He wanted the window-seat. From there he could see the carpet of cloud beneath him and the amber sun falling over the edge of the world. He sat quietly, tracing the ice crystals on the glass outside with his fingertip. It was only a few minutes until landing.
To reach his remote home we had flown east from London to Beijing and were now on the internal flight westwards to Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province. From there we would travel ten hours by road up to the Tibetan plateau and the grasslands of Amdo. Although Tsedup's family had told us we would be met at the airport, I wasn't sure that they would make it. The Tibetan lunar calendar is different from ours and I wondered if they'd got the right week. My heart hammered like a machine-gun and I struggled to suppress the butterflies in my belly. I glanced at Tsedup, who looked composed, but when I squeezed his hand I felt him shaking.
As the plane touched down, the lockers sprang open and Chinese businessmen grappled frantically with their briefcases. It was hot in the terminal and the baggage inspector was a pedantic soul. As we struggled to locate the tickets among our belongings, he stared at us suspiciously from beneath a shock of oily hair. I cast my eyes around the modest entrance hall, which was empty. As Dad pushed the last tag into the man's fist, another man approached us, grinning furiously. ‘I am your driver. Come this way, pie-'
Suddenly the swing doors in front of us burst open and a crowd of Tibetan nomads, children and monks surged towards us in traditional costume. They solemnly placed kadaks around our necks. It was the Tibetans' custom to offer a white silk stole to represent the purity of their heart. I was shocked: there were so many of them and they looked so incongruous in this place, so wild with their long hair, dark skin and jewellery, the monks serene in their vivid pink robes.
I stood still for a moment as my new relations moved around me in a blur of unfamiliar syllables and smiles. Then, slowly, I began to recognise Tsedup's brothers, Rhanjer, Tsedo, Gondo, Cumchok. Tsedup stood in the middle of the throng, stunned and grinning, until they led us to a car beside which a tiny, nomad woman stood weeping. It was Tsedup's cousin, Dolma. Tsedup took her in his arms and spoke softly to her in their dialect: there was no need to cry, he was too happy for that. I knew that he must have been feeling a tumult of emotion, but he was brought back to earth with a bump.
My father stood before him covered in kadaks. He was panicking. 'Tsedup! Where is our luggage?' he asked, and pointed to the pavement. ‘I just left it here and it's gone!' Tsedup calmed him. It is the Tibetan custom to operate smoothly and hospitably at all times, and he assured Dad that the bags were already in the cars. In Tibet Dad was going to have to learn to relax. In fact we all learnt that here, though things might sometimes seem out of control, they were always sorted out perfectly in the end.
We set off in convoy to the city. Tsedup and I took Sando's car. He was Dolma's husband and had a job as a driver in their town. Unlike his wife, who wore traditional costume, he was dressed in a shirt and slacks. Dolma had recovered her composure and sat next to him in the front chattering excitedly, with her small son on her lap. Gondo sat with us in the back, smoking and rarely talking. He was Tsedup's closest brother, only a year younger, but taller. They had been like twins when they were growing up. The last time Tsedup had seen him he had been a boy. Today, instead of tickling each other as they used to, they sat awkwardly side by side, trying to be normal after nine years of silence. Tsedup did most of the talking, jabbering questions, and occasionally Gondo would flash a smile and laugh. For most of the journey he was reserved, his tousled black hair and sheepskin tsarer a direct contrast to Tsedup's freshly chopped locks and western shirt and trousers.
We arrived at the Legend Hotel in the centre of the city after a two-hour drive through industrial wasteland. My parents had booked it through an agent in the UK and predictably, it was plush. We went to the desk to check in, followed gingerly by Tsedup's brothers and their children, who loitered uncomfortably under the enormous glass chandelier. This was not their territory. 'Are they country people?' asked the Chinese manager, as he cast his eye over their attire.
They stood fingering their massive coral necklaces, their sheepskin tsarers, which resembled large wrap-around coats with brightly patterned trim and huge red sashes tied around their hips. They provided a colourful contrast to the cream and chrome of their surroundings.
'They are our family,' I replied.
Rhanjer, Tsedup's oldest brother, a short, portly young man with mischievous eyes and a wide smile, accompanied us to our room to help us deposit our bags. Then we left Mum and Dad to sleep off the excitement of the day and went for some food. The boys took us to a small restaurant in a back-street, where an old Chinese woman sat on the pavement stirring a cauldron of broth. They laid out trestle tables and we sat down. I was in the middle opposite Tsedup. Their conversation, which I didn't understand, appeared stilted. They were either overwhelmed to see him, embarrassed at my presence or both. Either way, they didn't talk much, but the beer flowed as the overhead strip-lights sang in our ears and soon there was sporadic laughter and enthusiastic slurping of noodles. I didn't realise then, but this was the nomads' way. Their silence and composure disguised emotions deeper than I could have imagined.
