Himalaya

by Ruskin Bond

  Drowned boulders knock beneath the torrent, and a rock thuds at my back. Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.

  * * *

  SUNLIGHT ON KINCHINJUNGA*8

  Francis Younghusband

  From Kurseong we ascend through a magnificent forest of chestnut, walnut, oaks, and laurels. [John Dalton] Hooker, when he subsequently visited the Khasia Hills in Assam, said that though the subtropical scenery on the outer Himalaya was on a much more gigantic scale, it was not comparable in beauty and luxuriance with the really tropical vegetation induced by the hot, damp, and insular climate of those perennially humid Khasia Hills. The forest of gigantic trees on the Himalaya, many of them deciduous, appear from a distance as masses of dark gray foliage, clothing mountains 10,000 feet high. Whereas in the Khasia Hills the individual trees are smaller, more varied in kind, of a brilliant green, and contrast with gray limestone and red sandstone rocks. Still, even of the forest between Kurseong and Darjeeling, Hooker says that it is difficult to conceive a grander mass of vegetation—the straight shafts of the timber trees shooting aloft, some naked and clean with gray, pale, or brown bark; others literally clothed for yards with a continuous garment of epiphytes (air-plants), one mass of blossoms, especially the white orchids, coelogynes which bloom in a profuse manner, whitening their trunks like snow. More bulky trunks bear masses of interlacing climbers—vines, hydrangea, and peppers. And often the supporting tree has long ago decayed away and their climbers now enclose a hollow. Perpetual moisture nourishes this dripping forest, and pendulous mosses and lichens are met with in profusion.

  For this forest life, however, we cannot at present spare the attention that is its due, for we want above all things to see the mountains on the far side of this outer ridge. Tropical forests may be seen in many other parts of the world. But only here on all the Earth can we see mountains on so magnificent a scale. So we do not pause, but cross the ridge and come to the slopes and spurs which face northward, away from the plains and toward the main range of the Himalaya.

  Here is situated Darjeeling, which ought to be set apart as a sacred place of pilgrimage for all the world. Directly facing the snowy range and set in the midst of a vast forest of oaks and laurels, rhododendrons, magnolias, and camellias, the branches and trunks of which are festooned with vines and smilax and covered with ferns and orchids, and at the base of which grow violets, lobelias, and geraniums, with berberries, brambles, and hydrangeas—it is adapted as few other places are for the contemplation of Nature’s Beauty in its most splendid aspects.

  Its only disadvantage is that it is so continually shrouded in mist. The range on which it stands being the first range against which the moisture-laden currents from the Bay of Bengal strike, the rainfall is very heavy and amounts to 140 or 160 inches in the year. And even when rain is not actually falling there is much cloud hanging about the mountains. So the traveler cannot count upon seeing the snows. There is no certainty that as he tops the ridge or turns the corner he will see Kinchinjunga in the full blaze of its glory. He cannot be as sure of seeing it as he is of seeing a picture on entering a gallery. During the month of November alone is there a reasonable surety. All the rest of the year he must take his chance and possess his soul in patience till the mountain is graciously pleased to reveal herself.

  Perhaps because of the uncertainty of seeing Kinchinjunga, the view when it is seen is all the more impressive. The traveler waits for hours and days, even for only a glimpse. One minute’s sight of the mountains would satisfy him. But still the clouds eddy about in fleecy billows, wholly obscuring the mountains. Six thousand feet below may now and then be seen the silver streak of the Rangit River and forest-clad mountains beyond. Around him are dripping forests, each leaf glistening with freshest greenness, long mosses hanging from the boughs, and the most delicate ferns and noblest orchids growing on the stems and branches. All is very beautiful, but it is the mountain he wants to see; and still the cloud-waves collect and disperse, throw out tender streamers and feelers, disappear, and collect again, but always keep a veil between him and the mountain.

