12
EXPOSURE
Having taken a last long look at the source, I grabbed the reins of my pony and swung into the saddle, and the pony lurched forward, as frisky as ever. At that moment the girth slipped and the horse bolted, and threw me to the ground, causing the saddle to slide under its body. Somehow the saddle remained attached, bumping into the pony’s legs and frightening it so that it darted off and eventually broke the heavy cast-iron Chinese stirrup before everything else came apart, and the pony finally stopped and stood still, snorting in anger. I had fallen heavily but fortunately felt no harm. More time was now wasted as the horse was caught, the saddle repaired, and a makeshift stirrup rigged out of nylon webbing.
A bitter wind began to blow down from the pass as we trotted and then galloped before finally settling down to a fast walk down the river. Our spirits were high, and we were filled with that virtuous contentment of accomplishment. We were all still a little amazed inasmuch as it seemed both too grand and unbelievable that we had actually discovered the principal source of the Mekong.
We were too busy to assess the full meaning of our claim or the complications and discussions that would surely arise later as experts lined up to challenge our discovery.
For the moment our only goal was to get back to camp, and quickly. The sun was hidden, but it was still light when we reached the foot of the ridge and the camp of our nomad friend who had pointed us on our way. I chose not to ride up and see him, preferring, lest it get any darker, to follow the great bend of the river so that we could travel every inch of its course. This led us in no time to the deep valley between the Sag-ri range and the Drug-di range near the steep hill that marked the confluence with the Drug-di stream leading to the sacred source. Riding around the hill as daylight dwindled, we finally reached the flat plain where the Mekong flowed into the broad rocky bed that we knew would take us to our camp.
Realizing that we would save precious time in the race against darkness, we decided to listen to our guide and leave the river to cut across the uneven bumpy surface of the dried-up marsh.
At first all went well. The horses, agile as ever, managed to pick their way through the lumpy sod, which, by some odd effect of the thaw, no doubt better understood by experts, was raised in hard little mounds as obstacles to our progress.
I was now confident in the wisdom and directional sense of our Khamba companion; as night began to fall, I had little reason for concern, I told myself. Then, faster than expected, it was pitch black. Shouldn’t there have been a moon? What about the brilliance of the stars that on certain nights I had found so dazzling as to hurt the eye? Looking up I saw that there were no stars at all, just the slow knitting of clouds, black on black, those familiar clouds that we knew would bring hail.
Of course by now we felt immune to hail, as we had been pelted by plenty of it already. Our immediate problem was that the horses were stumbling on the half-frozen mounds on which they were obliged to step. Under our weight these clods would frequently crumble, causing the horses to lurch rather unpleasantly. After a short while I dismounted and so did the others, all of us relieved, in part, to be getting off our saddle sores. Walking proved even more difficult, however, in that the ground was hard to see and the rough tufts of sod constantly made us trip along with our mounts. In fact, it was a bit of a mystery how we could walk at all in the dark over the obstacle-strewn ground. It seemed we might be lost when suddenly, there, straight ahead of us, confirming the sixth sense of our Khamba muleteer, we saw a flash of brilliant light: Our camp lay straight ahead in the distance. It was now ten-thirty.
We were all exhausted, plodding on in disorder. I got back in the saddle with the others, and very soon our convoy was stretched out so that I couldn’t see who was who or where anybody was. Sebastian and Ling had miner’s lights that each occasionally turned on, though they were of little use in actually lighting our way. We had no choice but to abandon ourselves to the excellent night vision of our horses.
Toward eleven came the first rain, followed by the all-too-familiar sputter of hail. Dismounting, I donned my waterproof gear. Up in the saddle again, panting, I pulled my head into my shoulders as the little grains of ice bounced into my face and simultaneously froze my hands, since I had forgotten where I had put my gloves, somewhere deep in my backpack.
Looking up, I couldn’t see the others. I shouted out to Sebastian, asking everyone to wait and stay together. I knew how easily one of us might stray and get lost, a potential disaster in the paralyzing cold of our situation. At this hour, in a freezing storm out in the open in terrain void of any shelter, getting lost could prove fatal. Straining my eyes for hours I had yet to see the light of our camp again. What could be the matter? Surely we should be able to see the light again by now. But no, the horizon was jet black. My heart sank as I imagined that somehow we had gone too far.
I decided to call a halt to assess the situation and talk with our guide. We clustered together in the dark: Jacques, Sebastian, Ling … but the Khamba muleteer had vanished.
We shouted into the wind and it took our voices across the plain—no sign of the man. We knew he had a light, the little light I had given him that he had charged all day on his cap under the sun. I knew it worked, as he had used it that very night. Where was he? Why had he gone off?
There are moments when everything comes into focus with a cold lucidity. I was now faced with two unpleasant facts: Our guide was lost, or had abandoned us, and we ourselves were lost. I had no compass with me, nor had I any idea where we were or where our camp was located. In the howling storm the best I could do was to turn to our right and, hopefully keeping a straight line, run into the Mekong again. Once there we would have to choose to travel either downstream or upstream.
