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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 northeast 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 northwest 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

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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. Twentyone 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

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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,

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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, goldorange 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

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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-andchips. 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.

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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

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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

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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, twostoried, 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 selfconsciousness. The buildings all looked quite old. Beyond, the half-hidden, clustered silhouettes of other villages,

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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

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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

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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 redbrown 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

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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 onestringed 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 fastmoving little stream rushing through the village and passing very close to the house, and partly from the storm

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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

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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.

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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 fourwheel 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,

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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 Panggong 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 raggedlooking 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

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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

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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,

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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

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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 greenshouldered 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

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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 rubblestrewn 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 lowgear 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.

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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

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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 rustymetalled 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

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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 solarpowered cells. Mr K., we discovered later, was an enthusiastic proponent of solar powered energy of which more, later. Kerosene lanterns hissed, giving out a dirtylooking 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.

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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.

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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 OctoberNovember 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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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 warmblooded 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

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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

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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

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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 -

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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 rustcoloured 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

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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 semidomesticated 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.

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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

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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 wellused 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 selfcontained, 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

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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

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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

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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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