Riding the Iron Rooster

22: The Train to Tibet

In the more remote regions of China, where people are not trusted to be orderly, the authorities devise specific drills for boarding the trains. Xining had one of the cruelest I had seen. The Hard Class passengers were lined up in front of the station — perhaps a thousand cold, impatient people in a long, shuffling line. But it was a directionless line. It led nowhere. It was formed in the windy plaza in front of the station, behind an ugly statue depicting a dozen contending minorities. That was appropriate, because the line for the train was composed of the same minorities, contending for seats.

Ten minutes before the train left, a railway guard blew a whistle, and these people snatched up their bales and bundles, and ran. They went flapping two hundred yards across the plaza, panted another hundred around the station, and wheezed down the platform to where the train sat steaming. That race sorted them out, and so there was a gasping free-for-all for the seats, women and children last.

It was a horrible train. But that was not a bad thing. It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places. I had a strong feeling — and I was proved right — that I would be traveling through one of the most beautiful landscapes in China. This train was dirty, scruffy and extremely crowded. Before it set off there was a fight among the passengers, as five heavily laden Tibetans tried to get into the wrong coach. No punches were thrown. It was all push and pull, and some snarling. The Tibetans smilingly resisted. The most explicit sign that it was a bad train was that it ran out of water an hour after it started. No water — for tea more than for washing — is a catastrophe rather than a simple hardship in China. But no one got angry. No one even complained. They inquired in froggy voices, and then took it without further muttering. I was impressed but annoyed. Without hot water this long trip — thirty hours or so — would be unbearable. We were headed for Golmud, in the Qinghai desert, and there the train stopped. I planned to make my own way to Lhasa, with Mr. Fu.

There was no food either. I made noodles in a cup with the last few inches of hot water. People congregated in the dining car, but nothing was served. There was a certain amount of shouting and lots of abuse, but these sounds were drowned by the rattling and clanking steam engine. There were no lights on the train either. I was exasperated, then uncomfortable, and finally bored stiff. I couldn't eat, I couldn't read. I hated the friendly honks of passengers, the yells, the squawking kids. I dug out some of my food and ate it, and wished I had more. The floor was covered with spat-out sunflower seeds.

I was in a compartment with a young man and an old man. The young one smoked, the old one spat. But they were otherwise very courteous. They were also going to Golmud. As we went along in the trembling train it struck me that we were a great distance from what most people would regard as fruitful and bounteous China. We were over the edge, way past the old Chinese frontier, four days at least from civilization and its vast, stinking cities.

The scenery was lovely. The train had risen and snaked through the mountain passes west of Xining and then had traveled down to the cold valleys. The frozen river was a startling chalky white, and it showed up clearly even in twilight, like a road covered with snow, winding through the brown valleys.

"Going to Xizang?" the old man asked, meaning Tibet.

He assumed that no one would go to Golmud to stay, and of course he was right. That was why this was the train to Tibet.

The other passengers were Salars in embroidered jackets, and small brown people wearing stiff little felt bowls on their heads, and Kazakhs in boots and goatskin cloaks, Huis in skullcaps, and enormous Tibetans with ragged rucksacks and shaven heads and greasy robes. They were mostly country folk — shepherds and yak herds and tent dwellers — heading home after their pilgrimage to Taer'si or else their foray at Xining market. There were many soldiers, there were rowdies and spitters and shitters and oddballs in long underwear who loitered in the train's corridors and blew their noses on the curtains.

The mountains nearby had bright, sharp peaks and warm slopes, but beneath them in the shadows, the valleys were frozen and the square mud-walled villages looked like habitations left over from the Neolithic age. They had been built by Mao's pioneers in the 1950s, the Hans who left settled homes and headed west to bring order — as if it needed more order than Buddhism — to Tibet. Night came quickly, a sky of black and blue that was all cloud, and beneath it the brilliant whiteness of the ice on the river.

I lay in bed, cursing the lack of hot tea on this cold train and reading The Hole in the Wall, by Arthur Morrison. It was an old novel about the East End of London in its days of banditry. Leaving Xining, I had asked the young man what those quarries were. He said, "Lime pits." In the novel, lime figures in a hideous way. Blind George, having been assaulted by the bully Dan Ogle, takes his revenge by sneaking into Ogle's room and pressing lime into his eyes to blind him ("the thumbs still drove at the eyes the mess of smoking lime that clung and dripped about Ogle's head… Blind George gasped, 'Hit me now you's as blind as me!'").

That gave me a nightmare, and its terror arose from my confusing snow and lime — they looked the same — and disfiguring myself as I slipped in it. But it was fitful sleep. The cold in the train increased and it woke me a number of times. In the morning there were mountains in the north, and sandy waste all around. It was the roughest land I had seen in China, wild and stony, and later on, towards noon on this overcast day, there was snow thinly covering the desert — it had an uneven, spilled look — and swatches of snow lay in the ridges of the far-off mountains. The wind blew hard on the ground, and though it was flat, all its boulders were exposed. There was no vegetation at all, no one lived here, and even the railway stations seemed pointlessly positioned, because no one got on or off the train; the stationmaster stood at attention with his green flag — no one else.

There was still no water. It amazed me that no one complained. I spoke to a man in the kitchen who was actually pouring water into a pot. He did not reply. He came over to me, smiled briefly, then slammed the door in my face.

A boy in a smock was selling tickets in the dining car. I asked what the tickets were for. Noodles, he said. So I bought some tickets and lined up at a window leading on to the kitchen. I waited ten minutes, and when nothing happened, I said, "What about the noodles?"

"No more left!" the ticket seller said. He was smiling, but it was an ambiguous smile.

I complained: "I just gave you some money—"

"Come back in an hour."

"I want my noodles or else my money back."

"Later."

It was like prison, or the army, or an old-fashioned nuthouse.

I said, "You are not being very friendly. There is no food, no heat, no water on this train. This is very bad."

The ticket seller was still smiling. I wondered what would happen to me if I hit him. They would probably regard this as a very serious breach of discipline and send me to a far-off place for reeducation; indeed, they would probably send me here, to Qinghai, where they had sent so many other rebels. So I had nothing to fear: I was already in exile.

"Yes. It's bad," the ticket seller said, when he realized I was angry.

"At least get me some water for tea."

"There is no water."

"There is water in the kitchen. I saw it."

You win, he seemed to say, and he brought me a thermos of hot water, much to the delight of the men in my compartment as we shared it.

The landscape became even wilder, though I had not thought that to be possible. It was colder, windier, more rubbly; the mountains blacker. This made bleak Xinjiang seem lush by comparison. A cold wind howled across stony ground. It was hellish and memorable. I thought how the corners of China were so strange and inhospitable and unearthly the Chinese had come to believe that they represented the edges of the flat world they knew as The Middle Kingdom.

The younger man in the upper berth was Mr. Zhao. He came from Liaoning and said he had never seen a place as bad as this. He was a factory supervisor, something to do with magnesium, and was going to be in Golmud for several weeks.

"I'd rather be somewhere else," he said.

But I was pleased to be here, in such a wilderness. I sat in the safety of the train and looked upon the desolation of the land with a sense of mounting excitement. In the Lop Nor Desert of Xinjiang, and in Hami and Turfan they say, "Marco Polo came through here," or "This was the Silk Road." But here in Qinghai no claim at all could be made. There was never anyone here. It was death to attempt a crossing. No one passed through. And it was always like this — just as empty.

Mr. Zhao was traveling with his father, who visited him from another part of the train. This old man sat and stared at me. I tried to speak with him, but he was deaf. He had a deaf man's bright smile. Whenever I wrote in my notebook the old man put his teacup down and pressed his nose against my notebook page, marveling at my handwriting.

At last, the mountains and hills utterly vanished and in their place there was a light brown desert. I looked closer and saw that it was all low snowdrifts covered with fine sand. Later in the day it was stony. Still later, it was dark and rubbly — but still a desert — and the brown twisted symmetry of the rubble made it seem like an immensity of dog turds.

There were stations every twenty miles, but a station here was three small square buildings, the same brown as the turdy desert, standing in the wind, with emptiness on every side, and clouds madly blowing over them.

"It is not good," Mr. Zhao said. Obviously he missed the traffic and drizzle of urban Liaoning.

"I like this place," I said.

He erupted in the short spitting laugh that in China means You must be out of your mind.

"I just wish we had some water," I said.

I asked the Head of the Train, who seemed very young, why there was no water.

"Because this is the desert."

He spoke English with a slight American accent.

"But you have boilers," I said.

"The water in the boilers is for the engine."

"Are people complaining about the lack of water?"

"You are complaining," he said, in a friendly way, "and other people are complaining, too. But I tell everyone it is a problem, and they understand."

"I don't understand."

"Because you are a foreign friend," he said, which was a polite Chinese way of saying that I was a Martian.

He said he was twenty-two. I asked him his name.

"My name is Gold Country," he said in English.

"Jinguo?" I asked.

"Yes. My father named me that because he wanted China to be prosperous."

He seemed rather ineffectual to hold such an important job — he was in complete charge of the train. But he was pleasant. He said he had not had much formal education and in fact had learned his English on the Voice of America.

Towards the end of the afternoon the rubbly desert gave way to rockier ground, and mountains appeared to the southwest. Two mountains were distinct and beautiful, and the snow was a luminous bluish color, covering the entirety of these slopes because they faced north and received no sun. They were the mountains (I could see from my map) Yagradagze and Har Sai, each of them just under 20,000 feet. They rose out of great flat snowfields, while in the foreground was rough desert and the chugging train.

"It has recently snowed," Jinguo said. "That is not unusual. It often snows heavily in March here. And in the passes it snows all year. Foreign friends like snow!"

As if in welcome a flock of eight gray cranes gathered themselves together and made off, just ahead of the train, rising and still folding as they flew, like large mechanical bumbershoots blown sideways by the stiff wind.

Golmud was hardly a town. It was a dozen widely scattered low buildings, some radio antennas, a water tower. One of the few cars in town was Mr. Fu's ridiculous Galant. There were some buses, but they were the most punished-looking vehicles I had seen in China — and no wonder, for they toiled up and down the Tibetan Plateau.

"Snow," Mr. Fu said — his first word.

I had not expected this snow, and it was clear from his gloomy tone that neither had he. The snow lay thinly in the town, but behind the town it was deep and dramatic — blazing in the shadows of the mountain range.

We were still at Golmud Station. Mr. Fu had driven from Xining, and had met me. But he was very subdued in the car.

When I asked him how he was he did not reply directly. He said, "We cannot go to Lhasa tomorrow. Maybe the day after, or the day after that, or—"

I asked him why.

