To the Ends of the Earth

This pass was just under seventeen thousand feet. Mr. Fu stopped the car, and I got out and looked at a stone tablet that gave the altitude and mentioned the mountains. The air was thin, I was a bit breathless, but the landscape was dazzling—the soft contours of the plateau, and the long folded stretches of snow, like beautiful gowns laid out all over the countryside, a gigantic version of the way Indians set out their laundry to dry. I was so captivated by the magnificence of the place I didn’t mind the discomfort of the altitude.

“Look at the mountains, Mr. Fu.”

“I don’t feel well,” he said, not looking up. “It’s the height.”

He rubbed his eyes. Miss Sun was still whimpering. Would she scream in a minute?

I got in and Mr. Fu drove fifty yards. His driving had worsened. He was in the wrong gear, the gearbox was hiccuping, and still the rear wheel made its hideous ratcheting.

Without warning, he stopped in the middle of the road and gasped, “I cannot drive anymore!”

He wasn’t kidding. He looked ill. He kept rubbing his eyes.

“I can’t see! I can’t breathe!”

Miss Sun burst into tears.

I thought: Oh, shit.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

He shook his head. He was too ill to contemplate the question.

I did not want to hurt his pride, especially here at a high altitude, so I said carefully, “I know how to drive a car.”

“You do?” He blinked. He was very thin. He looked like a starving hamster.

“Yes, yes,” I said.

He gladly got into the back. Miss Sun hardly acknowledged the fact that I was now sitting beside her. I took the wheel and off we went. In the past few hours the ridiculous little Nipponese car had been reduced to a jalopy. It was dented; it made a racket; it smoked; and the most telling of its jalopy features was that it sagged to one side—whether it was a broken spring or a cracked axle I didn’t know. It had received a mortal blow, but it was still limping along. I had to hold tight to the steering wheel. The sick car kept trying to steer itself into the ditch on the right-hand side of the road.

Mr. Fu was asleep.

Miss Sun, too, was asleep. I pushed in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 and continued toward Lhasa. I liked this. I liked listening to music. I liked the fact that the other passengers were asleep. I loved the look of Tibet. I might have died back there on the road, but I was alive. It was wonderful to be alive and doing the driving.

There were no people here that I could see. But there were yaks grazing on some of the hillsides—presumably the herds of the nomadic tent-dwelling Tibetans who were said to roam this part of the province. The yaks were black and brown, and some had white patches. They were ornamented with ribbons in their long hair, and they all had lovely tails, as thick as any horse’s. In some places, herds of Tibetan gazelles grazed near the road.

Mr. Fu slept on, but Miss Sun woke up, and before I could change the cassette, she slipped in one of her own. It was the sound track of an Indian movie, in Hindi, but the title song was in English.

I am a disco dancer!

I am a disco dancer!

This imbecilic chant was repeated interminably with twanging from an electric guitar.

“That is Indian music,” I said. “Do you like it?”

“I love it,” Miss Sun said.

“Do you understand the words?”

“No,” she said. “But it sounds nice.”

At about four we were almost out of gas. Mr. Fu said he had spare gas in the trunk, in big cans, but just as I noticed the fuel gauge, we approached a small settlement.

“Stop here,” Mr. Fu said.

He directed me to a shack, which turned out to be a gas station—old-fashioned gas nozzles on long hoses. It was, like all gas stations in Tibet, run by the People’s Liberation Army.

“We should get the tire fixed, too.”

Mr. Fu said, “No. They don’t fix tires.”

In Xining I had asked Mr. Fu to bring two spares. He had brought one, and it was being used. So we were traveling without a spare.

“Where will we get the tire fixed?”

He pointed vaguely down the road, toward Lhasa. It meant he didn’t have the slightest idea.

I walked over to the soldier filling the tank.

“Where are we?”

“This is Wudaoliang.”

Names look so grand on a map. But this place hardly justified being on a map. How could a gas station, some barracks, and a barbed-wire fence even deserve a name? And the name was bad news, because Wudaoliang was not even halfway to our destination, which was Amdo.

As if to make the moment operatic, the weather suddenly changed. A wind sprang up, clouds tumbled across the sun, and the day grew very dark and cold. My map was flapping against the car roof. It would be night soon.

“When will we get to Amdo, Mr. Fu?”

“About six o’clock.”

Wrong, of course. Mr. Fu’s calculations were wildly inaccurate. I had stopped believing that he had ever been on this road before. It was possible that my map was misleading—it had shown roads that didn’t exist, and settlements that were no more than ruins and blowing sand.