In a bunch we moved over to the huts. Inside they were so low that Kolemenos had to bend his head to avoid touching the roof. The construction of the roof was interesting: bamboo lengths supported a covering of tightly-interlaced wattles, into which were woven twisted cords of animal hair, probably yak’s. The floors were dry enough to suggest that the roofs were reasonably watertight. The construction was of the crudest – three stone boxes with mats thrown over the top, with doorless slits for entrances. They contained some old nets, some odd lengths of bamboo poles and a few short, big-diameter cylinders of wood, heavily rubbed and scored, which were obviously used as rollers upon which the boats were pushed to the water and launched.
We picked out the best of the huts and decided to sleep there the night. On the earthen floor was a blackened, hard-baked circle with a few charred pieces of wood, and overhead there was a small hole in the roof. Here we built our fire, splitting up some bamboo for fuel and banking it up for the night with animal dung which Zaro carried with him.
In February we encountered our last village, just eight or nine houses snuggled in a hollow a couple of hundred feet above a narrow valley. Behind the village reared the forbidding rampart of tall hills over which we had struggled for two days. Across the valley, hazy in the light of a wintry afternoon sun, another range heaved itself up towards the clouds. The houses had, for Tibet, a rare distinction. They were the only two-storey buildings we saw in the whole country, or, indeed, since we had left Siberia. We had descended to a point west of and below the little settlement and had to climb up to it along a rough track. We were profoundly tired, miserable and hungry. Paluchowicz was limping on his right foot, the arch of which had been bruised when he trod on a sharp stone.
The Tibetans, when they understood by signs whence we had come and where we intended to go, showed amazement at our hardihood, or foolhardiness. We were gently ushered into one of the houses, made to sit down on low benches polished with years of use, fussed over, given steaming hot tea and fed with mutton and the usual filling oaten cakes. Paluchowicz was given some grease, possibly sheep fat, to rub into his sore foot. From all the houses men and children came to look at us. There was much smiling and bowing and slow nodding of heads. Undoubtedly our arrival was an extraordinary event and would long be a topic for wondering talk.
In this house was an excellent example of a building custom we had noted throughout Tibet – a flat-faced stone on which three or four lines of an inscription had been cut. This one had been built in near the door and about two feet above floor level. The Circassian had told us that these tablets could only be made by certain lamas and that the Tibetans set great store by them, for the words upon them were a holy injunction to the spirits of evil and misfortune to keep their distance. Our host, rather taller than the average Tibetan and aged, I guessed, about thirty, seemed pleased at my interest in his lucky stone. He came over, pointed to it and then to his left wrist, on which I saw a broad brass bracelet to which was attached a small metal box. This was, to me, a new variation of the prayer-wheel, and I think it is obvious the man was trying to show a religious connection between it and the inscription on the stone.
These people were skilled weavers. In the main downstairs room was a spinning wheel and a small loom, and the woollen material they produced was thick, warm and of good quality. The best examples of their work I saw were in blankets and bed coverings in gay and bold colours of red and yellow. The sheep which provided the wool were at this time in their winter quarters, a big dry-stone pound along one side of which were long, low stone sheds to protect them from the worst of the weather.
The link between upper and lower floors was a short, steep flight of rough-shaped stone steps leading out of a corner of the big lower room. There was no handrail and one entered the room above through a square aperture as though emerging from a hatch in a ship. Upstairs were the family sleeping quarters and a store for tightly-packed bales of wool. Here, in the warm, stuffy smell of sheep, we slept the night in cosy comfort while the wind moaned and whined around the thick walls outside. Daylight woke us gradually as it struggled through the tiny single window of thick mica stuff.
While we ate a substantial morning meal we were amused to watch the Tibetan householder going around our worn old sacks lifting them and feeling at the contents.
Said Zaro, ‘Perhaps he’s making sure we haven’t packed up the family silver.’
The Tibetan could not have known what was said, but he was pleased to see us laughing and joined in, completing his round of our belongings as he did so, finding out in the process that all we were carrying was an assortment of pieces of fur and fleece, and sticks and animal stuff for fire-making. When the investigation was over, he looked at us with some concern, pointed to the sacks and indicated the food we were stuffing into ourselves.
The American said, ‘He is worried because we are travelling without a supply of food.’
He went off into the little back room and we heard him talking to the womenfolk. Then he passed through and out of the front door, followed by a youth of fifteen or sixteen. They were absent about half-an-hour and when they returned they carried a young sheep freshly killed and skinned. The carcase was split down the back and for some hours the two women of the house busied themselves with the task of roasting the meat on spits over the open fire.
Meanwhile the man walked round us all and examined our cut and bruised feet. He took himself off up the stone stairs and brought down a bundle of raw wool. Demonstrating with one of Paluchowicz’s moccasins, he showed how the stuff could be used to insulate the feet against cold. He pulled out fistfuls of the wool and handed them round. The idea was excellent and I think we managed to convey our thanks to him.