'The snow. It is everywhere — very deep," he said. He did not even glance at me. He was driving fast through the rutted Golmud streets — too fast, but I had seen him drive in Xining and I knew this to be normal. At the best of times he was a rather frantic driver. 'The snow is blocking the road."

"You are sure?"

"Yes."

"Did you see it?"

He laughed: Ha-ha! You idiot! "Look at it!"

He pointed out the window. But I was not looking at the snow. I noticed that he was wearing a pair of elegant driving gloves. He never took the wheel without donning them. They seemed as old-fashioned as spats or gaiters.

"Did anyone tell you that the road was blocked with snow?"

He did not reply, so that meant no. We continued this sparring. The snow was bad news — it glittered, looking as though it was there forever. But surely someone had a road report?

"Is there is a bus station in Golmud?"

He nodded. He hated my questions. He wanted to be in charge, and how could he be if I was asking all the questions? And he had so few answers.

"People say the road is bad. Look at the snow!"

"We will ask at the bus station. The bus drivers will know."

"First we go to the hotel," he said, trying to take command.

The hotel was another prisonlike place with cold corridors and squawks and odd hours. I had three cactuses in my room, and a calendar and two armchairs. But there were no curtains on the windows, and there was no hot water. "Later," they said. The lobby was wet and dirty from the mud that had been tracked in. An ornamental pond behind the hotel was filled with green ice, and the snow was a foot deep on the path to the restaurant. I asked about food. "Later," they said. Some of the rooms had six or eight bunk beds. Everyone inside wore a heavy coat and fur hat, against the cold. Why hadn't my cactus plants died? The hotel cost $9 for a double room, and $2 for food.

"Now we go to the bus station," I said.

Mr. Fu said nothing.

"We will ask someone about the snow."

I had been told that buses regularly plied between Golmud and Lhasa, especially now that that there were no flights — the air service to Tibet had been suspended. Surely one of these bus drivers would put us in the picture.

We drove to the bus station. On the way, I could see that Golmud was the ultimate Chinese frontier town, basically a military camp, with a few shops, a market and wide streets. There were very few buildings, but since they were not tall, they seemed less of a disfigurement. It was a place of pioneers — of volunteers who had come out in the 1950s, as they had in Xining. They had been encouraged by Mao to develop the poor and empty parts of China; and of course, Tibet had to be invaded and subdued, and that was impossible without reliable supply lines — settlements, roads, telegraph wires, barracks. First the surveyors and engineers came, then the railway people and the soldiers, and then the teachers and traders.

"What do you think of Golmud, Mr. Fu?"

"Too small," he said, and laughed, meaning the place was insignificant.

At the bus station we were told that the snow wasn't bad on the road. A Tibetan bus had arrived just that morning — it was late, of course, but it was explained that all the buses were late, even when there was no snow.

Mr. Fu was not placated. He pointed south and said, "Snow!"

He was clearly apprehensive, although I was convinced that we should set off.

I said, "We will go tomorrow, but we will leave early. We will drive until noon. If the snow is bad we will turn back and try again another day. If it looks okay we will go on."

There was no way that he could disagree with this, and it had the additional merit of being a face-saving plan.

We had a celebratory dinner that night — wood-ear fungus, noodles, yak slices and the steamed buns called mantou that Mr. Fu said he could not live without (he had a supply for the trip to Tibet). There was a young woman at the table, sharing our meal. She said nothing until Mr. Fu introduced her.

"This is Miss Sun."

"Is she coming with us?"

"Yes. She speaks English."

Mr. Fu, who spoke no English at all, was convinced that Miss Sun was fluent in English. But at no point over the next four or five days was I able to elicit any English at all from Miss Sun. Occasionally she would say a Chinese word and ask me its English equivalent.

"How do you say luxing in English?"

"Travel."

Then her lips trembled and she made a choking sound, "Trow."

And, just as quickly, she forgot even that inaccurate little squawk.

Over the dinner, I said, "What time are we leaving tomorrow?"

"After breakfast," Mr. Fu said.

The maddening Chinese insistence on mealtimes.

"We should get an early start, because the snow will slow us down."

"We can leave at nine."

"The sun comes up at six-thirty or seven. Let's leave then."

"Breakfast," Mr. Fu said, and smiled.

We both knew that breakfast was at eight. Mr. Fu was demanding his full hour, too. I wanted to quote a Selected Thought of Mao about being flexible, meeting all obstacles and overcoming them by strength of will. But I couldn't think of one. Anyway, a Mao Thought would have cut no ice with young, skinny, frantic Mr. Fu, who played Beethoven and wore driving gloves and had a freeloading girlfriend. He was one of the new Chinese. He even had a pair of sunglasses.

"We can buy some food and eat it on the way," I said, as a last desperate plea for an early start.

"I must eat mantou when it is hot," Mr. Fu said.

That annoyed me, and I was more annoyed the next morning when at half past nine I was still waiting for Mr. Fu, who was himself waiting for a receipt for his room payment. At last, near ten, we left, and I sat in the backseat, wishing I were on a train, and feeling sour at the prospect of spending the whole trip staring at the back of Miss Sun's head.

Lhasa was a thousand miles away.

Looking towards Tibet I had a glimpse of a black and vaporous steam locomotive plowing through a dazzling snowfield under the blue summits and buttresses of the Tanggula Shan. It was one of the loveliest things I saw in China — the chugging train in the snowy desert, the crystal mountains behind it, and the clear sky above. Everything visible was jewellike, smoke and sparkle in a diamond as big as Tibet.

About twenty miles farther, at the first high pass in the mountain range, was the end of the line in China — though only soldiers were allowed to go that far by rail — and after that there was only the narrow road, on which Mr. Fu was now skidding in his Galant.

Mr. Fu, I could see, was terrified of the snow. He did not know its effect firsthand. He had only heard scare stories. That was why he had wanted to stay in Golmud for another week, until the snow melted. He believed that there was no way through it. But the snow was not bad. The road was fairly clear — anyway, two distinct ruts had been mashed into it by passing trucks. But they had created a ridge in the center of the road and this hard hump of snow and ice kept bumping and tossing the little car with its low clearance.

In the first passes, so narrow they were nearly always in shadow, there was ice. Mr. Fu took his time. He was a poor driver — that had been obvious in the first five minutes of driving with him — but the snow and ice slowed him and made him careful. The icy stretches looked dangerous, but by creeping along (and trying to ignore the precipitous drop into the ravine by the roadside), we managed. For miles there was slippery snow, but this too Mr. Fu negotiated. Two hours passed in this way. It was a lovely sunny day, and where the sun had struck it, some of the snow had melted. But we were climbing into the wind, and even this sun could not mask the fact that it was growing colder as we gained altitude.

In his terror, Mr. Fu did not speak a word for those hours, but his breathing — and his snorts and gasps — were like a monologue.

We passed the first range of mountains, and behind them — though it was cold — there was less snow than on the Golmud side. Mr. Fu began to increase his speed. Whenever he saw a dry patch of road he floored it and sped onward, slowing only when more snow or ice appeared. Twice he hit sudden frost heaves, and I was thrown out of my seat and bumped my head.

"Sorry!" Mr. Fu said, still speeding.

Most of the curves were so tight that Mr. Fu had no choice but to go slowly. And then I sipped tea from my thermos and passed cassettes to Miss Sun, who fed them into the machine. After a hundred miles we had finished with Brahms. I debated whether to hand her the Beethoven symphonies, as I listened to Mendelssohn. I drank green tea and looked at the sunny road and snowy peaks and listened to the music, and I congratulated myself on contriving this excellent way of going to Lhasa.

There was another frost heave.

"Sorry!"

He did not slow down. The road straightened, and he went even faster — about eighty, which seemed ridiculous for such a small car on such a narrow road. The only other traffic was trucks — big, rusted ones, loaded, with flapping tarpaulins and Tibetan drivers. Mr. Fu always leaned on his horn and passed them carelessly, not seeming to notice whether there was a curve ahead.

He was an awful driver. He could not have been driving long. He had probably gone to a state driving school and earned a certificate, and had been assigned to a Xining work unit. The driving gloves were merely an affectation. He ground the gears when he set off, he gave the thing too much gas, he steered jerkily, he went too fast; and he had what is undoubtedly the worst habit a driver can have — but one that is common in China: going downhill he always switched off the engine and put the gears into neutral, believing that he was saving gas.

I am not a retiring sort of person, and yet I said nothing. A person who is driving a car is in charge, and if you are a passenger you generally keep your mouth shut. I had an urge to say something, and yet I thought: It's going to be a long trip — no sense spoiling it at the outset with an argument. And I wanted to see just how bad a driver Mr. Fu was.

I soon found out.

He was rounding bends at such speed that I found myself clutching the door handle in order to prevent myself being thrown across the seat. I could not drink my tea without spilling it. He was going ninety — I could not tell whether the dial said kilometers or miles per hour, but did it matter? And yet if I said slow down, he would lose face, his pride would be hurt, and wasn't it true that he had gotten us through the snow? It was now about noon, with a dry road ahead. At this rate we would get to our first destination, the town of Amdo, before nightfall.

"Play this one, Miss Sun."

Miss Sun took the Chinese cassette of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. She rammed it into the machine and the first few bars played. The sun was streaming through the windows. The sky was clear and blue, and the ground was gravelly beneath the gray hills. There were snowy peaks to the left and right of us, just peeping over the hills. We were approaching a curve. I was a little anxious but otherwise very happy on the highest road in the world, the way to Lhasa. It was a beautiful day.

I remembered all of this clearly, because it was about two seconds later that we crashed.

There was a culvert on the curve, and a high bump in the road that was very obvious. But Mr. Fu was doing ninety, and when he hit the bump, we took off — the car leaped, I felt weightless, and when we came twisting down we were heading into an upright stone marker on the right. Mr. Fu was snatching at the steering wheel. The car skidded and changed direction, plunging to the left-hand side of the road. All this time I was aware of wind rushing against the car, a noise like a jet stream. That increased and so did the shaking of the car as it became airborne again and plowed into a powerful wind composed of dust and gravel. We had left the road and were careering sideways into the desert. Mr. Fu was battling with the wheel as the car was tossed. My clearest memory was of the terrific wind pressing against the twisted car, the windows darkened by flying dust, and of a kind of suspense. In a moment, I thought, we are going to smash and die.

I was hanging onto the door handle. My head was jammed against the front seat. I was afraid that if I let go I would be thrown out the opposite door. I thought I heard Miss Sun screaming, but the car noise and the wind were much louder.

This went on for perhaps seven seconds. That is an achingly long time in a skidding car; terror has everything to do with time passing. I had never felt so helpless or so doomed.

