Chapter 2 Turquoise and Coral

August 13

My route down off the Deosai Plateau followed the Satpura River. From its wellspring on the northeast corner of the plateau it meanders to the edge of the tableland, drops abruptly into a steep canyon and hurtles to meet the Indus at Skardu, the largest, most important town in Baltistan and the strategic lynchpin of the region.

For millennia shepherds had led their flocks up narrow trails through the gorge, but now the Pakistani Army has sliced a tenuous four-wheel-drive trail along its banks. The river, however, is undaunted and in the rainy season it presses with even greater force through the breach.

After the silence of the plateau the water’s constant roar was intrusive. Slowly, over a day of walking beside it, the river’s hum absorbed me. Everything else became peripheral. I lost track of time; the sun moved overhead. I focused on the single footstep ahead of me and gradually, from behind the rush, a rhythm evolved. It was not water or wind; it was a thumping pulse. Whuuuump, whuuuump, whuuuump. I would stop, shake my head, but the beat continued. I let my pace work with the sound, let my mind drift, until ten kilometres farther on the canyon opened out onto a stony plain and the river slowed its pace. The echoing walls of the gorge gave way to weather-beaten, boulder-strewn flats and the expanse ahead absorbed the water’s music.

Skardu, Northern Areas, Pakistan

Water was the last sound Gareth heard. The lake roaring, a northeast wind whipping the caps off two-metre-high waves. The boys in the water knew they had to stay in contact. The boat was upturned and snapped in two, and there was the worry that the crew would drift apart. So they called out their seat numbers, one to nine, rotating around the shell. Human sound was the verification they were all still there, still alive. The cold leeched into them; no one had more energy than what they needed to call out that single-syllabled number. Eventually, Gareth lost the energy to call his number; he lost his sound, and slipped from the smooth fibreglass hull. Underwater I imagine he wouldn’t have heard the crash of waves and the howl of the wind. Maybe there in the cool, peaceful, enveloping blackness he would have heard the same pulse that tracked me down the Satpura, the subliminal thump, pulsing gently, merging with the slowing beat of his own heart.

On the riverbed five kilometres before Skardu, I diverged from the main trail in search of a rock carving that a man selling camping gear in the Gilgit bazaar had brought to my attention the week before. On the map I’d bought from him he had pointed to the spot on the unfolded paper where it roughly lay and described it as a “great example” of Baltistan’s Buddhist history, a ten-metre-tall miniature copy of the Bamiyan Buddha carvings in Afghanistan.

Half an hour of exploration and I found the stonework. It was half the size the man claimed, about five metres tall, a granite boulder sitting alone, well removed from a cliff to the west. On its sheer northeast aspect was a large, full body carving of a Buddhist bodhisattva, a great teacher. The chiselwork was mellowed by two thousand years of wind and rain but still you could see the folds in the monk’s robes and the elongated node on top of his skull, one of the eighty-four signs of a Buddha. The image was surrounded by Apsaras – Buddhist angels – and a scrolled frame of Sanskrit writing.

Until Islam arrived in the eighth century Buddhism had been south-central Asia’s dominant religion. In the early years after conversion Islam eradicated Buddhism’s physical remnants – monasteries, shrines and temples – but simple, village stonework, too modest to challenge new powers, has endured. The Bamiyan Buddhas in Central Afghanistan were the best example, until they were blown up by the Taliban in 2001.

Thin clouds stirred above the carving. A rhododendron bush flashed scarlet in the ribboned sunlight. A thicket of wild rose at the stone’s base swayed, heavy with bloom. Two magpies, iridescent black and white, leaped from rock to rock, eyeing me suspiciously. Cirrus clouds crossed the sun, shadows gathered on the stone, the bodhisattva’s body darkened and lost definition.

For Buddhists, the body is a shell, a flimsy layer of skin and bone that decays second by second from the moment we are born. The corpse is merely a vehicle in which the soul travels through this life. My life, up until Gareth’s death, had been focused on my body. The muscles and mind I had been gifted were well suited to the long-distance pain of cross-country ski racing. I had loved what I could do: run for hours through forests and over mountains, ride my bike across entire continents. On and on and on – I was an endurance machine. In those days my body was a vehicle for the discovery of the outside world, not a vessel for my mind. But in the end, when it needed to prove itself the most, it had let me down.

The night Gareth died I was in Sweden. I had been training since September in the Alps and later in the Arctic Circle in Scandanavia. It was my year, the year I would race my first Olympics. I was a full-time cross-country ski racer. The two previous years I’d spent competing on the World Cup circuit. Like my brother I was a dedicated athlete.

