Silk Road

This chapter is an extract from Nick Middleton's travel writing about journeys along the Silk Road. It covers one leg only: the drive from the nomad camp at Ravu to the pilgrim town of Darchen at the foot of Mount Kailash, and the days of waiting there. Fix this in your mind before anything else, because students lose marks over it every year — the kora is never actually walked inside this chapter. The text ends with the author and Norbu agreeing to attempt it together.

1. Leaving Ravu. The morning of departure is clear and beautiful: "A flawless half-moon floated in a perfect blue sky", with banks of cloud like long French loaves glowing pink as the sun comes up. Lhamo, the author's hostess, has learnt through Daniel that he is heading for Mount Kailash to complete the kora, and has said he ought to get some warmer clothes. She ducks back into her tent and comes out carrying one of the long-sleeved sheepskin coats that all the men wear. Tsetan, the driver, sizes him up as they clamber into the car and delivers his verdict — "drokba, sir" — a nomad herdsman.

2. The short cut. Tsetan knows a route that gets them off the Changtang plateau to the south-west, almost directly towards Kailash. It involves crossing several fairly high mountain passes, he says — "But no problem, sir … if there is no snow." Asked how likely snow is, he will not promise anything: "Not knowing, sir, until we get there."

3. Across the plains. Gazelles look up from nibbling the arid pasture, frown, and bound away into the void. Where the plains turn more stony than grassy, a great herd of kyang (Tibetan wild ass) gallops past, wheeling and turning in tight formation as if practising manoeuvres, plumes of dust billowing into the air — Tsetan spots the far-off pall of dust and names the animals long before they appear. Then come solitary drokbas minding their flocks, who pause, stare and sometimes wave, and nomads' dark tents pitched in splendid isolation, usually guarded by a huge black Tibetan mastiff that explodes into action and comes at the car "like a bullet from a gun", chases for a hundred metres or so, and eases off having seen them off the property. The author remarks that it is not difficult to understand why such dogs became popular in China's imperial courts as hunting dogs, brought along the Silk Road in ancient times as tribute from Tibet.

4. Into the mountains, and the snow. They enter a valley where the river is wide and mostly clogged with ice, climb in third gear past big rocks daubed with orange lichen, and the author's ears block with the pressure. Then Tsetan stops: a swathe of snow lies across the track, stretching for maybe fifteen metres before the dirt trail reappears, and the bank on the upslope side is too steep for the vehicle to scale, so there is no way round. Tsetan steps on to the encrusted snow and slides forward, stamping to test how sturdy it is. The author looks at his wristwatch: they are at 5,210 metres above sea level. The danger, Daniel explains, is not the depth of the snow but its icy top layer — slip off it and the car could turn over. Tsetan grabs handfuls of dirt and flings them across the frozen surface; the other two pitch in, then stay out of the car to lighten Tsetan's load while he eases it across without apparent difficulty.

5. The second blockage and the pass. Ten minutes later a second blockage stops them. "Not good, sir," says Tsetan, and this time decides to drive round it, his four-wheel drive lurching from rock to rock up a steep slope, cutting off one of the hairpin bends and regaining the trail higher up. Past 5,400 metres the author's head begins to throb horribly and he takes gulps from his water bottle, which is supposed to help a rapid ascent. They reach the top of the pass at 5,515 metres, marked by a large cairn of rocks festooned with white silk scarves and ragged prayer flags. They all take a turn round it clockwise, as tradition requires. Tsetan checks the tyres, then partially unscrews the petrol cap, which emits a loud hiss — the lower atmospheric pressure is letting the fuel expand. It sounds dangerous to the author. "Maybe, sir," Tsetan laughs, "but no smoking."

6. Lunch by the salt lake. The headache clears as they career down the other side. At two o'clock they eat hot noodles inside a long canvas tent, part of a workcamp erected beside a dry salt lake — one of the salt flats and brackish lakes that are vestiges of the Tethys Ocean, which bordered Tibet before the great continental collision that lifted it skyward. The camp is a hive of activity: men with pickaxes and shovels in long sheepskin coats and salt-encrusted boots, everyone in sunglasses against the glare, blue trucks emerging from the blindingly white lake laden with salt.

