As the sun drops away, a full moon rises. Dinner of peanuts, watermelon, dried fruit, and two pieces of bread. The temperature plummets and I wear everything: heavy wool socks, underwear, down-fill vest, flannel shirt, wool toque and gloves. In my sleeping bag, I curl into a ball. Everything freezes outside.

At sunrise, my thermometer says minus 4 degrees Celsius. But the temperature zips up in no time. Soon, I take off everything down to my shorts. The ice peaks tower only a few hundred metres above. Only a few sheepherders live here.

Altitudes can be very strange. At 5000 metres, breath is short and glacial ice appears beside me in the river. I ride only 23 kilometres on this day, the 29th of June. The air is too thin and the Kunlun massifs tower over me. I stop at 2:30 to rest and acclimatize. Another road workers' commune. The Uigurs are happy to invite me in for the night.

A convoy of Chinese army trucks takes a break late in the afternoon. They hand out watermelons and take pictures with the Uigurs. The Uigurs are amused by these Chinese guys, as if, like me, they are unexpected visitors from some far away land. Most of the time people get along in Xinjiang. If you compare the Chinese administration with the strict Muslim rule of Afghanistan or Pakistan, at least you find that the basic right of women to live in public still exists in Xinjiang. It's a mess, thinking about how people want to control others - somehow, all the time, everywhere... Why? Why can't we teach that nobody knows better than you?

A huge snow mountain lies just across the valley on the other side of the road. I sit on the step, reading and staring at the wonderful sight for hours. I share my tobacco and exchange names with the help of a bilingual dictionary. After a dinner of rice, tubers and goat, the guys fire up the generator for lights and tv. Chinese and Indian stations. Everybody's in a good mood, I'm diverting them from monotony.

I get up at 6:30. At 7:00 A.M., the thermometer registers minus 2 degrees Celsius. Emerging from shadows into sun, I manage the remaining ten or fifteen kilometres to the top of the Chiragsaldi La. It's spectacular. The mountains are made of steely grey rock, sometimes charcoal black. Icy snow crowns them under azure skies.

The ride down is steep, smooth and fast to the army outpost of Mazar. But the Yarkant valley is still much higher above the sea than the desert of Xinjiang, two days behind me. An overturned truck rests beside the route. The driver waits disconsolately nearby. He must have lost control - driving too fast. This truck is the second of seven wrecks I will see on the way to Tibet. I spy some camels resting by the road. I've counted 20-odd camels so far, several prairie chickens, marmots and some pretty red birds bigger than robins. I've seen wild burros, too. I find a culvert draining icy, clear water into ditch by the roadway. It makes a great shower.

There is nothing at Mazar except a base full of drunken soldiers and half-a-dozen chop shops. I stop and eat some rice, tomatoes and eggs. It isn't really enough, but I keep going anyway. Some soldiers smile at me - and those who frown - I don't care what they think.

It's purely beautiful, the Yarkant River valley. It's barren and almost lifeless. You feel as if you're on a new planet. No people, no homes - nothing. The river flows rapidly past a jumble of polished carbon rocks. Iron pastels of gravel lie under the slopes on both sides of the valley. Only a few hardy scrub plants stick up near the water. That's all. The road is a donkey's joke - a rough gravel washboard ruined by the heavy transports rushing to Ali town. I jar painfully and slowly across deeply worn corrugations. The wind isn't familiar. First it holds me back from the East, and then it changes direction, head to tail, and now it pushes me along again. The sun is hot. Without asking permission, dust devils whirl and jump at me.

I'm low on water. Over there, a pure clear mountain stream flows into the muddy river, but on the other side! It's impossible to ford this deep river without being swept away. So, I conserve my remaining two cups of water, camping out beside the Yarkant, hoping for a clear stream tomorrow.

Morning, cool after the lucid moonlit night... How can I describe the feeling of being alone, with nothing to depend on but physical stamina? The sensation becomes acute - I'm far away from cities and towns. Helpless. Nature presents herself - but she does not speak. She watches without emotion. I may err by letting "human" imagination impute personality to inanimate sand, but there's so little life in the Yarkant Valley that its silence and emptiness is like some silent, watchful presence. I spot only one small group of camels grazing scrub on an islet in the middle of the Yarkant River.

Nature is the only thing here. But I'm a man. Rocks and sand cannot support life. I'm responsible for keeping alive. My food seems insufficient and I get that sudden panicky emotion of idiocy that comes as foresight seems likely to fail.

Water: I find it flowing over my toes - clear - absolutely pure to drink. As I fill my three little bottles a trucker drives by slowly, as if taking care to see if I'm okay. People are made to care for each other - as strangers and as family - the same. He's thinking about how slow I go...

I wonder what solitude is it made of? Why do I feel everything around me is so formidably opposed to life? Out here, it does not possess a name or a personality. I wasn't born to believe in the spirits of falcons and rocks, not as native American Indians who persisted for thousands of years with nature as their one tool, and their only mother and father. I grew up amid the man-made universe. I spent no time learning about survival. Does that make me lucky? I see things the same way as any other town person: it's a very streamlined world - problems are taken care of - or we forget them with appropriate fantasies and economic rationalizations.

