Gilbert hill

This guide to Gilbert Hill in Mumbai starts sixty-six million years before Andheri's apartment towers, when a volcanic event called the Deccan Traps forced molten rock upward through a crack in the plateau, cooling into towering basalt columns, the same geological trick that shaped Devils Tower in Wyoming. It tracks the hill's shrinking size through the twentieth century, as quarrying steadily ate away at it, while the nearby twin columns at Jogeshwari were carved entirely to rubble. Climb the stone steps toward the temples at the summit and look out over the neighborhood that grew up around this ancient column.