The Frozen River

And so it was that every morning I would retrace my own particular journey back through other mountain ranges. It was as if by being very still for weeks and months on end, the mind could at long last catch up with itself. And in those delicate ferns and ice crystals I could see my own inner journey from one end of a long mountain chain to another. As if each peak were connected to its neighbour, and in the rhythm of the valleys and rivers each peak moved with the seasons and shed its ideas like meltwater. Mountain thinking. A rich, varied landscape that fed my soul. But winter was long in the making.

Winter, winter. A time of gathering in, of holding close, of paring down, of minimal movement, of unfolding hibernation. Time without boundaries, which in its own way cultivated a richness and a sensitivity that had been buried within me for many years, a deep sense of returning, of coming home at last. I was remote yet perfectly at peace with myself.

In that room those ice ferns and ice patterns, so thinly engraved onto the window, became my friends and relatives. I used to follow them and read into them all sorts of journeys and ideas, and yet it was impossible to detect or predict points at which the story might change course or an idea become reality. Many of these narratives stretched deep into the past, but others leapt into the future. It was a place of germination as well as rumination, an internal barometer that registered the smallest change. The dialogue was with one’s self and the outer world. Yet there was no real need to retreat. The natural world was perfectly calm and the Zangskari culture a mirror into which I gazed.

Yet every day I had to destroy a part of this delicate and intricate world, and carve through this map of ice ferns, breaking the delicate ice filaments to see another natural wonder, which was of a different scale altogether and overlooked the whole valley. As I scraped away I felt the coldness of the ice crystals accumulate under my fingernails. I listened to the scraping noise, and then I would turn my head, strain my neck a little and look up, and while still lying down on the floor I would catch the first glimpse of dawn as the sudden pinkish light gently touched the mountain top that lay to the south. Very slowly I would watch as the light crept down the mountainside towards the monastery and then the village. I would wait for its warm rays to reach the room before stirring, unless of course snow was falling, which it once did for ten whole days.

There was no bed, no mattress, no blanket, no charpoy. My only luxury a sleeping bag that was laid out on a threadbare carpet. Under this was a bit of old, worn hessian sack that had been used as padding for the pack animals under their wooden saddles. This provided some small insulation, but the pressed earth floor was undulating and dusty. A little bumpy yet no real draughts. The ice crystals under my fingernails were unbelievably cold. Life was very basic. That was how I liked it. I always slept on the floor, it was warmer that way.

The window

That window was crucial to my existence. It was my eye onto the world, a lens like a porthole through which I could peer – and it lay just above where I slept. Those two panes of glass meant everything to me. They were only nine inches high by nine inches wide, and yet they would have been carefully carried on a man’s back for a hundred miles or more over the mountain passes, wrapped in straw and hessian and carried on wooden frames like artist’s easels to prevent them breaking. Glass in this valley was still something of a novelty and had an enchantment. It was treated with great respect and doubled if not tripled its value with its precarious journey. In their winter quarters the villagers often only had a wooden board that they opened slightly to let the smoke of the open cooking fires escape. It was often too cold to have glass in winter. Light came either from candles or small oil lamps using mustard oil. Some had old-style hurricane lanterns. One or two even had the newfangled pressurised Tilley lamps with a white mantle that glowed as they pumped it up. These ran on kerosene and were a constant source of entertainment, and for the man that owned the lantern a source of pride and status.

Even the wood for the window frame had travelled several hundred miles up the winding valleys from Kashmir, the lengths of timber carried on the backs of horses and yaks over the same passes that I had crossed (Zoji La and Pense La). Some timber also came from the south from the other side of the main Himalayan range, having been dragged across glaciers. Horses and men sometimes slipped down crevasses and had to be rescued with ropes. The temporary roadhead in Suru was a hundred miles away. That was where I had set out from in mid-November with four packhorses, a journey not without its problems.

Like most windows in this valley, the frame had open latticework at the bottom to let the air in, for this was a summer room. The passage of air was then cool and welcome, but in winter it was very different. Winds coming down from the mountains were often cruel and dusty. Whirling dervishes, dust devils, djinns, call them what you will, were common as the wind raced across the central plain. Cold winds that came off the glaciers chilled you to the bone.

