The Singing Bridge of Dolpo

In the high valleys of Dolpo, where the trails to Tibet cross rivers so fast they sound like arguments, there is an ancient bridge made of twisted juniper ropes and yak-hide that the villagers call Drolma Zam — the Bridge of Tara. And on certain nights, particularly when the moon is a thin crescent and the river is swollen with snowmelt, the bridge sings.

An old salt trader named Tashi had crossed Drolma Zam three hundred times without incident. On his three-hundred-and-first crossing, at dusk during a late spring flood, he heard the singing clearly for the first time — a low, vowel-heavy sound, something between wind in a conch shell and a woman humming at her loom.

He stopped in the middle of the swaying bridge. The water below was the colour of ash.

"Who sings?" he called.

The bridge replied in the creak of its ropes: "We are the ones who fell before you had planks to walk on. We are the ones who showed the valley where the ford was safe. You walk above our bones every crossing.