"Nothing I had read or
imagined prepared me for the splendor and majesty of the mountains that
first day; that was the first gift
Ladakh gave me, a silence
before that phantasmagoria of stone, those vast wind-palaces of red and
ochre and purple rock, those rock faces the wind and snow had worked over
thousands of years into shapes so unexpected and fantastical the eye could
hardly
believe them, a silence so
truly stunned and wondering that words of description emerge from it very
slowly, and at first only in
broken images a river
glimpsed there, a thousand feet below the road, its waters sparkling in
the shifting storm-light, the path
below on the bare rocky
surface moving with sheep whose wool glittered in the sunlight, small
flowers nodding in the crevasses of the vast rocks that lined the road,
rocks tortured in as many thousand ways as the mountains they are torn
from, sudden glimpses of ravines pierced and shattered by the light that
broke down from the mountains, of the far peaks of the mountains
themselves, secreted in shadow, or illumined suddenly, blindingly, by
passing winds of light. And there is no reason in the images, no demure
and easily negotiable order, because they emerge from a silence and a
wonder so full that they each seem to exist in a time
of their own, in a silence of
their own, remote from all thought, glimpsed purely as they are, as they
are in their essence, in some final purity words do not reach."
"A Journey in Ladakh" by Andres Harvey
