Lakes and rivers > Articles > The Ganges

"Actually," said Dr. Nigam, dipping a toe in the water, "it is all a matter of faith."

The doctor waggled his foot in the current for a second, testing the temperature. It was very cold, and he quickly withdrew it. "Let me try and explain," he said. "When a Westerner looks at the Ganges he sees only a river. But we Hindus, we see a Goddess: something divine that comes down from heaven and brings life to our India."

The doctor gestured towards the waters at his feet: "The Goddess Ganga irrigates our fields and cleans our cities," he continued. "She quenches our thirst."

We were standing on the steps of the bathing ghats at Hardwar, the Gate of Gods. The sun had just set behind the foothills of the Himalayas and in the warm haze of the afterglow, tens of thousands of Hindus were massing on the bridges and walkways of the waterfront. They were waiting for the priests to emerge from their temples and give the river the evening blessing. But it was still not time - darkness had not yet fully fallen - and as every minute passed more and more people were converging on the riverfront.

From as far as the horizon, you could see hordes of saffron-clad holy men heading in their hundreds towards the ghats. They were walking along the dust tracks which led from the caves and ashrams of the foothills, their heavy Shiva tridents balanced over their shoulders. One or two were wobbling along on bicycles, throwing up thin wraiths of dust in their wake.

Below, on the bank of the river, small groups of newly-arrived pilgrims were busy setting up camp: laying out cloaks on the shale flats, building fires to cook their supper, filling their billy-cans to make tea. One or two- older men- were already standing in the shallows of the river, stripped to the waist. They cupped handfuls of water in their palms, and mouthing a prayer, raised their hands to the heavens. They held them high for a minute, before letting the water splash back into the current. It was a small offering to the watching Gods in gratitude for the salvation they had just bestowed on the bather, the promised reward for any believer taking a dip in the Holy River.

I asked Dr Nigam: "Do you really believe that a bathe in the Ganges can cancel out a lifetime of sin?"

He considered for a moment.

"Much of this tradition may be superstition. That goes without saying. But I certainly want my remains brought here when I die. Who knows: maybe the next time I come here it will be in a jar full of ashes."

The doctor handed me his visiting card. On it was written:

DR. M.C NIGAM M.B.B.S, M.D
PSYCHIATRIST AND SENIOR MEDICAL SUPERINTENDENT

"Look!" he said. "I am an educated fellow. But despite my education I still want my bones brought here when I die. Do you know why?"

"Tell me."

"Because the Ganges is like a mother for us. Without her we would not be here; our land would be a desert. And of all the holy places along her banks, this is one of the most sacred. It is where the Ganges emerges from the Himalayas and hits the plains, where she begins to water our fields and fertilise our crops. That is the reason all these people gather here to do the Goddess honour. And it is why, when I have departed this life, I will instruct my sons to bring my charred remains to this ghat."

"And you think that immersing your bones here will automatically result in your swift despatch to the heavens?"

Dr. Nigam grinned and wobbled his head from side to side in the Indian manner: "If there is anything to this business, advantage is there," he said. "If not- well we don't lose anything."

"But as far as bathing here now is concerned," I said. "You might well lose something- you could catch any number of illnesses: look how dirty the water is."

"We have a saying," he replied. "'It is not the water that is dirty- that is pure. No: what is dirty is the rubbish inside the river.'"

As Dr. Nigam spoke, a ripple passed through the crowd. We looked up and saw that on the far bank a line of Brahmin priests had just stepped out of the largest of the riverside temples.

"Watch!" said Dr. Nigam. "The time has come."

The Brahmins were brightly lit by the torches burning outside the temples. They were tall men, and there were twelve of them, barefoot and stripped to the waste but for their Brahminical chords which were hanging across their chests. In one hand the Chief Priest carried a burning splint; with this he described a series of great semaphore circles in the air. Behind him the other Brahmins rang temple bells and banged cymbals and hand-gongs. The priests approached the river, and the crowds parted before them. They descended the steps and the circles of flame grew larger and the banging of cymbals louder and more piercing. Quite suddenly the Chief Priest dived forward and touched the splint onto the river's smooth inky-black surface.

