At the checkout counter of my grocer is an attractive magazine for
New Age shoppers entitled Shambhala Sun. This evocative name refers
to the mythical mountain realm of the Tibetan Buddhists, a hidden
place symbolizing purity, truth and wisdom. It is also what James
Hilton had in mind when he created the land of Shangri-La in his 1933
novel, Lost Horizons. As it happens, just last summer I was camping
on the Kazakstan-Russian border in the shadow of Beluka, a
16,600-foot peak that local people have long associated with
Shambhala. It is indeed an awesome sight, altogether worthy of the
symbolic role assigned to it by Buddhists and assorted mystics such
as Henry Wallace's friend, the Russian visionary painter Nikolai
Roerich. But the deep valleys of the Altai Mountain range that
surround Beluka are more notable for another characteristic: the
peoples who inhabit them are desperately poor and increasingly
frustrated over their circumstances.
For modern urbanites, the world's high mountain zones are symbols of
unspoiled nature and timeless truths that, we often presume, somehow
escape the lowland denizens of the global marketplace. They are
places depicted on gorgeous calendars, locales for "trekking"
(formerly known as hiking) and other forms of eco-tourism. But for
the people who actually live in them they are all too often places of
neglect or persecution, economic and cultural breakdown, and
spiraling violence. Indeed, a disproportionate number of the world's
bloodiest zones of conflict today are in mountain regions.
