Abstract
Whenever I fly from Chengdu in Sichuan westward to Lhasa, I take a seat on the port side of the plane. Below is an endless series of valleys bordered by forested slopes and sharp ridges broken by cliffs. Suddenly a huge ice massif, a glowing sentinel at the eastern edge of the Himalaya, comes into view. On some flights only the summit of Namche Barwa pierces a solid layer of cloud; on others billows of cloud roil around the massif, leaving gaps in which I glimpse a chaos of canyons. A second high peak, Gyali Peri, projects skyward just to the west, about 250 miles short of Lhasa. The Yarlung Tsangpo flows between the two in a canyon so deep that the river is invisible from the plane.
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© 2012 George B. Schaller
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Schaller, G.B. (2012). Two Mountains and a River. In: Tibet Wild. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-232-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-232-7_10
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