The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

  Four hours out of Dengchen, we began a steep climb, and two hours after that we staggered up to the snow-covered summit of a 16,600-foot pass. Neither the pass nor its altitude figured correctly on our maps. From that moment on, our journey became a strange and painful plunge into a hostile unexplored world. Now we knew why no one took this northern route to Lhasa.

  The moment we descended the great pass we entered a new world. After camping at the foot of the pass we pushed on through bushes and trees that eventually formed a forest. None of our maps had alerted us to the presence of a forest here in the heart of the barren tundra. By a strange phenomenon, humidity had managed to seep all the way up from the tropics of Burma through the deep mountain gorges of the Salween River, traveling over twelve hundred miles like a submarine current, bringing right into the very heart of the dry, damp-free tundra the humidity of the tropics. Thus it was that we were entering great forests whose trees were shrouded in moss, an island of vegetation as unexpected as it was unique. There were tall pine trees side by side with willows and birches and a whole array of thorny trees reminiscent of the parasol-like trees of the African bush. The forest’s microclimate came with a whole range of animals and insects. Without a road leading to this place, and, surrounded as it was by tundra, it had not yet been touched by the axe of the Chinese loggers who are elsewhere making short work of the other Tibetan forests.

  In keeping with the gloom of some of the forest, the local people were a dour and primitive lot. We were now deep in the heart of the land of the Bon-po, a region so remote and primitive that even the Bon scriptures of the rest of Tibet forbade these people from becoming heads of religious institutions. We were in the heart of the land of the “wild ones,” as the Tibetans themselves call these people.

  * * *

  After six days of painful riding, through every kind of weather, over a total of four passes, catching only now and then magnificent views of forested peaks reminiscent of the Rockies, we finally reached the Salween River. This great river, though far less famous than the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow River, is nevertheless formidable—it stopped us dead in our tracks. Described as “one of the wildest and most picturesque streams in the world” by Sir James George Scott, KCIE (Knight Commander of the Indian Empire), author of the Upper Burma Gazetteer, it drains most of central and northern Tibet and is the fourth-longest river in the region.

  As in the case of the Mekong, its course across Tibet and northern Burma cuts a gorge so deep that it can’t always be followed, and so it too remains a mystery. We found ourselves on a steep rocky cliff above the turbulent waters where a suspension footbridge built by the Chinese Army spanned the river—a bridge too crude to allow the passage of any animals but those horses and yaks especially trained for the purpose. Thus, on the north bank we had to abandon all our horses. It then took us the better part of half a day for one yak and a pony to shuttle our baggage across.

  Before the bridge was built, it had been impossible to cross the swift current at this point. One had had to travel about sixty miles farther east, where the current relented a little so as to allow the crossing of yak-hide coracles and the hardiest of horses brave enough to swim.

  We were soon to find out that the Salween wasn’t the only formidable obstacle on our route. We continued on south once we were able to hire more ponies and some mules. Having lost all of our Nangchen horses, we had to make do with local ponies, a rather nondescript lot of what the Tibetans call rong-ta, or valley horses—ponies of mixed blood without distinction.

  Beyond the bridge we began to climb the narrow and gloomy forested gorge of a tributary of the Salween. Hugging a trail along a slender ledge, we penetrated deeper into the evergreen moss-draped woods that clung to the sheer mountainside. For two days we rode in the gorge, eventually emerging at a snow-covered pass that led us down into a secluded wooded valley where small mud-colored villages punctuated patchworks of gray harvested fields. We were heading for Pemba, or rather Palbar as it is written out, what today is one of the most isolated of Chinese garrisons in Tibet.

  Yet another pass, 15,900 feet high, gave us a frightening view of what lay ahead. The entire horizon was blocked by a sheer crenelated barrier of snowy peaks, a mighty range whose northern face barred our route. I wasn’t at all sure that we would manage to cross this formidable obstacle.

  Eleven days after leaving Dengchen we reached Palbar, exhausted but happy to have made it in spite of the rain and snow and the slippery and dangerous trail. Our arrival created considerable commotion.

  “You have no right to be here,” we were told by a Chinese police official, who then confined us to barracks until the local military commander could be alerted. That evening, all the local Chinese authorities, in red-bordered caps with gold braiding, examined our documents, and no amount of protest or waving of permits on our part seemed to make an impression on them.

  It was announced again that the area was forbidden to all foreigners. Moreover, it was explained that the passes through the great ranges to the south were closed and the road to Lhasa would be impassable until the spring. The local Tibetans confirmed this last bit of bad news.

  There was no use arguing. We could see for ourselves that the passes were buried in snow. But what could we do? There were no roads south to Lhasa, or west or north for that matter—no roads, it seemed, to connect us again with the motor road by which we had come. Couldn’t we ride west until we reached a road? The answer was no, the entire zone was restricted, and our permit was only for the trail to Lhasa.

  There did nevertheless exist one small dirt road that supplied the garrison at Palbar by truck. This trail ran east until it joined the highway that led north to Chamdo, the capital of eastern Tibet, five hundred miles away. But the road in question and Chamdo itself were strictly out of bounds to foreigners.

