Mountains of Asia

"The wind swept, cold and pure, cut against our faces whistled in our ears filled our eyes with tears, but all unheeded as we gazed at the marvel stretched before us. For all doubts faded and fears were dispelled as before us stretched immortality, purification, a revelation of the world as God sees it, where no man has stepped to mar it."

"If the reason for climbing Mt. Everest is that it's hard to do, why does everyone go up the easy side?"

"On 10 April 1802 the Great Survey of India was launched. It lasted sixty years. With the help of tens of thousands of native labourers, scholars and guides, the British carefully mapped the whole of India, marking borders, measuring distances, and even calculating for the first time the exact height of Mount Everest and other Himalayan peaks."

"A symmetrical, beautiful snow cone summit."

"We have for some years known that this mountain is higher than any other hitherto measured in India, and most probably it is the highest in the whole world. I was taught by my respected chief and predecessor, Colonel Geo. Everest, to assign to every geographical object its true local or native appellation. I have always scrupulously adhered to this rule, as I have in fact to all other principles laid down by that eminent graduist. But here is a mountain, most probably the highest in the world, without any local name that we can discover, or whose native appellation, if it have any, will not very likely be ascertained before we are allowed to penetrate into Nepal and to approach close to this stupendous snowy mass. In the mean time the privilege, as well as the duty, devolves on me to assign to this lofty pinnacle of our globe, a name whereby it may be known among geographers and become a household word among civilized nations. In virtue of this privilege, in testimony of my affectionate respect for a revered chief, in conformity with what I believe to be the wish of all the Members of the scientific department, over which I have the honour to preside, and to perpetuate the memory of that illustrious master of accurate geographical research, I have determined to name this noble peak of the Himalayas "Mount Everest.""

"You will perceive the gist of the question is not whether the mountain should be called Mount Everest or by its true native name (which is a principle not disputed by any one), but whether it can be called Deodanga without risk of error, in the absence of satisfactory proof that this is really its native name."

"In Tibet, sunrise over the Himalaya is surely one of the most unforgettable experiences you will ever have."

"The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga."

"The good shine from afar Like the snowy Himalayas. The bad don't appear Even when near, Like arrows shot into the night."

"Himalayas have always been known as the abode of snow. This mountain range located in the north of India is considered to be the mystical dwelling of gods. There is a magnetic pull that draws pilgrims and tourists to this place. The Himalayan tourist centres are the toughest of all the pilgrimages."

"The mighty Himalayan Ranges are about 2500 km long and 350 km broad. They are the highest mountain in the world with hundreds of high peaks and pinnacles above 20000 feet. The Himalayas are the inseparable part of the Indian heritage. A description of the Himalayas is found in earliest Sanskrit literature. These mighty mountains figure prominently in the Epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Ancient texts, such as the Ramayana, the Puranas, the Vedas, the Mahabharata, all sing in unison of the glory and wonder of the Himalayas."

"Where else in the world can you feel closer to God. His presence is within such grandeur, within such might, within such beauty, within the Himalayas"

"The desire to smell the pure air, to sleep under the open skies in the mountains, meditating pulls in this serenity pulls you to the Himalayas. We as Indians are very lucky that this mountain is part of our geographical boundaries and heritage. Once you are near these mountains, the electrifying sights, the clean air makes you detached from the material world."

"The Mt. Kailash-Lake Manasarovar region, in the west of Himalayas, is a wonderful place, especially for those fascinated by the stories and tales of gods and demons. The pilgrimage organised by the Ministry of External Affairs in association...with Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam generally begins around the middle of June every year and pilgrims make their way to the heavenly abode till late September."

"The geography of the Himalayas is such that all its passes lead one to the region of Kailash and Manasarovar. Western Tibet, the place of the heavenly abode of Lord Shiva, has been known to the Hindus and their ancestors since thousands of years."

"It further continues to tell us that Meru is in the Himalayas between Malyavant and Gandhamadana. This gold-mountain is the highest of all mountains. It is round as a ball, shines like the morning sun, and is like a fire without smoke."

"This is a very major earthquake but it's really aggravated a thousand times by the topography. An earthquake is bad anywhere, in the Himalayas it becomes much worse."

"In the course of his service Gerard carried out many arduous and important survey duties, especially in the Himalayas, where he ascended heights previously believed to be inaccessible, and penetrated into Tibet as far as the frontier pickets of Chinese would allow. To him we are indebted for our earliest notions of the geological structure and remains of the Himalayan ranges."

