Namma

through the valley, bringing small cyclones of spiralling dust and billowing clouds of grit. We often went in twos for comfort, and that night I pulled up my kirchi as far as I could when Shermo Donker and I braved the night. We crouched next to each other in the darkness on a slope of dried grass and rocks at the side of the house. The wind was howling eerily and a shape was moving in the blackness. I began to feel uneasy. The nomads were firm believers in ghosts and I was becoming influenced by their fear. I had always been afraid of the dark and this land had been the site of much bloodshed. And Tsedup had told me that people had been abducted by ghosts. I had been sceptical, but as I felt the cold fingers of the frosty night air on me, I wasn't so sure. 'Did you see it?' I whispered to Shermo Donker. She shuffled over and gripped my arm. We peered anxiously into the ebony night as the sound of panting got louder. Then, in desperation, I turned on the flashlight and two eyes shone back at us. It was the dog. Cherger began to jump all over me in greeting and to lick my face, threatening to push me over. I laughed and stroked him. He was warm and his thick fur crackled with static and lit up in magical, neon-green flashes under my hand.

There was no threat of me being mauled any more as, under Annay's supervision, I had spent many days in the summer offering him scraps of dried meat to befriend him. Now he was my good friend. I was part of the pack. He even preferred me to Tsedup. When we pulled up on the bike outside the house and the dogs raced out to attack, Tsedup asked me to call to them, to pacify them. Because he was often away they weren't sure how to treat him. The dogs were fiercely territorial: even Rhanjer, who visited the family every day from his own home, was attacked regularly by the bitch, who seemed to have a personal vendetta against him. There were always fights outside between them, as she lunged at him and he beat her off with a stick. He didn't live in the family so he was not part of the pack. The rules were simple. I felt honoured that I had been accepted.

The next day, I climbed up the foothill of the mountain behind the house with Sanjay and Tselo, Annay Urgin's little daughter. They ran ahead of me, like goats over the rocks, as I puffed my way to the top, feeling the full weight of my tsarer. We sat in the tall grass on top and surveyed the land. Below, the house looked minuscule and isolated within the enormity of the arid landscape. The valley floor stretched away from us down to the glistening river and the blue mountain ranges. Beyond, the tips of the powder-white snow mountains flecked the horizon. Above our heads, hawks spiralled on the warm thermals in the sunlight. We played for a while, then the children scrambled back down the hillside, as I paused to watch the last light sinking behind the silhouette of the Ngoo Ra, Mount Silver Horn.

A shock of grey cloud drifted like a deep canopy above the orange and blue dusk. Pockets of phosphorescence illuminated the distant glaciers on the other side of the Yellow river, and a chill breeze rustled the dry grass at my feet. I could hear the children singing and their voices echoed in the valley among the bleating sheep and lambs as they called them to their corral for the night. Sanjay was now trundling around on his bike and crashing every so often. He had wanted a bike so much that he had said he would sell one of the puppies to buy it. Tsedup and I had saved him the trouble and now it was his prized possession, his only possession. He had tied a yellow prayer scarf around the handlebars as if it was his favourite horse and I watched him mounting it, as his father did his dapple-grey, swinging one leg up and jumping into the seat. His excited squeals carried to me on the breeze.

Gorbo was on the other side of the rocky stream, herding the yaks home for the night. I could just make out his orange hat as he came towards the house between the mountains on his horse, accompanied by a ewe and her lamb that had strayed. The mass of yak hoofs tripped across the valley like showering pebbles and crunched across the ice of the frozen stream. I could hear the whir and crack of his sling, as he chucked a well- aimed stone at a wandering yak. He was singing. His voice rang out clearly and soulfully, alternating between high and low pitch with a gentle vibrato, in the style of a traditional Tibetan song. The words were swallowed at the end of each phrase in a blunt staccato and the rhythm wove a steady pattern, almost hypnotic in the twilight, rebounding and reverberating up the valley.

It might have been a song of love or a song about his land: the mountains, the air, the light, the flowers, the life of the animals and their intrinsic value. Gorbo had said he wanted to be a bird. When he herded in the valleys, he would look up and wish he could be there, soaring over the mountains. In song the theme of nature was always used as an image of man's profound emotions. A song would be riddled with metaphor and had a unique relevance to the people of this land; Machu was renowned all over Amdo for its talented singers and many of the best Tibetan songs came from here. The Amdo people were imbued with the spirit of the land and their lyricism was a direct reflection of the profound love they felt for their culture. They sang with a raw energy unmatched in western society. This was a place where young lovers still sang across the valleys to each other; the two would spontaneously construct a song using metaphor and innuendo. These love songs, called kabshat or lazjhee, literally 'mountain song', were the most beautiful. They were flexible in their subject matter and might contain messages of love or teasing and sarcasm. It depended on the singers' mood. Sometimes they would deliver a verse alternately, which resulted in witty retorts, as each tried to come up with a better reply than the other. It was a formidable challenge and required a creative mind – but, then, they thought in that way. In Amdo, everyone was a poet. It was no exaggeration.

The music was often sorrowful. Amdowas had a strong sense of identity, an unfaltering concept of home, and an acute sense of the visual. Their vocabulary directly reflected this and they had a stardingly subtle variety of adjectives at their disposal. They had specific words for each minute colour variation of their horses and that colour could not be used to describe anything other than a horse. I was often reminded of the inadequacies of my own language in this respect, as some things were impossible to translate without sounding clumsy.

Tsedup's cousin, Lugerjar, was a singer-songwriter famed throughout Amdo. He made his living producing audio cassettes, which were sold across Tibet, and running the local School for the Performing Arts. I was privileged to have heard him sing for us one night in a restaurant. It was a melancholy sound, a lingering, crystal vibrato. He delivered it with passionate force from the pit of his solar plexus. Everyone stopped eating when they heard it:

My guru has winged into the blue space,
Tears well up in my eyes as I long for him.
Lend me your wings, white condor,
And I will go to the guru in the azure sky.

My brotherhood has been scattered to the four corners of the world,
Sorrow floods my heart as I long for my little brother.
Lend me your speed, wild horse,
And I will go in search of him.

My beloved parents have departed to the darkness of death,
I am lost in timeless nights and days as I long for them.
Bestow me with your beams, o great sun,
And I will search for them in the world of the dead.

Another relative, Choegetar, had just produced his first cassette. He was the one who had sung the reunion song for us in the tent when we had first arrived home with Tsedup. His music was haunting, revealing the drama and strife of this land, and now that I knew more about him I understood why. A few years