Chinese features, and paler ones with almond and green eyes, like
Afghans. They’re all Pakistanis, but show traits of the conquerors and
rulers of these lands, Mongols from the north, Afghans from the west,
Sikhs and Moghuls from the south. This road is the only way over land
to get to Skardu and its associated villages, so there are many trucks. Our
rest site is a rest stop for them too. Men from the village walk around
soliciting oil changes. If the driver consents, they crawl underneath the
engine, and open a valve; black oil runs onto the sand. The valve is closed,
and new oil added. The used oil stands in puddles in the sand, dozens of
shiny black lakes, eventually adding a glistening sheen to the Indus raging
below. The lack of environmental conscience depresses me.
The valley narrows, the road climbs and falls, and when opposing
traffic comes, we have to pull off to let them pass, slamming on the
brakes if someone cuts a corner around a promontory. The road goes
down, seemingly directed straight into the furious Indus and its deafen-
ing concert of raging waters. From my position in the car, I cannot see
sky. The mountains are too high, the valley too narrow. It is dark around
me. We are near the bottom of the valley. I feel panic: this is how I imag-
ine the River Styx opening into the underworld.
Skardu is in a pleasant valley, and as close to the end of the world as
one may go. One road goes north from it, ending at the foot of K2.
Another road goes east to the closed border with India. The location of
the border is disputed, so the practical edge of Pakistan is the Line of
Control, a cease-fire line from one of its wars with India, monitored by
United Nations observers.
The fieldwork is mostly a bust. Roads are eroded away. It is impos-
sible to cover much terrain on day trips, and hiking to locations seen on
a map requires mountaineering skills, which I lack. The army stops us
and sends us back from sensitive areas. In spite of that, I learn about the
mountains and their geology, and enjoy the scenery and the people. As
far as fossils go, this field season will have to be carried by a few days
that we will spend down in the Kala Chitta Hills, down on the hot Indus
Plain. We want to revisit the Ambulocetus locality and dig deeper, get-
ting the rest of our prized skeleton, if there is anything still buried. As
we drive the Karakorum Highway back toward the plains, the high
When the Mountains Grew | 75
mountains reinforce the lessons they taught me about plate tectonics. I
also think about the first geological explorers of this area, people who
provided the foundations for the work I am doing here, but who had no
idea about plate tectonics.
kidnapping in the hills
Long before plate tectonics was a generally accepted way to think about
the world, the first South Asian fossils relevant to the origin of whales
were collected by T. G. B. Davies in the Kala Chittas. At the time, the
area was part of British India and Davies was a geological surveyor for
the Attock Oil Company. He was sent there to investigate reports of oil
seeps, places where oil was exuded by rocks. In 1935, Davies drew a
geological map to determine whether oil exploration was feasible. While
mapping in the field, Davies also collected some fossils, and these even-
tually ended up on the desk of a vertebrate paleontologist at the British
Museum of Natural History in London, Guy Pilgrim, who had been the
paleontologist for the Geological Survey of India.3 In 1938, with World
War II looming, Richard Dehm, a professor from Munich, Germany,
visited Pilgrim to see his collection of Indian Miocene fossils (thirty-five
million years and younger), with the intention of setting off to British
India and collecting some himself.
I visited Dehm in the mid-1990s, when he lived in a retirement home
in Munich. Dehm was excited to tell his story, knowing that I was now
working in the area where he collected half a century earlier. On his visit
to London, Pilgrim had also shown him Davies’s collection of Eocene
fossils from the Kala Chitta Hills. Pilgrim encouraged Dehm to go there
too. Dehm set off on a long journey in 1939, sailing past the Cape of
Good Hope, collecting in many places in India, and then going on to
Australia. He was in Australia when the war caught up with him. Being
German, he was jailed, but eventually he was released and he traveled
back to Germany. His fossils were confiscated by the French, and
remained on the ship he had been traveling with, moored in a French
port, with the frontlines of the war moving across France. Eventually,
the Germans conquered France’s west coast, and found the ship, and
Dehm was reunited with his fossils. Dehm was not a Nazi. As a matter
of fact, the Nazis disliked him and moved him from his important
museum position in Munich, the Bavarian and Nazi heartland, to the
small provincial outpost of Strasbourg, freshly conquered from the
French. There he spent the duration of the war.