"In 1895 he [Albert Frederick] was mountaineering in the Nanga Parbat group of the Kashmir Himalayas. He was last seen on 23 Aug., and it is believed that he was overwhelmed by an avalanche while traversing a snow pass."

"SILENT amidst unbroken silence deep Of dateless years, in loneliness supreme, She pondered patiently one mighty theme, And let the hours, uncounted, by her creep. The motionless Himalayas, the broad sweep Of glacial cataracts, great Ganges' stream— All these to her were but as things that seem, Doomed all to pass, like phantoms viewed in sleep :Her history? She has none—scarce a name. The life she lived is lost in the profound Of time, which she despised; but nothing mars The memory that, single, gives her fame— She dreamed eternal dreams, and from the ground Still raised her yearning vision to the stars."

"We are humanitarians, we don't know how to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people in the Himalayas. But the most efficient military alliance in the world should be able to."

"Himalayas is a place of meditation. It reminds you of God’s home and a meditation ground for the realized soul Indian bliss of realization of soul and Himalaya are intermingled."

"The country through which we had been travelling for days has an original beauty. Wide plains were diversified by stretches of hilly country with low passes. We often had to wade through swift running ice-cold brooks. It has long since we had seen - a glacier, but as we were approaching the tasam at Barka, a chain of glaciers gleaming in the sunshine came into view. The landscape was dominated by the 25,000-foot peak of Gurla Mandhata; less striking, but far more famous, was the sacred Mount Kailash, 3,000 feet lower, which stands in majestic isolation apart from the Himalayan range."

"From Kurseong a very steep zig zag leads up to the mountains [Himalayas in Bengal] through a magnificent forest of chestnut, walnut, Oaks and laurels. It is difficult to conceive a grander mass of vegetation:—the straight shafts of the timber-trees shooting aloft, some naked and clean, with grey, pale, or brown bark; others literally clothed for yards with a continuous garment of epiphytes, one mass of blossoms, especially the white Orchids Caelogynes, which bloom in a profuse manner, whitening their trunks like snow. More bulky trunks were masses of interlacing climbers, Araliaceae, Leguminosae, Vines, and Menispermeae, Hydrangea, and Peppers, enclosing a hollow, once filled by the now strangled supporting tree, which has long ago decayed away. From the sides and summit of these, supple branches hung forth, either leafy or naked; the latter resembling cables flung from one tree to another, swinging in the breeze, their rocking motion increased by the weight of great bunches of ferns or Orchids, which were perched aloft in the loops. Perpetual moisture nourishes this dripping forest: and pendulous mosses and lichens are met with in profusion."

"HIGH in the azure heavens, ye ancient mountains, Do ye uplift your old ancestral snows, Gathering amid the clouds those icy fountains, Whence many a sunny stream through India flows."

"The trip takes about 8 hours, but the experience on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railways is worth the extra time you spend on it. This is also one of the two trains to be honoured with the UNESCO World Heritage status, given its legacy of making journeys for over a century now."

"The Himalayas are not today a physical barrier... They are an ideological frontier between democracy and communism... Himalaya is now the dividing line between democracy and communism. And this communist conspiracy, the international communist conspiracy, must be scotched on the heights, not at the foot-hills of the Himalayas."

"I am the Himalayas among the non-moveable."

"His, through his might, are these snow-covered mountains, and men call sea and Rasā his possession: His arms are these, his are these heavenly regions. What God shall we adore with our oblation?"

"All ancient Indian belief and veneration were directed to the mid-Himalayan region, the only original sacred outside land, and it was thither that rishis and kings turned their steps in devotion, never to the northwest."

"Climate change is expected to exacerbate current stresses on water resources. On a regional scale, mountain snowpack, glaciers, and small ice caps play a crucial role in fresh water availability. Widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century, reducing water availability, hydropower potential, and the changing seasonality of flows in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges (e.g. Hindu-Kush, Himalaya, Andes), where more than one-sixth of the world’s population currently lives. There is also high confidence that many semi-arid areas (e.g. the Mediterranean Basin, western United States, southern Africa, and northeastern Brazil) will suffer a decrease in water resources due to climate change. In Africa by 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change."

