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The villages are on the route of a pilgrimage to honor Nanda Devi, a manifestation of Parvati, a supreme goddess in Hinduism. People in the villages below Roopkund had their own explanation, passed down in folk songs and stories. Perhaps this was hallowed ground, an open-air cemetery, or a place where victims of an epidemic were dumped to prevent contagion. Or maybe the dead were a detachment of soldiers from a thirteenth-century army sent by the Sultan of Delhi in an ill-fated attempt to invade Tibet, or a group of Tibet-bound traders who had lost their way. The lake, some thought, was a place where holy men committed ritual suicide. Indian scientists were intensely interested in the Roopkund mystery. Carbon dating, still an unreliable innovation, indicated that the bones were between five hundred and eight hundred years old. A snowstorm forced the first expedition to turn back, but two months later another expedition made it and returned to Calcutta with remains for study. In 1956, the Anthropological Survey of India, in Calcutta, sponsored several expeditions to Roopkund to investigate. But what had happened to all these people? Why were they in the mountains, and when and how had they died?

The apparent age of the bones quickly dispelled that idea. In the midst of the Second World War, British officials in India initially worried that the dead might be the remains of Japanese soldiers attempting a secret invasion. The lake, a glacial tarn called Roopkund, was more than sixteen thousand feet above sea level, an arduous five-day trek from human habitation, in a mountain cirque surrounded by snowfields and battered by storms. When the snow and ice melted that summer, many more were visible through the clear water, lying on the bottom. In the winter of 1942, on the shores of a lake high in the Himalayas, a forest ranger came across hundreds of bones and skulls, some with flesh still on them. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.