Escape from the Land of Snows (17 page)

His Holiness found that, even on the trail, old habits died hard. As they approached Che-La, he decided to walk for a bit. He slid his right leg over the saddle and dropped to the ground, his soft leather boots kicking up a small cloud of dust as he landed on the dry soil. As he turned to march ahead, he noticed the minister on the horse behind him quickly dismount from his horse and begin walking. Like dominoes, all the tutors and even his family members began to drop off their horses one by one and started trudging forward. One apparently couldn’t be seen riding if the Dalai Lama had decreed it was time to walk. “
It’s OK,” the Dalai Lama called back to the other escapees. “Get back on your horses.” But, heads bowed, they kept shuffling ahead, old men for the most part who’d been softened by years of court life. Finally, the Dalai Lama gave up and jumped back in the saddle. Slowly, the line of marchers followed suit, and in a few minutes they were all riding again.

The incline of the ground began to rise. The fugitives stopped briefly at a farmhouse, where the peasants had been alerted that His Holiness would be arriving for food (he’d had no dinner) and a short rest. An old man, a former groom to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, appeared leading a white horse with a white scarf tied around its neck. The man was worried His Holiness’s pony wouldn’t make it over the high passes ahead. He began to cry as the Dalai Lama accepted the gift. His Holiness comforted the old man and assured him he wasn’t going far, all he could think to say on the spur of
the moment. The man accompanied them as far as Che-La, which they reached around 8:00 a.m. The sun was high enough in the sky that it lit the plain behind them, but the mountain ahead threw a shadow over the marchers.

They began to climb the sandy incline (Che-La means “Sandy Pass”). As they ascended the slope, the ground shifted under the weight of the animals. For every step forward, the horses would slide back four. Riders began to drop behind the leaders as the horses tired, and the rest found the trail “
rough and weary.” Choegyal saw his fat uncle ahead nearly topple off his horse. “
His saddle was slipping off the horse because he was just too heavy,” Choegyal says. “He was yelling and grabbing on to the mane.” As the Dalai Lama came to the crest of the pass, an aide sidled over to him and mentioned that this would be his last chance to look on Lhasa. His Holiness dismounted and gazed at the cluster of buildings to the north, tiny in the landscape. From this distance, even the Potala lost its imposing mass. “
The ancient city looked serene as ever as it spread out below,” he remembered. The Dalai Lama said a prayer and then turned and began running down the sandy slopes, lit by the sun, that led down to the valley of the Tsangpo.

As the sunlight hit their faces and they placed a mountain range between themselves and the PLA headquarters, the mood of the escapees lightened. “
I was laughing uncontrollably,” admits Choegyal, who couldn’t take his eyes off his uncle struggling to stay in his saddle. “But he was such a kind man, he didn’t yell at me.” Having escaped Lhasa, the uncle began to regain his sense of humor. “Whenever I did something naughty,” Choegyal recalls, “he would just shake his head and say, ‘Oh my god, he’s done it again.’ He was a very kind fellow.” The escapees dropped off their mounts and began to follow the Dalai Lama, who was running full speed down the side of the mountain. “We were all very happy,”
Choegyal said. “We’d escaped. We were euphoric. Now we could say what was in our hearts.”

The Dalai Lama took giant steps down the slope. “
The day after I escaped from Lhasa, I felt a tremendous sense of relief. Actually, the danger was still very much alive.” But for the first time in years, the constraint he felt in Lhasa was gone. He could curse the Chinese if he felt like it: “ ‘I have the right to say bad things about them,’ I remember thinking. The sense of freedom was very vivid: my strongest reaction following the escape.” When he reached the valley on the other side of the mountain, a dust storm kicked up, blinding the fugitives. The Dalai Lama comforted himself with the thought that the dirt would hide them from any PLA troops sent to capture them.

