Writing

A Note on the Terrace at Thalpan At the confluence of the Indus and the Gilgit rivers, where the gorge narrows to twenty-one kilometres between the river at eleven hundred metres and the summit at eight thousand one hundred and twenty-five, a series of rock terraces face the water. The terraces at Thalpan hold the densest concentration of petroglyphs in the upper Indus — more than thirty thousand carvings and five thousand inscriptions spanning ten millennia. Ten writing systems have been identified: Kharoshthi, Brahmi, Proto-Sharada, Sogdian, Bactrian, Parthian, Chinese, Tibetan, Middle Persian, and a disputed Hebrew inscription. Each script was carved by someone who had come a long way and would not stay. ...

Prefatory Note on Tongues A medium is not a translator. A translator knows both languages — the source and the target — and carries meaning between them. A medium knows only one: his own. The other language comes through him, not from him. He is the channel, not the speaker. In the valleys of the Karakoram, certain men are chosen — not by training, not by lineage, not by their own will — to serve as channels for the peri, the mountain spirits. The choosing happens before the chosen one can consent. The peri descend during the cherry and apricot blossoming season and select the child by smelling its mouth. The child grows up showing signs: fainting, ecstatic states, prolonged illness. If the calling is resisted, the chosen one may die. ...

Prefatory Note on Peg-Paths In 399 CE, the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Faxian crossed a gorge in the upper Indus by walking on pegs driven into a vertical cliff face. He counted seven hundred ladders. The river was eighty paces wide below him. The cliff rose, in his words, ten thousand cubits above. The Sanskrit name for this infrastructure is sankupatha — peg-path. The Chinese rendered it as xuandu, suspended crossing. Faxian’s own term was bangti, pole-step. When the pilgrim Xuanzang traversed a similar crossing two centuries later, the pegs were still there. The infrastructure had outlived the empire that drove the pegs and the pilgrims who walked on them. But it had not outlived the gorge. The river was still cutting downward, the cliff still rising, and the pegs — iron, or hardwood, or bone — were being slowly removed from the rock by the frost and the rain and the settling of a mountain that had been settling since before there were pilgrims. ...

Prefatory Note on Dowries A dowry is what one household gives to another at the time of a marriage. It is not a payment. It is the material foundation of a new life — the things the new household will need to exist: pots, blankets, seed grain, land. In the upper valleys of the Karakoram, the most valuable thing a household can possess is not land or livestock but water. And water, in a landscape that receives less than two hundred millimetres of rain a year, comes from one source: ice. A glacier that feeds a channel is a glacier that feeds a village. A glacier that retreats is a village that dies. ...

Prefatory Note on Tri-Junctions Where three valleys meet, the water knows something the traveller does not. A river flowing south from a pass carries snowmelt from a particular face of a particular ridge — and that face, that aspect, determines everything: how much snow falls, how fast it melts, what grows in the soil the meltwater feeds, what animals graze the meadow the soil sustains, what people settle the village the meadow supports, what language those people speak to their children and their gods. ...

Prefatory Note on Readings A map is a reading. This is not a metaphor. A cartographer who walks a valley with a plane table and an alidade is performing the same act as a scholar who opens a manuscript: choosing what to attend to, deciding what matters, setting down marks that represent not the thing itself but the reader’s encounter with the thing. Two cartographers given the same valley will produce different maps — not because they measure differently, but because they see differently. The measurements may agree to the metre. The maps will still diverge, because a map is not a collection of measurements. A map is a decision about which measurements to show. ...

Prefatory Note on Projections To make a map, you must decide what to lose. The earth is not flat. The Western Himalaya is less flat than most of the earth — the vertical here is not an abstraction but a daily negotiation, a matter of breath and gradient and the particular angle at which sunlight reaches a terrace two thousand metres below the ridge that blocks it until noon. To press this country onto a flat surface is to perform a translation, and every translation has a cost. The question is not whether you will distort, but what you will choose to preserve. ...

Prefatory Note on Serais The serai — from the Persian sarāy, a place of shelter — is older than the dāk bungalow, older than the British rest house, older than any system of accommodation that requires a booking or a name. A serai is a place where travellers stop. The keeper provides a roof, a fire, water. The traveller provides nothing except presence — and an entry in the register, if the keeper maintains one, which not all do. ...

Prefatory Note on the Dāk The dāk system — from the Hindi ḍāk, meaning post, mail, or the relay of runners who carried it — operated across the Himalayan valleys long before roads made them accessible to anything wider than a mule. The British formalised it, but the practice is older than any colonial record acknowledges: messages carried by runners through passes at altitudes where a letter, if dropped, would take three seasons to reach the valley floor by the route the water takes. ...

Prefatory Note on Warps In the Kullu valley and the valleys that branch from it — Tirthan, Sainj, Parvati, the side-valleys too small to appear on any map the Thread Walker carries — the loom is a frame of deodar wood, strung vertically with threads of pashmina or local wool, the threads pulled taut by stone weights hung from the lower bar. These vertical threads are the warp. They do not move. They do not produce the pattern. They are the structure through which the pattern becomes possible. ...