Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  By the time Karma arrives that evening we have a new companion, Sonamtering. He has a wide smile, a long plait, and a fringe of curls over his forehead. Over the next week his air of tranquil authority has such a sobering effect on Karma that he entirely stops drinking (or maybe the drink runs out), walks faster and throws no more fits. ‘Alicay,’ Sonamtering calls me, and his voice is as soothing and reassuring as a lullaby.

  Sonamtering is the younger brother and the younger husband–for both brothers live in the same tent with one young wife between them. Karma, too, shares a wife with his brother (in his case, it seems, extended religious tours to Tibet are one means of dealing with the clash of conjugal interests). Polyandry was banned in Tibet as part of a general Chinese attack on the Tibetan way of life during the Cultural Revolution. The institution of the family as an economic unit was also abolished and a commune system was enforced upon the Drokpa. This brutal reorganization of the Drokpa’s ancient livelihood pushed many of them to starvation, and many nomads died.

  The Drokpa who survived the ‘winter of genocide’ (1967–8) eventually lived to see these experiments reversed. In 1981, all livestock was redistributed once more between every living Drokpa (nine yak, twenty-five sheep and seven goats), and life reverted to partial normality. Even polyandry, though still illegal in the Chinese Constitution, is now tolerated by the authorities and is today on the increase in Tibet. The Drokpa are still not taxed, and while the elders go to town during periods of extreme hardship to ask for basic supplies from the government, Sonamtering says that the police and army never come here, it is too remote.

  The next morning Sonamtering is ready before we have even packed up. He is still wearing his cotton baseball boots, and now a sheep-wool overcoat with long sleeves, only one of which he uses. The other he slings around his waist like an extra pocket, and there he keeps a knife, a bag of tsampa and his precious spectacles.

  We say goodbye to Sonamtering’s wife, brother and children, and leaving behind the serenity of their summer pastures climb up out of the valley towards the pass, Tseti-La. This, explained Sonamtering’s brother to me last night, as he drew me a map of our route to the source, is the highest pass on the journey ahead of us.

  It begins to rain as we climb, and then it hails, but Sonamtering merely smiles and offers to take the stove from Karma and the tent pole from me. I walk close behind Yujaa, and just as I am beginning to despair–for the hail has got between the crevices of my waterproof clothing (I am wearing the plastic sheeting)–the sun comes out again. Looking around us, we find that we are in the middle of the pass: a huge plain of grass and snow and lakes enclosed by a ring of glaciers and mountains.

  Sonamtering leads us across the streams and rivers that criss-cross the plain until we reach a place he likes, beneath the gaze of the northernmost glacier. After eating tsampa we spread out our coats and shoes on the grass, and as they steam dry in the sunshine we drift into sleep with the sea-like roar of the glacier in our ears.

  ‘Look at the jungli horse,’ says Karma, waking us an hour later; ‘it must have lost its child.’ It is standing watching us on the other side of the lake. There is something childlike about its spindly legs and huge head, its delicate colouring of pale brown and white. We see many of these kiang or kuang, the Tibetan wild ass, as we walk towards the Indus. When they see us they canter along the horizon, or stand watching as we walk slowly past.

  Ladakh is a desert but in Tibet there is an abundance of water streaming from the land. Most of the energy of our walk is expended in stepping and jumping over streams, negotiating rivers, keeping ourselves warm from the snow, and sheltering from the rain and hail. Indeed, the greater part of the water in the River Indus comes from its upper reaches–from Tibet, Ladakh and Baltistan–rather than from its Himalayan tributaries in the Punjab. All the water that drains from these mountains, I remember, is currently being stopped by the new dam at Senge-Ali.

  After crossing Tseti-La we enter a series of mountain valleys. From now on the land around us changes with every step; it changes colour, form, complexion. Sometimes we walk through gorges where green stone merges into black and then into red. There are craggy hills, and next to them smooth rolling hills, and after that hills with swirls of different colours. There are mountains of warty rocky outcrops, with abrasions all over the surface, like the rough skin on an elbow. There are fields of rubble in which every stone is a different colour: orange, red, white, grey, blue, brown; and every one a different consistency: flecks of crystal, brushstrokes of colour on a white or black base, hollowed out like honeycomb, smooth and polished, speckled, ringed like Saturn.

