Water Treasures of the Himalayas

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A billion lives depend on the waters of the Himalayas; sixty million live in this mountain range, while the rest live in its foothills, on the plains of the Indian subcontinent. For them, the Himalayas are a providential water tower. Despite their astonishing diversity, all these peoples share the common belief that this is a "Sacred Land", and this mountain range is, above all, the "Abode of Snow" where pure water springs, rivers gush and lakes are crystal-clear.
Born from the eternal snows, in the most mystical land on earth, water perfectly embodies the essence of purity. In the Himalayas, water inspires a growing number of people even while it continues to frighten them. It can at times unite them and at other times divide them, provide for them and bring death. In this mosaic of peoples, languages, religions and lands, it plays a vital part in the geographical distribution of the various ethnic groups, their social organization and the way they see themselves.
This volume offers a complete view of the great Himalayan mountain range by taking an itinerary which follows the water and contrasts the two flanks of this formidable climatic barrier. By doing so, it stresses both the importance of this water tower of Asia, which provides for a thousand million people, and the scope of the current economic and ecologic issues which are at stake. It also offers an anthropological insight into the various bonds formed between man and water in the Himalayas

Serge Verliat is a professor of geography in Reunion Island, France, and author of several research papers on the Himalayas since 1980. He has a PhD in geography and a post-graduate diploma in anthropology. Verliat is fluent in Nepali. He has made several documentaries and films, including Living in the Himalayas (2004) and The Himalayas: Confidences of Water (2011).
Jean Philippe, a photographer, has exhibited his black and white silver prints at the Museum of Man in Paris as part of the exhibition Reunion Island: Two Viewpoints' in 1995. He is also the author of two specialized works on the Cilaos Cirque in Reunion Island. His photographs also appear in the book The Furnace: The Volcano of Reunion Island.

White peaks, spearing the sky and shrouded in snow, look broodingly down over the millions living in the folds and at the foothills. We are in the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world, givers of water and life. Water, pure and crystal clear, is the gift of these mountains to those who live there.
The Sanskrit word Himalaya means Abode of Snow When the sun shines the snow melts, the landscape is magically transformed by springs, gushing rivers and glittering lakes The people in the mountains and at the foothills may be astonishingly diverse, but all are bound by a common belief that this is Sacred Land The ice, turning into stalagmites that look like eternal flames, seems to bear witness to the divine forces that dwell here. Each mountain is a god, the entire universe is a temple.
So striking is the beauty of the place, so pure the air and radiant the light, it is no wonder that the clear water seems to embody the very essence of purity. It comes as free gift, bearing life and joy, a sign of the benevolence of the gods.
One coming from the West sees it quite differently. The first glimpse is from the air, and as the aircraft sweeps the sky and we look down, the great range appears as an effective barrier between two worlds. South of the range lies the green and wooded Indian flank receiving the full force of the monsoon rains. To the north, behind the highest peaks, the eye picks out the ochre deserts of the Tibetan plateau where little rain falls.
From the air the Himalayas look like, and indeed are, an impressive water tower, from which those springs and rivers flow. We may be in a sub-tropical region of the world, but more than 15,000 glaciers in these mountains feed into as many rivulets, which in turn merge into three mighty rivers, the largest in Asia. The Indus waters the dries western part of the range, the Ganges collects all the waters from the southern slopes that tower over the vast Indian plains, and the great Brahmaputra is formed by the waters from the northern slopes, above which the Tibetan plateaus lie under the blue skies at a height of 4000 feet.
The daily volume of fresh water flowing from the Himalayas would, we are told, fill an enormous tank one kilometre wide, six kilometres long and one kilometre high If one is thinking of tanker trucks, this is roughly equivalent to a convoy from the Earth to the Moon and back. The Himalayas are truly the impressive Water Tower of Asia'.
This uninterrupted series of valleys and crests makes one wonder where exactly the beginning and the end of the Himalayas might be. It seems arbitrary to mark boundaries to a mountain range The issue can be debated but it seems reasonable to say that it stretches, both geologically and ecologically, from the Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountains in the west, to the Indo-Burmese ranges of South-East Asia in the east. For the sake of convenience, geographers use the major gaps in the landscape that comprise the valleys of the greatest rivers the Indus to the west and the Brahmaputra to the east. Thus defined, the Himalayas extend over 2700 km.