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THOUGHTS, RANTS AND A

TRAVELOGUE
FOR THOSE SLEEPLESS, INSOMNIAC NIGHTS WHEN YOU´RE JUST MOOCHING AROUND AND YOU
DON´T MIND CHECKING OUT SOMEONE ELSE´S THOUGHTS AGAINST YOUR OWN...
TUESDAY, JANUARY 04, 2005 ABOUT ME
Ladakh, a travelogue C ER R O N EV AD O
VI EW MY CO M PL ET E
PRO F I LE
FAVOURITE QUOTES
PREVIOUS POSTS
Poetry is just the evidence

of life.
If your life is burning well,
poetry is just the ash.
- Leonard Cohen
NOTE
For those unfamiliar with the

location, Ladakh is a remote
high-altitude district north-
east of the main Himalaya
mountains and geologically a western extension of the Tibetan plateau. It
forms part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. It remains disputed
territory between India and China but except for a north-eastern chunk of it,
called Aksai Chin, which was taken by the Chinese in 1962, the rest of it
remains in Indian control. To the west of Ladakh is Kashmir, to the north-
west is Baltistan, controlled by Pakistan since 1947, and further north-west
is Afghanistan.
Chumathang-Nyoma Road, Eastern Ladakh, August 1977
I was twenty-one years old and on board a jeep moving across the high
desert of eastern Ladakh after leaving the silent, sun-blinded military
outpost of Nyoma. All day the four-wheel drive vehicle laboured across a
http://cerronevado.blogspot.com/2005/01/ladakh-journey.html 19/04/2009
seemingly trackless waste, deadly and pure. At the end of the day we arrived
at another outpost, a huddle of prefabricated buildings in a dead landscape
strewn with boulders as big as houses.
I sat alone beside a pebble-strewn stream, under a sky turned flesh and
midnight blue, spangled with stars like mica spots. Mountains bulked in the
distance, a torn and stretched black curtain against the luminous sky. I felt
tensely alive in a place that seemed so vast and so dead, not a bird, animal or
insect in sight. Yet I felt through the warmth of my body a strange oneness
with the cold, dead stone, the yielding, mirror-like water, the dark, limpid,
canvas of the sky, the brooding stillness of dark night clouds, the powdery
smell of dust and sand.
I sat in the twilight world between the living and the dead, the awakened and
the sleeping, the dark and the dawn, till all distinctions and separations and
discrete understanding were banished from my mind. I knew then that I
could never pass beyond the earth and the immense embrace of its spiritual
gravity. When I awoke from this emotional and perceptual fever, the stars
were just fading above the cold, cold hills and a jackrabbit stood a few feet
away, all tremble-nose and bright eyes. It was as still as a stone till it saw
me staring at it and fled.
It is one of the few occasions that I seem to recall I meditated. Not

deliberately, but just naturally. It wasn´t day-dreaming but a much more
alert and intense state. I felt extraordinarily alive. It was one of those rare
occasions when I could cope with not doing something specific, even just
reading a book, without getting bored. I felt that life was best when one felt
just like this. I discovered, for a few fleeting minutes, a genuine sense of
perfection. Of beauty, of sensation, of tension, of peace of a state of
awareness.
Arrival in Leh, October 1996.
In October 1996 I had an opportunity once again to visit the high plateau of
eastern Ladakh. I arrived in Leh by air with two friends . Leh stood at about
11,500 feet above sea level and the first night, like many new arrivals to
fairly high altitude, I slept badly. In the morning I went to the cold, bare,
concrete bathroom and looked out of the window to see dawn over the
mountains. It was a stunning view. The Ladakh Range rumbled across my
field of vision, brown fore-ranges flanked behind by snow peaks. Twenty-
one thousand-foot Stok Kangri raised her white-mantled head among many
other tall peaks like a queen surrounded by admiring courtiers. To the left, a
spur of the Ladakh Range darted towards us, like a rusty blade. In a sky of
luminous, soft blue, edged with flush-pink, a group of cumulous clouds
boiled dramatically dark. It was raining over that spur but the rain appeared
as downward smudges of black and grey, not anything you could see
moving, like the effect of an artist's hand deliberately smudging paint on
canvas to convey this impression, or the view caught in a still
photographer's lens: vigorous, natural movement, frozen in time. It was
worth more than a night's discomfort to experience this strange and
wonderful view, full of improbably colours, with at least two different
weather conditions visible in the same field of vision. The other part of the
view was huge, serene, bright, uncluttered.
A few days before leaving for the eastern sector, we decided to spend a day
in one of the villages outside the Leh valley. We were fortunate to have the
loan of a military jeep and we asked the driver to head towards the
monasteries of Shey and Thikse (Khrig-rtse) upriver. The sunlight was
wonderful, the sky clear with a few fluffy clouds to give definition.
Fifteen kilometres out of Leh, along a beautiful winding road fringed by

golden poplars and willows and bubbling streams feeding the Indus, we
arrived at Shey. We stopped beyond the monastery by the side of a stone
wall separating a bit of marshland from the village school. Shey was an
oasis of peace, silence, space and the most intense colour and beauty. Leh
had its attractions but to a jaded mood its bustle could seem tawdry and the
noise and hubbub could get wearisome. All this seemed very remote now. In
Shey, sunlight glittered on marshy water, drenching everything in liquid
gold. On looking up I saw an old ruined fort east of the monastery sprawled
along the crest of a steep, boulder-strewn hill. The pale, sand-coloured stone
of the fortress glowed against the gritty texture of the hillside from which it
thrust upwards like a fist in the sky which was a deep blue, so deep that if I
kept looking at it I felt as though I was levitating gently upwards and
disappearing into space. The outline of the fortress walls and the roof of the
buildings against the sky was sharp and abrupt between the intense swatches
of colour, making the forms appear as though drawn flat on a painter's blue
canvas. Beyond the road : golden willows and poplars, brilliant green
cultivated fields flashing with nuggets of water, a short-horned dzo quiet
beside a stone wall, her coat the colour of dark, rolling clay. Beyond: the
folds of the Ladakh Range, triumphant, like a rippling flag unfurled, snow
shining on the higher peaks.
We walked along the stone wall of the schoolyard swamped in heavy,

sweet,sun-laden silence. It was a long wall. Half a mile further, scores of
white, scarred chorten (reliquary shrines) stood like a troop of silent
sentinels on a low, uneven escarpment beyond a plantation of gold-leaved
fruit trees. I walked among the old monuments feeling oddly watched by
these impassive structures, overpowering in their numbers in such a humble
village. Centuries of human prayer seemed to emanate from the historic
relics, the way thoughts and feelings seem to whisper from tombstones in a
graveyard. The chorten stood in the sunshine bearing a faintly reproving air,
like retired guardians of a culture nearly forgotten, almost like ruins

themselves. This effect was enhanced by the loudness of the silence and the
fact that as I had chosen to walk on ahead while and were meticulously
contemplating and taking pictures, I was now utterly alone. My mood
picked up a strong contrast between the joyous optimism of the sunshine
and intense colour of everything around and the brooding quality of the
chortens. They looked like frozen figures about to speak but held back by a
spell. This emotional and visual trick imparted an uneasy and slightly
exciting quality to the peaceful surroundings. I picked my way among the
monuments, climbed over a low rubble wall and wandered among willows
and fruit-trees. Blue and gold were the dominant colours, blue of sky, gold-
orange and gold-red of the trees, and shivering white their elegant,
corrugated bark. The tall, blonde poplars and the red-headed willows
seemed as though they had been designed thus not for any practical purpose,
but simply to please, as though nature in Ladakh abhorred any clumsiness of
design. Every rough-textured stone and pebble, every green blade on the
earth, sprung up to meet the eye in an exuberance of form and texture and
colour. This was a place where the detail competed with the big picture and
the eye, unable to focus, to prioritise, and yet taking everything in, was
overwhelmed. Here among the fruit trees of Shey, light was love, beauty,
peace. The easy phrases, so glib-sounding and easily dismissed in more
prosaic surroundings, here came to mind with a vibrant sense of reality. The
cleanliness of the paths and yet their absence of prim, regulated boundaries
and smoothness of surfaces, the unfinished yet adequate apearance of
dwellings in traditional style, all strongly suggested a union of the forces of
nature and the hand of man. Little in the environment here appeared to be
wasted or abused, and if there was some such abuse, it was not much in
evidence.
I sat on a piece of broken stone wall on my own, looking across the grove of
fruit trees to a group of children and their teachers chanting lessons in
Ladakhi in the dusty courtyard, their voices soothing and clear-toned in the
sharp, dry, carrying air, impelling one to listen. The beauty and
reasonableness of life here, seemingly far away from the roaring misery of
the world, was like a cool, damp cloth on a feverish brow, putting a
sleepless man into a kind of restful, waking oblivion. Here, in Shey, I began
to see some merit in the much maligned idea of escape. I thought I
understood something of the idea that bliss is not some form of oblivion or
unconsciousness, but rather, an intense consciousness amid an absence of
pain and a near surfeit of beauty, perhaps closer to the Western paradise
than the Indian nirvana, to some minds. If only for a few minutes, I peered
through the gateway of my eyes and my other senses into the garden where
the flower always blooms on the branch and the fruit is always sweet. Then I
turned my head and saw the jeep that brought us to Shey, and the metalled
road linking Leh with the villages upriver, and the trucks lumbering
occasionally in both directions, and I was reminded that peace in Shey
depended on the village people living their frugal but adequate lives in
relative isolation and using old-fashioned, spare, but ecologically sound
technology. This peace was probably on its way out already, despite
appearances to the contrary.
The Tibetan Girl
I had very little meaningful contact with Tibetans in Leh. They occupy a
slightly tense place between Ladakhis, on the one hand, both Buddhist and
Muslim, and the Kashmiri Muslims of Srinagar and the Indians of the plains
on the other. I have always been interested in them since I was a little boy. I
used to go on holiday to my grandfather´s house in Kurseong in the
Darjeeling District. He had a Tibetan housekeeper and my younger brother
and I got friendly with his two sons. I had no understanding whatsoever
about political issues then (I was about twelve and not very politically
aware) but I knew that Tibetans and Chinese didn´t get along. I didn´t know
that China forcibly occupied Tibet in 1950, and slaughtered one million
people out of a total population of six million, and Tibet remains the
longest-running genocide which the world has chosen to turn a blind eye to
as everyone is so anxious for trade with big and powerful China. One day I
fished out a Chinese stamp out of stamp collection (yes, a lot of boys
collected stamps when I was young!) and showed it to the elder son,
Kesang. His face turned red and he spat on the ground. Then he wrenched
the stamp out of my hand and stamped his boot on it. My education aout
what happened to the Tibetans began on that day. It was 1968.
The only chance I got to meet Tibetans in Ladakh on my last visit in 1996
was towards the end of the trip and there was no time to build on it. I used to
walk occasionally from our government accommodation two kilometres out
of town to a Tibetan restaurant in the centre of Leh. It was a typically small,
dark, slightly secretive little place, with rough wooden chairs and tables, and
Tibetan posters and calendars on the walls. An open courtyard separated the
eating area from the kitchen where Tibetan, Indian and European-style food
was cooked. Apart from excellent Tibetan and Chinese dishes, they did a
great line in deep-fried potato chips, thick and steamy like English fish-and-
chips. Whenever we went there we always found Westerners. It was the sort
of place where it was impossible not to overhear other people's
conversations and, inevitably, to get drawn into some of them unless one
maintained a resolute social distance from one's fellow diners. Plenty of
locals used the place as well. Some of the posters were political, dedicated
to supporting the Dalai Lama and the cause of Tibetan freedom. It was run
by a young couple, perhaps in their late twenties or early thirties. The young
man wore glasses and had a faintly academic air, incongruous with his
chef's apron. The woman wore jeans and tee-shirt and was beautiful in a
fragile sort of way with long, shoulder-length hair, a delicate heart-shaped
face and large eyes.
Initially, there seemed to be no possibility of interaction beyond ordering