  Then of a sudden there is a rent in the veil. Without an inkling of when it is to happen or what is to be revealed, those mists of infinite softness part asunder for a space. The traveler is told to look. He raises his eyes but sees nothing. He throws back his head to look higher. Then indeed he sees, and as he sees he gasps. For a moment the current of his being comes to a standstill. Then it rushes back in one thrill of joy. Much he will have heard about Kinchinjunga beforehand. Much he will remember of it if he has seen it before. But neither the expectation nor the memory ever comes up to the reality. From that time, henceforth and forever, his whole life is lifted to a higher plane.

  Through the rent in the fleecy veil he sees clear and clean against the intense blue sky the snowy summit of Kinchinjunga, the culminating peak of lesser heights converging upward to it and all ethereal as spirit, white and pure in the sunshine, yet suffused with the delicatest hues of blue and mauve and pink. It is a vision of color and warmth and light—a heaven of beauty, love, and truth.

  But what really thrills us is the thought that, incredibly high though it is, heaven is part of earth, and may conceivably be attained by man. It is nearly double the height of Mont Blanc and more than six times the height of Ben Nevis, but still it is rooted in earth and part of our own home. This is what causes the stir within us.

  Hardly less striking than its height is its purity and serenity. The subtle tints of color and the brilliant sunlight dispel any coldness we might feel, while the purity is still maintained. And the serenity is accentuated by the ceaseless movements of the eddying clouds through which the vision is seen. There is about Kinchinjunga the calm and repose of stupendous upward effort successfully achieved.

  A sense of solemn elevation comes upon us as we view the mountain. We are uplifted. The entire scale of being is raised. Our outlook on life seems all at once to have been heightened. And not only is there this sense of elevation: we seem purified also. Meanness, pettiness, paltriness seem to shrink away abashed at the sight of that radiant purity.

  The mountain has made appeal to, and called forth from us, all that is most pure and most noble within us, and aroused our highest aspirations. Our heart, therefore, goes out lovingly to it. We long to see it again and again. We long to be always in a mood worthy of it. And we long to have that fineness of soul which would enable us to appreciate it still more fully. Glowing in the heart of the mountain is the pure flame of undaunted aspiration, and it sets something aglow in our hearts also which burns there unquenchably for the rest of our days. We see attainment of the highest in the physical domain, and it stirs us to achieve the highest in the spiritual. Between ourselves and the mountain is the kinship of common effort toward high ends. And it is because of this kinship that we are able to see such lofty Beauty in the mountain.

  For only a few minutes are we granted this heavenly vision. Then the veil is drawn again. But in those few minutes we have received an impression which has gone right down into the depths of our soul and will last there for a lifetime.

  * * *

  It will be still night—a starlit night. The phantom snowy range and the fairy forms of the mountains will be bathed in that delicate yellow light the stars give forth. The far valley depths will be hidden in the most somber purple. Overhead the sky will be glittering with brilliant gems set in a field of limpid sapphire. The hush of night will be over all—the hush which heralds some great and splendid pageant.

  Then, almost before we have realized it, the eastward-facing scarps of the highest peaks are struck with rays of mingled rose and gold, and gleam like heavenly realms set high above the still, night-enveloped world below. Farther and farther along the line, deeper and deeper down i
t, the flush extends. The sapphire of the sky slowly lightens in its hue. The pale yellow of the starlight becomes merged in the gold of dawn. White billowy mists of most delicate softness imperceptibly form themselves in the valley depths and float up the mountainsides. The deep hum of insect life, the chirping of the birds, the sounds of men, begin to break the hush of night. The snows become a delicate pink, the valleys are flooded with purple light, the sky becomes intensest blue, and the sun at last itself appears above the mountains, and the ardent life of day vibrates once more.