  Occasionally, between the stones, are red, yellow or purple wild flowers. And in the fissures we pass between the rocks, in the empty humanless silence of this enormous place, it is easy to imagine the force that created it: the plates slamming together fifty million years ago, India pushing north into Asia, displacing the Tethys Ocean so that the seabed became the mountains, and leaving this river in its trail. In the thin air up near the source there is a whole new vocabulary of peculiar, mouth-filling geological terms: orogenic, flysch, zircon, gneiss.

  Kangri Rinpoche itself, say geologists, is debris from the volcanoes that erupted during the tectonic collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates. Here at last geology and myth coincide, for this most sacred mountain, like the river formed from its meltwaters, is older than the Himalayas, one of the oldest and highest of the mountains that tower over the Tibetan plateau.

  The Indus, born in the wake of Kangri Rinpoche some thirty to forty-five million years ago, is the ‘oldest known river’ in the region. Clouds blew in from the sea, snagged on the mountains, and fell forming glaciers. In summer, these glaciers melted and flowed westwards. Thus a river was created, stretching from Tibet to the Arabian Sea, which, with its huge drainage area and unusual degree of erosion, created in turn at its mouth one of the largest deep-sea fans in the world. The Delta is made of sediment brought down from Tibet, Ladakh and the Karakorams.

  The immensity of this geological timescale diminishes the human history of the river, rendering it invisible by comparison. Instead, as we walk, I think of the pre-human inhabitants of this river system, of the blind dolphin which is one of its oldest inhabitants–a rumoured relic of the receding Tethys Ocean. So murky is the heavily sedimented Indus that the river dolphin evolved without the use of sight. Instead Platanista minor catches its prey by echo-location, and sleeps on the wing like a bird, snatching two-or three-second measures of repose.

  Birds, too, have always used the path which the Indus has forged through the mountains. A million migratory birds from East Africa, Asia and Europe fly along the Indus every year; to ornithologists the Indus is ‘International Flyway Number 4’. Some birds enter the Indus valley through the Karakoram, Khyber and Kojak passes (like medieval Muslim warriors and twenty-first-century smugglers). Others camp at the freshwater lakes in Sindh for the summer, like fisherfolk or nomads. Still more emigrate west from the Himalayas during the hot weather, and return east for the winter. The Indus is visited by sea birds, river birds, marsh birds, desert birds, hill birds, forest birds and mountain birds. There are petrel from Antarctica in Karachi, storks from Germany at the Sindhi lakes, red turtle-doves from India in the Punjab, and Tibetan black-necked cranes in Ladakh. In their annual migrations, birds are probably following the routes their pioneering ancestors took after the last Ice Age ended. This phenomenon has entered the earliest recorded culture of the humans who live on the birds’ flight path: an ancient motif in Hindu poetry is the soul journeying to God like the goose migrating to Lake Manasarovar. The Kerigars, a tribe who pan gold in the Indus from Chilas to Attock, believe that the gold is brought down from the high mountains on the claws of migrating cranes. But as the river shrinks, so do the numbers of flamingos, pelicans and geese.

  The lower Indus was first colonized by Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 80,000 years ago. Forty thousand years later
it was the Indus that humans crossed to reach India; and the Indus they followed north to populate Tibet and Central Asia. Recently, the lower Indus has nurtured Homo sapiens in their millions, and has in turn been transformed. But up in Tibet, the indigenous people have not altered the river at all. Drokpa such as Sonamtering watch the arrival and departure of migratory birds from their ancestral pasture lands but they never kill or eat them. They do not eat fish from the river. Nor do they fence the land, or cut it, or sow it. The contrast with the dam-makers is instructive. If a dam is the supreme symbol of man’s attempt to control nature, the nomads of the Tibetan plateau are exemplars of harmony.

  In this place Karma is as free as a migrating Manasarovar goose: he walks along slowly, always last, picking up the things that we have missed–sheep’s wool up on Tseti-La, prettily coloured stones, mushrooms, nettles near the Indus–and presents them to us demurely, a magpie-like treasure, when we stop at night to pitch camp. The oxygen bag which for three days has been floating above his head like a standard detaches itself from his trident while we are crossing Tseti-La and drifts away into the snow; but it is soon replaced. By the fourth day the thin strands of off-white sheep’s wool and black yak wool have become a thick stream entwined in the trident’s forks. He is beginning to resemble a mountain Neptune, seaweed strewn, barnacle encrusted.