"Experimental gardens [Tree that bears Qunine] were opened on the Nilgiri Mountains of Southern India, the Himalayas on the north of Bengal, the hills of Assam and the Northwest Provinces, and on the highlands of Burma. With the exception of the Nilgiri and Himalayas, these localities were found to be unfavorable. At Darjeeling in the Himalayas, four hundred miles north of Calcutta, near which the cinchona-gardens are located, … Cinchona alkaloid is now largely used throughout the country, with a proportionate reduction in the demand for quinine."

"A Himalayan trek is a metaphor for life itself. On a trek we are searching for a majestic peak or high plateau, a beautiful stream or waterfall, or a shrine or monastery. . The destination or goal serves to quench our thirst, our desire. It provides a short respite from the rigors of the trail, a brief "One Night's Shelter." Then we have to descend, move on. We cannot stay there."

"For asking questions about the height of the Himalayas, the height of Tibet, the height of the Andes, it's terrific. But if you go to small mountain ranges or small elevation differences, you're probably not going to be able to say much with confidence."

"If my body were cut in half, if a saw was put to my head, and if my body were frozen in the Himalayas - even then, my mind would not be free of disease. None of these are equal to the Name of the Lord. I have seen and tried and tested them all."

"Whenever I think of Himalayas, all my works come to a standstill. The Himalayas is the birth place of philosophy. Himalayas is the place where worldly taint could never reach, where rolls the stream of knowledge, truth and bliss. The heart of Himalayas is very far away from the material world."

"Four of us from here are in the Himalayas now, and with Gangadhar they are five. One brother-disciple named Shivananda came across Gangadhar at Srinagara on the way to holy Kedarnath, and Gangadhar has sent two letters here. During his first year in the Himalayas, he could not secure permission to enter Tibet, but he got it the next year. The Lamas love him much, and he had picked up the Tibetan language. He says the Lamas form ninety per cent of the population, but they mostly practice Tântrika forms of worship. The country is intensely cold — eatables there are scarcely any — only dried meat; and Gangadhar had to travel and live on that food."

"To give this ONE TRUTH a freer and fuller scope in elevating the lives of individuals and leavening the mass of mankind, we start this Advaita Ashrama on the Himalayan heights, the land of its first expiration."

"But the real disaster for China’s Third World relationships was the 1962 border war with India. This was a conflict that had been a long time coming. Although China and India had cooperated for a while after their states were reconstituted in the late 1940s, a decade later they were locked in enmity. The causes were many. China suspected, with some justification, Nehru’s government to be sympathetic to Tibetan nationalists. India feared that Chinese control of the Himalayas would put New Delhi at a dangerous strategic disadvantage. But the most basic problem was that the Chinese Communists always viewed Nehru’s Indian state simply as a colonial construct, something less than a real country. Nehru, on his side, saw Chinese-style revolution as a threat not just to his wishes for India’s development, but to the security of all of Asia. “The Indians,” Zhou Enlai had told Khrushchev in 1959, “[have] conducted large-scale anti-Chinese propaganda for forty years.” The war broke out when Indian military mountain patrols moved into disputed areas of the Himalayas in October 1962. Chinese soldiers tried to force them out, and both sides started shooting. The Indians were on the offensive first, but the PLA managed to get large reinforcements in, which pushed the Indian army back. When the fighting ended the Indians had been thoroughly routed, and the Chinese took control of the disputed region. The war was a shock to all of Asia, and not least to the members of the recently formed Non-Aligned Movement, which had India as one of its principal members. But the main effect was to further isolate China, who, largely because of its bellicose language, was seen as the aggressive party."

"You're chugging up Mount Everest in an old pack track in search of the legendary Abominable Snowman. But the track turns out to have collapsed (of course), and as the cars pick up speed —both forward and backward (and in the dark)—riders find themselves perilously close to an elephant- size and pretty scary Yeti, "protector" of the Himalayas."

"He had yet to wander throughout the length and breadth of India, from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, mixing with saints and scholars and simple souls alike, learning from all, teaching to all, and living with all, seeing India as she was and is, ..."

"Whose glory the snow-tops of the Himalayas declare, whose glory the oceans with all their waters proclaim..."

"Through the vistas of the past the voice of the centuries is coming down to us; the voice of the sages of the Himalayas and the recluses of the forest; the voice that came to the Semitic races; the voice that spoke through Buddha and spiritual giants,..."

"Men sit in the snow of the Himalayas, and do not care to wear any garment. What is heat? What is cold? Let things come and go, what is that to me, I am not the body."

