O Juanita I Call Your Name

The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat.

Allman Bros. w/ Jerry Garcia: Mountain Jam...NYE 1973

When the climbers in 1953
planted their flags
on the highest mountain,
they set them in snow
over the skeletons of creatures
that had lived in a warm clear ocean
that India, moving north, blanked out.
Possibly as much as 20,000 feet
below the sea floor,
the skeletal remains had turned into rock.
This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth.

If by some fiat,
I had to restrict
all this writing
to one sentence;
this is the one
I would choose:
the summit of Mount Everest
is marine limestone.


-- John McPhee
Annals of the Former World