White Mountain Read online

  So, 50.5 million years ago the current version of the Himalayas begins to form; 10 million years go by as if in a blink and at 40 million years ago it appears that the mountains are in place as we see evidence in seawater that erosion is occurring – this is bona fide evidence of topographic elevation. How do we know? Strontium ratios in seawater rise, which we can measure.

  Rocks from the summit of Everest contain the preserved fossilised stems of sea-lilies that grew in the shallow tropical seas of 400 million years ago. On the Tibet Plateau the fossil record includes miniature primitive horses, hippopotami and palm trees – all set in stone 5 kilometres above sea level where modern man must gasp for breath.

  Sacred river junction in the upper Ganges

  Another 5 or 10 million years fly by. From 35 to 30 million years ago we see the peak metamorphism of the peaks. We see crustal thickening and ever-higher elevation.

  Another cool 10 million pass. Cool, because this is the time of maximum rates of cooling, exhumation and elevation – this is when Everest is at its highest (a thousand feet higher than now and probably unclimbable without oxygen – had climbers, humans or even yetis been alive to climb it).

  Around this time, 16-20 million years ago, we see major faunal changes in the Indian subcontinent. We begin to see rapid cooling of the climate, accompanied by erosion of the highest mountains on a major scale.

  A few more million years of erosion and a general drying out of life. Northern Pakistan and India go from being entirely covered in jungle to being grassy places. Then, another million years go by and we see the emergence of a new Naga, a weather phenomenon that will dominate the entire region: the arrival and strengthening of the Indian monsoon season.

  At 7.4 million years ago the summer monsoon grows in strength. We see increased weathering; a lot more sediment is being carried down the mountains.

  Another 4 million years go by and the monsoon is getting more intense. Further cooling leads to the start, 2.5 million years ago, of the Quaternary glaciations of the Everest area. There is increased dust in the atmosphere, which gets deposited in China. The world cools further despite the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The monsoon becomes more variable.

  At 2 million years ago, glaciation is leading to the rapid erosion of those Himalayan giants. Everest is wearing down.

  Now, as Tibet’s population venture south we see the maximum advance of glaciers south of Mount Everest. Twenty thousand years ago and it’s cold!

  And now, from about 18,000 years ago, we see both cooling and gradual global warming, the retreat of major glaciers (though, anomalously, some extend while others shrink just as they do today). The weather gets more polarised. In Tibet and Ladakh, it becomes desert-like. The rest of the Himalayas sees increased rainfall. As recently as this the Karakoram rapidly uplifts compared to the rest of the Himalayas.

  As more detailed studies were done in the Himalayas it became clearer that the basic theory of plate tectonics with its model of rigid, undeforming plates – somewhat like the slabs of bone that make up the infant skull – was deficient in explaining the truly immense distortions of these mountains. While it appeared true that ocean beds were rigid with large plates of dense basaltic crust, with brittle faulting and fracturing or gentle buckling being the ways in which a collision would be resolved, it was not at all clear that this was happening in Tibet and the Himalayas. Earthquakes occur all over the Tibetan Plateau, not just at its bending and buckling margins.

  Destructive plate margins are where one plate dives, or ‘subducts’ under another. This is usually after a prolonged collision of some kind which causes crustal shortening; this sounds temptingly like a cooking process, but is in fact the horizontal collapsing of a plate which is then forced upwards into a mountain range.

  One might reasonably ask why the rate of crustal formation is balanced by the rate of crustal destruction. It seems remarkable that it should be so, yet the world would very quickly cease to be an orb if it did not. One answer is that the gravitational and centripetal forces of a spinning planet are so huge that these serve to constrain any untoward growth. Think of the yin-yang image: it’s as good a picture of this balance as any other. What is remarkable is the fact that, at the core of a ‘hard science’ like geology, there lies something esoteric, hidden, imaginary – a world miraculously in balance, gods and demons working it out. The Nagas are there, in the shadows, but they are still there.

  4

  The Rivers

  On a spring day there are three colds and three warmths.