This latticework below the window and the gaps round the window frames were temporarily blocked off with pages torn from a child’s exercise book. I jammed cotton wool into the gaps with my penknife, then tried to seal the joints with precious strips of Elastoplast to keep the wind and dust out. But fine particles of snow nevertheless crept in and covered everything.

Often I would wake covered in a fine dusting of snow. But it did not melt, even on the sleeping bag, for the temperature inside the room and outside was not that different. I had two plastic greenhouse thermometers so that I could monitor the temperatures. I discovered that if it was -20°C outside it was about -10°C inside. If it was -30°C outside, it was about -15°C inside. All very scientific, till a young lad stole one of the thermometers. It was returned a day or two later but sadly it was broken.

After a while the degree of cold becomes academic. Dry cold can be very deceptive. But when you are travelling outdoors for long distances on your own it is a matter of life, death and stamina. The main thing was to avoid sweat that then freezes on your clothing, and frostbite to fingers, toes, ears and nose. Sometimes when cross-country skiing I tied a blue and white spotted handkerchief across my mouth like a bandit or bank robber to stop the freezing air entering my lungs. The main thing was to keep moving and only stop for a few minutes at a time unless the sun was out. I had to prepare myself for the frozen river.

I slept with a dark blue woollen balaclava pulled down over my head and fingerless mitts on my hands in case I got frostbite. Three pairs of socks, long johns and two sweaters, one oiled wool, a fisherman’s Guernsey. Just right for the mountains and very hard wearing. Even indoors you had to be careful.

From here the village looked for all the world like a small convoy of tramp steamers with deck cargo. Flat roofs jostled with each other, covered in piles of firewood, kindling, scrub, roots, tamarisk and hay. Hatches all battened down for a storm and the odd grey-blue wisp of wood smoke wafting in the early morning air. Always quiet first thing, and if the weather was good the animals would be let out for fresh air and left to their own devices. They did not stray far and just milled around. They were very social and had their own pecking order. They valued human contact and were on almost equal terms to the people. For water, they ate snow.

Halfway down the outside wall was the third pane of glass. This was green and slightly frosted, and when the sun eventually hit the glass it cast a magnificent greenish light that gave the room the air of a monastic chapel or hermit’s cell. Such joys of colour must have lifted the souls of monks long ago, encouraging them to believe in the sanctity of light and the visual spectrum of nature’s palette. Such small delights made life here not just bearable but bountiful. Light was a resource in winter, and unlike the Arctic and Antarctic regions there were not the interminable hours of darkness to contend with. You made use of every scrap of sun to warm yourself, and many people worked on their rooftops spinning and weaving whenever they could.

When I first moved in I measured the room with an old wooden ski pole with leather straps and round baskets at the base, more akin to those used by Shackleton or Scott than what you might see on the chic slopes of the Alps. The room was 9ft 6in wide and 14ft 2in long. It was not a true rectangle, and the corresponding sides were about a foot longer in each direction, which gave it an interesting visual perspective. Nothing was quite square or even. This suited me fine. A rhombus, or was it rhomboid? Nothing parallel. No straight lines. Nothing vertical. Even the walls were built at 80 instead of 90 degrees. Maybe it was a parallel Buddhist universe after all. Everything was at a slight angle. Just as the Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy would have wished.

Hole in the wall

If the weather was good I could monitor the sun’s progress down the mountain while still in bed reading a book. I regarded that mountain as a very particular friend. It had a curving ridge like the prow of an old battleship. From the summit you could see K2 and the whole Karakoram, over 150 miles to the north. In between lay a vast ocean of mountains. To the west, the Nun Kun massif; to the east, Changtang; to the south, the peaks of Kishtwar. An unforgettable sight. A first ascent, no less. To climb a mountain for the very first time is a strange and exhilarating experience. Everything is fresh, even the view. A quiet feeling of euphoria. Success. Elation. Twenty minutes at the top, that is all. Cup of tea from a Thermos. Just time to build a small cairn. Then down before it gets dark.