our food and being served. The man never hung around the cashier's table
much; he was usually away in the kitchen and the young woman did most of
the serving and interacting with the customers. The young woman's manner
was brisk and to the point and she did not hang about much while we were
there, or indeed, any other outsiders including Westerners. I had a distinct
impression that she and her young man would rather be doing something
else if they had the opportunity, perhaps something making use of higher
education and advanced skills, something professional perhaps. Other
people in the restaurant tended to be rather silent or spoke in low voices,
enhancing the slightly conspiratorial air I had initially noticed when we first
visited the restaurant. We also started by speaking in whispers but after a
couple of visits this furtive approach seemed to lessen the enjoyment of the
good food so we became rather more expansive.
Our conversations could be easily overheard by everyone else in the small

restaurant. Some people listened in and occasionally someone would join in
though generally, the Westerners seemed to be very cautious about
interacting with me and my two Indian companions. There definitely
seemed to be a barrier between the Western visitors and ourselves. I suppose
we must have appeared like the sort of city-bred Indian tourists who just
didn´t "understand and appreciate" Ladakh - whereas they, of course, did.
One or two attempts I made to draw Westerners into conversations we were
having met with stiff or embarrassed responses.
All the time, the young Tibetan woman proprietor stood about listening,
either behind her cashier's desk or, more often, at the doorway to the
courtyard, with a rough cloth curtain partly drawn between us . She had
been watching us from the kitchen corner for several days. On the
penultimate occasion that we visited her restaurant, a few days before
leaving Leh, she suddenly approached our table and handed us a leaflet
asking for charitable donations to help Tibetan refugees in Ladakh improve
their conditions and to start self-help projects. Between the three of us we
gave several hundred rupees, a good cash donation within our very limited
funds at the tail end of our trip. I also asked her if she knew somewhere in
Leh where I could get Tibetan freedom posters and stickers as I would use
them in England. With her advice, I eventually managed to track down a
small shop in the Leh bazaar and obtained some of these stickers.
The very last time we visited the restaurant, we had a good meal, left a
generous tip and we were about to leave. I was about to go, gathering up my
shoulder bag and camera, when the young woman came upto my table and
hesitantly started a conversation. She wanted to know where we were from,
what we had done and enjoyed during our trip to Ladakh etc. etc. I started to
tell her a little bit about what we were doing, that we were taking pictures, I
was hoping to keep up a diary of our trip, that we had enjoyed her food. I
started asking her about the life of Tibetan people in Ladakh and wanted to
know what she thought but knew I no longer had the time to explore this
properly. Her replies were cautious, hesitant, she was obviously not sure
whether speaking freely was a good idea. I said that unfortunately I should
have asked her earlier, tried to establish some communication, that it was
my fault but now we had no time left and had to leave Ladakh. Reluctantly,
we shook hands and with mutual expressions of good will I left. Her face
had a look of resignation and slight disappointment. I think she had a great
deal she wanted to say, and that it would be easier with a stranger like me
who would go away and not trouble her again, than with people round about
whom she knew. Perhaps she felt that a stranger like me, and Indian
perhaps, but from outside India, would be able to understand some things
that other people round her - except for her husband - would not. These
things I sensed, they were not articulated verbally, they came across in
expression, gesture, body language. As I walked away I saw her standing at
the entrance of the restaurant, down a small alley, looking intently in my
direction. Once again I felt that I had failed to conquer my diffidence and
hesitation, that I should have found a way to turn back and pursue the
communication, to learn about something that I had the opportunity to learn,
but I did not.
Tendzin, the shepherd-nomad and I
Idealistic Western visitors have their biases and

enthusiasms which also romanticise and, in doing so,
patronise. To them, Ladakhis are sophisticated in spiritual
gifts but simple in material things and technology. Within
this overlap, however, there is room for re-evaluation and
a better mutual appreciation on both sides. To Indians,
however, determinedly bent on a modernisation course,
Ladakhis are just plain backward. I have never heard an
Indian say that India has something to learn from Ladakh,
whereas plenty of Westerners are saying that they could
learn something. With Westerners, and despite all the
caveats and resentments I have heard expressed from
Ladakhis, I think the Ladakhis are in some respects freer
to be themselves.
Tendzin, a young farmer I met in Leh, told me about his

life in the village, his deep feeling for the land, the
spiritual joy of hard work in the fields, the uncertainties
and dangers of a life at the mercy of the elements, his
close relationship with his grandfather whom he admired
and revered, who was now old and wanted to keep

Tendzin at home. He told me of his desire to go away,
back into India where he had got his college education, to
become a film director and express his feelings and
thoughts for his land and people in an age of rapid change.
He also spoke of his difficult relationship with his father
who he respected but whose consevative views frustrated
him.
My background was very different, city-bred, food

appearing not out of the earth but as if by magic in
markets and thence to the kitchen table, my life lived in
various parts of the world, my sense of self a bricolage
cobbled together from various places, a coat of many
colours. His sense of self was as rooted as the earth that
nurtured him, with him from the day he was born. Now he
looked outside as well as in. I do not think I had any clear
ideas about myself until I was over thirty. I had my own
kind of growth from the outside back in. It greatly moved
me that though we had different things to say, neither
needed to be something other than what we already were,
neither sought some other state of being than what was
already within the individual concerned. There was a kind
of basic acceptance of what the other person was, different
in many respects but with points of mutual comprehension
in others. and joined the conversation and contributed
greatly to expanding some of the things Tendzin and I had
touched on.
The conversation carried on throughout the day. It was

interrupted by a dreamy, vividly remembered walk over a
hillside, covered in marshy clumps of grass to the edge of
a cold, powerful stream. and lagged behind again, perhaps
looking for things to photograph or perhaps even sensing
that I was trying to get through some things with Tendzin
on his own. Late afternoon sunlight glowed on the yellow
grass and the glistening marshy water. Looking down from
the stream, I saw and heard the buzzing fields, the hillside,
the lowing yaks, the occasional tinkling bells of goats.
Among them, the dazzling white of the farmhouses, two-
storied, and with the Tibetan-style wooden-shuttered
windows and painted borders angled pyramidically
inwards, so characteristic of the tradional style. Here, in
this village, it was kept up without any apparent self-
consciousness. The buildings all looked quite old. Beyond,
the half-hidden, clustered silhouettes of other villages,
Karzu, Samkar, Yuthung, Leh out of sight behind the fold

of a huge hill. Willow and poplars waved streaming
blonde heads in the sunshine. Beyond them, the far valley
across from the hidden Indus, violet, purple, sienna and
soft blue mountains, the highest peaks of the Ladakh
Range topped with snow. Above, the sky, a dreamy, easy,
unquestioning blue, like a summer sky in England.
Tendzin decided to take a bath in the stream. I contented
myself with rolling up my trousers to above knee length
and plunging in. The stream was as cold as it looked and
after stepping out, my feet and lower legs were flushed
red. I was glad I had not considered a full dip. Tendzin
seemed to relish the dip and rubbed himself down
vigorously while a cold wind coming from the hills to the
north began whistling down. Here, on the hill by the
stream, Tendzin was really very much a countryman, a
local farmer by conditioning, and the signs of his
acclimatisation to the easier and more sophisticated life of
the Indian city were few, though important : his Delhi
University accent when he spoke in English, his excellent
grasp of Hindi, and his habit of smoking tobacco and
grass. He gave an impression of having acquired from
Indian city life only what he found interesting and useful
after due consideration.
We sat on tussocks of nearly dry grass among lumpy white

boulders and spread out our lunch - parathas, curried
vegetables, processed cheese, beer. Above, the sky began
to fill up with dark clouds rumbling in over the hard, bare
brown hills to the north. suddenly noticed the figure of a
man coming in from the hills upstream. We turned to look
and saw a tiny, indistinct figure, scarcely more than a dot.
The figure was approaching with great speed and within a
couple of minutes, became distinguishable as a man,
moving over the rough, steep, boulders and pebble-strewn
hillside in a fast, rolling gait. Within five or six minutes
we could see that he was wearing the dark purple gonchha
(woollen gown) tied with a cloth cummerbund at the
waist, traditional in these parts. By the time he was within
twenty yards of us, more interesting details became
apparent. He wore a Mongolian fur hat, the ear flaps taken
up and fastened to the headpiece in the characteristic
fashion of the nomadic clans. He wore knee-length
rawhide boots, reinforced with leather thongs and chased
with worked silver along the flanks. In one hand, he
carried some sort of long, whip-like object, looped into a
double-length. His lined, leathery face suggested an age of

sixty but he was probably not much more than forty-five.
He had high cheekbones and a wispy beard and
moustaches. His eyes, elongated, were hidden almost
completely in their epicanthic folds as his face creased into
a friendly, but slightly wary, smile. There was a strange
minutes' silence when the nomad approached and stood
before us and we sat or half stood facing him. It was an
infrequent, but characteristic type of moment we
encountered occasionally in Ladakh, when we met very
simple people who had few of the trappings of modern life
about them, and faced us without any attempt to pose, to
present themselves in a certain way. The effect is
distinctive and a little startling and I feel certain that it has
something in common with encounters with simple,
traditional people elsewhere in the world. There is a lack
of pretension or artifice about them, of either pride or
humility, just a way of confronting you with themselves,
looking you straight in the eye, neither challenging nor
calculating. There seems to be no hidden agenda, no
impression that one is needed and being worked on. To us
city people it created a feeling of mystery, magic almost,
and of having encountered somebody who knows how to
be what they are, whereas we are always trying to make
ourselves be what we are really not because the exigencies
of sophisticated life require it at all times; we have been
role-playing false personas for so long that we have
forgotten how to be ourselves.
No one spoke, there was a slight tension in the air, but it

was not an unfriendly tension, more, a kind of
anticipation. The wind stirred. Time stood still for the
minute or so in which all this seemed to take place, like
slow-motion photography, with all the details clear and
measured. I could hear the gurgle of the stream. Sunlight
glinted off the metal surfaces of our eating utensils.
Instinctively, I grasped a boiled egg and held it out to the
nomad in a gesture of welcome and to join us and eat. The
nomad looked at me slowly, searchingly, then at Tendzin,
an expression of enquiry on his face. There was no verbal
reply but Tendzin made a slight gesture with his head. The
nomad took the egg in a large, calloused hand, paused
briefly and smiled, then stood back straight and carefully,
almost reverently, placed it in the folds of his gonchha. He
refused to take any other food but and , through Tendzin,
persuaded the nomad to have his photograph taken. He
acquiesced and stood straight and relaxed. I could not

resist the urge myself, and took a couple of shots. We
wanted to know what the whip-like object was. Through
Tendzin as an interpreter, we asked him. The nomad
chuckled and offered to give us a demonstration. He took a
stone about the size of a man's palm, and placed it in the
loop of the sling - for that is what it turned out to be - and
then pointed to a pinkish boulder among a lot of white and
gray boulders about fifty or sixty yards away. It looked, at
this distance, not much bigger than a large stone itself. He
then whipped the swing round in a hard, very fast motion
and a moment later we saw a puff of rock powder coming
off the pink boulder followed by a tremendous crack like a
rifle shot. The bang reverberated round the hills and in its
wake, a small pile of little stones came slithering down a
scree slope. There was a moment's silence. It was clear
that the sling may have looked like a primitive weapon,
but when used with force and accuracy of this kind, it was
as deadly as a firearm. The nomad laughed heartily and
looped it round again and stuffed the end into his
cummerbund, at the hip. He explained to us through
Tendzin that he was a shepherd and used the sling to deter
wolves. After exchanging a few more words with Tendzin,
he smiled round at all of us and shook our hands warmly
and then moved off, back up the rough, brown hills, in that
fast, rolling motion that within a few minutes, rendered
him once more a little dot in the distance.
A few minutes later we packed up our lunch and started