76 | Chapter 5
Dehm returned to Munich after the war and made plans to go back
to British India to collect more fossils. The war had not only left Europe
scarred; British India was broken up into Hindu-dominated India and
Muslim Pakistan in 1947. The Kala Chitta Hills were now in Pakistan,
and Dehm visited his old sites in this young country in 1955. His collec-
tion grew, and he published it in 1958.4 Dehm had found a small jaw
fragment with two teeth. It belonged to a whale; however, he was not
aware of this. No whales older than Basilosaurus were known, and
Dehm’s whale was too different and too fragmentary for recognition.
He did make a remarkable inference, though, guessing a diet that befit-
ted a cetacean for the animal. He called the animal Ichthyolestes; ich-
thus means fish in Greek, and lestes means robber. It was the first Indo-
Pakistani whale to be named, and remains one of the oldest whales in
the world. The specimen came from rocks a few hundred yards from the
ones that yielded a jaw which Robert West, thirty years later, id
entified
as a whale.5 Dehm marked his site on a hand-colored copy of the map
that Davies had made. He gave me his map when he heard I was work-
ing there.
I think of Dehm and West as we drive toward Attock. In 1987, I flew
to a conference of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Tucson,
Arizona. On the plane, I happened to sit next to West. I told him that I
was interested in working in the Eocene of Pakistan, and asked him
whether he minded if I were to visit his old sites. There is an unwritten
rule, observed by many paleontologists but also frequently broken, that
one does not visit localities where someone else is working without their
permission. West had not worked those sites for years, but I wanted to
make sure. Graciously, he said I should go ahead and that he had no
claims to those areas.
We leave the Himalayas and enter the frying pan that the plains of
Punjab are. Temperatures are in the low 100s, and the humidity is high.
We stay at a railroad guesthouse in Attock, next to the tracks and the
station. The town is scorched, dusty, and miserable; the smell of rotting
garbage and diesel fuel fills the air. But the guesthouse has a courtyard
that smells sweet, it is full of vivid colors, there are flowers everywhere.
A caretaker is employed at the guesthouse full-time, and his main job is
watering this visual paradise. But it does not diminish the heat. I wear
sunglasses and a hat, but it still gives me a headache, and the sweating
dehydrates me. The electric service is out. Arif and I share a room, and
the first thing he does is position his bed in the dead center of the room.
Odd, it appears to me, as I leave my bed along a wall. Later, when the
When the Mountains Grew | 77
electricity revives, the ceiling fan comes to life. It is located right over
Arif’s bed.
The next morning we leave the guesthouse at four a.m., hoping to
arrive in the field area at sunrise and leave before the hottest part of the
day. Attock is dark and still asleep, no breakfast available, we see no
person or beast. Munir drives the red jeep. We are tired. No good sleep
is possible in this heat. We cross the high parts of the Kala Chitta Hills,
still not having seen a soul. The hills here are the tiny cousins of the
mountains that we left a few days ago; they are the last ripples of the
continental upset to the north. There are gray Jurassic limestones,
formed in oceans that harbored ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, long
before whales originated. A stretch of road crosses an area covered in
bushes and labeled “dense jungle” on the map. Ambulocetus is just a
mile away. The bushes are taller than a man and grow in clusters. You
can easily walk around them, but you can never see far. The place is like
a giant, green maze. We round a hairpin turn, and suddenly we are all
fully awake and in shock. The place swarms with police in army-like
outfits. There are busses that have brought ground troops with semi-
automatic guns, camouflaged jeeps, and armored vehicles. They stop us,
and ask what we want. Arif explains in a nervous voice. They tell us to
keep driving, we are not to stop in these hills but to cross the hills to the
police station in Basal, south of the hills. A man has been kidnapped,
and the kidnappers are hiding in this jungle. Today, the police will hunt
them down. I am puzzled and dazed and try to organize my thoughts on
the way to Basal. They can’t do this to us. I have waited for two years
to come back here. We cannot just give up. The police in Basal have to
give us access. I am gearing up to make my case.