  Ladakhi proverb

  I saw the raft and had to have a go. It seemed like sacrilege. It was sacrilege. This was the mighty Ganges, after all. White-water rafting in holy water – a definite sign of something. Commerce erodes or consumes everything and leaves behind an experience, or pollution. The Ganges, the most sacred river in India, is polluted from various sources – agricultural run-off, industry, sewage, wildcat stone – and gravel-harvesting from the banks, dam-building and the floating dead. Floating down through Rishikesh, the smell of the river was rather pleasant; I’ve smelt worse on certain weedy backwaters of the Thames.

  In 2015 over a hundred bodies were found in a Ganges backwater being devoured by crows and other scavengers. These were ‘water burials’ reserved for unwed girls and the very poor. Most dead people enter the Ganges as ashes after a cremation, which costs more than simply tipping them into the stream.

  The living cause problems too. Over seventy million people perform their ablutions in the Ganges. According to a 2015 report, faecal contamination has spread a superbug resistant to antibiotics. Ashrams in the holy cities of Haridwar and Rishikesh are blamed for much of the untreated sewage discharge, with 17 out of 22 major ashrams reported dumping untreated sewage into the river. In May and June, when thousands of devotees dip themselves in the sacred river, superbug levels were found to be sixty times higher than the rest of the year. It’s regularly reported as the fifth most polluted river in the world: though I suspect there are many smaller dead rivers in ex-Soviet republics and rogue goldmining operations in Latin America. At least there isn’t three feet of detergent foam all across the river as I once saw on the La Brague, a charming little river in the South of France pretty close to Nice. And there are still fish in the Ganges; all I saw in the La Brague were nasty-looking black water snakes. That said, industrial effluents form 12 per cent of all the waste water entering the Ganges.

  Almost alone on the Ganges

  To a Western mind, pollution and white-water rafting simply don’t fit with the religious significance of the Ganges. But attend any of the riverside ceremonies (pretty much every night) at Rishikesh or Haridwar and you’ll change your notion of what constitutes religious significance. Unlike northern Europeans, Indians don’t do pious in that joyless, rather stiff-arsed way. For one thing, there are too many people. And for another, there is just too much craziness going on . . . like people rushing to get some luck from the sacred fire that is being passed around.

  Light/light: this may be a happy accident, but I don’t think it is any accident that light plays a huge part in all religious iconography. I suspect it is lightness, in all its forms, which leads us closer to that which is significant. Heavy things sink, light things rise up, they go higher.

  They also float, like the corpses jettisoned into the River Ganges. Or tourists in an Avon inflatable raft.

  Going downstream, the river is an easy journey. Like a moving path, it takes you to your destination. But to get anything extra in life you have to go against the grain. Pilgrims travel upriver to the source, they go against the natural journey, the easy path. Pilgrims on the roads of Himachal Pradesh, some riding Enfield Bullet motorbikes that gasp for air even at moderate altitude, some in buses, others walking with Sadhu sticks and tin pots, nothing else, heading along the muddy, potholed, collapsing roads that line each gorge of the Ganges and its tributaries. Some of the pilgrims head to Haridwar or Rishikesh, others keep going to the sac
red lake of Roopkund. The pilgrims can be Hindus or Sikhs or Jains or Buddhists. Buddhists and Hindus and Jains continue further, as far as the source of all sources – Lake Manasarovar, at the foot of Mount Kailash. It is a strange and obviously central fact for all real and imagined journeys in the Himalayas that all the rivers rise in the same place, around Mount Kailash and its environs.

  Rishikesh, a good place to venerate the river gods

  It is rather wonderful that such a coincidence should be: five great rivers (the Indus, Sutlej, Karnali, Ganges and Tsangpo-Brahmaputra) rising in the same part of the Himalayas. Four rise not so very far from Mount Kailash (and the Ganges rises only forty miles away), a strange dome-shaped peak of 6,638 metres on the Tibetan side of the range. Kailash, perhaps derived from the Sanskrit kelasa, meaning crystal, is the most revered religious peak in the entire Himalayan zone. The Chinese asked a Tyrolean alpinist to summit this most holy of peaks. Reinhold Messner – one of the world’s top mountaineers – sensibly turned down the chance. Once, when asked who were the greatest climbers, Messner memorably answered, ‘Those who are still alive’. He is aware that you cannot play at such things. Not in the long run.