Every morning sunlight made its long descent from the summit, down the various ridges and steep slopes. Sometimes painfully slowly, at other times in leaps and bounds. It was my hourglass and I could plot the progress of the sun until it reached the whitewashed walls of the Buddhist monastery. The sun then glided down across empty terraced fields to the village, which lay among the boulders of a vast terminal moraine.

Eventually the sun comes into the room, not through the window as you might suppose, but through a hole in the end wall where the door is. The door is made from three adzed planks of wood that are dowelled together, but like all Zangskari doors it is only three feet high and there is a sill of at least a foot over which you have to step. It saves on wood and draughts. There are cracks in the wood, and so I have put another hessian sack over the door that keeps the wind and snow out. The light is dappled, the hinges are leather. There is only a bent nail to keep it shut, so I lean some old wooden skis against it. These stop the wind blowing in and also keep out the dogs that roam the rooftops.

Next to the door is the end wall, and in it have been driven small wooden pegs for hanging up the family’s homespun cloaks. These are deep red or maroon, almost magenta, woollen and very warm. The cloaks were removed when I first arrived, but one peg came out and so there is a small hole in the wall. It is through this hole that the sun first appears, casting a diagonal shaft of silver light that slices through the dust and arrives on the opposite wall just above my shoulder, coming to rest on the green flowery chintz hanging. Normally I stop reading and watch its progress as the sun rises. It is as if I am a prisoner, but a willing one. That small shaft of light is a true delight.

Usually I find some matches and light a stick of incense, no easy matter with cold, stubborn fingers. I watch the blue smoke drift lazily around the room. It is another small part of the ritual, an offering to the local gods. And you have to keep the gods on your side. If the air is very still the smoke rises from the incense stick in a thin column that slowly widens rather like a silk stocking and then after rising a foot or two it forms very elegant ripples that get wider and wider. They curve and then invert and almost seem to catch up with each other before breaking out into turbulence, which has its own charm and elegance, as if mirroring the winds that sweep round the peaks. Indeed the smell of burning incense is an essential part of the rituals of this valley, and offerings to the local gods are vital on any journey or important occasion. The gods, like the mountains within which they live, are so much larger than oneself and have to be respected. Incense breeds humility and respect for the natural world.

So important was that first shaft of sunlight in the day that I never closed off the hole, even though it led outside to the bitter cold. It was somehow a direct connection with the world I had come to investigate. Each day had its own rhythm and insights. Slowly my mind became very quiet and alert. I became a silent observer, taking pictures in my mind. A language of images.

Only when the sun’s rays reached the window directly did the ice ferns begin their retreat, and within a few minutes it was as if they had never existed. The silver gallery evaporated but I knew it would return the next evening, like a friend or a secret lover. Returning again and again. Night after night. A visible sign, a talisman akin to the single flame of the candle that I would read by until the stars came out. You were in the hard grip of deep winter but you were also in the grasp of great beauty and deep silence. Winter cast its spell not just over the village but over the valley.

Time and solitude

During the winter I had no watch or any contact with the outside world, so there was no need for timekeeping in the normal sense. Time did not really exist. It was a mere fragment of its former self, measured in snowfalls and summer pastures, in fodder and the condition of animals, in the eyes of the people and the mood of the children, in the time it took to light a fire or milk a cow or shear a sheep or plough a small field or brew a pot of beer. These were real measures of time, and beyond that there was the time it took to walk to the next valley with a flock of sheep or a small herd of yak. Instead of saying to someone, ‘How old are you?’ they would simply say, ‘How many pastures have you seen?’ Such is the importance of the migration to the lush summer pastures. They might as well have said, ‘How many winters have you seen?’ or ‘How many yak do you own?’

Then there was Buddhist time and monastic time and the time it took to cremate a body. The time it took to walk to Lhasa and back or load a yak. The time to build a monastery, the time to grind up the rocks to make colours and the time to paint a vast Buddhist mural that would last a thousand years, the time to recite mantras and sutras, and the time to count the stars.

