The Beauty of the Mountain...

Oil on canvas:- Paul Linke(1844-1917)

"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges — Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"
—Rudyard Kipling from "The Explorer"

Until I stayed in the interiors of Himachal at Joginder Nagar for some years I didn’t have a real hand on feel of the mountains though my fascination with them was there since childhood and I even joined the Trekking and Mountaineering Club of my college, but we never ventured out.

One November evening, passing through Kangra valley on my way to Joginder Nagar, I glimpsed the snow clad mountains of Dhauladhars at a distance emerging as if suddenly from nowhere in the shape of a long arc taking the frontal horizon in their embrace… and I clearly felt the distance melting away. It was as if I could just stretch my hand and touch these!

The white sheet of snow in its ethereal hues with evening Sun peeping on it through clouds, a golden shine here, a dark patch of shadow there, an unfathomable silence, a sense of enormity and loads and loads of mystery of what lies beyond….It was a perfect setting for a love at first sight!

Something happened deep inside and one felt a kind of rejuvenation…It was like awakening from years long sleep. The body was coming to its own rhythm and one could understand its language. The colors looked so vibrant, the sounds so clear. The mountains were the Life and it was beautiful and one felt blessed to be alive. Words looked totally unnecessary then!

Since then, one has never been able to leave the mountains so to say or rather these won’t leave one as these keep on imploring one to return here every year…

Even after staying there many years and seeing the elements in all their extremes, the cold, the rains, the dangers of wrong stepping, landslides and relative aloofness one still wants to cross just one more range to be there in the next unknown valley by treading a difficult and often dangerous trekking trail….It is as if you want to go there for the ‘hell’ of it as put by Edmund Hillary.

Why the mountains have a trance like effect on one? Why so much allure and mystery behind them?

Is it because one is away from the routine ‘civilized’ cacophony and humdrum that one finds entangled in hopelessly and grabs the chance to be in relative aloofness and it then becomes a kind of escape?

If this is merely an escape, I am afraid it won’t have much meaning beyond the ordinary!

Or perhaps, as the mountain presents itself in its extraordinary majesty, for some moments as happens in deep inquiry or wonder, one with one’s burdens, tensions and conditioning is not there! Only watchfulness …no watcher!

And that cleanses one to one’s deepest recesses.

Sure that happens for some moments and coming soon to their ‘own’, the burdens and the past experiences with their inevitable likes and dislikes, comparisons and calculations take over and soon convert the moments into just lifeless words to be savored and pursued again sometimes in future!

Anyway, as a mountaineer observed, writing about mountains may become boring, I would rather go there…!