So I was surprised when the car finally stopped. It was on its side. Only the deep gravelly sand had prevented it from turning over completely. I had to push the door with my shoulder to open it. The dust was still settling. The rear tire on my side of the car had been torn off, and I could hear it hissing.

I staggered away to be as far as possible from the Galant and saw Mr. Fu and Miss Sun gasping and coughing. Miss Sun was twitching. Mr. Fu looked stunned and sorrowful because he saw the damage to the car. All its chrome had been torn off, the grille was smashed, the wheel rim twisted, the doors smashed; and we were fifty yards from the road, sunk in desert gravel. It seemed incredible that the sun was still shining.

Mr. Fu laughed. It was a cough of blind fear that meant God, what now!

No one spoke. We were wordlessly hysterical that we had survived. Mr. Fu tramped over to me and smiled and touched my cheek. There was blood on his finger. I had gotten out of the car not knowing whether I was hurt — I suspected I might have been. But I checked myself. My glasses had smashed and dug into my cheek, but the wound was not bad — anyway, not too deep. I had a bump on my forehead. My neck ached. My wrist hurt. But I was all right.

It infuriated me that this had happened on a dry road, under sunny skies, so early in the trip. Now we were stuck, and it was all because of the incompetence of Mr. Fu. He had been driving too fast. But it was also my own fault for having said nothing.

Mr. Fu had unpacked a shovel and was digging around the car. What good was that? We could not go anywhere on three wheels. It seemed hopeless. I debated whether to grab my bag and start hitchhiking; but in which direction? Mr. Fu had got himself into this mess; he could get himself out of it. I could not imagine how this car could ever be dragged onto the road. I looked around and thought: This is one of the emptiest places in the world.

We took turns digging for a while, but this merely seemed a cosmetic endeavor, unearthing the car. And the more we saw of the car, the more wrecked it seemed.

After twenty minutes or so, we were exhausted. Miss Sun was making little piles of broken bits of plastic that had been torn from the grille and scattered. These she intended to save, as if collecting them showed her deep concern.

Some brown trucks were laboring slowly down the road. We had passed them hours ago.

"Let's stop them," I said.

"No," Mr. Fu said.

Chinese pride. He shook his head and waved me away. He knew they were Tibetans. What a loss of face for him if these savages witnessed this piece of stupid driving. He had no excuses.

"Come back," Mr. Fu said. "Help me dig."

But I did not turn. I was waving to the approaching trucks, and I was delighted to see them slowing down. It was a three-truck convoy, and when they parked, the Tibetans came flapping slowly through the desert, laughing with pleasure at the tipped-over car and Mr. Fu on his knees digging, and Miss Sun squatting like a lunatic with her piles of broken plastic. There were seven Tibetans. They looked very greasy in their old clothes, but I was reassured by their laughter and their squashed hats and their broken shoes: their ordinariness gave them the look of rescuers.

I dug out my "List of Useful Tibetan Phrases" and consulted it. I said, "Tashi deleg!" (Hello — Good luck!)

They returned the greeting and laughed some more.

I pointed to the car. "Yappo mindoo." (That is not good.)

They nodded and replied. True, they were saying. That's not good at all.

"Nga Amayriga nay ray," I said. (I'm an American.)

They said, "Amayriga, Amayriga!"

I looked at my list again and put my finger on a phrase. I said, "Nga Lhasa la drogi yin." (I am going to Lhasa.)

By now one of them had taken the shovel from Mr. Fu, and another was digging with his hands. One was unloading the trunk — pulling boxes out, unbolting the spare tire. Several of them were touching the wound on my face and going tsk, tsk.

"Want a picture of the Dalai Lama?" I said.

They nodded. Yes, yes!

The others heard. They said, "Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama!"

They dropped what they were doing and surrounded me as I pulled out the roll of portraits I had brought for just such an emergency. They were tough men, but they took the pictures with great gentleness and reverence, each one touching the paper to his head and bowing to me. They marveled at the pictures, while Mr. Fu and Miss Sun stood to the side, sulking.

"Everyone gets a picture," I said. "Now you have a nice portrait of the Dalai Lama. You are very happy, right?" — they laughed, hearing me jabber in English—"And you want to help us. Now let's straighten that axle, and get the wheel on, and push this goddamned car back onto the road. Get some ropes and hitch it up" — they were laughing and nodding—"and push us over there, because Nga Lhasa la drogi yin, and if I don't I am going to be very annoyed. What do you say?"

They all said "Ya, ya!" and set to work.

It took less than half an hour for them to fix the wheel and dig out the car, and then, with eight of us pushing and Mr. Fu gunning the engine, we flopped and struggled until the car was back on the road. As the wheels spun and everyone became covered with dust, I thought: I love these people.

Afterwards they showed me little pictures of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama on the sun visors in the cabs of their trucks.

"Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama," they chanted.

Mr. Fu thanked them in Chinese. It meant that he had to swallow his pride to do that. They didn't care. They laughed at him and waved him away.

It was now early afternoon. It had all been a shock, and yet I was encouraged because we had survived it. It seemed miraculous that we were still alive. But Mr. Fu said nothing. When we set off again, he seemed both dazed and frenzied. His glasses had broken in the crash, and I could see that he was wild-eyed. He was also very dirty. Miss Sun was sniffing, whimpering softly.

The car was in miserable shape. It looked the way I felt. I was surprised that it had restarted; I was amazed that its four wheels were turning. That is another way of saying that it seemed logical to me, a few minutes after we set off again, that a great screeching came from the back axle. It was the sort of sound that made me think that the car was about to burst apart.

We stopped. We jacked up the car. We took a back wheel off to have a closer look. The brakes were twisted, and pieces of metal were protruding into the rim. At low speeds this made a clackety-clack, and faster it rose to a shriek. There was no way to fix it. We put the wheel back on, and while Mr. Fu tightened the nuts, I looked around. I had never in my life seen such light — the sky was like a radiant sea; and at every edge of this blasted desert with its leathery plants were strange gray hills and snowy peaks. We were on the plateau. It was a world I had never seen before — of emptiness and wind-scoured rocks and dense light. I thought: If I have to be stranded anywhere, this is the place I want it to be. I was filled with joy at the thought of being abandoned there, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

"I think it is heating up," Mr. Fu said, after he had driven a hundred yards down the road.

He was breathing hard and noisily through his nose. He slammed on the brakes, ran around to the back wheel and spat on the rim. It wasn't frustration. It was his way of determining how hot the hub was.

He remained kneeling by the back wheel, his head bowed.

"Are you all right, Mr. Fu?"

He stood up and staggered, and then he grinned horribly at me. He seemed manic. He yelled that he was fine, and it was obvious from the way he said it that he wasn't.

"It is very high here!" he cried. There was dust on his face. His hair was bristly. His color had changed, too. He looked ashen.

After that, we kept stopping. The wheel noise was dreadful. But that was not the worst of it. Mr. Fu's driving changed. Usually he went fast — and then I told him clearly to slow down. (No one will ever make me sit still in a speeding car again, I thought: I will always protest.) Mr. Fu's overcareful slow driving unnerved me almost as much as his reckless driving.

This did not last long. We came to a pass that linked the Tanggula Shan with the Kunlun Shan. It was a Chinese belief that in a valley nearby there was a trickle that rose and became the great brown torrent that ended in Shanghai, the Great River that only foreigners know as the Yangtze. The river is one of the few geographical features that the Chinese are genuinely mystical about. But they are not unusual in that. Most people are bewitched by big rivers.

This pass was just under 17,000 feet. Mr. Fu stopped the car, and I got out and looked at a stone tablet that gave the altitude and mentioned the mountains. The air was thin, I was a bit breathless, but the landscape was dazzling — the soft contours of the plateau, and the long folded stretches of snow, like beautiful gowns laid out all over the countryside, a gigantic version of the way Indians set out their laundry to dry. I was so captivated by the magnificence of the place I didn't mind the discomfort of the altitude.

"Look at the mountains, Mr. Fu."

"I don't feel well," he said, not looking up. "It's the height."

He rubbed his eyes. Miss Sun was still whimpering. Would she scream in a minute?

I got in and Mr. Fu drove fifty yards. His driving had worsened. He was in the wrong gear, the gearbox was hiccuping; and still the rear wheel made its hideous ratcheting.

Without warning, he stopped in the middle of the road and gasped, "I cannot drive any more!"

He wasn't kidding. He looked ill. He kept rubbing his eyes.

"I can't see! I can't breathe!"

Miss Sun burst into tears.

I thought: Oh, shit.

"What do you want to do?" I asked.

He shook his head. He was too ill to contemplate the question.

I did not want to hurt his pride, especially here at a high altitude, so I said carefully, "I know how to drive a car."

"You do?" He blinked. He was very thin. He looked like a starving hamster.

"Yes, yes," I said.

He gladly got into the back. Miss Sun hardly acknowledged the fact that I was now sitting beside her. I took the wheel and off we went. In the past few hours the ridiculous little Nipponese car had been reduced to a jalopy. It was dented; it made a racket; it smoked; and the most telling of its jalopy features was that it sagged to one side — whether it was a broken spring or a cracked axle I didn't know. It had received a mortal blow, but it was still limping along. I had to hold tight to the steering wheel. The sick car kept trying to steer itself into the ditch on the right-hand side of the road.

Mr. Fu was asleep. This cycle of frenzy and fatigue was something I had seen before in China. It seemed a Chinese way of living: working very hard, with tremendous concentration or else flailing arms, and then stopping suddenly and going to sleep. Often in trains, two chattering and gesticulating people would crap out and begin to snore like bullfrogs.

I could see in the rearview mirror that Mr. Fu's color had changed, the sallowness had replaced his papery look of fear and illness. In sleep he looked calmer, and he had a bold snore. Miss Sun, too, was asleep. I pushed in Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 and continued towards Lhasa. I liked this. I liked listening to music. I liked the fact that the other passengers were asleep. I loved the look of Tibet. I might have died back there on the road; but I was alive. It was wonderful to be alive and doing the driving.

The road was oddly straight — few curves, no mountainside stretches, none of the alpine circling and hairpin bends I had expected. I had to force myself to keep my eyes on the road, because I kept wanting to look at the surrounding landscape. I was driving in a dry snow-flecked desert that was quite flat, and the snowy peaks at the edge were like the heads and shoulders of giant druids showing around an immense table. In the distance the mountains were vast and black, rather frightening, with sharp cliffs and flinty-looking slopes. But the road was even. It was innocent looking. No other vehicles appeared on it. It occurred to me that a person could easily travel down this Tibetan road on a bicycle, and I began to plan a trip that involved riding a bike around Tibet.