If you are not aware of time, then there is no sense of time passing and in a sense it is always time present. Distance is measured in days, winter in feet of snow, families in reincarnations. Life’s journey is always in three if not four dimensions. Time here is cyclical as well as linear. A Buddhist spiral, or is it a vortex? The mind, it seems, can go in two different directions at once, if not three. A black hole that receives your thoughts. What is then left? Where has the mind gone, and where is the thinker if there are no thoughts? There is a logic to it, repetitive like a mantra, but the deeper you go into the mantra, or the silence of snow, the more becomes apparent. Buddhist time is curious. On the one hand there is the Tibetan calendar that regulates the monasteries, festivals and times of prayer, governed by the phases of the moon. On the other hand there is philosophical and psychological time, which can be very elastic indeed, leading to Buddhist ‘emptiness’, where time ceases altogether.

Winter is a time of hunger, particularly if there is a late or particularly deep fall of snow. Wolves are common and snow leopards come down into the villages if they are hungry enough. There are many wolf traps up the valley. Life revolves around animals, the seasons and the river. In summer small glittering irrigation channels rely on meltwater from glaciers high above the villages. The monks play their part in keeping track of the seasons, as do the astrologers and medicine men, the amchis. Agricultural time has an important part to play.

In some villages, time is hereditary. Certain families will know the jagged mountain skyline so well that they will be able to predict when it is the right time to plough the fields by the way in which the sun rises. A skyline that is handed down from father to son. The whole village depends on their timing – if the timing is wrong and heavy snow comes, the whole crop is lost. Sometimes for reference they build cairns on a ridge or take bearings on certain buildings.

There is a time for harvest and a time for marriage, a time for the festivals and a time for rebirth. Time for children to grow up. Everything is related to everything else. Each village in the valley plays its part and all are joined together in ways that cannot always be seen. Generations have traded with one another, and animals are as much a part of their lives as their children. There are invisible threads of trade and marriage, exchange of seed grain and labour, a religious continuity that has its own pace and circular form.

Time is measured in silence and meditation in years. Buddhist time often takes the very long view and is akin to geological or even cosmic time. Maybe it is no coincidence that Zangskar is home to many yogins past and present, yet you cannot see them. They live in remote caves and are sometimes walled up on long retreat for three years, three months, three weeks and three days. Occasionally you may see a man high up on a ridge or a mountainside taking food to them, but that is all. Time is also measured in respect and gratitude. In such a valley a man who chooses to live alone is never lonely. There are always mountains and mountain spirits. Here there is complete freedom, though the air is rarefied. Your life is pitched between mountain and river. An offering.

Every day I go down to inspect the river by the bridge to see how much has frozen over, and I wonder about its own journey. I have to get to know the river in all its moods to understand its idiosyncrasies, its quirky beauty. I inspect the watering holes that are cut in the ice, the source of all the water for the village in winter. As winter progresses, the ice gets thicker and the holes get deeper. Young children have to use old tin cans to help fill the metal jerrycans. It is a long, laborious process, and then there is the walk of several hundred feet back up to the village. Their fingers and hands get very chapped. Rivers can move and so can the ice. Some nights you can hear it cracking.

Solitude, however, is not the same as isolation. Solitude is a virtue, a way of being content, a chosen path. Isolation is in effect an imposed loneliness. The two states are very different and yet they are linked. Isolation can enhance solitude, but it is not to everybody’s taste. Time and solitude both feed on silence. Silence has its own energy and you have to learn to harness it. Even the cold has its own echo, ice its own symphony.

I knew deep down that this kind of solitude was a rare commodity and one that I prized above all others. I was fully aware that I needed time to be myself. I also had a strange inner feeling of being on the threshold of something extraordinary. This was exploration in another dimension. Solitude. I had come a long way to taste its fruits. You can savour silence, you can breathe it in like savouring a fine wine, yet there is no delusion. Clarity of purpose and being becomes all the more obvious. Absolute silence, like absolute zero, is a state of mind.

