1.
Not long ago, an ugly, hairy goat, a particularly loathsome goat, with a scar rising on the left side of his face from jaw to nose, tried to throw me in jail. Along with four other foreigners, I spent two hours being interrogated by this goat, while my guide, who was a peaceful yak, begged for forgiveness. Her job was made harder because I kept telling the goat off, and even doing so in his own goat language.

2.
That Chinese government, it sure does like to censor. People said, the internet, hah, you can’t censor that one, my not-quite-Communist-but-still-repressive friend! What are you gonna do about the internet? The only way to stop it is to sit a few hundred thousand people down in cubicles and have them manually censor away every nascent breath of electronically-enabled freedom, right?

No problem, replied China, as they sat a few hundred thousand functionaries in cubicles and started censoring. The problem isn’t usually too bothersome – a blogspot shut down here, a gmail locked out there. But when you’re talking about Tibet, particularly this June, when there was the twentieth anniversary of nothing that never happened in Beijing, particularly around Tiananmen Square, on June 4, 1989: well, in that case, the censoring gets to be a bit much.

Luckily, the Chinese are used to totalitarian government. The most famous emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, the Great Uniter of China two thousand years ago, was a notorious scholar-killer and book-burner. Unsurprisingly, Mao loved the guy. In any case, a standard Chinese response to repression developed: to speak by analogy. If the current government was employing some terrible agricultural policy, then the Chinese would stage plays about some widely-hated former emperor that happened to employ a similar policy. This leaves the government in a catch-22. Either they can ignore the insulting play, or they can ban it, and by doing so, tacitly acknowledge that their policies are the same as a hated former leader.

This interesting historical aside is completely and utterly unrelated to the following story, which is merely a lighthearted tale about two groups of animals.

3.
This is a story about the Land of Yaks, which is currently controlled by the repressive fist, or hoof, as it were, of the far-off People’s Republic of Goats.

The Yaks live on a very high plateau in the far southwest of the People’s Republic of Goats. For most of history, this sparsely-populated plateau was very rarely invaded. To the South, the Himalayas rise out of Indian jungles at a sharp gradient, closing off access for all but the summer. To the North and West, a thousand kilometers of desert keep even the hardiest armies at bay. The East offers no insurmountable barriers, but few goat leaders felt that there was much worth conquering in the Land of Yaks. At various times, such as after the 18th century, the Land of Yaks was in theory a vassal state of the Goat Empire, but direct control was always quite limited.

Without threat of invasion, the yaks developed a simple lifestyle. They nearly all proscribed the faith of Yak Lama Buddhism, believing in the reincarnation of the great Yak Dalai Lama and Yak Panchen Lama. Most common yaks were organized, under their monastic rulers, into something looking a lot like slavery. The few foreign observers who arrived, however, noted that the yak serfs, grazing in their fields and eating the occasional dumpling-like momo, seemed a poor but cheerful lot.

In 1949, the goats had a communist revolution under their leader Mao Goat Zedong, and by 1959, the revolution had shed any pretense of moderation. The ultraleftist goats, in that year, finally reached the Land of Yaks, forcing the Yak Dalai Lama to flee into exile, and leading to up to a million yak deaths over the next decade. Over the next fifty years, the goats began to educate the yaks, ended yak serfdom, and developed the yak economy. They also began to migrate to the yak plateau in great numbers, and today, in the biggest cities in the Land of Yaks, you scarcely ever see a yak manning a hotel desk or running a police squadron. The combination of deaths in the early days of Mao Goat communism and the slow replacement of yak culture with goat norms has led to a great resentment among yaks.

Last year, the yaks did a bit of wylin’, as they say, smashing the windows of goat-owned businesses, and occasionally the heads of the businesses’ owners as well. This was not a good idea. The People’s Republic of Goats sent in their army, arresting yaks left and right, especially those uppity yak monks with red robes over their fur and splittist ideology in their minds.

4.
It’s not that the army presence has totally ruined Lhasa. There are still old yaks circumambulating monasteries, and butter tea, and barley wine, and long strings of five-colored prayer flags, and traditional houses that refuse the cubic formula of houses the world over and instead stand as trapezoidal pyramids, the outer walls inclining ever so gradually from floor to roof. There is the harsh smell of burning juniper, its smoke slithering out of porous white stupas. There is still the Potala Palace, with its unique shade of red and its utterly modern appearance, despite existing in more or less its current state for four hundred years.