7. Hor, and two punctures. By late afternoon they reach the small town of Hor, back on the main east–west highway that follows the old trade route from Lhasa to Kashmir. Daniel leaves here, finding a ride in a truck back to Lhasa; the goodbye happens outside a tyre-repair shop, because two punctures in quick succession on the drive down from the salt lake have left Tsetan with no spares, and one replacement tyre is "as smooth as my bald head". Hor itself is grim and miserable: "no vegetation whatsoever, just dust and rocks", liberally scattered with years of accumulated refuse — unfortunate, because the town sits on the shore of Lake Manasarovar, "Tibet's most venerated stretch of water". Ancient Hindu and Buddhist cosmology pinpoints the lake as the source of four great Indian rivers — the Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra — though in fact only the Sutlej flows out of it, the headwaters of the others rising nearby on the flanks of Kailash. While the tyres are mended the author is sent to drink tea in Hor's only cafe, a badly painted concrete building with three broken windows, where a good view of the lake through one of them helps compensate for the draught. A Chinese youth in military uniform spreads the grease around his table with a filthy rag before bringing a glass and a thermos of tea. Half an hour later Tsetan relieves him from what he calls his "solitary confinement". All of this is a stark contrast with the accounts he has read: Ekai Kawaguchi, a Japanese monk who arrived in 1900, was so moved by the sanctity of the lake that he burst into tears, and a couple of years later the same waters had a similar effect on Sven Hedin, a Swede who was not prone to sentimental outbursts.

8. The bad night at Darchen. They drive on in the dark and draw up outside a guest house in Darchen after 10.30 p.m. Hor has set off his cold once more. One nostril is blocked; his watch tells him he is at 4,760 metres. Lying down makes his chest feel strangely heavy and his sinuses fill; sitting up clears both almost instantly. He props himself upright against the wall, cannot relax enough to drop off, and a little voice tells him that if he sleeps he might never wake up again. He stays awake all night.

9. The medical college. Next morning Tsetan takes him to Darchen's new medical college, which looks like a monastery from outside, with a very solid door opening into a large courtyard. The consulting room is dark and cold, and the Tibetan doctor wears none of the paraphernalia the author expected — no white coat, just a thick pullover and a woolly hat. He shoots a few questions while feeling the veins in the author's wrist and gives his verdict through Tsetan: a cold, and the effects of altitude. Asked whether he will recover enough to do the kora, the doctor says he will be fine. The author walks out clutching a brown envelope stuffed with fifteen screws of paper — a five-day course. The after-breakfast package holds a brown powder taken with hot water that tastes just like cinnamon; the lunchtime and bedtime packages hold small, spherical brown pellets that look suspiciously like sheep dung. He takes them anyway, and after his first full day's course sleeps "Like a log, not a dead man."

10. Darchen by daylight — and the problem. Once he sees the author is going to live, Tsetan leaves for Lhasa. After a good night's sleep the town does not look so horrible: still dusty, partially derelict and punctuated by heaps of rubble and refuse, but the sun shines brilliantly and the outlook south gives a vision of the Himalayas, commanded by the snow-capped Gurla Mandhata with a wisp of cloud over its summit. There are a couple of rudimentary general stores selling Chinese cigarettes, soap and prayer flags, men gathering for pool on a battered table in the open air, women washing their long hair in an icy brook. But there are no pilgrims. He has timed his arrival for the beginning of the season and come too early. He cannot tell whether snow still blocks the route, he does not fancy walking it alone, and since Tsetan left there is nobody in Darchen with enough English to answer even that question.

11. Norbu. Darchen's only cafe is small, dark and cavernous, with a long metal stove down the middle and walls and ceiling wreathed in the striped plastic sheeting the author calls one of China's most successful exports along the Silk Road today. A man sees his book and gestures at the rickety table opposite. "You English?" Norbu is Tibetan but works in Beijing, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in the Institute of Ethnic Literature. He has been writing academic papers on the Kailash kora for many years and has never actually done it. "We could be a team," he says — "Two academics who have escaped from the library." The chapter closes on the pair of them planning: yaks hired to carry the luggage, and no prostrating round the mountain — an idea that leaves Norbu collapsed across the table in hysterical laughter.

