Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  The plateau felt even closer when His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to town. I weaved through crowds to find my seat in the Sheldonian Theatre, where hundreds of students and professors leaned forward to glimpse the smiling monk in the middle of the room. Here was someone worshipped as a god since childhood, someone forced to flee a homeland so transformed by the Chinese that if he ever made it back to Lhasa (unlikely, given the Chinese government deems him a terrorist), he probably wouldn’t recognize the Potala Palace, where a four-lane paved road has replaced the front lawn where pilgrims used to gather. And yet the Dalai Lama sat in the theatre beaming through thick-rimmed glasses, giggling at his own jokes. The frivolity of his laughter against the hard facts of his life made him seem a living koan, a riddle in the Zen Buddhist tradition that demonstrates the inadequacy of logic and provokes enlightenment—or, in my case, giggling in turn. I didn’t think the Dalai Lama would mind.

  He introduced himself as “just a simple monk” and gave a short talk on kindness. Afterwards a bunch of scholars, in typical Oxford fashion, asked questions that weren’t really questions but statements designed to reveal the asker’s own erudition. Jamie had sometimes fallen into this, for he could argue any issue from any angle so persuasively that you couldn’t tell how he felt about anything. Perhaps he himself didn’t know. “You don’t believe in the basic rights of people to food, water, education, jobs?” my friend had grilled him over dinner one night. I knew his dismissal of development wasn’t as glib as it sounded, that in questioning “progress”—our collective striving to make life easier and more comfortable for everyone—he was passionately interested in the relationship between suffering and the sublime. He hoped to get at the heart of why a drop of water in a desert tastes so sweet. But instead of opening up about any of this, Jamie had dodged my friend’s questions with detached, scholarly feints of logic, which was easier for him. Frustratingly easy, from my perspective, but then I’d never figured out how to be anything but earnest.

  The Dalai Lama had little patience for semantics. At one point a philosophy professor stood up and held forth on the distinction between “compassion” and “kindness.” Noting that His Holiness had used the latter term throughout his talk, this professor praised the Dalai Lama for such a clever verbal strategy, given kindness was a more accessible concept for the masses than compassion, which had connotations of divinity, of excessive and unattainable virtuousness, and therefore seemed less authentic.

  “Oh no!” The Dalai Lama giggled. “It is my English that is not authentic! Kindness, compassion, they are same. No strategy, ha ha! These are simple things, hmmm? Simple to say, harder to live.”

  I left the Sheldonian craving a thousand years to think over the Dalai Lama’s words. Instead I settled for a long run through Port Meadow, a thousand-year-old commons where Buddha-bellied cows and sheep graze still. The tragedy that so famously afflicts the commons can be averted through mutual respect and restraint, or the sort of kindness the Dalai Lama was talking about: a basic empathy for others, the recognition that your desires matter no more and no less than anyone else’s. By contrast, greed and ego—both on the individual and national scale—were the driving forces of exploration, with everyone gunning to claim all they could of the world before somebody beat them to it. Every week at Oxford I seemed to banish yet another exploratory idol from my pantheon, most recently Richard Hakluyt, the namesake for the Mars Society letter-writing prize I won as a teenager. Though Hakluyt wasn’t technically an explorer himself, he was a loud evangelist for the European colonization of the “New World,” which didn’t turn out so well for the people already living there, a legacy now being repeated by the Chinese in Tibet. But almost as disturbing as such overt exploitation was the kind of exploration that had been initiated in total innocence and integrity—and led to disaster nonetheless.

  A half-century after Fanny’s expedition, for example, Siachen lost the honour of being the world’s longest glacier (one in Tajikistan proved even longer) but it eventually gained the more dubious distinction of being the world’s highest-altitude battlefield. After the Line of Control was drawn through contested Kashmir in 1972, dividing the territory between the newly designated nations of India and Pakistan, the boundary was terminated at survey point NJ9842, in the foothills south of Siachen, and from there vaguely extrapolated “thence north to the glaciers.” Neither country much cared about Siachen, a place dismissed as a wasteland, and therefore exiled beyond the bounds of territorial ambition.

