To the Ends of the Earth

He did not reply, so that meant no. We continued this sparring. The snow was bad news—it glittered, looking as though it were there forever. But surely someone had a road report?

“Is there a bus station in Golmud?”

He nodded. He hated my questions. He wanted to be in charge, and how could he be if I was asking all the questions? And he had so few answers.

“People say the road is bad. Look at the snow!”

“We will ask at the bus station. The bus drivers will know.”

“First we go to the hotel,” he said, trying to take command.

The hotel was another prison-like place with cold corridors and squawks and odd hours. I had three cactuses in my room, and a calendar and two armchairs. But there were no curtains on the windows, and there was no hot water. “Later,” they said. The lobby was wet and dirty from the mud that had been tracked in. An ornamental pond behind the hotel was filled with green ice, and the snow was a foot deep on the path to the restaurant. I asked about food. “Later,” they said. Some of the rooms had six or eight bunk beds. Everyone inside wore a heavy coat and fur hat, against the cold. Why hadn’t my cactus plants died? The hotel cost $9 for a double room, and $2 for food.

“Now we go to the bus station,” I said.

Mr. Fu said nothing.

“We will ask someone about the snow.”

I had been told that buses regularly plied between Golmud and Lhasa, especially now that there were no flights—the air service to Tibet had been suspended. Surely one of these bus drivers would put us in the picture.

We drove to the bus station. On the way, I could see that Golmud was the ultimate Chinese frontier town, basically a military camp, with a few shops, a market, and wide streets. There were very few buildings, but since they were not tall, they seemed less of a disfigurement. It was a place of pioneers—of volunteers who had come out in the 1950s, as they had in Xining. They had been encouraged by Mao to develop the poor and empty parts of China; and of course, Tibet had to be invaded and subdued, and that was impossible without reliable supply lines—settlements, roads, telegraph wires, barracks. First the surveyors and engineers came, then the railway people and the soldiers, and then the teachers and traders.

“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.