Gurudongmar Lake

 

A white void, vast as a mountain’s foot, lies amoebiacally here. Its thick blunt limbs fill gaping valleys. I feel strange tickling sensations under the soles of my feet. I stand at the edge of a steep fold of land and gaze at Gurudongmar lake, a couple of hundred feet diagonally below. It is unfreezing itself as morning grows; as if by volition. The stray thought of slipping over this rocky slope makes me breathe hard. My carotids knock on my throat. Pinballs of thought guzzle oxygen. And here at about 17,800 feet, it is scant. My team leader gives me an oxygen aerosol-can and keeps an eye.

Not many months ago we were on a jeep winding around sharp Himalayan roads on the way to Sela-pass. We were at little under 14,000 feet, near the border of Arunachal Pradesh and Chinese-Tibet. After initial nausea, I had an onset of strange altitude sickness. Breathlessness, copious salivation and I sank into a state of semi-consciousness. I saw whiteness, flashes of closely grazing Yaks, clouds and a feeling of something extraordinarily beautiful. My eyes were closed, and tears flowed down. What was being spoken I heard lucidly, without an understanding of to whom. Speech felt non-directional. The team leader stopped the vehicle and dragged me out. Somebody suggested that smelling a lemon would help the delirium. Most of half-a-cut-lemon was squeezed into my nose and I seeped back into normalcy, coughing juice.

Gurudongmar, cradled in the Kangchenyao range of the Eastern-Himalayas, is special among the dozens of high-altitude lakes in Sikkim. These are fed by glacial meltwater. During the long ascent here, one passes through camp and after camp of the Indian Military. Barbed wire fences around large green bunkers, army tanks and armed uniformed men. Alpine choughs and Himalayan Griffon roosted around here. More Griffons circled above, mobbed by Choughs if they soared too low. Chubby Marmots peeped out of their underground dens or stood up on their hinds and surveyed the distance. They chewed on the scant dry grass and prostrate vegetation. Photography, on the way, was strictly prohibited. Here too the Chinese border was only a few kilometers away. Valley glaciers snaked down the mountains like frozen cascades. Robin accentors sat on rocks by the melt-pools, flicking their tails to inflections in their song. A pale young Tibetan Gazelle prances across the path before our jeep; tawny - like it was conjured from the pale expanse around, which it leaped back into and melded off.

Gurudongmar lake

Prism and light made a rainbow. Ascending here, mountain and weather cast a spectrum of Rhododendrons. A different species, hue of flower, lived at and occupied each rung.

 This was April; the glaciers were on their retreat into the peaks. They had dumped heaps of moraine on and beside the rugged dirt roads. Military vehicles were moving them aside. Room-sized boulders were strewn around like they were lego blocks. These sinuous ice-giants had immense strength. There were long parent glaciers constricting whole mountains. And there were little ones, separate or as offshoots, fitting snugly into rock grooves. There were glaciers which lay on wide flat cliffs, overlooking them; freeze-gripping on rock, like they were peering down and watching.

Colorful prayer flags bordered and fluttered around the waterbody. Legends record that Bodhisattva Padmasambhava and Saint Guru Nanak have touched its surface and sanctified it. They are to have come by its presence during their travels in the mountains and considered it worthy of veneration. The lake is since known to be providing water to the villages below, melting even during winter. Buddhists and Sikhs dispute over this place.

Here you witness many such contrasts, ironies. To the West is the swan-white vastness of the lake, sentinelled by steel grey peaks. Opposite to it is undulating barrenness, abounding desolation till eye can see. Here no ice can form under unsheltered and close sun.  When the air is still, the land is a furnace. But a draught of wind is a frost-bite. If a cloud passed over, the temperature dropped instantly near zero.  Body and skin get perplexed. One moment you hug tight to your five layers of clothing, fingers deep in your down-jacket. The next moment you want to throw them all off.

A Himalayan Marmot peeking out of its den

Fine windblown grey-soil kept slithering like ghost serpents just above the ground and vanished.

 Rufous-Necked Snow-finches in parties of three and four foraged the coarse sand. Their hopping around and skirmishes amongst themselves threw up little dust plumes. I took a handful of sand and my eyes discerned nothing in them which could be called living. Tibetan Snow-finches and Horned Larks flitted between the Buddhist pebble stacks made by pilgrims along the slope to the lake. These small birds lived all year in these spare and extreme conditions.

Foraging Rufous-necked Snow finches

A branch of the mighty Teesta river flowing through Sikkim and West-bengal is birthed here, from one end of the glacial-lake. This river runs deeply in the culture of Sikkim's people. In the faith of the Lepcha community - a Sikkimese tribe, there is no heaven or hell. After death, their souls travel up the Teesta river and go to rest in Mt.Khangchendzonga.  On a map, Teesta looks like a Sea-fan. Numerous tributaries join it at various points along its course. It is a master sculptor, mountain carver. In Pelling it ran blue-green, weaving under the silk-routes. In Lachen, it gushed like liquid ice, nearly opaque, spewing up mist with its deafening flow. At the triple juncture of West-bengal, Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal, from a barrage, I saw Teesta becoming the sea. Its body was kilometers wide, its force appeased. At Gurudongmar it was a just-born. Trickles merged into clear stream where a Guldenstadt’s Redstart was singing from a boulder. It flowed softly. A river exists as infant, child and adult simultaneously. Its time runs on many axes. River evolves over time, but time too flows through river.

I was carrying Matthiesen’s Snow Leopard in my backpack. I searched the grey and white slopes for the Bharal and the Argali. Sandeep, our guide said that these animals are becoming increasingly difficult to see here. They are moving further and further up into the mountains. Sandeep is a local from Latpanchor, a village in West Bengal. He also says that birds like Blood pheasants, Tibetan Snowcocks and Snow Patridges are heading upslope too. These large fowl and other birds are becoming rather difficult to show his clients as they are no longer found where they earlier were. Scientists from the Cornell lab are calling this ‘an escalator to extinction’. A tightening noose, a flood of high temperature is inching up, melting, de-colouring, engulfing these montane life-scapes with an irrepressible momentum.

The big glacial lakes in Sikkim are filling with meltwater quickly in Summer, breaking their moraine dams and flooding the regions below, unpredictably. Settlements and croplands are destroyed. Lives are lost. In contrast to the birds, the villagers here are moving downslope in search of livelihoods, as it is no longer safe to live here by the lake, which for centuries had been the center of their culture and lives.

Changing climate has climbed these high mountains.

I imagine a saint walking by the lake, bending down, touching it and making its waters freeze again.

- From a field trip to Sikkim in April 2019