Signs of winter

These are the signs that winter is coming.
In the market there is a run on sawdust to burn in iron stoves. I joined in and have stockpiled 15 sacks, each as tall as a man.
The market is bright with cold-weather cast-offs from the west: jumpsuits, boiler suits, shell suits, anoraks. An elderly gent outside my house sources his winter wardrobe differently. He straddles a goat and neatly strips of its hide with a glinting knife. The underside, the leather, is bright white and the fur thicker than the man's beard. A head with a bloody stump on the ground beside him seems amused by the proceedings in that smiley way goats have.
There is a chill in the air and smoke curls around pine trees, each embossed with one of the 99 names of Allah on one path. It is the stuff of fairy tales, where to see a gingerbread cottage or meet a big bad wolf would seem quite normal.
And with no apparent concern for buffering anyone against any cold, a platoon of soldiers have been commanded to work on the borders - by which I mean the herbaceous borders of the mess. The have dug up whole sides of the road and are planting rose bushes, proving the truth of their banner, 'Pakistan Army, Men at their Best.' They follow up Project Pot-Plant with Project Papier-Mache: there's a replica mountain under construction on the lawn. It's likeness looms overhead.
Gentle rain fell the other night. In the morning, solid rock soaring above us had turned to glitter and dairy cream; the first snow of the season. I was surprised, but then I have woken with wonder every day for two weeks now. New mountains reveal and hide themselves constantly as veils of cloud are lifted and draped again. Sometimes a misty purdah remains and transforms a high valley into a distant dreamland. I am reluctant to go indoors for too long and miss the show. I sometimes stop mid-sentence when I see a new peak.
"Because it's there," said Sir Edmund Hillary to explain why he climbed Mount Everest, and you can't argue. They are there. Close, sometimes too close, are the barren rock mountains walling us in all around, heavy and hung with gravity. Further off and elusive are the high peaks, which through their snow, strive against the serious substance of geology to sublimate into some spiritual state. No one will ever hear their silence, for climbers are always accompanied by oxygen tanks and kerosene stoves, hissing away.
Nevertheless a good walk to one of their base camps from here may help me to connect up the three worlds I see but which do not hang together in my mind. Here I am in that vortex of humanity and activity in the bazaar which hammers metal, greases axles, hews wood, fries pastries, spits and splatters blood from butchering, imports-exports, pushes cart-loads of fruit, shouts into mobiles, banks money and arranges packets on shelves. I am in Anywhereabad, South Asia.
Above all this is a terrace of corn fields, exhausted after bearing a crop in such a cruel climate, withering leaves on orchard trees and, where channels flow down to the Indus, green.

And then those mountains.

Awe has become the tenor of my life.