As he did so the attendant Brahmins put down their cymbals and raised to their lips conch shells, the sacred symbol of the River Goddess. From these conches came the drone of a primaeval fanfare. Spontaneously, the crowd began to chant: "Ganga ki Jai! Ganga ki Jai! Victory to the Goddess Ganga! Victory to the Goddess Ganga!"


"That was the arti," explained Dr. Nigam, "the ceremony of blessing the river. Now see what happens next."

As we stood, the pilgrims at the river bank began taking out boxes of matches from their pockets. Each one lit a candle and placed it in the bows of a small leaf boat, about six inches long. (Earlier I had seen hundreds of these boats for sale in the Hardwar bazaars, but had not known then what they were for).

At the waterfront the first boats had already been launched into the current; soon the entire surface of the river was ablaze with light. The current carried the candles off into the rapids, then rippling downstream towards the wide Northern plains: a moving carpet of light unrolling at speed into the darkness. We watched the spectacle in silence for almost twenty minutes.

"The pilgrims do this as a token of love for the Goddess," whispered Dr. Nigam eventually. "The Ganga serves these people in many ways. By launching these boats we do her honour. This is the old tradition of our forefathers. They told us we should honour the Ganga, should pray to it, and give it respect."

He smiled:

"These are our most ancient traditions. We should not be embarrassed about them. You see; this love of the Goddess Ganga lies at the very heart of our culture."

It was true: Indians revere their rivers like no other people on earth; and of all rivers, they exalt in particular the Holy Ganges.

This is not because of its physical size: the Ganges is neither the largest nor the longest river in the subcontinent: the Brahmapurtra and the Indus are both much bigger waterways. Yet for millennia it is the Ganges that has captured the imagination of Indians, and held it like no other geographical feature in their vast and astonishing country.

According to Hindu theology, the Ganga is the Mother Goddess of the whole Subcontinent. She is tangible, approachable and all accepting: distilled compassion in liquid form. As well as Ganga, Hindus have given the Goddess 107 other names: Daughter of the Lord of Himalaya, Cow Which Gives Much Milk, Having Beautiful Limbs, Carrying Away Fear, Making a Noise Like a Conch Shell, Eternally Pure, Destroyer of Poverty, Taking Pride in the Broken Egg of Brahma, Light Amid the Darkness of Ignorance...

Being brushed by a breeze containing even a drop of Ganges water is said to erase instantly all sins accumulated over a hundred lifetimes. In the Hindu scriptures the waters of the Ganges are likened to amtra, the nectar of immortality. According to the Agni Purana, written about 1,000 B.C, bathing in the waters of the Ganges is an experience similar to being in heaven; those afflicted with blindness and other ailments will be instantly cured and become like Gods. To die while being immersed in the Ganges results in moksha, final spiritual liberation.

For this reason, Hindus from all over India try once in their lives to visit the Ganges and bathe in her waters. But the more hardy and devout make one more effort still. Although the entire river is held to be sacred, Hindus believe that its source is of an extra special sanctity. According to Hindu cosmography the source- the Cow's Mouth which lies hidden high in the Central Himalayas, on the very borders of Tibet- is the most sacred place on earth, the axis mundi, the centre of the world. To visit it is the single most auspicious act a human being can perform.

So every summer, as the sun dries and desiccates the white-hot plains of India, a stream of pilgrims leave their farms and villages, pack their belongings into bound-up cloths, and plod their way up to Hardwar, where they bathe in the river. Most then return home. But a few, mainly sadhus (or wandering Holy Men) press on into the cool of the High Himalayas. They follow the river as it winds its way to the temple below the peak of Kedarnath, the Indian Mount Olympus, where the great God Shiva is said to sit in deep meditation. Finally, on the last leg of their journey, they take the old pilgrim's route across the mountains to Gaumukh, the Cow's Mouth.

For the Holy Men, the decision to visit the source of the Ganges is dictated by faith. My own motives were less profound: I was merely curious. Nevertheless I did have one special reason to want to see the Source for myself. For it was my wife's forbear, the Scottish artist and explorer James Baillie Fraser who, in 1815, was the first Westerner ever to penetrate to this then semi-mythical destination. I had always been gripped by Fraser's account of his epic journey and was fascinated to know how much- or little- the pilgrimage had changed in the 178 years since James had reached the source.