There were no people here that I could see. But there were yaks grazing on some of the hillsides — presumably the herds of the nomadic tent-dwelling Tibetans who were said to roam this part of the province. The yaks were black and brown, and some had white patches. They were ornamented with ribbons in their long hair, and they all had lovely tails, as thick as any horse's. In some places, herds of Tibetan gazelles grazed near the road.

Mr. Fu slept on, but Miss Sun woke up, and before I could change the cassette, she slipped in one of her own. It was the sound track of an Indian movie, in Hindi; but the title song was in English.I am a disco dancer!

I am a disco dancer!

This imbecilic chant was repeated interminably with twangling from an electric guitar.

"That is Indian music," I said. "Do you like it?"

"I love it," Miss Sun said.

"Do you understand the words?"

"No," she said. "But it sounds nice."

It sounded awful. I kept driving. I had no idea where we were, but it hardly mattered. There was only one road. The accident had made me cautious. I was averaging about fifty miles an hour. And the car was making such ominous noises I thought that if I went any faster it would fly apart. Mr. Fu woke up, but he showed no inclination to drive. I was glad of that, because it was glorious to be bouncing down this Tibetan road in full sunshine, past the yaks and the gazelles, with mountains all around.

At about four we were almost out of gas. Mr. Fu said he had spare gas in the trunk, in big cans, but just as I noticed the gas gauge, we approached a small settlement.

"Stop here," Mr. Fu said.

He directed me to a shack, which turned out to be a gas station — old-fashioned gas nozzles on long hoses. It was, like all gas stations in Tibet, run by the People's Liberation Army.

"We should get the tire fixed, too."

Mr. Fu said, "No. They don't fix tires."

In Xining I had asked Mr. Fu to bring two spares. He had brought one, and it was being used. So we were traveling without a spare.

"Where will we get the tire fixed?"

He pointed vaguely down the road, towards Lhasa. It meant he didn't have the slightest idea.

I walked over to the soldier filling the tank.

"Where are we?"

"This is Wudaoliang."

Names look so grand on a map. But this place hardly justified being on a map. How could a gas station, some barracks and a barbed-wire fence even deserve a name? And the name was bad news, because Wudaoliang was not even halfway to our destination, which was Amdo.

As if to make the moment operatic, the weather suddenly changed. A wind sprang up, clouds tumbled across the sun, and the day grew very dark and cold. My map was flapping against the car roof. It would be night soon.

"When will we get to Amdo, Mr. Fu?"

"About six o'clock."

Wrong, of course. Mr. Fu's calculations were wildly inaccurate. I had stopped believing that he had ever been on this road before. It was possible that my map was misleading — it had shown roads that didn't exist, and settlements that were no more than ruins and blowing sand.

Mr. Fu had no map. He had a scrap of paper with seven towns scribbled on it, the stops between Golmud and Lhasa. The scrap of paper had become filthy from his repeatedly consulting it. He consulted it again.

"The next town is Yanshiping."

We set off. I drove; Mr. Fu dozed.

Miss Sun played "I am a disco dancer."

After an hour we passed a hut, some yaks and a ferocious dog.

"Yanshiping?"

"No."

In the fading light and freezing air this plateau no longer seemed romantic. "This country makes the Gobi seem fertile in comparison," a French traveler once wrote. It was true. Moonscape is the word most often applied to such a place; but this was beyond a moonscape — it was another universe entirely.

There were more settlements ahead. They were all small and all the same: huts with stained whitewashed square walls, flat roofs, and red, blue and green pennants and flags with mantras written on them, flying from propped-up bush branches. As these prayer flags flapped, so the mantras reverberated in the air, and grace abounded around them. There were more yaks, more fierce dogs.

"Yanshiping?"

"No."

It was nearly dark when we came to it. Yanshiping was twenty houses standing in mud on a curve in the road. There were children and dogs, yaks and goats. Several of the dogs were the biggest and fiercest I had ever seen in my life. They were Tibetan mastiffs — their Tibetan name means simply "watchdog." They lollopped and slavered and barked horribly.

"There is nowhere to stay here," Mr. Fu said, before I could ask — I was slowing down.

"What's the next town?"

He produced his filthy scrap of paper.

"Amdo. There is a hotel at Amdo."

"How far is Amdo?"

He was silent. He didn't know. After a moment, he said, "A few hours."

"Hotel" is a nice word, but China had taught me to distrust it. The more usual Chinese expression was "guest house." It was the sort of place I could never identify properly. It was a hospital, a madhouse, a house, a school, a prison. It was seldom a hotel. But, whatever, I longed to be there. It was now seven-thirty. We had been on the road for ten hours.

We continued in the dark. It was snowier here, higher and colder, on a winding road that was icy in places. There was another pass, choked with ice that never melts at any time in the year because of the altitude, another 17,000 footer.

Mr. Fu woke and saw the snow.

"Road! Watch the road!" he yelled. "Lu! Lu! Looooooo!"

The altitude put him to sleep, but each time he woke he became a terrible nag. I began to think that perhaps many Chinese in authority were nags and bores. He kept telling me to watch the road, because he was frightened. I wanted to say, You almost got us killed, Jack, but to save his face I didn't.

I often mistook the lights of distant trucks on the far side of this defile for the lights of Amdo. There was no vegetation at this altitude, and the freezing air was clear. In the darkness I saw these pinpricks of light.

"Is that Amdo?"

"Watch the road!" Mr. Fu's voice from the backseat set my teeth on edge. "Lu! Loooo!"

His nervousness made him nag. He was the passenger. I was the chauffeur. They were both in the backseat now — he and Miss Sun — she was whimpering still, he was chattering. "Keep your eyes on the road," he was saying. "Watch the road! That's not Amdo — it's a truck!"

Now and then he would tap me on the shoulder and cry, "Toilet!"

That was the greatest euphemism of all. It was usually Miss Sun who needed to have a slash. I watched her totter to the roadside and creep into a ditch, and there just out of the wind — and it was too dark even for the yaks to see her — she found relief.

Three more hours passed in this way. I wondered whether we might not be better off just pulling off the road and sleeping in the car. Midnight on the Tibetan Plateau, in the darkness and ice and wind, was not a good time to be driving. But the problem was the narrowness of the road. There was nowhere to pull off. There was a ditch on either side. If we stopped we would be rammed by one of the big army trucks that traveled by night.

I was glad we were still going. Why didn't the back wheel fall off? Why was the axle still screaming? Why didn't we get a flat tire? After all, we were traveling without a spare. Nothing bad happened. The moon came out from behind a cloud and showed me a snowy mountainside and the black pit of a valley beside the road.

I glanced at it and almost immediately Mr. Fu yelled at me.

Towards midnight I saw the sign saying Amdo. In the darkness it seemed a bleak and dangerous place. I did not know then that it would look much worse in daylight.

"We are staying at the army camp," Mr. Fu said.

To save face, Mr. Fu changed places with me and drove the last twenty feet to the sentry post. Then he got out and argued with the sentry.

He returned to the car trembling.

"They are full," he said.

"What now?"

"The guest house."

Miss Sun was sobbing quietly.

We drove across a rocky field. There was no road. We came to a boarded-up house, but before we could get out, a mastiff bounded into the car lights. It had a big square head and a meaty tongue, and it was slavering and barking. It was as big as a pony, something like the Hound of the Baskervilles, but vastly more sinister.

"Are you getting out?"

"No," Mr. Fu said, hoarse with fear.

Beyond the crazed and leaping dog there were yaks sleeping, standing up.

Mr. Fu kept driving across this rocky hillside, pretending he was on a road. Was he trying to prove something, after hours of yelling in the backseat?

There were more dogs. I could take the yak-meat diet; I could understand why the Tibetans didn't wash; I found the cold and the high altitude just about bearable; I could negotiate the roads. But I could not stand those fierce dogs. I was not angry or impatient. I was scared shitless.

"There is a guest house," Mr. Fu said, grinning at some dim lights ahead.

It was a dirty two-story building with bars on the windows. I guessed it was a prison, but that was all right. We checked for dogs, and while Miss Sun threw up next to the car, we went inside. A Tibetan sat on a ragged quilt on the floor, gnawing raw flesh off a yak bone. He was black with dirt, his hair was matted, he was barefoot in spite of the cold. He looked exactly like a cannibal, tearing shreds of red meat off a shank.

"We need a room," Mr. Fu said in Chinese.

The Tibetan laughed and said there was no room. He chewed with his mouth open, showing his teeth, and then with aggressive hospitality he pushed the bone into my face and demanded I take a bite.

I took out my "List of Useful Tibetan Phrases."

"Hello. I am not hungry," I said in Tibetan. "My name is Paul. What is your name? I am from America. Where are you from?"

"Bod," the cannibal said, giving me the Tibetan name for Tibet. He was grinning at my gloves. I was cold — it was way below freezing in this room. He gestured for me to sit with him on his quilt, and in the same motion he waved Mr. Fu away.

It is a Tibetan belief that all Tibetans are descended from a sexually insatiable ogress who had six children after copulating with a submissive monkey. It is just a pretty tale, of course; but looking at this man it was easy to see how the myth might have originated.

He batted away Mr. Fu's identity card, but he took a great interest in my passport. Then he put his juicy bone down and fingered the pages, leaving bloodstains on them. He laughed at my passport picture. He compared the picture with my gray, frozen face and the wound under my eye. He laughed again.

"I agree. It's not a very good likeness."

He became very attentive, hearing English spoken, like a dog listening to footsteps in the driveway.

"Do you have rooms?" I asked. I held out a picture of the Dalai Lama.

He mumbled a reply. His shaven head and big jaw made him look apelike. I switched to Chinese, because I couldn't understand what he was saying. He took the picture gently.

"One person — six yuan," he said, clutching the portrait.

"Oh, thank you, thank you," Mr. Fu said, abasing himself.

"Tea, tea," the cannibal said, offering me a tin kettle.

I drank some salty, buttery tea, and as I did, a truck pulled up outside. Twelve Tibetans, women and children, entered the room, went into the corridor, threw quilts on the floor and fell on them.

I paid my money, got my bag from the car and found an empty room on the second floor. The light on the stairwell had shown me what sort of a place it was. Someone had vomited on the landing. The vomit was frozen. There was worse farther on, against the wall. It was all icy, and so the smell wasn't bad. It was very dirty, a bare cement interior that was grimmer than any prison I had ever seen. But the real prison touch was that all the lights were on — not many of them, but all bare bulbs. There were no light switches. There were howls and murmurs from the other rooms. There was no water, and no bathroom. No toilet except the stairwell.

Not far away I heard Miss Sun berating Mr. Fu in an exasperated and whining sick-person's voice. I closed the door. There was no lock. I jammed an iron bed against it. There were three iron bedsteads in the room, and some reeking quilts.

