Into the bowl he ladled a quantity of gruel and laid it on the skin rug. He disappeared into the shack and came out holding an unglazed earthenware jar, dark-brown and long-necked. It held about a gallon of ewe’s milk, a little of which he added to the gruel in the bowl. He made no attempt at working out our seniority but handed the bowl and spoon to Zaro, who was seated nearest to him. Zaro ate a spoonful, smacked his lips and made to pass the bowl around, but the shepherd gently held his arm and indicated he was to finish the portion.
Zaro made short but evidently highly enjoyable work of it. ‘By God, that tastes wonderful,’ he exclaimed.
It was my turn next. The main ingredient seemed to be barley, but some kind of fat had been added. The sweet, fresh milk had cooled the mixture down a little and I fairly wolfed it down. I could feel the soothing warmth of it reaching my ill-treated stomach. I belched loudly, smacked my lips and handed back the bowl.
He saw to the needs of each of us in turn before he ate himself. To what was left in the cauldron he added several pints of milk and started stirring again, making enough extra to give us each another bowlful.
He took the cauldron off the fire to cool off, moving it with some difficulty because it had no handle, although I noticed there were the usual two holes in the rim. To our unspeakable joy he then produced tobacco from a skin pouch and handed us each enough for two or three cigarettes. Out came the pieces of hoarded newspaper. We lit up with glowing brands from the fire. We were happy in that moment and brimming over with gratitude towards a supremely generous host. And he, bless him, sat there cross-legged and basked in our smiles.
Away he went after about half-an-hour, refusing offers of help, to wash the cauldron and the precious bowl at a nearby spring. He came back, stoked up the fire and made us tea, Tibetan style, and this time we even faintly approved the taste of the rancid butter floating in globules on the surface.
I felt I wanted to do something for the old man. I said to Kolemenos, ‘Let’s make him a handle for his cauldron out of one of the spare wire loops.’ Everybody thought it an excellent idea. It took us only about thirty minutes to break off a suitable length, shape it and fasten it. Our host was delighted.
We tried to think of some other service we could render. Someone suggested we forage for wood for the fire. We were away about an hour and came back with a pile of stuff, including a complete small tree which Kolemenos had hacked down with his axe. The shepherd had been waiting for our return. As we came in he was finishing sharpening his knife on a smooth piece of stone. He had his two dogs with him again. He made us sit down and, with his dogs at his heels, strode off.
He returned shortly dragging by the wool between its horns a young ram, the dogs circling him in quiet excitement as he came. In something like five minutes the ram was dead, butchered with practised skill. He wanted no help from us on this job. He skinned and gutted the carcase with a speed which made my own abilities in this direction seem clumsy. The carcase finally was quartered. Salt was rubbed in one fore and one hind quarter, which were hung inside the stone hut. He threw the head and some other oddments to the dogs.
Half the sheep was roasted on wooden spits over the blazing fire that night and we ate again to repletion. We made signs that we would like to stay overnight and he seemed only too willing that we should. The six of us slept warm around the fire, while the shepherd lay the night inside his hut.
From somewhere he produced the next morning a batch of rough barley cakes — three each was our share. There was more tea and, to our astonishment, because we thought the limit of hospitality must already have been reached, the rest of the ram was roasted and shared out, and a little more tobacco distributed.
We left him in the early afternoon, after first restocking his fuel store. We did not know how to thank him for his inestimable kindness. Gently we patted his back and smiled at him. I think we managed to convey to him that he had made half-a-dozen most grateful friends.
At last we stood off a few feet from him and bowed low, keeping our eyes, according to custom, on his face. Gravely he returned the salute. We turned and walked away. When I turned he was sitting with his back to us, his dogs beside him. He did not look round.
19. Six Enter Tibet
I THINK IT probable that at the time we encountered the old man and his sheep we had not even entered Tibet but had come out from the desert into the highlands in the narrow neck of the Chinese province of Kansu lying along the northeastern border of Tibet. The time then was about the beginning of October 1941 and it was to take us over three months to cover about fifteen hundred miles of difficult country to the Himalayas. We tried always to do at least twenty miles a day. Often we did more. There were occasional days, too, when we did no travelling, glad of the rest and refreshment provided by friendly Tibetan villagers. The tradition of hospitality to travellers was an innate and wonderful part of the life of these people, their generosity was open-handed and without thought of reward. Without their help we could not have kept going.
It seemed to me that our resistance to the increasingly sharp cold of the nights was markedly weaker than it had been when we first made our break at the end of the Siberian winter. The ordeal of the Gobi had left its imprint on us all. We found ourselves plodding on after the reasonable limit of a day’s march had been reached in order to find a spot offering fair shelter for the night. On the other hand we sometimes cut short the scheduled distance on discovering a small cave or some other well-protected place. The gathering of fuel became almost an obsession and it became unthinkable that we should spend a night without a fire burning throughout.
In the mornings the ground was thick with white frost and it stayed for a long time after the sun had risen. The skyline to the east was indented with the silhouettes of peaks white-tipped with snow. As always, we wondered just where we were.
We came across our first village some five days after leaving the shepherd. We had been on the move for about an hour after dawn when I saw, over to the left of our course and up to ten miles distant, a smear of smoke. We were hungry, stiff and not very warm. We decided to investigate. We came down a hill scrub-covered on its upper reaches, giving way to grass of good sheep-grazing quality. As we got nearer we saw the smoke came from several fires and knew we were approaching some kind of settlement, hidden from us by the rounded shoulder of the opposite hill.
It was well past noon when we reached the village. The hill threw out a green-clothed buttress like a long arm and ten small box-like houses nestled there like a child in the crook of its mother’s arm. Each house was about twenty feet by twelve feet, flat-roofed with overlapping wide boards weighted down with stones. The roofs sloped slightly forward in the direction of the overlap. A few of the dwellings were backed by a fenced-in enclosure containing an outhouse a couple of yards square. The slopes around were dotted with dozens of long-haired sheep, some brown and some grey. We came in slowly on an almost due west-east track, frequently pausing to look round so that the villagers would have ample warning of our visit. We did not know then what reception to expect.
A closer view of the village revealed the presence of a number of children, some chickens, goats and the first yaks any of us had ever seen outside a zoo. At a leisurely shuffle, strung out in couples, we came near to the first house and stopped, interested in the novel spectacle of a man harnessing a yak to a high two-wheeled cart. He had seen us but had his hands too full with the task in hand to do anything about it. Half-a-dozen shy but frankly inquisitive children, the eldest about ten years, positioned themselves about the cart and eyed us. The yak, its long silken hair riffling in the breeze blowing through the valley, was being difficult and was doing its best not to be attached to the cart. Possibly it had got wind of us and did not care for the evidence of its nose. (I couldn’t have blamed it for any adverse opinion based on the smell of us!)