White Mountain Read online

  George Everest rested, coincidentally, in the hill town of Mussoorie when he wasn’t surveying India. His dilapidated house is still there. My dad’s school has closed, turned into a hotel. I went there in winter. The air was so clear you could actually see Everest hundreds of miles away.

  * Baltistan is to be found between Pakistan and Ladakh.

  † A kind of flying suit used in freefall parachuting – halfway between hang glider and falling stone.

  † Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough

  2

  The Barrier

  You cannot send a kiss by messenger.

  Proverb widespread in the Himalayas

  Silk flows through your hands. It is a flow from East to West. Gold one way, silk the other. Is it any surprise that the underground economy of the virtual world should be called Silk Road? Bitcoins replace gold, drugs replace silk. Drugs promise imaginary journeys every bit as enticing as real ones to the land of the Himalayas.

  Long before Marco Polo, two Nestorian Christian monks returned from India, where they had either been studying or proselytising; they brought with them the secret of silk. It was the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian (AD 527-65) who had long exercised his mind on how to obtain better access to the luxurious fabric. Sea journeys had failed; now it seemed the monks had the answer. They revealed that silk came from China and not India as had been supposed. They spoke of the mulberry tree, which far from producing silk was merely the food for an insect that produced silk. Their mission was to return and steal some eggs and larvae and break the Chinese monopoly. In this they succeeded – silk production became the cornerstone of the Byzantine Empire for the next six hundred years. It is as if the energy needed to cross the barrier of the Himalayas – the most awe-inspiring barrier on the planet – somehow becomes transmuted into a very real momentum for any ideas or products that successfully make that journey.

  Nestorian Christians were officially heretics, convinced of the bipartite nature of Christ, putting more emphasis on his human than his divine attributes. To the secular Western mind it seems odd that mere descriptions of a deity should be the cause of friction and war, but look at the controversy that rages over the exact causes of climate change, the wording of sustainability and conservation agreements. Perhaps future generations will see such punctilious argument over the phrasing of important matters as equally misguided . . .

  Nestorius (AD 386–450) and his followers were possibly influenced by the earlier movement of Buddhism within the Greek-speaking empire set up by Alexander. Certainly the invention of Western Monasticism in third-century Egypt occurred after Buddhism had arrived in Alexandria. There are remains of Buddhist graves in the town. Clement of Alexandria wrote: Among the Indians are those philosophers also who follow the precepts of Boutta, whom they honour as a god on account of his extraordinary sagacity.’ He added:

  Thus philosophy, a thing of the highest utility, flourished in antiquity among the barbarians, shedding its light over the nations. And afterwards it came to Greece. First in its ranks were the prophets of the Egyptians; and the Chaldeans among the Assyrians; and the Druids among the Gauls; and the Sramanas among the Bactrians; and the philosophies of the Celts and the Magi of the Persians, who foretold the Saviour’s birth . . .

  It was in Persia that the Nestorian Church established its strongest foothold, a launch pad for travel over the Hindu Kush into India. Zoroastrians mistrusted the early Christians, but under Muslim rule in Persia (AD 633-54 onwards) Nestorians, as ‘people of the book’, were accorded the protection of a dhimmi* community. Monks went back and forth, setting up communities in China (from where they were eventually evicted by the Ming dynasty), Central Asia and India – where they survive as the Nasrani of Kerala – one of the oldest Christian congregations in the world, dating from the first century AD. Though it was a boat journey and not a mountain journey that brought St Thomas, the Keralan divine, to India, many Nestorians would enter India using the trade routes over the Himalayas of the Ancient Greek and Buddhist empires of what is now Afghanistan.

  Alexander the Great had crossed the ranges of the Himalayas via the Khyber Pass in 323 BC, leaving behind Greek currency and buildings with Doric symmetry. This incredible incursion demanded a counterflow of some kind. It came in the form of Buddhism. Intriguingly, you may note the easy similarity between the words ‘Boutta’ and the land of ‘Bot’ (Tibet),† though at that time Buddhism had yet to enter the high heartlands of the Himalayas and merely existed along its foothills. It is almost as if Boutta had, through the imaginary journey of his name, begun already the spiritual conquest of the country that in some sense still bears his name. Buddha means ‘enlightened’ in Sanskrit. Is there any more powerful imaginary journey than the path higher, the one upwards to enlightenment? And what an odd coincidence that in the Puranic and other Indian scriptures Thibet is the word for heaven.

  The barrier of the Himalayas is their first fact. We will later try to uncover the geological facts, the real and imaginary forces that keep the tectonic plates spinning, but to start with we will focus on their sheer ability to get in the way. One of the most curious aspects of human vitality or energy is that it rises to meet an imagined occasion. We can psych ourselves up for something – and the bigger the thing the more psyched we can become. I once made a canoe journey across half of Canada; I knew at the time, a shorter trip – paradoxically – would have been harder; I would have been less motivated. People thrive on big goals and great ambitions. And great mountains demand precisely this.

