excerpts from Ladakh Diary

The overcast sky merges with evening; it is soon dark. I lie on my bed '._ eating monaco biscuits with some jam& some dried rasins.

It's about all I can keep down in this thin air. Altitude always sends your appetite haywire.

The silence of the night is shattered hourly by the long cries of another gust of wind. It shrieks as it rages across this high desert and then it hits my flimsy tent. For now the guy ropes hold (barely).

This high desert amplifies each mournful Sound and entwines it with the weak threads of my own thought.

Normally I enjoy solitude, but tonight my aloneness oppresses me like the magnified sound of blood beating in my ears. Nothing brings it home more than this rugged desolate plain which stretches out before me

I seem to equate my life with the landscape before me.

Rock, Rock, Desert, Ashen mountain scapes covered with a fine silt of dust which were once rocks but have been rendered thus by the jealous love of the north wind..

The wind loves the rock just so...

I fall asleep only towards dawn. Across the road an Army Depot where I hope to buy fuel in the morn.

Across the treeless street

A moist breeze blows.

I re-arrange my sheet,

Wiggle my cold toes,

Stare at the sky, and toss,

---------------Insomniac.

The wind comes like a freight train

Screaming through wide plains

Alongside, the scent of distant rain.

I am too tired tonight

To sleep. I lie Companion less.

The white Clouds gut the sky.

Orion, Pleiades, Plough,

All signs and certainties

Are lost to vision now.

The Army trucks come Unload.

The loaded trucks move on.

This is the great depot

Where nothing stays.

The hours move towards light.

Sleep: in the tall-skied days

You will forget me tonight.

==============================================

In The Nubra Valley.