1st July 2010
The entrance to Leh is a work of intricacy and a difficult one to photograph because you usually pass through it in a vehicle, not on foot, so you have to shoot from a moving vehicle; also, there is continuous traffic moving in and out...you have to wait for some calm to get an unobstructed view of the arch...and before you have got it right, you have left it behind... so much like so many good things in life.
As we drove towards Hemis, the spectacle of spaces stretching till the end of the world and rising into a border of mountains had lost its sharpness to the wooly mist that hung about them.
But not for long.
Those striations! I spent most of my camera on these wonderful striations.
Uniform strokes of a paint brush.
Layers of dry fruit in a sand-brown cake.
Hard jagged rock that will kill if you touch.
The lush patch of green was a novelty.
I hadn’t even imagined it possible in this setting, during the last visit.
That purple streak on the mountain was the finishing stroke of the brush, just to break the monotony of brown and beige. Without that, the picture wouldn’t have been the same.
1 comment:
"and before you have got it right, you have left it behind... so much like so many good things in life." Liked this line. :)
Beautiful mountain striations. Whenever I have looked at mountains like these anywhere, I have often wondered how much geological activity must have taken place deep inside the earth over millions of years and how these mountains with their wonderful "strokes of paintbrush" were gradually disembowelled - again over a period of millions of years - and then, how due to tectonic movement some of these strokes turn up horizontal, some in angles, some almost vertical. And furthermore, why do we humans still find a connection with that which was formed so many million years ago. Just what is it that connects us? Is it that man is purely "aesthetic"? Or is there a deeper connection since we are all born out of the very dust that made these mountains - dust thou art, to dust returnest?
Bizarre !!
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