Mountains are often defined by their height, though the summit of a peak is nothing more than the point where it ends, giving way to clouds and sky. The true substance and structure of a mountain rests beneath, amidst the cliffs and crags that fall away into fluted snowfields and sun-sculpted ice. More than elevation, other elements of a mountain help establish its presence—the contours of its ridges, the angle of its slopes, the solidity and depths of its foundations as well as the meadows and forests that grow at its feet. When we measure and calculate the complex geometry of a mountain, all its various dimensions must be taken into account, including where it stands in relation to other peaks.

The Himalaya may be the tallest mountain range on earth but to focus on altitude alone limits our perspective and lessens their significance. The splendour of these mountains exists as much in their valleys as it does on the steepest inclines. The inspiring presence of Himalayan massifs has less to do with magnitude than the subtle nuances of nature out of which they rise: the trickle of a glacial stream flowing through channels of ice; translucent crystals of quartz embedded in a granite boulder; a twisted juniper root clutching loose moraine; or a herd of wild sheep silhouetted on a distant pass.

As we approach the Himalaya and observe their physical features, our eyes trace each fretted profile, where sunlight dazzles off the snow and casts uneven shadows on the rocks. At times, these mountains seem almost alive for they are always changing. The clatter of falling stones echoes the process of erosion or the scrambling hooves of an ibex gaining purchase on a precipitous ledge. The boom and thunder of an avalanche disperses clouds of white particles that float like mist yet settle and harden as firmly as concrete, burying whatever lies beneath. The Himalaya contain places of terrifying beauty, vertiginous terrain and extremes of weather that inspire both awe and fear. With their immense grandeur they appear to have been around in perpetuity despite the fact that these are among the youngest mountains on earth and continue rising several millimetres every year. Constantly pushing upward, they have formed a series of arcs that stretch from the arid borderlands of Baltistan to the tropical jungles of Arunachal Pradesh.

The Himalaya span a distance of roughly 2,500 kilometres in length and between 350 and 150 kilometres in breadth, rising to a maximum height of almost 9 kilometres above the level of the sea. Altogether, fourteen of the world’s tallest summits exceed 8,000 metres and ten of these are located in the Himalaya. The other four are in the neighbouring Karakoram. More than half of the fifty highest peaks on earth lie along the Himalayan chain. Five nations—China, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan—include a portion of the Himalaya within their borders, though many of these boundaries are in dispute and the exiled government of Tibet still lays claim to much of the territory occupied by China. Just as the spelling and pronunciation of the Himalaya has been debated for centuries, ever since the Sanskrit name was first transliterated into English, geographers have struggled to define these mountains with any coherence or consistency. While most writers, like myself, limit the Himalaya to the mountains that stand between the river Tsang Po or Brahmaputra in the east and the Indus in the west, others allow for a more flexible definition, often including parts of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush as well as some of the mountains further eastward. Regardless of these discrepancies, the two giant peaks that bookend the Himalaya are Namche Barwa in southeastern Tibet and Nanga Parbat at the north-western edge of Kashmir.

An equally difficult question is where to draw a line for the northern and southern limits of this range. For example, Mount Kailas, the most sacred mountain of all, sometimes called the ‘keystone’ of the Himalaya, is technically situated in the trans-Himalayan region to the north. On the other hand, the Shivalik foothills to the south are considered a separate range, though they merge with the Himalaya at many points. Similarly, the Duar Range, the ‘doorway’ to higher mountains in north-eastern India, is virtually contiguous with the Himalaya. Both the Bhabar and Terai, consisting of grasslands and jungle, below an altitude of 500 metres, that skirt the central foothills, are an integral part of the Himalaya, as are the upper margins of the Tibetan Plateau, where the northern slopes of the mountains level out at 4,000 metres. Nevertheless, whatever ambiguities are found on maps, these mountains rise above the contentious and confusing boundaries of cartography and politics that divide them.

‘In a thousand ages of the gods, I cannot tell you all the glories of the Himalaya,’ exclaimed a Vedic sage, while another wrote: ‘As the sun dries the morning dew, so does the mere sight of the Himalaya dissipate the sins of man.’ However remote and ineffable the mountains may seem, nothing on earth exists in isolation and it is our story as much as theirs—whatever we choose to tell of these high places and our place amongst them.

Origin myths from different regions of the Himalaya seek to explain the formation of the mountains. According to Verrier Elwin’s Myths of the North-East Frontier of India, the Hruso tribe (also known as the Aka) in Arunachal Pradesh believe that the world was created out of two eggs. When these hatched, one produced the sky, which was male, and the other the earth, which was female. When the sky tried to copulate with the earth, he discovered that she was too large for him to take her in his arms, so he asked his terrestial lover to make herself smaller. As she did, her pliable body was drawn together and folded into hills, mountains and valleys. ‘When the Sky made love to the Earth, every kind of tree and grass and all living creatures came into being.’