  It is excusable to believe that the Himalayas simply provide a north-south barrier. This is true, though less significant than the more formidable east-west barrier they provide.

  Studying maps laid out in the common but illusionary Mercator projection, the Himalayas appear like a crown set upon the triangular head of India, blocking her off from Tibet. But when you study satellite photographs adjusted for the curvature of the Earth it becomes starkly apparent that the Himalayas are simply the heaviest part of a backbone of mountains that stretch up into the Steppes past the Altai and into the Arctic; and down through the Pamirs, Karakoram and the main Himalayas before snaking further south through Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Burma until the hills drop into the Indian Ocean. It is the most formidable land barrier across any continent and a natural division since most ancient times.

  The only way through is over. There are many high passes but only one lowish gap: the Dzungarian Gate, which has been equated with Herodotus’s description of the home of Boreas, the north wind. It was through this six-mile-wide pass in northwest China that the Silk Road flowed and all the hordes of the steppes passed. It is to be found north of the main barrier of the Himalayas, more or less at a point known as the continental pole of inaccessibility. This is the furthest place from any ocean or sea in the continental mass of Eurasia. Later we will see that it coincides with the geopolitical notion of the ‘heartland’, control of which is key to the control of the largest land mass on Earth.

  * Dhimmi refers to non-Muslims living as taxable ‘protected persons’ in Islamic lands.

  † Geographical ‘Tibet’ refers to the land of the people known as Bod, the Tibetan term of national identity. Roman-era Ptolemy talks of the Baut people – who were mountain not boat people – though perhaps again there was already a confusion between early Buddhists and Tibetans. The Chinese added a T’u when talking about the T’u Fa, T’u Fan, T’u Fod, and the northern region of modern Tibet became known as Tuppet. Muslim writers since the ninth century referred to Tibet as Tubbet or Tibbet, and from here it entered Western languages as Tibet.

  3

  In the Beginning when the Demons Shook the Earth

  Without seeing the ice you will not have sympathy for the water.

  Nepali proverb

  I was walking between villages in western Nepal when a huge rock detached itself high up the cliffside above the narrow path. Most H
imalayan paths are narrow, with a precipice one side, which, even if wooded, is barely climbable, certainly not in a hurry. The noise a rock makes – this one was as big as a transit van – when it detaches from the cliff face is not that loud but it is distinct, like gunshot, and then it falls. I did nothing to save myself. I watched the giant sharp-edged boulder make random twists and turns, detaching a stream of small rocks, bruising and cutting the cliff; an arm-thick deodar branch was scythed in two, hardly splintering and offering no resistance. Then it was over my head and gone. I looked down. On the path below me, red-capped men with goats leisurely pulled in closer to the cliff; they were missed by what looked like inches. Apart from the devastation of earthquakes (I left shortly before the terrible earthquake in Lamjung in 2015 which killed over 8,000 Nepalis) it is only in such instances of quotidian rockfall that the mountain hints at the live forces that constitute its own reality.

  For centuries, and still in many rural Himalayan areas, earthquakes were believed to be caused by the Nagas, a race of demons or gods – it is hard to tell which, but their propensity for destruction is more in keeping with our idea of the demonic. The snakelike Nagas were part of the old chthonic religions that worshipped animal gods. They were displaced by the light religions – the sun religions and the monotheistic Middle Eastern religions. The demons were demoted to . . . mere demons. Then the great monotheisms were displaced by science. Science, too, has sought to eradicate the demons, unearth them and reveal the empty grave. But the demons simply burrow deeper. Now they inhabit our subconscious, influencing what we think in a shadowy way, even as we make the daily commute to the science lab and the hi-tech firm in the business park.

  One of my favourite films is Cosmic Zoom; made in 1968, it is a short film of a boy rowing on the Ottawa River. I saw it when I was at school, projected during an ‘integrated studies’ lesson with the school’s 16 mm projector, which had its own secret cavity in a square pillar in the middle of the room. Most of the films were documentaries about remote places. I loved them. Sitting with my back to the pillar was my preferred spot for viewing; hearing the humming and clicking of the projector and smelling the hot dead air tinged with the faint sweet smell of evaporating celluloid was all part of the ritual, a way of entering more fully into the reality of what I was seeing. The remarkable thing – and you will now recognise the film – is that nothing ‘happens’ except that the camera zooms ever outward to view the river, then Canada, then Earth and finally the solar system, before zooming back in, back to the boy. We see a mosquito on his hand and then the blood of the boy pumping through the mosquito, zooming further, right down to cellular and atomic level, before pulling back until we see the boy again, still rowing with his pet dog on the river. We’ve been on a journey through neither time nor space but rather a journey of perspective. Of course, you could argue that we’ve been on a spatial journey in the sense of height rather than along and across; the latter alters perspective too – but uniquely, I think, the perspective changes that occur as we go higher and higher change the meaning of what we see. All relationships are changed when we go higher, or get higher.

