The Anatomy of Journey

It held sway slowly - the fog - swirling in the distance in clean, white splendor, hiding the glowing sun behind her skirt, making the sun look like a dying flame behind sheets of oilskin. From time to time the sun would break upon it and through an alchemical magic turn the fog into gold. Weighed down by cool moisture and pulled to the ground by the gravity of mountains, the fog flowed with the effortlessness of water through the nettles of old pine trees.

  As we ride up a narrow mountain path, silence descends then deepens. The road is thin, the fall to our left deep and green and the curves sharp and wild. And as we climb, the road ahead of us begins to fade in the encroaching mist. We follow it excitedly - willing, needing and wanting to get lost in its enveloping whiteness that will hide the world from us. But the mist is yet thin; its resolve not yet strong. And so it plays a game of hide-and-seek with us. We climb slowly – the road is difficult and wet, and the views pristine and wet.

  Minutes later, I stood trembling in the cold, looking down a steep valley as the driving fog rushed in to block our view of the land below. The mountains are swathed in swaying green Shola grass that seem to enjoy being wet all the time. Whenever the mist disappeared, we saw a range of mountains, receding into a blurred horizon, covered incoherently with the thick green shawls of Shola forests.

  We were halfway up the narrow road that leads to Kemmangundi, a tiny mountain town lost in the mists. Fifty two kilometers from Chikmagalur this road runs, becoming narrower and narrower, until the bikes are teetering right on the edge, off the mountain face. This road isn't kind - Olympic-size swimming pools form in the middle of the road during the monsoon; the motorcycles get through by going around the swimming pool, right at the edge of the road - flirting with the open sky, skirting death. This wouldn’t have been as thrilling if we could see the valley descend – but we were for the most part enveloped in a sheet of glowing white fog, and the hairpin turns were all the more scary because we didn’t know where the whiteness ended and empty space began.

  Stopping at just such a turn, we tried hard to stare through the white sheet to allow our senses a semblance of identity, to locate ourselves. Our combined voices were suppressed by the fog, as if demanding silence in its awesome presence. Our faces flushed with cold, hands pressed deep inside riding jackets for warmth, the leather rough and comforting against numb, frozen fingers, we stood glancing at each other and the fog, staring at something that gave us no definition, until a sudden gust of wind collected all the fog and pushed it away, or perhaps it was the mountain sighing with nostalgia, but it was as if the white curtains had been pulled apart to reveal nature’s extravagant display of the emerald Kemmangundi valley sprawled beneath us. The amphitheater of god is full of such inspiring surprise and mystery.

  I have always loved mountains for this very reason. They come with a dizzying array of elemental beings, offspring’s of earth and water – fog and mist and wind and Pine trees and snow and rain and thunder and clouds - things that have an arctic energy. I like the deciduousness of mountains, and I find they quench the thirst when the soul is parched.

  We are on our bikes again and we can see now that the mountaintop above us is covered in a blanket of fog. At some very near point in the future, this mossy road will lead us into it. Thickly. There are already signs of it – our faces are sprayed with cold drops of water as we pass through random wisps of earth-bound clouds.

  And suddenly we are part of the mist and the rest of the world is forgotten in our awe and in the whiteness. All around us is the sky. The earth and trees recede into the mist. Above us the clouds are thick and wet. The sounds of our bikes are muffled by the mist and the only sound now is the distant sound of rain drops beating against the metal tanks of the motorcycles. The transformation into this cave of white is as real and sudden as the mountain was. We look all around us, shouting nonsense, and gaze up to see only the tallest of trees stretching to the sky to escape the clouds. And in this cave of smoke, the mist was a liquid that seemed to dilute the color of all that was solid. The world became monochrome. The world began to melt. The ink of leaves and grass and bird became dull and grey and wet and swirled, like a drop of violet paint in a gallon of white. Swirling thus, all solidity became ghost. The mist lends its characteristic fluidity and smokiness to all things earthbound and turns them all into silent spectres. Only the sight of the dark road beneath us kept us from becoming skybound. We would have become ghosts. We would have become mist.

  Nothing stops the mist but the sun. In Kemmangundi as well as in Manali, in Gulaba, on Rohtang Pass - in mountain country - the sun is kind to the union of earth and sky. Regularly do the two lovers meet. Trees and mist are fingers of earth and sky, twining in diffused colors of green and brown and grey and white. It is full of soul this meeting, and must be witnessed. This is perhaps the only time they meet so directly. Almost all other times, earth and sky touch each other randomly in the rhythmic anatomy of rain.

  *

  Rohtang Pass to Jispa

  Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

  Cesare Pevase

  Day 5

  Elevation: 13,050 ft.

  Distance from Leh: 423 km.