making our way back to the village. Around us, the red-
brown hills loomed, hard against the sky. Their pinnacles
must have been two to three thousand feet above us and
rose so steeply from the narrow valley that to see their tops
one had to look almost vertically up. The dark clouds were
mingled with pale grey, pinkish and pearly white cumulus.
They were moving swiftly and golden light wallowed
through them. Choughs flitted among the clouds, little,
dark, fast-moving birds, indistinct and slightly batlike at
that distance. , whose eyes were the keenest, pointed out to
me a line of sheep walking the crest of one of the hills. I
craned upwards and screwed up my eyes to see and for a
few moments, saw nothing. Then suddenly the pattern
emerged: I must have detected the movement first. A line
of tiny white specks were negotiating the crest of the
mountain. The crest of the hill was a long row of hundreds
of small, needle points, like crocodile teeth. Clouds moved
swiftly, seemingly just above the crest of the hill, like a

patchwork quilt just unfurled and about to come down. I
stared at this giddy vision and I could feel my sense of
balance going. The idea of any animal actually standing or
walking up there, looking down thousands of feet of
nearly sheer drop, head in the clouds, made me feel
slightly sick. Despite my attraction to mountains I have
never had a head for heights. I dismissed the thought of
falling by telling myself that they were, after all, sheep,
who could and would do, without much trepidation, what a
man would not. Then I remembered that behind the sheep
must be the shepherd. I asked Tendzin about it. He grinned
and confirmed that the sheep belonged to the nomad we
had just met and he was making for most of the way up to
the top. After another hour he would lead his sheep down
to an evening bivouac somewhere in the hills.
When we arrived back in the village, Tendzin led us to a

two-storied farmhouse, nestled among flame-leaved trees.
It was a traditional-looking structure of stone and plaster
with walls a foot thick. A narrow, steep little staircase led
up to the living quarters on the first floor. This consisted
of a large, rectangular, simply furnished room which
served as kitchen and dining room. Small windows of
smeared glass were recessed deeply into the thick walls on
which copper kettles and pots gleamed. A Ladakhi one-
stringed guitar, about 45 cm. long, carved and painted in
wood, hung on one wall. A woman in her late twenties or
early thirties sat handling the kitchen fire. She had the still,
composed manner of the village people which made her
such an excellent subject for a photographer. With a little
persuasion from Tendzin she agreed to be photographed.
She was composed and just herself, neither camera-shy
nor forward. I marvelled at her simple dignity, something I
certainly could not achieve in front of a camera. In a way,
these people just took their own pictures.
While the picture-taking session was going on, I wandered

out of the room. Another small set of stairs led up to the
roof. A few square yards of open courtyard was backed by
another room, standing as a structure on its own on the top
of the building. I did not enter this room but stood in the
courtyard and looked around, breathing in the cold, clean
air. It was slightly moisture-laden, partly from the fast-
moving little stream rushing through the village and
passing very close to the house, and partly from the storm
clouds moving over and away from the village, in the

direction of the Ladakh Range beyond the far side of the
Indus. Bales of straw for animal feed were piled in neat
bundles, tied together with grass stems. The hills were
darkening a little to soft browns, blues and purples. In a
few minutes, the others all came up to the roof and we
went inside the free-standing room. It turned out to be very
simple, little more than a cell about eight foot by ten foot.
One small panelled window looked out over the
mountains, the fragmented view scraping past behind
stands of willows. Some thick woollen blankets were
folded out at one end of the room in a U-shape and at the
other end, a simple wooden table and a couple of wooden
chairs. We sat around together on the blankets and the
woman brought us supper, a simple but hearty meal of
rice, parathas and vegetables. It was a much better meal
than anything we had in Leh and we all ate ravenously.
After dinner a joint was passed around. I engaged Tendzin

in conversation. sat back, relaxed, observing. A kind of
happy intensity seemed to invade us all, in the peace of
that room, high up in the hills.
The walk back to Leh turned into a kind of odd fiasco. It

was nearly seven kilometres back to Leh, plus an extra two
kilometres to the government building in which we were
staying. By the time we left Gyamsa it was nearly dark.
The sun was declining redly behind mountains which were
now black backdrops to the hushed valley. The birds had
stopped twittering and the yaks and goats were silent in
their byres. We walked back along the broad, stony jeep
track out of Gyamsa, towards Leh in a loop via Yuthung
and some of the other villages. As it grew darker, our
ability to see the track worsened. I had a weak left ankle,
injured a year ago in an accident and I tended to favour it a
little. This also made me cautious about my footing and I
started worrying about turning my ankle again on the large
and often sharp stones. It was by now quite cold and the
wind was beginning to bite. and maintained a comfortable
pace while I tried to keep up with Tendzin, partly in an
effort to keep him company but more out of a growing
anxiety to get the walk over with. He remained a little
ahead of me maintaining a steady, easy gait over the stony
path. He moved without looking down at the ground at all,
his feet in sneakers bouncing lightly over the uneven,
potentially dangerous surface as though he were on level
ground, while I planted my feet rather awkwardly and

heavily and frequently stumbled. In that dim light, he
seemed almost to levitate slightly, so unencumbered was
his progress. As for me, I just wanted to be back in town
as fast as possible. I was so engrossed in trying to walk
without stumbling that I had to stop occasionally to take in
the overpowering beauty of the whole experience, the sky
silky blue-black but rent with pearly snatches of moonlight
from gaps in the cloud cover like ichor-coloured wounds.
Stars in the gaps glimmered faintly like scatterings of
silver dust. The hills hulked all around, a dark army of
sleeping giants, massive shoulders hunched against a light
sprinkling of rain.
Tendzin must have noticed that in the gathering darkness

we were all having increasing difficulty in negotiating the
path and our pace was slowing down so he suggested
taking a short cut. He meant well but the results were
actually worse. The short cut involved negotiating ditches,
five foot high stone walls at two points, streams with sharp
and stony declines at various places, and walking along
narrow alleys alongside houses guarded by aggressive
dogs, which, for all we knew, were likely to be untethered
by this time. For me, the darkness was the problem, I
could not see what I was doing. The others seemed to
manage better, and Tendzin simply floated over
everything as though the obstacles were not there, like a
phantom. Fortunately I had a pocket torch handy. A little
after we had got past Yuthung village, we hit the main
metalled road. A jeep slowed down, dazzling us in its
powerful headlights. Two young locals, respectably
dressed, gave us a lift all the way to where we were
staying, even though it was well off their own route. This
kindness, we thought, had a lot to do with the fact that
Tendzin was with us as well as because they were
Ladakhis. Generally we found that in Leh, people in
vehicles were not obliging about giving us lifts. This is not
because they fear muggers, as in Western countries.
Cadging lifts was still an innocent activity, as it used to be
in Europe in the sixties. However, most vehicles in Ladakh
are driven mainly by public servants, usually Indian, or
Kashmiri, who usually come from traditionalist
backgrounds and who do not like the urban, westernised
classes. Ladakhis, as yet, do not seem to have the same
level of difficulty with westernised Indians, although this
may not be far off coming.
The last frontier: Ladakh-Tibet border, Nyoma to Kyari

and Pangong Lake, September 1996
The morning we left for the frontier on the east of Ladakh

with Chinese-occupied Tibet, the sun was shining in a
characteristic hard blue sky and the golden poplars (yarpa)
and willows (sol-'cang) splashed the twists and turns of the
broad Indus valley near Shey and Thikse in a frieze of
crumbling gold. Mr K. of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police
was our host and driver. His subordinate officer, Sonam,
sat impassively, sandwiched tightly between two of us in
the back seat. With our sacks and photographic equipment
and a party of five, there was no spare room in the four-
wheel drive Maruti Gypsy. This Indian-made vehicle
designed with Japanese collaboration only had a 1000 cc
engine, the sort that in Britain is installed in small cars
used for tootling around towns to bring home children and
shopping. The vehicle had a fuel consumption of about 8
kilometres per litre over hard terrain. The first day's
driving was to prove the longest and hardest, subjecting
the vehicle to a punishing regime as Mr K. proudly
demonstrated his cross-country driving skills on what must
have been one of the tougher jeep trails in Asia. Mr K.
planned to reach Chushul Post, on the eastern edge of
Indian-held territory, a few kilometres from the shores of
Pang-gong, the largest (140-kilometres long) salt lake in
the Western Tibetan plateau, about a quarter of which
remains in Indian-held Ladakh, the rest under the Chinese
military occupation. None of us had any experience of
terrain driving. The tour convinced us that any notions we
may have entertained at the outset of driving ourselves
over this territory were unrealistic - we would probably
have broken the vehicle's axle within twenty miles of
leaving the dirt trails and moving over country. The
driver's skills invited awe ; so did the hardiness of the
vehicle. Comfort and interior space were certainly not
uppermost in the minds of the engineers who designed it
but if stamina was, their efforts were not misplaced. The
initial 30 kilometres or so to Karu were easy. We bowled
along merrily on a broad, single carriage road, passing the
majestic tumuli of Shey and Thikse monasteries and a
number of small villages till we turned sharply left at a
junction after Karu. The road began to climb steeply. After
two hours the mountains were now completely bare rock,
rolling and tumbling down in great sweeps of burnt umber,

ochre and rust-red scree which plunged thousands of feet
down the slopes.
We were crossing the Ladakh Range from south to north.

All the passes in this range were high ; the highest peak,
Stok Kangri, stood at over 23,000 feet. The Khardung La
pass at 18,380 feet, leading into the Nubra Valley north of
Leh, still claims the world's highest metalled road,
although there may be roads in Tibet climbing higher, for
all anyone knows. The Chang La pass on the road to Pang-
gong Lake, which we were about to tackle, is estimated to
reach 17,350 feet at the top. Mr K. believed that some of
these altitudes were exaggerated a little but as they remain
the officially published figures, it is not my place to
dispute them. At about 16,500 feet above sea level we
stopped for a breather, fighting nausea from the effects of
drinking alcohol at Mr K.'s house the previous night.
Patches of ice glittered on the sun-beaten, treeless slopes
around us. was ecstatic : he had never seen snow or ice
before, outside the cold compartment of a refrigerator or
the television screen. Smoking a cigarette was not
recommended but and I smoked one anyway. Up here, life
seemed so fragile anyway that to smoke or not seemed a
side issue. As we struggled back to the Gypsy, a huge
pick-up truck loaded with road workers grunted painfully
around the steep corner of the road behind us and panted
slowly away up towards the top of the pass. The ragged-
looking road workers with both Indian and Ladakhi
features, stared back at us with the automatic, tired
curiosity they all have in these remote areas. I thought
about how hard their work must be ; I could scarcely take
breath and walk about quickly up there let alone break up
stones by hand into smaller pieces for laying into tar.
India's mountain roads have exacted a heavy toll in the
lives and health of road workers. The Chang La road over
the pass to Drangtse, Lukung Post and Pang-gong Lake
was reputedly one of the worst.
When we finally reached the top of the pass, the wind was
icy despite the brilliant sunshine and snow blanketed the
rock in huge patches all around. Indian army soldiers in
camouflage stared at us from their dark green trucks as we
took pictures for the record beside a plaque declaring the
altitude of the pass above sea level. Prayer flags - strips of
paper and cloth covered in Tibetan scripture - fluttered in
the wind, strung out on long strings like clothes on clothes

lines, giving the powerful, desolate scene a slightly
incongruous, festive air. We piled back into the Gypsy and
left the hostile environment of the pass as quickly as we
could. The jeep trail was nothing more than a snaking pile
of rubble through the mountains and our tightly packed
condition did not prevent us from being jolted up and
down and from side to side with every foot of track
covered. We had started out at 8.30 in the morning and by
lunchtime we reached Drangtse, at 14,700 feet above sea
level, having covered about eighty kilometres in four
hours.
Drangtse was set in a silent, well-watered valley

