Five Hundred Dead at 5,020 Metres: The Bone Lake of the Himalaya
In the last days of summer the ice on Roopkund draws back from the shore, and the bones come out.
They lie in the shallows and across the scree around the rim: skulls, ribs, whole limbs still jointed, and among them wooden shafts, iron spearheads, scraps of leather and rings. The lake is small, roughly forty metres across in most descriptions and shallow enough to wade, set in a bowl of grey rock at 5,020 metres in the Indian Himalaya, between the peaks of Trishul and Nanda Ghunti. There is no village within two days of walking. There is no shelter, no firewood, and nothing that grows above knee height. For eleven months of the year the pool is frozen solid and the dead are invisible. Then the melt comes, and anyone who climbs the last ridge can stand at the water's edge and look down at several hundred people.
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