The same afternoon as Gareth’s accident the team coach and manager, Christer and Hugo, called me into their office in the small town of Idre Fjall. I sat in a beaten old armchair, its innards bursting from frayed corners and edges. They looked nervous. Christer had flecks of Swedish chewing tobacco stuck to his teeth. Hugo didn’t look me in the eye.

“Jono,” said the manager, “I’ll get to the point. You won’t be racing in the Olympics.”

He said he wasn’t happy with the decision but word had come from higher up the sporting hierarchy that my times in the qualifying races were not up to the standard. I had been cut. After years of training focused on a single goal this was like telling me I needed to have a limb amputated. I was in shock. I complained I was still moving towards my season’s peak performance and that selections should be decided closer to the Olympics, but my protests were met with embarrassed silence.

I stepped outside into the freezing midday sun of northern Sweden. I was numb on the outside, hollow on the inside. I had to lean against the wooden panelling of the cabin and I still had no idea that my brother was dead.

A few of my teammates walked by without a word. They knew already. It was as if I was a leper. Being cut from the Olympic squad was the plague none of them could risk catching.

I went back to my room, curled up on the single bed and cried. Ten years I’d committed, a decade of getting faster and faster, my body modifying itself, becoming a machine to move fast and long, and yet the transformation was incomplete; when I needed it the most, during the selection races, my body didn’t have the extra centimetres of speed I needed. I couldn’t help but feel that ten years had been wasted.

Yes, the body is a vessel gradually changing with time, but Gareth’s body had gone through an infinitely more tragic transformation. It had shut down in the brutal cold of Elk Lake. His thin film of insulating fat had done nothing to stave off the deadly grip of the freezing water. In less than an hour he had changed from an almost perfect human body to a lifeless husk.

August 14

The Skardu plain is one of the few broadenings of the Indus during its passage through Northern Pakistan. As the flattest, most fertile land in the region, the forty-kilometre stretch of ground at the confluence of the Indus and Shigar rivers has been of strategic importance to every invader with a claim to the region. The area is littered with their relics: the Buddhist stone art of the Greeks, Kushan, and Ghandaran eras, the lonely hilltop forts of Sikh and Dogra invaders from the Punjab and Jammu in the south, and now the Pakistani Army’s long rows of corrugated steel Quonset huts.

In Skardu you realize the extent of the military’s power in South Asia. The army is everywhere. Soldiers are conspicuous on the streets, every fourth vehicle is painted khaki and sandbagged sentry posts stand at every intersection. The area is constantly on the verge of conflict. Baltistan was the scene of intense fighting during the India-Pakistan wars of 1947, 1965 and 1971. In 1999 a border war broke out between Pakistani irregulars and the Indian Army forty kilometres south of Skardu near the Indian town of Kargil. This was the first fighting between the two countries after they had each tested nuclear bombs in May 1998. Over a period of fifty days the Indian Army gradually pushed back the intruders. In Pakistan, the aftermath caused major instability and on October 12, 1999, a coup d’etat by the military elevated army chief Pervez Musharraf to power.

In 2001–2002 a huge military buildup occurred in the region in response to a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001. India blamed Pakistan for supporting the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad Islamic fundamentalist groups who initated the attack and in a show of force amassed 500,000 military personnel along the border. Pakistan replied with 120,000 soldiers. It was the largest buildup of troops since the 1971 war. The tension de-escalated following diplomatic pressure and a speech by President Musharraf promising a crackdown on Islamic extremists groups in Pakistan.

This brinkmanship plays into the hands of both countries’ security forces. Since both countries are created entities – India is an amalgamation of more than five hundred princely states and Pakistan was arbitrarily sliced from the right flank of India – a common enemy has proved useful in the creation of national identities. In India, with its multicultural chaos, to be Indian is to not be Pakistani, and in Pakistan to be Pakistani is to be Muslim and not Indian.

I arrived in Skardu from the south on a rough road that followed the Satpura River. After the quietude of the Deosai Plateau Skardu seemed a lively, bustling town. In the summer dozens of mountaineering expeditions gather to organize on their way to the great 8,000-metre summits of K2, the Gasherbrum group and Broad Peak. The area has one of the densest concentrations of spectacular peaks in the world and during the dry season Skardu is filled with height-crazed adventurers.

In the main bazaar, a fly-infested, blue and green tarpcovered sprawl of wooden stands and shabby shopfronts, I met such an explorer. I stumbled upon Michel while locating parts for my dysfunctional kerosene stove. He knew the bazaar and led me directly to a man who could repair it. I invited him to lunch in one of the market’s open-fronted restaurants. We sat at an unsteady, plastic-covered wooden table between the tandoori oven and the rush of market-goers on the path outside.