At the beginning of May, my wife Olivia and I left Delhi and headed North. We drove slowly through the burning plains, hitting the Ganges at Hardwar. After a night there, we headed on up into the hills, winding our way up the narrow gorge of the river valley. It was a terrifying road, narrow and precipitous, and the government had littered the way with warning signposts to try and curb the enthusiasm of the more excitable drivers. Those near Hardwar were fairly light-hearted:

NO RACE, NO RALLY,
ENJOY THE BEAUTY OF THE VALLEY.

But further on they became rather more pious and severe:

GOD IS FIRST
SAFETY IS NEXT
SPEED IS LAST.

Finally, by the time we approached the roadhead at Gauri Kund, the tone was verging on the morbid:

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER.
LIFE IS SHORT:
DO NOT MAKE IT SHORTER.

The landscape changed its character in keeping with the signposts. After Hardwar the valleys would occasionally widen into a great green opera of cultivation terraces, falling away like the tiers of a Greek amphitheatre into the convex bowl of the mountainside. After weeks in the heat and dust of the plains, we smelt for the first time the chlorophyll scent of ripe crops: terrace upon terrace of salad-green rice paddy.

But as we went on, the road rose higher and the landscape became bleaker and more rocky. Cultivation receded and was replaced by a wasteland of crushed and tortured strata: dark dragonsback peaks rising ever higher in a succession of steep inclines and saddles. Below us, the Ganges turned colour: from ash-grey at Hardwar it grew darker until, a little before our destination, it turned as black as essence of damsons.

At Gauri Kund the tarmac road finally came to an end. We spent the night there, in the bare room of a pilgrim's rest house.

Tashi, our Tibetan head porter, woke us at dawn the following morning with bad news: it was raining, and ahead of us stretched the prospect of a hard climb in the pouring wet. We got out our waterproofs and ate our breakfast in a gloomy silence. But then, in one of those astonishingly swift changes for which the Himalayas are renowned, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and sun shone brightly. When we finally set off along the old yatra (pilgrimage) route half an hour later, the air was clear and warm. A cuckoo called out across the valley.

Ahead of us rose the great white pyramid peak of Kedarnath, Shiva's sacred home.

It was a high, clear Himalayan morning, and we were corkscrewing our way up from the banks of the river, up the steep sides of a narrow, thickly wooded valley. After the rocky bleakness of the last few miles of the road to Gauri Kund, the old yatra route was a wonderful surprise. The track was soft and mossy, and it led though ferns and brackens, thickets of brambles and groves of tall Himalayan cedar trees. Small waterfalls tumbled through the deodars.

We were not alone on the road. The previous night we had seen groups of poor pilgrims- mainly villagers from Rajasthan- camping beside the temples and bazaars of Gauri Kund, warming their hands over small driftwood fires. Now, in the light of morning, their numbers seemed to have miraculously multiplied. Every half mile we would come across groups of twenty or thirty villagers straining up the steep mountain path: barefoot, bent-backed old men with grey walrus moustaches would be leading their heavily-veiled wives up the slopes; others, more pious, would be bowed in prayer before the small shrines- often no more than piles of pebbles and a calender poster of Shiva- which were strung out at intervals along the route. The richest pilgrims were carried up in wooden palanquins by tough, wiry hillmen.

I fell in with one group of villagers from Jaipur. Why had they come on this trip, I asked? Was it for a holiday?

"No," replied Ram Bihari, who turned out to be the village headman. "We have come to do darshan- to catch a glimpse of the God- in the miraculous image of Shiva in the temple at Kedarnath. Every year people from our district come here to pray and each time their prayers are answered."

"What are you personally praying for?" I asked.

"A son," replied Ram Bihari. "My wife has given birth to four daughters and still I have no heir."

"And did you never think of coming before?" I asked.

"For many years I have wanted to make this journey," he replied. "But it is expensive to travel: this pilgrimage will cost nearly three thousand rupees. But at last God has allowed me to make it here. Many members of my family have joined together to help me financially, especially my brother. He is looking after my fields while I am away. In return I will pray for him when I get to the temple."

"And visiting the temple at Kedarnath is the highlight of your pilgrimage?"

