At length we took our departure and headed off down
the hill in the direction of the valley we wanted to explore. We
had some adventures descending its steep, sometimes precipitous
sides, in search of the larger palm trees which we felt must be
here somewhere. Small plants up to 4 or 5ft tall we saw by the hundred,
but no large ones. Hareesh kept on saying 'No big, no big.‘
With sketches and mimes we tried to explain that these small plants
came from larger trees, mummies and daddies in fact, and we asked
him, 'where Mummy? Where Daddy?' but he insisted, 'No Mummy, no
Daddy.‘
During a rest stop he got around to explaining why
there were no mature plants or big trees, and it was with sinking
hearts that we realized the awful truth: the young plants are cut
off at the base when they have 18" of trunk, to provide fibres
for ropes.
'All cut?' we asked, incredulous. 'All cut' confirmed
Hareesh. The stupidity of it is that no seeds are produced by the
palms before they are cut, and despite what the natives believed,
new plants did NOT spring up from the stump of the old one. One
of the 100 year old accounts we had read in the library at Kew spoke
of 'hundreds of palm trees' in this very valley. Presumably they
have been cutting them smaller and smaller ever since, and now there
are none, rather like smaller and smaller elephants being shot for
their ivory, even before they have had a chance to breed.
A further irony is that it is perfectly possible
to remove all the fibres from a mature tree without harming it at
all. We have done it a few times at the nursery: Start from the
bottom of the trunk and with a sharp knife cut through the old petiole
and then right round the trunk, just cutting through the fibre.
A sheet of fibre about 40cm square will come away, with the old
petiole in the middle. Continue onto the next one up and repeat
the process. It's time consuming but not difficult. On a tree with
a couple of metres of trunk you can get up to 30 or 40 such squares.
And of course the tree will continue to thrive and produce more
fibres for you.
We tried to explain all this to Hareesh but it was
an impossible task. Our guess is that once every year or two a gang
of villagers make an assault on the valley and cut down every palm
that has half a metre of trunk. They would all then be gathered
together and stripped back at the village. What a waste!
As time was getting on we asked Hareesh to take
us to the temple. It wasn't too bad a climb and we reached it at
about 4pm when, after a rest and some tea, Hareesh and his colleague
left us, to return to Burapi.
The solitude was wonderful then, on the roof of the world, no one
around for miles, the snow-capped Himalayan peaks on the horizon,
and only a few ravens for company. We lit a fire and cooked a surprisingly
good meal: potatoes, lentils and some packets of soup, all mixed
into a kind of stew. We watched the sun sink lower and lower and
finally dip below the horizon at precisely 5.4Opm. The Himalayan
peaks were the last things to see the sun, which shone on fewer
and fewer until Nanda Devi was the last to remain illuminated by
its now pink rays.
The temperature drops quickly when the sun sets
and soon we donned jumpers and watched the new moon rise and the
stars begin to shine, until there were countless millions of pin
points of light in the sky. At 7.30 we saw the promised torch light
from the distant neighbouring summit and flashed ours back in return.
We could just hear his shouted greeting, and rang the bells and
whistled in reply. We finished our stew by torch light, then cleared
up and settled down in our sleeping bags for a good night's sleep.
I woke to the sound of the ravens. The sun was over
the horizon already, and it was time to be up. We made a cup of
tea and sorted ourselves out. On our max/min thermometer we saw
that the temperature had dropped to 8 C during the night. This was
October; it must get considerably colder in mid-winter. We left
the summit and the temple at 8.3Oam. We said goodbye to Shiva and
the ravens and decided the best way down to the valley. Then, taking
our last look at the fabulous view, descended into the forest.
Trekking on the Trachycarpus Trail
