Into the Heart of the Himalayas by Jono Lineen

Author:Jono Lineen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2014-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

October 10

For a mountain river the Spiti is surprisingly wide. Here and there bony plateaus cut from the cliffs to the waterside. On those flats ragged sheep graze. There was no need for fencing as the flocks were hemmed in on all sides by precipices. From river to ridge it is a landscape of layers. Often the tablelands are riven by creeks, some flowing, many dry. Seasonal waters have carved deep fissures through the loose earth and along the miniature canyons wind and water have shaped files of pockmarked hoodoos, medieval-like steeples that look to be the refuge of gargoyles.

Not that I saw any of those mythical creatures, but the Spiti Valley is a land of mirages. In the morning the river’s long straight lines enabled me to see three or four villages ahead. From the village of Hal I could see the regional capital, Kaza, more than twenty kilometres downriver to the east, but in the rarefied high altitude air I swore it was a quarter of the distance. Strangely, those depth misperceptions invert themselves after midday, as the temperature increases and features ahead disappear in waves of heat or dust kicked up by late-afternoon squalls. Distance in that environment is nebulous. You can interpret space infinitely; your mind knows a kilometre is a thousand metres, but a tired body wants those metres to pass swiftly and an occupied mind lets space move through it like water over sand. In such a realm of mirages distance is best measured one step at a time.

Following the rough road down a hoodoo-sided draw late in the morning I saw, across the narrow stream, a trailer-size, boxy, yellow air compressor and around it a huddle of construction workers lightly waving their hands in conversation and smoking bedis. They were upgrading the road, making it passable for Tata trucks and creaking buses. They were five hundred metres away by the circuitous road but only one hundred metres directly across the creek. They seemed to be ignoring me, so I ignored them and enjoyed the sense of my footfalls on the stony trail, always uneven yet consistently solid, each step a drop and gathering of my self, a movement forward …

Then …

BOOM!

One hundred metres away the cliff exploded and jagged rock spewed in a 180-degree arc. I cringed, threw my hands over my head and dropped headfirst to the ground. My pack rode over my shoulders and drove my face into the gravel. My senses were wrenched. Flight or fight. The aftershock rolled up and down the canyon, beating against my chest. The ringing in my ears was deafening. For a second I was newborn, without knowledge of past or present. I hovered.

The shock waves receded and slowly I rose. I dropped my hands to my hips and felt my legs. Everything still there? The explosion had coated me in a skin of powdery dust. As I stood pebbles fell from the folds in my clothes. The closest major debris, a shattered orb of pink-flecked river stone twenty centimetres in diameter, lay mockingly two metres away.

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