  This situation began to change in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as mountaineers from Japan, England, and America requested permission from Pakistan—not India—to attempt peaks on the glacier, simply because it was easier to access Siachen from that country. The climbers didn’t mean to choose sides, but even so their passport stamps implied Pakistan controlled all that ice. What further riled India were foreign maps hinting that Siachen belonged to Pakistan. The original cartographic error can be traced to the United States Department of Defense’s 1967 Tactical Pilotage Charts for Kashmir, which showed a dotted Line of Control angling “thence north to the glaciers” in such a way that Siachen was suggestively contained within Pakistan. Instead of jagging and twisting along the natural if squiggly ridges of the mountains, like the rest of Kashmir’s Line of Control, the DOD line ran straight as a gunshot from NJ9842 to Karakoram Pass, once part of the ancient Silk Road. I’ve often wondered who made the fatal decision to draw that dotted line, and whether the decision was made innocently, for purely navigational purposes (perhaps the Karakoram Pass made an ideal piloting landmark?) or out of a more surreptitious fidelity to Pakistan, a country long allied with the US military. In any case, the DOD lines were not official boundaries, yet other maps reproduced them without this crucial caveat, including the reputable world atlases of Rand McNally, the Oxford Encyclopedia, and National Geographic. When a colonel in the Indian army happened to meet some Germans who planned to raft the Indus River, he was shocked to see that their American-made map showed Siachen as effectively belonging to Pakistan. India invaded the glacier in 1984 to prevent those paper-based borders from becoming a reality, Pakistan responded by sending its own troops to Siachen, and so began an escalating altitude race to the staggering heights of human absurdity.

  Ever since, soldiers from both armies have lived year-round at elevations where few mountaineers dare linger. A ceasefire has been in effect since the early 1990s, but most casualties in the Siachen conflict result from natural hazards like avalanches and altitude sickness rather than enemy fire, meaning the death toll hasn’t diminished much. Millions of dollars are spent daily to maintain troops on the glacier, and because it’s too expensive to fly trash down the mountain, human waste and other refuse gets dumped in crevasses. After three decades of military occupation, the Siachen Glacier, a place one early explorer raved about as “indescribably grand, its unrelieved and elemental savagery producing in an unusual degree a feeling of exaltation and intense remoteness from humanity,” has been reduced to what Indian army officials call “the world’s highest and biggest garbage dump.”

  Why so much costly fuss over a far-flung chunk of ice? Because what the glacier lacks in strategic worth it makes up for in symbolic value, and neither country wants to lose face by losing Siachen, even as the standoff destroys the commons both wish to claim. In this respect the conflict over the glacier seemed itself a koan, and as I ran back to Oxford, which looked from Port Meadow like an alpine cluster of spires and towers, I wondered what kind of enlightenment a war-torn wilderness could possibly provoke.

  Maybe reading about the Himalaya brought out my usual migratory instincts. Maybe Jamie wasn’t goofy enough, or I didn’t bring out his lighter side just as he didn’t bring out mine, and so our relationship existed purely on the deep, searching plane where I spent too much time as it was, and therefore felt to me unsustainably intense. “Maybe we love each other best in words,” I mused to Kim as we set the table at Holywell Ford, a quaint graduate res
idence at Magdalen College that looked roughly how I pictured Darwin’s countryside retreat, with vine-tangled stone walls and a bucolic forest setting. Fortunately this cottage was filled with far more music, poetry, and laughter thanks to the irreverent crew from South Africa, Australia, Mexico, America, and Canada who gathered there weekly to cook dinner, drink wine out of jars (the shared kitchen lacked glasses), and debate serious academic questions like “If the field of global public health was a celebrity, who would it be?”