I realized that I was shivering. I was cold, but I was also hungry. I ate half a jar of Ma Ling orange segments, and a banana, and I made tea from the hot water in the jug I had brought. I was light-headed and somewhat breathless from the altitude, and also nauseated from the frosty vomit in the corridors. Just as I finished eating all the lights went out: midnight.

I put on my gloves, my hat, my extra sweater, my coat, my third pair of socks and thermal-lined shoes; and went to bed. I had been cold in my life, but I had never worn a hat with earmuffs to bed before. I had a quilt over me and a quilt under me. Even so, I could not get warm. I could not understand why. My heart palpitated. My toes were numb. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be Chris Bonington. After a while I could see moonlight behind the thick frost on the window.

In the middle of the night I got up to piss. I used an enamel basin that I guessed was a chamber pot. In the morning the piss was frozen solid. So were the rest of my orange segments. So were my quails' eggs. Everything that I had that could freeze had frozen.

I had hardly slept, but I was gladdened by the sunlight. I found some peanuts and ate them. I ate my frozen banana. I visited the cannibal (he looked even dirtier in daylight) and drank some of my own tea with him. He did not want Chinese tea. He made a face as if to say, Disgusting stuff! How can you drink it?

The frail warmth of the morning sun only made the place worse by wakening the stinks on the stairs and in the corridors. There were dark clumps and little twists of human shit throughout the building. In this heavenly country, this toilet.

Mr. Fu was up and fussing. He said Miss Sun was not at all well. And he felt sick, too.

"Then let's go," I said.

"Breakfast first."

"Oh, God!"

But he insisted.

There was a dead dog lying at the entrance to the smoky hut where Mr. Fu and Miss Sun had their breakfast: eggs stir-fried in yak fat. Other dogs cowered and barked. An old dead sheep was flattened on the road, as stiff and worn as a hearth rug. Across a frozen pond was the army camp. A few scattered buildings stood in the rubble of the settlement. Tibetans with crimson headdresses watched me walk down the path. I kept walking until the dogs started barking, and then I headed back to the main road. It was full of dead animals that had been turned into flat, stiff corpses — gruesome little mats in the road.

Another late start. But this time I did calculations on my map, estimated the distances between towns, figured an average speed, and felt much better until I remembered the tire.

"Did you get the spare tire fixed, Mr. Fu?"

He had said that he would do it this morning, before breakfast. Although Amdo was a dump, there were garages here; and it was the only place of any size for miles.

"No. Better to get the tire fixed in Nagqu."

That was over a hundred miles away.

Mr. Fu took the wheel. A few miles down the road he stopped the car and clawed at his face.

"I cannot do it!" he shrieked. In Chinese it sounded like a pitiful surrender.

It was another attack of the wobblies. I welcomed it; I soothed Mr. Fu as he crept into the backseat. I slotted Brahms into the cassette player and drove south, under sunny skies.

I was feeling wonky myself. I had a bump on my head, a neck ache, and a deep cut on my face from the car crash. My right wrist hurt, probably a sprain, from my holding on during our careering. And the altitude affected me, too — I felt light-headed and nauseated, and my short walk in Amdo had given me heart palpitations. But this was nothing compared to Mr. Fu's agony. The color had drained from his face, his mouth gaped, and after a while he simply swooned. Miss Sun also went to sleep. Crumpled together on the seat, they looked like poisoned lovers in a suicide pact.

There were no more settlements until Nagqu, nothing except the windswept tableland, and it was so cold that even the drongs, the wild yaks, were squinting and the herds of wild asses did nothing but raise their heads and stare at the badly damaged Mitsubishi Galant. After a few hours the road ran out and was no more than loose rocks and boulders, and more wild asses. The boulders clunked against the chassis and hammered the tires. We had no spare tire. We were ridiculously unprepared for Tibet, but I did not mind very much. I felt, having survived that crash, that we had come through the worst of it. There is something about the very fact of survival that produces a greater vitality. And I knew I was much safer as long as I was driving. Mr. Fu was not really very good at all, and as a nervous new driver, he had no business to be in Tibet.

On some hillsides there were huts flying colored prayer flags. I was cheered by them, by the whiteness of whitewashed huts, by the smoke coming out of the chimneys, and by the clothes that people wore — fox-fur hats, silver buckles, sheepskin coats, big warm boots. Miles from anywhere I saw a mother and daughter in bright, blowing skirts and bonnets climbing a cliff side path, and a handsome herdsman sitting among his yaks, wearing a wonderful red hat with huge earflaps.

Mr. Fu was very annoyed that there was nowhere to eat at Nagqu. He was stiff and cranky from the altitude, and reluctant to stay, but I pestered him into finding someone to fix the spare. This was done in a shed, with fires and chisels; and while this primitive vulcanizing went on, I walked around the town. John Avedon's In Exile From the Land of Snows (1984), which is mainly an anti-Chinese account of the recent turmoil in Tibet, and pleasantly passionate on the subject of the Dalai Lama, claims that Nagqu is the center of the Chinese nuclear industry. The gaseous diffusion plants, the warhead assembly plants and the research labs have been moved here from the Lop Nor Desert. Somewhere in this vicinity — though you'd never know it from looking at it — there was a large repository of medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles. But all I saw were yaks.

Snow came down like soap flakes, big damp things. It was only minus ten centigrade, but in the high wind and blowing snow it felt colder. I took shelter in a Chinese store and ate my jar of Golden Star pickled quails' eggs. I noted that a Tibetan woman was buying an orange plastic bag, and a middle-aged Tibetan man was trying out a blond doll. A metal key stuck out from between her buttocks, like an enema nozzle; he wound her up and her legs and arms moved. The man laughed and bought the thing.

On a back street of Nagqu I was accosted by some Tibetans who wanted to change money. They also had artifacts — copper tobacco tins and silver coins and Tibetan seals, for stamping messages or names onto documents. I bought a silver seal with a Tibetan motto that said, Worship the Sky for Enlightenment.

I wanted to hand out pictures of the Dalai Lama in this remote place, but to avoid attracting a crowd I followed individuals down the little icy lanes and, when there was no one else around, I whispered in phrase-book Tibetan, "Dalai Lama picture, Dalai Lama picture."

They hissed with pleasure as I handed over the pictures, and they always touched them to their foreheads before folding them into their quilted coats. They reacted to these pictures in a way that I found deeply moving. It was not their profuse thanks — though Tibetan gratitude was hardly ritualized: they were able to communicate great warmth in the simplest gestures. There was no question about their devotion to their god-king, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

They were like early Christians, and I was among them, encouraging them with little icons, spreading sedition. Virtually every Tibetan is a Buddhist and it is impossible to overestimate their love and respect for the Dalai Lama. The Panchen Lama, a political cleric, was in Peking, where he was reputed to be a member of the Central Committee. But this Dalai Lama had never capitulated to the Chinese. When he was attacked on St. Patrick's Day in 1959, he hurried away disguised as a herdsman on a horse, fleeing his Summer Palace, the Norbulingka, with thousands of his followers, while monks and warriors fought a rearguard action against the confused Chinese attackers. He has been in exile in India ever since, swearing that he will not return to Tibet until the Chinese have left.

Relations between Tibet and China had been uneasy from the seventh century (the Tang Dynasty) onward, and for the next 1300 years it is a history of patchy diplomacy, marriages of convenience and invasions (by the Chinese), using flimsy pretexts. Tibet was a sovereign country when the Chinese invaded in 1950. Tibet was also extremely isolated in every sense. There were no motor vehicles at all in Tibet. There were no schools (although monasteries provided education of a religious kind for novice monks and nuns). There were no banks. Money was not used much. There were no wages, for example — payments were usually made in kind, with barley, tea, yak butter and cloth. It was a medieval system, and the Dalai Lama had a divine right to govern. The class structure ranged from the nobility and a handful of rich aristocratic families to the lowest class of outcasts, whose single function in Tibetan society was to dispose of corpses.

The Chinese were eager to snatch Tibet and turn it upside down. "A good comrade is one who is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater," Mao had said. That exhortation had gotten Chinese settlers into Qinghai. Now the armies began to march into eastern Tibet. What good were swords and pikes against modern Chinese armaments? And when the Tibetans were overwhelmed, and they appealed to the U.N., and tried to publicize their case against the Chinese, the world turned its back while a Tibetan delegation signed a treaty that had been dictated by the victorious Chinese. No one had gone to Tibet's aid; and a few years later in the maniacal Maoist spasm known as Religious Reform, ancient monasteries were dynamited, monks were sent to work in factories, and all Buddhist rituals were banned, including all prayers and insignia. The Chinese believed that the liberation of Tibet was complete, especially when the humiliated Tibetans fought back in various uprisings in 1956 and were flattened.

Antireligious feeling in Tibet was a perfect frenzy during the Cultural Revolution. The few monasteries that remained were either pulled down or else used for secular functions. Pigs were kept in the most sacred chapels of the Drepung Monastery in Lhasa, and the Jokhang Temple, the holiest of holies, was renamed Guest House Number Five. Soldiers bivouacked in its chapels and cloisters. The Buddha statues were beheaded. The gold filigree altar relics were melted down. The Red Guards yanked down the ancient medical college, Mendzekhang on Chakpori Hill in Lhasa, and a television antenna was erected in its place. Except for the Potala, Lhasa was destroyed.

"It was a mistake," a Chinese official told me. He was not belittling the damage. This after all was a man who had lived through the Cultural Revolution in China. Part of the Great Wall had been pulled down and plenty of temples and monuments had been wrecked. The whole of China had been vandalized. So what were a few dusty shrines and painted statues to that?

What happened in Tibet was an excess. It was not an outrage in Chinese eyes. Many Chinese I spoke to could not understand why anyone would prefer an old Buddhist medical college to a tall new TV antenna bolted to a ferroconcrete block.

And official Chinese vandalism is unlike any other vandalism on earth. You imagine gangs of crazy chanting youths smashing their way into a monastery and kicking the slats out of it. But it wasn't that way. It was Chinese wrecking. When the order went out, Smash the feudalistic nests of monks! the soldiers, Red Guards and assorted vandals made chalk marks all over the monasteries — save these timbers, stack these beams, pile these bricks, and so forth. Brick by brick, timber by timber, the monasteries were taken down. The frugal, string-saving, clothes-patching, shoe-mending Chinese saved each reusable brick. In this way the monasteries were made into barns and barracks.

The Dalai Lama has stayed in exile, but some rebuilding has been carried out by Chinese who admit that wholesale destruction was a mistake. A little bit of old Tibet was given back. But schools were built, factories were put up, and army camps and gun emplacements sprang up everywhere in Tibet (in this way it greatly resembles Soviet-dominated Mongolia). And portraits of the Dalai Lama were banned. I was aware that in handing these pictures out I was breaking the law. But what the hell. They had nuisance value. They made the Tibetans happy. And they allowed me to feel like John the Baptist.