1

The Road to Zangskar

November 1976

Zoji La

Mountains had been an important part of my life for many years. You visit them every so often and spend a few days with them. They become your friends. You think about them when they are not there. You talk about them with affection. You plan excursions around them. You travel long distances to see them. Slowly, they become part of your own character. Even mountain ranges become like extended families.

But such ambitious journeys as the frozen river do not come out of thin air. They are carefully planned. To get into the Zangskar valley by mid-November was a close-run thing. I had less than a week to get there and three passes to cross before the snow came down.

Down in Delhi airport at three in the morning the customs wallah looked at all my luggage and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Where are you going, Sahib? Ladakh, Sahib? Very cold, Sahib. Too much snow.’

Instead of searching all my baggage, which would have taken him half an hour, he simply marked every bag with a chalk cross, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he looked me straight in the eye. He had sussed me out and proudly gave his verdict, saying, ‘Back to nature.’

From Delhi I travelled Third Class on The Frontier Mail,1 a train that once ran all the way from Bombay to Peshawar on the North-West Frontier. From the station announcements I could just make out the route. ‘Platform Four – Panipat, Kanal, Ambala, Ludhiana, Jullundur, Amritsar.’ Chai wallahs everywhere. ‘Chai, chai, chai.’ Half a dozen porters in red loincloths and grubby turbans carried my luggage aloft on their heads, weaving in and out of the commuter crowds who were in turn besieged by wiry beggars. Third Class in the Punjab is an education. Seats hard, cramped and colourful.

In Amritsar I changed all my money in Grindlays Bank.2 An old Sikh bank guard in faded army uniform sat outside with a shotgun cradled across his knees. Inside, large fans gyrated slowly overhead in elliptical orbits. Piles of paperwork in triplicate were anchored down by large stones. I was given great wodges of 5 and 10 rupee notes an inch or two thick, stapled together, which I put into an old pillow case. I’d have the equivalent of £300 to last the whole winter. Then I took a branch line to Pathankot across the Punjab by steam train at night under a full moon, followed by a bus from Jammu. I crossed the Pir Panjal via the Banihal Pass (which was now a tunnel)3 and entered Kashmir.

There I visited the Tyndale Biscoe School,4 where the headmaster, Rev. John Ray, let me stay in the Church Mission School hostel. The hostel was run by one Chandra Pandit, whose father had once been a sirdar on K2. Chandra was a Brahmin Christian and liked bottled beer. There was always a crate behind the sofa. On his mantelpiece, hedging his bets, were both the Virgin Mary and Lord Krishna.

In the hostel I met two charming Ladakhi boys, sons of the Queen of Ladakh.5 Little did I realise it then, but I would help campaign on her behalf the following summer when she stood for parliament as the MP for Ladakh. What this involved was merely putting up a few posters with drawing pins on a stable door in a remote village at 14,000ft, perhaps the highest polling station in the world. Ladakhi boys were resourceful. Some of them even descended to Kashmir in January by sliding down the snowy slopes of the Zoji La6 – la is a ‘mountain pass’ – on their satchels, a bit like bobsleighing. Several thousand feet in one go. It takes some nerve and skill.

I bought supplies at Embee Stores in Srinagar bazaar to last me six months. That concentrates the mind. Bags of rice and atta (flour), tea, sugar, a large tin of biscuits, six round tins of Amul processed cheese, six tins of baked beans, Nescafé, milk powder, soap, soups, jars of jams (red, yellow and green, like traffic lights), peanut butter, salt, vermicelli, macaroni, jars of lime pickle, a five-kilo slab of tamarind known as imli, dark, bitter and sticky, a dozen tins of sardines caught in the Indian Ocean, twelve packets of dried soya ‘meat’, which I hated (for emergencies only), three tins of tuna, one for Christmas Day, one for New Year and one for my birthday, three tins of pineapple slices, a Dundee cake and a Christmas pudding, nutmeg, garam masala, chilli powder, turmeric, pepper, drinking chocolate, a bag of toffees, two dozen bars of Indian Bournville chocolate and one bottle of Bulldozer high-strength lager. This had a large macho bulldozer on the label, appropriate for road building. Only they had no bulldozers in Zangskar. No road yet.