Writer and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk is a storytelling odyssey across the world in the footsteps of our human forebears. This is his latest dispatch from India.
AZURAM, MANIPUR, INDIALate last summer, I walked for nearly three months through the hills of northeastern India. They shimmered under the sun like the green velvet lining of a jewelry box. They held treasures of vanishing sound.
On the maze of trails outside Khanduli, a village whose market peddled silk worms by the bushel, it was impossible to speak. Why? Cicadas. All the cicadas in the world had converged there. It was the global conclave of cicada-dom. The dripping forests hosted a vast confederacy of cicadas. Their song pulsated through the wet air for mile after mile: a referee’s shrill whistle, blown at full volume, calling a cosmic foul on the apes who imagined themselves rulers of the world. I gestured to my
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