Chembra is the highest peak in the Wayanad hills of Kerala, in southern India, and it is grassland from its foot to its crown. The walk up it does not reach the top. It ends two-thirds of the way, at Hridaya Saras, a small rain-fed tarn lying in a hollow of the meadow in the shape of a heart, which is where the path now stops and which local reckoning says has never run dry. Getting there starts among the tea estates and bamboo at the bottom and steepens almost at once. Within an hour the plantations are behind you and there is nothing but bare grass and wind, with the whole of Wayanad opening underneath — estates, forest, and the blue ridges of the Ghats fading paler toward the horizon. First light is the hour for it, while mist still lies in the valleys and the low sun picks the estates out below in bands of gold and shadow.
Below the lake the path runs along an open crest with nothing above you but sky and grass. In steady weather you can watch the wind cross the slope in visible waves, and at the most exposed points bare rock breaks through the meadow you are crossing. None of this baldness is accidental. Chembra belongs to the shola-grassland system of the high Western Ghats, where dense evergreen forest survives only down in the sheltered folds and hollows, while frost, wind and fire keep every exposed ridge and summit under grass. The whole mosaic holds the rain and feeds the streams in the valleys below. That same grass is the reason the mountain is guarded so carefully. In the dry months it turns to tinder, fires have closed Chembra before and sometimes for months at a stretch, and the thing that makes these slopes so green is exactly the thing that can burn them off.