Tibet's Secret Mountain by Chris Bonington;Charles Clarke;

Author:Chris Bonington;Charles Clarke;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

10 The Sa La Is Not For Horses

10 August—5 September 1998

Charles Clarke

I can deal with most smells. I like game high and reeking. I love old-fashioned camembert, the sort one used to be able to buy in France. But Pasang’s yak meat stank the place out. Our room in the Tsoka Political Cultural Centre was bare but dry and preferable to the nearly continuous rain in the yard outside. Pasang had bought the meat fresh in Chamdo. He had boiled it four days previously. Since that time the temperature had barely touched freezing; often it was 10 to 20 °C. The plan was that the cooked meat would dry and with this in mind Pasang had laid it out on his bed in this simple room. It was already mouldy and on the rare occasions the sun shone the flies swarmed there. They were enormous bluebottles. They scarcely flew except to reach the rotting hunks of meat; there they crawled, buzzing with contentment and laid their eggs, spellbound at their good luck. The surface of the flesh became invisible.

Pasang insisted stubbornly that the meat was ‘just fine and when it’s dry you’ll like it’ and fried a little for lunch. It fizzed in the oil in the wok as one might expect but there then came a secondary fizzing in the mouth like overripe Stilton. The taste was foetid. Elliot and I commented more than once that all was not well and perhaps, we suggested, it was not how Yishi, Pasang’s wife and an exquisite cook, would like it. At this he faltered and perhaps thought of her alone with the children in Lhasa. Elliot attributed his queasiness to the meat. Pasang thought his own malaise that morning was due to a surfeit of Kong Fuyan rice wine, an evil 40 per cent proof sweet and sickly liquor in an over-decorated bottle which he had bought in Do Martang. He asked Sanchu, a pretty widow who lived next door, what she thought about the meat. ‘Rotten,’ she replied, ‘but I’ll cook it again for me and my daughter.’ She took it away. Sanchu was about twenty-two. She had lost her yak-herder husband from illness the year before and had been given a room free in the compound. She was keen to earn money and welcomed the pile of filthy clothes we gave her to wash.

Besides Sanchu, her two-year-old daughter and the caretaker, whose name we never knew, there were the two other residents of the compound of the Cultural Political Centre, Dr Choephel, the general practitioner, and Li Puye, the teacher of English. Dr Choephel lived opposite our quarters, across the yard. He had learnt medicine in Chengdu, where his father had studied before the Second World War. His surgery and sole dwelling was a single room. He looked after a population of about a thousand.

‘What sort of diseases do you see and treat?’ I asked.

‘Everything,’ he replied with a smile and continued to talk to the woman who was consulting him.

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