The lead party crossed the Che-La and sped ahead to the Tsangpo River, ten miles away. Rebels were waiting at the banks, with coracles to ferry them across. When they reached the other side, they met a group of villagers who had been told the Dalai Lama was approaching. The sight of Tibetans along the trails was almost always the same: humbly dressed men and women, bowing their heads in prayer, sticks of incense or
katas
in their hands. One villager recalled spreading hay and dung across an expanse of ice that the escape party would be crossing, crying both with joy and with grief at the thought that His Holiness was fleeing to India. Others brought out food and clothing from their meager stocks and offered them to the escapees, “weeping with sorrow at the fate of Tibet.” Knowing that this might be the last time they saw the incarnate, they all asked for his blessing. At the sight of the villagers, the escapees’ giddiness evaporated.

After twenty straight hours of riding, Choegyal and the second group of fugitives stopped at Rame, one of the earliest Sakyapa
monasteries in Tibet, built in the twelfth century. The Dalai Lama’s mother was by now the worst off in the party. “I had no scarf or glasses, and since I had on a man’s short dress, I froze on the way,” she remembered. “I could barely stand, from a mixture of cold, fatigue and cramps in my legs.” Her face was covered with a thick layer of dust, and the skin on her face had begun to peel because of the wind and dust storms. Choegyal was cold and tired but overjoyed to see his older brother, who’d arrived hours earlier. He found the Dalai Lama on the second floor of the monastery, dressed in high leather boots and his soldier’s uniform. “How are you feeling today?” the Dalai Lama asked. The boy replied that everything had gone well, apart from the sandstorm and their mother’s pains.

His Holiness paused for a moment, looking at his younger brother. “
Tendzin,” he said, “do you realize that we’re free now?”

Choegyal nodded.

But the fugitives were still hundreds of miles from safety. The route ahead was treacherous, lined with dangers both natural and man-made. They were leaving the Vale of Lhasa, the heart of Tibetan civilization, and venturing into desolate territory. The Himalayas, still encased in their winter ice, awaited; the passes alone measured 19,000 feet and more and were for part of the year totally impassable. The 500-yard-wide Tsangpo River, cold and fast with the winter snowmelt, would have to be forded. The rebels held the territory ahead, but they were battling with large contingents of PLA forces in places such as Lhoka. Traitors among the Dalai Lama’s own people, militants who favored armed rebellion and disdained his pledge of nonviolence, could easily be lurking in the villages ahead, or even among his own party, and might deliver him to the Chinese. There were even wolves and leopards native to South Tibet and the
de-mong
, a legendary bear with mustard-colored fur.
There were landslides, deep cold, and rock falls. Travelers on these routes would often find boulders the size of cars blocking routes that had been passable the year before.

The escape parties headed due south through a landscape of flint and sand. “
It was all new to me, this land,” Choegyal remembers. He had never ventured more than a day’s journey from Lhasa, and now he was seeing the ancient seabed that made up the enormous Tibetan plateau. “It reminded me of Palestine, arid and flat.”

But the Chinese were the real worry. “We were all thinking they might all of a sudden intercept us,” Choegyal says. “That’s why we traveled very fast and didn’t stop more than was absolutely necessary.” One Khampa leader rated the Chinese intelligence network, even in some rural areas, as “excellent.” “
They knew beforehand what to expect,” he said, “and could prepare accordingly.”

If the Dalai Lama’s party did make it as far as the Indian border, Prime Minister Nehru, who was increasingly anxious about his relationship with the Chinese, might refuse to admit them. The Lord Chamberlain had sent word to Athar and Lhotse, who he knew had radios capable of reaching Washington, but the two guerrillas hadn’t yet reached the escape party, and even if they managed to send a request on their CIA-supplied radios, there was no guarantee that Nehru would grant the fugitives asylum. The Lord Chamberlain had tried to notify the Indians before leaving that asylum might be requested, but the message was never received in New Delhi.