He was a fiftyish climber from Chamonix in the French Alps, but in his cut-off T-shirt and hiking shorts you could see he had the body of a thirty-year-old. His face had been tanned and tightened by years in the sun and his shoulder-length greying hair was swept back in a way that made you think he’d just arrived from some windblown cliff. It was a long lunch, with Michel leading the conversation.

The conversation revolved around the Himalayas. Michel said he loved the mountains and couldn’t bear to be away from them. Purgatory for him were the planar landscapes of Holland, Belgium or Luxembourg. “The high places are my home,” he said, sweeping his hand out towards the snow peaks that surrounded the valley. The Karakoram were his chosen range. This was his fourteenth trip to the area. When I asked him why, he said because “they are the most beautiful, and the most dangerous.” K2 and Nanga Parbat, he said, have some of the highest death rates amongst the world’s highest peaks.

The answer hinted at a machismo that didn’t fit with the selfless impression he had given me. I asked him, if the Karakoram were so dangerous then did he harbour a death wish?

“I climb in dangerous, beautiful places to be close to God.”

I looked up from my rice and lentils.

Michel went on to explain how he considered himself a climbing Sufi. Sufis are followers of an esoteric form of Islam whose goal is, through intense practice, to have contact with Allah in this life. It was God, he said, who brought him to the summit. Danger, he said, was the catalyst for his practice. Climbing was the medium through which he could connect with God. In the midst of a technical climb, in the interzone between life and death, Michel believed he had contact with Allah.

I didn’t ask how Michel had developed this philosophy and I have no idea how traditional Sufis would feel about his interpretation, but over that lunch with the great moutains all around us he seemed a man at peace with himself.

In our comfortable suburban existences it’s strange to think about danger, but in the end it’s unavoidable. I remember once at university walking back to my dormitory and seeing a group of people milling around a flight of concrete steps near the gym; some of them were crying. It was raining, the concrete was stained dark grey, but I could see darker marks on the lower steps, as if something had been spilled. I asked what was going on and a guy from my economics class told me a student had died there just an hour before. He had been jogging, tripped at the top of the stairway and hit his head on the edge of one of the steps. That was it – a simple fall and he was dead. For weeks afterwards I thought about it constantly. I’d never met the guy but I’d run and walked those steps dozens, possibly hundreds of times. I’d never fallen. I’d never even thought about falling. It was just another flight of stairs. But he had fallen. He’d fallen and he was dead.

In that vein you don’t think of rowing as a dangerous sport. Well, maybe crossing the Atlantic in an open shell, but not training on Elk Lake on the outskirts of Victoria. Pulling oars with seven other guys in a twenty-metre-long rowing shell, on a two-kilometre by one-kilometre freshwater lake, surrounded by comfortable neighbourhoods, it’s not a picture of great risk.

Gareth’s death was a tragic, one-in-a-million accident. I accepted it was something larger than the individual; the weather, water, wind, preparations on the lake and the combined power of nine men were involved. Gareth was one small element. Maybe there were reasons for it, but if there were they existed on a universal scale, a dimension to which my background had given me no insight.

August 15

Along the Indus River heading east I walked the road that connects Skardu to the disputed border with India. Again I was struck by the number of soldiers. Every ten kilometres I was stopped at a checkpoint and asked by a young man with a rifle for my passport and to verify, in writing, my nationality and purpose in Pakistan. Every hour or so convoys of camouflaged trucks rolled by, their covered cargo decks bursting with raucous infantrymen headed for the battlefields of Siachen glacier. At one point a soldier leaned out the back of one of the transports, holding onto the truck with one hand and waving his burgundy beret with the other. “Hop on,” he shouted in respectable English. “It’s a one-way trip to the snow.”

The twenty-year-old battle for Siachen glacier, a snaking tongue of snow and ice at 5,000 metres, may be the epitome of the nonsensical war. In the 1960s and 1970s the United States Defense Mapping Agency, with no legal authority, began showing the area on its publicly available maps as part of Pakistan. The Pakistani government’s claim to the area was bolstered by its issuing of permits to international climbing expeditions throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Eventually, in 1984, the Indian government decided to act and Operation Megdhoot was launched. The military airlifted three hundred men onto the glacier and in what became a race for the peaks they secured two of the three major passes and two-thirds of the glacier’s area before Pakistan could get its troops into place. Since then the two armies have been stalemated; India controls much of the high ground but Pakistan has much easier access into the area. Neither country can reduce the number of troops on the glacier for fear that the other side will attack and twenty years of intense labour and hard-won propaganda will be lost. So the soldiers wait on a frozen wasteland as the two armies face off at 5,600 metres, squabbling over a piece of rock and ice so desolate that no mammal can survive on it. On Siachen, the sad truth is that more men are squandered to the whims of altitude and cold than to the bullet.

