In Guy Gavriel Kay's brilliant, atmospheric novel Under Heaven, the character of Shen Tai has undertaken a strange vocation.
Under Heaven is set in a world that is a thinly-disguised Tang Dynasty China, and Shen Tai has distanced himself from the backstabbing intrigue of court life to live in a small house beside a lake in the far west of the country. The lake shore was the site of an ancient battle that left thousands dead. All his life, Shen Tai has heard the voices of the slain warriors, so once he became an adult he made the decision to spend his days unearthing their skeletons and giving them proper burials, honoring their deaths with the appropriate rituals so their spirits can finally find rest.
I was immediately reminded of Shen Tai's long and arduous task when I stumbled upon an account of the strange (real) place called Roopkund, a glacial lake in Uttarakhand State, India. It's high up in the Himalayas, at an altitude of a bit over five thousand meters:
Not, to my eye, the most scenic place in the world, but nevertheless Roopkund is a popular trekking destination for a very peculiar reason; like the lake near Shen Tai's little house, Roopkund's rocky soil contains hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of human skeletons. Some are at the surface, but more erode out of the talus after every spring snow melt. A few are visible beneath the water's surface, bringing to mind another creepy literary allusion -- Tolkien's Dead Marshes:
The legend is that the skeletons are the remains of people killed by a freak violent hailstorm in the ninth century C. E. Some versions of the story are even more specific -- that the victims were a local king, Raja Jasdhaval, his wife Rani Balampa, and their retinue, who were on their way to visit the nearby Nanda Devi Shrine when they perished in a storm. And indeed, many of the skeletons show unhealed injuries of the kind you'd expect from a blow to the top of the head by a rounded object like a large hailstone.
The story, though, gets even weirder. Recent radiocarbon and DNA analysis of the remains found that they didn't all die in a single event. Some of them died in around 800 C. E.; all of those showed typical South Asian genetic signatures. But another group, that died in around 1800, had highly varied DNA signatures -- not only South Asian, but Vietnamese, Malay, and... Greek!
Nothing from local histories seems to account for how a large group of Greeks and Southeast Asians ended up high up in the Himalayas over two centuries ago. But apparently, as odd as it seems, there were two separate hailstorms that wiped out not only a bunch of locals, but a large group of foreigners a thousand years later.
I'm not superstitious, but myself, I'm thinking visiting this lake might not be such a great idea.
Be that as it may, it's become a popular destination for aficionados of "dark tourism," the hobby of visiting places with grim or sinister histories. In fact, the government of Uttarakhand is taking measures to protect the site as a national monument, spurred by how many tourists were going there -- and bringing pieces of the skeletons home with them.
Just a wee bit disrespectful, that. I'm doubtful anyone is going to start hearing the disembodied voices of ghosts, like Shen Tai did, but fer cryin' in the sink, these are the remains of actual human beings who died painful and gruesome deaths. Go take a look, if it floats your boat, but then -- just let them rest in peace, okay? You really don't need a human skull collecting dust on your mantelpiece.
Maybe just read Kay's Under Heaven and learn a few lessons there.
Anyhow, that's our weird story for the day. A lake full of bones up in the Himalayas, the full story of which is yet to be fleshed out.
So to speak.
