Paul Theroux - To the Ends of the Earth - The Selected Travels

“Want a picture of the Dalai Lama?” I said.

They nodded. Yes, yes!

The others heard. They said, “Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama!”

They dropped what they were doing and surrounded me as I pulled out the roll of portraits I had brought for just such an emergency. They were tough men, but they took the pictures with great gentleness and reverence, each one touching the paper to his head and bowing to me. They marveled at the pictures, while Mr. Fu and Miss Sun stood to the side, sulking.

“Everyone gets a picture,” I said. “Now you have a nice portrait of the Dalai Lama. You are very happy, right?”—they laughed, hearing me jabber in English—“And you want to help us. Now let’s straighten that axle, and get the wheel on, and push this goddamned car back onto the road.”

It took less than half an hour for them to fix the wheel and dig out the car, and then, with eight of us pushing and Mr. Fu gunning the engine, we flopped and struggled until the car was back on the road. As the wheels spun and everyone became covered with dust, I thought: I love these people.

Afterward they showed me little pictures of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama on the sun visors in the cabs of their trucks.

“Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama,” they chanted.

Mr. Fu thanked them in Chinese. It meant that he had to swallow his pride to do that. They didn’t care. They laughed at him and waved him away.

It was now early afternoon. It had all been a shock, and yet I was encouraged because we had survived it. It seemed miraculous that we were still alive. But Mr. Fu said nothing. When we set off again, he seemed both dazed and frenzied. His glasses had broken in the crash, and I could see that he was wild-eyed. He was also very dirty. Miss Sun was sniffing, whimpering softly.

The car was in miserable shape. It looked the way I felt. I was surprised that it had restarted; I was amazed that its four wheels were turning. That is another way of saying that it seemed logical to me, a few minutes after we set off again, that a great screeching came from the back axle. It was the sort of sound that made me think that the car was about to burst apart.

We stopped. We jacked up the car. We took a back wheel off to have a closer look. The brakes were twisted, and pieces of metal were protruding into the rim. At low speeds this made a clackety-clack, and faster it rose to a shriek. There was no way to fix it. We put the wheel back on, and while Mr. Fu tightened the nuts, I looked around. I had never in my life seen such light — the sky was like a radiant sea, and at every edge of this blasted desert with its leathery plants were strange gray hills and snowy peaks. We were on the plateau. It was a world I had never seen before — of emptiness and wind-scoured rocks and dense light. I thought: If I have to be stranded anywhere, this is the place I want it to be. I was filled with joy at the thought of being abandoned there, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

“I think it is heating up,” Mr. Fu said, after he had driven a hundred yards down the road.

He was breathing hard and noisily through his nose. He slammed on the brakes, ran around to the back wheel, and spat on the rim. It wasn’t frustration. It was his way of determining how hot the hub was.

“It is very high here!” he cried. There was dust on his face. His hair was bristly. His color had changed, too. He looked ashen.

After that, we kept stopping. The wheel noise was dreadful. But that was not the worst of it. Mr. Fu’s driving changed. Usually he went fast — and then I told him clearly to slow down. (No one will ever make me sit still in a speeding car again, I thought: I will always protest.) Mr. Fu’s overcareful slow driving unnerved me almost as much as his reckless driving.

This did not last long. We came to a pass that linked the Tanggula Shan with the Kunlun Shan. It was a Chinese belief that in a valley nearby there was a trickle that rose and became the great brown torrent that ended in Shanghai, the Great River that only foreigners know as the Yangtze. The river is one of the few geographical features that the Chinese are genuinely mystical about. But they are not unusual in that. Most people are bewitched by big rivers.

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.