A friend of mine, a porter from the remote Zanskar Valley between Ladakh and Kashmir, worked on Siachen in the mid-1990s carrying loads for the Indian Army. It is a well-paid job for porters. I asked him if he would go back there again. “No, it is a too much dangerous place, always people shooting and bombs going off.”

Near the small village of Tampa I passed fields thick with ripened barley. The irrigation ditches by the road were lined with fleecy capped heracleum. A man on the other side of the canal walked towards me through the stubbly field. He drew close and swung the shovel he was using as a walking stick over his shoulder. His fingers, broad and sinewy, wrapped easily around the wooden handle. There was the smell of mustard flowers about him. He said hello and asked me to join him and his son on a blanket by the canal. He spoke English well and we made small talk about weather and crops.

Muhammad Khan was a government official in the village, but his long woolen robe and rubber boots were reminders that during harvest everyone was needed in the fields. He was eager to have me home for dinner; he had never talked with a foreigner. I knew I would simultaneously be guest and entertainment but still accepted.

Muhammad’s family had lived in the valley for centuries and his home reflected that longevity. It was a massive mud-brick construction of three stories. Many of the rooms were unused, the family concentrated in only four: the kitchen, an adjoining dining room, and two bedrooms. The rooms were barely illuminated by tiny windows glazed with opaque glass. The walls were castle-like, one metre thick. The atmosphere in the dining room was comfortable, where woolen carpets lay patchworked on a dirt floor and low, brightly painted tables were constantly stacked with cups of tea and plates of biscuits.

Muhammad’s young son and a male friend from the office joined us. During a lull in the conversation I asked about his wife and daughter. Muhammad shrugged and replied, “They are in the kitchen.”

I then made a faux pas by asking him if he did not think they would enjoy participating in our conversation. At this Muhammad chuckled and responded as if talking to a child who posits unanswerable questions. “My friend, it would be uncomfortable for her to be here.”

His friend and son nodded in agreement and it was true.

For the sake of dinner I pulled back from my line of questioning. But it was too late, and the meal thereafter was a tightwire affair with the height of manners observed on both sides.

Normally, someone such as Muhammad would have invited me to stay the night, but after my question he wasn’t quite sure of my personality and so, before it became too uncomfortable, I excused myself after the meal. I threw my pack back on and trudged another few kilometres southeast of the village until I found a pleasant campsite on a stony flat amongst trees by the river. I didn’t bother setting up my tent. Instead, I laid out my mat and sleeping bag, climbed into the downy cocoon, and let the rustle of the poplars’ leaves lull me to sleep.

August 16

Ten kilometres farther east up the Indus River, a broadening in the valley is watered by a stream running from furrowed peaks to the south. The creek irrigates Gol village’s many layers of paddies. Every sliver of practical ground has been adapted to agriculture; barley and wheat grow to the edge of the road and up the hillsides to the band of fields where the soil turns to stone. Between the houses, sheds, barns and walls the broad leaves of cauliflower, spinach, potato and cucumber blossomed. The harvest looked ready, as heavy sheaves of golden grain and the deep, dusty green of late summer vegetables dotted the view. But Gol is a land on the edge of fertility. Altitude and topography work against crops and this is in stark contrast to the valley’s swelling population. In the previous five years I’d walked through dozens of valleys such as this and asked myself many times where the ever-expanding population will fit into such a crowded land.

At the tea shop in Gol – a one-bench, polyethylene tarp-covered addition to an existing mud-brick house – I put the question to the only other customer that afternoon. Iqbal Jafaar looked to be in his sixties, and though his weather-beaten face and hands were those of a farmer, his clipped English and neatly trimmed moustache were those of a bureaucrat. Dressed in a traditional ankle-length dark woolen robe, cinched at the waist by a purple silk sash, he looked every bit the Balti patriarch.

Mr. Jafaar was the father of five and the grandfather of nineteen. His family, he told me, was the village’s last surviving “old” clan, all of whose members still lived in the area. He estimated that three-quarters of the young male population had moved south to Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi in search of work. Mr. Jafaar lamented that the passage was not just a migration of opportunism but a cultural exodus because the young men left Baltistan with the traditions they had absorbed and those customs were lost in the chaos of Pakistan’s megacities.

