The Himalaya are themselves part of a vast highland region that runs in a crescent for four thousand kilometers from Kyrgyzstan in the west to Myanmar in the east and includes the Pamir, Hindu Kush and Karakoram ranges. There are longer mountain ranges: the Andes are the longest at seven thousand kilometers. There are few places in the world where geography inspires the human imagination to such a degree. It was as though I’d found a door marked “adventure” and stepped through it. A price was agreed and our gear continued into the village on their backs. A number of lean and eager men surrounded the bus, grinning wildly, dressed in thin cotton shorts and shirts and holding plastic sheeting around their shoulders, their only protection against the rain. We peered up at the unstable slope wondering about the next rock fall, anxious to get going and out of the way. It would take explosives and bulldozers to clear the way. Huge granite boulders had tumbled down from a cliff above, loosened by the rain. A mile or so from the village of Gangotri, in what was then part of Uttar Pradesh, the bus stopped abruptly. The roads ran with water mist clung to rock faces that overhung the roof of the bus. Next day we reached the mountains, half-submerged in a torrential downpour. Ravi and the sitar were excuses although they were a very important part of it, it was a search for a spiritual connection.” It occurred to me only much later that I had been lifted into the mountains on the last gasp of the same cultural tide, upstairs in my suburban bedroom in the early 1980s, listening to old Bob Dylan records and reading stories of my climbing heroes high in the faraway, mythical Himalaya.
That was part of the reason I went to India. “After I had taken LSD,” George Harrison recalled, “a lingering thought stayed with me, and the thought was “the yogis of the Himalayas”. . . The Beatles studied transcendental meditation here in 1968 with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, turning on millions of young Westerners to eastern spiritual practices. It was still raining as we drove north in a bus, stopping for a night in Rishikesh on the banks of the swollen Ganges. The monsoon was still strong and in those days, a quarter of a century ago, parts of Delhi flooded more readily many lower-lying streets were submerged in brown water. In the late summer of 1995 I flew to India for my first experience of climbing in the Himalaya.
We three gods as mountains will reside in the earth for the benefit of mankind.” The Earth asked Vishnu, “Why do you come in the form of mountains and not in your own form?” Vishnu replied: “The pleasure that exists in mountains is greater than that of animate beings, for they feel no heat, nor cold, nor pain, nor anger, nor fear, nor pleasure.
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