Take a look at the earliest photographs of Lhasa, taken during the quasi-imperial expeditions of Tsarist Russians and mustachioed Englishmen like the ones following Younghusband. Potala is an absolute titan, gazing down on Lhasa’s shacks. The palace, thirteen stories itself, is on top of Lhasa’s tallest hill, with staircases forming ziggurats on their way down. From a distance, Potala looks like a mountain itself, surely an architectural reflection of the primary topological feature in the Land of Yaks.

Yet still, the army grates. Young goats with harsh expressions, buttoned up in overstarched uniforms, stand frozen on circular platforms beneath umbrellas at nearly every intersection – the umbrellas to keep the fair-toned goats from acquiring a yak swarthiness, and the platforms, one imagines, to hide the fact that the goats are much less physically imposing that their yak neighbors.

I did my part; my last day in the city, passing one particularly odious line of goats, honest to God I gave a quick fart in their direction. I forget – was it Gandhi or Doc King who recommended this form of flatulent civil disobedience?

5.
If Potala is a titan, what can be said of Everest, that greatest of mountains that the yaks call Qomolangma? The road to Everest from Lhasa never drops below ten thousand feet of elevation, rolling past lakes the colors of jewels – lapiz lazuli, jade – and over wind-strewn, barren seventeen-thousand foot passes. There are few birds and fewer animals: even insects make themselves scarce.

Forty miles from Everest, a dirt track with dozens of switchbacks opens on a marvelous vista, looking out on five of the fourteen tallest mountains in the world. The view might indeed be breathtaking on its own aesthetic merits, but at such elevation any activity is breathtaking, forcing gasps of breath regardless of the scenery. From this distance, Everest doesn’t look as massive as you might imagine; its vertical prominence from base to peak is about 11,000 feet, significantly less than solitary mountains like Denali and McKinley, and nearby mountains like Lhotse, itself a 26,000 monster, lessen Everest’s visual impact.

Two hours of driving onward, our Landcruiser arrived at a series of yurts set up a few kilometers from Everest Base Camp. The road to base camp lies in a narrow valley, artistically framing Everest, and the day we arrived was a rare clear sky, allowing the mountain to fade from gold to gray as the sun took its leave. The Tibetan face of Everest is imposing; there is very little snow, because from the peak a seven thousand foot tall cliff forms the mountain’s northern edge. Unsurprisingly, the Nepali side is the more common route up.

Our yurts were set above 17,000 feet, much higher than the highest peak in the Alps or the Rockies. Even after a good deal of acclimatization – I had spent nearly a week over 11,000 feet, and two weeks above 8,000 – that is an incredibly difficult altitude. A run of one hundred meters is enough to leave you completely out of breath. The real trouble is at night, however. The air isn’t thick enough to breathe through your nose, so every hour or two, you can’t help but wake up gasping for breath; the sensation is what I imagine claustrophobics must feel. Breathlessness wasn’t what got us into trouble, however.

6.
It was the next morning that got us into trouble.

From the base camp, a six kilometer road winds its way toward the peak itself, an ice cold river forming the rightside nadir of the valley, and gentler, scree-covered foothills forming the left. A walk along a main road struck an Irish tourist and myself as a bit boring, so we scrambled up the foothills. The wildlife in this area hasn’t yet learned to fear humans; I jumped clear in the air when a troop of deer lumbered down the hill a few feet in front of my path.

The foothills climb higher and higher, leaving the main road out of sight, until a rocky, hundred-meter cliff opens up to a narrow, glacier-fed stream crossing the valley, and a series of outhouses and flat campsites that make up the base camp proper during climbing season. We made our way down the hill to the open expanse where a dozen tourist goats and a handful of Westerners were taking photographs of Everest. The best site for photos, however, appeared to be on a rise just past the stream, and the two of us joined a Canadian and an Englishman in an attempt to get across.

The stream, though narrow, proved its mettle. An outrageously slippery moss – more slippery than any ice I have ever encountered - covered all of the rocks, prohibiting a frog-like series of jumps across. The standard technique in this case is to go across wearing only socks, which grip better, particularly on the pebbles at the floor of the stream. This too proved impossible – the water was frigid.