"That and bathing in the Ganga at Hardwar," said Ram Bihari. "You must take only one dip in the Ganga and every sin will be washed out."

He added: "There is no other river on earth that is like the Ganga."

A full 17 kilometres separated Kedarnath from Gauri Kund. After six hours climbing we crossed the treeline, passing over a saddle of rock onto a desolate plain of scree: a great expanse of sharp, broken stones, ground up, crushed, then left scattered by the retreating glacier. There was little vegetation and a bleak wind blew down from the snows of the high passes. Although it was May and the plains were in the grip of an inferno heat, up at this altitude it was now very cold. There were still patches of snow and ice in the hollows of the tributary valleys so that the ice patches stood out like white ribs against the black rock.

Beyond the scree we turned the side of the saddle and there, ahead of us, in a col surrounded by the white flanks of the Kedarnath peaks, stood the temple, one of the most sacred structures in India. It was in the lake behind this temple- a source of one of the tributaries of the Ganges- that Mahatma Gandhi asked for his ashes to be immersed. Here also was the Bhairava Jhamp, the cliff where for centuries pious Hindus came to commit ritual suicide; they thought that to die in so sacred a spot would automatically guarantee instant freedom from the eternal cycle of rebirth: according to early British sources, so popular was this act of self-destruction that in the early years of the nineteenth century as many as 15,000 people were believed to have jumped from the peak.

For a building raised in such a desolate and remote place, the temple was a surprisingly large edifice. It stood towering above the surrounding cluster of dharmasalas (pilgrim rest houses), ashrams and teahouses like a Gothic cathedral rising above the huts of a mediaeval village; even the grand residence of the rawal (head priest) of Kedarnath, said by Hindus to be the living embodiment of God, was dwarfed by the great shrine.

The narrow lanes leading towards the temple were full of strange, silent holy men. They were sitting on the steps or resting on the balconies of the teahouses, staring at the tired, footsore pilgrims as they trudged past. Some of the Holy Men were naked naga sadhus: the ash-smeared warrior ascetics who throughout Indian history have formed the shock-troops of Hinduism. Occasionally one or two of the braver pilgrims dared go up and give the ascetics an offering- a few coins perhaps, or a note- in return for which the holy men gave the pilgrims a peremptory blessing.

The paved main street of the village led straight up to the temple. It was outside the great west portal there that the pilgrims stood queuing as we waited to be admitted. Each of us had bought in the bazaar a tray of offerings for the deities within, and these we now clutched as, two by two, we were admitted into the interior.

Through the great doorway we emerged into a dark and cavernous ante-chamber formed by a quadrant of pillars supporting a shallow dome raised over a lifesize statue of Shiva's mount, the black bull Nandi. The walls were smoke-blackened and damp, their massiveness broken by niches full of idols. As they passed the pilgrims anointed these with ghee- clarified butter- from their offering trays. Everyone was packed tightly together, pushed forward into the backs of the devotees ahead, or else pressed against the walls. To me the cramped darkness lit only by the dim light of the smoky oil lamps was claustrophobic, even frightening, but the other pilgrims clearly found it inspirational: as they queued the pilgrims began to mouth prayers, to weep and wail, and as they moved forward the cries somehow resolved themselves into ordered chants: Jai Shri Ram! Victory to the Lord Ram! Jai Baba Kedar! Victory to the Lord of Kedarnath! Jai Shankar! Victory to the Lord Shiva!

From the first chamber the now near-hysterical crowd was pushed through a narrow doorway into an unlit passageway which led in turn into the inner sanctum. Here the priests were sitting in the window niches, further blocking out the light; it was only gradually, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, that I saw the object which the other pilgrims had come to adore: a lump of solid rock projecting from the floor in the shape of a near-perfect pyramid- the holy Kedarnath peak in miniature.

As I watched, one hysterical lady broke through a cordon of priests, climbed over a pile of offerings, and fell forward onto the stone, kissing it as if it were Shiva himself. But the pressure from the pilgrims behind me did not allow me to see what happened next. I only had time to drop my offerings- some rice, a coconut and a marigold garland- onto the waiting podium, before the pressure of the devotees behind me propelled me through the exit doorway and into the fading daylight and chill wind of the exterior.