Nagqu has the only hotel worth the name, north of Lhasa, but even so I thought: Next time I'll bring a tent and a sleeping bag. Mr. Fu drove us out of Nagqu — perhaps a face-saving gesture, because a mile outside town he stopped the car and clutched his eyes.

"I cannot do it!"

And he slumped in the backseat.

I was happier than I had been since starting this trip on The Iron Rooster. I was driving, I was in charge, I was taking my time; and Tibet was empty. The weather was dramatic — snow on the hills, a high wind, and black clouds piled up on the mountains ahead. I also thought: I didn't die the other day.

Today, below the snowy and majestic Nyenchen Tanglha Range, nomads rode among their herds of yak, and the road was straight through the yellow plain. That tame road contributed to my feeling of well-being — it was wonderful to be in such a remote place and yet to feel so secure. Mr. Fu and Miss Sun were asleep in the backseat. There were no other cars on the road. I drove at a sensible speed towards Lhasa and watched the birds — hawks and plovers and crows. There were more gazelles, and once a pale yellow fox bounded across the road.

There was a sudden snowstorm. I went from a dry sunny valley, around a corner, into a black slushy one, the large cottony flakes whipping sideways. Mr. Fu, who was terrified of snow, mercifully did not wake. The snow eased; it became a dry flurry in a valley farther ahead, and then the sun came out again. Tibetans call their country "Land of Snows," but in fact it doesn't snow much and it never rains. The gales pass quickly. The Tibetans are not bothered by any of this. I saw children playing in this sudden storm.

I had wanted at the outset to reach Lhasa quickly. But now I didn't mind a delay. I would gladly have spent more nights on the road, providing it was not in a place like the dump at Amdo.

Damxung looked promising. It was at a bend in the road, there was an army camp nearby, and half a dozen one-room restaurants. We stopped and had four dishes, which included wood-ear fungus and yak meat, and Mr. Fu revived enough to accuse the serving girl of overcharging him — or rather me, since I paid the bill.

There were six soldiers in the kitchen, warming themselves, but they fluttered away when I tried to talk with them. Travelers in China had sometimes told me that they were harassed by soldiers or officials. This was never my experience. When I approached them they always backed away.

I found Mr. Fu spitting on the wheel to see whether it had overheated. He was kneeling, spitting, smearing, examining.

"I think we should stay here," I said.

We were watched by a small boy who had a playing-card-sized picture of the Dalai Lama tucked into the front of his fur hat. When I peered at him he ran away and returned without the picture.

"We cannot stay here. Miss Sun is sick. Lhasa is only one hundred and seventy kilometers."

"Do you feel well enough to drive?"

"I am fine!"

But he looked terrible. His face was gray. He had not eaten much. He had told me he had a pain in his heart. He also said that his eyes hurt.

"This wheel is not hot," he said. "That is good."

He gasped and gave up at a place called Baicang, saying he could not do it. I took over, and in a pretty place on a riverbank called Yangbajain, we entered a narrow rocky valley. It was the sort of valley I had been expecting ever since Golmud. I had not realized that this part of Tibet was open country, with flat, straight roads, and distant snowy peaks. But this valley was steep and cold, and half in darkness it was so deep. A river ran swiftly through it, with birds darting from one wet boulder to another. I saw from my bird book that they were thrushes, and the commonest was the White-winged Redstart.

When we emerged from this valley we were higher, and among steep mountainsides and bluer, snowier peaks. We traveled along this riverside in a burst of evening sunshine. Farther south, this little river became the mighty Brahmaputra. The valley opened wider, became sunnier and very dry; and beyond the beautiful bare hills of twinkling scree there were mountains covered with frothy snow.

Ahead was a small town. I took it to be another garrison town, but it was Lhasa, for sure. In the distance was a red and white building, with sloping sides — the Potala, so lovely, somewhat like a mountain and somewhat like a music box with a hammered gold lid.

I had never felt happier, rolling into a town. I decided to pay off Mr. Fu. I gave him my thermos bottle and the remainder of my provisions. He seemed embarrassed. He lingered a little. Then he reached out and put his fingers on my cheek, where there was the wound from the crash. It was scabby, the blood had dried, it looked awful; but it didn't hurt.

"I am sorry," Mr. Fu said. He laughed. It was an abject apology. His laughter said, Forgive me!

***

It is immediately obvious that Lhasa is not a city. It is a small, friendly-looking town on a high plain surrounded by even higher mountains. There is very little traffic. There are no sidewalks. Everyone walks in the street. No one runs. These streets are at 12,000 feet. You can hear children yelling and dogs barking and bells being rung, and so it seems a quiet place. It is rather dirty and very sunny. Just a few years ago the Chinese bulldozed the Chorten, a stupa which formed the entrance to the city. It was their way of violating Lhasa, which had always been forbidden to foreigners. Even so, the city is not crowded. The Chinese badly damaged Lhasa and hoped to yank the whole thing down and build a city of fine ugly factories. But they did not succeed in destroying it. Much of it, and some of its finest shrines, were made out of mud bricks — easily broken but cheap to replace, like the Buddhist statues that were made anew every few years, or the yak-butter sculptures that were expected to go rancid or melt in order for new ones to be fashioned. The whole of Buddhism prepared the Tibetans for cycles of destruction and rebirth: it is a religion that brilliantly teaches continuity. You can easily see the violence of the Chinese intention in Lhasa; but it was a failure because the Tibetans are indestructible.

Lhasa is a holy place, so it is populated by pilgrims. They give it color, and because they are strangers themselves to Lhasa, they don't object to foreign travelers — in fact, they welcome them and try to sell them beads and trinkets. Chinese cities are notorious for their noise and crowds. Lhasa has a small population, and because it is flat it is full of cyclists. To me that was a complete surprise. I had expected a dark, craggy city of steepnesses and fortifications, overrun by Chinese and hung with slogans. I found a bright little war-torn town full of jolly monks and friendly pilgrims and dominated by the Potala, which is an ingenious and distracting shape.

Half the population of Lhasa is Chinese, but those who are not soldiers tend to stay indoors, and even the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army keep a low profile. They know that Tibet is essentially a gigantic army camp — the roads, the airports and all the communications were a military effort — and they know that the Tibetans resent it. The Chinese feel insecure in Tibet, and so they retreat into a sort of officiousness; they look like commissars and imperialists but their swagger is mostly bravado. They know they are in a foreign country. They don't speak the language and they have not managed to teach Chinese to the Tibetans. For over thirty years they maintained the fiction that the official language of Tibet was Chinese, but then in 1987 they caved in and changed it to Tibetan.

The Chinese imply that they have a moral right to run the Tibetans' lives, but since the late seventies, when they began to despair of political solutions to Chinese problems, they have felt more uneasy about being in Tibet. They have no right to be there at all. The Tibetans themselves would probably have found a way to tax the rich families, get rid of exploiters and raise up the Ragyaba — the scavenging class and corpse handlers — and free the slaves (slavery persisted into the 1950s). But the bossy ideology of the Chinese compelled them to invade and so thoroughly meddle with the country that they alienated the majority of the population. They did not stop there. They annexed Tibet and made it part of China, and however much the Chinese talk about liberalizing their policies it is clear that they have no intention of ever allowing Tibet to become a sovereign state again.

"It feels like a foreign country," Chinese friends of mine confided to me. They were bewildered by the old-fashioned habits and clothes, and by the incomprehensible rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, celebrating the sexual mysticism of the tantric rites, and the hugging and fornicating statues illustrating the mother-father principle oiyabyum, and the big, toothy, goggling demons that Tibetans see as protectors. Even with the Chinese watching closely and issuing decrees and building schools and initiating public works, Lhasa is a medieval-seeming place, just like Europe in the Middle Ages, complete with grinning monks and grubby peasants and open-air festivals and jugglers and tumblers. Lhasa is holy, but it is also a market town, with pushcarts and stacked-up vegetables and dirty, air-dried cuts of yak which will keep for a year (grain keeps for fifty years in the dry Tibetan climate). The most medieval touch of all is that Tibet has almost no plumbing.

The pilgrims hunker and prostrate themselves all over Lhasa, and they shuffle clockwise around every shrine. They flatten themselves on stair landings, outside the Jokhang and all around the Potala. They do it on the road, the riverbank, the hillsides. Being Tibetan Buddhists they are good-humored, and because they are from all over Tibet, Lhasa is their meeting place — they enrich the life of the town and fill its markets. They come out of a devotion to the Dalai Lama, the incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. They pray, they throw themselves to the ground and they strew tiny one miao notes and barley grains at the shrines, and dump blobs of yak butter into the lamps. The very pious ones blow horns made from human thigh bones — a femur like an oboe — or carry water in bowls made from the lopped-off top of a human skull. They venerate the various thrones and couches of the Dalai Lama in the Potala, and even his narrow art-deco bed, his bathtub and toilet, his tape recorder (a gift from Nehru) and his radio. The Dalai Lama is worshipped as the Living God, but the pilgrims also pay homage to the images of Zong Kapa — founder of the Yellow Sect — and of the Lord Buddha, and of other Dalai Lamas, notably the 5th, whose great buildings dignify Lhasa. Pilgrims have made Lhasa a town of visitors who are not exactly strangers, and so even a real foreigner feels a sense of belonging there. Its chaos and dirt and its jangling bells make it seem hospitable.

Lhasa was the one place in China I eagerly entered, and enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave. I liked its smallness, its friendliness, the absence of traffic, the flat streets — and every street had a vista of tremendous Tibetan mountains. I liked the clear air and sunshine, the markets, the brisk trade in scarce antiques. It fascinated me to see a place for which the Chinese had no solution. They admitted that they had made grave mistakes in Tibet; but they also admitted that they did not know what to do next. They had not counted on the tenacious faith of the Tibetans, and perhaps they found it hard to believe that such dark, grinning people, who never washed, could be so passionate. Tibet has made no economic gains at all. It is entirely dependent on Chinese financial aid. The visiting Party officials stroll around looking smug and hard-to-please. They are mostly on junkets. Tibet is a junketer's paradise: a subject people, two fairly good hotels, plenty of ceremonial functions, and so far from Peking that anything goes. The Chinese reward each other with junkets and official trips — they often take the place of bonuses — and Tibet is the ultimate junket. But it is really for sight-seeing, not business. These Chinese officials nearly always look physically uncomfortable in Lhasa — it is the altitude, the strange food, and the climate, but it is also the boisterous Tibetans, who seem to the Chinese a bit savage and unpredictable — superstitious primitives if not outright subhuman.

