We came back
smaller.

Harsh & Holy

a week in ladakh · july 20221

A sky full of stars had been a concept, a song even.

Here, they were real.

Everything else — the cold, the road, the air or lack thereof — was the price of admission.

View from a plane window over bare brown mountains and a thin green river valley, snow peaks on the horizon

"Of immovable things, I am the Himalayas."

The Gita says it simply. Below the plane window,2 for the first time, you believe it.

For most of the group, this was a first time. I'd been before. I remembered a little of what was coming. Not enough.

The land above eleven thousand feet
is a different country.
Grass stops trying. Trees surrender.

A vast glacial valley of grey scree with patches of snow and a winding road cutting through the bottom

What's left is colour — umber, ash, bone, rust — and the wind that moves between them.

You notice your breath first.3 Then your heart. Then a headache behind the eyes that nobody warned you about.4

We were climbing toward Khardung La5 — one of the highest motorable passes in the world — when the clouds lowered onto the road. Someone asked if it was rain.

It was snow.

A mountain road disappearing into snowfall and heavy fog, snowflakes visible in the air

They stepped out. Some of them wept.

A woman in a beige coat among prayer flags at Khardung La, arms stretched wide, face tilted up to the falling snow with eyes closed
A second woman in black, same place, arms outstretched, face lifted to the falling snow, smiling

Nobody spoke.

At 18,000 feet, a handful of steps earns you breathlessness. The cold doesn't knock8 — it enters, takes the warmth from your hands first, then your face. And still they stood in it, arms wide, faces up. One of them was mouthing something I couldn't hear. I think she was thanking it.

I woke them
at two.

Nubra is what the sky does when nothing is in the way.6

It took maybe a minute for our eyes to adjust. Then it appeared.

The Milky Way stretching across a black sky crowded with stars, a dark mountain silhouette at the bottom of the frame

I didn't yet know how to photograph stars. The sky I've shown you is from a different valley, a different night. But it is the sky we saw.

Not all rivers shout.

The Zanskar river wide and slow and brown between bare mountains under a grey sky

The Zanskar here is slow, brown, enormous.7 It does not roar. It exhales. You can watch it for a long time and understand why people once decided the oldest gods lived in water.

Then one of us — quietly, almost to herself — started to sing.

Chamba kitni door…

Her voice was not a performance. She wasn't singing for us; she was singing at the river, the way you might speak to someone you hadn't seen in a long time.

The mountains listened. The dog listened. We listened.

That was the second silence of the trip. The first had been under the stars.

We came back
smaller.

Ladakh · July 2022

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