Two days later we awoke at dawn to find our camp looking straight out over the mountains to Shiv Ling, the strange black peak that rises immediately above the Cow's Mouth. Less than one hundred kilometres now separated us from our goal.

We had pitched camp at dusk, raising the tents beside the ruins of an old pilgrims rest house on a bluff of rock named Maggu Chatti. We now were in the very middle of the Himalayas, miles from any road, and seemed to have entered a kind of Jack and the Bean Stalk world of indeterminate date, place or period. Other than the white Himalayan peaks in the distance, there was nothing to place us specifically in India, or even in Asia. The people we met were like the cast from an old faery tale: bearded woodcutters sat chatting in clearings of the forest; cowherds and shepherdesses wandered past with their flocks, shy and silent. The trees supported thick arbors of moss and lichen which hung down from their branches like long brown beards; each could have formed a suitable residence for a faun or a dryad in a Greek myth.

After weeks in the burned-out heat and dust of the North Indian plains, the flowering rhododendrons, the damp incense-smell of the leaf mould, and the sweet resinous scent of the conifers transported me straight back to my native Scotland- exactly as it had done to James Baillie Fraser nearly two hundred years previously. Passing through the same area at the same time of year, he recorded in his logbook his pleasure at finding so much that was so familiar from his childhood:

"We now bound China and Tartary and live in a climate very like Scotland," he wrote. "We can go and lie down under the oak, birch, larch, elm or gather wild strawberries and raspberries as at home... Asia was lost to our imaginations." He added: "The delight of such associations of feeling can only be understood by those who have lingered out a long term of expatriation and who anxiously desire the moment of their reunion with their native land."

But even to the dewy-eyed exile, the people and the architecture of the region were in many respects more sophisticated than those of Scotland:

"...their persons are better clad, and more decent;" wrote Fraser, "their approach more polite and unembarrassed; and their address better than that of most of the inhabitants of Scotland. Their houses, in point of construction, comfort and internal cleanliness, are beyond comparison superior to Scottish highland dwellings."

It was a measure of James Baillie Fraser's open-mindedness that he was prepared to recognise this. At a time when imperialist notions of European racial superiority were accepted by most Westerners without question, Fraser was a rare example of the free-thinker who treated all men alike, irrespective of colour, race or religion; and for this reason today he comes across as a genuinely sympathetic character. His brother William who was the East India Company's Resident at the Moghul Court in Delhi had almost turned into a Moghul himself: he spoke Persian, Sanskrit and Urdu like a Delhi citizen; he wore Indian dress, ate only vegetarian food and kept a harem of forty wives in a palace outside Delhi.

James was in the same mould. While travelling in the Himalayas he wore the native Gurkha dress and lived with his servants as if they were fellow travellers rather than employees. In this respect we, unintentionally, were behaving rather more imperiously than he: we had originally hoped to travel with a single guide and a team of pack ponies for our tents and luggage, but in the event a combination of union rules among the Himalayan porters and confused instructions from our travel agent in Delhi had led to us trekking with a retinue fit for a Moghul Prince. Our caravan was vast- muleteers and porters were in the lead; head porter, cook and guide tramped behind them in the middle; Olivia and I brought up the rear, some seventeen people and two ponies in all. What had started as a simple camping expedition had unintentionally turned itself into something approaching a military campaign.

As he trekked through the High Himalayas, Fraser made thousands of sketches of scenes, people, landscapes and buildings, many of which he later turned into lithographs. From these and his written descriptions it was astonishing to see how little the area had changed in nearly two hundred years. There had been no deforestation in these parts and the vegetation- rhododendrons, deodars, larch and birch- was identical to that in Fraser's prints. The dress of the hill peoples was unchanged: the women still pleated their saris in the same manner; the men still sported the white homespun kurta-dhoti (long shirt and waist-wrap); at higher altitudes this was still supplemented by a thick, locally-woven shawl. New temples were still being built in the traditional manner of this part of the Himalayas: made of carved wood with high pitched rooflines that recall the flying eves of Chinese pagodas, their doors are still carved to a cusped Mughlai design, while the squat spires are still surmounted with a flat canopy decorated with a fringe of wooden bobbins.