  What united us “Jar Kids” across countries and academic disciplines was our mutual appreciation for the absurd. Jamie operated on a different wavelength entirely, and it was probably telling that he didn’t join us often at Holywell Ford, that I spent more and more time on my bike, or reading and writing in the Bod, or executing pranks with the Jar Kids, such as filching our friend’s snow globe of the Virgin Fatima and taking “selfies” of the sparkly Catholic saint around campus, which Fatima posted to her very own Facebook profile. Between dinner parties at Holywell Ford I subsisted on cheap muesli from Tesco, free coffee and cake from Rhodes House, and expired Clif Bars that I bought in bulk off eBay to save money for discount flights to Morocco and Norway, and later India, Chile, and Nepal. Graduate seminars in the history of science at Oxford met once a week, leaving the rest of my days free for adventure as long as I brought along my books, which were just as easily studied in a tent as in a library. Life had never seemed so open and reeling with possibility—except when I was with Jamie, which was less his fault and more a function of my chronic restlessness. Why hang out with the same person week after week when the world is calling? In any case, not long after he suggested we move in together, I decided I wanted out entirely.

  After we broke up I went hiking in Wales for a weekend, craving a landscape large enough for my despair—over the fact that I would never find another letter in my pidge from Jamie, among other reasons I’d genuinely miss him in my life. Was I making a huge mistake? But I was wrong, if only about the letter. When I returned to Oxford, on the brink of getting back together with Jamie, he said he’d written something for me, but I could only read it on two conditions: that I remember he was very upset when he wrote it, and that I give him a copy because it belonged in the archives of his life. Then he handed me not the usual thin envelope I was used to finding in my pidge, but a subpoena-like stack of white sheets.

  I brought the sixteen-page, hand-scrawled missive to Kim’s room because I needed to not be alone when I read it. It took me two hours. The letter was a dramatic exegesis of our relationship, how we were meant for each other, how I’d messed it all up with my heart of stone, “which even a lawyer couldn’t crack.” On that point he was right, but where logic had failed, some levity might’ve helped. I returned the letter to Jamie without making a copy. The original, for his archives.

  The next day he called and said he wanted to talk. I didn’t answer the phone or return his call, but I ran into him a few days later on Catte Street. “Wait,” he pleaded. “I’ll be right back.” He returned with a poster of Mount Everest that he’d gotten signed by a renowned alpinist at a lecture in London, an event we were supposed to attend together. “A peace offering,” he explained, his face paler than ever. Mine probably looked the same. I stared at the poster with a mountain-shaped hole in my heart and longed to be anywhere in that wildness, that slant of light so intense you could lean into it and be held.

  Reading about the Himalaya was the next best thing. I decided to write my master’s thesis on the Siachen Glacier, detailing the soap-opera saga of exploration and geopolitics that had played out on its ice, but also exploring the possibility of scientific collaboration as a potential solution to the conflict. If scientific expeditions and their subsequent maps had led the way into war on Siachen, however inadvertently, could science, that supposedly neutral, non-nationalistic pursuit of truth, also lead the way out?

  A dear friend tipped me off to the idea of “scientific peacekeeping” as a potential way to resolve the Siachen conflict, namely by rendering the icy battlefield into a demilitarized buffer zone dedicated exclusively to scientific research. It was a dreamy notion, but people had done it before: in Antarctica, for example, where countries with competing territorial claims formally agreed to disagree about who owned the continent and collectively set it aside for science. If such a treaty could happen for a cold, remote, uninhabited continent coveted by dozens of countries, why not for a cold, remote, uninhabited glacier few people outside of India and Pakistan had even heard of? Not that obscurity or isolation is an antidote to desire; sometimes those very qualities amplify longing, as the bleak yet coveted Aksai Chin attests. Even so, a science-focused treaty on Siachen seemed reasonable, a way to defuse a senseless military standoff and return the glacier to its original unowned state.

