"I sat on a pile of stones, and slowly my breath grew quiet and my mind emptied. Below me, the river. Above, the great ochre face

of the rock overhanging the river. I can hear the songs of harvesters carried down to the river on the wind, and sometimes the high

call of a bird.  In the new transparence of my mind, I find that everything — the roar of the river, the bird-call, the harvesters singing

— is the same sound, the same ringing sound, only in different registers, different intensities. Even the rocks are ringing to this

sound, even the small stones I can see dully shining at the edge of the water; even the tuft of moss and sheep droppings to my

right. My breath is that sound also, and my heartbeat, and the brush and creak of my body as I stir.  I am frightened that I

shall not be able to survive so much feeling. Each bird-call is a knife through me; each twist in the rock brings me almost to tears.

I am afraid of dying and yet I know that dying is not possible if I am part of all this ringing energy. But how to calm my mind with that

knowledge? For a long moment, it happens. The fear passes. The river runs and roars through me; in the late evening light, the

rocks slow their dance, golden, and darken.

"On the desk as I write this, a pair of antique Ladakhi chopsticks. I bought them for the son of a friend, but when it came to it I could

not part with them, and gave him an old bell instead. The chopsticks are small, made of old, scarred, yellowing, thukpa and

mok-mok stained ivory, fitted into the back of the sheath of a silver dagger. Food and death, pleasure and wariness, happiness

and a proper caution. . . a happy dance of opposites and paradoxes. If they were to be used in a Tantric ceremony, the most

elaborate symbolism could be woven around them — the knife for cutting the strings of illusion, the chopsticks for eating the food

of contemplation. Their handles are of rough silver and on each there is only one ornament — a fan-tailed, fire-breathing dragon, of

such power that I expect each time I pick them up to burn my hands."

"Nothing I had read or imagined prepared me for the splendour and majesty of the mountains that first day; that was the first gift

Ladakh gave me, a silence before that phantasmagoria of stone, those vast wind-palaces of red and ochre and purple rock, those rock

faces the wind and snow had worked over thousands of years into shapes so unexpected and fantastical the eye could hardly

believe them, a silence so truly stunned and wondering that words of description emerge from it very slowly, and at first only in

broken images — a river glimpsed there, a thousand feet below the road, it’s waters sparkling in the shifting storm-light, the path

below on the bare rocky surface moving with sheep whose wool glittered in the sunlight, small flowers nodding in the crevasses of

the vast rocks that lined the road, rocks tortured in as many thousand ways as the mountians they are torn from, sudden glimpses

of ravines pierced and shattered by the light that broke down from the mountains, of the far peaks of the mountains themselves,

secreted in shadow, or illumined suddenly, blindlingly, by passing winds of light. And there is no reason in the images, no

demure and easily negotiable order, because they emerge from a silence and a wonder so full that they each seem to exist in a time

of their own, in a silence of their own, remote from all thought, glimpsed purely as they are, as they are in their essence, in some final

purity words do not reach."