That night in our bed Tsedup told me he felt as if he had been asleep for nine years. Seeing his brothers had made him feel as if he had jumped from boy to man in one day. As his mind had flooded with memories, he had also realised how much he had changed. We talked long into the night and I held him. This was only the start. Although I shared his euphoria, I suddenly became aware of the gap in our experience, for here Tsedup had a whole history of reference to draw on. I had only what he had told me in England, along with snippets of what I had read and some old photos. This was all new for me. Yet he was grasping at the threads of his old life and beginning to reconstruct a picture. I had noticed a change in him: he was now confident, taking control, guiding my parents and me, organising, explaining, translating. This was his territory and I could already feel our roles reversing. I was elated to see him so self-assured.
The next morning the family collected us from our hotel and, after we had distributed a packet of travel-sickness tablets between us, we set off for Machu, his home. Many of the nomads had been sick on the way to Lanzhou: they were not used to long car journeys or pollution. It was stiflingly hot and the sky above the city and surrounding industrial landscape was tinged a curious shade of orange. We were glad to escape.
The convoy of cars blazed a trail through Gansu province. It was an ugly place of occasional belching factories and isolated no-stop towns, occupied by Chinese Muslims who cycled suicidally down the middle of the road. We drove through markets with row upon row of suspended cattle carcasses and colourful fruit, the strains of Chinese music wailing from shabby shop doorways to compete with the Tibetan tape in the car. It was raining and through the drizzle I watched the landscape change. The further we got from Lanzhou, the greener it became. Melon fields spanned the valley, bordered by rocky hills peppered with scrub into which small caves had been excavated by the farmers. Avenues of poplar trees lined the road and, beyond, fields of barley rolled in the wind.
Soon the sheer scarp of mountain ranges were ahead. It was such a dramatic change in the landscape that we knew the Tibetan plateau was not far away. We began to climb through precipitous mountain valleys, dodging barren chasms and clefts of jagged rock. Then, high up between two peaks standing sentry at either side of the road, we stopped. It was the old border between China and Tibet.
As we crossed the high pass we were ecstatic. A chorten, a white and gold monument draped in prayer flags, marked the border of the area known as Hortsung by the Tibetans. There, I saw the first Tibetan man walking along the road in his tsarer, and Tibetan writing on a whitewashed wall. At the side of the road, a woman with long, plaited hair sat spinning yak wool on a finger-sized spindle. We had arrived. Before us lay the great plains of central Asia, land of the nomads, a vast panorama of flat grassland and green hills, soft and undulating, receding into the horizon. Sometimes we saw rocky crags rearing in the distance. Tsedup breathed in and told me he could smell home. I felt as if I had passed into an unknown world of solitude and mystery.
Suddenly the featureless landscape of our earlier journey was marked by curious totem-pole structures. On top of each tall mountain we passed was a collection of wooden stakes and prayer flags, spiking up into the sky. I asked Tsedup what it meant. He told me that they were holy mountains, laptse, and that these structures marked the Tibetans' offering sites to the mountain spirits. At the foot of a hill we passed a small monastery and a monk collecting water from the stream, his fuchsia robes bright in the dull afternoon.
At eleven thousand feet my ears popped. Tsedup's friend Gondi took the wheel – Sando had been driving for seven hours and needed a nap. He soon fell asleep on the back seat and began to snore gently. I was beginning to feel conspicuously underdressed in my thin, linen skirt and T-shirt beside Dolma, resplendent in full traditional costume. With her tiny frame, delicate features, leopardskin tsarer and strings of coral and turquoise, she was, without doubt, the prettiest woman I had ever seen. She smiled at me as Sando let out a loud grunt and the two of us giggled. It was strange not being able to talk: so much was left to instinct, gesticulation and facial muscles. But we played with Gonbochab, her little boy, who at first clung to his mother to escape the weird white woman next to him, then relaxed enough to let me play with the little doll that he insisted onbanging on Gondi's head as he drove.
Soon we turned off the main road and continued the last part of the journey on a winding dirt track through the mountains. We stopped to wait for the rest of the convoy beside a huge lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Tsedup told me this was a bird sanctuary. The cold wind ruffled the water towards me as I peed in a ditch. Then I slipped and ruined my skirt. My sandals were now full of muddy water as well and I sighed. Not only did I feel underdressed for meeting my in-laws, I was now cold and wet. What I had been thinking of when I chose to wear my office clothes to come to such a wilderness, I shall never know. I don't think I had grasped the concept of where I was going.
As we moved on, nomad encampments of black yak-hair tents became visible in the valleys; yaks and sheep were grazing on the slopes. In the steady drizzle of the early evening the tents seemed to offer little in the way of shelter for their inhabitants and I began to wonder if our new home would be the same. These were pitched close to the road on blackened scrub and looked considerably less attractive than I had imagined. In contrast to the breathtaking vista I had witnessed when we first arrived at the Tibetan plateau, this land was more closed in and claustrophobic. I saw a nomad woman in a sodden sheepskin tsarer shovelling yak dung into a basket and children staring at the cars as we passed. I looked forward to seeing the true splendour of the Machu landscape, as Tsedup had described it: although I had been excited at the prospect of living in a tent, I had also hoped that the beauty of the surroundings might compensate me for the loss of home comforts. This area was bleak and I couldn't conceive that somewhere like this would feel like home. I felt anxious.
