For no apparent reason he switched to French. Zaro spoke the language extremely well and carried on some talk with him before they reverted to German. The Tibetans were listening in open-mouthed fascination at the flow of strange sounds. I had the strong impression that our new-found acquaintance did not like us. I think probably the cause of it was our appearance – the dirty matted hair, our torn clothes, our complete poverty. It seemed to me that in this and other villages he enjoyed a prestige as a Westerner built up and consolidated over long years. He might well have thought that the advent of six battered European tramps might weaken his reputation with the natives.
Zaro, who was doing most of the talking on our side, soon sensed that our arrival here was not entirely a pleasure to the stranger. It brought out the imp in Zaro. He answered the missionary’s questions with jaunty insouciance. He described us as ‘a group of cosmopolitan tourists’ and airily evaded an answer to the inquiry of where we had come from.
He looked frankly unbelieving when Zaro said we were travelling to Lhasa as pilgrims and in a few minutes there had developed an unmistakable atmosphere of mutual distrust. Only the Tibetans were enjoying the exchanges – and they did not understand a word.
‘You carry nothing with you. How do you live?’
Zaro replied, ‘Through the hospitality of the country. The people are very kind, as you must have discovered.’
‘But you are not able to eat every day in that manner?’
‘We take less than we need,’ said Zaro. ‘There are many days when we pull in our belts. We are used to it.’
Marchinkovas broke in to ask the missionary where he lived. The man pointed to a mule cropping grass a few yards away. ‘That is my mule. Wherever it stops, that is my home.’
Our entry into the village was about ten o’clock in the morning. The missionary sat with us while we ate – I remember particularly about this place that we were given rice and I wondered where it had been grown. He talked a little but it was a strained meal. He was puzzled by us and did not know how to tackle us. About three o’clock in the afternoon he announced that he would be moving on. We walked outside with him and he went off on a round of calls at the houses. He saddled his mule and looked round at us as he prepared to depart.
In German he said, ‘I wish you luck wherever you are going.’ We thanked him. He did not offer to shake hands. He said his farewells to the Tibetans and walked away, leading the mule.
The Tibetan who had made himself our host watched him go and then made signs to us, drawing himself up, thumping his thrust-out chest and flexing his muscles. He was trying to tell us, I think, that the parting guest was, or had been, a man of great physical prowess. I felt a spasm of regret that the meeting could not have been more friendly. With the barriers down between us, he could have told us so much we wanted to know.
The inevitable bunch of sharp-eyed, inquisitive children surrounded us as we made to follow our host back to the little house. One little fellow of about eight plucked at Zaro’s trousers. Zaro made monkey faces at him. The children, about a dozen of them, crowded laughing about him. Zaro did some more clowning and the children loved it.
‘Give them your Cossack dance, Eugene,’ I called out.
And down he went on his haunches, kicking up the dust as we stamped out the rhythm. The children screeched with joy and the grown-ups came out to laugh and wonder at his cavorting.
Zaro’s uninhibited performance was like a derisive gesture towards the aloofness and dignity of the man who had just gone. And I think Zaro was not unaware of it.
In the fullness of time we came to a fork in the rough trail which we confidently accepted as that mentioned to us by the Circassian – the eastward branch leading to Lhasa and the other south-west to India. A few hours later we saw far off a big caravan of possibly fifty men and animals creeping slowly away from us in the direction we imagined to be Lhasa. It was the only large travelling group we ever saw in the country.
We found this to be a country not only of rugged ranges but also of great lakes. Near the end of November our way led us to a vast sheet of water like an inland sea. From the high ground as we came down to it we tried to guess its size. We thought we must be looking across the breadth of it and because we could not be sure that the thin line on the horizon really was the far shore, estimates of the distance varied from sixteen to forty kilometres. There was no way of even roughly calculating the length – we could not see either limit. We bathed in the fresh cold water and camped the night around a fire which did not throw out quite enough heat to keep out the damp night air from the lake.