He had not wanted his children to move south, for he believed that a good family equalled a good life. Although all three of his sons had said they would like to move south, he had encouraged them to stay and admitted that as a government official he could afford school fees and had promoted education. He boasted that each of his sons used newly developed seed and fertilizers and were able to independently feed their families as well as hold down government jobs. Now, with so many villagers reappearing from the city empty-handed, he was confident that his stubborn decision not to let his sons leave had been a sound one.

My family had moved to Canada for some of the same reasons that the young men of Gol moved south: opportunity, security, expectations. Belfast was the past, a place steeped in gloomy history and deep-seated hatreds. When we left in the early ’70s Northern Ireland’s economy was in ruins. All my cousins have worked overseas at one time or another.

Canada had security, not just economic stability but distance from Northern Ireland’s troubles, but unfortunately even on the other side of the world there were relics of the past. The first summer we were in Canada my family went to the annual twelfth of July celebrations put on by the Northern Irish community in Vancouver. Considering the history of that particular day – a remembrance of the Battle of the Boyne in 1693 where the pro-Catholic Jacobite forces of King James II of England were defeated by the pro-Protestant forces of William of Orange – maybe it was inevitable that history would creep up on us.

It was a hot day by Burnaby Lake. The men in typical Irish fashion were drinking heavily and the air was thick with the smell of whiskey, beer, barbequed meat and the acidic trace of vomit. The lake was surrounded by maple trees and freshly cut grass. My brother Peter and I were sitting close to five men, all in unbuttoned marching band uniforms. They were gathered around a huge bass drum, a metre and a half in diameter. We were interested in their drunkenness, their movements smooth and jerky at the same time, their speech and facial expressions labouring in slow motion. We wanted to laugh but knew it was the height of bad manners to laugh at anyone drunk and still standing.

The man in the centre of the group had a shock of dark hair hanging over one eye. All of a sudden he stood up straight, shouted, “C’mon, lads.” He threw back his Brylcreemed Elvis hair and started thumping the drum, booom, booom. It was the kind of bass that settles under your skin and gets the hair on the back of your neck stiff and tingling. For me it was the thud of marching season in Belfast, a sound that accompanied thousands of tramping feet and days of shouting. It was a sound loaded with emotion and Peter and I were mesmerized. The leader started singing, and he’d only gotten a few words in before his mates joined him.

If I had a penny I tell you what I’d do,

I’d buy and rope and hang the Pope.

Yes, that is what I’d do.

And the chorus went on and on. The drunken antics of the crew halted and the four of them stood up straight, arm in arm, swaying to their tune and wailing to the treetops. Peter and I would have liked to join in – they were happy men singing a song with a catchy chorus, and we knew that “Pope” was a word that never failed to generate a reaction in the adults – but before we could get caught up in it my mother was striding towards us.

“Right, you two. Time to go.” She pulled me to my feet and tossed a withering look at the oblivious crew of fundamentalist choristers.

The last thing I remember as we were dragged towards the car was my dad’s rugby-playing, beer-loving friend Mr. Pye shouting at the four singers, “You’re a bunch of fucking idjits. It’s a different country. Let it go.”

August 17

Five kilometres from Gol the Shyok River merges with the Indus, which has flowed north from the border with India. I followed the Shyok another twenty kilometres east to the small village of Gwali. The place bustled with activity, for the first wheat and barley were being gathered. Around the apricot trees planted between the fields, the earth was littered with fruit and bandy-legged goats feasted on the decaying pulp. A wetness blew off the river, and on its banks grew wild asters, everlasting and pedicularis. Busy people worked the fields, too engaged in their work to notice a single man tramping the periphery of their paddies.

The downy shade of the fruit trees bordering the road encouraged me to extend my lunch. There, under the poplar trees’ branches, in the village’s open-air tea shop I met another elder of the district. Mr. Khan was an older, more wizened version of Mr. Jafaar from Gol. He wore the same ankle-length, rough woolen robe held at the waist with a tie-dye patterened sash, his flat, woolen cap hung low over his forehead and his face was creased like old brown paper.

Mr. Khan spoke no English but the young man making chai translated for us. The elder initiated the conversation with a slight bow of his head and the offer of a cup of tea for a “weary traveller.” Quickly, though, after polite introductions and small talk about the weather, he turned to what was most important in his life, Islam. It seemed important for him that I understand his devotion. He told me that after a life devoted to his family and his land, now he was an old man and had the time to commit himself to his religion. After that first cup of tea I realized I was in the presence of a gentle missionary. Islam, Mr. Khan insisted, had an answer for everything. The prophet Muhammad had spoken on all aspects of life. “Why look elsewhere for the answers?” he asked me.