  Kailash, though, is the alibi, the marker stone – it is the place which is important. Rivers give life to wherever they pass through – in a banal sense, but also in a more refined sense. There is a quickening of the air, there is life of all kinds, movement and sustenance. The strangest thing is that the Indus, Tsangpo and Ganges define the main extent of the Himalayas by encircling them. The Tsangpo, after an incredible journey along the back of the Himalayas, punches a hole through this impregnable wall of mountains to become the Brahmaputra, a river that weaves back and under India, eventually merging with the Ganges. The whole of the Himalayas is encircled in their grip; the strictest definition of the Himalayas stretches from the source region of the Ganges to the Tsangpo gorge in Arunachal Pradesh. The mountains give birth to the rivers, which cradle the mountains. It is such thoughts as these that trundle through a pilgrim’s mind watching Sadhu after Sadhu trudge up the roads in the Garwhal Himalaya, getting ever higher, ever nearer to the source.

  The Oxus doesn’t quite make the same source zone as the others but it is fairly close. Flowing west along the intriguing Wakhan corridor, it marks the northern boundary of Afghanistan. Flowing south is the Indus, which at various times has marked the boundary between Afghanistan and India – the Kishan kingdom, for example. In these troubled times, some insist on making a Pashtun realm between Helmand and the Indus, and a Tajik-Uzbek realm between the Oxus and the Helmand.

  People follow rivers. The Tsangpo-Brahmaputra defines the eastern extent of India. The Ganges divides Himalayan India from its southern extremities. The Tsangpo is the main artery through Tibet, though right in the south of the country is its centre of gravity.

  Mountains constitute a different kind of dividing line because they are never really lines in the way a river is. Crossing a river is an act of transformation, ‘a fording / To dry, different clothes’,* but crossing a mountain range is an act of defiance and a boost to the ego. Crossing over a high pass, one does not feel that one is entering a new country; one feels, with it all laid out below, that one has already conquered it – only the mopping-up remains. Both Tibet and Nepal have claimed each other’s lands from the high vantage point of a mountain pass. China still claims parts of India below the highest parts of the natural backbone of the Himalayas. Rivers provide a less disputable boundary; the earliest kingdom, Mesopotamia, was literally the land between two rivers, not the land between two mountain ranges.

  The dividing line between Tibet and India usually follows the line of highest peaks, but it is still far from settled. China claims most of Arunachal Pradesh and tried to take it in 1962. They continue to make regular incursions just inside the border – most recently in 2013 – but always back down when Indian soldiers appear in force. The Himalayas feel as if they are a kingdom in their own right; dividing them down the middle seems counterintuitive. No wonder each side thinks it should have access to the foothills of the opposing side too. Nomads and mountain dwellers have traditionally criss-crossed mountain borders, finding them permeable. Rivers are less amenable. Unless there is a bridge you can’t cross. And even with a bridge there tends to be a town on each side – like the Rio Grande towns in America and Mexico. Much of the sad stripping of territory happens because rivers have not been made the border. I envisage a new world map where new countries are defined by patches of land between rivers, every country a kind of Mesopotamia. We let nature dictate: countries with few rivers can remain large, otherwise they should be made small. It is perhaps the case that every country should be viewed as a series of inland islands, divided inexorably and without possible remonstrance by the rivers that criss-cross the land.

  The Sutlej is the easternmost tributary of the Indus. It is a great long river in its own right, the longest flowing through the Punjab where some still call it the Satadree. It rises in Tibet, near enough to Kailash at Lake Rakshastal. It is called the elephant river in Tibetan and crosses into India through the Shipki La, a pass 5,669 metres high. It flows through the Punjab and into the Indus and Pakistan before reaching the Arabian Sea. Geologists believe that five million years or so ago it flowed the other way and joined the Ganges. In an attempt to reverse time there is a proposal afoot to build a canal linking the Sutlej again to the Ganges, allowing ships to cross India without going around the southern tip. Like all big canal projects, it relies on images with mythical force, ideas buried in the ancient brain of ancient waterways; such a canal, in its seemingly modern attempt to save money and time, is really a reversal, a reuniting of Pliocene water systems, another feeble attempt by man to challenge the gods and reverse the effects of time. The ecological cost of such a project, would, of course, be huge.