Then followed a period of comparatively easy progress. The lake margin was our guide for many miles. A couple of days later we were in broken country again. There was a cluster of a few houses where we stayed for only one meal and on our refusal to stay overnight were given food to carry with us. We were moving well and morale was excellent. My leg wound had closed cleanly and I had discarded the bandage.
Three or four days after leaving the great lake we camped in a valley strewn with gaunt rocks where the thin vegetation struggled to exist. It had been raining and the ground was wet. Even with the tinder we carried it took a long time to get a fire going. In a shallow cave we settled down to eat what remained of our flat cakes of coarse-milled flour. The night breeze eddied the smoke from the fire about us and we sat close together for warmth. There was little to distinguish this night from dozens of others that now lay behind us. Certainly there was nothing to warn us that this was to be the setting for tragedy.
We slept, as always with the exception of Kolemenos, fitfully. One and another would awake mumbling from half-dreams to get up and tend the fire. Zaro it was who rose and went out as another day began palely to light the still desolation of the valley. I lay propped on one elbow as he came back.
‘There’s some mist about and it’s cold,’ he said to me. ‘Let’s get moving.’ He stepped over the others, rousing them one by one. Paluchowicz lay next to me, Marchinkovas was huddled between Smith and Kolemenos. I stood up and stretched, rubbed my stiff legs, flapped my arms about. There was a general stirring. Kolemenos pushed me with elephantine playfulness as I limbered up.
Zaro’s voice cut in on us. ‘Come on, Zacharius. Get up!’ He was bending over Marchinkovas, gently shaking his shoulder. I heard the note of panic as he shouted again, ‘Wake up, wake up!’
Zaro looked up at us, his face tight with alarm. ‘I think he’s ill. I can’t wake him.’
I dropped on my knees beside Marchinkovas. He lay in an attitude of complete relaxation, one arm thrown up above his head. I took the outstretched arm and shook it. He lay unmoving, eyes closed. I felt for the pulse, I laid my ear to his chest, lifted the eyelids. I went through all the tests again, fearful of believing their shocking message. The body was still warm.
I straightened up. I was surprised at how small and calm my voice was. ‘Marchinkovas is dead,’ I said. The statement sounded odd and flat to me, so I said it again. ‘Marchinkovas is dead.’
Somebody burst out, ‘But he can’t be. There was nothing wrong with him. I talked to him only a few hours ago. He was well. He made no complaint . . .’
‘He is dead,’ I said.
Mister Smith got down beside the body. He was there only a minute or two. Then he crossed the hands of Marchinkovas on his chest, stood up and said, ‘Yes, gentlemen, Slav is right.’ Paluchowicz took off his old fur cap and crossed himself.
Zacharius Marchinkovas, aged 28 or 29, who might have been a successful architect in his native Lithuania if the Russians had not come and taken him away, had given up the struggle. We were stunned, we could not understand it, we did not know how death had come to him. Perhaps he was more exhausted than we knew and his willing heart could take the strain no more. I don’t know. None of us knew. Marchinkovas the silent one with the occasional shaft of cynical wit, Marchinkovas who lived much with his own thoughts, the man with a load of bitterness whom Kristina had befriended an
d made to laugh – Marchinkovas had gone.
In the rocky ground we could find no place to dig a grave for him. His resting place was a deep cleft between rocks and we filled up the space above him with pebbles and small stones. Kolemenos carried out his last duty of making a small cross which he wedged into the rubble. We said our farewells, each in his own fashion. Silently, I commended his soul to God. The five of us went heavy-footed on our way. With us went Marchinkovas’s fufaika and sable waistcoat. We thought they would be useful to us.
The country changed again, challenging our spirit and endurance with the uncompromising steepness of craggy hills. We learned to use our wire loops as climbing aids on difficult patches. We tried always to find a village to spend the night under cover but all too often the end of the day overtook us in the open with no human settlement in sight.