  ‘Where is Senge Tsampo?’ I ask Sonamtering every now and then, using the sonorous Tibetan name for the Indus river; and he points over the hills into the distance. A little bit further. With Sonamtering to guide us I never again feel the pure fear I experienced when it seemed as if Karma had led us recklessly over a mountain and into a hostile, unknown world. But I feel awe as we walk, tiny specks beneath an ever-changing sky, through a landscape empty of humans.

  We camp that night in a valley that is a gentle wave of hills and slopes. Sonamtering chooses a place near a mountain stream, sheltered by the brow of a hill, and no sooner is our tent up–this takes time, twisting the poles into place, lugging boulders to pin the ropes in lieu of tent pegs–than the rain comes crashing down. I lie in the tent next to Yujaa, praying that the lightning, which seems to draw nearer with each crack, won’t fizzle down our metal tent poles; that the mountain streams will not spread across the plateau and lift the groundsheet from under us.

  In the morning, Karma is up at first light, singing his Buddhist prayers. Having got used to dawn at around five o’clock in Ladakh, it seems odd that in Tibet it is still dark at seven–the country is run anachronistically on the time in Beijing, over five thousand kilometres away to the north-east. This morning, as Karma returns with a kettleful of water from a stream and calls to Yujaa to light the stove, Sonamtering makes an announcement. ‘Today,’ he says, ‘we will see Senge Tsampo.’

  After a day’s walk over a pebbly plain as wide and empty as a beach we finally reach the river. It is deep and fast, even so near the source. Sonamtering points out his winter home on the further side–impossible to reach now, for the gorge is sheer and the water glacial. He lives here for five months in the cold season, for unlike Himalayan pastoralists who descend to the plains in winter, the Drokpa go up to higher elevations where there is sedge for their yak to eat.

  The huge landscape is very still. Then something moves: we turn and see a herd of kiang on the horizon. Yujaa whoops and jumps to scare them away. Like me, he has never been on a journey so far into the mountains before, and he finds them frightening.

  Two hours later, a bridge looms up out of nowhere. ‘What is that?’ I say to Karma. ‘A bridge,’ he says, and laughs at my dull-wittedness. We draw nearer. Robustly made of poured concrete, the bridge reminds me, in its incongruity–remote as it is from cars and trucks–of the one I saw in Sindh, near Johi, a huge roadbridge suspended in the desert but with no road for miles on either side. That was a planning scam, an embezzlement scandal. This is utilitarian, an example of Chinese foresight: for though there is nothing coming over it now, something will, one day–army trucks, perhaps, to put down an insurrection; or prospecting jeeps, after some mineral. Gold was mined near the source of the Indus as late as the early twentieth century; and as Herodotus knew, the Indus has been associated with gold throughout its human history. (The heavily dammed Indus now yields less and less gold, and since the construction of the Tarbela dam, the Kerigars do not work downstream of Darbund.) Chinese geologists, however, have recently identified six hundred new mineral sites in Tibet, a discovery which, the government says, ‘will fundamentally ease China’s shortage of mineral resources’. Or maybe the Chinese are simply banking on jeep-loads of tourists.

  We cross the bridge which spans the Kla-chu, an Indus tributary, just before the two rivers’ junction, and walk along the Indus: now a throng of sinuous silver streams. Within an hour we see another unfamiliar sight: a group of abandoned stone huts, a second Drokpa wintering site; and we pitch our tent in the yard outside, next to a mound of hard sheep-dung pellets, a fuel store. It is instinctive, the false sense of safety one feels at being within sight of these remnants of human culture. The bridge, the empty huts, the road along which no cars ever come–there is loneliness here too, as if we have stumbled across a lost civilization.