"Religion, which is the highest knowledge and the highest wisdom, cannot be bought, nor can it be acquired from books. You may thrust your head into all the corners of the world, you may explore the Himalayas."

"...searched almost every cave here, and lived in the Himalayas. I know people who lived there all their lives. I love my nation, I cannot see you degraded, weakened any more than you are now. Therefore I am bound for your sake and for truth's ..."

"... the same India whose influx of spirituality is represented, as it were, on the material plane, by rolling rivers like oceans, where the eternal Himalayas, rising tier above tier with their snowcaps, look as it were into the very mysteries of heaven."

"... and we sincerely pray that your efforts in this direction be crowned with success. The great Shankaracharya also, after his spiritual conquest, established a Math at Badarikâshrama in the Himalayas for the protection of the ancient religion."

"To the great tablelands of the high Himalaya mountains first came the Aryans, and there to this day abides the pure type of Brahman ..."

"In ancient India, when men became very old, they would give up everything. So did the kings. When a man did not want to live any more, then he went towards the Himalayas, without eating or drinking and walked on and on till the body failed. All the time thinking of God, be just marched on till the body gave way."

"But as a troop of pedlars, from Cabool, Cross underneath the Indian Caucasus, That vast sky-neighbouring mountain of milk snow; Winding so high, that, as they mount, they pass Long flocks of travelling birds dead on the snow, Chok’d by the air, and scarce can they themselves Slake their parch’d throats with sugar’d mulberries— In single file they move, and stop their breath, For fear they should dislodge the o’erhanging snows— So the pale Persians held their breath with fear."

"After this I proceeded to the city of Barwan, in the road to which is a high mountain, covered with snow and exceedingly cold; they call it the Hindu Kush, that is Hindu-slayer, because most of the slaves brought thither from India die on account of the intenseness of the cold."

"It is entirely likely that the name Hindu Kush came about as a sarcastic twist on the older name Hindu Koh, viz. on the occasion of an actual mass-killing."

"That Muslims enslaved Hindus and drove them to their death in the Hindu Kush is a solidly documented historical fact, never refuted, and only a “highly contested claim” in the Nehruvian-secularist world of fact-free political polemic."

"When he reached Mt. Argeas, he wanted to climb it but he was stopped by those who lived there because it was winter. Lazaros, however, put all his hope in our Lord Jesus Christ and His mother and started to climb. When he was halfway up the mountain, such a dense fog came down around him, as he used to relate, that, even though he strained his eyes, he could not see to the right or left or anywhere else. He did not give up his attempt, however, but bent down and, using his hands to guide him, went on up. While he was climbing like this, he met a bear, as he used to say, and neither he nor it sensed the approach of the other until they came so close that they bumped into each other. The only explanation for this was that it was a device of the Evil One intended to frighten him into turning back, or rather of God allowing this as a trial of his faith and hope. The bear came to a halt at their sudden collision and left the path, while Lazaros went on his way unhindered, heartily singing the Davidic psalms. When he had climbed up to the top he found that the door of the chapel had been securely barred. He opened it and went inside; when he had prayed, he came out, closed the door securely, and went down the mountain again."

"Whenever I visited Mount Takakuma I found myself thinking about Plato’s allegory of the cave in The Republic. He tells of men imprisoned in a cave where all they see are shadows on the wall from outside activity, and all they hear are echoes from outside noise. His point is that all humans are like these prisoners in the cave: ignorant, trapped in the depths, looking and listening to illusions they believe are real, unaware of the limits of their perceptions. On rare occasion one individual escapes and through a long painful journey discovers true reality, which according to Plato is that goodness is the great origin of everything that exists. In Plato’s view it is not kings through birth or dictators through strength or presidents through election who are best equipped to govern society but this rare individual who has left the cave and gained knowledge of what is ultimately real. The problem is this person is almost always misunderstood because the humans in the cave have not had his experience or gained his insight. As I write these words it feels like I am telling Onisaburo’s story. He went into the cave and then had his out-of-body experiences; when he left the cave he understood the world of humans and the world of spirits. Onisaburo spent the rest of his life trying to teach the Japanese to see their illusions for what they were and to embrace the spiritual world. In the world of humans, since Onisaburo moved to his burial mound, most of us are still stuck in the cave, buried in illusions: the illusion of material wealth; the illusion of military might; the illusion of controlling destiny. The list goes on. Our illusions exclude ritual, nature, the arts, the spiritual world and other ancient ways explored in this book."