surrounded by gigantic mountains, the highest peaks
smothered in plentiful snow. There were about twenty five
or thirty houses built in the sturdy, white-washed Ladakhi
style, strung in an irregular line a few yards away from the
banks of a winding stream that watered the meadows on
both sides. The meadows were covered in short gold and
green grass. Golden poplar and willow clumped heavily in
the village, all white and silent stone. The village walls
held together without masonry, relying on weight and
balance for stability and forming interstices between the
buildings. Suddenly I saw what Mr K. had hinted at: the
village monastery, prayer-flags in red and yellow aflutter,
perched high up a steep hill like a small fort, on the edge
of a nearly sheer drop. A steep path, partly in the form of
rock-cut steps, led up to the monastery. I reached the main
courtyard with some difficulty, several hundred feet above
the valley. The monastery, silent and sunlit, appeared to be
deserted, Though the buildings looked old, the main
temple entrance was decorated with new frescoes. Mr K.
and had moved up into the second tier courtyard. My
asthma was beginning to impede my breathing seriously
now and I was panting heavily. After about five or six
minutes I had recovered my breath. I decided not to go
further up into the monastery as there were no monks to be
seen and I did not wish to be inadvertently intrusive. I
picked my way back down the rough, steep steps to the
village below.
The monastery was surrounded by a close outcrop of hills,

grainy, heavyªshouldered and tall. They seemed to form a
protective ring around it, patient guardians of their charge.
It was a huge, open, but strangely secret sort of place, the
effect enhanced by the lack of human voices and figures

despite the ubiquity of human dwellings. As I passed one
of the houses in the village, an unkempt youngish man
appeared at a gate, grinning. He invited me to have tea
which I amiably declined. I stopped to exchange a few
words. His name was Pema and he had no occupation.
Although related to a number of the Drangtse farming
families, he himself did nothing. He did not look
physically disabled or unwell in any way but he had a way
of looking craftily sidelong and grinning widely at
inappropriate moments that suggested that he may have
had some intellectual or emotional disadvantage - it was
not definite enough for me to feel sure. I could not get him
to discuss his situation very logically, why he had no work
to do, how he found money to live, how he managed to
live on his own. His responses were vague. Pema found
out quite a lot about me except the fact that I was currently
living abroad. He told me that he had been to Leh and
even to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. This he
announced proudly as though he had been some
astonishingly far distance, almost to the edge of the world.
It made me realise how solid and compact his world was,
and how immensely large the world beyond must seem to
him, and also how large my world was but, in some
respects, a good deal less well defined than his.
"I was born here", he said, "so here I must stay. I cannot
live in the town because it costs money and I do not have
any." He laughed loudly and flashed me a sidelong look.
"No woman, no children : I live here by myself." He
looked me intently in the face, his expression now serious,
his brows furrowed. There was a strange yearning in his
look, as though he hoped I would find a way to take him
away from this place where he lived in silence and had no
one to talk to. He wanted bright lights, big city. He had
been to Leh and Srinagar, had eaten of the apple from the
tree of city delights and was never quite the same again.
Yet, he seemed also to be afraid to leave, here where the
people knew him and would see to it that he was fed and
watered and attended to if sick. For one such as him even
Leh may have been too big and anonymous and Srinagar
exhilarating but frightening like a ride on a fairgound giant
wheel: you can stay on it for a bit but not for long.
I looked around in the silence at the trees, at the lovely,

blank blue sky, the golden willows. For me it was peace,
remote, hidden space, champagne air. Here lived a man in

this peace, without money, in the sort of place which
stressed out professional types from big cities in India or
the West would pay a lot of money to get away to, away
from their pressures. Provided, of course, piped hot water
and bearer service in hotels were available.It was so easy
to romanticise the situation, but for this man it was
boredom, frustration, a trap.
I could not see Drangtse, however, turn into one of these

meditational circuses: it had too powerful an air of hidden,
serene secrecy about it for me to really imagine such a
transformation. Here there were only rusting bukhari
stoves to keep men and animals warm in thick-walled,
solid houses, cold water available from wells, parched
barley (rtsampa) and dried fruit to eat, and not much else.
Indian security issues kept it free of mass tourism - but for
how long?
Unlike Thikse monastery, there was no blaring from radios

or ghetto blasters, no advertising posters on village walls,
no corner shop with plastic food and household ware from
the towns. It looked as though the Drangtse people, by
virtue of their relative isolation, still had a choice about
how to live. So far, it looked as though they had chosen to
stay more or less as they had been before, for as long as
they were going to be able to. The gold of autumn willow,
the deep blue of the sky, the secretive ring of mountains,
the monastery huddled precipitously against the gaunt
flank of the hill, the bubbling stream, the sheep grazing on
the brilliant green meadows, that was all there was, that
was all, it seemed, there could be in such a place.
The road to Lukung took about two and a half hours of

hard driving through jolting rubble track. The stony
valleys climbed steeply up on both sides. Occasionally, a
black-haired yak raised its bison-like horned head to peer
suspiciously at us, its long belly hair hanging to the
ground. Great ranges marched parallel on either side of the
vehicle and in the distance, Mr K. pointed out the ice
peaks of the Chang Chenmo Range marking the southern
border of Chinese-held Aksai Chin. Soon after, we passed
a trail that veered off towards the Shyok (She-yog) valley.
There was no sign of humanity in all that silent, sunlit
wilderness till we came upon three tents. Two small boys
in local dress looked at us out of a wreath of smoke from a
dung fire on which their mother was cooking. They stared

silently but without fear. We stopped and Mr K. chuckled
at them. Their faces broke into grins and they came
forward. Pictures were taken. The woman stayed where
she was, watching the little group from the fire, the wind
flapping at her wine-coloured gown. At one point we
passed a tarn, a turquoise jewel set in a stony-red coombe,
its shining surface deep blue, peacock green and blush
pink, a mica mirror reflecting the face shattered of the
afternoon sun back into the sky. The tarn was a prologue
to the grand opening of the performance, the first view of
the western edge of the big lake which we finally
encountered, all of a sudden, as we rounded a great green-
shouldered hill.
We reached Lukung Post, a well-kept police building with

a railing around its forecourt jutting towards the lake. The
great depth of the lake rendered the colour of the water a
deep ink blue, even in the stunning late afternoon sunlight.
The jagged strip of dark blue water, narrow on the
approach, got quickly larger as we reached Lukung until at
the post it was like a narrow sea several kilometres wide,
its eastern end scores of kilometres out of sight, lost
among the twisting, kidney-coloured mountains. The air at
Lukung, 14,786 feet above sea level, was cold even in the
sun and a wind battered our exposed hands and faces as
we stumbled about, taking pictures. It ruffled the smooth
surface of the lake, leaving thousands of fine, virtually
unmoving, wrinkles like the skin of a monstrous lizard.
The salt lake was deathly quiet. It was devoid of fish, I
was told, on account of its high salinity. Its shores were
littered with shells, descendants of ancestors that lived in
the Tethys Sea of which the lake had been a part millions
of years ago till it was pushed along with the rest of the
Tibetan plateau all these thousands of feet up into the air
when India crushed slowly into the Eurasian land mass.
The general absence of plant and animal life was partly
responsible for the clarity and intensity of the colour of the
surface water. The knowledge that the lake was dead
despite the intense vitality of its colours made the water
appear as though it were somehow a metal rather than a
fluid, closer to the rock in essence than to organic matter.
The Pang-gong Range on the near side marched as
pyramids, sharp, pointed heads all of the same height and
shape, brown, dusted with snow. On the far side of the
lake, a long spur of the Chang Chenmo Range rumpled
and twisted like hills in a dream: sienna, russet, dark red,

sand-blasted gold, lizard green, salmon pink, duck-egg
blue, pale purple, etched against a cobalt, cloudless sky.
Small villages, Man, Spangmik, nestled in the rubble-
strewn approaches to the lake shore from the hills, fading
from sight in the slowly gathering darkness caused by the
steep shadows of the hills on the narrow valley down to
the lake shore. The track, if there was one, was atrocious.
The last time I was at Pang-gong Lake there was some sort
of proper jeep trail and I do not remember the terrible
jolting we got this time round as Mr K. wrenched and low-
gear gunned his vehicle, twisting and turning, churning up
showers of sharp crunching stones all along.
I grew sick, then got better. I developed nausea and a

fierce headache. The sky grew dark after sunset, the pale
light, storm-like, remained as a scar in the sky above
rolling dark clouds crowning the tops of the hills on the far
shore. The hills blackened, became mysterious, flung
across the horizon like the cape of a sorcerer. In the fading
light the deep rose sunset was flushed against an
opalescent blue and milk upper sky quartered by dark
purple and flesh-coloured clouds, and in a while the angry,
pale colour was gone. In the middle of this psychedelic
loneliness, hushed except for the churning of the rubber
tyres, vast, somehow threatening and restless, a young boy
appeared, alone in this enormous, deadly place, a stick and
a bundle on his shoulder. He stared as the vehicle went by
and raised his hand in a slow, automatic, almost absent
greeting which we returned. Where had he come from,
where was he going ? No doubt there was a village nearby
but being completely hidden from view, the huddled
buildings, white as they were, stayed shielded by shadow
from any reflective light. They appeared to vanish
altogether, as though conjured up in my feverish
imagination like a mirage, expressions of my desire for
human contact in all this overpowering, beautiful, terrible
desolation. The sense of abandonment was actually
enhanced, not relieved, by the appearance of this fragile,
solitary figure, popping up out of nothing. The child
himself seemed like a trick of the mind, like the appearing
and disappearing villages. I was overcome by a sudden
intimation of my own mortality, the way I did from time to
time in this terrible, beautiful place, something like the
way I did in the desert beyond Nyoma, twenty years ago.
The landscape seemed to mock us, playing tricks with

colours, forms, perspectives, dropping things down in
front of us and taking them away in caprice, reminding the
photographers among us that the open wilderness was the
primary source of illusion and the original magician with
light, inventing thoughtlessly what all the artifices of the
deliberate will and ingenuity of the photographer could
never emulate. A couple of Tibetan wild asses (skiang)
appeared dimly on the rubble-strewn valley, our first view
of these wild creatures of Tibet's immense highªaltitude
northern plateau. They wheeled and cantered off into the
dusk as our vehicle approached. I felt so nauseous that I
had to stop the vehicle and get out to be sick, my stomach
cramping painfully. I stood alone in cold, black space, the
vehicle only a few feet away but scarcely visible in near
pitch darkness. I really did think for a moment, in my
confused state of mind, that the jeep was itself part of the
illusion, that it would vanish as I walked back towards it,
that I was alone in this silent place, that I always had been.
I felt that the world of crowded humanity was a dream,
that I was on the point of waking from this dream to
realise that I and the emptiness around was all there ever
was or had been. Then came up and got a grip of my
shoulder, and the spell was broken.
The last hour of the journey to Chushul was made in

complete darkness, nothing whatever of the landscape
being visible. Our host was Mr K. who worked for the
Ladakh Scouts. He expertly followed an invisible stony
track in the soft glare of his headlights. He also switched
on a red strobe light mounted on the bonnet of the vehicle
which enhanced the peculiar, unreal quality of the journey.
The turning, flashing red light interfered with my forward
vision creating a confusing effect as in a discotheque but
he seemed quite happy with it and as he was the one
driving, I supposed that was all right. I was too sick and
tired to care. It was beyond my understanding how he
could distinguish a trail in those conditions : it was really
just open country. Some of it was sandy with thick
tussocks of grass, and large stretches were rubble, the
sharp stones heaped thickly about and on which the tyre
marks of previous vehicles left little or no visible trace,
even, I discovered, in daylight let alone under the
conditions in which we were driving. Every few miles a
marker would appear, confirming that we were still on
track. They were tall boulders or posts three or four feet
high with a target motif painted on them, red centre in