The other aspect of Lhasa — and Tibet, too — is that like Yunnan it has become the refuge of hippies. They are not the dropouts I met years ago in Afghanistan and India, but mostly middle-class, well-heeled hippies whose parents gave them the airfaire to China. Some of them come by bus from Nepal. They seemed harmless to me and they were a great deal more desirable than the rich tourists for whom Lhasa was building expensive hotels and importing ridiculous delicacies — and providing brand-new Japanese buses so that groups of tourists could set out at dawn and photograph such rituals as The Sky Burial (Tibetans deal with their dead by placing them outside for vultures to eat). As Lynn Pan remarks in her analysis of recent Chinese history, The New Chinese Revolution, "it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tibetan culture, which has survived the worst that Maoism and force could do to stamp it out, has been left to be killed by tourism." But I had my doubts. Tibet seemed too vast and inaccessible and strange for anyone to possess it. It looked wonderful to me, like the last place on earth; like a polar ice cap, but emptier.

It took me a while to recover from the drive. My head still hurt from the crash. My neck had been wrenched. I still had an interesting wound under my left eye. The altitude gave me insomnia. I lay in bed in the cold hotel room, with my heart pounding, my pulse racing. Outside, I would sometimes forget where I was and begin running and have to gasp for breath.

I found a young Tibetan fellow who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the monasteries. He did not speak Chinese at all. He had left Tibet as a child with his parents — when the Dalai Lama escaped in the exodus of 1959, with his 70,000 followers. After his education in Kashmir, in Ladakh, and in various Tibetan refugee schools in Simla (he had been in India for twenty-five years), he returned home. I asked him what it was like being back in Chinese Tibet.

"It is all right. But my heart is not here. My heart is in Dharmsala — you know what I mean?"

"The Dalai Lama is in Dharmsala."

"That is correct. He is not here."

His name was Ralpa. It was very funny to see him addressed in Chinese. He smiled at the Chinese speaker and said, "No, no, no, no." He could not even utter that useful Chinese sentence that means, "I hear you but I don't understand you." Since the Chinese did not speak Tibetan, and rarely spoke English, Ralpa in a year of being back in Tibet had never had a conversation with a Chinese. I asked him whether it bothered him. He said no. He said, "This isn't China."

We went to the Drepung Monastery. Before Mao's Religious Re-form of 1955, Drepung had 12,000 monks. It was said to be the largest monastery in the world. It was a sprawling place of whitewashed buildings piled up high in a ravine on a hillside just outside Lhasa. It's nickname was "The Rice Mound." Its population was much reduced. It now had 500 monks, but they had returned to monastic life only recently. One I spoke to had spent the twenty years between 1959 and 1979 on a farm in eastern Tibet, digging vegetables. He was wearing thick brown robes.

"Did you wear these robes on the farm?"

"No. I had farm clothes. A blue suit. I hated it."

"Did you do any praying?"

"No. It was forbidden."

"How did you get back here to Drepung?"

"I heard that things were improving politically, so I made a request. I asked whether I could return to my monastery, and they said yes."

Another monk at Drepung was a muscular, broad-shouldered man with a deep laugh.

"I was in prison for twenty-one years," he said.

"What was your crime?"

"No crime!" His laugh attracted attention, and pilgrims stared at him, but he didn't lower his voice. "I protected the Dalai Lama at the Norbulingka when he escaped. I was fighting, you see, so that he could get away." He looked very pleased as he said this. "The Chinese caught me and put me in prison."

"Where was the prison?"

"Not one, but many prisons. They kept moving me from place to place."

"What do you think of the Chinese?"

"I don't hate them. I just want them to leave," he said. "But most of all I want the Dalai Lama to come back. Then I can die happy. I will be very unhappy until then, and I don't want to die until the Dalai Lama returns."

"Do you think he will?"

He said nothing, but his gesture was eloquent. He pressed his big hands together and shut his eyes and made a prayerful sign.

I gave him and other monks pictures of the Dalai Lama. Some monks approached me and asked in halting English, "Dalai Lama picture?" I was not the first traveler to pass through handing out portraits.

Ralpa pointed to a cluster of white buildings on the hillside.

"That is the Nechung Monastery, where the Oracle lives. But he is with the Dalai Lama now, in India."

"What does the Oracle do?"

"He meditates near the Oracle statue in the chapel, and he speaks for it."

He showed me the Oracle statue. It was a small doll on a shelf, robed, with staring eyes, outstretched arms and its mouth open as if in a shriek. It gave me the creeps. I wondered whether I was alone in finding most dolls of this kind rather distressing things.

The pilgrims at Drepung had come hundreds of miles — and in some cases more than a thousand miles — three or four days, jouncing in the back of a beat-up truck. They brought what little money they had, they brought all their children, and quilts and food; they brought meat and vegetables to sell at the market in Lhasa. I was impressed by the way these extremely poor people shared their food, and gave money at the shrines, and money to beggars. They even fed the dogs that hung around the monasteries in yelping, mangy packs.

We walked around, Ralpa identifying the various pilgrims from their headgear or their robes or their earrings, or the way they braided their hair.

At one chapel he said, "Do you see that Tara figure on the wall? It appeared all by itself. It was not carved by a human hand. One morning the monks looked at the stone wall and it was there."

I peered at it.

"You don't believe it," Ralpa said.

"I don't know," I said. It didn't seem any more absurd than the Mormon belief in the golden tablets and the Angel Moroni, and it was a good deal more tangible than the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima or the stigmata of those Italian priests who began bleeding every Good Friday.

There were more miraculous murals — and some spontaneous statues — at the Jokhang, Tibet's holiest place: Manjushri's head popped out of one wall, a Tara had sketched itself on a shelf, and a small stone buffalo had materialized in a corner of a chapel.

I had arrived near the end of the Tibetan New Year, which is a fifteen-day festival known both for its piety and its rambunctiousness. That was why there were so many pilgrims in Lhasa. The monks — about a thousand or more — had gathered at the Jokhang to chant mantras. They were led by an elderly bald figure called the Ganden Tipa, the holiest monk in Tibet and the spiritual leader of all these monasteries. He sat cross-legged and robed in gold, facing away from the monks. The monks fidgeted and laughed. Some chanted, others fooled and giggled. They were all ages — some were no more than teenagers, and some were women; but they had shaven heads and were robed like the men, and so they were almost indistinguishable. I watched it all from an upper balcony, where Tibetans tossed scraps of paper with mantras written on them to the monks below, who made piles of them.

Through Ralpa I asked a monk whether it was true that the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism was characterized by debating subtle points of theology.

The monk nodded vigorously and said, "Yes, yes!"

"Could you give me an example?"

"Yes. The abbot asks, 'Does a rabbit have a horn?' And a monk may stand up and say, 'No. A rabbit does not have a horn.' Then the abbot hits the monk with a stick and the other monks laugh. Another monk may say, 'Yes. A rabbit does have a horn. He digs a hole in the ground, and what does he use? Not his paw, but the nail on his paw. That is his horn.'"

"Does that settle the matter?"

"Maybe they argue a bit more, about whether it is a horn or not."

All this time, everywhere in Lhasa, the prayer wheels were spinning. Most pilgrims had the hand-held variety, a sort of upright pencil sharpener. The pilgrims plodded clockwise and spun the wheel — often very quickly, because the prayers uttered by the wheel (there is a scribbled mantra inside) are weaker than spoken prayers. These prayer wheels were usually copper or brass, but occasionally they were embossed with silver or else gilded. Prayer wheels were fastened in the temple enclosures — some were the size of oil drums and very hard to turn, others were no larger than nail kegs, and you could hear the flutter of the mantras in their innards as they spun. They had handles, they were greased with yak butter, and they were all inscribed in Tibetan and Sanskrit with the efficacious mantra om mani padme hum—the om is the most powerful and mystical element in the mantra, a combination of three Sanskrit sounds that sum up the three-in-one nature of the universe. These prayers are so sacred that just writing them or carving them in stone (the sacred om is frequently seen hacked into cliff faces) is regarded as much more pious than putting up statues.

Tibetan pilgrims thronged the Jokhang Temple, muttering prayers, prostrating themselves and gawking at the monks. They were from distant places, and they were dazzled by this Vatican of Tibetan Buddhism to such an extent that their pilgrims' piety seemed to vanish among the gold statues and lurid murals (of hell and heaven) and incense (sandalwood, cypress leaves) and dull, clopping drums. The pilgrims' eyes glittered in the half-dark of the cloisters, and these people took on the odd curiosity of tourists with their squints and stares, as if, so startled were they by the droning monks and the aromas and the drooping tankas, they had fogotten to pray.

Here, very recently, in the inner sanctum of the Jokhang, under the serene gaze of the holiest figure, Jowo Shakyamuni, the Precious Lord, the Chinese army had kept pigs, and the rest of the Jokhang had been commandeered as a barracks. They had been following the Mao dictum set out in the well-known essay "On Going Too Far": "To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded." That was the Chinese epitaph for Tibet. You didn't close the temples — you kept pigs in them. You did not simply shut the monasteries — you defrocked the monks, put them into factories and forbade them to pray; and you used the monastery timbers for chicken-coops. The Mao policy of systematic humiliation of traditional belief reached its apotheosis in Tibet. Now the Chinese admit to "mistakes… excessiveness and errors during the ten chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution," as the Chinese diplomat Zheng Wanzhen put it in his defense of Chinese policies in Tibet which he wrote for The Washington Post in 1987. The Chinese reiterate the sums spent on restoration work, but it goes without saying that the Tibetans will never forgive the desecration of their holy places and the impertinence of the Chinese occupation. Buddhism teaches restraint and moderation and propriety. The worst, most anti-Buddhist aspect of Chinese policy was that it stipulated that liberators and revolutionaries must go too far.

Rebuilt and restored buildings in Tibet have the Disneylandish simplicity of fresh paint and characterless frippery — and it is true all over China: the style is pervasive. Only the Potala was spared the philistine fury of the Cultural Revolution, and that was because Zhou Enlai intervened. But it was in the Potala that a monk showed me a series of monasteries depicted on an old mural.

He pointed to one monastery.

"China destroy," he said.

He pointed to another.

"China destroy."

He indicated six more and said the same thing. For this information I rewarded him with a portrait of the Dalai Lama. He clasped his hands and hissed at me.

"Dalai Lama come! China go!"

The Chinese have invited the Dalai Lama back, but he has so far refused to return until his conditions are met. It is unlikely that the Chinese will agree to the conditions, the central one of which is independence. Feeling is so strong in Tibet, and his devotees are so passionate and numerous, that he would not have any difficulty leading a rebellion. He is a peaceful soul, so that is unlikely. But even if any Tibetans attempted an uprising it would fail. The Chinese would crush it without mercy — and not out of revenge, but (as they would explain) for the good of Tibet. Party officials are happy to admit their mistakes in Tibet, but the thing they find hardest to understand is why the Tibetans are not more grateful for roads and buses and schools that were brought at great expense to this plateau. They say: "It's modern! It's progress! It's civilization!"

