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.