The tightly controlled Sino-Soviet borderlands are about as easy for the ordinary traveler to visit as Middle Earth or Lower Slobbovia, and some of the terrain along the 4,500-mile common frontier displays characteristics of both those fabled lands. A few wanderers, including scholars, journalists and political analysts have managed to visit portions of the frontier. Their impressions, gathered by TIME correspondents around the world, of the lonely, alien and often lovely terrain where the modern empires of Moscow and Peking collide:
SOME 70 miles south of the site of the vicious four-hour battle between...