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!"