At last we stood off a few feet from him and bowed low, keeping our eyes, according to custom, on his face. Gravely he returned the salute. We turned and walked away. When I turned he was sitting with his back to us, his dogs beside him. He did not look round.
19.
I THINK IT probable that at the time we encountered the old man and his sheep we had not even entered Tibet but had come out from the desert into the highlands in the narrow neck of the Chinese province of Kansu lying along the northeastern border of Tibet. The time then was about the beginning of October 1941 and it was to take us over three months to cover about fifteen hundred miles of difficult country to the Himalayas. We tried always to do at least twenty miles a day. Often we did more. There were occasional days, too, when we did no travelling, glad of the rest and refreshment provided by friendly Tibetan villagers. The tradition of hospitality to travellers was an innate and wonderful part of the life of these people, their generosity was open-handed and without thought of reward. Without their help we could not have kept going.
It seemed to me that our resistance to the increasingly sharp cold of the nights was markedly weaker than it had been when we first made our break at the end of the Siberian winter. The ordeal of the Gobi had left its imprint on us all. We found ourselves plodding on after the reasonable limit of a day’s march had been reached in order to find a spot offering fair shelter for the night. On the other hand we sometimes cut short the scheduled distance on discovering a small cave or some other well-protected place. The gathering of fuel became almost an obsession and it became unthinkable that we should spend a night without a fire burning throughout.
In the mornings the ground was thick with white frost and it stayed for a long time after the sun had risen. The skyline to the east was indented with the silhouettes of peaks white-tipped with snow. As always, we wondered just where we were.
We came across our first village some five days after leaving the shepherd. We had been on the move for about an hour after dawn when I saw, over to the left of our course and up to ten miles distant, a smear of smoke. We were hungry, stiff and not very warm. We decided to investigate. We came down a hill scrub-covered on its upper reaches, giving way to grass of good sheep-grazing quality. As we got nearer we saw the smoke came from several fires and knew we were approaching some kind of settlement, hidden from us by the rounded shoulder of the opposite hill.
It was well past noon when we reached the village. The hill threw out a green-clothed buttress like a long arm and ten small box-like houses nestled there like a child in the crook of its mother’s arm. Each house was about twenty feet by twelve feet, flat-roofed with overlapping wide boards weighted down with stones. The roofs sloped slightly forward in the direction of the overlap. A few of the dwellings were backed by a fenced-in enclosure containing an outhouse a couple of yards square. The slopes around were dotted with dozens of long-haired sheep, some brown and some grey. We came in slowly on an almost due west-east track, frequently pausing to look round so that the villagers would have ample warning of our visit. We did not know then what reception to expect.
A closer view of the village revealed the presence of a number of children, some chickens, goats and the first yaks any of us had ever seen outside a zoo. At a leisurely shuffle, strung out in couples, we came near to the first house and stopped, interested in the novel spectacle of a man harnessing a yak to a high two-wheeled cart. He had seen us but had his hands too full with the task in hand to do anything about it. Half-a-dozen shy but frankly inquisitive children, the eldest about ten years, positioned themselves about the cart and eyed us. The yak, its long silken hair riffling in the breeze blowing through the valley, was being difficult and was doing its best not to be attached to the cart. Possibly it had got wind of us and did not care for the evidence of its nose. (I couldn’t have blamed it for any adverse opinion based on the smell of us!)
The villager decided suddenly to give up the struggle. He dropped the harness and let the beast go free. We stood our distance as he turned towards us. We bowed, our eyes on his young, flat, glistening face. Meticulously he returned the salutation. The children watched silently. Kolemenos and I stepped forward a few paces, smiling. The children broke out into a chatter at the impressive stature of the big man, his long blond beard and hair. We stood in front of the man and bowed again. He talked and I talked but all the pair of us learned was that we could not understand each other. The children grouped themselves behind the man and listened to the exchange. All the time they kept darting glances at the blond giant. The villager turned round, walked a few paces, turned and motioned us to follow. The children ran past and ahead of him to spread the news through the village of our coming.
As we trod close on the heels of our guide I looked about me. I saw a few cultivated patches but nothing was now growing on them. I saw a woman leave a goat she was milking and hasten indoors. More children came out of houses and shyly scrutinized the strangers. Beyond the last house, some twenty or thirty yards from it, I saw the village was bounded on the eastern side by a stream. I thought how well the place was sited. I noted how quickly the children lost their shyness: soon there were a dozen pattering along beside us. At about the middle of the uneven row of houses the guide stopped. This dwelling followed the same unassuming pattern as the others, but it was distinguished from them by being slightly larger and having a porch formed of two sturdy timbers at its door.
‘This looks interesting,’ Mister Smith whispered to me as the man disappeared through the door.
‘I think he’s gone inside to fetch the Mayor,’ said Zaro.
There was not much time for further speculation. Almost as though he had been waiting behind the door, a new figure emerged through the porch. I judged him to be about fifty and he wore the normal dress of the country topped with a loose sheepskin jacket. He was a little taller than the average Mongolian and, though as dark as any of them, his features were not of so pronounced a Mongolian cast. We exchanged the usual greetings before he spoke in the language of the country. I shook my head and replied in slow, precise Russian. His face lit up, he beamed at me.
‘Welcome,’ he said in Russian. ‘Now we shall be able to talk.’
We were rather taken aback. He spoke Russian easily and without hesitation. I had to remind myself that there could be no danger so far south of the Soviet Union in a chance encounter with a Russian.
He waited a moment for me to reply and when I did not he went on eagerly, ‘I am a Circassian and it is a long time since I met anyone who could speak Russian.’
‘A Circassian?’ I repeated. ‘That is most interesting.’ I could not think of anything less banal to say.
His questions tumbled over themselves. ‘Are you pilgrims? It is not many Russians who are Buddhists. You came through the Gobi on foot?’
‘Yes, on foot.’
‘It must have been a terrible experience for you. Once I nearly died myself on that journey.’
He was going to ask more questions, but suddenly recollected his duty as a host. He apologized and invited us into his home. We trooped inside. A stone partition divided the one big room and I caught a glimpse of a woman I took to be his wife hustling three or four children out of the front half to presumably the kitchen at the rear. Little details leapt into notice — a few shining tin mugs, a row of wooden spoons on a shelf, a bunch of hanging dried herbs and, most oddly, in one corner a framed six-inch-square lithograph of Saint Nicholas in the Russian Orthodox style, much faded behind its glass pane. Underneath the lower edge of the frame was a metal stand on which stood a miniature oil lamp of simple construction with a red glass. There were wooden benches, solidly made, a stone cooking range, a heavy wooden bucket with a boat-shaped dipper, a flour mill, a primitive wool-spinning machine. The small amount of space available was well utilized. Around the walls were wooden bunks covered with home-woven rough wool blankets.
We sat, rather awkwardly in such unusual surroundings, on the benches. The Circassian — either designedly or perhaps forgetfully, he never gave us his name and we never volunteered ours — addressed himself to me again. The first question startled us.
‘Are you armed?’
‘No, none of us is armed,’ I answered.
‘Have you nothing even to chop wood with, for instance?’
‘Oh, yes. We have an axe and a knife between the six of us, unless you count the sticks we carry.’
