In the Valley of Dhunge Dhara

The Kathmandu Valley was once a lake. Ancient stories tell us the valley was created when the Boddhisattva Manjushree came to worship a divine lotus planted in the lake long before by a messenger of the as yet unborn Buddha. Manjushree could not reach the lotus because of the deep waters, so with a sword he smote the rocks in a narrow gorge and drained the lake. Geological evidence supports the mythic lake that Manjushree is said to have emptied. The Kathmandu Valley is a basin at an altitude of approximately 4,000 feet between the lower and the middle hills of the Himalaya. As the Himalaya were shoved north into the Tibetan plateau, many valleys were created between the folds of the hills. If a landslide were to block the main exit from such a valley, it might begin to fill up with water from rivers and springs. Around two million years ago, it seems a large lake formed in this fashion in the Kathmandu Valley’s bowl of wooded hillsides. Long after, perhaps because of a big earthquake, or a series of jolts over many years, a channel opened a gorge at the west end of the valley. What would later be called the Bagmati River spilled out, finding its way down to what is now the Ganga and leaving the valley dry by around 10,000 years ago. There were, as far as we know, no people living in the path of any such Bagmati flood, so none were harmed. Instead, the draining of the valley led to the superb conditions the earliest settlers would eventually exploit: terraces and knolls, rich soil, springs, rivers, and shallow aquifers. It is enticing to imagine that the myth captures some distant human memory of the events that helped to create this perfect valley. We know these hills and mountains have been a crossroads for restless mankind since before any recorded history. Perhaps even for thousands of years before the oldest inscriptions give us hints about settlements and rulers in the valley, people were peacefully going about their business here.