When we left the little mountain hamlet we were loaded down with food, which included a complete side of the roasted sheep. Up to now we had kept whatever eatables we had been given in one sack, which was carried in turns. We decided at this stage to share the meat and flat cakes equally between us because of the danger of losing the lot if the precious single sack disappeared with its owner on one of the increasingly difficult climbs we were now encountering.
The Tibetan escorted us about half-a-mile on our way along a narrow track above the valley. Left to ourselves we should have dropped down to the lowest point and started on the stiff ascent on the other side in order to maintain our direction due south. He, however, gestured insistently southwest along the track and to each of us in turn indicated in the far distance the landmark of twin peaks which we understood we were to cross. He bowed us off on our journey, then turned and went back the way he had come.
‘God be with you,’ said Paluchowicz fervently, in Polish.
It was early afternoon and with what remained of the day we covered possibly ten miles of fairly easy terrain. That night, around a small fire, we sat talking for hours trying to assess our position and how much farther we had to go. When the conversation flagged, the extraordinary stillness and silence of the brooding mountains engulfed us. I had a feeling of great pity for myself and for us all. I wrestled with a desperate fear that now, with thousands of heart-breaking miles behind us, the odds might be too much for us. Often at night I had these bouts of despair and doubt. The others, too, I am sure, fought the same battles, but we never voiced our waverings. With the coming of morning the outlook was always more hopeful. Fear remained, a lurking thing, but movement and action and the exercise of the mind on the daily problems of existence pushed it into the background. We were now, more strongly than ever, in the grip of the compulsive urge to keep moving. It had become an obsession, a form of mania. Like automatons we set out each morning, triggered off by a quiet ‘Let’s go’ from one or another of us. No one ever pleaded for half-an-hour’s respite. We just went, walking the stiffness out of our joints and the chill of the dark hours from our bodies.
We rationed the food out thinly and it lasted, one meal a day, for over a fortnight. It was insufficient for the heavy climbing and the peri
lous descents in which we were now involved but at least we had the comfort of knowing we could not starve while it lasted. Several times we were caught out on the heights and had to resort to the lessons of our Siberian experience in making a snow dugout and holing up sleepless until the dawn of another day.
Of the art of mountaineering we learned much as the weeks crept by. I had done some climbing in Poland before the war, but it bore little resemblance to this grim Himalayan business. Then I had stout spiked boots and all the civilized paraphernalia, plus the services of an expert guide. And we had climbed in summer, for sport. Here we would claw our way upwards for hours, sacks lashed on our backs, only to find our way blocked by a sheer, smooth outward-thrusting rock face. We would cling to our holds and rest our toes, cramped and sore with their prehensile curling inside the soft moccasins for footholds. Then we would turn about and go down and down until we found a place from which to attempt a different approach to the summit. In these conditions the going was very slow. Our total equipment was one strong rawhide rope limited in use by its short length, the axe – by far the greatest single asset – the broad-bladed knife and the loops and spikes we had made back in the heat of the Gobi.
We climbed as individuals but in set order. Zaro, the lightest man, led the way upwards, testing the holds with the axe, breaking through the ice-crust on the snow, blazing a trail for the rest of us. I came next, sometimes changing over leadership with Zaro to give him a rest, then Kolemenos, Mister Smith and Paluchowicz. We tried to make things as easy as possible for the two older men, but they always insisted on taking the lead on the descents. We still carried our trusty sticks and on gentler slopes used them for probing through the snow for hidden crevices. At other times we carried them stuck through our belts at our backs.
Zaro would have made a skilled and intrepid climber in any company. A clumsy device we thought up and made for getting us past bulging overhangs of rock was a weighty piece of smooth, hard, black stone, waisted in the middle like a figure 8, to which we tied our rope. This we would throw up and over, again and again and again, until eventually, unseen somewhere above, it would jam itself and take hold. Kolemenos would haul gently at first at the rope until it took his full weight. Then Zaro heroically would start to climb while we watched with our hearts in our throats, knowing that the penalty for a slip was death. When I saw on one or two occasions by what flimsy chance the stone had taken hold on the original throw my stomach turned over.
Occasional bright days brought the additional trial of sunglare off the white snow. We were harrowed, too, by a new experience of intense physical discomfort: the manner in which the cold struck at our foreheads until they seemed to be held in frigid bands of ice. This trouble we overcame by making sheepskin masks with slits for the eyes, the upper parts held under the rim of our caps and the lower parts hanging loosely at nose level. The masks were effective for the purpose for which they were designed, and they also seemed to help with the trouble of snowglare, but we found that moisture gathered beneath them, trickled and froze round the nose and mouth. There were times when I had to stop and thaw out the gathering ice by holding the lower part of my face in my mittened hands. We kept our hands covered as much as possible, but when climbing demanded the use of the fingers our mittens hung from our wrists by thongs. With the masks around our heads and tied at the back of the head and the ear-flaps of our Russian-style caps in position, we found it difficult to hear one another. Irritation piled on irritation. We were deadly tired, morose, always hungry. My nerves were strung up like piano strings. It was too cold to sleep.
