1.
The town has a theatre stage, temples and a square paved in sandstone. Once Tibetans and local Bai residents traded salt and horses there. Much was damaged after the Cultural Revolution, and the old trade gave way to the weekly market. In the early twenty-first century, researchers from ETH Zurich found the declining town and began a restoration that lasted more than a decade. Visitors followed; some passed through, while others opened shops and stayed.
During my first two years there I was weak, depressed and withdrawn. I opened a tea shop, first selling a friend’s tea and later travelling to the tea mountains myself. Walking those roads slowly restored my strength. After one journey I met Wei Ze, a taciturn northwesterner who had opened a bakery. He was dark, long-faced and easily sullen, but exceptionally fit: he had worked at an indoor climbing gym and trained as an outdoor guide.
Our first climb was the hill behind the village. We left at seven; by eight I was sweating, aching and nearly out of water. Bidens seeds pierced my heavy trousers until I looked, Wei Ze said, like an upright porcupine. Each time I asked how far remained, he answered, ‘Almost there.’ Before the summit came into view my will collapsed. I turned back and he quietly followed. As the village drew closer my good humour returned. ‘A moment ago you were half dead,’ he said. ‘Where did this energy come from?’
We climbed nearby mountains again. I bought proper equipment, and we began multi-day walks farther away. Yunzi, a slight and stylish commercial photographer with tattoos and an orange wool hat, joined us, as did Yaxuan, a tall, short-haired architect whose fitness was modest but whose endurance had carried her through several trail races. After a year, Wei Ze proposed a longer route through the Taniantaweng range in Tibet.
Climbing tormented me, yet over two years my body and nerves had strengthened. Perhaps this is what the outdoors teaches: the body ages, but the will can reach beyond its limits.
2.
Mornings were the easiest part of a trek: emerging from a dew-covered tent, cooking in cold light, stretching on the grass and packing slowly, with enough space between tasks to remember that nothing absolutely had to be done. The natural world was silent and full. One morning Wei Ze asked me to lead radio exercises. I felt marvellously restored after racing Yaxuan to camp the evening before; Yunzi climbed a slope to photograph sunrise, while Yaxuan nursed blisters and Wei Ze joked as though fatigue and weakness did not exist.
The gradual climb turned cold below a snowy pass. Dark cloud gathered and rain blew on the wind. Yunzi layered fleece, softshell and waterproofs, and I copied him. Wei Ze laughed at our clothes—‘Walk and you won’t be cold’—then cut straight up the scree like a bharal. Snow mist struck my face near the top. Afraid of falling, I lowered myself almost to a crawl. Behind us the valley remained sunlit; cloud had stopped exactly over the ridge. Beyond it, rain swept sideways across deep snow.
Wei Ze posed on a dangerous, snow-covered rock while Yunzi photographed him. We waited for Yaxuan, watching blue sky, warm brown slopes, a sliver of lake and horses drinking far below. We soon descended, leaving Wei Ze to gather ‘snow tea,’ a white high-altitude fungus. Snow buried the path behind a wall more than a metre high. Yunzi put on gaiters and broke trail, and we left a stone marker so Wei Ze would not miss the way.
By the time I reached the river valley, Wei Ze was only just crossing the snow. Through the rain I radioed him to hurry. Five seconds of static passed before his low voice answered: ‘No problem. I’m bringing up the rear. Go on if you can’t wait.’ Our camp stood above the river beside a lake and a meadow thick with pink, white, yellow and blue flowers—the Hundred Flowers Camp. We cooked an unusually lavish supper. Wei Ze arrived last, pale and coughing, swallowed cold medicine, refused food and went straight to his tent.
3.
We later learned that this was not a cold but acute pulmonary oedema. Rapid ascent, exertion, cold and lack of oxygen can make fluid and blood enter the lungs, bringing breathlessness, racing pulse, weakness and confusion. I began to wonder whether the will trained by mountaineering keeps people alive—or carries the strongest past the line of danger. Because Wei Ze was our leader and the only trained guide, none of us wanted to question him. Moments we might have noticed slipped past.
At eight the next morning his blue tent was still. At nine we drank coffee in the sun. At ten he emerged, white-faced, refused hot chocolate and calmly insisted he merely had a cold. We would skip the side trip and walk four easy hours to the pasture camp, where he could rest. Yunzi later said he had already considered an emergency descent, but Wei Ze led briskly along the river, joking, and briefly reassured us.
After lunch we crossed the river and entered a forest of empty huts whose Tibetan owners were gathering caterpillar fungus. Light moved through the trees like plucked harp strings. On the steep climb I passed Wei Ze asleep beneath a cypress. He told me to continue. At the burned woodland above, I caught Yunzi and basked proudly in the sun: perhaps, for once, I was not the person holding everyone back. Then Yaxuan’s voice came over the radio: ‘Wei Ze can’t climb. Come back and carry his pack.’
4.
The pasture met the sky beneath a flat-topped snow mountain. Tibetan herders had built dozens of shelters from logs, stone and metal. We pitched on an empty foundation. Wei Ze silently inflated his mat and disappeared into the tent, no longer promising that a day’s rest would cure him. A newly built farm road, absent from his route notes, offered a way out. Nearby, sixteen-year-old Jiang Bai and his friends dug caterpillar fungus, tended yaks, wrestled and laughed. At dusk a black tide of yaks crossed the ridge; Jiang Bai ran easily at 4,500 metres and returned with a blood-soaked sack of meat from an animal attacked by wolves.
In the night hundreds of green yak eyes floated like fireflies. At dawn Wei Ze could bear no more. Bent over at the tent door, he coughed pink mucus while his lungs bubbled like boiling water. ‘You go on. I’ll take a car down alone.’ Yaxuan put a hand on his back. ‘We agreed that if anything happened, we would all descend.’ Yunzi and I found the driver, and together we returned to Yanjing.