The Englishman and the Canadian continued their attempt, while the Irishman and I searched on the right side of the valley for some sort of bridge. It was then that a young goat, in oversized camouflage, on a dusty old motorcycle, rode up to us. In loud, stoccato English: “You…not…allowed.” Why, I ask. “Not…allowed.” I tell him to speak Goat. He says the area we’re is restricted. I ask why. He says it’s restricted because it’s a restricted zone. But for what reason? Well, the regulations and laws say you can not be here. We’re told to come back to the checkpoint, a checkpoint whose existence we still didn’t know about. He rides off.

Being Westerners, we string out our direct walk back along the longest possible route; the mathematician in me will note that the young goat soldier didn’t specify which geometry he meant when he wanted us to go back by the shortest route, and can I be blamed if I chose not to use the Euclidean form? Halfway back, two goat soldiers on motorcycles reach us. The newer goat has a better command of English, though his accent sounds suspiciously like a villain in a bad movie, the final syllable of every sentence drawn out with extended vowels. “Youuuuuuu have….broken the ruuuuuuuuule.” I tell him to speak Goat. He says that we’re in a restricted area. The rest of the conversation goes pretty much as before.

I imagine that the two had planned, by this point, to escort us back, but our conversation was halted when the newer soldier spotted our two river-fording friends attempting to climb a hill off in the distance. The goats quickly drove off in their direction.

The checkpoint turned out to be a proper country army base, tucked in the side of a foothill, invisible from our walking path. Our yak guide – guides are mandatory in the Land of Yaks - did not look happy.

“I told you not to go past the checkpoint!” Our argument that we never saw a checkpoint, and further that a dozen tourist goats were with us on the other side carried no weight. The goats had apparently been yelling at our yak guide for some time, claiming that her permit to lead tours in the Land of Yaks would be torn up.

As the lower-ranked members of the goat army took our passport details, I happened to see the commander of the post, the aforementioned, sour-faced, cigarette-puffing goat with the scar running up his cheek. Being a Westerner, I gave him both barrels, telling him to stop wasting our time, and to stop harassing our guide, and that now that we’re registered, we’d like to go, and so on, et cetera. He was unresponsive. I broke out the trump card, that unless we were permitted to leave soon, I was going to call my friends in the security bureau back at the Beijing embassy, where I used to work, comrade, and have them call their friends in high places in Goat ministries, and let’s be clear, it’s obvious you’re not that high up, because otherwise they wouldn’t have assigned you to this desolate expanse of land. Oh, and how you like them apples?

True, that may have been counterproductive.

An hour passes, and the Irishman and I are called to the main office, which is nothing more than a canvas tent with a table and three chairs inside. Scarface is sitting regally, as if his plastic table were the desk of some high-powered CEO. Blah blah blah, he begins, speaking a very stiff, formal Mandarin, you have violated rule XXX of the People’s Republic of Goats, entering a restricted border zone which must be protected by the Goats Liberation Army, a very serious breach, you understand, very very serious.

He continues: I will let you off today with only a fine of five thousand yuan – eight hundred dollars. We tell him we don’t have the money. He says, with a grin, that there’s nothing he can do, rules are rules, and if we don’t pay we’ll have to visit the police station a few hundred kilometers to the north. And there, he says with an even bigger grin, who knows what will happen?

Our poor yak guide is supplicating herself, apologizing, bowing, doing all sorts of humiliating things; the yaks often have to do this when the goats are around; we know who has power, after all. I don’t like this.

Look, Scarface – I actually called him Xiansheng, Mister, my concession to politeness – we were only a few hundred yards past the checkpoint, we never saw your hidden tents, we came back here when we were told, and anyway, there were tons of goat tourists there with us, and I don’t see them here being badgered. Now we’ve registered, and we’re going to Nepal today anyway, so just let us go.

Scarface stiffened up. I continued to plead the case. Ah, but rules are rules, and anyway, you’re talking too much, do you want to go to jail right now?

7.
Shall we cut straight to the denouement? I got let go, the guide got let go, the Irishman got let go. No fines, no jail. Indeed, the other Westerners, who all played along with the bowing and the apologizing and the supplicating ended up detained longer than we did. And who got to have fun berating that jerk of a goat? This guy.

There’s a moral here. Next time you’re getting harassed by goats or Siberian tigers or Arabian onyx or Congolese elephants, make sure you hit back just as hard. That always works.

Right?