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The snow that seals the passes leading to Leh, Ladakh's capital, is only one of many oppressors in the former kingdom's eternal struggle to maintain its identity. From earliest times, the stoic, heroic inhabitants of this aerial island crushed between the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges in northern India have been assailed by invaders -- geologic, political, climatic and touristic -- that would have reduced a lesser people to penury or wiped them out altogether.

Even in good weather, one senses the region's Shangri-la-like isolation, the tall ranges that hem it in. "An island in a sea of dust" is less a metaphor than a description of its remoteness, as well as a comment on its genesis. Geologists contend that when the earth's jigsaw tectonic plates began to break apart, Ladakh was an isle caught between colliding continents. Sandwiched between India and Asia, Ladakh was lifted high into the air, and then rent by seismic upwelling that transformed sea bottom into towering ranges that, like honeycombs, embraced dozens of deep valleys.

To reach Leh, one must cross the 17,582-foot Taglangla Pass. Traveling to the next valley north, the Nubra, requires driving a wretched track through the Khardungla Pass -- which, at 18,380 feet, ranks as the world's highest motorable road.

Geologic upheavals also provided Ladakh with barren marine scrabble for farm land, while, its setting in the lee of the Himalaya deprived it of the monsoon rains that shower fertile India. Surveying the valley from the pass leading to Leh, it is hard to regard Ladakh as anything but an arid moonscape: tan soil rising to buff dirt mountains melding into the white snow, and from there into a cobalt sky unhazed by moisture. Leh's squat, two-story, unpainted stone and mud buildings reflect their surroundings, seeming to rise from the dun landscape, rather than having been set upon it. Over the rooftops looms the craggy bluff crowned by the huge adobe-covered Leh Palace, visible from every point in the city and resembling more the hills surrounding it than a rustic Versailles.

Ladakh's arid soil can support only a small populace: 130,000 people in an area of 38,680 square miles. Of that number, nearly 25,000, or 20 percent, live in Leh, which sits at an elevation of 11,000 feet.

Leh is a created town, the handiwork of farmers who have channeled the snowmelt coursing down the mountains, building dozens of canals that water the town before dropping into the Indus River. Walking the town's dirt roads, one crosses a canal every hundred feet or so; without them, the town would cease to exist. This fact becomes apparent when one stands on the valley rim: Where the irrigation system's reach ends, the desert begins.

Kunzang and her sisters farm a small plot surrounding their house, an acre separated from its neighbors by high walls of stacked stone that protect it from marauding cows and sheep. In the short growing season, they plant barley, which will be roasted and ground into tsampa, the staple grain of their diet. They also plant vegetables for their own use and for sale in Leh's markets. Because the harvests barely feed them, they supplement their income by turning their three-story stone and wood home into a guesthouse for the hundreds of backpackers who flow into the valley once the passes have been opened at the end of June. For a few dollars, guests have a bare room looking out on fruit orchards and a bed with a thin mattress. The shared bathroom features a "dry toilet" that requires no water, an attempt by the ecologically minded Ladakhis to stretch limited resources even farther. Hot shower water is provided by the bucket.

Ladakh's diverse population is the result of several waves of immigrants to its desolate valleys over the past two millennia. First to arrive were the nomadic Khampas from eastern Tibet, who each season pitched tents on stream banks to watch their yak herds. They shared the valleys with Drukpas (or Dards), pockets of whom still exist in some of the lesser valleys. Their Mediterranean features and bacchanalian fertility festivals suggest possible descent from soldiers who deserted Alexander's Macedonian army and marched to the banks of the Indus in the third century. Discouraged by the prospect of re-crossing the Persian deserts, many of these elected to stay and farm. Ladakh's isolated valleys must have seemed much like the city-states compartmentalized by the mountains of their native Greece.

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