Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 S E C O N D M O O N 06The boat was then towed up river by the ferrymen. They bent forward,hauling on ropes over their shoulders, and grunted their wayalong the bank until we had gone some several hundred yards. Then weset off, steered and pushed by them straining on the poles against thesurge of the current. Despite this the boat steadily moved downriver aswe crossed. The river lapped at the sides, a dirty grey, full of sedimentfrom the Himalayas. From our low perspective the river looked vast asit slipped away beneath us.The boat landed on a grey sandy beach and we had to clamber outinto the shallow water. Beyond was an empty expanse of sand heapedup and channelled, deposited there by the river in flood, with tall wavinggrassland some way beyond it. A couple of grass huts sat at the edgeof the grass, presumably homes for the ferrymen, and from there a pathwent on. Ignoring the path—and the warnings about bandits and crocodileswe had received earlier—we trudged across the sand headingdownriver and let the increasing gloom of the approaching night hideus. We sat that night by the river feeling it quietly surging by, laden withthe sediment that created the Ganges plains we were crossing.India was once, 45 million years ago, a separate land mass. Havingbroken away from Gondwanaland, much of which is now Antarctica, itsailed majestically and imperceptibly across the ocean to come upagainst the rest of Asia. India, true to its disruptive nature, is still moving,pushing north and forcing up the Himalayas as its crunched-up leadingedge. Because India is being forced under Asia, there was at first aninland sea at the base of the Himalayas, much like the Mediterraneantoday, but bigger. The erosion of the new mountains filled the sea withsediment until it became a vast river plain, known now as the Indus-Ganges plain, running from the Afghani hills in the west over three thousandmiles to the Burmese hills in the east. The Himalayan mountainsare still being eroded as they continue to be pushed up, filling with sedimentthe big rivers that flow out of them: the Ganges, Brahmaputra,and Indus with their tributaries, such as the Gandak.1 1 0