Two Mountains and a River

Abstract

Whenever I fly from Chengdu in Sichuan westward to Lhasa, I take a seat on the port side of the plane. Below is an endless series of valleys bordered by forested slopes and sharp ridges broken by cliffs. Suddenly a huge ice massif, a glowing sentinel at the eastern edge of the Himalaya, comes into view. On some flights only the summit of Namche Barwa pierces a solid layer of cloud; on others billows of cloud roil around the massif, leaving gaps in which I glimpse a chaos of canyons. A second high peak, Gyali Peri, projects skyward just to the west, about 250 miles short of Lhasa. The Yarlung Tsangpo flows between the two in a canyon so deep that the river is invisible from the plane.