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By Root 1238 0

had blinding snowpacks. The road itself was largely deserted except for the occasional solitary monk on pilgrimage. Up, hands to head. Pray. Hands to knees. Lie down. Up. Hands above head. Pray. Step forward. Repeat. It wasn’t the fastest mode of transport, but I suspected that was probably the point. I had never been anyplace more devout than Tibet. I sensed that people here lived in a different universe from the one I inhabited; it would never occur to me that my spiritual well-being might be enhanced by prostrating myself on a highway in the middle of nowhere. The only other people I’d encountered with a propensity for lying down on roads were Pacific Islanders on payday Fridays. Of course, they were drunk, having found bliss through the bottle. But the Tibetans were sober, and yet still they lay down on roadways.

We followed the Yellow River, which flowed to our right in a blue, icy stream. Soon, Goba began to drive very fast, and I was beginning to regret stirring him up with the China talk. Then I considered. Hey, I’m paying for this. If we run over a monk doing his devotions, it’s going to seriously mess up my karma. So I asked him to ease up.

He slowed to possibly twenty miles an hour. “Is okay?”

Leadfoot, of course, couldn’t keep that up for long, and we flew along the highway until we stopped at a dusty road-stand, where Goba bought me a drink. It was a can of Red Bull, fuel of choice for drivers everywhere. We idled with some local truck drivers.

One pointed at my drink. “Yak piss. Ha ha ha.”

I nodded. “I hear it’s good for the heart.”

Back in the car, Goba inserted a cassette into the tape deck. “Nepali-Tibetan. Okay?”

It was a groovy trance beat overlaid with what appeared to be Tibetan chanting. Together with the Red Bull, all that was missing were the Ecstasy tablets.

“Have you been to Nepal?” I asked him. After all, it was just across the border, albeit a very high border, and if the Tibetans have an affinity for anyone, I figured, it would be the Nepalese. They are both mountain people and Buddhists. Indeed, in the seventh century, before the peace and love of Tibetan Buddhism had set in, the Tibetans had occupied Nepal.

“No passport,” Goba said. “No Lhasa Tibetan with passport.”

In the near distance was a snowcapped mountain that towered above 20,000 feet, and on its lower slopes rested a village with stony, terraced fields and fluttering prayer flags. They are everywhere in Tibet, long strings with colorful flags draped over mountainsides or hanging from masts like ships’ pendants.

“Tibetan,” Goba said, pointing to the village. “Very beautiful.”

How, I wondered, did these people manage to live here? True, there was a haunting, austere beauty to the land. There was something elemental in Tibet that I had not experienced before. The sky disappeared into an endless blue-black void; the mountains were venerable, and the land hard. Perhaps it was the lack of oxygen, but in Tibet I felt near to something profound and powerful. It did not leave me with soft and fuzzy feelings. Instead, I felt something very like awe, a deep, primordial awe.

But few places could possibly be more inhospitable to human habitation than Tibet. There is, of course, the extreme altitude. But Tibetans have solved that problem by simply having stronger lungs than lowlanders. They’ve adapted and evolved, and now the average Tibetan has a far greater lung capacity than just about any other person on Earth. While I gasped at my first exposure to the altitude in Lhasa, my pedicab driver could merrily pedal and smoke without breaking a sweat. But still, there remained in Tibet a vast and challenging landscape that was ill-suited to human habitation. Little grows in such conditions. Tibet is essentially the final frontier of human civilization.

We had come to a fork in the road. We could continue following the paved road that would eventually wind up on the doorstep of Mount Everest. Or we could follow a dirt track that, from what I could see, led into a valley of desolation. We took the dirt trail.

Goba drove as if this was