“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.
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 back seat, 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 toward Tibet I had a glimpse of a black and vaporous steam locomotive plowing through a dazzling snow-field 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 was an awful driver. 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 from being thrown across the seat. I could not drink my tea without spilling it. He was doing 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 got 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 were going to smash and die.