Escape from the Land of Snows Read Free Page A

state’s chief medium, then decreed that three large search parties would head to the east to conduct a thorough search for the child Fourteenth. In September 1937, the Year of the Fire Rat, the search parties set out from Lhasa: one party headed northeast toward Amdo (which began with Ah, the first letter the regent had seen in the lake), the second party traveled due east to Kham, and the third southeast toward the regions known as Takpo and Kongpo. They were heading into territory as desolate, in places, as the surface of the moon.
    Tibet is awash in superlatives. It is the highest country on earth and the most mountainous, with three-quarters of the country’s territory lying at 16,000 feet or higher, a full three miles above sea level. It’s ringed by world-class mountain ranges on three sides. In the north, the Altyn Tagh range separates Tibet from China’s Xinjiang province and the Gobi desert. To the west is the Karakoramsystem, across which lie Kashmir and Pakistan. In the south are the almost impenetrable Himalayas, which cut Tibet off from India, Nepal, and the kingdom of Bhutan. Mount Everest, on the border with Nepal, is the crown in a line of mountains that top out at more than 25,000 feet. The mountain ranges are so high that they even dictate Tibet’s weather, intercepting storm fronts before they can shower the plains beyond with water, leading to the “rain shadow effect” that has made Tibet so arid. The country receives only eighteen inches of rain and snow a year.
    From this ring of summits, the land drops down to a huge plateau that is hardly any more conducive to human or animal life. Most of Tibet is so high and cold that trees and vegetation—beyond a few native bushes—will not survive. The north is marked by glaciers, marshes, and quicksand pits. The central province of U-Tsäng is so wind-blasted that it’s called “the land of no man and no dog” by Tibetans themselves. The
changthang
, or northern plains, present an alien landscape that across thousands of miles alternates between flat lengths of earth covered in yellow borax, beautiful deep lakes, and miles of soda and salt deposits that are so bright they can cause snow blindness in travelers. This entire area once lay under the Tethys Sea, which left behind only vast mineral deposits and the occasional river churning white with rapids.
    The landscape gives Tibet a physically intoxicating air. Things happen here that happen in very few places on earth. It’s possible to get frostbite and an intense sunburn at the same time. You can safely dip your hand in a pot of boiling water, as water boils at a much lower temperature. You can spot a man walking toward you from ten miles away because the land is so flat and the air so clear. It’s one of the sunniest places on earth, but frost covers the ground over three hundred days a year. For centuries, the
misers—
bonded servants who worked for aristocrats or monasteries for their entirelives—slept crouched on their hands and knees, with every stitch of clothing they owned piled on their backs, looking like they were bowed in prayer. Any more contact with the frigid earth and they’d have frozen to death.
    The land limits the number of people who can live on it. Cold, altitude, and alkaline soil conspire to give the country a small population stretched over 500,000 square miles, the size of Western Europe.In 1950, only about 2.5 million people inhabited the nation (this includes ethnic Tibetans living in the country’s border areas), fewer than 5 per square mile, while the rest of Asia averaged above 200 per square mile. Tibet, the most sparsely populated country on earth, fairly echoes with emptiness.
    The Amdo search party experienced the harsh landscape firsthand as they went in search of the child reincarnation. Led by Ketsing Rimpoche, the thin, bookish abbot of Lhasa’s influential Sera Monastery, the group took two full months to travel the thousand miles to Amdo, battling