High up in Himalayas, signs of ground slipping
As a young teenager on the geomorphic scale, the Himalayas is a living, moving giant working out its destiny in a cycle of upthrustings and weatherings
Living in the Himalayas in the age of rising prices is a blessing tinged with the awareness that the priceless gift of fresh mountain air comes along with the petrol bill for “freight charges” in carting things up from the plains. Public reverence for the Himalayas as a reflection of our higher human instincts like most things in life is hedged by paradoxes. The Uttarakhand hill road from Rishikesh to Badrinath completed in the 1960s (about 350 kms) has been constantly widened to accommodate pilgrim and defence traffic. Drivers from the plains welcome a faster surface just as dhaba and homestay owners delight in increased takings.
However, the buzzword these days is the “carrying capacity” of the Himalayas, which despite its hoary and reassuring appearance and its USP as the “Abode of Snow”, is now under severe threat from overexposure to human pressure and a warming climate. The recent horrific floods seen in Himachal Pradesh causing the collapse of entire buildings have been exacerbated by the removal of nature’s brakes — the large stones and sand from river beds having been mined for new buildings. The subsidence phenomenon in Joshimath is another warning. Construction is winked at on steep unstable slopes, where shoddy and unsafe buildings are raised for quick sale, trees are cut and not replaced and where they are too big to cut, and acid is poured on their roots.
When the Indian Mountaineering Foundation was launched, its slogan “millions to the mountains” was made with the best of intentions, but did not consider the impact of the footfall on a fragile, still growing mountain range. As a young and lively teenager on the geomorphic scale, the Himalayas is a living, moving giant working out its destiny in a cycle of upthrustings, weathering and earthquakes, forming part of a chain of tectonic plates that stretch from the Alps of Europe to the Southern Alps of New Zealand. For mankind, any shrugging of this Atlas can be catastrophic. A huge earthquake predicted by geologists along the Kathmandu-Dehradun sector hangs over our heads ominously, a hundred years overdue.
The brilliant new highway from Delhi to Dehradun wafting motorists in four hours peters out when traffic jams snarl up the start of the hill section to Mussoorie. The hill station’s roads were built for mule traffic and I remember, till the 1960s a notice at the toll booth carried the tax rate for camels and elephants. An ungrateful species, we Mussoorie residents show no affection for that inanimate modern elephant, the JCB, which keeps our supply chain open during the daily rockfall of the rainy season. Traffic jams have now reached the erstwhile Hillary’s Step near the summit of the Everest. Perhaps the Step collapsed from the weight of the waiting traffic? To prove capitalism has its sublime moments, climbers who pay more than $50,000 to be chaperoned to the summit are willing to stand for an hour just under the top (as they lose brain cells and frostbitten toes) waiting their turn to join an exclusive club, whose members have rudely been referred to as “blithe cretins”.
The modern paradox of the soul being lured to the Himalayas by fast cars for the acquisition of selfhood is not so strange if you remember the greatest single draw of Uttarakhand is Ganga Maharani, herself a vehicle of considerable velocity who is worshipped precisely for her speed, which is the guarantee of our ashes being delivered to her heavenly abode.
The similarity of human urges down the ages would be confirmed in the most unlikely and dangerous of places on the steep side of the Rishi Ganga gorge, which guards the way into Nanda Devi sanctuary. Halfway up the sheer ascent, the Lata village porters at the Patalkhan campsite had carved out a narrow ledge on which had been erected a small lodgment of stacked-up slates to protect against the worst of the elements. From the depth of their burrowings, Natha Singh and Partap Singh produced a thick package wrapped in expedition toilet paper in a plastic envelope. From it emerged an anthropological paperback classic on Greek mythology, which had fallen down the rockface a year earlier from the rucksack of an Australian climber but had been secretly retrieved by the porters. I got them to autograph the book at 14,500 feet. Reading it was an extraordinary experience for what had been true for the ancient refrain “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” was being repeated at that very moment across the valley in Badrinath as “Jai Badri Vishal”. Also, the festival of Nandashtami in honour of the Goddess Nanda is celebrated in the same season as the festival of the Mother Goddess of the Greeks and Romans.
Dev Bhumi is reluctant to give up her mysteries and every few years a new theory emerges to try and explain the presence of the bones of 300 skeletons (some with flesh attached), which appear briefly in September when the ice melts at the tiny tarn called Roop Kund. These refrigerated remains have been identified since they were first advertised in 1942 as the bones of pilgrims of the 12-yearly Nanda Devi Raj Jaat. But every time they are tested by improving technology, the mystery of who they are instead of being clarified only deepens. Ranging from Konkani Brahmins of the 6th century CE to natives of the Aegean Sea region (where the eighth wonder of the world — the temple of Diana — was situated), I like to think some of “dem dry bones” may have been followers of Diana of the Ephesians.
Bill Aitken is the author of numerous books on the Himalayas, including The Nanda Devi Affair. The views expressed are personal
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