Travel writing lives or dies on people, and this extract is built out of five of them. The examiner almost always wants either Tsetan or Norbu, so know those two properly.

Nick Middleton, the narrator. A traveller and writer. He is heading for Kailash to complete the kora, but the text never calls him a believer; he says he had originally envisaged making the trek in the company of devout believers, which places him as an observer rather than one of them. What makes him readable is that he never poses as a hero: he records his blocked nostril, his throbbing head, his fear of not waking up, his boredom in a greasy cafe. He is dependent — on Tsetan for the road, on Daniel for translation, on a doctor for sleep, on a stranger for company. He is also honest that he had not made much progress with his self-help programme on positive thinking.

Lhamo, the hostess at Ravu. She appears for a moment and never returns, yet she sets the tone. Told through Daniel where he is going, she does not lecture him — she says he ought to get warmer clothes, then ducks back into her tent and emerges with one of the long-sleeved sheepskin coats that all the men wore. Practical care, given in the form of a thing he will actually need. She is the first evidence in the chapter of what NCERT calls the sensitive behaviour of hill-folk.

Tsetan, the driver. The most important figure in the first half. Read him through three things he does.
First, honesty: he will not pretend to know whether the passes are clear, only that they will find out on arrival. Second, competence: at the first blockage he steps on to the snow and stamps his foot to test how sturdy the crust is before risking the car, then improvises grip by flinging dirt across the ice; at the second he leaves the track altogether and picks a line over the rocks, cutting off a hairpin bend. Third, calm: the hissing petrol tank alarms his passenger and gets nothing from Tsetan but a laugh and a warning not to smoke.
His English is broken and formal — the sentences end in "sir" — which is exactly how a working guide picks a language up: on the job, from the customers. NCERT asks this as a question in its own right.
His care extends past the driving. He is eager to have both punctures fixed rather than travel on with no spares; he takes the author to the medical college the next morning and interprets for the doctor; and he leaves for Lhasa only once he sees the author is going to live. His reason, delivered as a joke, is the chapter's most quoted line: as a Buddhist he knew it did not really matter if the author passed away, but he thought it would be bad for business. The humour is real and so is the affection, and underneath both sits a genuine Buddhist attitude to death that an Indian student can place at once — death as a passage, not a full stop.

Daniel. Lightly sketched. He is the author's companion for the first part of the drive and, importantly, the interpreter — the phrase "I told her, through Daniel" tells you the author cannot speak to Lhamo directly. He also supplies the technical warning about the icy top layer. At Hor he finds a ride in a truck back to Lhasa and drops out of the story.

The Tibetan doctor at Darchen. Half a page, but memorable, because he wears none of the paraphernalia the author had been expecting: no white coat, a thick pullover and a woolly hat, in a dark, cold consulting room inside a building that looks like a monastery. He diagnoses by feeling the veins in the wrist — pulse reading, a method Indian students will recognise from Ayurveda and Unani practice — shoots a few questions, and delivers his answer through Tsetan. The treatment is fifteen screws of paper holding powder and pellets, unglamorous and slightly comic, and it works after a single day's course. The episode quietly refuses to patronise traditional medicine.

Norbu. The chapter's gift. A Tibetan who works in Beijing at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in the Institute of Ethnic Literature, wearing a windcheater and metal-rimmed spectacles of a Western style — so the author assumes at once that he is not from those parts. He has spent many years writing academic papers about the Kailash kora and its importance in works of Buddhist literature without ever having done it himself. His self-description — two academics who have escaped from the library — is affectionate mockery of them both.
Be accurate about him in answers. He is not a devout pilgrim: the text says he was not really a practising Buddhist. He keeps telling the author how fat he is and how hard it is going to be — very high up, so tiresome to walk. He has no intention of prostrating himself all round the mountain, and collapses across the table in hysterical laughter at the idea, partly because it is not his style and partly because his tummy is too big. And yet the author decides he may be the ideal companion — because Norbu has enthusiasm, is Tibetan, speaks English, and is practical enough to suggest hiring yaks for the luggage, which the author reads as a good sign. A companion who plans is worth more on a mountain than a companion who prays.