Once from the heights we saw, many miles off, the flashing reflection of the sun from the shining roofs of a distant, high-sited city, and it pleased us to believe that at least we had seen the holy city of Lhasa. What we saw may have been one of the greater monasteries of Tibet, but the direction was right for Lhasa and the idea of having seen it after using its name like a talisman all the way from the borders of Siberia appealed to us.
Towards the end of December we came across the biggest village of our Tibetan journey, almost a small township of some forty houses arranged with an unusual regularity on each side of the road. It had, too, the unusual refinement of a larger building which in Europe would certainly have been the village hall. We were taken along to this building by a villager who was well padded and clothed against the cold and we remarked on the way on the absence of children. The reason emerged when our escort fetched out from the building a slim, lean-faced, sharp-eyed Asiatic who may have been between thirty and forty. He looked us over, bowed, smiled and went back inside. A minute later a couple of dozen children exploded out and scampered down the street, throwing us glances as they went. The place was a school and the thin man apparently their teacher.
I am sure he was not a Tibetan. Chinese? I could not be sure. Three or four Tibetan villagers stood beside us as he came out a second time and there was an exchange of conversation between them and him the gist of which was that we were foreigners who did not understand their language. That much seemed obvious. He spoke to us in a couple of languages, which may have been Tibetan and Chinese, enunciating slowly and carefully. I said a few words in Russian and Zaro spoke in German. We were getting nowhere.
We stood there awkwardly for a minute, the Tibetans looking anxiously on. The teacher spoke again, very slowly. His language this time was French. Zaro fairly threw himself into the fray. The words tumbled from his lips. The teacher smiled and put up his hand, motioning Zaro to speak more slowly. Zaro complied. They talked together with evident enjoyment. It was a talk with a wealth of gesticulation on Zaro’s side and many re-shapings and simplifications. The Tibetans were delighted with the way things were turning out and beamed on us all.
Then the man, in his slow and gentle voice, said to Zaro, ‘Go with the man who brought you to me. He will take you to his house and look after you. Later I will join you and you shall talk again to me.’ He turned and spoke briefly to the Tibetan. We were led off, taken into a house and regaled with tea while a meal was in preparation.
The teacher walked in quietly. He entered without knocking – nobody seems to knock on doors in Tibet – and bowed all round. He sat with us and when the meal came ate with us. He produced a clasp knife attached to a plaited leather thong about his waist and, noting my interest, handed it to me. It was single-bladed, bone handled and the inscription on the steel showed it had been made in Germany. He did not tell me where he had obtained it.
Zaro tried to get from him where he had been educated and particularly where he had learned his little French but he cleverly allowed his attention to be distracted by his host, leaving the question hanging in the air. Zaro’s inquiries on this point were, in fact, never answered. The man interested me tremendously and I felt sure he had not lived the whole of his life in Tibet. The thought has since occurred to me that he might have spent some part of his time in French Indo-China.
With our habitual caution we did not tell him the origin of our journey but Zaro satisfied his curiosity on the manner of our entry into Tibet. He was genuinely impressed to learn that we had crossed the Gobi. He said he had not heard of anyone making the crossing without animals and without food supplies.
‘And where are you going now?’ he asked.
‘We are trying to reach India,’ said Zaro. It was pointless now to talk of a pilgrimage to Lhasa. We were off course.
The Tibetan householder interrupted politely to ask for a translation. The teacher answered and both men showed concern.
‘You should change your route,’ he advised us. ‘The weather will be bad in the mountains and you will suffer greatly. The best thing you can do is to go to Lhasa and join up with a caravan. You may have to wait a long time but you will find it worthwhile.’
Zaro said we would think over his counsel, but we all knew we were going on and that we should never enter Lhasa.
We asked the teacher to thank the Tibetan for the meal and for his kindness to us. The message was passed over. The Tibetan talked and the teacher said to us, ‘The man is pleased. He wishes your feet will preserve you and that you will not meet with any misfortune on your way. He says you will stay with him tonight and he will give you food for your journey tomorrow.’
We sat there talking until long after darkness. Through Zaro I asked a question on a subject that had been bothering me ever since I entered the house – that was the peculiar, acrid, faintly farmhouse smell in the place.
