Before the Age of Distraction

Evenings on a Himalayan trek are filled with reading and maintaining a journal.

In another planet: “Markha valley is a solemn, funerary landscape.” Approaching the top of the Kongmaru La, the last pass on the Markha Valley.

I write these lines in the comfort of my study, but it all seems insubstantial. I am here. But I’m also in a valley where the moon is a coin of bone, where ziggurats of stone reach for the sky, in a land dreamt up by a mad god.

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I’m about to embark on a Himalayan trek. We are to set off from Leh, trek for eight days through the Markha Valley culminating in an ascent to the Kormang Pass at about 17,000 feet. We are to start early in the morning, and reach camp by afternoon. Night falls quickly and we will be spending many hours cooped up in our tents. No cell phones, no electricity even. This conjures up a perfect image of a life with books, of how it was before the Age of Distraction. I envisage evenings filled with reading and maintaining my journal. Now all that remains is selecting the reading material carefully.

Preparations

The night before leaving for Leh, I wander around a mall bookstore in Gurgaon. Inverted World by Christopher Priest, a highly inventive science-fiction writer, immediately catches my eye. Priest is probably best known for writing the novel which formed the basis of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige.

Inverted World has a fascinating conceit, an entire city which is perpetually on the move. Situated in an alien world with twisting geometries, this city has to be constantly dragged on rail tracks. For they are on a hyperboloid planet, if they stay at one place for too long, the gravitational stresses will shred them apart. The inhabitants are in search of the “optimum”, a place where the earth is stable. They are trapped in a cycle of monumental drudgery, to reach this mythical point. A few days later, making our way to Ganda La I’m reminded of this. Get up, break camp, walk, set up camp again. Certainly we are walking through a science-fictional landscape. Ladakh is another planet. We could be explorers descended onto its surface.

Thanks, Captain Haddock

As the trek continues, we pass deeper through the Markha Valley. Chortens and lhatos mark every step. Thanks to that famous scene in Tintin in Tibet featuring Captain Haddock, I know that you always walk to the left when crossing them. Mani walls are everywhere, with their invocations to Avaloketisvara carved into stone, a jigsaw puzzle left to Him to solve. It is a solemn, funerary landscape.

All around us are the wounds of the collision between the Indian and the Eurasian plate, which pushed up the Himalayas more than 60 million years ago. Ophiolites show the banded layers of the hidden earth. Terms vaguely swim up from long-gone geology classes — crustal flyschs, basalts, cherts.

The strange rock formations remind me of Brian Aldiss’s Cryptozoic! , “They proliferated on the margins of time, embodying all the amazing forms the world was to carry; the earth was having a nightmare of stone about the progeny that would swarm over it… as if they were the sinister fore-shadowings of what was to come as well as the after-images of what was long past”. Serrated mountains tear the horizon. It is a landscape of ancient violence. The Chanko hunts the Argali. Eagles hunt marmots. Glaciers hunt hills, a 1,00,000-year-long chase that always ends the same way, with the hill eaten.

These primordial vistas of dead lithologies are the perfect setting for what I’m reading now, The Horror in the Museum , a collection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. “HPL” was an American writer of the 1930s. To him, existence itself was the greatest monster, and a landscape could be more menacing than a pack of werewolves. The very scale of the universe and our utter insignificance therein was the ultimate terror.

He was deeply influenced by the paintings of Nicholas Roerich, the Russian master who travelled extensively through Tibet before settling down near Manali. He would say that “surely Roerich is one of those rare fantastic souls who have glimpsed the grotesque, terrible secrets outside space and beyond time, and who have retained some ability to hint at the marvels they have seen”.

And indeed I can espy the connection between the interior and exterior landscapes, a geography of words mapped out. HPL’s epic “Mountains of Madness” whose titular peaks are “stark, nightmare spires…the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream” and which “gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed astral world”.

The planet has died. And we are walking through its cadaver. Ladakh is the autopsy table for a dead world.

But ghosts?

The yellow carpets of wheat near Markha village dispel this mood. I have Oliver Onion’s Dead of the Night with me. The collection of late Victorian-era ghost stories seems out of place on a brilliantly blue day, the light reverberating between the purple peaks. That night, however, reminds me perhaps that Onion is not so extraneous. By custom we all congregate in the dining tent after supper. We try to spook ourselves by coming up with paranormal scenarios. The girl from Luxembourg wins the house with her imagining of what happens when we leave the tent late at night to ‘answer nature’s call’ as they say. Ghost stories are primal currency of humans. They make us go back to that time when we peered out of the campfire into the encircling darkness, and the darkness peered back.

As we head to the lonely plateau of Nimaling, I rummage deeper in the rucksack. In the distance the permanently mist-ravaged peak of Kangyatse grows more prominent each day. In Leh, on the night before the trek, a sudden panic had assailed me. As my German friends would call it, a “torchungspanik”, a gate-closing panic. What if I run out of books? What if I’m stranded on lonely mountainside with nothing to read?

Jaideep Unudurti is a freelance writer.