To step across such organic structures—a rare, harmonious collaboration between the human imagination and the growing muscle of nature—is literally a moving experience.

The root bridges of Cherrapunji give softly, almost imperceptibly, underfoot. They cradle the body’s weight in a supple way that lifeless concrete and metal never could. Underhand, through the railings made of living tissue, you feel the immense power of the joined trees. You span time.

Some of the living bridges of Cherrapunji grew when the feudal kingdom of Ahom, invaders from what is today Myanmar, ruled over the Meghalaya hills.

They were carrying walkers when, according to the “Report on the Khasi and Jaintia Hills - 1853” by A.J.M. Mills (with an introduction by Dr. J.B. Battacharjee), the corrupt British colonial trader Harry Inglis terrorised the people of the frontier region through torture and assassination in the 1830s and 1840s. “After his death, his widow Sophie installed her husband's corpse in a glass coffin on the verandah, telling the Khasis 'that he would rise from the dead and avenge himself on any person who wronged her,’” wrote one historian of the East Khasi Hills. “Sophie's logic played on the fear the Khasis still felt of Harry's power, even in death.”

And they bore my walking partner, Priyanka Borpujari, and I onward into the future, over the trails of northeastern India.

For a few steps on our long journey, we inched eastward, toward Myanmar, on bridges that breathed. On architecture built of memory. Of rain and sunlight.

This story was originally published on the National Geographic Society’s website devoted to the Out of Eden Walk project. Explore the site here.



Paul Salopek won two Pulitzer Prizes for his journalism while a foreign correspondent with the Chicago Tribune. Follow him on Twitter @paulsalopek.