The police station in Basal is built around a courtyard. We park the
car outside. Arif alone passes the guards. He does not want to take me
inside. I think that he is worried that the presence of a foreigner compli-
cates matters further. He comes back with no news at all. I barrage him
with questions, but he remains silent. Did he make a case at all, or did
he just go inside because I insisted? I call Taseer, who is in a hotel in
Islamabad. He says to return to Islamabad. The next day, an Islamabad
newspaper reports that four policemen have been killed in the operation
and that the kidnappers were not caught. Taseer tells me to go home
and forget about it, the fossils will be safe in the ground for another
year. I am disappointed.
Life goes on. The parts of Ambulocetus that are still under the ground
remain where they have been for forty-eight million years.6 But the
78 | Chapter 5
kidnapping incident is part of a larger problem with Pakistan. Too
often, when I point at a place on the map, Arif tells me that the place is
off limits for security reasons. Pakistan is too risky a place to be the sole
purveyor of study material. So, I am looking elsewhere. There are fossil
whales in India. In addition, India is opening up politically.
indian whales
The man who looms larger than life in Indian paleontology is Ashok
Sahni, the father of vertebrate paleontology in that country. Some years
ago, I sent him a letter asking him about his study of the tooth enamel
of Eocene Indian whales.7 A letter came back saying little about enamel
and instead inviting me to visit his lab. It was a pleasant surprise.
Studying tooth enamel in whales could be very interesting because it
may provide clues to the strange tooth wear in ambulocetids and basi-
losaurids. And that may help us understand what these animals were
eating. Of course, to study enamel, one has to cut a tooth on a diamond-
blade saw and look at the cut face with an electron microscope.8 That
destroys the precious specimen. Having more fossils would make it hurt
less to cut some of them up. Teeth from Indian whales would be a wel-
come addition to those from Pakistan. I am taking Dr. Sahni up on his
invitation.
Chapter 6
Passage to India
stranded in delhi
Islamabad, Pakistan, February 1992. After a month of fieldwork in
Pakistan, I am boarding a plane that will take me to India’s capital, New
Delhi. Flights between the countries only happen twice a week, the result
of the hostile stance between them. Soldiers commonly shoot at each
other across the Line of Control, near Skardu.
I am excited to go to this
new country, meet Ashok Sahni and his colleagues, and study their whale
collections from Gujarat, the western Indian state on the Indian Ocean.
The original arrangements were all made by airmail back and forth,
weeks between correspondences. From Pakistan, I tried to call Ashok
but never reached him, so I hope for the best. The Air India flight to
India is crammed with Indian Muslims who have visited Pakistani rela-
tives. As we land, it is prayer time, and many of them unroll their prayer
mats in the corridors of the airport to pray, obstructing the flow of traf-
fic. Airport officials, Hindus and Sikhs mostly, in drab military-looking
uniforms, give them a condescending look, but let them be. Coming
down the escalator in Delhi, I see a large wooden statue of Ganesha, the
elephant-headed Hindu god of travelers and traders, welcoming all those
who want to be welcomed. Coming from Muslim Pakistan, where
depicting deities is sacrilege, I am taken aback by such blatant idol wor-
ship, but also elated to enter this strange new world. Back in the United
States, I was unable to buy a ticket to fly from Delhi to Chandigarh, so I
79
80 | Chapter 6
will buy it here, at the airport, for the flight tomorrow morning. I ask at
the Air India check-in desk to buy a ticket to Chandigarh.
“We do not fly to Chandigarh.”
I am puzzled. I thought they did. I don’t really believe her. “So, where
can I buy a ticket?”
“You go outside.”
I walk on, leaving the terminal building. Then I realize my mistake:
the flight to Chandigarh is on Indian Airlines, not Air India. I turn
around and walk back into the terminal building. A man stops me.
“Change money, sir?” There is a rich black market in money-changing
here, and I politely decline the offer.
A policeman stops me and asks for my ticket.
“I do not have one yet, I will buy it inside.”
The Walking Whales Page 12