I asked what motivated his conviction. He said life in Baltistan was “short and full of hardship,” but his reward for a life lived within the prescripts of the Koran would be a “glorious hereafter.” Living long enough for his family to support him meant he could absorb himself in practice. His one great remaining aspiration was to complete the Haj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

I mentioned how I too was on a pilgrimage, a solo one with no set goals. As Mr. Khan looked at me, his old eyes caught a spark and he began to laugh. The young shopkeeper raised his eyes and translated as Mr. Khan spoke.

“He says that you are on a long walk, not a pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is about drawing close to Allah. About working with your Muslim brothers. There must be compatriots and a focus on God for it to be a pilgrimage.”

My shoulders drooped. I could have replied that Muhammad, Jesus and the Buddha had all undertaken individual quests in the wilderness, removed from their everyday lives, each had found what he was looking for.

The wanderings of the prophets have inspired a lineage of disciples: Sufi travellers, the dervishes who used walking, Siyahat, to detach themselves from the world and lose themselves in Allah; the ancient Christian church’s ambulare pro Deo, “wanderers for God,” roaming mendicants imitating the trials of Christ in the desert; and the Hindu saddhus, travelling ceaselessly over a landscape imbued with their faith. The last words the Buddha uttered to his closest disciples were, “Walk on!”

I mentioned none of this to Mr. Khan. He had deeply held beliefs, a confidence in one answer to every question. Religious journeys to Mr. Khan occurred within a tightly regulated framework. His God was a man of discipline and strength. There was no point in arguing with someone so close to his final goal.

For the four months I spent walking in the Himalayas I’d believed I was on a personal pilgrimage. I had convinced myself the trek was part of the research for a book on landscape and religion, a pilgrimage towards knowledge. But I never asked myself the basic question of why I wanted to write about those subjects.

It wasn’t until five years after the trek that I understood the deeper motivation for my obsessive walking. I was in Kathmandu after another season in the Himalayas. I had already written three drafts of Into the Heart of the Himalayas. I knew the walk was a great story, but I had been unable to tell it the way I had felt it. Then I gave the manuscript to a friend, a carpet entrepreneur and an astute reader. She read the book and her first comment was, “There’s something missing in this story. There’s something more going on behind the scenes.”

I disagreed. To me it was simple. It was a book on landscape and religion, an intelligent adventure tale about walking through the highest mountains in the world and trying to understand the religions I was moving through. After all, I had written the book, so I should know what it was about.

A few weeks later I was rewriting the manuscript again. I was working on the section where I arrive at Gaumukh, the source of the Ganges River. It read like this:

“I approached the glacial source of the River Ganges as the sun set. I was alone. I had walked for eight hours that day. I had been walking for three months, eight hours everyday. My body was tuned to the rhythm of my steps. Every part of me wanted to walk. I hummed in time with my steps, up and down, passes and valleys, rivers and peaks. I had traversed the length of the range from the northern edge of Pakistan to the Hindu heartland of the Indian Himalayas.

“Before me the azure and white of sky and snow merged with the setting sun. The valley was shot with the colour of coral. In the near distance Gangotri glacier’s icy frontal wall shimmered in turquoise. Coral and turquoise are the protective stones every Tibetan child receives in a necklace at birth. The land glowed in that soft, pre-sunset light. I reached the glacier’s snout, the point of emergence for the nascent river, the place called Gaumukh, the Cow’s Mouth. In Hinduism the cow is the personification of maternal energy. At the birth of that great river I was immersed in a compassionate landscape. I was exhausted and at ease.

“By the ice cliff, on the bank of the stream I unslung my pack and sat down. The shaly earth was cool, the air stirred by a fresh breeze blowing from the west off the glacier. I breathed deeply. I was wearing a T-shirt and a fleece vest. The skin on my forearms prickled. The world slowed and that composure filtered into me. The wind stilled. Everything was quiet. The boundary between me and the world outside slipped. Tears welled up, stumbled off my cheeks and fell to the dark sand. I was crying.”

For years after the trek the thought of those tears returned to me again and again. Initially I’d attributed them to being in a landscape infused with the religion of a billion people and to sitting quietly at the birth of the one of the world’s greatest rivers. But when I went back over that passage in Kathmandu a sense of déjà vu filled me. When was the last time I had felt that same calm, that chill, the quietude? It came to me – the same cold clarity was there when I had seen Gareth’s body in the hospital morgue in Victoria.

