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Outside Magazine February 2003

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The Coldest War (Cont.)

IT TOOK US FOUR DAYS to reach Kumar Base, which sits at a point where two other glaciers come crashing in. From the northeast, toward China, the icefall from Teram Shehr cuts a broad swath across the east side of the Siachen. From the southwest, toward Pakistan, the Lolofond Glacier descends from Bilafond La in a gentle roll. The base floats above the surface like an ice ship. At the bow and stern are two platforms that serve as helicopter pads. In the middle is a warren of dirty parachute tents and fiberglass huts connected by a lane of wooden pallets. Running down the sides are streams of refuse and thin brown smears of frozen feces. In the distance, you can see other camps rising raggedly out of the moraine, each looking like it has just been through a ruinous siege. All of these are connected to Kumar by a four-inch-thick black plastic umbilical cord known as the K2 pipeline, which snakes up the center of the glacier. Once or twice a month, the pipe bursts. The breach is usually repaired within a few hours, but a big hole can result in as much as 7,000 liters of kerosene spewing onto the ice and draining into the crevasses.

From the top of Kumar, you have a

The trash mountains at Kumar base are bizarre enough by day, but at night the scene is truly ghastly—a frozen necropolis, a golgotha of ice haunted by the spirits of the dead.

splendid view of the Siachen's white skin, the white peaks that wall it in, and a dense ring of odd white pillars stretching out from every side of the base. These pillars are the remains of 19 years of parachute supply drops. Over time, as the ice has melted and refrozen, they have risen about five feet above the surface. Most appear to have a head, shoulders, and a torso. There are thousands of them, and from above they look disturbingly human.

This scene is bizarre enough by day, but at night it becomes truly ghastly: a frozen necropolis of trash, a Golgotha of ice haunted by the spirits of the dead. When the wind subsides and the moon rises and you gaze out at the cordon of pillars shrouded in the pleated folds of the parachutes, it looks like you've been encircled by an army of ghouls, as if all the soldiers slain in these mountains have risen from their icy graves and gathered before Kumar to stand in mute judgment of what they have done to one another, and to the balance of nature. "This is the most depraved thing I've ever seen," Teru whispered one night. "I don't know if this is war. But it's definitely hell."

There is not much cause for optimism with regard to the future of this hell. Since 1986, India and Pakistan have sat down seven times to hammer out some kind of solution to the Siachen war. Although they've come tantalizingly close to an agreement more than once, the talks have broken down each time, and the Kargil incursion of 1999 drove a stake through the heart of any rapprochement for the foreseeable future. What's worse—as if this situation could possibly get any worse—an end to hostilities on the glacier is inextricably tied to perhaps the toughest geopolitical mess of all: achieving peace in Kashmir.

Meanwhile, the corrosive detritus of war keeps metastasizing. The Indian army has an impressive scheme to try to clean the glacier by building a gargantuan aerial cableway that will cart supplies up and carry waste down. And Harish Kapadia, a well-known Indian mountaineer, is trying to galvanize a grassroots campaign to turn the region into an "international peace park" that Pakistan and India would share. But that seems highly unlikely. As Colonel Kumar told me back in New Delhi: "There's no sharing to be done. The Siachen belongs to us."

On our final evening at Kumar Base, I sat down on a rock to watch as a storm moved in over the Saltoro. The clouds were scudding along the tops of the peaks, and the sky was bruised a deep purple. I turned to the north. Somewhere up there, over on the other side of Bilafond La, the Pakistani soldiers at Tabish were gearing up to endure another night at their post. I looked south. Farther down the glacier, the men at Sher were undoubtedly doing the same. The storm would probably clobber both posts, but for the moment, the Siachen front was very still.

And then something strange happened. The wasteland disappeared and I saw only the great peaks, the great bowl of dark sky, the great ice serpent of the glacier. The sadness and despair of our journey fell away and left only desire: the desire to strike off across the glacier toward Bilafond La and climb its ridgeline. The desire to ski down the gentle slope of the Lolofond Glacier, as Colonel Kumar had done during that magical summer of 1981. The desire to go marching off toward Indira Col, to posthole up its sugary flanks and gaze into the white wastes of China. Like Yaseen, I wanted to come here without restrictions and without confinements; to set up a base camp with some friends; to scale every peak that struck my fancy, for as long as it took me to swallow them all or be swallowed up by them.

I wanted to do all these things, and I knew that they were all impossible. The most that was possible—and this was a lot, I realized—was to feel the pull of these mountains, a pull that is powerful enough to transcend the war and the squalor and the shame of everything else that has happened here. If you go to the Siachen, the very best you can hope for is to know the meaning of kashish.

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