Not everything had been frozen in time. The elaborate towers and wooden forts that dot the hilltops on Fraser's prints have either fallen into decay or been deliberately demolished; no one now carries the broad scimitars and rhino-hide shields that the hill-warriors of Fraser's day obviously took such pride in. But perhaps the biggest change was in the number of pilgrims walking the yatra route.

In the early nineteenth century the Garwhal hills were not only remote and physically challenging: they were a dangerous border region in which the British and the Gurkhas of Katmandu vied for power in a series of almost daily skirmishes. For those who did not have access to a bodyguard (as Fraser did) travelling in these hills must have seemed an alternative option to the ritual suicide at Kedarnath. As a result very few attempted the pilgrimage, something which struck Fraser:

"The source of the most sacred branch of the Ganges ought to hold, and does bear, the first rank among the holy places [of Hinduism]," he wrote in his published account of his expedition. "Here Mahadeo [Shiva] sits enthroned in clouds and mist amid rocks that defy the approach of living things, and snows that make the desolation more awful. Gods, goddesses, and saints here continually adore him at mysterious distance, and you traverse their familiar haunts. But though this be the most sacred, this is not the most frequented shrine, access to it being in every way much more difficult; consequently pilgrims flock [elsewhere] appalled at the remoteness and danger..."

Two hundred years later it was still true that few secular pilgrims attempted to trek along the rutted cobbles of the old yatra route from Kedarnath to Gaumukh. But sadhus- India's wandering holy men- now filled the road in dazzling profusion. As we wandered past the knee-high columbines, buttercups, cowslips and wild strawberries of the high-altitude pastures, we passed a constant stream of lean, dark, wiry men with matted, dreadlocked hair and thick beards leaping up the track whence we had come, as fit and as hardy as mountain goats, even though many were weighed down by heavy metal tridents, the outward sign of their inward dedication to Lord Shiva. Some of the Holy Men travelled in groups of two or three; other travelled alone and many of these appeared to be locked in deep meditation as they walked.

I had always assumed that most of the Holy Men I had seen in India were from traditional village backgrounds and were motivated by a blind and simple faith. But my assumptions were shattered when, on the morning after I left Maggu Chatti, I fell in with Ajay Kumar Jha, an orange-robed wanderer who was heading in the same direction as myself. When I had hailed Ajay he had replied in fluent English, and as soon as we began talking it became apparent that, though he looked indistinguishable from any of the other sadhus I had seen, he was in fact highly educated and from a prosperous middle class background.

I had started earlier than the rest of our caravan and Ajay and I walked together along the steep ridge of a mountain, alone but for the great birds of prey circling the thermals below us. I asked him to tell me his story and after some initial hesitation, he consented:

"I have been a sanyasi [wanderer] only for two and a half years," he said. "Before that I was the sales manager with Kelvinator, a Bombay consumer electricals company. I had done my MBA at Patna University and was considered a high flyer by my employers. But one day I just decided I could not spend the rest of my life marketing fans and fridges. So I just left. I wrote a letter to my boss and to my parents, gave away my belongings to the poor, and took a train to Benares. There I threw away my old suit, bought these robes and found a guru."

"Have you never regretted what you did?" I asked.

"It was a very sudden decision," replied Ajay. "But I have never regretted it for a minute, even when I have not eaten for several days and am at my most hungry."

"But how did you adjust to such a colossal change in your life?" I asked.

"Of course at first it was very difficult," he said. "But then everything worthwhile in life takes time. I was used to all the comforts: my father was a politician and a very rich man- by the standards of our country, at least. But I never wanted to live a worldly life like him. Now for the first time I have found peace."

We had now arrived at the top of the ridge and the land fell steeply on every side. Ajay gestured out over the forests and pastures laid out at our feet, a hundred shades of green framed by the blinding white of the distant snow peaks:

" When you walk in the hills your mind becomes clear," he said. "All your worries disappear. Look! I carry only a blanket and a water bottle. I have no possessions, so I have no worries."

He smiled: "Once you learn to restrain your desires," he said, "anything becomes possible."

That night, after we pitched our camp in the valley bottom near the village of Guttu, I wandered over to the Dharmasala where Ajay was staying, a simple mud-walled building beside the old, clematis-hung village temple. With me I brought some food- rice and a few vegetarian curries in a stack of tin tiffin bowls. Ajay accepted the gift and offered me the bhang (hashish) pipe that he and another sadhu were smoking.