  Science tries to explain things in terms of laws but it relies first on accurate descriptions of visible reality – journeys that everyone can make themselves and agree upon. Once science discovered tools that allowed macro and microscopic inspection, it began to provide information and theories about the invisible as well as the visible world. The telescope and the microscope are the tools that really changed science, turned it from being an exercise in gentlemanly curiosity to a branch of the occult. For the first time it could lay serious claim to knowing what was hidden.

  Telescopes and microscopes change our perspective in a very radical way. If you spend all day looking down one or the other, you may start to think in different terms than someone always at ground level with normal eyesight.

  The attraction of altitude, which we’ll look at in later chapters, is that it offers this radical perspective change. Before telescopes were available, and before balloons existed, men had to climb mountains to get a change of perspective. People look antlike from on high and the stars seem closer.

  Telescopes are for physicists; biologists prefer the microscope. Einstein’s thought experiments involved planets and space, Darwin’s involved animals and plants; both effected revolutions in their particular science. Today Einstein’s and Darwin’s ideas permeate the sciences they worked in. But earth sciences, which experienced a similar revolution in the form of plate tectonics and continental drift theory, have nothing like the same public interest or awareness. Wegener, the originator of continental drift as a testable hypothesis (and it’s a lot easier to test than evolution; continents may be slow-moving but they are reliablyslow), remains relatively uncelebrated, despite being the equal of Darwin and Einstein in terms of the audacity of his thinking. Perhaps rocks are just more boring than our own origin and the very fabric of the universe. Or is it that continental drift, though it took seventy years to become orthodoxy, didn’t come up against a violent, vocal opposition? In any case, what lies deep beneath the Earth’s surface is as hidden as the subatomic level or the furthest reaches of the solar system. We can get glimpses and make inferences, but that’s about it. We can drill a little way into the Earth’s crust (a few kilometres) but that leaves thousands of kilometres that we can merely speculate about. The inner Earth remains something we can only know second hand from refracted radio and magnetic waves. There is masses of disagreement among geologists about the details of plate tectonics (about the only thing they unequivocally seem to agree upon is plate movement itself), so here I will try to keep to the less controversial elements of the theory. As Dr Mike Searle writes, ‘Every model that has been proposed for the Himalayas, Karakoram and Tibet is almost certainly wrong; some may be slightly useful, many are wildly inaccurate.’

  We have seen how there is a natural barrier north-south, formed by the mega-Himalayas stretching up the left-hand side of the Tibetan Plateau towards the Altai Mountains and beyond, a tract of mountainous terrain that ends in stable Siberia – so called because, unlike the Indian tectonic plate, it remains resolutely in the same spot despite taking a pounding all along its southern borders. These northerly-running mountains are the result of earlier collisions and mountain-building impulses as the giant plates of the Earth’s crust gradually shift.

  But there is also an east-west line of mountains – from the Alps to the Himalayas via the Balkans and the Zagros Mountains of Turkey and Iran that marks the much later, though still ancient, collision boundary between two continental plates – the supercontinent of Gondwanaland – Africa, Arabia, India – with Laurasia (Europe and Asia). Squeezed between them was the old Tethys Ocean, the last remnants of which form the Mediterranean. The impact of these cruising supercontinents colliding led to massive crustal shortening some way inland – just as pushing a carpet back can result in a bump some distance from where the pressure was applied. From the Pyrenees across the Alps and the Balkans, all the way to the Zagros and the mega-Himalayas, there formed an uprising mountain belt that really separates cold climates from warm.

  Both the north-south chain and the east-west chain meet in that vast area of high altitude around the Karakoram, where the tightest congregation of 8,000+ metre peaks meet. It really is the mountainous centre of the world and you feel it.

  What evidence had I seen for myself? The enormous fault lines, curved and bent; the seashells fossilised and way up on the tops of mountains; and the rockfalls.

  Rockfall – collapse of the mountain on which you are walking – is a sign of erosion, destruction, entropy. It doesn’t show how the mountains were formed, but it gives a good indication of how they were shaped.

  But before we discuss the end of a mountain as it is ground down into dust (imitating in a much slower way what happens to the river in the opening story), we need to go back 50 million years to when the vast Tethys Ocean separated the two super continents of Laurasia an
d Gondwanaland. These continents began to break up in the vast space of Deep Time between 140 and 50 million years ago. India separated from Madagascar and southern Africa and continued its way north, travelling maybe 20 centimetres a year. Then BANG: 50-55 million years ago it hits what will become the Tibetan Plateau. The demons have joined combat.

  When two continental plates collide it is like a fight between gigantic equals – two Nagas. Neither will give up, so the collision is greater than when oceanic and continental crusts meet. This is what happens when the ancient continental plate of Gondwanaland closes in on the equally ancient plate of Laurasia.

  In a sense, both Darwin and Wegener seek to replace gods and demons with Time – Deep Time; a length of time so huge that it functions as the infinite does, making all things possible. When Einstein showed that Time and Space were part of a continuum he provided us with a majestic vision of the infinite that works to awe us into humility – not unlike the written and spoken descriptions of the gods.