  The Indus River, the watering place of one of the world’s oldest civilisations, the Indus Valley Civilisation, gives its name to the language and religion and people of India – the Hindus. So named by the Persians as the land of the people of the Indus – Hindustan.

  Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley are all gifts of their great rivers; only through the sheer excess of regular water could man begin to build large cities and grope towards the current urban-dominated culture. But it is not the effect of the river we seek, but the mysteries of its source. One of the oddest things for science to explain is the exact coincidence in size between the Moon and the Sun when viewed from the Earth. It is rather like those trick photos where a giant distant boulder can be ‘held’ by someone posing in the foreground. The moon is 400 times smaller, but the sun is 400 times further away. It is a rare coincidence. According to Dr Myles Standish – formerly of Caltech and Yale University, and the author of over 300 papers on celestial mechanics – the similarity in size is unique among the planets and moons that form our solar system. I am reminded of the previous odd balance between the rate of crust formation and destruction; the tiniest imbalance here would result in the Earth having imploded or exploded billions of years ago . . .

  There is another twist to this coincidence in the Himalayas, in that the Indus predates the current rise of the Himalayas but the Tsangpo came millions of years later – yet both rise in the Kailash region.

  One way in is to study the Indus suture zone – the place where the actual collision took place. This suture zone runs across southern Tibet and right across the northern end of ‘Little Tibet’, Ladakh. Leh, the capital of Ladakh, was a significant crossing point for caravan routes bound for Central Asia, and a receiving point for goods from Khotan and Yarkand. That the ancient boundaries of geological events beyond human time should affect our existence is rather fascinating to contemplate. The very areas of plate destruction, no doubt due to the huge environmental effect they have, leave areas of great human difference too.

  The Indus River predates the rise of the Himalayas – at least the present incarnation of the Himalayas. There seems to be som
e consensus that there were mountains before the present steroidal upthrust of fifty million years ago. The rivers were then ‘captured’ by the fault lines, in some places changing their route. The major collision line is the Indus suture, which merges into the Tsangpo suture, which curves round at the top of Nagaland and interlinks with the line of hills running down the spine of the Burmese-Indian border.

  That the Indus and the Tsangpo both rise very close to Mount Kailash and encircle the Himalayas is, as we have already noted, an extraordinary fact. That the Sutlej and the Ganges rise within a further 40 kilometres makes this the source pipe of the entire Himalayas and much of the Indian subcontinent. How did the ancients know that this spot was the key point in the formation of this epic mountain range? Until the nineteenth century, no one knew that the Brahmaputra was actually a continuation of the Tsangpo. Most thought it simply arose in the Himalayas, not that it cut right through them. Just as traditional knowledge in the Sahara suggests an understanding of geological processes that formed the sands, so, too, we find in the mythological foundations of humanity here in the Himalayas a form of understanding that operates, albeit in a very different idiom, to explain the significance of the landscape and yet is confirmed by the latest scientific findings. It is yet another mystery of the Himalayas.

  The evidence of ancient wisdom resides in the scattered texts and art of previous civilisations, tailored though it was to previous peoples and eras. That these ancients also had an elevated knowledge of the planet’s structure, accessed through dreams and hypnotic states, is not so far-fetched.* The act of pilgrimage to a river’s source could be the simple checking of the life-source, making sure the river is running and hasn’t any problems. Man has a tendency to ritualise everything he does, render it empty, mere spectacle. The pilgrimage may become something else, even if it has its roots in something as prosaic as river maintenance. One thing the ancients managed far better than us was finding activities that had synergy, that had multiple uses and benefits. Such activities radiate out and harmonise with the planet. Pilgrimage is one such activity.