white surround. Out of the darkness, they loomed
suddenly into view in the glare of the headlights like the
faces of astonished ghosts. Mr K. never missed one of
them. We had long since left the lake shore so there were
no other obvious directional guides in the landscape.
Visibility was limited to a few dozen yards ahead and to
five or six yards on either side of the vehicle. Occasionally
a hare would spring out in view, sitting stunned in the
headlights, and then it would spring for cover. Twice we
saw foxes, lean creatures with thick, bushy tails of a
colour somewhere between red and dark brown; it was
impossible to be sure. After some three hours of driving,
ghostly white buildings appeared and I thought, thank God
we've arrived! We had not. We passed these building and
moved on. Ten minutes later, we passed some more
ghostly buildings. These were not the end of the trail
either. Ten or fifteen minutes later it happened again.
Again the sense of unreality pressed urgently in my mind:
I began to think that I was trapped in a crazy dream which
played the same images repeatedly like a faulty slide
projector, and that it would never end. Finally, we arrived
at an iron bridge, broken down and trailing one huge rusty-
metalled end into the bouldery bed of a stream. Mr K.
manoevered the vehicle through the stream with a
tremendous amount of jolting, the Gypsy's suspension
groaning under the strain. I cracked my head a few times
hard against the side of the jeep but I scarcely noticed, I
was so dazed.
About ten minutes beyond the iron bridge, we finally

arrived at Chushul Post which, at 14,566 feet above sea
level, was a huddle of buildings of thick stone and plaster.
The main building housed the senior officers and guests of
the force and was comfortably decorated with reed carpets
and snug bukharis. The bukharis were insecure,
dangerous-looking contraptions of rusted metal. A
cylinder functioned as a burner-oven, a pipe in segments
fed evil-smelling kerosene into the oven, and an exhaust in
several segments of thick piping snaked crookedly
upwards and through the roof. The whole effect was like
that of an aga though much cruder, smaller and unreliable
looking. The bukhari was typically placed in the centre of
the room. Much of the winter life in the post, when not out
on patrol in temperatures of minus 40 degrees Centigrade
and below, would be spent huddled around these
contraptions, trying not to burn one's self by knocking into

them. Once they got going, they did keep the rooms
reasonably warm. Electric lighting was from solar-
powered cells. Mr K., we discovered later, was an
enthusiastic proponent of solar powered energy of which
more, later. Kerosene lanterns hissed, giving out a dirty-
looking light. In the dining room, genial border police sat
or stood around us, grinning politely, and making stilted
small talk. After an excellent dinner of parathas (fried,
unleavened bread), several vegetable curries and a chicken
curry finished off by a sweet milk dessert, we retired to
our rooms. We huddled around the bukhari which roared
and burbled softly, and looked out through the small,
smeared-glass single window pane at the brooding, jagged
shadows of the mountains. The cold, dimly seen landscape
seemed somehow to suggest not merely an indifference to
the fragile presence of life, but a kind of brooding
hostility, a positive hatred of life. A dog howled
mournfully into the moonless night and the wind rattled
the projecting corrugated iron roof of the single-storey
building as we shoved ourselves into sleeping bags and
blankets.
However, we were not going to sleep just yet. Mr K.

turned up in our room in his striped pyjamas. Perhaps it
was his usual serious, slightly suspicious expression and
his straight, military bearing, feet planted slightly apart for
balance, that gave him a faintly comical look in this night
garb. He sat on the edge of my bed and regarded me
wordlessly, head cocked slightly to one side as though
listening for a faint sound. As none was forthcoming
beyond the noises already indicated, I gave in to my not
always suitable predilection for conversation. We talked
about social and cultural trends in Ladakh. Mr K. took a
staunchly conservative, even isolationist line. supported
my argument for a more open, less defensive approach to
outside influences but it did not go down well and the
discussion began to border on the acrimonious before I
realised that I was probably upsetting our generous host
and tailed off. Eventually Mr K. decided to turn in himself
and bidding us amiably good night, he withdrew. We
drifted uneasily into a disturbed sleep. My breathing was
still laboured in the thin air, and I slept fitfully, catching
only an hour or two of undisturbed sleep in between
jerking awake and gasping for breath.
Curiously, when morning came and the sun shone brightly

in the cold, still air, my eyes snapped wide open, my
stomach had settled, my mind was alert and, along with
the others, I was ready to enjoy the day. For some reason,
disturbed nights did not mean tiredness in the day time. I
noticed something of this effect in Leh, also. Perhaps in
Ladakh, I just did not need my normal quota of sleep.
Before breakfast, the genial second in command at the
post, a well-educated South Indian, joined us for a few
minutes. We were pleased to find someone at the post to
have a conversation with. He was a big, well-built man in
his thirties, bespectacled and smiling, looking faintly like a
bank manager in disguise. I described my reactions to the
extraordinary, disturbing beauty of the Pangong Lake area,
and suggested that I thought the best thing for eastern
Ladakh would be to turn the whole area into a protected
region, such as a national park. Its striking and unique
environment would make a case for this very easy, if not
obvious. The flora and fauna could be relatively easily
protected since human habitation was thin and the nomads
had an ecologically sound relationship with their
environment. It was not necessary to interfere with their
way of life, and a policy of guided tourism - the new
buzzword "eco-tourism" inevitably came to my lips -
could ensure that not only did the tourists bring some
benefit to Ladakh but also that they were not allowed to
disrupt the environment unduly. The big man smiled even
more genially and, without a trace of irony, agreed that
tourism was a good idea. What Pangong Lake needed was
plenty of tourist hotels, sports and wildlife observation
facilities, a few good bars and a discotheque. That would
turn it around from a boring dump into somewhere worth
visiting. Who wanted a wilderness ?
I got out a little early, to take a walk. Cameras swinging

from our necks, wrapped up warmly in duffle coats and
leather jackets, thick socks, boots, gloves and mufflers, we
boot-crunched our way over a thin-frost ground to the
entrance of the post and out in the direction of the village.
Brown, dun and cream-coloured mountains roped around
the horizon. The sun dazzled. It was very cold. One of the
uniformed men we asked told us that the temperature that
morning at eight o'clock, despite the strong sunshine,
registered at two degrees centigrade. The low, white
buildings of Chushul village were scattered around the
valley, and women were already working in the fields.
eased into an alleyway near which three women were

threshing grain, emitting a curious rythmic, rattling whistle
as they did so. A white dog barked at us. took pictures, the
women grinned, apparently pleased and embarrassed at the
same time. When we returned to our building we found a
generous breakfast laid out and Mr K. in hearty good
humour. Backs were slapped as curries again were served.
I remember Chushul, along with Dungti post, for the
outstanding food by frontier standards in contrast to the
poor quality of cooking in Leh and elsewhere. All the
good cooking in Chushul was down to a shy young man
from Punjab who was introduced to us and whom we
thanked for his good work. The taste and quality of food is
always important, but in the conditions of post life it feels
like the only thing that matters and a good cook is one of
the most precious assets post personnel can have to make
their duties bearable.
The whole of the morning after we left the post was spent
near and on the Sirijap-Chushul battlefield and beyond,
scene of the sad and lonely defeat of defending Indian
forces against invading Chinese PLA troops in October-
November 1962. The details behind the dispute are well
documented. Chairman Mao's China not only crushed and
absorbed Tibet but laid claim to various border areas also,
including Ladakh. The 1,500 mile MacMahon Line
demarcating the borders of India, China, Nepal, Sikkim
and Bhutan at the Simla Agreement in 1914 was never
ratified by the Nationalist regime in China and this was
used as part of the rationale for Chairman Mao's claim.
China occupied Aksai Chin, an area in the north-east of
Ladakh that Indian forces had never actually held.
It is one thing to read the facts in the dry, unemotional

texts of historians and documentalists, quite another to feel
it as though one is reliving the experiences of the Indian
troops who fought and died there. We walked slowly,
breathing heavily in the cold, clear air, up to the
monuments dedicated to the dead soldiers from every part
of India: Sikhs, Jats and Rajputs from the plains of the
north, Tamils and Malayalis from the tropical south. The
Gorkha monument was decorated in green with two
crossed kukris glinting gold in the sun. The dedication
stones were carefully maintained and willows were
planted in ranks around them, rustling their red-gold
leaves. The monuments were located several kilometres
from the battlefield itself, and perhaps two kilometres

from the police post. We drove towards the battlefield and
stopped in the middle of a huge plain, completely devoid
of human habitation or even traces of visits by humans
such as tracks, camp litter or remains of fires. The plain
was of hard, cracked mud, dun-grey in one part and
blueish-grey in another, separated in huge stretches by
tracts of fine sand knotted together by clumpy red bushes.
The cracking gave the mud plains the appearance of a
gigantic mosaic, a shattered dish whose pieces had just
about held together. Water channels, a couple of feet wide,
gurgled slowly for miles through this wilderness, bursting
into soft spectra in the sunlight as we got close to look at
them. We got back into the vehicle and drove on,
clattering across the cracked mud. Mr K. skilfully avoided
the parts which were soft from moisture and in which we
could get stuck. Then, in the distance, we could hear yaks
grunting though we could not see them. They may have
been grazing behind a rise, hidden from view.
All of a sudden a human figure popped up at about ten

o'clock to our field of vision, along with two bareback
horses, one roan and one white. This must be the person to
whom the yaks belonged, in all probability a nomad. Mr
K. immediately swung the vehicle towards these figures
and started driving fast, churning a thin slipstream of mud
as we went along. The figure turned out to be a youngish
nomad woman, dressed in the typical dark wine-coloured
gown, lots of beads in coral and turqoise, and leather
boots. Clearly alarmed, she started running away,
zigzagging in an attempt to evade the vehicle bearing
rapidly down on her. The horses snorted, wheeled and
began galloping away in opposite directions. The woman
shouted after one of the horses was attempting to lure it
back and escape the vehicle at the same time. I was
speechless for a few moments, unable to grasp what
exactly was going on. I asked Mr K.. He shouted that she
was fleeing because she feared assault, apparently a
common occurrence in these parts where Indian military
and other personnel, all male, are posted for long periods
without any access to women, and where the remoteness
prevents rape being readily dealt with by the authorities. In
a few moments we got close to the woman, who by now
was standing and facing us with her face contorted in
alarm, feet planted widely apart and a cowhide whip held
firmly in both hands. Mr K. shouted out to her in Ladakhi.
She looked doubtful at first and he talked some more, then

she relaxed. Mr K. stopped the vehicle, dismounted and
spent a few moments talking a bit more to the woman.
Apparently she was agreeable to being photographed with
her horses but for some reason Mr K. wanted this to be an
action situation, we could not do this quietly. The horses
had meanwhile calmed down and were starting to trot back
to their mistress. Mr K. churned the vehicle into a fast
acceleration when we had all got in again and chased the
white horse which turned in a swift, graceful movement,
all supple neck, flank and long, loose legs, and moved off
in a fast gallop. Mr K. revved and thrashed the vehicle
along the hard mud flat, wheels showering grey clay
powder, the cracked earth shooting away below us as we
leaned out of the side and tried to get a picture. The
woman stood with her feet planted apart, her arms both
raised in the air, becoming small in the distance.
The Chushul battlefield was an enormous stony plain

littered with rubble of all sizes from boulders the size of
small houses to small pebbles. The relics of the war had
largely been removed since I had last visited the battlefield
in 1977. Then, I had seen the hulks of burnt out tanks and
anti-aircraft guns, many of them British post-World War
Two ordnance with serial numbers and other markings still
visible on their rusted sides. Most of the twisted wreckage
had been removed. The effect now was even more strange,
sad and sinister, all the more for being seen in dazzling
sunshine instead of the misty, moody landscape I had seen
in the monsoon month of August, nearly twenty years ago.
Three large pieces of machinery lay like museum pieces
posed on the plain, spaced out irregularly at a distance of
several score yards from each other. Two were tank
chassis, rusty, gleaming like bone, like the remains of
dinosaurs. A third large piece which we were unable to
identify looked eerily alive, an effect created by two large
round eye-like cylinders and a vertical, rectangular piece
of metal between them like a nose, crowning the bulk of
the machinery. Here and there were the shattered ruins of
Indian defensive ramparts and trenches the dun colour of
the stony plain, rising like monuments to a past
civilisation. They reminded me of pictures of Anasazi
ruins in the American South West. In reality they were
small by comparison but strangely, at distances of a
hundred yards or more, they suggested great size. The
illusion was enhanced by the distortion of perspective. The
natural phenomena all around was so large that the eye

