Kham, 2004

We came down off the plateau as if by steps: a ledge, another ledge, and each one we wanted to call the last. When it was completely dark we put on our head torches and kept picking our way along the path, until at one of the bends we lost that too. We had no strength left to look for it. We stood there deciding where to pitch the tent.

And then, out of the darkness: a dog barking. A shot. Another one.

So this is the end, I thought. Who will ever find us? We’ve walked ourselves to the end. A more senseless ending would be hard to imagine: to get over both passes, the thorns, the ice, the wolf plateau, and take a bullet a hundred metres from the first human being in two days.

I advised Kirill to take off the torch burning on his head at once: it made an excellent glowing target. Kirill did not take it off. Instead he began shouting into the dark that we were peaceful people and had simply got a little lost. A minute later a young man came out to us with a carbine on his shoulder and a torch in his hand. Later he explained that he had taken us for horse thieves.

That is how we found ourselves in a nomads’ black tent. A family lived in it: a man of about twenty-five from Lhagang, his wife of thirty-two, who came from the mountains and did not understand a word of Chinese, and their three-year-old daughter. They graze a herd of yaks and a herd of horses here. A fire burns in the middle of the tent, the smoke goes out through an opening in the roof, and a cauldron of tea is always boiling over the flames. One wall is stacked with saddles, sacks of provisions and other belongings. The slope under the tent has been levelled, the ground is laid with turf, and on either side of the fire there is a sleeping bench. It was warm. After that day, almost unbearably cosy.

“Can you drink plain tea?” the host asked, embarrassed by his poverty.

We could. We could drink anything at all. We took out of our rucksacks everything that was still left in them. Who would have thought that sausage and dried meat from the Minsk meat plant would end up on the “table” of a Tibetan nomad?

They gave us tea, fed us and put us to bed on one of the benches.

In the morning the little girl found her warm trousers all by herself, with nobody helping, and was very pleased with herself. The host brought three horses, and his wife braided their tails for the road. Only here can people braid horses’ tails so beautifully and say goodbye like this.

Together with him we rode down for five hours, as far as the village of Yakra, where civilisation begins again.