To counter any possible PLA attack, the guards on the route went around heavily armed even for Khampas, their
chubas
dripping with swords, jewel-encrusted daggers, pistols, Lee-Enfield rifles, and Buddhist charm boxes that would, they believed, protect them from Chinese bullets. Even the Dalai Lama’s cook wore a bazooka over his back and a bandolier of the enormous shells
around his chest. At one point, wanting to impress His Holiness with his “magnificent and terrible-looking weapon,” he unslung it, loaded a shell into the bazooka, lay down on the ground, and fired at an outcropping. The shell exploded with impressive power, but it had taken fifteen minutes to load the thing. A second demonstration took even longer. “
If we’re going to use that bazooka during the war,” the Dalai Lama commented dryly, “we might want to ask the enemy not to move.”

The fugitives rode at a punishing pace, around twenty miles a day at altitudes of 16,000 feet and higher, across rough trails. As they pushed forward, one miscalculation became clear. Some of the horses they’d brought from the Dalai Lama’s stables weren’t fit for the journey. “We only had ‘court’ horses, aristocratic animals if you will,” said one guard. “All they knew was to eat, drink, and sleep.” Even the meager supplies that the guards had loaded on the animals’ backs were proving too heavy, and the horses began to collapse on the road. When the fugitives came across a settlement, they asked the villagers for pack animals. “Why do you need them if you can carry the packs yourselves?” the villagers asked—not realizing, apparently, that these were not hardy farmers and nomads but city-bred tutors and old men. Finally, forty peasants, including women, volunteered to take the loads and carry them across the mountains. “
I was surprised to see that women were willing to carry such heavy loads,” said one fugitive. “They replied that when it came to carrying loads and climbing mountains, the women were stronger than the men.”

His Holiness dashed off a quick letter to his sometime rival the Panchen Lama at his base at Tashilhunpo Monastery, informing him that he’d escaped and encouraging the younger incarnate to join him. It had been months since the two had communicated, kept apart not only by centuries-old jealousies but also by the
Panchen Lama’s alliance with Peking. But during the winter, the twenty-one-year-old Panchen had sent him a secret note telling the Dalai Lama that the two needed to work together on a single strategy. “This was the first indication he had given of being no longer in the thrall of our Chinese masters,” the Dalai Lama said. The Tibetan leader also knew that with him out of the picture, the pressure on the Panchen Lama to bow to Chinese pressure would increase exponentially. Peking would want him to become what the Dalai Lama never had: the Tibetan face of a Chinese occupation.

One of the Dalai Lama’s ministers went in search of Tenpa Soepa, an enterprising young Norbulingka official who’d helped arrange the escape. When he found the young man, the minister asked him if he would do His Holiness a service. The Dalai Lama was still carrying the letter he’d written to his ministers back at the Norbulingka—he’d either forgotten to hand it over in the rush to escape or been worried that leaving it would reveal the fugitives’ plan. Now someone needed to hand-deliver the letter to the Dalai Lama’s personal secretary back in Lhasa. The minister asked Soepa to accept the mission.

Soepa didn’t want to leave His Holiness in the wastes of southern Tibet. “
A great feeling of sadness and depression came over me,” he said. “In my whole life I have never been sadder than at that moment.” When the emotion passed, he began to consider what was waiting for him in Lhasa. It was bound to be a dangerous place, especially for someone who’d helped the Dalai Lama flee. “The Chinese are there,” he thought to himself, “ready to start the killing.… If I go back …”

Soepa gathered his things, alerted his servant, and set off for the summer palace.

oepa retraced the escapees’ route back north. He arrived back at the Kyichu River, which he’d crossed only hours before. On the riverbank, he found a few poor villagers waiting for a boat to Lhasa, where they would sell some sticks and branches they’d collected for firewood. He advised against it: “
I told them that instead of selling their firewood, they were likely to lose their lives.” He was melancholy as he stared at the far shore: “
I felt that once I crossed the river, I might never make it back again.”