  The history of exploration, as I’d learned at Oxford, was basically synonymous with imperial expansion and indigenous repression—a rather cringe-worthy legacy for an endeavour I once deemed so essentially wondrous and searching. Science and exploration as a force for peace in contested frontiers seemed to offer a kind of redemption. I was so compelled by the work—and the Himalaya—that I seriously entertained the idea of staying at Oxford for a doctorate. After all, the Rhodes offered me another year of funding, and the laboratory at MIT wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a historian of science, exactly; what I craved was the life of reading, wandering, and writing that studying history at Oxford made possible.

  Knowing I needed a “distinction” result in my master’s degree to qualify for the doctorate program, I worked harder on my thesis than I’d ever worked before. Strangely, it didn’t feel draining the way laboratory science and problem sets always had. Reading and writing mysteriously gave me more energy than I put into them. I would ride my bike around Oxford for hours each morning, then work all day and late into the night on my thesis, furiously awake and full of questions.

  “Well done, a fascinating piece of work,” Corsi raved after reading an early draft in my second year at Oxford. We talked about Fanny, the Aksai Chin, the way maps confuse possession for control. We discussed the Outer Space Treaty, which was one of my case studies for Siachen, and the seductive delusion of a “final” frontier. I was just working up the courage to ask if he’d be willing to supervise my doctoral studies, in which I hoped to widen and deepen this work on contested borderlands, when Corsi’s tone changed. “But Kate, I must say,” he began in a manner ominously less operatic. “I worry your thesis may not qualify as the history of science. So much of it concerns the present, the future, no?”

  Hesitation, it turns out, is the hardest frontier to cross. I was so shaken by Corsi’s words that I lost all faith in my project, the idea of staying on at Oxford for a doctorate in the history of science. I debated finishing the Silk Road immediately, biking contested borderlands from Turkey back to Tibet and on to Siachen—a way of finishing what I’d started and ground-truthing what I’d studied. I didn’t need academia as my excuse to read, wander, and write. But Mel was busy with her own master’s degree in community development, and I was too good at school, in every doomed sense. After being on an achievement bender most of my life, the prospect of withdrawal, of doing anything without external approval, or better yet acclamation, kept me obediently between lines I couldn’t even recognize as lines. Isn’t that the final, most forceful triumph of borders? The way they make us accept as real and substantial what we can’t actually see?

  In any case, I went back to my room and applied to MIT.

  That spring I submitted my seemingly hopeless thesis on Siachen. A month or so later I wrote my final exams, a surreal, uniquely Oxonian experience in which students must wear a mortarboard or soft cap, a black academic gown known as a “sub fusc,” and a flower pinned to the gown where a breast pocket would be. But not just any flower: you must wear a white carnation for your first examination and a pink one for all but your last, when you wear a red carnation, which signals to t
he mob waiting outside Exam Schools that you’re ready to be stormed with champagne, whipped cream, and glitter. An oddly satisfying if dizzying end to a master’s degree, itself an experience not unlike being shaken in a snow globe until the glass breaks and releases you into the bright air, drenched and sparkling, where you celebrate by drinking wine out of jars with your friends.

  Shortly before I left Oxford, Jamie invited me over for dinner for old times’ sake. Over Greek salad and wine the two of us talked our way back to the Silk Road, Egypt, a remote Arctic island long ago in a galaxy far away, or was it Stratford? In a strange congruence, we realized we’d both studied dumps for our master’s theses: on the Siachen Glacier in my case, and in Cairo in his, among the Zabbaleen, which means “garbage people” in Arabic. Though we’d each written critiques against a certain kind of progress, or at least against the natural and spiritual wreckage that so often accompanies it, Jamie observed that we’d used opposite methods: he’d embedded himself in civilization’s deepest, most degenerate core and projected into the future, while I’d withdrawn to civilization’s outer, mostly untouched edge in the Himalaya and projected into the past (if not far enough, according to Corsi, but I kept this to myself). I stared at Jamie, stunned, for I suddenly guessed why our fascination with each other was mutual, sincere, and finally incommensurable: we looked at the world through the different ends of a telescope.