Silk Road — Class 11 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: Silk Road (Class 11 English)

Nick Middleton's travelogue of a drive across the Tibetan plateau towards Mount Kailash to complete the kora. The journey moves through mountain passes, a salt lake and the squalid town of Hor before ending in illness at Darchen.

Leaving Ravu

Lhamo gives the narrator a farewell present — one of the long-sleeved sheepskin coats the men wear — because he is heading for Mount Kailash to complete the kora. Tsetan calls him 'drokba'.

Tsetan's condition

The short cut south-west crosses several high passes. 'But no problem, sir, if there is no snow' — and, asked the likelihood, 'Not knowing, sir, until we get there.'

Kyang

The Tibetan wild ass. A great herd gallops 'en masse, wheeling and turning in tight formation as if they were practising manoeuvres on some predetermined course'.

Tibetan mastiffs

Huge black dogs guarding nomads' tents, wearing bright red collars, charging the car 'like a bullet from a gun and nearly as fast'. They reached China's imperial courts as hunting dogs via the Silk Road.

The first snow

At 5,210 metres a swathe of snow crosses the track. The danger is not depth but the icy top layer — 'If we slip off, the car could turn over.' Tsetan flings dirt across the surface to give grip.

The top of the pass

5,515 metres, marked by a large cairn of rocks festooned with white silk scarves and ragged prayer flags. They walk round it clockwise, as is the tradition.

The hissing petrol tank

Lower atmospheric pressure lets the fuel expand, so the tank hisses when opened. 'Maybe, sir,' Tsetan laughed, 'but no smoking.'

The salt lake

Lunch of hot noodles in a canvas tent at a workcamp beside a dry salt lake. The plateau's salt flats are vestiges of the Tethys Ocean, which bordered Tibet before the continental collision lifted it.

Hor

A grim, miserable place with no vegetation, only dust, rocks and years of accumulated refuse — unfortunate, since it sits on the shore of Lake Manasarovar, Tibet's most venerated water.

Manasarovar and the rivers

Hindu and Buddhist cosmology names it the source of the Indus, Ganges, Sutlej and Brahmaputra. In fact only the Sutlej flows from the lake; the others rise nearby on Mount Kailash.

Earlier travellers

Ekai Kawaguchi, a Japanese monk, reached the lake in 1900 and wept at its sanctity; Sven Hedin, a Swede not given to sentiment, was similarly moved a couple of years later.

Darchen and the diagnosis

At 4,760 metres he cannot breathe lying down and stays awake all night. A Tibetan doctor in a woolly pullover diagnoses 'a cold and the effects of altitude' and gives him fifteen screws of paper.