  For a moment I was worried that we might be forced to backtrack on foot or on horseback, providing the passes were still open. In the end, faced with no other alternative but to let us travel east, the exasperated officials allowed us to go to Chamdo, although no one among them would take the responsibility of granting us an official permit.

  Our way back to Lhasa was to be a long, rough, eight-day drive. First it would take us two days to reach Chamdo, then five days from Chamdo to Lhasa via Riwoche and Dengchen, the town from which we had set out for Palbar. This would be a journey of more than twelve hundred miles, most of it through restricted territory, a large part of which had never been visited by foreigners.

  We were all disheartened by our setback, by our inability to blaze a new trail to Lhasa, and, more particularly, by our failure to secure any Nangchen horses. But there it was, the unexpected is to be expected on any true exploration.

  Yet more surprises lay ahead as we started on our long journey across the remoter regions of Kham. Successively we climbed up and down the near-vertical gorges of the Salween and then the Mekong River nearing Chamdo. Sebastian and I eyed the Mekong with a certain complicity; had we not seen it as a mere trickle, known it at its birthplace? Our route to Chamdo had been across dry, barren, treeless country until we reached the deep gorges. Chamdo itself, the second-largest town of Tibet and the capital of Tibetan Kham, was a large Chinese-dominated town with all the attendant squalor a huge garrison can assume. It was here that the Tibetans had capitulated to the Chinese invaders in 1950, and here that Nawang Nagbo, the traitorous minister of the Dalai Lama’s government, had blown up the town’s arsenal rather than put up a fight.

  In Chamdo we were treated as suspects of the highest order, and were not allowed to photograph or film this “forbidden city.” Accordingly, we were pleased to leave the following day, climbing out of the gorge of the Mekong to head for one of its main affluents, which led us to Riwoche.

  Riwoche was where I had originally planned to begin this journey because it was the Tibetan province closest to Nangchen. What happened on our way to Riwoche was to change our expedition from a semifailure into a success.
True to the dictum that exploration is, above all, a venture into the unknown, it was by sheer accident that we discovered in Riwoche a fascinating breed of horse, never before recorded by Westerners.

  We had been driving for six hours when we reached the foot of the Gung-la, the principal access to the main Riwoche valley. I was seated in the front of the truck with Jerome Nouvelle, the cameraman, and Dr. Casas. In the back the rest of the team were dozing on the floor of the truck. We had entered a forested region of large pines, broken up now and then by alpine pastures. The atmosphere here was very different from the dark forest on the banks of the Salween. Above us, the peaks rose to nineteen thousand feet, granite rocky crags up the sides of which climbed mighty pines. I was familiar with this kind of forest, a continuation of the sort found just east of Nangchen Gar. The forest was known for its white-lipped deer and also for the presence of two breeds of macaque monkeys and some rare members of the shrew family.

  As we drove down into the shady valley, I sighted a small herd of horses grazing under the trees. It had become a reflex for me to look at horses carefully, and as I observed them in detail, I was struck at how short and stocky they were. I asked that we stop the truck. Getting out, I took a couple of snapshots of them with my camera from the roadside and then decided to walk toward them. I managed to reach two young horses with a third horse that may have been their mother. One of these was a pale coffee color with a dark stripe running down its back and, to my surprise, two brown stripes at the top of its fore and hind quarters. Such stripes, recalling the markings of wild asses, are occasionally found on feral horses that have returned to the wild. Looking at the two small horses I was struck by something particular in their bodies, although at first I couldn’t say exactly what it was.

  I called out to Jerome and Ignasi to join me. Jerome arrived with the camera and began shooting. With Ignasi I tried to approach the young horses and get within reach, but one swung around and tried to kick me. Were they wild? I didn’t think so, as they wouldn’t have let us get so near if they were. I now noticed nearby under the trees some rather elegant wooden shelters—the huts of herders from the villages below.

  Ignasi pointed out to the rest of us that the horses looked primitive to him, and then suddenly everything fell into place. We were looking at a strange archaic horse. There were some twenty in all in the little herd, which had scattered at our approach. They all seemed to share the same general conformation. They were small—twelve hands (four feet) high at the withers—with truncated, triangular heads and very bizarre narrow nostrils and slanted eyes.

  The horses resembled no others I had ever seen in Tibet, or anywhere else. What could they be, I wondered? They were all the more amazing for the fact that we were so close to Nangchen, and yet these animals were so different from the horses we had ridden there. Since I had begun my research on Tibetan horses, I had recorded eight breeds, the smallest being the Tsaidam pony inhabiting the marshy wasteland of northwestern Qinghai. But the Tsaidam too was a pony very different from these, with a much more “normal” horse’s face.

  We took many photographs and continued on down the valley. Here and there we sighted other horses and noted that they were all similar to those we had first observed near the pass. On arriving in the garrison of Riwoche we were excited about what we had seen, and we decided to investigate further. On learning that a veterinary station was attached to the garrison, Dr. Casas and I immediately paid a visit to it, while Rinzing set out to hire horses for the following day, so that we could comb the countryside for more horses and get an idea of their distribution.

