mountains

The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, acclaimed as the most brilliant and perceptive reporter of his time, writes in "Travels with Herodotus" that with every new town visited, with every new foreign word learnt, the traveller experiences small, almost imperceptible personal changes. Wherever you go becomes part of you and the person who returns home is never the same as before departing. Knowing new people is in many ways like travelling, and those who you meet along your road become part of your existence too.

I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh.

You are funny like a kid and awesome like a princessUnseen like an angel, like the morning sunshine_ Kindness like a river and highness like a mountain, In the middle of the Rheine, the cute face and sweet lips _(La la la la, La la , mmmm , mm _)Keep the lovely smile, in your juicy icy eyes Open the heaven for my eyes, forever angel voice Never angry never harsh, never mad never marsh Dear or darling, either diamond or dime, Overall the dream of the world

Water is very soft and submissive, but not even the mighty mountain can resist it.

I dream that one day I would be a published writer and people would read my books - if not, I would be living in the mountains in a small hut, near a pond where swans swim, writing a diary for myself.

Throw your hands and pull up those in the valley do the hill. However, press your feet on the ground so hard that you don__ fall into the same valley together. Some people__ helping hands became their grave digging tools!

You may not be able to move the mountain with one hit, but you can do so by picking up the rocks bit by bit! Stop loading yourself and go bit by bit... You will get there!

Men come and go. They lie, or die, or leave you. A mountain is not a man, though, and a stone is a mountain's daughter. I trust myself, and I trust my mules. I won't fall.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

I wondered what those mountains behind them might tell me, what advice they would give, if they could talk. What they would tell me about love, and about loss, and about how this wild place could heal as naturally as it could kill.

After midday, the rain eased, and the Land Rover rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a deep tumult of swirling grays was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come. Then four miles above these mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shone- the light of snows. Glaciers loomed and vanished in the grays, and the sky parted, and the snow cone of Machhapuchare glistened like a spire of a higher kingdom. In the night, the stars convened, and the vast ghost of Machhapuchare radiated light, although there was no moon.

The light irradiates white peaks of Annapurna marching down the sky, in the great rampart that spreads east and west for eighteen hundred miles, the Himalaya- the alaya (abode, or home) of hima (snow).Hibiscus, frangipani, bougainvillea: seen under snow peaks, these tropical blossoms become the flowers of heroic landscapes. Macaques scamper in green meadow, and a turquoise roller spins in a golden light. Drongos, rollers, barbets, and white Eqyptian vulture are the common birds, and all have close relatives in East Africa.

By death the moon was gathered in Long ago, ah long ago;Yet still the silver corpse must spinAnd with another's light must glow.Her frozen mountains must forgetTheir primal hot volcanic breath,Doomed to revolve for ages yet,Void amphitheatres of death.And all about the cosmic sky,The black that lies beyond our blue,Dead stars innumerable lie,And stars of red and angry hueNot dead but doomed to die.

Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once_Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one__ own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound.