International: Over the Hump

John Hall Paxton, U.S. consul general at Tihwa, in China’s far western Sinkiang Province, was eager to take his well-earned leave. Washington had granted permission, but there was still a question: How to get out of Tihwa? The Chinese Communist armies were pressing close. Chinese air service to Canton had been cut, and U.S. planes were barred from the province by a Sino-Russian treaty. Old China Hand Paxton, who had come to the Orient first with his missionary parents at the age of two, called his staff together for a conference. They decided to trek out of embattled Tihwa by truck and jeep, over the age-old route across the mighty Himalayas to India.

Wire & Rope. One day last August, the party set out for Kashgar, an ancient trading post near the Soviet border. There were 16 travelers, including 50-year-old Paxton and his wife Vincoe, an ex-Army nurse; Vice Consul Robert Dreeson; two White Russian chauffeurs and their wives & children; a Turki interpreter and his sister; his wife and four-month-old baby.

Their first ten days of driving took them 1,000 miles across rough roads through the depths of the Turfan Depression, one of the world’s lowest spots, and around the vast Takla-Makan desert. The clinical thermometer in Vincoe Paxton’s first-aid kit rose to 108°. The brakes on one of the jeeps failed, and its steering gear broke. Then its frame collapsed.

Paxton’s chauffeurs managed, with wire and rope, to get the jeep to a mud-hut village. There the local garrison commander, who had taught himself English in order to listen to BBC broadcasts and read the Reader’s Digest, put his men to work and all but rebuilt the jeep overnight.

At teeming, primitive Kashgar the party was held up for three weeks, haggling for a caravan to take them into India. On from Kashgar, the route led 500 miles to Kargalik, through the walled, rug-making, Moslem town of Yarkand. Mutinous Chinese Nationalist troops, who had not been paid for seven months, were in possession of Yarkand, and it took Paxton’s smoothest Chinese to talk his party’s way through. Paxton dismissed the truck and the jeeps, and hired ten caravan men with 33 horses and a handful of camels and donkeys. A white mongrel dog named It (Turki dialect for dog) decided to join the caravan for pot luck.

Babies & Baggage. Four days later, the travelers passed the last inhabited outpost on China’s side of the grim Himalayas. As they crossed and recrossed treacherous river rapids, babies and baggage splashed repeatedly into the icy stream. At 15,800-foot-high Yngi Pass, the hearts of the horses began to pound dangerously. Vincoe Paxton helped slit the beasts’ nostrils so that bleeding would keep their arteries from bursting. She swatted maggots from the festering wounds torn by saddle ropes on the animals’ sides. Nausea, dizziness, frostbite and insomnia meanwhile began to affect the travelers themselves. “It made us feel like idiots,” said Vincoe. In 18,600-foot Karakoram Pass, the sun burned their faces, and their tea froze before they could drink it.

Some 20 days later, Paxton’s party reached the first settlement in Ladakh Province, on the Indian side of the Himalayas. But the worst day was still to come. At Kardang Pass the travelers faced a 400-foot glacier, slick as mirror-glass and tilted at a 45° angle. They dismounted and crept on foot up a narrow path hacked in the ice. Donkeys and horses had to be helped up the treacherous slope. Gallant Vincoe had come close to the end of her tether. The caravan cook encouraged her, step by step: “Put this foot here, now that one there, now this one here . . .”

At last they tottered into Ladakh’s capital. The Indian army made them comfortable for the night and sent out yaks for their abandoned baggage. Last week a U.S. embassy plane flew the travelers into Delhi. They had covered some 2,500 miles in ten weeks. John Hall Paxton was ready for his vacation.