JUL-B-8
TANGSTE:
THE FIRST OF OUR
MEDICAL CAMPS
IN THE REMOTE
VILLAGE ALONG THE CHINESE BORDER
REPRESENTED BY
PANGONG LAKE
I was already awake, and planning an excursion through town in Leh around breakfast time to try to find some Internet Café which might make it possible for me to email the messages already prepared yesterday when and if electricity came on, when I heard the muezzin’s first call of the faithful to prayers from the minaret. It was 3:47 AM. Now just what lunar timetable the Islamic faithful have to make it necessary for this call at this time, I am unsure; what I do know, however, is that the canine calendar is set by this lunar calendar, since every dog in Leh awakens with a howling rejoinder to this prayer call. As a consequence of timing this canine chorus for the nest 75 minutes, I was awake to time the advent of the birdsong in Leh at 11,600 feet in this high alpine desert with an irrigated oasis flowing through the center of town I had run through the day before. The birds began their chorus just forty minutes after the last of the howling dogs had gone down to whimpers. As the currency divisions in Malawi mean, “One hundred cockerels bring the dawn”, both the muezzin and a canine pack put the night to rest before this sound of daytime begins. This is a “circadian rhythm” of a different kind than that which has effected us all in our disruptions in moving to the globe’s far side from the one in which our hypothalamic and “reticular activating system” had been used to, even if, as in my case, this was for a very short interval since my last “orientation.”
But, I am no longer “in town”. If that phrase connotes hot showers and telephones and electricity, I never was in town this trip, but if you understand by that that rather than a bed and mattress in Room 107 in the Hotel Kangri, I now have my sleeping bag at creek side tent near Tangste, this is the right picture. And, instead of the muezzin’s call to prayer for the Islamic faithful, I have the hum of the sacred syllable “Ohm..” as the mantra of the Buddhist monks up on the mountaintop overlooking Tangste begin their morning ritual of prayers and drumming, with an occasional blaring of the “flugelhorn” Asian equivalent. And, it is an earlier and different chorus of birds that I hear, since I am out among them, since they also come down to this streamside green sward and glean behind the new-born cattle as they stir up in the grass what insects have been awaiting the warming sun to start their chirping for the new day. So, we are all functioning on our inborn cycles of relating to a natural environment, many of our s having been turned around in their endocrine and solar centric responses by the speed and trans-meridian progress of a sequence of 747’s that paid scant attention to the biologic clocks of those on board when the flight computers were programmed.
And, now I am beyond, not only 747’s, but aircraft—and still have the automotive facility of the Mahindra and Tata-diesel belching jeeps at our disposal which carried us over the Chungla Pass over 17,600 feet to our current position along the Chinese border, but next month, I leave these facilities behind and have only the power of packstock to porter our medical supplies and sleeping bags up and over the Tibetan Plateau for us to reach the roadless villages of Lingshed.