The teacher smiled and pointed to the stone floor, which appeared to have been given a hard, thick coat of brick-red paint. The smell, he explained, came from the floor. The smooth painted effect was achieved by house-proud Tibetans in this part with the use of a fine red dust mixed with animal urine.
Zaro had him work out the date for us. It was 23 December 1941.
We slept soundly on sheepskins spread on the coloured stone floor and the next morning were given food as we had been promised and sent on our way with good wishes for the success of our journey.
On Christmas Eve we sat up around a bright fire. The night was freezing and no one wanted to settle down to a chilled half-sleep. We talked about Christmases we had known, of the awful Christmas a year ago when we were slogging north to the timber camp. Paluchowicz, that tough, devout old Roman Catholic, surprised us all by suddenly starting to sing in his rusty, off-tune voice a Polish carol. He got through two verses; then, finding we were not going to join in, became silent.
After a little while he said, ‘Every Christmas since I was old enough to remember I have sung carols on Christmas Eve. So tonight I have sung a carol. It will be good for us, I know.’
The days were cold now, the nights colder. Snow-charged clouds hung menacingly over the distant, gaunt foothills of the Himalayas. In a poor hamlet of four stone-built shacks we stayed one night and the next morning spent several hours making warm mittens from the Circassian’s gift fleece.
There came one clear day when we saw the snow-capped, cloud-topped soaring hump of the Himalayas, deceptively near. We were, in fact, a long way off and were to find the intervening distance fraught with trial and hazard.
We tried desperately not to be caught on the heights after darkness, but there was nothing we could do about it when early one afternoon we were enveloped in a howling snowstorm. It would have been folly to push on through it. The snow was whipping into our eyes and it was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead. As we crept along looking for shelter the snow packed hard on our moccasins. We were on a normally steep descent and the slippery soles threatened us at every downward step with disaster.
Luck or Providence gave us a natural, cave-like windbreak between two great rocks lying at an acute angle. With us we carried one sack of wood
and some dried animal droppings which we took turns in carrying and we set about lighting a fire. We almost gave up the job as time and again the glowing gubka failed to get the small dry twigs alight in this high, snow-laden wind. Zaro and I worked on the job for what must have been over an hour before we met success. Over the narrow opening at the junction of the two rocks we spread our sacks, pinning them down with the heaviest stones we could find and they were soon sagging with the weight of the snow. Then we jammed our sticks, rafter-fashion, under the sacks to take the strain.
By morning we were snowed in, but surprisingly cosy in our smoky little retreat. The worst of the storm was over and only small snow flurries under a watery sun greeted us when we dug our way out. The descent was perilous but we made it unscathed. It took us all day to get down from our high perch.
21
Himalayan Foothills
I ESTIMATE the time to have been late January when we came to the great river, iced over from bank to bank. This must have been the broad Tibetan waterway flowing west to east across the southern part of the country to find its way through the mountain barrier into India as the mighty Brahmaputra. Winter had overtaken us and the night temperatures were well below zero. There were occasional heavy snowfalls, sleety rain, winds which whipped down off the tops of the hills with the chill of the heights in them. Bitter though the conditions, they had not the severity of the Siberian winter. But they were grim enough for us, underfed and weakened by nine long months of continuous foot travel. We crossed the river warily, Zaro, the lightest of us, leading to test the strength of the ice in the middle, where we feared it might not take our weight. There was no difficulty, however, until we reached the south bank, which was tall, steep and ice-coated. Kolemenos chipped steps out with the axe and we climbed up. We followed the river along westwards for a mile or so until we came to a point where the bank fell away, offering easy access to the water. Grouped here were three low stone huts and in front of them on a small sloping beach well back from the river edge half-a-dozen small boats lay keels upwards. Because of their high bows and sterns the boats were canted over, leaving space enough between the gunwales and the ground for a man to crawl under. I poked my head under and sniffed at the smell of long-dead fish. In the boat’s planks I could see fish scales.