The fan goes on whistling overhead, an exasperated, monotonous cutter of hot, thick air. Three o-clock hot July afternoon: the breath of Lahore in July, stifled in a dome of heat and dust. I look at the sky through my window which is hazy, off-white background with blobs of molten sun somewhere behind. The outside world is an inferno of shouting rickshaws, honking horns and distantly screeching complaint of building. This is my life, life in the busy, colorful, yet completely overwhelming caldron of the plains. In some such moment, when the walls seem to be turning in and the very air seems to be tired, my mind then does the greatest miracle of all, and escapes. It goes in the north.
It does not say please. It can be brought on by a smell, a noise or by even a stray thought. To-day it was the scene of a seller piling up merrily a modest pyramid of apricots, their sun-blushed velvet skins a shocking patch of colour in the grey pavement. In a moment the bustle and the heat of Lahore melt away. The noise of the fan turns into the sound of the wind at great height. The stifling air is exchanged to the clear cold mountain air. Even my soul has risen up unseen, and made ready its bags and journeyed homeward to the Hunza Valley. It has come back to an outdoor visit which is my favorite bus tour that was not merely a visit across some land, but a significant readjustment of the inner world.
A memory is something strange. Others are temporary snapshots, that are fading on the sides. Yet some are living breathing ecosystems. There are wells you can dip into them, temples you can take musing to. The latter is my recall of Hunza.
The trip in itself was a purifying act. The journey between Lahore to Hunza is like a fantastic journey of geology and psychology. The story starts in a world of the Punjab, a land of fertile soil and ancient settled past, the world of which you are leaving out of the horizontal, sprawling space. Hours pass: the land is old: flat, dusty, with villages and towns everywhere which seem filled to bursting point. Yet so gradually, so slowly at the very first, the world starts to tip. The highway starts uphill.
When you come across the Karakoram Highway KKH it is the beginning of the true pilgrimage. It is not really a road although it is a tribute to human daring a narrow strip of asphalt that hugs the foothills of the biggest mountains on this planet. Behind the wheel it is a humility lesson. You are a very small particles that travels in the world of giants. At your side, most of the way, is the Indus River, foaming, silty, raw power, the artery which has created this daunting land over the millennia. The further north you go the more the worldly clutter is shed. Instead of the billboards and commercials, there are sharp, dramatic brute faces of rocks. The air no longer becomes of a humid, heavy character, but thin, cool, and sharp, as the draught of ice water. The colour changes also, dusty greens and browns of the plains giving place to a primordial grey of rock, white snow, and piercing blue sky.
I still have the sensation of peeling off the layers both physically and symbolically. As the thousand feet of altitude was attained, a coat of city cares, deadlines, promises, appeared to be shed off. My cities-crawled shoulders started to relax. My breathing which is usually shallow and quick deepened. I was not travel ing towards a place, I was travel ing towards another state of existence.
Such was my first clear-cut sight of the Hunza Valley, an image burnt in my memory. Around a corner of the road the valley spread out in front of us, and the car grew dead quiet. It was with such baffling beauty that I could not imagine it to be a picture of landscape, but a work, rather, of the hand of God. The floor of the valley was an exuberant brocade of emerald-green terraces of wheat, apricot-tree groves and poplars with the compact stone-and-wood dwellings of Karimabad. On every other side mountains rose in gigantic, sterile walls of rock and scree that bounded this strip of impossible life. and in the air above were rising the mighty snow-clad mountains.
Rakaposhi. it was not a mountain; it was a presencing. a 25 thousand foot monster of ice and snow which towered above the southern sky and whose great, white sides reflected the sun with a glare so intense that it was almost painful to the eye. on the north towered the rugged spires of the Ultar Sar massif, of Diran Peak, and others, each an individual personality, a silent, white-robed god looking down into the valley. One can live in Lahore a whole life without ever seeing a clear horizon. The horizon here had been a sharp edged, and terribly impressive line of most dramatic architecture of the creation.
Senses were a treat of these days, the total re-education of my senses, numbed by the routine of the city.
Of course the vision was overwhelming. It was landslide formed, gemstone-blue of the Attabad Lake, vividly coloured that it appeared almost to hum. It was a scenery of geometric patterns of the terraced fields, a monument to generations of human labour and hard work. It was how the light was affecting the nature of the mountains all the time. They were precise, clear and medical in the morning. Later in the afternoon they were mellowed, fringing clouds hugging them like scarves. Then at the sunset their snows would blaze in a rosy glow of alpenglow, a transitory, sacred brand of pink and orange that made you catch your breath.
The silence was sounded. Or some weird sort of noise which seemed silence to my urbanized ears. The incessant mechanical hum had ceased, and was heard in its place the murmur of the breeze sweeping along the valley, the far-off, murmuring burble of the glacial streams which supplied their irrigation ditches, and now and then the wild, sharp scream of an eagle soaring about at great altitude. It was a silence which enabled you to hear your own thoughts with a startling clearness.