It seems like proof to the Chinese that they are dealing with sentimental savages when Tibetans say the roads and schools are just another Chinese outrage. But that does not weaken the Chinese resolve — quite the opposite. It just means there is much more work to do in this benighted place, they say, echoing missionaries and colonizers and imperialists and encyclopedia salesmen the world over.

The Chinese have a fatal tendency to take themselves and their projects too seriously. In this they resemble some other evangelizing races, spreading the word and traveling the world to build churches, factories, or fast-food outlets — the intention may be different in each case but they are all impositions. What the evangelizer in his naive seriousness does not understand is that there are some people on earth who do not wish to be saved.

The Tibetans were too isolated to understand what a very great favor it was for them to be admitted to the Chinese world: that is the Chinese view. But it is plain that the Chinese are themselves isolated and do not understand how deeply their version of progress and modernity is hated by many sensible people. Partly this is due to their insensitivity and the clumsiness brought about by their isolation. But their seriousness doesn't help — nor does it mean they are particularly watchful or wise, since seriousness can often indicate that someone is vacant and stupid.

Not much opprobrium was ever attached to the Chinese invasion of Tibet. In one respect the rest of the world did not care greatly. The prevailing view was that the Chinese were possessed of a kind of wisdom. How could such people fail the Tibetans? But that view accepts the Chinese as inscrutable, and working out their solutions in mysterious ways.

I do not accept Chinese inscrutability. I think, like many people on earth, they are knowable, and they are a great deal more scrutable and obvious than most. Now the Tibetans know them much better and would probably agree (as I do) with Doctor Johnson who wrote 200 years ago, "The boundless panegyricks which have been lavished upon the Chinese learning, policy, and the arts, show with what power novelty attracts regard, and how naturally esteem swells into admiration. I am far from desiring to be numbered among the ex-aggerators of Chinese excellence."

Tibet is so underpopulated that the Chinese have relaxed their one-child policy for Tibetans — it is also practically unenforceable in such a wild place. And the emptiness of the country means that any crowd of people is a novelty. That is why the Lhasa market is so busy: many of the people are merely spectators who have come to Lhasa on a New Year's pilgrimage and can't get over the sight of fresh oranges and bananas or the hundreds of highly ornamented Kham men swapping beads and necklaces.

The Lhasa market was the most interesting one I saw in China, because the Chinese have found it impossible to regulate. As a consequence, the traders sell everything they can lay their hands on, at whatever price they can get. There is a lively trade in antiques — silver, pewter, semiprecious stones, knives, swords, saddles, horse brasses and harnesses, whips, rugs, carpets, and more Buddhist paraphernalia than you can shake a stick at. Some of the objects are copies. Many are fakes. Some are genuine. I was offered a silver charm box — a sort of sporran studded with jewels. Tibetan jewelry is heavy and often handsome. Enough tourists have come to Tibet for even these country folk to demand hundreds of dollars for their strings of coral and turquoise. After I bought a silver bowl from a young man he saw me as a serious customer and lifted up his robe, giving me a glimpse of an antique gold statue of Tara. Everyone had rare antiques stuffed up their cloaks and sleeves.

I walked from one end of Lhasa to the other. The distance was not great — just a few miles — but the altitude made it slow going. I went to the carpet factory, the tannery, the boot and shoe factory. The bazaar atmosphere of the free market made it seem much busier than any of these industries. The factories operated at half speed, with abundant tea breaks and giggling employees and work-in-stoppage — a far cry from the sweatshops of Canton and Shanghai.

There are no suburbs to Lhasa. Walk for fifteen minutes and you come either to the mountains or the river. A yak skin boat, a sort of unstable coracle, takes people across the river. On the other side there is a sandbank, a gravelly plain and more mountains.

An early European explorer to Tibet burst into tears when he saw one lovely mountain covered with snow. When I saw the landscape of Tibet that did not seem to me an odd reaction. The setting is more than touching — it is a bewitchment: the light, the air, the emptiness, the plains and peaks. Dusty crags and steep slopes surround Lhasa, and on some of the mornings I was there they were covered with snow from flurries in the night. Tibet has none of the winding roads and black cliffs of the Alps, nor the impenetrable and dangerous look of the Rockies. It is a safe and reassuring remoteness, with the prettiest meadows and moors buttressed by mountains. It was, somehow, a mountain landscape with few valleys — a blue and white plateau of tinkling yak bells and bright glaciers and tiny wildflowers. Who wouldn't burst into tears?

I got used to the smell of yak butter. It did not bother me that the Tibetans didn't wash.

"The water is too cold," Ralpa said.

"Of course," I said.

It was much harder for me to understand the fresh-air fiends in Harbin who chopped holes in the ice on the Sungari River and jumped in.

"They will get sick if they take baths," Ralpa said.

"Of course."

They were very dirty, but the cold pinched the smell, and it was so windy the stinks were academic. And Tibetans wore such gorgeous jewelry and furs and coiffures that they did not look dirty. In the end, the only thing I objected to were the fierce and rabid dogs, and in particular those mastiffs they called dhoki, guard dogs. I kept imagining myself riding a bike down these lovely roads on a long peregrination of Tibet, and the vision was interrupted by a mastiff lunging from behind a rock and messily dismembering me.

While I was in Tibet I read in a two-week-old China Daily that the politburo had met in Peking and decided that Lei Feng was still relevant as an example to Chinese youth. The politburo issued a statement saying that Lei Feng ought to be emulated. This made strange reading in Tibet.

Lei Feng was "the rustless screw." He was a model soldier and fervent Maoist who died after being crushed by a truck in 1962. No one had really known him; but after his death his diary was found and it showed him to be exemplary. He wrote how he reread and adored Mao's writings. He worked night and day, so he said. One night he went without sleep in order to wash a ton of cabbages. He did not stop there, but spent the early morning mopping floors.

In the diary (which some sceptical Chinese have called a forgery), Lei Feng wrote, "A man's usefulness to the revolutionary cause is like a screw in a machine. Though a screw is small, its use is beyond measure. I am willing to be a screw."

Twenty-five years later, Yu Qiuli, an important politburo member, said that what was needed in China today was more of "the Screw Spirit."

It was very hard to imagine a laughing Tibetan in his homemade fleece-lined coat with four-foot sleeves, his fantastic hat and boots, and red silk plaited into his hair, and his silver charm box and dagger, with jeweled earrings and ivory buttons, hollering at his dogs and gnawing bones and tying ribbons to his yaks — this freebooting man of the mountains — saying piously, "I am willing to be a screw."

It was even less likely that a Tibetan woman would be so submissive. No women in Asia were tougher or freer. Polyandry was still practiced in Tibet — some women had three or four husbands (the men were nearly always brothers). I could not imagine such a woman in blue coveralls, washing cabbages and losing sleep for the revolutionary cause.

It was not in the Tibetan's nature to be a robot. As nomads and the descendants of nomads; as hut dwellers in the emptiest region of the world, they were independent, and they were a great deal more self-reliant than the Lei Fengs. They were nearly always smiling, probably because they were either heading somewhere to pray or had just returned — prayers seemed to put Tibetans in a good mood. They seldom looked tired. They were brisk but they never hurried. They never ran. Unlike the Chinese they never nagged. They had made Lhasa a town of jolly pedestrians. They walked in the clean air through spindly winter-bare willows. They often stopped to admire the mountains. The mountains around Lhasa in new snow looked to me as though they had been made out of starched and crushed bedsheets, a mountain range of frozen laundry. Farther off the mountains were higher, bluer, and softened by the deeper snow. The snow represents holiness and purity to the Tibetans, whose glissading spirits need this symbol of innocence to prove they are still free: such snowy mountains are proof of God's existence.

You have to see Tibet to understand China. And anyone apologetic or sentimental about Chinese reform has to reckon with Tibet as a reminder of how harsh, how tenacious and materialistic, how insensitive the Chinese can be. They actually believe this is progress.

And yet, even with the policy of going too far, and the turbulence and damage in Tibet's recent history — the bombings, massacres, executions "for economic sabotage," oppressive nagging, crucifixions, tortures, desecrations, idiotic slogans, political songs, humiliations, edicts, insults, racism, baggy pants, army uniforms, brass bands, bad food, forced labor, compulsory blood donation, struggle sessions and pink socks — the scars hardly showed. Tibet had a way of looking inviolate. The mountains helped, but the people's attitude mattered most. They had found a way of distancing themselves from the Chinese, and they had done so in the most effective way, by laughing at them.

The most serious development in recent years is the Chinese discovery that Tibet is a tourist attraction. Tourists want monasteries. Tourists want temples and ringing gongs. Tourists adore monks. So the Chinese allowed Tibet to return, at least superficially, to its spiritual slumber. The Chinese doubled all the prices in Tibet. They welcomed Holiday Inn to run their best hotel, and they promised to rebuild the dynamited Ganden Monastery. There is a trickle of tourists; China has said it would like to have 100,000 a year. In that event, the destruction of Lhasa might be assured.

But it is a hard place to get to — six days overland from Xian, or else a long and frightening flight from Chengdu to Lhasa's small and dangerous airfield, which is so far from Lhasa that people must go there the night before if they have to catch a morning flight. These difficult journeys are part of the reason that Tibet has remained untouched. And the altitude can make even a strong person feel unwell — your head is two or three miles in the air most of the time. But the main reason Tibet is so undeveloped and un-Chinese — and so thoroughly old-fangled and pleasant — is that it is the one great place in China that the railway has not reached. The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa. That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more.

Quite by chance I saw Mr. Fu before I left Lhasa. He was anxious to show me that he had overcome his horror of snow and his altitude sickness. He was being an exemplary Lei Feng for a change.

Was there anything I wanted to see?

"Let's go for a drive," I said.

He slipped on his driving gloves. We set off alone. Miss Sun was in her room, playing cassettes, wagging her head to "I am a disco dancer."

"It is a lovely day," I said. It was clear and cold.

But I had a destination in mind — a gateway that was said to have been destroyed by Red Guards. I had read a clear description of it but it was not on any of the maps. Mr. Fu drove. We went past the carpet factory, and easterly past a ruined monastery; past barracks, past ugly Chinese houses, past barbed-wire fences. Dead dogs were flattened against the road — the wheels of Chinese army trucks had reduced the corpses to hairy stains. The red flags that flew were not prayer flags, which repeated mantras as the wind made them flap; they were army pennants.