The bad news is that John Pritchard, ace sound recordist, has been examined by a doctor and found to have pulmonary oedema, an accumulation of fluid in the lung that normally occurs in small amounts at high altitude. He’s also showing early indications of pneumonia and must be admitted to hospital at once.
Later in the day we go to visit him at the People’s No. 1 Hospital, getting lost in a series of functional modern blocks separated by strips of lawn, which they’ve tried to cheer up with pagodas and play equipment.
Eventually find the Mountain Sickness Unit (largely financed by the Italians) and in a small, friendly ward John sits up in bed, a drip inserted into the vein in his right hand and an oxygen feed taped, rather ineffectively, to his left nostril. Even John, who suffers from almost terminal cheerfulness, cannot disguise the fact that he is in quite a bad way, though not as bad as the only other occupant of the six-bed ward, a young Korean with the much more serious cerebral oedema, or fluid in the brain. Both are casualties of the punishing pressure that the body progressively suffers as oxygen levels decrease. It can affect anyone who climbs above 8000 feet (around 2500 m), and no-one really knows why some suffer more than others.
We find a more congenial place to eat tonight. A small, Western-style, climber’s bar and restaurant called the Summit Camp a few doors down from the hotel, cold as the grave, but at least built of brick and wood rather than the self-important chrome and glass of the Himalaya.
Over a Tibetan pizza we have to face the reality that John will not be able to continue with the journey. A temporary replacement is coming in from Beijing, and until that time Pete will carry the tape recorder and microphone, as well as everything else.
Day Sixty Six : Lhasa
‘Thursday’, the mat in the lift reminds me, as I descend from my seventh-floor eyrie, in which a mobile radiator with one broken wheel is engaged in a life or death struggle with the air of the Tibetan plateau.
We make for the Barkor area in the heart of the old city, where a rabbit warren of side streets leads off a main square. In fact, the rabbit warren once included the square, which was cleared less than 20 years ago, ostensibly to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (as the Chinese renamed central Tibet), but also, some think, to allow the army easier access to the potential trouble spots of the Old Quarter.
A wide, granite-paved approach now leads up to the Jokhang Temple, the most ancient and holiest site of Tibetan Buddhism. Some of its remarkably modest stone walls date back to the mid 7th century, when Queen Bhrikuti, the Nepali wife of Songtsen Gampo, the unifier of Tibet, set up the temple on what was considered to be a powerful geomantic point representing the heart of a supine ogress. Much changed over the years and in the 1960s it was commandeered as a barracks for the PLA. Today, the Jokhang is once again a religious building.
A low, piercing sunlight bounces back off the flagstones and at first it’s difficult to see 30 or 40 figures, hidden in the deep shadow, prostrating themselves before the walls of the temple. Most have bed-rolls, on which they flatten themselves, using pieces of cloth or cardboard beneath their hands to push themselves forward. Then they stand, hands pressed together above their heads, in front of their faces and then in front of their chests, before prostrating themselves and beginning the whole process again. Many of them, Migmar tells me, will have begun their prostrations outside Lhasa, with some coming from up to 600 miles (960 km) away, and taking two or three years to get here.
They fight for space with pilgrims from out of town, with matted black hair and deeply grooved faces, who pause on their devotional walk around the temple to pull juniper branches from plastic bags and feed them into the two small kilns whose smoke drifts across the square. They believe the pillar of smoke that rises from these fires creates a conduit between the earth and the sky down which the Buddha can travel. A very old lady with prayer beads in one hand and a stick in the other inches painfully slowly past the temple entrance.
The Jokhang Square seems to be the social, as well as the religious, heart of Lhasa. There are Tibetans from the east with complexions like old, weathered wood, pale Chinese immigrants, Muslim stallholders in white skull caps and farmers wrapped up in greasy sheepskin coats, wearing Stetsons with curled-up brims, looking almost identical to the people of the high Andes. Bored soldiers sit at strategic points, supposedly keeping an eye on things. One is having his shoes shined while trying to figure out the controls on a new radio, another sits, with great concentration, picking hairs out of his chin with a pair of tweezers.
Migmar and I join the clockwise perambulation, which they call the kora, passing rows of stalls set in front of old houses with Spanish-style, wrought-iron balconies. We stop for coffee at one of them, the Makye Ame restaurant, hung with red, tasselled lanterns, which manages to feel very Tibetan whilst serving Jim Beam whisky, playing The Grateful Dead on its sound system and offering ‘Chicken a la King’ as Dish of the Day.
It was here, on the first floor of a corner house overlooking the Jokhang, that Tsangyang Gyatso, the sixth and naughtiest of all the Dalai Lamas, used to drink and entertain a succession of lovers. In his book Tibet, Tibet, Patrick French quotes a contemporary Jesuit priest’s verdict on the sixth Dalai Lama: ‘No girl, or married woman or good-looking person of either sex was safe from his unbridled licentiousness.’
As if that wasn’t enough, he also wrote poetry. Such apparently unrestrained love of life is not as incompatible with Buddhism as it is with Christianity, and later in the day we climb up to Sera, one of the great monasteries of Lhasa, to witness an activity that would probably be classed as highly eccentric in any religion other than Buddhism. Around 100 young monks gather beneath the trees of a shady, walled garden to take part in ritual arguing, a sort of verbal martial art. The idea is that one of a group has to stand and defend a proposition, which can be as provocative as possible (Migmar says he heard one monk arguing that there is no such thing as water) and the sitting monks must debate with him. Possibly because Sera has a long tradition of supplying fighting monks, the whole thing is very physical. The arguer, arms flailing, thrusts aggressively at his opponent and each error in the opposing argument is marked by a wide swing of the arm and a ricocheting slap of one hand against the other.
Old Lhasa can still be found - the Sera monastery was established in 1419 and the Jokhang Temple long before that - but new Lhasa is growing with an overwhelming momentum, and it has nothing to do with religion. This is a secular, consumerist boom, and from the lingerie ads to the health clubs to the main street boutiques with names like Ku-La-La, Eastern Camel and Gay Mice, it’s clear where the new influences are coming from. America, via China.
Take some food to John, as the hospital doesn’t provide anything. He now has the ward to himself, as the young Korean with cerebral oedema checked himself out in the middle of last night. John thinks he simply couldn’t afford to stay.
Day Sixty Seven : Lhasa
Woken this morning by sound of soldiers being drilled in an army barracks somewhere below me.
Down to breakfast, all muffled up. The usual little awkwardnesses as we try to communicate the difference between toast and a heated slice of bread to a bemused Tibetan staff.
Why we persevere with these esoteric demands I don’t know. Probably because Nigel has produced a pot of Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade, and eating Cooper’s Oxford from a limp patch of warm bread is like playing the Cup Final on tarmac.
We drive out to the west, passing the Golden Yak roundabout, where two of these great beasts are impressively mythologized, and a number of monumental government buildings. The six-lane highway is virtually empty, save for a rickshaw with a live pig sitting in the trailer behind it, and an official convoy of black limousines, which appears from nowhere and fades into the void ahead, sirens blaring and lights flashing as if it was trying to negotiate Fifth Avenue or the Champs Elysees.