We maneuver ourselves to a mountainside vantage point overlooking Zayü and wait for nightfall. After dark, we slip around the sentries and begin slinking from one Tibetan vendor to another procuring supplies. Just before midnight two plainclothes Chinese security men spot us. We take off stumbling down a dark alley, but it's buffoonery—like trying to run with a piano on your back. The cops quickly catch us, one of them grabbing my shoulder and spinning me violently around. I am still thinking we have some chance of escape when the cop with his fingernails in my shoulder suddenly pulls out a stun gun, a small black device with needle-points on the end, and holds it against my neck. That's when I suggest to Keith that perhaps we should buy these gentlemen a beer.

This time the interrogation is not postponed. We're taken to the commander's office and stripped of our passports and our backpacks. The commander sits behind a large wooden desk and doesn't smile. He also doesn't speak English, so an interpreter is brought in. We're grilled for two hours. Why were we here? How did we get here? Who were we really? For a while the commander thinks we're spies, but especially stupid ones. No guns, no deadly knives camouflaged as pens, no secret documents.

We tell him we were tourists who got caught in a terrible blizzard and have been lost in the mountains for weeks. He assumes we must be hungry and has crackers and tangerines and a thermos of hot tea brought in.

The entire interrogation is duly recorded in longhand Chinese by a scribe, a four-page confession that we can't read but are obliged to sign and date before being escorted to a cement cell.

In the morning we're again hauled before the commander. He rubs his eyebrows and speaks slowly through the interpreter. Unfortunately, he says, his is a very remote military base. Here there are no phone lines, no possibility of communication with any of his superiors. He is almost apologetic. Without any direction, he continues, he is at a loss as to what to do with us. It occurs to me that we have passed beyond the pale—that in a sense we don't exist in any way that can be assimilated by the officialdom here. I take the hint and humbly suggest that he show his magnanimity and international goodwill by simply letting us go. He looks dubious, but then I add that as far as we're concerned, we've never been here.

He smiles for the first time, gives us back our passports, and gets us each a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast. Then he seats us in a jeep, waves good-bye, and has his soldiers drive us back up the road and drop us off smack dab in the middle of nowhere.