English (Core) · Ch 10 — Silk Road
Summary of the Lesson
Summary of the Lesson
On the morning the author leaves Ravu, his hostess Lhamo gives him a farewell present — a long-sleeved sheepskin coat like the ones the local herdsmen (drokba) wear — and his guide Tsetan teases that it makes him look like a drokba himself.
Tsetan chooses a short cut off the Changtang plateau that heads almost straight towards Mount Kailash but crosses several high passes that may be blocked by snow. Crossing the open plains, they see gazelles, a great galloping herd of wild ass (kyang) wheeling in tight formation, solitary herders with their flocks, and nomads' black tents guarded by ferocious Tibetan mastiffs that charge the car 'like a bullet from a gun'. The author recalls that such dogs were once carried along the Silk Road as tribute to China's imperial courts.
Crossing the passes
The track climbs beside a frozen river and grows steeper. Twice their way is blocked by snow: Tsetan first spreads dirt over an icy patch to get traction and drives across, then, at a second blockage, cleverly drives around it over rocky ground. Higher up the author's head throbs with the altitude; they reach the top of the pass at 5,515 metres, marked by a cairn hung with prayer flags, walk round it clockwise as tradition demands, and then career down the far side.
Salt lake, Hor and illness
They lunch at a salt-lake work-camp, relic of the ancient Tethys Ocean, then reach the shabby town of Hor on Lake Manasarovar — a sacred lake that had moved earlier travellers to tears, but which the author finds grim, dusty and full of rubbish. Daniel leaves to return to Lhasa. That night at Darchen, the author cannot sleep lying down: his chest feels heavy and a 'little voice' warns him he might not wake up, so he stays awake all night. Next morning a Tibetan doctor at the Darchen medical college diagnoses 'a cold and the effects of altitude', gives him a five-day course of Tibetan medicine (a cinnamon-tasting powder and pellets that look 'like sheep dung'), and after the first day he sleeps 'like a log'.