  That night, the night before we reach the source, Karma the magpie finds an old kettle outside one of the Drokpa huts. He chops and boils the nettles picked from the riverbank; throws in the mushrooms that he has collected during the walk, some yak butter and tsampa; and then he crouches over the fire he has made using the yak dung (Yujaa alone has dominion over the blowtorch), pushing his hair out of his eyes and singing his prayers, stirring the pot like a happy witch. The three of them eat the soup that night. I watch them warily, remembering my majoon experience in the Kaladaka and hoping that Karma knows his fungi, that I won’t find them dead in the morning. On the morrow, when I am woken by singing, Karma is vindicated, and I finish the soup off for breakfast. It is thick and luscious, the mushrooms as succulent as Yujaa’s yak meat is stringy.

  Usually, we are woken every morning by Karma, as he moves around outside the tent, singing his prayers. But today it is Yujaa who breaks into song, and the songs he sings are rich and expressive; love-songs for Darchen and paeans to Kangri Rinpoche. Yujaa is singing because he is happy: we are now an hour’s walk from the source, and then we can turn around and go home. He has been counting the days. Sonamtering, who has a deep, modulated speaking voice, joins in shyly, and hearing him is like listening to running water; but when Yujaa sings it is like listening to pleasure.

  There are three rivers to cross on the way to the source. Until now, each time we have reached a stream that is too wide, we have simply walked upstream to where it narrows, or thrown in some stones to step across (except for Karma Lama, who wades in without taking off his boots, as the others weep with laughter). Here, however, the rivers are too wide to jump. Sonamtering, Yujaa and I sit on the riverbank, removing our shoes. The water, when we enter it, is so cold it brings tears to my eyes; and the water of the second river reaches my thighs. I look down at my feet moving across the bed, across pebbles the colour of the gorges we have walked through: sky blue, tsampa pink, turmeric yellow.

  We dry off our feet in the sunshine and warm up by walking quickly onwards. Suddenly, we come upon the source. ‘There it is,’ says Karma, pointing to a long low line of chortens (Tibetan stupas) in the distance and a mass of prayer flags, pushed taut in the wind. ‘But it can’t be,’ I say, expecting a steeper walk to the source and thinking: he hasn’t been to Senge Khabab after all. But we follow the stream up to the top of this gentle hill and there it ends, in a pale rock face at the foot of which water bubbles up from the mossy earth.

  ‘This is the Lion’s Mouth,’ says Karma, pointing to the rock face as he translates Sonamtering’s words into Hindi. He points to the hill behind. ‘That is Senge Uré, the lion’s mane.’ His finger moves west. ‘That is Senge Norboo, its claws. That is Senge Nama, the lion’s tail.’

  Karma sits down beside the source, lights
a dung fire, and begins an hour-long incantation. He says it is by Guru Padmasambhava, the man who came from Swat (in Pakistan) to spread the teachings of the Buddha through Bon-Tibet by subduing or killing the demons: the mountains are their petrified entrails. Sonamtering looks on with interest, as he does at everything we do; but Yujaa just giggles. He has no respect for Karma’s self-administered charms and spells.

  After Karma’s prayers are over we follow the stream downhill again and I check: the river it joins is ten times as large. So this is the Senge Khabab–the stream issuing from the mouth of the lion. But is it really the true source of the Indus? I understand that the main river can be joined by a tributary larger in volume than itself–this is the case in Ladakh, where the Zanskar flows into the Indus. But can a source really be a source if other tributaries rise further from the sea than it?

  That night in the tent I ask Sonamtering which of the Indus tributaries that we crossed this morning is the longest. All of them, he says, start at least a day’s walk away from here. The Bukhar begins near the village of Yagra. The Lamolasay’s source is in a holy place: there is a monastery there. The Dorjungla is a very difficult and long walk, three days perhaps, and there are many sharp rocks; but its water is clear and blue, hence the tributary’s other name, Zom-chu, which Karma Lama translates as ‘Blue Water’. The Rakmajang rises from a dark lake called the Black Sea.

  One of the longest tributaries–and thus a candidate for the river’s technical source–is the Kla-chu, the river we crossed yesterday by bridge. Also known as the Lungdep Chu, it flows into the Indus from the south-east, and rises a day’s walk from Darchen. But Sonamtering insists that the Dorjungla is the longest of the ‘three types of water’ that fall into the Senge Tsampo.