About the beginning of March the five of us walked out of a snow-flurry along a sweeping downward east-to-west traverse into the sudden sunshine of a deep, white-clothed depression between the mountains. It was mid-morning and the sun invited us to take off our masks and caps. We sat down and rested, wrapped in silence. We had been foodless for a couple of days and our spirits were low. We sat hunched up without talking. Then I heard a sound and strained my ears to hear it again and identify it.
‘I heard a dog bark,’ said Paluchowicz.
‘I heard something, too,’ I put in.
Paluchowicz pointed excitedly. ‘It came from that direction. We must go and investigate.’
We walked along for about a quarter of a mile with our ears pricked. The sound of the dog barking was so loud and so close when it came again that we stopped in our tracks. We looked around and could see nothing. We were expecting to see a house or a shack but there was no building of any sort in sight. The dog must have scented us, because it set up a prolonged yapping until we tracked down the source as the mouth of a cave, black against the surrounding whiteness. It was only about a hundred yards away, and as we went towards it we saw the figure of a man come out into the light and look in our direction. He spoke to the dog, now joined by another one, and it stopped its noise.
He was an elderly man, with wispy white hair around his chin and a seamed and wrinkled, weather-beaten brown face. His smile showed gaps where age had robbed him of some of his front teeth. He was well clothed against the cold with the usual Tibetan sheepskin surcoat over padded jacket and trousers. He wore a fine pair of boots of leather, the upper part around the lower calf fretted with an openwork pattern which showed an inner lining of green felt. I don’t know which side was the more delighted at the meeting. The old man wagged his head and bowed and talked and flashed his great gap-toothed smile. We bowed and laughed and were happy enough to have danced in a ring about him. Even the dogs, gingery brown and looking like smaller editions of Samoyeds, were infected with enthusiasm and ran round us furiously swinging their bushy tails and yelping with excitement.
Outside the cave was a low wall about four feet high made of loosely heaped stones which acted as a windbreak. He led us round the wall and into half-gloom and immediately, before our eyes became adjusted to the change of light, our noses were assailed by the strong, clinging, fuggy odour of sheep.
The small size of the opening left me unprepared for the lofty spaciousness of the interior. The cave bent round so that its floor plan was like a boomerang. The man and his dogs lived in the space of about fifteen feet from the opening to a point where the cave was partitioned off with a rubble wall. Behind, into the farthest recesses, were sheep, about a hundred of them, I judged. This then was the winter quarters of a shepherd awaiting the coming of spring and the melting of the snows so that the sheep could be allowed out to graze on the fresh green grass of the valley. On pegs hung four or five packs of hay in big-meshed nets. A pile of empty nets showed that the sheep had been penned inside for many weeks.
A fire burned in the middle of the floor and nearby was a heap of brushwood and dung fuel. One large and one small iron cauldron stood against the stones of the fireplace. The large one, I discovered, was used for melting snow to provide water for the sheep. The other was the shepherd’s general utility cooking pot, in which he straightaway started brewing tea and for the only time in Mongolia or Tibet I saw tea made with loose dried leaf. It came from a polished wooden box and was olive green in colour. This must have been a welcoming special treat because subsequent brews were made with the usual black brick tea.
From his waist the old man took out a clasp knife and opened it. He knelt down and began with slow deliberation to sharpen the blade on a flat stone. The dogs got up and danced around him as he worked. They knew there would soon be fresh meat. He tried the edge of the steel on the ball of his thumb, grinned at us, and went off among the sheep, the dogs frisking at his heels. He went outside the cave with a kicking, bleating young sheep under his arm and in a remarkably short time was back with the fresh-skinned carcase. The dogs were fed at the cave entrance with the head and tit-bits of offal and then he cut off joints for roasting. While the meat hung spitting and sizzling on a wooden bar over the fire, the old man amused us by putting his fine boots under the roast and allowing the fat to trickle over them, afterwards rubbing it into the leather, presumably to soften an
d preserve it. With coarse flour and a little water from the bottom of the big cauldron he kneaded up cakes and baked them on a flat stone over the side of the fire. We ate like starving men and there was no difficulty about the performance of belching our appreciation at the end of the meal.
When the old man went to lug the heavy water cauldron out of the cave, Kolemenos and I took it from him and carried it out. We all helped in the chore of filling it with snow. We made a move to carry it back when it was piled high, but he stopped us. With surprising agility he jumped up on top of the cauldron and began treading down the snow. He stepped down and we topped the cauldron up again. This time Zaro climbed up and danced with whoops of joy to press down the snow, while the old man chuckled with glee at the fun. The hard-packed mass of snow was melted over the fire and later the shepherd fed his flock with hay and watered them.
The presence of the sheep rather more than the smouldering fire made the cave very warm that night and I slept exhaustedly. A couple of times during the night the appalling stink of long-confined animals woke me and I wondered where I was, but I soon dropped off again, feeling warm and safe. Our Tibetan caveman was astir before us in the morning and by the time we were fully awake had prepared a thick gruel which he was slowly stirring over the built-up fire. His parting gift to us was the last quarter of the sheep he had killed the day before.
Outside the cave he was obviously asking us where we were going. We looked at the sun and pointed south. He took Zaro’s outstretched arm and nudged it round until it pointed a few degrees west of south. And that was the way we went.