After two hours of winding through the mud-sludge and mountain fog, we rounded a sharp bend at the top of a pass. The convoy stopped and Tsedup fumbled with the door handle.
This is the Wild Yak range!' he exclaimed. This is Machu soil!' Then he jumped out and ran to the cliff edge of the road. We followed and everyone stood in the pattering rain to survey their beloved homeland.
Far below, the first bend of the Yellow river meandered through the mist that shrouded the grassland. The Amnye Kula mountain range, deep green and dense with peaks and valleys, rolled into the distance. Herds of black yaks grazed on the shallow escarpments and a flock of sheep scrambled beneath us on the shale and rocks. The horizon was blurred by rainclouds, but it was an exhilarating sight and I was stunned by the power and drama of the landscape before me. It was just as Tsedup had described it.
The men climbed up to a stony ridge high above the track, where prayer flags flapped wildly from wooden stakes. Tsedup gave a wild, triumphant cry and flung his arms in the air. At last he was home, and as his voice ricocheted around the mountains, the other men began whooping and shouting, called repeatedly upon the mountain gods, giving thanks for his safe return, tossing fistfuls of long hda, 'wind horses' – small paper squares with pictures of horses – into the wind. The thin slivers of paper fluttered down into the valley and out of sight.
We descended from the high pass to the small town of Machu, which lay in the flat river basin. The car accelerated down a long, straight track of dust and stones, crunching over the gravel and spitting out shingle from the tyre grips. The last pale shades of thin light still illuminated the sky, but dusk would be swift tonight as the sun had already been snuffed out by the creeping fog. It was a race to get there before dark, and Tsedup explained that we still had another six miles to drive through increasingly rough terrain. I hoped the Santana was up to it, and wondered how my parents were faring in the car behind. Ten hours of breakneck roads and precipitous valleys had probably finished them off.
As we sped through the deserted streets, I realised that the town was not quite as I'd expected. I had often asked Tsedup what it was like and, in his search for a suitable parallel, he had told me it resembled a town in the Wild West. I had imagined sandy streets, wooden buildings, tumbleweeds and saloon brawls, but apart from the horses standing outside restaurants, it seemed like just another concrete rural town with rows of squat buildings lining the road. Everyone had shut up shop and it had the air of a ghost town. I glimpsed two streets that day, and Tsedup told me that there were only three altogether. It certainly was a small town and, as this was to be my only haven of civilisation for the next six months, I hoped I would be able to unearth its charms before too long.
At the end of the main street we turned westward and saw a small group of nomads brandishing prayer scarves, an old woman with some children. 'Drive on,' said Tsedup. We were behaving like spoilt royalty, but time was running out and Tsedup's parents were waiting. Later he discovered that the old woman had been his grandmother.
We left the town, then negotiated the ditches of the next rutted track through the grasslands. We seemed to be driving into nowhere, an infinite horizon of vast green plains and mountains that spread for ever in the dim half-light. This was the end of the earth. Tsedup was quiet: it seemed that he wanted to savour the sight of his home for, despite the rain, he had wound the window right open and was leaning out. I watched him and wished I could share his thoughts right then.
As we approached the site of Tsedup's tribe the light was almost gone. We turned off the track on to the grass, and I could just make out the silhouette of black tents huddled in a valley between two ridges. This was the Valley of the Rocks. Suddenly the convoy stopped. Everyone opened the car doors and got out. As we stood peering into the dark, I could see figures moving slowly towards us. Then one broke free and ran faster. An old woman in a dark tsarer, grey hair streaming, necklace thumping on her chest, arms outstretched. It was Tsedup's mother. She flung herself around him, weeping. I watched her clinging and sobbing and stammering with joy. I was already crying when she pulled me to her and held me tight. I could smell the outdoors in her hair.
'Namma, shata go! Shata go! Bride, thank you! Thank you!' She wept.
I didn't know what she was thanking me for, but the pain and relief in her voice touched me. Then his father came, followed by his sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, their children and dogs, and I saw him standing before Tsedup: he wore his tsarer and a smart waistcoat beneath the tufts of tangled sheepskin. He was a real nomad, a proud man with a fine, lined face. He stood still for some time, staring into Tsedup's eyes.
We were guided back to the tent. His mother held my hand and I felt the warmth of her rough fingers as she led me through the wet grass, carefully sidestepping the yak dung. Tsedup was the first to enter. We waited behind him as he paused at the doorway and wept into his hands. The sight of the tent was too much: he wept with recognition of all he had missed, for the lost years, the waiting, for his aged parents, for love of Tibet.
The tent was empty. At its heart the clay fire danced orange and red, casting shadows over the yak-wool roof. They had laid out their best woven rugs and a table of bread and meat. The smell of juniper and dung smoke filled the air. It was all so perfect, just as he had remembered, and in a moment Tsedup was a child again. We all sat down in the warm glow and they served us tea. Then Tsedup turned his head to me and smiled as I have never seen him smile, before or since.
'I am home,' he said.