In another story that Elwin collected, the Nocte tribe of Tirap district recount how the earth was first covered in water. ‘Deep down in the water there lived a snake called Pu.’ Gradually, over time, the all-encompassing ocean receded and areas of land began to appear. ‘At first, everything was mud and when the snake moved over it, there was a long winding track which became a valley through which the rivers could flow. When the mud dried up, part of the earth became flat and part turned into hills.’

At the opposite end of the Himalaya, where the Indus circles Nanga Parbat, another folk tale recounts how the world was once submerged beneath a primordial sea. Ghulam Muhammad, who recorded this story in 1905, explains how certain areas of water were frozen and a race of giants, called Yaths, lived on this desolate ice cap. To make their kingdom more habitable, they decided to dredge soil from the seabed and place it above the water. Accordingly, the ruler of the giants and his council sent a messenger to ‘a wolf called Bojare Shal who lived at a place named Milgamok (old ice) and who, owing to his great genius, would be able to perform this work.’ The wolf was initially reluctant but he was finally persuaded and told the Yaths to summon a bird named Gorai Pattan, as well as a mouse that lived nearby. Then the wolf told the king of the giants to lift the bird on his shoulders where it spread its wings while the mouse was instructed to dig a hole in the ice. ‘The orders were obeyed and the wings of the bird covered all the water, while the mouse brought out all the soil which was beneath the water.’ The earth was then spread on Gorai Pattan’s wings and in this way the land and mountains were formed.

The scientific view of Himalayan origins, put forward by twentieth-century geologists, suggests that the Himalaya were conceived beneath the surface of the Tethys Sea. Their gestation and birth is one of the greatest creation stories of all time, as complex and awe-inspiring as tribal folk tales or myths from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. This formative epic was composed and written upon the land long before the earliest ancestors of man evolved, long before language and thought, long before life itself.

When the Himalaya began to emerge from the earth’s womb, the first contractions started somewhere around a hundred million years ago, as the primordial landmass of Pangaea started to cool and break apart. The earth’s crust fissured and sagged into a deepening trough, which was filled by the Tethys Sea. Known as a geosyncline, this depression gradually sank and widened. Meanwhile, fast-flowing rivers fed by violent storms drained into the trench, depositing tonnes upon tonnes of sediment every day over millions of years. The silt and debris of these ancient, unnamed streams are what form the bedrock or basement of the Himalaya. As the weight and pressure of those vast alluvial beds grew heavier, the birth pangs intensified.

Volcanic eruptions shot through the planet’s crust and molten magma cooled to form igneous layers. Crushing forces that generated intense heat served as a crucible for granites and gneisses. Much later, veins of limestone accretions, from the remains of aquatic creatures, were added to the matrix.

Over the gradual passage of geological time, the protracted ebb and flow of the earth’s surfaces reassembled areas of land and water. Eventually, when the subcontinent of India collided with the rest of Asia, perhaps fifty million years ago, a series of three major thrusts occurred. Giant slabs that geologists call ‘nappes’ buckled upward out of the ocean and closed the trench. Those lines where the collision occurred and the continents fused together are known as ‘sutures’. One is the Indus Valley and another, the Tsang Po or Brahmaputra Valley. These great rivers serve as the parenthetical limits of the Himalaya. The ongoing process of mountain building is called ‘orogeny,’ from the Greek words ‘oro’ for mountains and ‘genesis’ for beginnings.

Traces of early upheavals are still evident throughout the Himalaya, older and younger zones of rock that lie in recumbent folds. Instead of pushing upward in sequential order, one layer of the earth’s crust is often thrust beneath another through a process of subduction. In this way, overlapping strata from different eras are shuffled like a pack of cards. The friction created by these monumental forces can change the rocks themselves. Loose debris is compressed into conglomerate stone while the heat and pressure of collision creates metamorphic rocks. Ultimately, erosion cuts away cross-sections of strata, exhuming ancient timelines of geological history. Through the gradual chiselling of rain and wind, the birthmarks of the mountains are exposed for all to see, crumpled striations that are like convoluted puzzles sandwiched in stone.

Today, we accept the idea that mountains are like rafts of rock and soil, frosted with ice and snow, floating upon a molten sea. Plate tectonics is the key to understanding the formation of the Himalaya. Though the German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener first proposed the theory of continental drift in 1912, this fundamental concept regarding the earth’s evolution was only accepted in the mid-1960s. Until then, most geologists were debunking the idea of continental drift and calling it a fantasy. In an essay, ‘The Validation of Continental Drift’, Stephen Jay Gould explains how attacks on plate tectonics were biased by the way in which geologists perceived the problem. He writes that virtually every scientist rejected the idea of continental drift, though the empirical evidence was indisputable. ‘It was dismissed because no one had devised a physical mechanism that would permit continents to plow through an apparently solid oceanic floor. In the absence of a plausible mechanism, the idea of continental drift was rejected as absurd.’