It was the sensation of cleanness. It was a sensation of the air of the cool north flowing into my lungs, clean, thinner than a knife blade, an elixir which appeared to wash the inside of my lungs right through them. It was the unexpected hotness of the sun on my flesh, a hotness which was not weighed down by the unrelieving trigger of moisture, and the sharp welcome coolness when I had been in the sun and turned aside into dimness. Worst of all it was the sense of being small. Argue with these mountains To stand at the foot of them is to be squarely put in your place. The ego, thus painstakingly built up and propagated in the city, just melts away. What of your cares, and your dreams, and your fears? At such scale and such times they all appear most unimportant indeed.
But what was taking this visit to another level to a wonderful trip to what I always considered as my most favourite was just not the beauty in the landscape. They integrated it in the culture. Spending some time in the town of Karimabad was a visit to the past. We toured the Baltit Fort, which stands like a watch-tower over the town, with its old timbers and stout, plain rooms, and with their tales of old kings, of traffic along the great Silk Road, of the life led in harmony with the hard conditions of the mountains.
Here a sense of time was changed. Time it seems is a mad, linear sprint, a commodity which is always in short supply in Lahore. Time was circular, time was slow and profound in Hunza. It was measured by those turning of seasons, by the life cycle of the apricot trees and by the stories of the elders, whose faces told as much as maps of the mountains, criss-crossed with the lines of hardship and jokes. It aroused in people of Hunza who are very long-lived and always complain of their health, probably a superior strength of character, a tranquility, an indifference to hard things, a contentedness, such as only a life so intelligently strenuous and yet so productive, can make.
They were not only a fruit, they were money of life. We would pluck them right off the tree and they were a burst of sunshine as they were a sweetness. we sipped of their juice like nectar. we used to see them dried on mats on the rooftop, all on the rooftops waiting through the long winter to come. Apricot was a symbol of how Hunza could wring sweets and nourishment out of the hard rock, a perfect metaphor of how gracious it was and how tough it was. A simple meal of local bread, fresh cheese and sun lit apricots whilst gazing on Rakaposhi was an experience of pure.
All the best adventures can be said to have a nucleus of sorts, at one point the entire strand of the experience is revealed in an almighty flash of insight. In my case it occurred at sunrise, at a platform (Duikar) situated high up over the valley, and commonly spoken of as the Eagle Nest.
It was still cold out of doors, we had wakened in the pre-dawn, when the stars were still out, jeweled as diamond dust upon a black velvet sky. It was a heart and breathing tugging process in the thin air to get up. By the time we arrived at the vantage point the last remainders of light were showing behind the mountains on the eastern horizon. Below there was nothing but a sea of shadows: the valley continued to sleep. Huddled together in the raw wind we were waiting.
And after that it commenced. It did not begin as a light, but as a gradually emptying of the darkness. the shapes of the mighty mountains started coming forth out of the mist, as though photographic pictures were being developed in a darkroom. And thereupon the very crest of Rakaposhi was touched by one bright strip of sunrays. Then the colour ran down hill spilling out over the snowfields, as other heights caught the light–Diran, Golden Peak, Ultar,–all blushing in their turn. The light streamed down the valley pursuing the shadows, and showing the green terraces, the turquoise river, the stone houses.
Within that half-hour, as I beheld the birth of the world in a soundless majestic pageant of light and colour, somewhere within me there was a change forever. I did not only watch this beauty but shared it. The separateness which afflicts civilization, the feeling that one is a consciousness in a body, watching an outside world go by, disappeared. Me and the mountains do not exist. there was but one, united breathing bulk. I had an awe that was so intense; it was something that is akin to a spiritual experience. And I felt a peace which was absolute, because in my personal timeline all its petty contingencies met with the mammoth and the geological time of the mountains.
The fan keeps on going in my room in Lahore. The hot weather has not disappeared. The hue and cry is not abated. but these have made a difference in the nature of this room, because of the remembrance of that sunrise at the Eagles Nest. It has turned out into an inner reservoir, a safe haven I bear within me. Our choice of outdoor visit is not a thing of the past, it is a continuous thing.
I also close my eyes and imagine I am under the power of the inexorable Rakaposhi when I am stressed because I need its imposible steadiness. When I am overwhelmed by the noise and self-disorder, I remember of the silk bottomed silence of the valley, marked by the wind alone. And when I am cynical I recall the unmistakable flavor of a sun-warm apricot and the natural deep gentleness of the Hunza people.
And that trip made me realize that the purpose of traveling is not only to see the world but to perceive your world back differently when you go back. Hunza has made a difference, has provided me with a new horizon, a view that is at the top of the world, at the top of the world that is at my disposal any time I desire. It helped me to understand that beauty is a not a luxury but nutrient to human soul. And it showed to me that those most cherished things of the past are not mere reverberations of the land we have passed through, but are living, breathing sceneries within our own souls, pools of calm, which we are at liberty to visit always, long after the stamp of our feet has disappeared on the pathway. The apricots on the vendor s stall are no more than fruit. But to me also they have been the key, the portal to the great, cool and beautiful retreat of my favorite outdoor visit.