He said: "To walk every day is a good life. But to walk in the Himalayas thinking of God: that is the best life. Men feel good when they live like this."

Hindus maintain that for many millions of years before the Ganga began flowing on the earth, it watered the gardens of the heavens. How the great Goddess was persuaded to leave the Upper World and come down to earth is the subject of one of India's most famous myths.

In ancient India there was a custom that a king who wished to expand his territories would perform a ceremony at the beginning of a year, then release a horse to wander where it would. At the end of the year the king would claim as his own any land that the horse had passed through.

One king who wished to become Chakravartin (or World Conqueror) was the wise and just King Sagara. He performed the correct ceremonies and released the horse, but by the end of the year the horse had wandered so far that the Gods became worried that Sagara would soon be able to challenge even their authority. So they hid Sagara's horse in the hermitage of a holy man named Rishi Kapila. Rishi Kapila lived by the sea and was famous for his bad temper.

When King Sagara realised that his horse had been stolen he sent out his 60,000 sons to look for it. For years they searched ever bare mountain and every jungly valley- indeed they even searched the underworld- until eventually they saw the horse sheltering in Rishi Kapila's hermitage. They rushed up, shouting insults at the sage who was then deep in meditation. Furious at having been broken out of his revery, he burned to dust all 60,000 of Sagara's sons with the fire of his angry gaze.

For generations, Sagara's family begged the Gods to allow the 60,000 sons of the King into heaven, but as they had insulted a great holy man the Gods refused their request, and great dishonour fell upon the family. Eventually, one of Sagara's descendants, King Bhagiratha, became so troubled by the fate of his cousins that he gave up the kingdom and retired to the Himalayas where for many years he performed terrible austerities to try and make up for the sins of his forbears. The Gods were pleased; and the Goddess Ganga eventually consented to come down from the heavens to purify the ashes of the 60,000 sons and thus enable them to attain heaven. To prevent Ganga from shattering the world with the force of her fall, Shiva agreed to absorb the shock in the matted locks of his hair. Which is why today the river flows out from Shiva's locks- the Himalayas- and winds its way cross the plains down to the sea, where the ashes of the sons of King Sagara lay scattered at the site of Rishi Kapila's hermitage.

The exact place where the Ganga is said to have fallen to earth is marked today by the great temple of Gangotri. When the temple was first built, perhaps two thousand years ago, Gangotri was actually the source of the Ganges. But today the glacier which feeds the river has retreated 20 kilometres up the valley, and the Cow's Mouth is now a day and a half's trek up from the temple. After a night camped the shores of the Ganges a little downstream from Gangotri, we set off on the final led of the trip to the glacial source of the holy river.

Although it was by no means the steepest climb of the trek, it was still one of the most strenuous. We were now very high- over 12,000 feet- and the air was now noticeably thinner. We were all tired: both Olivia and I had blisters, Tashi, the elderly head porter, had caught a fever, while several of his men had chaff marks where the ropes securing their loads had rubbed their skin red. Moreover the route to the Cow's Mouth seemed to be in some kind of rain shadow: it was very dry, and there was no vegetation.

Ahead rose the weird black pyramid of Shiv Ling. Around us the hot sun reflected off the white rocks and the white dust and the dazzling white snow of the enclosing peaks; there was no green and no shade. It was a suggestively supernatural landscape and it was easy to see how more pious pilgrims could believe that they were travelling through the roots of Lord Shiva's matted locks, walking ever closer to the crossing place between heaven and earth.

By lunch time, exhausted, we halted by a small hut near the river. Going down to the bank to wash my hands before eating, I stumbled across the hut's inhabitant. He was an old sadhu and he was sitting on a rock with his back to me. Only when I drew closer did I realise what he was doing. He was talking to the river, chatting with the Goddess, quite seriously addressing her as if she was his sister, wife, mother or queen, effortlessly making the crossing from mythical metaphor- the idea of the river as Goddess- to its reality: actually conversing with the river as if it was listening, nodding its head to him as it passed rippling through the rapids. I withdrew quietly without disturbing the holy man, but half an hour later, just as we were shouldering our packs to leave, he came up and dropped a few sprigs of a feathery herb into my hand.