and the brain could not arrive at a proper appreciation of
size, distances, relationships. Objects much bigger or
smaller than others, especially those near the horizon,
tended to look about the same size. Distances were
cancelled out; objects far apart appeared the same sort of
distance from each other as objects closer together. The
extreme clarity of the air eliminated haze which made
many objects appear much nearer than they were. A hill
that looked a couple of hours walk away could actually
take two or three days to reach on foot. Even around Leh
you got this effect: a hill might seem quite small, perhaps
a few hundred feet high, easily climbable in an hour or so ;
then you would see a little building, perhaps a temple or
small monastery perched on top, which you had seen
before much nearer and from below. You knew it was
really closer to a thousand feet to the top of the hill. That
hill itself would be not much more than a large bump in
comparison with the big mountains immediately behind it.
It was only this succession of visual realisations that
helped you appreciate just how big and how high some of
these mountains were.
In the wastes of eastern Ladakh, there were rarely any

human artefacts to help with this at all. The ruins, with
their suggestiveness of monumental building work, looked
much bigger than they actually were. A couple of trenches
about ten feet in diameter contained piles of rusted tins -
food abandoned and burned by the retreating Indian
troops. A large pile of burned and smashed glass lay
strewn in two large patches ; other heaps were of
destroyed supplies. The glass was twisted into fantastic
and suggestive shapes, here a piece of miniature,
modernistic sculpture, somewhere else a bottle, fully
intact, melted and twisted into numerous impossible loops
like a ball of thick wool. I picked up the remnants of a
smashed hurricane lantern. I imagined Indian troops
untrained and unacclimatised to high altitude, parachuted
into the battlefield straight from the hot plains fifteen
thousand feet below, gasping for oxygen, being
commanded to defend against the advancing, well-trained
battle-hardened Chinese troops, the Indians inadequately
clothed against the cold. I stood in windless silence, the
dazzling sunshine as heavy as a blinding white drape. I
looked at the slow, rather distant figures of my
companions, small on the vast flats, picking their way
among the wreckage. The sunshine made them indistinct

and gradually, I did not recognise them any more.
The sun splashed light in our eyes and winked off mica
spots on the mountains as we headed south west. The sky
was a blinding mirror reflecting the sunlight back very
strongly. I had mislaid my sunglasses and I could not look
up out of the windows, only ahead and to either side. This
was skiang country but none were to be seen though we
strained our eyes in all directions. As one might expect in
Ladakh's Chang-thang high plateau, particularly in very
arid terrain, life-forms, both rooted and mobile, are
ubiquitous but often hard to see, despite the openness of
the country. I would look out and see boulder, pebble,
dust, earth, mountain, sky, cloud and - nothing. The air
was thin and empty. Space seemed really to be just space
and nothing more, a gasless vacuum in which inanimate
objects were fixed by an ancient, petrified, invisible glue.
But then, looking harder, I might see a sprig of yellow
grass waving in the wind, clinging on tenaciously to the
underside of a piece of rock. Stopped by the side of a trail,
dismounted from the vehicle, I might see a small black
spider with short, slender legs, scuttling purposefully
among stones, negotiating skillfully among clods of earth,
or a dragonfly, hovering like a miniature helicopter over a
dainty red plant of some lichinous variety, its long,
metallic, scarlet and black abdomen extended for balance.
Occasionally overhead, a flock of finches, slicing the air
swiftly in perfect formation, or a wallowing stream of
Himalayan choughs. They would swoop for a few
seconds, split into a widening "V" and wheel away, gone,
suddenly nothing at all.
Everywhere in the desert life teemed, not furtive so much

as concealed by the overpowering, granular complexity of
rock and stone, their crystalline structures repeated billions
of times to form irregular patterns, small and huge,
providing a perfect camouflage for life forms that seemed
to need no other significant strategy for safety. The
immobile vitality of the stone seemed to eclipse our own
through sheer ubiquity. The inanimate energy of rock and
the energy of the many life forms blended to form a
continuous whole. It was a place that encouraged the big
view, the grand idea, the sweeping gesture, the binoculars
rather than the microscope, the wide-angle lens rather than
the macro, the exultation of the spirit rather than the
careful calculation of the next step forward.
And then we saw the skiang. A group of ten or twelve wild

asses stood still as stones among them, etched against the
rubble of the plain beneath them that stretched away
behind to the Panggong Range. Dun-coloured earth, hard
grey and yellow stone, dusty purple and buff-coloured
hills, eye-watering sunlight. Behind them were quite a few
more animals. The skiang facing us were slim as poles,
sides bulging slightly with their rib cages. They were not
alarmed but watchful, clearly confident that they could
move away from any definite danger. They must have
seen occasional vehicles before and, not being threatened
by them, did not feel that one in relatively close proximity
was necessarily dangerous. One of the fastest animals on
the Tibetan plateau, the skiang has few natural enemies,
survives for days on virtually no fresh water and is
completely at home on the surface of the world's coldest
desert. It is a strikingly handsome animal, reddish-orange
in colour with a white belly and dark stripes along its
neck, back, sides and flanks. In 1977 when I was last in
the Chushul area, I had seen skiang in small groups but on
one occasion, I saw a herd of nearly fifty animals walking
in single file along the top of a low escarpment. They
made a remarkable sight etched against a deep blue sky,
and the vision remains in my mind as clear as the day I
saw it. Because the skiang is so mobile and lives
confidently out in the open, and because it is completely
wild, it remains one of the great symbols of freedom on
the great plateau of High Asia, more so than the lynx, the
giant Marco Polo sheep, the wild yak (drong) and even the
snow leopard, now hunted close to extinction. Only the
eagle can outstrip the skiang in the imagination as a
symbol of freedom as any life form that commands the air
waves so majestically must do. Men struggle against the
forces of gravity with all the resources of modern
technology but we cannot quite manage what warm-
blooded avians can with a few bits of bone, tendon and
feathers. Whenever we see a great, wild bird, that is what
we remember. Now the eagle is threatened, too, the snow
leopard and lynx retreat before the poacher's gun but the
handsome skiang remains successful and numerous. The
high plains of Chang-thang teem with the animals and
puffs of dust from their hooves can be frequently seen far
in the distance before they actually come into our field of
vision. The illusion of the skiang's continued
successfulness, supported by the relatively undisturbed

environment in Ladakh, still seems to hold for a moment
in the naked eye. India's last great wilderness has partially
opened its door, the floodgates are about to open, the boots
and guns ready to march in. The skiang's last stand, like
that of all the other big land mammals of south and central
Asia, is probably nearly over. Today, he still stares you
head on and stands his ground or tosses his head in a
chase-me-if-you-can gesture. Meanwhile, in the click of
the camera shutter, captured on light-sensitive paper, one
of the last free wild animals on earth is frozen for the
record.
Whenever I had seen skiang before, they had always been

in the distance, too far even for my camera with its
standard 50 mm lens to take a snapshot that would show
up its handsome coat properly. Now we were in the
vehicle of a most enthusiastic and skillful driver. After
driving us over two hundred kilometres over difficult
country without any mishap, not even a mechanical
difficulty, we had confidence in whatever he did, however
risky it might seem. Mr K. turned the vehicle sharply to
the right and headed straight for the skiang, whooping
enthusiastically, apparently starting a re-run of his driving
exploit on the mud-field outside Chushul where we
encountered the nomad woman and her horses. But here,
the ground was rougher and sandier with a great many
low, clumpy bushes to avoid, some of which threatened to
destabilise the Gypsy if we went over them. Some twelve
or fifteen skiang in a horizontal line facing us began to
slowly break up their formation. They gracefully moved
into a canter, heading away from us at an angle and then
began picking up speed. The jeep was now thundering
towards them at over forty miles an hour - a considerable
speed on that kind of ground - churning dust. By the time
we had got to within fifty yards of the animals, they had
broken into full gallop, reddish-brown manes streaming in
the wind. The jeep rocked and thumped, we were flung
from side to side in the vehicle, only our packed condition
within it preventing bruised shoulders. There were no seat
belts. The view from the side windows of the jeep was
blurred and kept shifting angles with all the movement. I
could hear some of the animals uttering harsh brays as
they leaped forward and away into a steady gallop they
could probably maintain for some time. In the excitement
we were all shouting gleefully now except Mr K. who had
gone quiet and was concentrating fully on his driving. sat

in front next to Mr K., behind on the left, Sonam in the
middle, his stony impassive face only now broken into a
quiet grin of pleasure, I sat on the right. I reached for my
camera as skiang thundered by on both the right and left of
the vehicle, and now in front. We were churning along
right in the middle of the herd which wheeled away from
us and returned to maintain a loose, flexible corporate
entity despite our being among them which I found
surprising : I thought they would scatter altogether and
reform after they were sure they had lost us. It is difficult
to really convey the excitement of those minutes. Our
hearts thumped in our chests. We scrabbled for our
cameras, taking off and fitting lenses as fast as possible,
our equipment every moment in danger of being smashed
against the interior of the vehicle with all the jolting and
turning. The air was filled with noise, our exhilarated
shouting and the harsh cries of the animals. I leaned out of
the vehicle, trying to focus my manually operated camera,
trying to judge apertures and shutter speeds to allow for all
the rapid jarring movement, being so close to the action
but with only normal speed film in my camera. I had the
zoom on and my arm and shoulders were half out of the
jeep window, no strap around my neck, the jeep thumping
from side to side, the skiang wheeling and turning in a
storm of dust within three to five yards in front of me. I
prayed that the camera would not be jerked out of my
hands. I could hear cursing : he had the wrong sort of film
in his camera, or the wrong lens or something, he was
speaking urgently to to try and get something adjusted. ,
keeping calm under pressure, was fiddling about with the
equipment. I fast-triggered my camera at the action,
knowing that I had no chance of ensuring that I was
getting good pictures, or, for that matter, any pictures
worth taking at all with my primitive equipment, but I had
never been in a situation like this before, nor had I ever
had a previous opportunity to try and take pictures like
this, and I knew I probably would not ever again. As it
eventually turned out, my pictures were of poor quality,
unfocussed despite my best efforts and with more dust
than animals in them. Somehow, when I saw my pictures
later, it did not dampen my feeling of remembered
exhilaration as much as I expected it to. I know now, as I
only vaguely realised then, in the middle of all the
excitement, that the end results did not matter. I am, after
all, not a photographer. I was acting like a Japanese tourist
when really I should have abandoned my gadgetry to the

moment.
For two or three miles the jeep roared along, showering

dust and stones, the animals thundered around us, I saw
through the blurring camera lens the rippling of sinew in
hindquarters and flanks, arching of russet-striped backs,
hooves striking the air, the gleam of eye and flaring
nostril, the graceful turn of mane-tossed necks as they
tried to keep us in view while moving away. Mr K. now
kept the jeep on a straight course rather than trying to stay
within the twisting, wheeling lines of the animals. The
skiang began to stream away in irregular lines, now
numbering perhaps twenty five or thirty animals, necks
leaning forward, long, slim legs reaching right out into
space as though grasping the air and pulling forward like
swimmers in water. The herd grew smaller, receding to the
left of the jeep at an angle of forty five to fifty degrees.
The long, mountainous backdrop rolled by, fluid gold
flecked and streaked with malachite green and dark purple
above a still, dusty blue sky. The wild asses became a
long, fast-moving line of small shapes and blended into
the backdrop of hills till they finally disappeared from
view. As we lowered our cameras back into our holdalls
and cases, we drove on a few minutes longer and then
stopped in the middle of a tract of sandy desert for a break.
We got out of the jeep and stood around in the blinding
sun. and I smoked cigarettes.
The terrain in eastern Ladakh changes constantly : cracked

mud flats stretching for miles; salt flats; grit flats; great
plains of rubble; plains of boulders only; tyre-squelching
marshlands whose real character is hidden from the
inexperienced eye by hummocky, soft clay-rock in which
occasionally moisture winks in the shifting angles of
sunlight; rocky-bedded streams; water-logged cracks,
crevices and canals nearly concealed from the driver's eye
in apparently dry, flat open ground; dry water courses
sometimes appearing as deep, narrow trenches, sometimes
wide and shallow; soft, sandy desert where driving feels
like wading through water; open rubble desert where there
is no visible track at all, where the wind blows over the
traces of vehicles past as quickly and smoothly as a
handkerchief across a powder-smudged cheek. I'm sure if I
were a geologist I would have a lot of fun in a place like
except - unless I were looking for oil of which there is -
fortunately for Ladakhis - apparently none.
In the trackless country the direction is decided by each

