us, so why bother? Did anyone really care? Jacques had tried to explain to me what mysterious chemical reactions went on in the brain and the body as a result of the change of atmospheric pressure. He told me about the terrible disasters that might disrupt the delicate equilibrium of fluids behind the membranes that controlled cells and hormonal distribution (whatever that meant). These were weird chemical reactions on the molecular level that could have such devastating effects as making one blind, momentarily deaf, or, worse still, could trigger a heart attack or pulmonary edema, causing the lungs to fill with that deadly foam about which Jacques had spoken with such apprehension.

  Altered perception being a natural corollary of high altitude, I advanced like an automaton, with my mind racing around the inner globe of my head, conjuring up odd images of Mexico and its blissful climate, a swimming pool under palm trees, and hibiscus blossoms floating on the water.

  Mine were dreams of comfort in an uncomfortable world—a world that had driven the nomads to praise discomfort, great effort, perseverance, struggle, and combat, just like the Victorian public school principals who produced Younghusband and all those other nomadic, masochistic colonial civil servants and explorers who were really happy only when it hailed pigeon eggs, when their ponies died under them and their supplies fell over cliffs and the flood washed them all away. How I loved the hardship of expeditions, that self-inflicted torture that gave me a good conscience, allowed me to overeat in Paris, frolic in London, and drink too much in New York, while enjoying the holier-than-thou feeling of those who know what it is to pay the toll. I considered hardship noble, necessary, and virtuous, as all through my childhood and school days it had been drummed into my mind that all things pleasurable were evil—sex, wines, sweets, pretty pictures, lovely dresses, sports cars, luxury limousines, gold plate, late-night parties, dancing, and most music. In the end, all those things would, like masturbation, make you mad or blind. Yes, pleasure was like drugs: addictive and destructive, leading to crime and then death. These were the thoughts and mores of my nanny, my puritan housemasters, and those noble explorers on whom I had modeled my childhood dreams—to whom I owed being where I now stood, buffeted by the wind, scorched by the sun, my seat blue from abrasion, my face cracked from sunburn. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I was happy—happy like those Muslim saints who sang songs of joy as the Crusaders cut them to pieces, in the kind of slow martyrdom they had always wished for themselves.

  Looking ahead I saw yet another of our horses trip and fall. Weighed down by our baggage, it lay there exhausted, unable to get up, no doubt ill-fed and in poor condition when hired. Pressing on, I galloped up to the young man in charge.

  After a brief discussion, I was given to understand that if we set up camp now and left our baggage behind, we could gallop ahead and reach the Dragon water head, one of the so-called sources.

  I was a little bit skeptical, as the young man had so far proven slightly devious. Was he shy or just playing stupid? I couldn’t tell. Since leaving Moy
um I had had my doubts. First there had been no saddle carpets, then the attack by wolves, and the too-hasty departure and nonreturn of the senior of the three muleteers. Could all of it have been a ploy? None of us clearly remembered hearing a wolf, but then I suppose wolves don’t bark or howl when attacking.

  Seeing the condition of the horses and considering that the grass was greener where we were than along much of our stony marshy trail, I thought it could do no harm to give the horses a half day’s rest. We had been under way for nearly four hours, and from what I gathered we could return from the Drug-di spring that very night. The following day, with rested horses, we could carry on with our bags to seek out the other source, the Sag-ri chu-go. Beyond any doubt, without baggage we could travel faster.

  I discussed the plan with Sebastian, Jacques, and Ling. I had learned from bitter experience that it is never good to be separated from one’s baggage or to split forces, but, with the sun shining and not a cloud in sight, why not push on ahead? We decided to leave the cook behind with the second muleteer. Hastily, together we erected the mess tent in a sheltered hollow, had a fast nonlunch, and jumped into the saddle. I felt pleased, in good shape for a change, with no pain anywhere except for my saddle sores.

  Jacques looked tired. If only we had had six weeks to acclimatize. To my doubtful queries about making it to the source and back, Sebastian, cheerful as usual, just smiled, and mumbled “piece of cake,” his pet Cockney expression, and one that we had adopted to ease whatever formidable obstacle we encountered.

  * * *

  It was close to one o’clock when we set off. Our urge to gallop was soon dampened by the built-in spitefulness of our saddles.

  The unadulterated blueness of the sky accentuated the immensity of the plateau stretching out on three horizons; the fourth, our western vista, was partly obscured by the rounded yellow mass of the Drug-di and Sag-ri ranges. The gap between the two seemed to be bridged by a low ridge we imagined to be a pass. As we advanced I became more and more convinced that, indeed, there must be two sources, one in the left range and one in the right. We would have to determine which of the two was the true source of the Mekong. If all went well, I thought, tonight we would get to the Drug-di source.