Gould argues that science depends on ‘creative thought’ to propel knowledge forward and it was only through a leap of imagination that such a theory could emerge. John McPhee, in his Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Former World, confirms this view, explaining how, until 1963, editors at Nature were still rejecting articles on plate tectonics because this emerging theory was considered far-fetched while their colleagues at The Journal of Geophysical Research suggested that discourse on continental drift was more suited to cocktail party conversation. He goes on to explain that the proof for this theory was found not on mountain heights or exposed surfaces of the earth but in the depths of oceans where the technology of naval warfare helped unlock these submerged secrets. McPhee writes:
‘The Second World War was a technological piñata, and, with their new fathometers and proton-precession magnetometers, oceanographers of the nineteen-fifties—most notably Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp at Columbia University—mapped the seafloor in such extraordinary detail that in a sense they were seeing it for the first time.’ He goes on to say that though these naval charts of the ocean floor were kept secret to protect the location of submarines, they revealed deep trenches and mountain ranges beneath the surface of every ocean around the globe—the wrinkles and stretch marks of continental drift.
Essentially, the proof of plate tectonics and Himalayan orogeny was unveiled by US naval officers hunting for enemy U-boats. These discoveries were further reinforced by seismographic data collected by military scientists who were busy monitoring nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s. McPhee asserts that the, ‘by-product of the Cold War was seismological data on a scale unapproached before. The whole of plate tectonics, a story of steady-state violence along boundaries, was being brought to light largely as a result of the development of instruments of war.’

The rumpled contours of the ocean floor as well as volcanic and seismic activity along the edges of submerged plates, allowed oceanographers to confirm that as continents drift apart, the resulting ruptures are filled with molten magma that bubbles up out of the earth’s interior and cools to form scabs and scars beneath the sea. McPhee describes the Himalaya as ‘the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian Plate’, which collided with Tibet and levered up fractured sections of the earth’s crust until they protruded more than 8,000 metres above sea level. As he points out, when Tenzing and Hilary reached the top of Mount Everest in 1953, they were actually setting foot on the fossilized remnants of aquatic creatures that once lived in the Tethys Sea.

As with any creation story, whether scientific or mythological, many fundamental questions remain unresolved. Amongst contemporary geologists, no clear consensus has been reached as to when the Himalaya were formed. While plate tectonics continues to provide the broad narrative arc and offers a variety of possible scenarios, there is considerable disagreement as to how long ago this process actually began and whether it was a gradual uplift or a sequence of relatively sudden and violent events. Scientists from different disciplines, including glaciologists, climatologists and botanists have examined the evidence in their respective fields and contributed competing hypotheses on the geomorphology of the Himalaya. Carbon dating of tooth enamel from jawbones of ancient herbivores, pollen samples preserved in peat and computer-generated models of river systems or paleoclimates, are all part of the data being studied. Old theories, which were once graven in stone, have now been disassembled or deconstructed while new pieces of the puzzle have yet to be fitted together into a coherent and integrated whole. The more we learn about the origins of the Himalaya the less we seem to agree. Like any epic, it is possible to read this story on many levels and interpret each episode according to conflicting priorities, prejudices and perspectives.

Some theories suggest that Himalayan–Tibetan orogeny occurred between 100 to 45 million years in the past but there are others that argue it is much more recent and happened closer to 25 million years ago. A few geologists have proposed that instead of a single event the mountains were formed in two stages, first with a collision between the Indian subcontinent and an archipelago of islands off the coast of Eurasia. This lifted the Himalaya up to nearly their current height before they finally rammed into the Tibetan Plateau. In recent years, a bewildering variety of time frames and tectonic reconstructions have been postulated.

Regardless of the shifting sands of science, most of which is the result of faster and faster computers that have outpaced the human mind, we can still effectively imagine the genesis of these mountains in primordial slow motion. Born out of rock and water, the mountains continue to be shaped by these elements—the corrosive energy of flowing streams, their freezing and melting. A succession of ice ages, beginning 2. 5 million years ago, abraded the features of the Himalaya, as glaciers carved out broad cirques, leaving lateral trails of moraine. On the surface, this process represents a perpetual conflict between fluids and solids, minerals and moisture, precipitation and accretion—the blood and bones of the mountains.

At the same time as the monumental engineering of orogenesis was occurring in the Himalaya, the smallest forms of life, single-celled organisms and other microbes, began to emerge in wetlands amidst rocks and soil, incubated by sunlight, nourished by minerals and germinated by water. The earliest alpine plants were ancestors of lichens, liverworts, mosses and, eventually, ferns. Fossils of these paleontological specimens are impressed upon rocks, their delicate death masks preserved in hardened sludge.

As the mountains rose up over millions of years, they hosted more and more plants and grasses, as well as insects, birds, reptiles and mammals such as rodents, wild sheep and goats, along with predators like wolves and Panthera blytheae, the ancestor of snow leopards and other big cats.

The presence of human beings in the upper Himalaya is a relatively recent intrusion, dating back to somewhere between 10,000 to 7,000 years ago, during the Neolithic Age when the first nomadic hunters crossed over high passes in search of meat.

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