experienced driver virtually reinventing the track for
himself, following a sense of direction that seems almost
as uncanny as that of a beast. They do not use compasses
or other tracking equipment, and the shifting angles of
mountain faces seem too repetitive to the untrained eye
after hours or days of driving to provide useful guides.
Before the trip, Mr K. claimed in his usual somewhat
bombastic way that he knew "every stone" and boulder" in
this country. However, after a few days I began to take
him almost literally at his word, otherwise navigation
seemed inexplicable. It's the sort of thing rally drivers are
used to but for me it was quite an experience. To drive
through this country you cannot relax for even a fraction
of a second. You cannot drive straight on an apparently
level surface for more than a minute or so at a time before
you have to wrench the wheel to the right or left to avoid
some obstruction or hazard invisible to a passenger who
does not know what exactly the driver is looking for. You
have to trust totally in the driver's skill and experience. It
is a passive driver's nightmare.
The driver had no time to absorb the beauty of the

constantly changing surface textures and the passing life
forms but fortunately I did : grey clay earth gave way to
salt-covered grit flats, to yellow earth, to purple and rust-
coloured iron-rich rocky soil, to brown, marshy soils, to
blue-grey flinty plain, to deep yellow, light yellow and
gold-white sand. Stretches of stubbly grass passed by, then
in succession, purple-red stretches of low, bushy pencil
cedar, white fungus fields covering clumpy clay soil,
bushy, thorny semi-ªdesert, yellow-orange short grassland,
boulder-strewn pebble desert, and sandy semi-desert held
together by knots of short, tough moisture-preserving
plants. Flights of the ubiquitous choughs, finches and also
water birds near marshland swooped and flurried low. I
looked away from the whitening bones of a yak skull, of a
horse's head, of a mastiff's jaw bone, slowly burying
themselves in the desert dust and grit. Creatures large and
small, slow and fast, sailed the air waves or crept or
pounded over the ground in a affirmation of life.
From the emotional rigours of Chushul battlefield it was a

long, slow road to Hanle, about 150 kilometres away to
the southwest. The gradual climb up to the Tsaka La pass

at 16,190 feet above sea level covered an altitude gain of
only about 1500 feet over a distance of 32 kilometres from
Chushul. We scarcely noticed the climb except in the last
three or four kilometres to the top of the pass. The country
was broad and sloped gently away to massive, low-slung
hills. There was no snow. The sun hammered down on our
heads as we stopped, dismounted and stood at the top,
unmarked by any sign or plaque. The wind was cold and
strong despite the sun. We rolled gently down the pass for
a kilometre or two and then stopped again, a few
kilometres distant from the village of Tsaka below the pass
which was well out of sight. To our left, the hills rose
quickly above the track which hugged its flank; to the
right, an enormous marshland stretched away to the hills
on the far side of the valley, clumpy brilliant green,
glistening with patches of ice. Water burbled and hissed in
shallow channels. A small herd of yaks numbering perhaps
fifteen animals moved slowly in this marshland within
fifteen yards of us. They were either wild or semi-
domesticated but if they were owned there was no herder
in sight. The area was entirely without any discernible
human presence. These yaks were the closest we had got
to and we were determined to get closer.
There were a couple of bulls with great, sweeping horns

curved forward and up, and shaggy bellies and tails. The
smaller bull had a thick white shoulder and neck mane and
a white underbelly, giving it a strikingly handsome
appearance. The other bull was considerably larger and
glossy black. The bulls were potentially dangerous
animals and Mr K. advised approaching them with
caution. We tried to apply the usual principles of
unhurried movement, keeping as quiet as possible and
avoiding direct eye contact. and crept about bent at the
knee, with their cameras trained on the animals. They
continued to graze but they were aware of our presence
and kept moving slowly away, maintaining a distance of a
few yards between us all the time. Occasionally an animal
would spook and lumber rapidly away for a few metres
before stopping again. There was no hostility as yet to
deter us. I picked my way towards them, stopping at a
water channel which was almost completely bridged by a
thin laminate of ice about six feet by two feet, delicate and
complex as lacework.
The ice, in its thinner patches, reflected rainbow light in

the sun. I put my hand in the water. It was cold and
diamond green. We spent an hour or more moving among
the animals before the big black bull finally got fed up
with us. He had moved off to the outer perimeter of the
herd but eventually showed signs of distinct annoyance.
He began to rumble ominously, lowering his massive,
shaggy head and sweeping his horns along the low tops of
the grass. Then he surged forward towards us a few yards,
shaking his head from side to side and snorting. That was
enough for us and we moved quickly away. and remained
within twenty metres of the less volatile members of the
herd. I worked my way back to the dusty road and the jeep
and climbed up the slope of a hill above the vehicle. A red
mastiff appeared suddenly and stared hostilely at me.
Mastiffs are highly terriorial and must be taken seriously.
This one began moving forward and, a little uneasy, I
climbed further up and picked up a heavy stone. The
mastiff took the hint and jerked away, moving off round
the corner of the hill. It stopped once to look at me long
and hard before turning away and disappearing out of
sight.
Mr K., however, had not given up with the yaks. and

finally finished their peek-a-boo game with the big black
bull which was getting more and more restless. They came
back to the jeep. Sonam passed round hot tea from
thermos flasks. Mr K. moved rapidly off across the marsh
and remained visible as a small figure against the brilliant
green in his sky-blue anorak. He selected the black bull the
rest of us were by now anxious to avoid and went after
him in a zigzagging approach, camera poised. The bull
began moving off. Once or twice, in the distance, we saw
the animal turn and lumber forward a few steps but Mr K.
faced him straight up and motionless, standing his ground,
like a toreador. The bull would stop and turn away again.
We sat uneasily in the jeep watching this half comic, half
alarming chase in the marshland, Mr K. becoming a blue
dot against the backdrop of the farther hills, the bull a
black, agitated lump. They disappeared out of sight.
Sonam's impassive features creased slightly into an
expression of concern. About an hour later we saw Mr K.
returning, his boots crashing confidently in the wet, lumpy
grass, waving and smiling broadly. Aparently he was after
a close-up shot of the bull. He had to harry the animal for
about two kilometres before he got close enough to satisfy
himself.
We had delayed our travel about two and a half hours

among the marsh yaks. Further down was the village of
Tsaka, set in a sweeping valley below barren, painted
mountains. Tsaka was quite a large village, stone-built, set
among golden fields of hay and winding rubble-walls and
stands of autumn-coloured poplar. Mr K. knew some
people there and we were ushered into a room smelling of
damp woollen cloth, handworked carpets and old leather,
walls hung with burnished copper pans and ladles, and
small, smeared glass windows letting in shafts of late
afternoon sun and nuggets of turquoise sky. We were fed
elaborate snacks, steamed, boiled and curried, and glasses
of hot tea. Before we left, after photographing some pretty,
giggling women working at haymaking, we had to pass
near some of the mastiffs who lay dozing. Some were
green-eyed, others yellow-eyed, all heavily-built, shaggy
animals, near-feral in aspect and comportment. These dogs
were not pets, they were working animals, guarding
domestic animals and villagers' homes from wolves and
perhaps even the occasional snow leopard hungry enough
to come down from remote heights and attack stray herd
animals out to pasture. My attitude towards dogs is, I
think, positive and practical : I like them if they like me
and if they show it first. The dogs, clearly, were not the
waggy-tailed variety. A deepening of friendship and
mutual understanding, I sensed, was going to be a lost
enterprise from the start. I eyed them warily; they eyed us.
We kept firmly out of their way and fortunately they
desisted from attacking us and I thought that was a
satisfactory and sufficient result all round. None of these
dangerous and unpredictable-looking animals were
tethered.
I was reminded, on that occasion, of an incident in 1977

when I was at Koyul post on the road to Demchok on the
south-eastern border of Ladakh with Tibet. The area was a
high, wide plateau covered in sparse, short grass and well-
used by large herds of domestic yaks and their Drokpa
nomad owners. On the way to Koyul, travelling in two
jeeps, we passed a herd of about a couple of hundred yaks,
with four or five very large mastiffs managing the animals.
The mastiffs, on seeing our vehicles, immediately lurched
forward towards us and gathered themselves into a full tilt
charge, rendered all the more unnerving for its
soundlessness - not one of them barked. They hurled

themselves at the back and the sides of both jeeps, rocking
and rattling them as we moved along. Shouts and threats
from the vehicles failed to deter this attack. Not until the
driver had accelerated enough to leave the dogs behind,
now snarling in low bass tones, were we safe from the
possibility of being pushed by the animals into an
accident. By the time we arrived at Koyul post, I decided I
was already nervous of these animals. After a fitful night's
rest, I got up next morning to use the toilet which turned
out to be an iron cabin about twenty yards up the slope of
a hill away from the sleeping accommodation. When I
opened the back door to go up the hill, I discovered that
there were two parallel rows of mastiffs, facing each other
as though at some weird canine conference.The two lines
led from the back door all the way up to the toilet. There
must have been at least thirty or forty dogs altogether.
They all turned their heads simultaneously as I emerged
and eyed me unblinkingly. Not one dog made a sound. No
tail wagged; no paw twitched. They were all completely
silent except for the slow movement of their heads and the
turn of eyes ears in my direction. I looked at them; they
looked at me. I lost all interest in going up to that toilet.
From Tsaka, the route towards Hanle took us over sandy

desert country via the post of Loma Bridge. The sand was
a relatively thin layer over broad, flat country but thick
enough to slow the vehice down considerably, the wheels
slithering and churning dust. Tracks there were, this time,
but they seemed to go off in different directions. The
strong afternoon sun was angled at two o'clock, casting the
mountains on our right in deep shadow and the ones on
our left in full, white-hot relief. The wind whispered
among tussocks of grass. Stones scrunched under the
wheels. At about four in the afternoon, with the sun still
bright but leaning hard on the topmost crests of the hills in
the west, we saw one of those startling incongruities that
time and again make the Ladakh landscape wake you up
all of a sudden after hours of driving. This time it was an
enormous sand dune, conical, perfect, butter-golden with a
knife-edge crease as though it had been freshly sculpted
that morning. It stood on its own, hugging the flanks of the
hills on either side which were bare rock. We stopped and
stared. It looked completely and magnificently out of place
as though some insane theme park entrepreneur had
brought thousands of tons of sand and deliberately tried to
create a comic-book desert theme in an otherwise

inapppropriate landscape. The thing was an elegant,
stupendous natural folly. We got out to take pictures, as
usual. was doing the clever stuff, concentrating on the
possibilities in form and texture, shape and light. There
was a lot to recommend it. I was thinking about the sun, a
suspended halo of blinding light hanging dead above the
top right slope of the dune which must have been a good
thousand feet high. I was wondering whether I could get a
picture of the dune with the sun like that. As I watched, I
heard exclaiming so I went over to and to listen to what
they were saying. Then I noticed what had grabbed their
attention. When we had arrived, the dune had been a
pyramid with its crease a perfect curve, set with a single
tall bush halfway up the slope of the crease like an
ornamental flourish. Now the curve was starting to move
and dissolve with the motion of the wind. As we watched,
the lower third of the crease rippled and broke up, and
became a smooth flank, that part of the crease probably
reappearing around the flank of the dune but out of our
line of vision. The ripple slowly moved up the crease; the
edge broke up altogether and the dune, within fifteen or
twenty minutes, became, from our angle of view, just a
great lump of sand without the elegant, perfect geometric
shape we had seen. We could tell from the way the wind
was blowing the sand that the whole crease from top to
bottom was probably forming around the side out of sight.
The wind was not destroying the pyramid, it was, as it
were, turning it, rotating its shape. I used to think that with
large structures modifed by wind or water power, the
processes of remoulding usually took rather a long time
and in most cases, you would not actually see the changes
taking place unless you kept up observation for days,
months or years. We just happened to be at the right place
at the right time on this occasion to see a piece of nature's
ceaseless restructuring produce and break up an entire
transient form, perfectly geometrical in shape, and, huge
as it was, do this in a few minutes before our eyes as we
stood watching.
At Loma Bridge, we stopped for tea in the shadow of

sunset. We sat around on cold, metal folding chairs while
the open door framed ink-dark distant hills and oxblood
clouds below a clear, faded blue evening sky. We had
passed the marshlands between Dungti and Loma without
seeing anything much of its beauty, but the time would
come for that on another day. The 65 kilometres between

