Dr. Dan Haines (University College London) For Jean Kingdon-Ward, the night of 15 August 1950 should have been ordinary. She and her husband Francis, a well known British botanist, were travelling in the borderlands between northeast India and Tibet, looking for plants. All seemed calm. Suddenly, a huge earthquake shook the ground underneath their tent. Jean wrote in her memoir, ‘I felt the camp bed on which I was lying give a sharp jolt . . . The realization of what was happening was instantaneous, and with a shout of “Earthquake!” I was out of bed’. Despite feeling many earthquakes during her years in the region, this was the first time she experienced ‘the uttermost depths of human fear’. ‘Incredibly’, she went on, ‘after an interval that can only be measured in terms of eternity, we found ourselves back in the more familiar dimensions of space and time’. Frank also wrote about the experience. ‘I find it very difficult to recollect my emotions during the four or five minutes the shock lasted’, he wrote in the scientific journal Nature, ‘but the first feeling of bewilderment — an incredulous astonishment that these solid-looking hills were in the grip of a force […]