  * * *

  In the full glare of day the mountains are not seen at their very best. The best time of all to see them is in the evening. If we go out a little from Darjeeling into the forest to some secluded spur we can enjoy an evening of rare felicity. On the edge of the spur the forest is more open. The ground is covered with grass and flowers and plants with many-colored leaves. Rich orchids and tender ferns and pendant mosses clothe the trees. Graceful vines and creepers festoon themselves from bough to bough. The air is fragrant with the scent of flowers. Bright butterflies flutter noiselessly about. The soft purr of forest life drones around. Rays from the setting sun slant across the scene. The leaves in their freshest green and of every shade glitter like emeralds in the brilliant light.

  Through the trunks of the stately trees and under their overarching boughs we look out toward the snowy mountains. We look over the brink of the spur, down into the deeps of the valleys richly filled with tropical vegetation, their eastward-facing sides now of purplest purple, their westward-facing slopes radiant in the evening sunshine, with the full richness of their foliage shown up by the dazzling light. Far below we see the silver streak of some foaming river, and then as we raise our eyes we mark ridge rising behind ridge, higher and higher and each of a deeper shade of purple than the one in front. The lower are still clothed in forest, but the green has been merged in the deep purple of the atmosphere. The higher are bare rock till the snow appears. But just across them floats a long level wisp of fleecy cloud, and apparently the limits of earth have been reached and sky has begun. We would rest content with that. But our eyes are drawn higher still. And high above the cloud, and rendered inconceivably higher by its presence, emerges the snowy summit of Kinchinjunga, serene and calm and flushed with the rose of the setting sun. As a background is a sky of the clearest, bluest blue.

  These are the chief elements of the scene, but all is in process of incessant yet imperceptible change. The sunshine slowly softens, the purples deepen, the flush on the mountains reddens. The air becomes as soft as velvet. Not a leaf now stirs. A holy peace steals over the mountains and settles in the valleys. The snow mountains no longer look cold, hard, and austere. Their purity remains as true as ever. And they still possess their uplifting power. But they now speak of serenity and calm—not, indeed, of the unsatisfying ease of the slothful, but of the earned repose of high attainment. Great peace is about them—deep, strong, satisfying peace.

  The sun finally sets. Night has settled in the valleys. The lights of Darjeeling sparkle in the darkness. But long afterward a glow still remains on Kinchinjunga. Lastly that also fades away.

  * * *

  LADAKH SOJOURN*9

  Andrew Harvey

  “Every object in the light of Ladakh seems to have something infinite behind it; every object, even the most humble, seems to abide in its real place.”

  Francois’s words and his voice came back to me as I walked, in the early evening light, to the stupa at the edge of town and sat down in its warm shadow. A stupa is a building of plaster and brick that has four stages: a large cubic foundation, rising diminishing cubes that support a wide, empty, bun-like middle portion, which supports in its turn a long spire that comes to a point in the symbol of a crescent moon cradling a sun. It is a building in which relics are kept, the relics of saints or kings or very holy teachers, and each stage of the building symbolizes a different state of consciousness. All over Ladakh, there are stupas of every shape and size; in mountain passes, on the long slopes up to monasteries, along the banks of rivers, at the entrance to secluded villages, sometimes with small shrines attached to them, as in the stupa at the entrance to Sankar, where a few badly painted smiling Bodhisattvas raise their hands in blessing. Wherever you walk in the lower parts of this landscape, you are never far from the softly rising brick-red spire of the stupa, from the flash of its crescent moon and sun in the light, from the eye, the Bindu, at the center of that union of sun and moon, that is an ancient symbol of Universal Consciousness, of the Awareness that is Nirvana. Wherever you walk, you are reminded, in the carefully calculated shape of the stupa, of the different stages of illumination that end in the experience of liberation; each of its different parts is dedicated to a different element, a different Buddha, a different ecstasy. It is a simple building, but its shape represents a whole philosophy, is that philosophy in one of its purest statements, crumbling white plaster and brick, against rock and sky.