1. The road is older and larger than the traveller. This is why the piece is called Silk Road, and it is the theme most often examined. The author is not travelling the Silk Road end to end; he is crossing a small Tibetan stretch of the network, and the text keeps reminding you that the corridor is still in use. The mastiffs guarding the nomads' tents are of the breed that was brought east along these routes in ancient times as tribute from Tibet to China's imperial courts. At Hor he rejoins the main east–west highway that follows the old Lhasa-to-Kashmir trade route. And in the cafe at Darchen he notices the striped plastic sheeting on the walls and ceiling — the same material made into shopping bags sold all over China, Asia and Europe — and says plastic must rate as one of China's most successful exports along the Silk Road today. Ancient tribute, historic trade road, modern plastic: the same artery, three periods. That is the argument the title makes.

2. Legend versus reality. Lake Manasarovar is holy in both Hindu and Buddhist cosmology and is named as the source of four great Indian rivers. The author gives the belief its full weight, then adds the geographical correction: only the Sutlej actually flows out of the lake, though the headwaters of the others rise close by on the flanks of Kailash. He does the same with the human record. Kawaguchi in 1900 burst into tears at the lake's sanctity; Hedin, not a man prone to sentimental outbursts, was similarly affected. What the author gets is a town with no vegetation, dust, rocks and years of accumulated refuse, and half an hour in a draughty concrete cafe with a greasy table. He is not sneering at the pilgrims or at the lake. He is recording the fact that a sacred place can have a squalid town attached to it — the sanctity is not cancelled, but neither is the refuse. Indian students will recognise the problem instantly from any crowded pilgrimage town.

3. The body is the real antagonist. There is no villain in this chapter and no accident. What threatens the journey is altitude: pressure building in the ears, a head throbbing horribly past 5,400 metres, fuel expanding in a tank, and finally the long night at Darchen when lying down fills his sinuses and weighs on his chest, and a little voice tells him that if he sleeps he might never wake up again. The hardships are mundane — snow, ice, two punctures, a head cold — which is exactly what makes them convincing. Real travel is a series of small solvable problems, and the chapter respects that.

4. Kindness as infrastructure. The author survives on other people's competence and generosity: a coat he did not ask for, a driver who tests the ice with his own foot, a doctor who reads a pulse in an unheated room, a stranger who shares a table. None of them is paid to care as much as they do. NCERT frames this as the sensitive behaviour of hill-folk — people whose lives are hard are often the readiest to help.

5. Who counts as a pilgrim? The chapter's quiet joke. The author had originally envisaged making the trek in the company of devout believers. What he gets is Norbu — an academic who has written about the kora for years without doing it, who is not really a practising Buddhist, who thinks walking that high is tiresome and prostration impossible, and whose first practical instinct is to hire yaks. The author decides on reflection that this may be ideal. The text does not mock faith; it suggests that curiosity, honesty and good humour are also legitimate reasons to walk round a mountain — and that shared human company matters more on a hard road than shared belief.

6. Positive thinking, tested. Running under everything is his self-help programme on positive thinking, which he admits has got him nowhere as he sits in the cafe concluding that his options are severely limited. Then Norbu appears and the plan becomes possible again, and he allows that perhaps the strategy was working after all. It is said lightly, with a shrug — the text credits luck at least as much as attitude.

Form. This is a travelogue: a first-person, past-tense, strictly chronological account of a real journey. There is no plot in the fictional sense — no crisis and resolution — only a sequence of places and problems. Structurally it is a chain: leave, drive, obstacle, solve, drive, arrive, wait, meet. The one structural surprise is saved for the end, when Norbu's arrival converts a dead stop into a beginning.

Precision as a technique. Middleton keeps checking his wristwatch, which gives altitude, and reports the figure: 5,210, 5,400, 5,515, 4,760. He gives the extent of the snow patch, the hour of the lunch stop, the time of arrival at Darchen, the number of screws of paper in the envelope, the year Kawaguchi arrived. This is not decoration. Exact numbers are how a travel writer earns your trust, and they are also how you earn marks — a sentence with a figure in it looks read, not guessed.

Widening the frame. Every so often he steps outside his own windscreen to give you history or geology: the mastiffs brought as tribute to China's courts, the salt flats as vestiges of the Tethys Ocean which bordered Tibet before the continental collision lifted it skyward, the two earlier travellers at Manasarovar, the rivers of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. These digressions turn a car journey into something with depth in time.