Loma Bridge and Hanle (altitude 14,200 feet) were passed
mostly in darkness. When we arrived in Hanle we were all
very tired, except the irrepressible Mr K. who, as usual,
had done all the hard work.
In the pitch darkness, several men came out with

torchlights, one carrying a paraffin lamp, flaring smearily.
A tall, gaunt sergeant, lantern-jawed, stood to attention.
Mr K. got out and the sergeant rattled through a litany
listing the number of men of different ranks currently
manning the post and their functions. I guessed that Mr K.
knew the details without it being repeated for him but, for
those who like rituals in uniform, it sounded good. Hanle
turned out to be a rather spartan post, in marked contrast to
the upbeat, almost luxurious air of Chushul. The next
morning we discovered that the buildings commanded the
heights, almost hidden in a defile in the hills, looking
across a huge oval marsh. But now we stumbled about in
semi-darkness, escorted by men armed with flashlights.
Mr K. had a large low room with a bukhari in the middle,
sputtering uncertainly. Food was brought: tough, old
chicken curry, too hot for Mr K.'s palate, fine for mine.
Mo-mos (Tibetan meat dumplings) were served which I
declined as I found them indigestible, but demolished
three or four of these very filling boiled meat dumplings
encased in suet. After a little desultory conversation, we
admitted to Mr K. that we were too tired and wanted to get
to bed. Mr K., as usual, was not tired, and appeared to be
slightly put out at our departure within half an hour of the
end of the meal. Our room was a little dispiriting, located
next to the kitchen which was noisy till quite late in the
night. The three camp beds with damp evilªsmelling
bedding were grouped around a rusted bukhari, with
slightly cracked piping, and which took the orderly about
ten minutes to get going properly. Rats scurried busily in
the hay-stuffed ceiling; their furry shadows scuttled along
the walls and corners of the room. I, selfishly, grabbed the
bed nearest the toilet, grabbed the one near the door, was
left with the one sloping downwards along the far wall.
The floor of the room was at a slight angle so that 's bed
was tipped towards the bukhari at the centre of the room.
It was also the least stable as one of the legs was shorter
than the three others so every movement of the body made
it wobble and move along the floor. The tendency, we
suspected, was for the bed to move towards the burning
hot bukhari with the danger that in the middle of the night
could burn his arm in an unconcious movement. The rats
squeaked and slithered about ceaslessly. was by this time a
little subdued, unsurprisingly, as he definitely had the
worst deal and no one was in a self-sacrificing mood. tried
to liven things up by leaping about and poking at the
ceiling with a stick, pretending to get rid of rats. This
failed to raise anyone's spirits so he gave up after a few
minutes. The night was cold and dark, the bukhari not very
effective. We drifted off to sleep, thinking about rats
scurrying across our faces in the night, and longed for
morning.
The next day, after a wash and some breakfast, we all felt
a good deal better. Mr K. turned out to be an enthusiastic
installer of solar-powered energy, though his motives
seemed to be complex. A special little laboratory complete
with computerised equipment was maintained for research
and a room entirely powered by solar cells was shown to
us. We wished we had had this room the previous night
instead of the one we had been given. It was self-
contained, out of ear-shot of the noisy kitchen and
spotlessly clean. The walls were installed with large
windows looking out onto a magnificent panorama in all
directions : the night sky views would have been superb.
being maintained. The equipment was very expensive
indeed and apparently there were problems with their
maintenance. Although Ladakh has an abundance of
sunlight, I was told by the engineer we met in Leh that
solar equipment has problems with operation in very low
temperatures which is exactly what you get in Ladakh for
half the year. Batteries are very sensitive and easily
damaged in such conditions and replacement is expensive.
Mr K. was apparently undeterred by any of this and had
invested time, money and energy in setting up these
systems, supervising maintenance very carefully. My
impression was that he was partly motivated by a desire
for his posts and units to be as self-sufficient as possible
and therefore less dependent on supplies of energy from
Leh. In view of the logistical difficulties, this was
probably sensible. On the frontier, the more you could do
for yourself, the better. Mr K. was proud of the
professionalism and high morale of his own corps. He had
a touch of the egomaniac about him but his confidence
was real, his ideals genuine, and it was clear that anyone
who attempted to bribe him or deflect him from what he
saw as his duty would be making a big mistake. It is an

impressive and unusual quality in an individual living in a
nation in which bribery and corruption is so much the
order of the day now that it is actually no longer
distinguishable from normal life to many people. The
respect he inspired in all his men was touching and
obvious. He was clearly in complete command.
Journey´s End: Hanlé Post
Before we left Hanle post, there was a delay of about

twenty minutes as someone reported that a pair of rare
black-necked cranes had been seen in the huge marshes
beyond Hanle village. We stood on the track by the jeep,
looking across a tremendous circular view at least twenty
kilometres in diameter. Hanle village's white houses
clumped on low outcrops of rock above cultivated fields.
Beyond stretched green marshes and all of this was ringed
by a circle of massive, sharp-crested hills. The sun was
very bright and the air a little hazy. We stood around while
Mr K. peered for a long time through his binoculars and
the apparatus was passed around but nobody could see
anything. Mr K. was determined to find the cranes so we
all piled in and he drove down the track away from the
post and towards the marshes. After two or three
kilometres he headed right out over the marsh which
glistened wetly and occasionally showed up stretches of
shining water. After some careful negotiation Mr K.
finally stopped near a herd of about a hundred sheep and
goats, the herders small figures with sticks on the outer
perimeters of the flock. There were no dogs to break up
the immense peacefulness of that place, the silence broken
only by the occasional low bleating of an animal. , and Mr
K. decided to look for the cranes together and they
squelched off across the marsh. I made off on my own
about a couple of hundred metres into the marsh away
from the jeep which was minded by Sonam, Mr K.'s
assistant. I sat alone with my back to the sun on a big
hummocky lump of nearly dry clay topped with a pretty
white fungus. The whole marsh was covered with patches
of this fungus giving it the appearance of being streaked
with snow. The sun was hot on my back, I could see sheep
and goats as warm, off-white bundles clumped together in
a big oval sweep before me, the sky was a soft, streaky
blue. , and Mr K. were in the marshy distance, so far by
now that I needed to look through my zoom lens to

distinguish them individually. I lapsed into silence for a
long time and the peace settled into my bones like
aromatic massage oil. I lost track of time although I
remained awake. Eventually the others came back to me in
a group, I looked at my watch and at least two hours had
passed. They reported that they had seen the cranes but
could not get close enough to take pictures. I felt so rooted
to the spot that for a few dreamy moments I was thinking
about not getting up at all but just staying where I was
forever and, from time to time, if I got hungry, persuading
a shepherd to part with one of his sheep.
The jeep rumbled on across the marshes and we crossed

around a short range of hills and came onto another
enormous marsh, at least fifteen kilometres in diameter. It
appeared as a perfect oval, like a stupendous football field.
Mountains completely closed it in, looming four or five
thousand feet above the level surface. A lake of water
about two hundred yards wide appeared in view, reflecting
the stippled, dark golden pyramid of a big hill by its
farther shore and a soft burst of spectrum colours from the
sun that shone brightly onto it. It was as we approached
this beautiful lake that an old woman appeared as a small
figure to our left. She was walking slowly in the direction
of the lake about a hundred yards away. At that distance
her age was suggested only by a slight stiffness of gait and
a forward bend of the back, plus her stick for support. Her
black gown flapped slightly in the light mid-morning
breeze. The presence of this human figure was as strange,
in this clear morning light, as the appearance of the little
boy in the evening half-light of Pangong Lake. There was
no human habitation anywhere in sight, all the way to the
mountains ringing the marsh. Where had she come from ?
Where was she going?
We stopped the vehicle a few metres away while she stood

still and looked at us without moving. The sunlight shone
on her old, old face. We approached her and stood a few
feet away, uncertainly. Mr K. said something to her and
her face creased into a smile. Her eyes seemed filled with
tears but it was probably just from strong sunlight. She
raised a frail hand, palm outward, as though in blessing.
We all stood like this for a few moments and looked at
each other. Then she turned slowly and using her stick,
strode surprisingly swiftly away, black gown fluttering in
a light wind. After ten minutes she was barely a dot in the
distance, the mountains looming above her, only her head
showing above an emerald sea of grass. All around was an
immense silence. It was the last day of our eastern trip and
we were on our way home.
PO S T ED BY CER RO N EV AD O A T 8: 20 A M
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Thoughts, Rants and a Travelogue: Ladakh, a travelogue Page 1 of 45

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THOUGHTS, RANTS AND A

TUESDAY, JANUARY 04, 2005 ABOUT ME

Poetry is just the evidence

For those unfamiliar with the

Chumathang-Nyoma Road, Eastern Ladakh, August 1977

It is one of the few occasions that I seem to recall I meditated. Not

Arrival in Leh, October 1996.

Fifteen kilometres out of Leh, along a beautiful winding road fringed by

We walked along the stone wall of the schoolyard swamped in heavy,

like retired guardians of a culture nearly forgotten, almost like ruins

The Tibetan Girl

Initially, there seemed to be no possibility of interaction beyond ordering

Our conversations could be easily overheard by everyone else in the small

Tendzin, the shepherd-nomad and I

Idealistic Western visitors have their biases and

Tendzin, a young farmer I met in Leh, told me about his

and revered, who was now old and wanted to keep

My background was very different, city-bred, food

The conversation carried on throughout the day. It was

Karzu, Samkar, Yuthung, Leh out of sight behind the fold

We sat on tussocks of nearly dry grass among lumpy white

double-length. His lined, leathery face suggested an age of

No one spoke, there was a slight tension in the air, but it

acquiesced and stood straight and relaxed. I could not

A few minutes later we packed up our lunch and started

swiftly, seemingly just above the crest of the hill, like a

When we arrived back in the village, Tendzin led us to a

While the picture-taking session was going on, I wandered

clouds moving over and away from the village, in the

After dinner a joint was passed around. I engaged Tendzin

The walk back to Leh turned into a kind of odd fiasco. It

ground, while I planted my feet rather awkwardly and

Tendzin must have noticed that in the gathering darkness

The last frontier: Ladakh-Tibet border, Nyoma to Kyari

The morning we left for the frontier on the east of Ladakh

rolling and tumbling down in great sweeps of burnt umber,

We were crossing the Ladakh Range from south to north.

the wind, strung out on long strings like clothes on clothes

Drangtse was set in a silent, well-watered valley

The monastery was surrounded by a close outcrop of hills,

effect enhanced by the lack of human voices and figures

I looked around in the silence at the trees, at the lovely,

remote, hidden space, champagne air. Here lived a man in

I could not see Drangtse, however, turn into one of these

Unlike Thikse monastery, there was no blaring from radios

The road to Lukung took about two and a half hours of

dung fire on which their mother was cooking. They stared

We reached Lukung Post, a well-kept police building with

and twisted like hills in a dream: sienna, russet, dark red,

I grew sick, then got better. I developed nausea and a

The landscape seemed to mock us, playing tricks with

The last hour of the journey to Chushul was made in

high with a target motif painted on them, red centre in

About ten minutes beyond the iron bridge, we finally

contraptions, trying not to burn one's self by knocking into

However, we were not going to sleep just yet. Mr K.