The Aravallis were old before the Himalayas were born, raised in the Proterozoic more than a billion years ago, and for most of that unimaginable span they have done the quiet, unglamorous work of a frontier: turning back the Thar, recharging the aquifers beneath Rajasthan, holding the air over Delhi a fraction cleaner than it would otherwise be. They are less a feature on the map than a witness to it, older than every kingdom that ever sheltered in their rain-shadow.

We have repaid that service with dynamite. When the Supreme Court froze the grant of new mining leases across the Aravalli stretches of Rajasthan, Haryana, Gujarat and Delhi in November last year ~ pending a single landscape-wide Management Plan for Sustainable Mining, a blueprint drawn up through the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education to mark out where the hills may be cut and where they may not ~ it seemed, for a moment, that geology had won. Then the Court did something rarer than a moratorium. On the twenty-ninth of December it stayed its own judgment, conceded that the definition needed a firmer scientific basis, and placed the question in abeyance pending a high-powered expert committee that must report by the end of this August.

A mountain range held in abeyance is a strange legal object. The order that put it there had fixed an elevation test ~ any landform rising a hundred metres or more above the surrounding ground would count as Aravalli ~ and the test was promptly attacked as too clinical by half, a metric that on careless application would have lifted protection from the low ridges, valleys and wildlife corridors that make up the greater part of the range. The Court’s retreat was an admission worth pausing on: that a living landscape cannot be carved into arbitrary contour lines, that the right unit of judgment is the whole system and not the isolated parcel.

The committee now at........

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