In the same weeks that the mountain came down, India and China agreed ~ quietly, and to their credit ~ to talk to one another a little more. They would widen the military hotlines that link their commanders and convene their boundary working groups more regularly, the patient machinery by which two wary armies keep a contested frontier from tipping into accident. It is a real and welcome thing. It is also an accidental confession. We have taught the frontier to speak, soldier to soldier, about the war that will probably never come. We have left it mute about the flood that certainly will.

That silence is the whole opportunity, and closing it asks no one to love his neighbour. It asks only that three governments admit what the water has already proved ~ that above a certain altitude they share one weather, one watershed and one set of dangers, and that meeting those dangers three times over, in three languages, from behind three closed borders, is a way of losing slowly. What the region needs is not another season of goodwill but a standing arrangement with a treaty beneath it: a Himalayan mutual-aid compact, dull enough to survive the next diplomatic freeze and precise enough to save lives in the first hours, while lives are still there to be saved.

Its first business would be a shared pair of eyes. What matters most in these mountains is not the movement of troops but the filling of lakes and the loosening of high faces ~ and, as this collapse warned, a sensor trained on a glacial lake will not hear a bedrock failure that was never a lake. Today each state watches only its own slope and files it where the others cannot read it. A common register of dangerous lakes and unstable faces, fed by pooled satellite and ground monitoring and open to every valley downstream, is the cheapest life-saving instrument on offer and the least threatening to anyone’s sovereignty.

A glacier does not become less Chinese for being watched by a Nepali, or less Indian for being watched by both. Eyes are worth little without a voice, so the compact’s second task is a common alarm ~ a single........

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