A word kept on running through my mind: exposure. Exposure, that fatal moment when the body gives up from fatigue after struggling too long to keep warm. We were all exhausted, all of us freezing cold. How long could we roam on like this?
I had always been lucky in life, walking away from car wrecks, surviving the open sea in a dugout canoe, shooting Himalayan rapids by hovercraft, traversing unexplored jungles, mountain ranges, and deserts, flirting with armed guerrillas, and crossing strategic borders in disguise. Now for the first time I was aware that luck sometimes runs out, and I suddenly felt a mortal fear rising from deep within me.
The storm’s hail had turned to freezing rain, the ground was slippery, the night as dark as ever without the slightest sign of a light. Maybe we had seen a nomad and not our camp at all. Where was our guide? Why and to where would he have fled?
As we advanced I saw a dark mass loom up to my left and realized it was a clifflike step in the plateau; perhaps we were nearing the river, having cut across the large bend. I had my flashlight accessible and shone it at the mud wall. It was pouring water and hail, and the torch lit up every drop as silver. Through this screen, who did I see cowering against the cliff but our muleteer, holding on to the reins of his horse?
I wanted to shout at him and demand an explanation, but being too weary I said only, “Dro,” or “Go.” Looking sorry for himself, soaking wet, he got into the saddle, and once again we headed east, stumbling in the dark, our eyes hurting from scanning the void ahead for the slightest light or glow. The muleteer himself had given up trying to lead us.
Should we go back? Had we overshot our camp? Where exactly was the course of the Mekong? By my watch it was close to one o’clock, and I was too cold, too tired, and too worried to figure out how long we had been in the saddle. It had been such a long and momentous day on which all had gone so well, too well: our having chosen the right tributary to lead us to the Rupsa pass, our meeting the nomad who knew the names of the smallest streams, the fact that the Japanese had not been up to the Rupsa pass and the end of the Mekong basin.
Everything had been in our favor. From now on I made sure everyone rode close together. There was little we could do to avoid exposure, no possible shelter, nothi
ng like a cave or bush here. Fortunately the hail and rain soon stopped, but the night was just as dark and cold. I remember getting off my horse, too tired to spur it on, too cramped after what must have been over fourteen hours in the saddle. Would we make it till daybreak and survive?
My thoughts had sunk to the point of despair when suddenly there was an unmistakable flash of light ahead of us. It was our camp. The light blinked and swooped as if searching; we could see the wall of the mess tent. It was one-thirty, and we were finally home.
Few people could have been happier as we stumbled into the vast and comfortable windproof tent. In the glow of candles we ate, drank, and celebrated our victory over the Mekong and our having pulled through the long march in the dark.
* * *
Our original plan, after finding the source, was to turn around and travel down the Mekong as far as Nangchen Dzong and Nangchen Gar, the ancient fortress and capital of the nomad kingdom. This now conflicted with our natural immediate desire to make public our find. As I have said, the definition of discovery encompasses the duty to publish. As we set off back down the river we were torn as to what to do next, to carry on or run back and “inform the world.” We decided to continue our research as planned, including a further study of the Nangchen thoroughbred horse in preparation for a larger equine expedition I was planning for the following year.
As we set out we were not yet fully aware of the toll our rush up the Mekong had exacted. Exhilarated, we began the long walk and ride all the way back to our jeeps, praying that rain and snow would not block the high passes that separated us from Zadoi.
We were never able to figure out whether our chief muleteer was a crook or was simply overwhelmed by having to lead “dog-faced” strangers to the source of a river where he had never been himself. Though I believe he was basically honest, I was nevertheless puzzled by the official in Moyun who, upon our return, tried to get Mr. Ling to pay for the three runaway horses without offering any explanation as to what had become of the man who had disappeared with them. Ling agreed to pay for one of the horses out of QMA funds.
Too happy to worry, we set off back through the Dza-Nak Lungmo pass, which we could now rightly claim had been for decades mistakenly identified in countless atlases as the watershed of the Mekong. Because of our research, the Mekong now extends a full degree west of this pass, sixty miles or more into the heart of southern Qinghai.
For years the location of the Dza-Nak Lungmo pass itself had been recorded in quite the wrong place, at Lat. 33° N, Long. 93° E (in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example), instead of where it actually is, at Lat. 33° 5′ N, Long. 94° 1′ E, a full degree off course. (The Times atlas gives a better reading: Long. 33° 4′ E, Lat. 93° 55′ N.) By coincidence these mistakes placed the Dza-Nak Lungmo pass and source of the Lungmo River just south of the Mekong’s true source, an ironic mistake revealing the relativity, or perhaps futility, of it all.
Crossing through the pass, once again surrounded by kiang, marauding wolves, gazelles, foxes, and wild sheep, I understood now that man was no different here than elsewhere, except that here the nomads—and I—felt closer to our very nature, to that biological expectancy we all carry in our genes—an expectancy that encompasses our spiritual aspirations and being, and an inherent state in which body and soul are fused, and both are as real as the feet we walk on.
In spite of the progress of science, we are still reluctant to attribute the origins of such behaviors as nobility, kindness, or love to our genetic structure and internal chemistry, even though we seem ready to accept the notion that aggression can be linked to specific genes and hormones.