  What was particularly interesting was that this breed, if indeed it was one unto itself, seemed to fit into the well-contained local wooded alpine ecosystem with its unique deer and macaque monkeys. Could it be, we wondered, that the local horse was a leftover—a survivor—of some very ancient breed? A horse that somehow got locked into the Riwoche valley complex and was preserved from mixing with breeds in adjacent valleys?

  We were told that all the horses of the region were similar to those we had seen. They all had slanted eyes, barely marked chins, and odd-looking noses.

  Dr. Casas was eager to round up more horses for a closer look. The following morning we were presented with an odd bunch of mounts, hired from the police to take us to search out more of the little beasts.

  Overnight, everyone had become rather suspicious of our intentions. Even our companions from Lhasa began to show concern: as tired as we were, they wanted to return to Lhasa. Dr. Casas declared that we should make sure to obtain a blood sample of this new breed to see if it had an anomalous chromosome.

  Normally all horses except the wild Przewalski have the same number of chromosomes. Could this horse be an “intermediate” species? Only blood tests could prove that. But I couldn’t give Dr. Casas permission to conduct the tests, for I myself had been expressly forbidden to take blood samples of the Nangchen horses. I explained the problem to Dr. Casas, whereupon he decided to act according to his “scientific conscience.”

  In the meantime we rode off to examine more horses. We immediately found that the accompanying policeman—a narrow-minded sort—had no intention of letting us wander into the wilderness, which meant that we were reduced to examining only those horses we could find just off the main road.

  A few miles out of Riwoche we found a half-dozen fine specimens grazing, and we filmed and photographed them from every angle. We were now utterly convinced that the “Riwoche horse” was not only a breed apart, but that it was no doubt very, very ancient. In my mind’s eye I saw the horses of the Stone Age cave paintings.

  I was right, in fact: When we returned to Europe we were able to show that the little horse we’d come upon was the spitting image of the horses depicted in detail in the Chauvet cave found in southern France in 1994. The drawings in this cave have been estimated to be thirty-four thousand years old.

  European prehistoric cave paintings, as has been said, consistently show two types of horse, one easily identifiable as being a Przewalski horse due to its white donkey-like muzzle, and the other, the mysterious horse number two, characterized by slanted eyes, a duckbilled nose (just like the “odd-looking” nose of the Riwoche), a straight face, a weak jaw, and a small rump.

  Could the Riwoche horse be the famous archaic horse number two? The sheer isolation of the Riwoche region—the high passes closing off its valleys from adjoining areas—seemed to confirm what the horse’s shape alone demonstrated: It was related to horses that roamed the world thirty-four thousand years ago.

  On our return to Europe, blood samples were sent to Dr. Steven Harrison, an equine geneticist at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, England. Unfortunately, we had only two samples, and neither one showed chromosomal anomalies or variations, so that little could be learned on that front.

  It is important to remember that every existing animal or human being alive today traces back to the beginnings of time. “The Riwoche horse,” as we had gotten used to calling it, was no exception. The key question, then, is simply this: How much, or how little, had the horse evolved over the years? Only pictures from ancient caves could give us the clues we needed and prompt us to say that it was very like the famous horse number two, which had been thought to exist only on the walls of those caves.

  For centuries equine specialists have been wondering which breeds or types of horses were first tamed. Archaeological studies to date indicate that the first domesticated horses known are preserved in the six-thousand-year-old skeletons found in a tomb at Dereivka Sredri Stog in the Crimea. These skeletons show the wear marks of a bit on their teeth and are of a very small horse, much smaller than the Przewalski; their size—a coincidence?—matches that of the Riwoche horse. It thus seems quite clear that the first of the wild horses to be tamed were not, as some have long believed, descendants or crossbreeds of the wild Przewalski, but were a smaller horse, the famed horse number two from which the Riwoche—and possibly all other tame horses�
��now seemed to us to be descended. It is my belief that the Riwoche is a living fossil of the original “noblest conquest of man,” the horse that man first dared ride some six thousand years ago. Perhaps domesticating horses was a small step for man, but it was without doubt a huge leap for humanity. When man domesticated the horse he changed the world forever. The ugly little, flat-nostriled Riwoche was rapidly to give way around the globe to the thoroughbreds raised by man for sport and war, the horses that ended up leading entire nations and their heroes on the paths to conquest and to greatness.

  Our finding the Riwoche horse in 1995 was to have repercussions at least as great as our discovery of the source of the Mekong River.

  Perhaps more important than our discoveries, as far as I was concerned, was the realization that the last years of this century, far from putting an end to a long tradition of exploration and discovery, can still lead us into a new era of scientific inquiry on what remains, even now, an exciting and mysterious planet.

  INDEX

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Afghanistan

  Afghan Wars

  agricultural society

  Alexander the Great

  altitude sickness

  Amazon River

  Amdo area. See also Qinghai Province

  American Indians

  Amne Machin range

  Angkor Wat

  Animal Health Trust

  Annapurna range

  A River

  Arun River

  Asa people

  ass breeds

  African wild

  kiang

  Syrian wild

  Attila

  Bailey, George

  Baltistan (formerly Bolor)