Too many questions and no easy answers... My father wondered why I was always asking questions. Sometimes, I asked so many questions that he gave up trying to answer. Maybe he didn't know how to explain it easily... "What does the word 'inevitable' mean?" I asked in front of my dad's friends... "I don't know..." he said, shaking his head, "...this kid." And when I insisted to know what the word meant, my elder brother had to intervene, and distract my mind away. But I still wanted to understand the new idea I had found, and was forbidden from learning...

We grow up with the definitions for everything around given to us. We are obliged to earn our living by knowing how to do special things very well! But nature is far from being a routine that we simply have to learn. It's a thing outside of our familiar knowledge. We may see it everyday - but we have no need to interact with it at all. Even if we try to understand the world around us, the words we choose and the ideas with which we attempt to fathom things rely on references to the familiar universe of our scientifically inspired, idea-oriented home. We're made conscious by everything we do: making a fire, planting a tree, catching a fish - and by knowing complicated things about history, culture and the political milieu.

We're capable of fathoming myriad abstractions about the nature of our modern time. But the more we know, the more we assume perspective, in this sense: because of our deeply inborn hindsight about the progress and failures of our civilization, we expend plenty of energy imagining that we have earned a wonderfully comprehensive understanding of the whole history and present estate of humanity. We earn so much from this devotion to achieving wisdom that we complain of shortcomings as if they were somebody else's problems. Can you begin to see what I am driving at? We all believe in ourselves and have great faith, but without knowing how to realize our responsibilities.

I mean to say, the more we understand, the more we ought to expand our natural depth, and our unsinkable convictions for pointing ourselves in the right direction of genuine progress. We have faith in ourselves as never before. All insecurities are imaginary small things that we conquer by concentrating our thoughts on resolving the dilemmas we exact from nature. If we need a lot of hydrogen, then to derive it from water, nothing is stopping us from constructing huge solar arrays in the world's deserts.

The development of global equality among human societies, and the wisdom we bear along with us, has seen much less advance than the great physical and social benefits afforded by recent scientific and technological wonders; except, not everyone benefits from the new wonders. What does that mean to say? Materialism is our way of being selfish. It's been said before by people with far more metaphorically inclined poetic dispositions. Our present state of consciousness is lop-sided. We do without knowing why and wherefore; so, our superficial attempts to grasp the answers lead us into deep confusion, and we misplace priorities. ...The syndrome that envirophobes love to talk about involves the main roots of our apparent social, economic and industrial miasma: it's a cliche about needing too much of a good thing... We can't ever have enough plastic bags and cars, nor enough factories to make all of them, can we? The limit is invisible and we are so slowly imbecilic in the effort to suggest and act upon our future sanely, instead of greedily and zombiely-glued on our paradigm career, happy mice gleefully filling out forms and submitting to the magic authority of expert planning... I'm glad to report that I am not an expert at anything but taking a shit.

Our estate is ruffled when people saturate us with threats suggesting that our universe may collapse momentarily, due to depleting ozone, or increasing carbon dioxide levels... It is all true, I am sure, too. And like you - I don't know what to do. Everyday we are obliged to contend with great idealists who may actually go so far as to lob missiles at other people because they think political thoughts that have far less in the bank than they actually have to spend on the war effort. If we could grow up enough, then we might realize many good things: that an enemy isn't really an enemy, but just someone you don't know very well.

For a moment, imagine that all our wishes for perfection are foolhardy, and our belief in accomplishment, quite unnecessary. To be free is to let things go, and let them be themselves... To control, to attempt to change others and make them see the light, what is that but an attempt to impose your desire for a better idea upon someone else whose soul you don't understand in the first place? But this is a crime you scream - I will surely let everyone down again! (Especially the women, whom I ignore by sticking to only one lover-girl at a time... When instead, I should be chasing all their tails at once...)

I am too poor, but overfed. All the powers are so weak, while so very strong. Is the pacifist just a peasant buck-skinner who hasn't the pep to pop the pebble in the hole? Even a dummy can suggest that we, the wealthy powers, are likely to concentrate on keeping things going on much the same as ever - and the same as we can possibly keep them! But that isn't so good, because it leaves the rest of the world under the gun - and they know it; meanwhile nobody in the streets of America, Sweden or Japan or anywhere like that has the slightest clue about how the really poor feel - because of how you and I are able to live... The poor under the heals of your society at home - do you hear them?

What about those who pretend to non-violence simply by ignoring the fight between nations? It beggars reason to expect everyone to come home and roost among the myth of peace from progress, when in reality people are as bloodthirsty and crazy as ever. We have to figure out how to make ideas reach the heart and enlighten the Spirit - that ancient organ for truth and compassion - with real hope for freedoms made of joy. But we are too busy joking, bullying or competing for illusions of correct status... We can't take the time to figure out what to do...

Nowadays, responsibility is touted as governance by the content and emptiness of your pockets. But isn't that belief an irresponsible hubris unto itself? Today's popular attitudes make it seem as if fools are the only ones who care for other people. All right - responsibility is often thought to be the action of living consciously and with care and concern. In words more lyric perhaps: responsibility is the face we hide in the palm of our pocket: without knowing who we are - we still want to know...!

My enemy? Our lover? Our god? Who's telling we should know better?! I feel poetry is the only throb we have to know, feel and realize the world. Poetry is insight into true feelings for each other. Poetry is the deepest, most immediate meaning available. The predilection for poetry is recognized by human sensitivity as it unveils truth - undeniable and obvious...

True discipline is learned from within and cannot be imposed from outside: that is a subject for a poem!