  The stupa at the edge of Leh stands separately on a small raised hill. I noticed as I walked up to it, seeing it against the wide spread of the Karakorams, that its shape was a meditation on the wild forms of the mountains behind it. The stupa echoes the mountains and the mountains are stupas also. Everything in this world is linked.

  * * *

  Everything is dark by ten. Leh is given over to the night—vast, cloudless, soaked in moonlight and starlight, the Milky Way lustrous in this high mountain air, each cluster of stars, each swirling nebula, precise and dazzling…

  You walk into the main street and look up at the palace, that by day looks so dilapidated. At first you can hardly tell it from the rock it stands on. Then slowly its walls emerge; night gives them back some of their old grandeur. Starlight salts them brightly…

  Hardly anyone in the street. A few Kashmiris sitting under an extinguished streetlamp talking in low voices and smoking. An old woman who passes and stares at you, her face mysterious and sibylline in that light, until she smiles. A dog you cannot see, that brushes past you suddenly and barks in fear.

  There is one café that is always the last to close. It is at the beginning of the main street. At the time I go there, usually about nine, there is no one else there except the young Sikh who is sitting on a table in his dirty yellow turban, making samosas for the next day. We are friends. He has taught me how to make samosas—how to mold the batter, how to fill them with vegetables. But I am ashamed of my slowness, my lack of expertise. He can sit and talk and laugh and his hands move instinctively, shaping, filling, conjuring samosa after samosa out of the chipped white bowls of batter and vegetable…I have to watch all my movements. My samosas are lumpy. He laughs at me gently.

  Sometimes when I come back to Leh late I pass him sitting alone in the window of his café, making samosas by lamplight. His fine, sad face shines in the yellow light; his hands, pianist’s hands, move with an almost magical delicacy and precision…He looks up, calls me in, and we talk. An hour or two later, I walk back to my hotel. I can never sleep at once; my mind is too full to read. I lie on the roof and look up at the night, breathing in its mist of stars.

  * * *

  You see and hear water everywhere in Leh. Under all talk, every silence, all slow, sensuous watching, runs the murmur and flash of water. Every street glitters with snow water, racing from the mountains into the ragged stone channels that lead it through the town into the fields below. I wake up and walk to town. The first thing I see is the morning river, leaping in the light over its smooth rocks. I walk up to Pamposh; water, noisy and brilliant, runs down the hill on both sides of the street. I sit in Pamposh and look out at the old lama passing, or the woman sitting on the corner selling cabbages, or a young Kashmiri squatting outside his shop and singing, and in everything I see there is a flash of running water. I walk in the late afternoon to the Tibetan Restaurant, just down the street from Pamposh, and wait for friends, and try to write; every time I look out of
its wooden windows onto the street I see the small turbulent stream outside with a child dabbling in it, or a dog wading through it, or two old Muslims sitting by it under a tree and smoking their evening hookah. And when at night I am walking, alone or with friends, through Leh up the small streets behind and round the main street, or outside to Sankar or Changspa, the villages that are only a few hundred yards away, it is always to the noise of water, shaking in moonlight and starlight, coursing in untidy channels through darkening corn, between moon-washed poplars and willows, bringing a flickering life to paths lined by shrines and small stupas that in the moonlight seem hardly more solid than the stream that runs by them.

  Surrounded by so much water, the mind becomes water, hindered by nothing, abandoned, happy.

  * * *

  At this time of year many Ladakhi roofs are bright with drying apricots—circles and squares and lozenges of burning orange. I keep for dark days my glimpses of them from the inside of buses, from the tops of passes, or standing on the walls of a monastery: shouts of wild color in a wilderness of ocher.

  Today I found a spoon in the bazaar for an old friend in Oxford. The spoon is only a long copper handle with a roughly hammered end. All it has for decoration is a linked series of askew triangles indented, unevenly, on the handle. And yet it could be Egyptian or Mayan or Amerindian or Eskimo or the latest invention of an Italian designer; its simplicity is timeless.