“At last they entered a different world within a world – a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of the mere rubble and refuse from the knees of the mountains… This place is no place for man.”

It is a hard place for man, this high-altitude valley described so starkly by Rudyard Kipling in his classic novel Kim over a century ago. Nudging up against India’s border with Tibet, Spiti Valley has a minimum height of 3,000m, and its needle peaks thread the few clouds that dare to pass into their rain shadow at heights around 6,000m. Everything of the human condition is dwarfed by the dimensions of this place, stripped as it of vegetation to reveal a rippled and muted color chart. It is regarded as one of the great geological museums of the world. Its perfect forms cover every rocky epoch since the pre-Cambrian period, ranging in wild numbers from 4,500 million years ago, to the time when worms and jellied animals began to emerge merely 543 million years ago; a vast stretch covering seven-eighths of the world’s history.

Sitting as it does on a delicate border, an area often referred to as the Tibetan Frontierlands, it became a disputed region and was closed down to the outside world for 40 years. Then, in the early 1990s, the closure was eased, and if you were able to wangle a visa it was possible to enter the valley with a minimum group of five. I managed to persuade four friends to take the tentative journey, and so we were one of the first groups back into the valley in 1992.

Over the Edge

We faced a brutal journey climbing in, our lungs rattling over the highest pass, Pin-Parbati, at about 16,000ft. We descended, beaten down by snow blindness and cracked skin, and found ourselves in the upper reaches of a world stripped bare of all that was recognizable. Rearing rock faces descended to scree fields and down to a turquoise ribbon of water, the Pin, one of the main tributaries of the Spiti River. And as we came down from the outer limits we found white-painted villages, limpet-clinging to the valley walls, their tiny patchworks of subsistence farming clawed back in terraces from the mountainsides.

We were met by a high altitude people, the faces of even the young already carved with lines by the dry winds and lack of moisture in the air, broad Mongolian brows and narrow, dark eyes squeezed tight against either the glare of the sun, or the bite of the wind. They greeted us with amazement, most of them having never seen outsiders. They insisted that we went to their homes and that we join them for tsampa, a leaden mix of boiled barley and tea. Cup after cup of butter tea was pressed on us, a mixture almost impossible not to choke on unless you throw out an idea of it being a relation of tea, and think of it more as salty, greasy soup. A convergence of heart-melting kindness and bitter reality, perhaps nothing could have epitomized our hosts better than this.

The Silence of Snow

There has always been a mythical quality to Spiti, a veil of thin-aired secrecy that hangs over it. The tribal areas around Kinnaur and Lahual practice polyandry, but in order to ensure the survival of tiny landholdings wrested back from sheer mountain faces Spiti evolved its own system of primogeniture. The eldest son inherits the land, the eldest daughter is given all her mother’s jewelry, and any other children are expected to become Buddhist monks or nuns. Farming methods remained unchanged and the monasteries and nunneries are full.