Days on the Chadar are so full of images, colours and sounds, all in continuous motion, that by days end there is a feeling of fullness and completeness rarely found in the 'real' world.
Now as I write, the sounds are of warmth. The crackle of the porters fire, with the occasional woosh as the logs collapse, sending up clouds of glowing embers, offering like, to the sky where the stars shine unblinking here in the thin air at 4000 metres.
But no childhood dream could imagine this.
Powder snow that crunches gently beneath your feet, a million tiny particles caught at one point in the freezing process, perfect to stop sliding on the blue ice beneath.
A layer of fragile ice that shatters on contact, into jagged one foot shards you can shuusssh through like autumn leaves, leaving a trail of vandalism that no one will scold you for.
Ice, pure, thick, clear ice that you can look down to the river bottom through, with, there! a fish darting at the corner of your vision.
Ice that is layered with consecutive freezings, rocks once on the surface suspended below, hanging like planets in a schoolroom display, and around them air trapped with lava lamp like curves.
Blue green ice coated with thousands of leaf like ice crystals formed by some combination of wind, sun, and cold - and in the minus 16c (if you pre chill a gloveless hand) you can scoop them up and admire their delicate patterns for whole seconds at a time before your warming hands return them to moisture.
And then at corners of the river, jagged plates - dining room floors, ball room floors, hotel room floors, canted at bizarre angles by the pressure of water beneath, some seeming solid and unyielding, luring you into the middle with the promise of moving horizontally, but as they take your weight, gunshot like cracks echo from canyon walls, and the whole thing starts to bow as it breaks and the Zanskar surges up, sending you skittering back to the safety of the churned up expansion ridges art river's edge.
Tired and at days end, with camp just minutes away, you cross a flat expanse and feel a shift, and realise the whole surface is rising and falling gently with the surge of the river below. And tired not just from the strain of staying upright on all the varieties of frozen water, but with the sheer immensity of the Chadar straining your credibility, you simply stop and let the moment take you.
And the sound running through it all, of course, Siddartha like, is the so, so blue Zanskar sometimes roaring up in white and blue spray as the ice calves, sometimes a gentler background wash with hundreds of perfectly circular roundels of slush bobbing on the surface, piling into river bends to form a new surface, and sometimes jerking you awake in the early hours as huge chunks ice crash down river...and in the morning are frozen in rippling waves.
As you teeter gently on a foot wide ledge it surges past an inch or two from your nervous ice encrusted foot, it focuses the mind marvellously.
Then lift your eyes (making sure your feet are firmly anchored first) to frozen waterfalls that drop deep aquamarine claws over impossible black rock walls, wind whipped and water curved, that you despair of finding purchase on as you clamber away from bad ice to the sparse footing on an ibex trail above.
And the porters, always the porters as counterpoint to the river, the light relief. Smiling, laughing, smoking, cooking,collecting firewood, repairing their crazy soapbox sledges that skitter behind them on the ice. Washing their socks through a fissure in the ice, dipping their cups in the Zanskar to drink, and screaming with delight when one of them wipes out on slick ice, or another ruefully pulls off his boot to empty a pint of ice water.
At days end before the plummeting temperatures take you inside, look up from your darkling gorge and watch the sun pick out the heights that soar above you, red brown sheer faces lit golden, leading higher to glittering gunmetal summits picked out with veins of snow...and drop your gaze to pick out trails you have followed and will follow on balmy summers days both past and future.
Surely. as Kipling's Kim said, the Gods live here.
And just as you have made a cautious coexistence with this river, you turn a bend and here is a fresh delight, the snowcapped plateau of the old kingdom of Zangla, tiny dwellings with frosted prayer flags on every roof.
The narrow village lanes bustle with snot encrusted bubbling brown eyed children, red wool goncha clad, dragging makeshift sleds down to their local ski run to plunge shouting and with the breathless purity of childhood in the sharp thin air, spinning to a safe landing in deep powder, sobbing with laughter as they shout at you
Ju le Ju le Ju le
Evenings by stovelight and hot salt tea, in warm Zanskari homes as we cross the frozen plain towards Zangla, with every morning the Chu la, the frost mist, surging off the river towards us as we move, past ice encrusted briar and poplar coated in hoar frost glistening with that first-morning-of-creation light; look and you may see the tiny pink petals of a faded rose from a summer long gone.
Then before you, the end of our journey, and the beginning of many, the Great Himalayan Range rising sheer to 6000m and more, stretching glittering blue white across the horizon. The massed snows on the heights, come spring, will be irrigating the green oasis towns of this tiny land, this snow fed river will still be curving through it, and the childrens laughter and the Zanskaris joy in life will be renewed once more.
Would all endings bring such peace
"The scale, the purity, the unknowedness, these are characteristics that stimulate contemplation."
Sarah Wheeler
