Grown, Not Built: The Root Bridges of the Khasi Hills — Epoche B1
Down three thousand steps to a bridge that is alive From the road at Tyrna, in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya in north-east India, a concrete staircase drops into the gorge — about three thousand steps, my knees counted every one — to the village of Nongriat, reachable no other way. The first river crossing explains the journey. The bridge is not built; it is grown. The floor under my feet was a lattice of thick roots braided around flat stones, and the handrails were roots too — living ones, with leaves opening at the far end. It did not sway like a rope bridge; it was rigid, part of the two trees that hold the banks. At Nongriat stands the famous double-decker: two root spans, one above the other, from the same pair of rubber fig trees. Further up the valley we passed a man tending a crossing that does not exist yet. He had guided pencil-thin aerial roots of a fig through a hollowed betel-palm trunk aimed at the far bank. He checks it a few times a year, he told us. It will carry a person in fifteen or twenty years. The reason for the patience is the rain: the plateau above holds the world's rainfall records — around eleven to twelve metres a year. In that climate bamboo rots in a season or two, timber soon after, and steel cable corrodes. A living root does the opposite of decaying: each monsoon it thickens, grafts onto its neighbours, and grips its stones harder. So the Khasi grow their bridges, and the oldest still in daily use are thought to be centuries old. On the climb back up we stood aside for schoolchildren who cross a living bridge twice a day and find nothing in it worth mentioning. References Narayan, R. K. (1958). The Guide. Methuen Publishing.