Humour, mostly at his own expense. The tone that makes the chapter likeable is self-deprecating irony. A replacement tyre is as smooth as his bald head. Half an hour alone in a cafe becomes solitary confinement. Medicine that works looks suspiciously like sheep dung. A night's sleep is like a log, not a dead man — a joke that reaches back to his fear of never waking up the night before. He is the butt of nearly every joke; Tsetan and Norbu get the good lines.

Voice and dialogue. Speech is short and left exactly as spoken. Tsetan's clipped, courteous English — no problem, sir; not knowing, sir; not good, sir — is reproduced without correction or comment, which respects him rather than mocking him, and shows a language picked up at work from foreign clients. Norbu's English is more fluent but still non-native. Twice the text marks that speech has passed through a translator, which keeps the reader aware of the language gap; NCERT builds an exercise on exactly those two utterances.

Active voice. NCERT itself points out that the account has only a few passive voice sentences. Active verbs — the dogs explode into action, the trail hugs the bank, plumes of dust billowed into the air — keep the narrative moving and keep the people, not the events, in charge of it.

How this chapter is set. In the Literature section you will meet it in three forms: extract-based objective questions (a short passage followed by MCQs or one-line answers on meaning, device and tone), short answers of about 40–50 words, and long answers of about 120–150 words asking you to discuss, comment or evaluate.

The recurring question shapes.

1. The hardships of the journey. Almost guaranteed. Answer it with a ladder of concrete obstacles in order: snow at 5,210 m and its icy top layer, the second blockage bypassed over rocks, the throbbing head past 5,400 m, the hissing petrol tank at the pass, two punctures with no spares, and the sleepless night at 4,760 m. Close with what it shows — endurance, dependence on local skill.
2. The people he met. Lhamo, Tsetan, Daniel, the doctor, Norbu. Do not merely list. For each, give one action and what it reveals.
3. Legend against reality. Hor and Manasarovar, Kawaguchi and Hedin, the four rivers and the one river. Also Darchen — expected to be bustling with pilgrims, found empty.
4. Give reasons for the following. NCERT's own set, reused constantly by paper-setters: the title, the mastiffs, the contrast at Hor, the disappointment at Darchen, the positive-thinking strategy.
5. Briefly comment on. NCERT's second set: the purpose of the journey, the author's physical condition at Darchen, the meeting with Norbu, Tsetan's support, and the 'bad for business' line.

The shape of a full-mark answer. Use point → evidence → inference. State the claim in the first sentence, support it with a specific detail or a short quoted fragment, then say what it shows. A 150-word answer has room for roughly three such units plus a closing sentence. Never open with a rewritten version of the question.

Quoting. One or two short quoted fragments in a long answer is ideal; four is padding. Quote only what you are certain of — the safest are Norbu's 'Two academics who have escaped from the library', Tsetan's 'no problem, sir … if there is no snow', and 'Like a log, not a dead man'. A remembered gist in your own words costs nothing; a misquote can cost the mark.

Mistakes that cost marks in this chapter.

• Writing that the author completed the kora. He does not, within this extract.
• Writing that the Ganga flows out of Manasarovar. The text says only the Sutlej does.
• Calling Norbu a devout pilgrim. He is a scholar and was not really a practising Buddhist.
• Saying Daniel left at Darchen. He left at Hor, by truck, for Lhasa.
• Saying the passengers pushed the car through the snow. They got out to lighten Tsetan's load after helping spread dirt on the ice.
• Saying the altitude readings came from the car or from Tsetan. They come from the author's own wristwatch.
• Turning Tsetan's 'bad for business' line into pure selfishness. Explain the Buddhist attitude to death behind the joke, and his evident concern.
• Retelling the plot when the question asks 'why' or 'comment on'. Narration is not analysis.

Vocabulary the paper may test. kora — the ritual circuit of a sacred mountain, walked clockwise; drokba — a Tibetan nomadic herder; kyang — the Tibetan wild ass. All three are Tibetan words, and NCERT asks exactly that. Also learn NCERT's own 'notice these expressions' list: ducking back, swathe, careered down, manoeuvres, cairn of rocks, salt flats, billowed.