A hospital in Shangri-La confirmed that most of Wei Ze’s lungs were clouded. Our ten-day route had ended after five, and the doctor urged him lower. He remembered almost nothing of entering the van; above 4,000 metres he slept and woke coughing. By Shangri-La he was already better. Yaxuan, with five days of leave remaining, suggested recuperating below 2,000 metres in Cizhong, known for its Catholic church on the old missionary road.
A dam had raised the Lancang River and displaced part of Cizhong uphill into new concrete houses. The imposing church—gate, courtyards, sanctuary, orchard and vineyard—was built by French missionaries in 1921. They had also taught generations of villagers to make wine. We arrived on its centenary and found the village empty because it was Easter. A Tibetan priest in white read slowly in Chinese of earth, sea, light and love. Candles filled the sanctuary below a chandelier, the Virgin and stained glass. The congregation carried fire into the courtyard, then returned to sing hymns in Tibetan. I joined the line for holy water; Wei Ze watched coldly from the doorway and left before the end.
His distance contained hostility, perhaps because he imagined we blamed him and no one had passionately denied it. He seemed to believe that risk gave high mountains their meaning, that the unpredictability of nature was precisely what called us from the timid civilisation of cities. Even Yaxuan sensed his anger. At dinner she confronted him; he denied anything was wrong, then insisted he was no longer our leader. The room went still.
That night I asked why we climbed if it left bodies and friendships in pain. I had imagined mountaineering as a search for harmony: in a chance moment the self might loosen, perception clear, and a person become part of nature’s cycle. Though no athlete, I repeatedly approached my body’s limit and met a philosophical question there—how to breathe, walk and summon an unfamiliar body far enough to hold a fragile balance. I kept returning to Wei Ze at the first pass, refusing warm clothes, first to the top, expressionless on the snow. It had been the decisive moment.
6.
Two months later, in November, Yunzi, Yaxuan and I set out along Meili’s northern slope with a local guide named Third Brother. Wei Ze had sworn off elevations above 4,000 metres. Avalanche season was approaching. Across an ice-hung bridge we watched snow pour down Lairidingka with a sound like thunder. Three glacier peaks—Lairidingka, Lairigongka and Mangkanglaka—stood under iridescent cloud, and beyond them rose the saddle-shaped Shizizuo, Meili’s second-highest peak. We would camp beneath it and cross its pass the next day.
Yaxuan’s pack strap broke on the first climb. We knotted it, then divided her tent, bedding and cookware among our packs. Mine weighed at least twenty kilograms, yet I kept pace. By the third day she carried only five. At snow-mountain camp, Yunzi and I followed Third Brother towards the glacier while Yaxuan cooked. Near sunset Yunzi ran into the mountain’s shadow and vanished inside a hanging icefall as stones and snow thundered down. He reappeared half an hour later and ran into the day’s last light. Touching the glacier, he said, had made him tremble, kneel and weep. Deep within its blue, pure universe, he had felt safe.
Antelope raced diagonally down the mountain to drink, covering in two minutes the ground that had taken us an hour. That night a full moon made the meadow bright as day. Yunzi took a painkiller for his head and slept. By morning my breath had frozen the mouth of my doubled sleeping bags and I too had a violent headache.
Before dawn we crossed frozen forest into sunlight on sandstone ground. I felt dizzy. Near the pass I fell asleep standing on my poles. My hands were white with blue veins; for a moment I imagined seeing blood cells trembling beneath the skin, queuing to carry energy. Sunlight reached them, my heart became audible, and strength returned. Above me Yunzi waved a flashing pole. At nearly 5,000 metres I could no longer understand his simple instruction to climb towards him.
I had told myself that preparation could prevent what happened to Wei Ze: humility, communication, checked equipment, assessed weather. Instead I sat in warm grass and wanted only to sleep. I told the others I needed to meditate before crossing the pass—perhaps poor sleep and cold medicine had made me drowsy—then switched off my radio. While they waited, they built thirty-six stone cairns.
When I stood, my lungs gurgled like boiling water. My awareness seemed to rise above my body and watch it cough a pool of yellow-brown mucus, then sink slowly to its knees. Shizizuo stood close, immense, solemn and indifferent under a deep blue sky, wrapped in clouds waiting to become snow, like an inverted lake.
We descended by a bamboo shortcut. Below 4,000 metres the mucus whitened and my swollen lungs slowly relaxed. I could not climb even a small rise; my blood seemed reserved for my heart. Yunzi called a village rescue team. I imagined two horses and a handful of people. At three in the morning, twenty Tibetan men arrived with twenty bright lamps, breath smoking, asking warmly, ‘Where is he?’ They passed me from back to back and ran along cliffs and valleys as swiftly as the antelope.
Yunzi and Yaxuan ran behind them, their poles and legs seeming to move independently. Carried like cargo, I moved from resistance and shame to gratitude and warmth. On the dark trail, my demands upon being a person dissolved. The self appeared as an illusion made by a fragile life wrapped in impermanence—useful for protection, but failing when it yielded to stronger natural law and met life’s breakable edge.
The men competed to carry me, calling one another ‘mules.’ At a clearing they sat in a ring and turned their lamps upon me while they ate bread and dried beef, drank energy drinks and beer, and talked as if picnicking behind their homes. After half an hour someone said, ‘Let’s go.’ They rose together, ran on, placed me beside the village road and scattered like birds into the night.
My lungs lay quiet. I remembered that Wei Ze had endured the same thing; fate’s structure was a joke. In my pocket I found the crumpled cigarette Yaxuan had given me by the bridge. Its smell of tobacco and tar was dark-red lava, travelling through my limbs and gathering at the crown of my head.
25 January 2020