Towers to the Heavens.(mysterious stone towers discovered in Tibet)

French explorer Michel Peissel was touring Tibet in 1982 when he first stumbled upon a series of tall, mysterious, star-shaped stone towers dotting the Himalayan valleys along the Chinese border. "I was blown away by them," he remembers. But during the adventure, Peissel--who has traveled extensively in Tibet and is credited with discovering the source of the Mekong River as well as the archaic Riwoche horse--broke both legs and was unable to follow up on his find. Then, in 1998, Peissel's friend Frederique Darragon--a top polo player and the sometime girlfriend of Ted Turner--went to Tibet to research snow leopards. Peissel told her to be sure to check out the towers. She did, and was so captivated by them that she abandoned the snow-leopard project to focus solely on the towers. Her goal: to chart all the towers in the region and find out as much about their history as possible.

In the riveting documentary "Secret Towers of the Himalayas," directed and narrated by Peissel and scheduled to premiere this week on the Discovery Channel, Darragon shares what she unearthed. The towers, as stunning for their architecture as for their unexpected appearance on the landscape, stand as tall as 60 meters and date back as far as 1,000 years. Some are clustered in peasant villages; others fleck the sweeping, 3,000-meter mountains. A few now serve as stables for yaks and ponies, but most are empty, their wooden steps and stories long since collapsed or carted away. How many towers are there, who built them and what was their purpose?

At first, Peissel and Darragon found the answers to such questions elusive. Until recently there were no roads in the region, which is plagued by heavy rains and mudslides in the summer and snow and avalanches in the winter; at times Darragon traveled by horseback and yak. The towers dot four regions--Qiangtang, rGyalrong, Miniak and Kongpo--that cover an area roughly the size of Texas. But the tribes who have lived there for centuries speak different dialects and do not have written languages. "Even from one valley to the next, the locals couldn't speak to each other," Darragon says.

She turned to local Buddhist monasteries for help, but the monks found no mention of the towers in their ancient texts. Chinese scholars late in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) wrote about some of the towers in various kingdoms that no ...