Jageshwar

A hundred stone towers under the deodars, and a Jyotirlinga three shrines claim

There is a narrow valley in the Kumaon hills, northeast of Almora, where a small stream called the Jata Ganga runs down between cedars so tall and old they seem to hold up the sky, and gathered along it, close as a stone forest of their own, stand over a hundred ancient temples. They count about a hundred and twenty four in the main group alone, and more at Dandeshwar down the valley, and still more scattered through the trees, raised over centuries by the Katyuri and Chand kings of the hills, their curved towers dark with age and lichen. Pilgrims have come here for well over a thousand years, since before the tenth century, to a Shiva Dham that many hold to be the Nagesh Jyotirlinga, the eighth of the twelve great lights, though truth be told two other shrines, one in Maharashtra and one by Dwarka, claim that honour too, and the old books leave the question open. It does not seem to matter much, standing in the cold of a Kumaon morning while the aarti bells ring through the deodars and the light comes slanting green and gold between the trunks. The stone floor is bitter under bare feet and the air smells of cedar and incense and woodsmoke, and in the little museum beside the shrines the old gods sit in rows, Uma and Maheshwara together, the sun god Surya, a bronze king named Pona, carved by hands nine hundred, a thousand, years gone. It is a quiet place, far from the crowds and the noise, deep in the hills, and it asks only that you come slowly, up the winding forest road, and stand a while among the hundred towers under the trees.