It turned out to be a valley between two ridges that had been bare during the summer but during the last couple of weeks had become covered with snow to a depth of a meter. Farther up that valley, at about fifty-eight hundred meters of altitude, was the foot of a glacier whose meltwater created a stream that ran down the valley toward the salt lake of Pangong Tso. In former days, the glacier had extended quite a bit farther down. At its foot, after the 1962 cease-fire, the Indian Army had set up a base and constructed a few buildings, of which the only one that wasn’t a total ruin was a barracks. This was a stone and mortar crackerbox consisting of two stories of soldiers’ quarters above a ground floor with a mess hall and other common rooms. It had long since been abandoned by the receding glacier, which because of the valley’s curve could not even be seen from its windows. The ridge to its west was almost always on the Indian side of the Line. From its top you could look west into territory that was, beyond all dispute, Indian. The ridge to its east was almost always on the Chinese side, and from there you could see the sun rising over China.