"Take this," he said in English. "You look very tired. Rub this herb between your hands and sniff it and you will find your strength return."

I did what he said and sure enough, whether I imagined it or not, I did suddenly feel stronger and fitter. Olivia sniffed the mysterious herb too, and reported the same sudden boost to her energy.

The following morning, the final day of our trek, we rose at dawn to find a thin mist covering the ground. The porters struck camp and headed back down the valley towards Gangotri. But with Tashi acting as our guide, Olivia and I drew on our boots for the last time and headed on up the pilgrim's path for the final four kilometres of our quest.

As we drew close to the source, we found ourselves surrounded by the caves and wattle huts of innumerable holy men; they seemed to rear out of the mist, dotting the landscape wherever we looked. Out of these huts ghostly silhouettes were emerging, all heading out in the same direction as ourselves. One sadhu a little ahead of us was followed by a small pet monkey who leapt nimbly from rock to rock after his master.

The path wound its way to a summit; the route being marked by a chain of cairns, on the highest of which a trident had been placed so that its silhouette was visible from far below. We passed the trident, crossed over the hill and tumbled down a moraine the far side, our feet slipping on the loose rock. We passed between two boulders at the bottom and emerged onto what appeared to be a kind of pebble shore.

We focused our eyes through the mist. As we looked, indistinct shapes slowly resolved themselves into solid objects, revealing a sight so strange that it seemed at first as of we had stumbled onto a film set rather than a natural panorama. Ahead, rising perhaps 400 metres into the air, was a solid wall; at first we took it to be rock, but gradually it became clear that it was in fact a solid wall of ice. The haze hung like a sheet just above the pointed peak of this ice wall; another thinner line of haze hung over the water at its base, so that the whole wall appeared somehow disembodied by the vapour, suspended, as it were, between two clouds.

Slowly the sun began to rise over the ridges of the surrounding mountains and over the following twenty minutes as the mist slowly evaporated, so the sight became stranger still: it became clear that the Ganges flowed directly out of the glacier, emerging not- as most rivers do- as a small stream which gradually gained volume as it flowed seaward, but emerging from the ice as a fully-formed river, a wide grey swathe of snowmelt, thirty metres across, flowing straight out of the solid ice wall.

As we drew closer the old name for the source- the Cow's Mouth- suddenly made sense: the wall was indeed curved into a convex parabola, arching inwards and downwards just like the inside of an enormous upper jaw. This then was the source, the holiest place of Hinduism. No man-made shrine or structure broke the solitude; no priest tried to intercede between God and man: the ice wall was the shrine and all around us holy men were mouthing mantras and prayers directly to it. As we watched one sadhu, pulled off his shoes, stripped off his clothes and jumped into the freezing water, standing there stark naked amid the bobbing ice floes, eyes shut, hands cupped in prayer.

Two hundred years earlier, at the end of a much more difficult and perilous journey, James Baillie Fraser had stood watching the same sight. Always a modest man, he did not trumpet his feet, but his journal records the quiet sense of achievement he felt at achieving his goal:

"We were now in the centre of the stupendous Himala," he wrote, "the loftiest and perhaps the most rugged range of mountains in the world. We were at the acknowledged source of that most noble river, equally an object of veneration and a source of fertility, plenty and opulence to Hindustan; and we had now reached the holiest shrine of Hindoo worship which these holy hills contain. These are surely striking considerations, combining with the solemn grandeur of the place to move the feelings strongly.

"The fortuitous circumstance of being the first European to ever penetrate to this spot was no matter of boast, for no great danger had been braved, no extraordinary fatigues undergone: the road is now open to any other who chooses to attempt it, but it was a matter of some satisfaction to myself..."

The sun was now fully risen and the mist had almost entirely cleared. Soon it would be hot. It was time to head back. At the two great boulders which form the natural gateway to the Cows Mouth, I paused for a last look. The naked sadhu was still praying waste-high amid the ice floes of the freezing water; many other holy men were standing as if transfixed on the bank. Like James Baillie Fraser I too felt a tinge of satisfaction at having finally reached this most remote of places; and like him I felt somehow sure that however far I travelled on this globe, I would never again see so strange and otherworldly a place.

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