Travelling Companions

If we read to know we are not alone then I have found a close companion in Dervla Murphy in her book, Where the Indus is Young: Travelling in Baltistan. I am rereading it under a vast weight of blanket not too far from where she wrote it, under an even more ample weight. I have come in from the cold and have brewed a degchi of tea and am reading her book, the part where she has just returned from a frozen landscape and is brewing a degchi of tea to thaw out. It's as if we're sharing a pot and having adult conversation about the Karakoram. However, since it was too cold for her to ever undress and wash and too remote to find anything other than apricots and sometimes lentils to eat, if she saw me (clean-ish, well-fed) she'd justifiably react like the great explorer Thesiger did when he met Eric Newby and his friend after their 'short walk' in the Hindu Kush: 'pansies'. But I am heartened to read that even she "despaired of ever being able to convey in words any adequate picture of this region. Everything is so extreme here that language loses its power."
For I too am struggling. I have just returned from my own even shorter walk to a glacier and would love to be able to convey the solemnity of inching upwards between the walls of a mighty canyon to approach a whole congregation of peaks enthroned ahead. The trepidation one feels is partly natural: O, that my foot may not slip, that the mountains may not tremble and fall and O, that the icy waters may not pass over me. But partly it is awe.
I would love to describe an uncanny silence: the space so vast, the sounds so small; the sense of being lost in a landscape, trespassing where we don't belong; the unearthly power of the place. But to do so, I'd be lying. Yes, yes, sure the silence is broken by the sound of water rushing through the gorge and the echoes of rock falls sometimes ringing out. But the truth is, I never had a chance to attain such lucidity or even hear such sounds. I was interrupted not by a six-year old such as Dervla Murphy had for her travelling companion (her daughter Rachel) but by the fourteen thirteen-year-olds whose geography field trip I was helping to conduct.
Picking my way over scree or conglomerates of pebbles I am overtaken by boys pretending convincingly they are on motorbikes. I am trying to consider the insignificance of man and his perilous existence when I was told that he is hitting her. (She started it.) Can they have their apples yet? Please miss. Where are Ali's biscuits? Was there anywhere Faizan could charge his phone? He'd brought his charger. A quick survey of the scene revealed that no, there was not. (But did I think there might be somewhere soon? A socket among the rocks?) Anyway, not for want of trying, no one fell in the river or got a stone in their eye.
That day the glacier retreated at an unprecedented rate. Scientists, be concerned. One has not reached it until one has eaten it, it is believed, so the children chipped off ice to have with their lunch.

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Shadow here is not a vague thing. It is not nebulous, not ephemeral, not shadowy in that sense. When the shadow of the mountain to our south passes over us in the early afternoon of a sunny day, it turns hot to cold, light to dark and day almost to night. If the North Wind and Jack Frost talk to people in children's stories, then Shadow can touch you in real life. At 2:20 today we said goodbye to the sun till tomorrow morning and for signs of daylight looked upwards to the south faces of the mountains across the valley. We are plunged into a gloomy grey of rock frozen in shadow. But far above, where the snow has never melted, the sunlight blazes pink and rosy orange before nightfall and it's as if it's summer there, the only warm place in the world, a Himalayan Hawaii.