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.
We continued in the dark. It was snowier here, higher and colder, on a winding road that was icy in places. There was another pass, choked with ice that never melts at any time in the year because of the altitude, another seventeen-thousand-footer.
Mr. Fu woke and saw the snow.
“Road! Watch the road!” he yelled. “Lu! Lu! Looooooo!”
The altitude put him to sleep, but each time he woke he became a terrible nag. I began to think that perhaps many Chinese in authority were nags and bores. He kept telling me to watch the road, because he was frightened. I wanted to say, You almost got us killed, Jack, but to save his face I didn’t.
I often mistook the lights of distant trucks on the far side of this defile for the lights of Amdo. There was no vegetation at this altitude, and the freezing air was clear. In the darkness I saw these pinpricks of light.
“Is that Amdo?”
“Watch the road!” Mr. Fu’s voice from the back seat set my teeth on edge. “Lu! Loooo!”
Now and then he would tap me on the shoulder and cry, “Toilet!”
That was the greatest euphemism of all. It was usually Miss Sun who needed to have a slash. I watched her totter to the roadside and creep into a ditch, and there just out of the wind — and it was too dark even for the yaks to see her — she found relief.
Three more hours passed in this way. I wondered whether we might not be better off just pulling off the road and sleeping in the car. Midnight on the Tibetan Plateau, in the darkness and ice and wind, was not a good time to be driving. But the problem was the narrowness of the road. There was nowhere to pull off. There was a ditch on either side. If we stopped we would be rammed by one of the big army trucks that traveled by night.
Toward midnight I saw the sign saying Amdo. In the darkness it seemed a bleak and dangerous place. I did not know then that it would look much worse in daylight.
“We are staying at the army camp,” Mr. Fu said.
To save face, Mr. Fu changed places with me and drove the last twenty feet to the sentry post. Then he got out and argued with the sentry.
He returned to the car trembling.
“They are full,” he said.
“What now?”
“The guest house.”
Miss Sun was sobbing quietly.
We drove across a rocky field. There was no road. We came to a boarded-up house, but before we could get out, a mastiff bounded into the car lights. It had a big square head and a meaty tongue, and it was slavering and barking. It was as big as a pony, something like the Hound of the Baskervilles, but vastly more sinister.
“Are you getting out?”
“No,” Mr. Fu said, hoarse with fear.
Beyond the crazed and leaping dog there were yaks sleeping, standing up.
There were more dogs. I could take the yak-meat diet; I could understand why the Tibetans didn’t wash; I found the cold and the high altitude just about bearable; I could negotiate the roads. But I could not stand those fierce dogs. I was not angry or impatient. I was scared shitless.
“There is a guest house,” Mr. Fu said, grinning at some dim lights ahead.
It was a dirty two-story building with bars on the windows. I guessed it was a prison, but that was all right. We checked for dogs, and while Miss Sun threw up next to the car, we went inside. A Tibetan sat on a ragged quilt on the floor, gnawing raw flesh off a yak bone. He was black with dirt, his hair was matted, he was barefoot in spite of the cold. He looked exactly like a cannibal, tearing shreds of red meat off a shank.
“We need a room,” Mr. Fu said in Chinese.
The Tibetan laughed and said there was no room. He chewed with his mouth open, showing his teeth, and then with aggressive hospitality he pushed the bone into my face and demanded I take a bite.
I took out my “List of Useful Tibetan Phrases.”
“Hello. I am not hungry,” I said in Tibetan. “My name is Paul. What is your name? I am from America. Where are you from?”
“Bod,” the cannibal said, giving me the Tibetan name for Tibet. He was grinning at my gloves. I was cold — it was way below freezing in this room. He gestured for me to sit with him on his quilt, and in the same motion he waved Mr. Fu away.
It is a Tibetan belief that all Tibetans are descended from a sexually insatiable ogress who had six children after copulating with a submissive monkey. It is just a pretty tale, of course, but looking at this man it was easy to see how the myth might have originated.
He batted away Mr. Fu’s identity card, but he took a great interest in my passport. Then he put his juicy bone down and fingered the pages, leaving bloodstains on them. He laughed at my passport picture. He compared the picture with my gray, frozen face and the wound under my eye. He laughed again.
“I agree. It’s not a very good likeness.”
He became very attentive, hearing English spoken, like a dog listening to footsteps in the driveway.
“Do you have rooms?” I asked. I held out a picture of the Dalai Lama.
He mumbled a reply. His shaven head and big jaw made him look ape-like. I switched to Chinese, because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He took the picture gently.
“One person — six yuan,” he said, clutching the portrait.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Mr. Fu said, abasing himself.
“Tea, tea,” the cannibal said, offering me a tin kettle.
I drank some salty, buttery tea, and as I did, a truck pulled up outside. Twelve Tibetans, women and children, entered the room, went into the corridor, threw quilts on the floor, and fell on them.
I paid my money, got my bag from the car, and found an empty room on the second floor. The light on the stairwell had shown me what sort of place it was. Someone had vomited on the landing. The vomit was frozen. There was worse farther on, against the wall. It was all icy, and so the smell wasn’t bad. It was very dirty, a bare cement interior that was grimmer than any prison I had ever seen. But the real prison touch was that all the lights were on — not many of them, but all bare bulbs. There were no light switches. There were howls and murmurs from the other rooms. There was no water, and no bathroom. No toilet except the stairwell.
Not far away I heard Miss Sun berating Mr. Fu in an exasperated and whining sick person’s voice. I closed the door. There was no lock. I jammed an iron bed against it. There were three iron bedsteads in the room, and some reeking quilts.
I realized that I was shivering. I was cold, but I was also hungry. I ate half a jar of Ma Ling orange segments, and a banana, and I made tea from the hot water in the jug I had brought. I was light-headed and somewhat breathless from the altitude, and also nauseated from the frosty vomit in the corridors. Just as I finished eating, all the lights went out: midnight.
I put on my gloves, my hat, my extra sweater, my coat, and my third pair of socks and thermal-lined shoes, and went to bed. I had been cold in my life, but I had never worn a hat with earmuffs to bed before. I had a quilt over me and a quilt under me. Even so, I could not get warm. I could not understand why. My heart palpitated. My toes were numb. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be Chris Bonington, climbing Menlungtse near Everest. After a while I could see moonlight behind the thick frost on the window.