It was more than a week before Gareth was recovered from Elk Lake. Every morning dedicated navy scuba divers combed the storm-churned lake floor looking for the anomalous silty hump that would be my brother’s body. On the ninth day of searching they found him.

Mum, Katrina and I went together to the hospital when we heard his body had been found. The room, somewhere in the building’s concrete rabbit warren of a basement, was dim and very still. The air was cool and the light fluorescent. Gareth, his long body shrouded in a white sheet, lay on a stainless steel table. The nurse motioned us one at a time up to his side. When it was my turn she pulled back the covering. I let out a half breath. He was a handsome man with curly blond hair and thin, perfectly proportioned features. I had always envied his looks. He appeared so peaceful, his skin slightly freckled and very pale, his eyelashes thick, his lips thin and blue. It was a face without any of the fear that Western society associates with death.

With that connection, the stillness in Gangotri and the quietude of the morgue, whole pieces of my life fell into place; the trek, the meetings, the landscape, all the thoughts and ideas in those four months of walking that in small ways had scared me, started making sense. I had been crying at Gangotri because of Gareth. The trek was about the search, a quest through the ideas that inspired me – landscape, religion and walking – to come to terms with my brother’s death. I saw that the reason I wanted to write a book about those subjects was because subconsciously they were tools to help me move through the loss of Gareth. Gareth was the catalyst and eventually he became the endpoint of my pilgrimage.

August 18

I saw Khapalu, the capital of Ghanche District, from a distance, a green mottling against a steep earthen backdrop. As with all the villages along the Shyok River, it is as an oasis in the high desert with its abundant orchards of apples and apricots, fields laden with barley and vegetables, sheep and goats dotting the pastures. In the gardens close to the village, finches and buntings darted to and fro, gorging themselves on the harvest’s leftovers. It was a vision of plenty in a land of parched grass and vertical sandstone.

I quickly found a guest house in the village, laid out my sleeping bag on the thin bed and had a lunch of rice and dal at a café across the road. In the afternoon I walked up to the Mir’s palace on a path lined with stone walls and apricot trees. It was a trail of lingering village smells, fermenting stone fruit, the stench of goat, soils rich with decaying compost.

Khapalu is, after Skardu, the largest settlement in the region and before the subcontinent’s partition in 1947 it had been the second most powerful principality in Baltistan. After partition, the area came under control of the Azad (Free) Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) government, but in 1949 the AJK government officially delegated powers to Islamabad. The arrangement was unfortunately very similar to the one in existence during the British colonial times, with the local Rajas and Mirs allowed to maintain their power and continue to tax their subjects, but in the 1970s Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto removed the Mirs’ oppressive system of land revenue. The role of the hereditary monarch has been greatly eroded and the Northern Areas are controlled, to a greater extent along the eastern border with India and to a lesser degree along the western border with Afghanistan, directly from Islamabad.

That afternoon, in the gravelled widening of the road that is the parking lot for the Mir’s palace, I came across a young man leaning into the engine compartment of a late-’80s model Toyota Corolla. The car was black and yellow with jagged rust holes eating at the wheel wells. In a previous life it may have been a taxi in Lahore or Karachi. The man heard me coming and pulled his head out from under the hood. His smile was open, disarming in a way, and we started talking. He was a pleasant, modern young man in his late teens or early twenties. He wore jeans and a polo shirt. Ahktar was his name, and he told me he was in charge of the Mir’s interests “in the tourist industry.”

I looked at the old taxi and he smiled. He invited me for tea and from the front seat of the car he took a stainless steel thermos and poured me a plastic tumbler of steaming chai. The chai was sweet and hot, maybe too much of both for a warm day. After our drink he offered to show me around the buildings, telling me that he had grown up there.

The palace is a rambling two-storey structure of mud-brick and sagging applewood beams. The central feature, situated over the main entrance, is an impressive octagonal balcony; its filigreed windows are carved with a skill that would be difficult to find today. Ahktar said the building had been constructed by multiple generations of imported Kashmiri artisans, but now the grand residence is a shell; years of vacancy have drained it of life. The overall effect is of a majestic relic – the walls falling in on themselves, doors crooked in their frames, the woodwork decomposed to a state of blurry recognition.