At the source of the Mekong I realized that good and evil are complementary, and that both are essential elements of human nature.
* * *
After two harrowing days of driving through the mountains, we pulled into Zadoi. The main street, with its outdoor billiard tables, its general store stocked with sweets, batteries, and other marvels, its walled-in garrison and government depots, appeared to us like some huge capital.
It was a dismal capital, also a reminder of the fate that had befallen the whole country. While contemplating the garrison town as if for the first time, it came to me I was back where I had started, and as Eliot said, “know[ing] the place for the first time.” Zadoi, the tiny garrison on the upper Mekong, was just like Paris, New York, or London in relation to the values of the nomads, whose world was without constraints, without objects, without police, without shops, and without money. Theirs was a world in which everyone is, in most ways, self-sufficient, free of the material wants we consider necessities, and free also of the thousand encumbrances that such needs and wants create—the chains that make us affluent slaves, men and women driven to pawn our time and our minds and bodies for a salary to purchase bowls of instant soup, international travel, and electronically illustrated storytelling machines. Slaves through onerous taxes paid to governments that are supposed to protect our goods from the greed of neighbors and protect our rights from the greed of merchants. Governments, who school our children to have the correct wants and needs in a world in which all and everything is for sale. To be civilized, in our terms, is to be controlled from within and from without, making a civilized gentleman, in many ways, into a domesticated animal.
Only rarely can we perceive in ourselves and in others behavior that isn’t preconditioned, harnessed, or regulated. We are educated to respect the law, to believe in what is written in this or that book, to acquiesce to this or that social order, with the result that man has become tame and has traded freedom for easy access to shelter, food, and comfort.
Therein lies the dilemma that has caused us anguish in our cushy lives, spent on sofas before television sets.
“Man is not made for comfort just like the goat is not made for the plains.”
Our very nature is opposed to what is sold to us by our merchant princes as the compulsory adjunct to happiness. Men are not made for comfort any more than we are made to spend our lives working for others, whether our employers be the state or the shareholders of some corporation.
Men are born to love freedom and independence; born to be masters of their own destiny; born to find pleasure in the struggle for survival; born to experience the delights of the chase and the fulfillment of what nature has established as our role and place in creation.
Only now that I was about to leave the upper Mekong did I clearly understand why modern Western myths of freedom and salvation are set in Tibet, on what was still a lost horizon as far as we were concerned. This was a world where men and women are still free to live out their destiny as nature intended. We Westerners, on the other hand, have lost the paradise that haunts our dreams, that Garden of Eden from which we long ago banished ourselves in the name of comfort, greed, and maybe also laziness. The Garden of Eden is still here in our midst, but maybe there’s no going back to it. Maybe we’re simply too tame to face the hardships of the wilds for which we were originally conceived. By this I don’t wish to make noble savages of the Khambas and the other Tibetan nomads. I believe we are all noble and savage deep inside, and that it is only the debilitating effects of “civilization” that has undermined our nobility.
But aren’t we now too numerous and too domesticated ever to achieve again the nobler ideals to which we aspire? What are we to do? Forfeit comfort for happiness or happiness for comfort? Few of us have a real choice, and so we must resign ourselves to live in a world cursed by the gods, and bearable only if one believes in a better life after death. The great irony lies in the fact that paradise on earth is a land of hardship, that only in discomfort can we find happiness.
In the meantime, slowly and inexorably, on the ultimate frontier in Tibet, as once occurred in North America and Mexico, the last free men are being hunted and exterminated or drawn into the net of civilization at the gates of a paradise already theirs.
Of course most of us believe sincerely that there is no turning back, that there is n
o solution because there are so many of us, and it seems we can do nothing about it. Instead, we turn over our responsibilities to divine providence, to the socialist welfare state, or to the whims of some modern prince. Few of us are able to understand that the world in which we live was made by man and not determined by fate. It is now up to man, not to God, to make the necessary changes to our society. The Eskimo, like the Tibetans themselves and so many of the people of our planet until recently, were masters of their own and their children’s destiny. Their social system provided them with the means for survival through the ages. Shouldn’t we once again meet our obligations to our descendants and, for instance, take whatever birth control measures might be required to allow our children to live a life closer to their aspirations? In thirty years China’s ballooning population—Mao’s biggest mistake—could reduce itself by half through rigorous birth control. But Mao exhorted the Chinese to have many children, and, now, like many another modern leader, he must take the blame for the slums and misery that have arisen as a direct result of an irresponsible ideology.
* * *
As we set out for Nangchen I knew exactly why it was that for several millennia the nomads had overrun the city states surrounding them: Their intimate convictions of what was right and wrong and their disregard for hardship allowed them to prevail both physically and morally over the self-doubting, comfort-loving, civilized nations.
It is strange to think that the British and French colonial powers were able to conquer the world because of the spartan nineteenth-century education they had received, which taught them to despise comfort, love effort, and draw a very straight line between right and wrong. The last barbarians of Europe were the colonials—the singularly stubborn, rugged, and unflinching schoolboys, with their black and white certitudes. Maybe as one of them I had become the last explorer, the last true barbarian.
The Last Barbarians Page 22