The palace is 230 years old, its style of another age, yet twenty-five metres away across a flat, parched lawn sits a substantial house curiously in the fashion of British Indian hunting lodges. Two buildings of such differing provenance I would have expected in the old Indian hill station towns of Darjeeling or Shimla, but not in Khapalu. Without my asking Ahktar explained that it was the “new” palace, built for the wife of the current Mir’s great-grandfather. The Mir’s wife, he proudly pointed out, had been English. The story was something of a local myth as Akhtar continued on. The Mir and his future wife had met in Srinagar, Kashmir, a holiday spot for British Raj administrators and rulers of the princely states. The monarch had swept his bride off her feet with “his horsemanship and manliness.” The couple had wed in Kashmir and soon after returned to Khapalu.

The lady would have had little knowledge of the land she married into; in the nineteenth century only a handful of Westerners had been to the area. Baltistan’s precipitous high desert was geographically and climatically removed from the soft, green hills of Kashmir. Ahktar said the princess disliked the drafty, old palace and had demanded a new home. The hunting lodge could not compare in splendour to its architectural neighbour but was eminently more practical for the winter cold and biting wind that rips down the Shyok Valley.

I imagined the princess sipping tea in the evening, prints of fox hunting on the walls, a silver tea set on a walnut table, a crackling apricot wood fire in the fireplace and outside in the bitter Balti winter, the temperature dropping to minus thirty Celsius. The doors of the lodge were locked, the windows boarded up, but Akhtar said the Mir still stays there when he returns to Khapalu.

August 19

At first light the next morning I packed my bag and made my way to the Shyok River. I left my pack on the gravelly bank and climbed a large, smooth boulder to get a better view upstream. On the far shore people were moving to the fields. I could hear the low chanting of their harvest songs. A lizard appeared on the mica-peppered rock by my feet, warming itself in the early sun, a tangerine rosette on its flanks moving in quick time with its breath. Two brown dippers flickered restlessly close by, their tail feathers bobbing with every twist of their heads. Anxious for morning food, they were concentrated on the river’s back eddies. The river swept by, gently, smoothly, the water turquoise and turbid, swirling with muddy debris. The sun caught the surface obliquely and glinted metallic.

The Shyok is a river that cuts its way aggressively through the deep valleys of Baltistan until it meets the Indus east of Skardu. The Indus flows west for 250 kilometres then turns south and wanders through the heartland of Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. It is the economic engine of the country. The Indus is also one of the seven sacred rivers of Hinduism and, through the Harappan culture that flourished along its banks from 3300 to 1700 B.C.E., one of the cradles of human civilization.

The river’s source is northeast across the Greater Himalayas near Mount Kailash, the holiest mountain in Buddhism and Hinduism, and the Kailash area is the source of a matrix of rivers that spread across the entire subcontinent. From its southern slopes the Indus winds west and south; the Tsangpo River pushes east through Tibet, then as it turns south it becomes the Brahmaputra and carves a path through India and Bangladesh; the Ganges and Yamuna rivers press south and then east from Kailash; the Sutlej River, the fastest running in the Himalayas, drives west then drops off the Tibetan plateau to flow south; and the Mahakali, the final destination of my own pilgrimage, parallels the Sutlej’s course through the highest mountains in the world. I felt a humble connection to the wild water and mountains that stretched for 3,000 kilometres to the east.

I removed my shoes and socks and dipped my feet in the water; the glacial melt was numbing. The water was beyond borders.

Water: soothing, moving, giving, all-encompassing, without ego, an altruistic medium. We are fifty to sixty percent water and without ingesting three litres a day we will slowly die. We can’t live without it. But water at two degrees Celsius is deadly because immersed in it for anything more than a few minutes the body becomes hypothermic. When the body’s temperature drops by one or two degrees below normal you enter the first stage of hypothermia. You start to shiver, and breathing becomes quick and shallow. As body temperature drops by three or four degrees you enter hypothermia’s second stage; miscoordination becomes apparent, your movements become clumsy and you are mildly confused. If your body temperature drops below thirty-two degrees Celsius you have entered the third, possibly lethal stage of hypothermia. You have difficulty speaking. You are unable to use your hands. Below thirty degrees Celsius the shivering stops. Around this time major organs fail and with that your body dies. Strangely, though, because of the slowed metabolism, the brain continues to function for a short time. For a frightening moment you are that rarest of entities, a mind devoid of a body.

Gareth went through those stages. The water leeched away his warmth, his life. It took him without a thought as to who he was, who he could have become. Lucky, unlucky? Water doesn’t care. Water has made me believe in karma, in fate, in the difficulty of changing that universal hand of cards. Water. I used to love it but now I fear it. Maybe that’s why mountains have become my sanctuary.