Kashmir [antikvár]

It began as great love begins: unobtrusively. Almost unobserved. When the hot summer sun of the Punjab beats down on a person week after week, when gales dry him out day in, day out, at 50° Centigrade, when on the road between Karachi, Mohenjo-Daro and Amritsar his skin gets tanned by wind more so than by the sun, he begins to long for a nook on this earth where there is shade and water, and the peaks are covered with snow. He longs for the midday shade under the sycamores and for the cooling night breeze oflfthe mountains. Such a place exists in northern India, hardly six hundred miles to the north of New Delhi. Two thirds of the way endless plains, the last third along the ridges of high mountains, from pass to pass, above bottomless canyons and along slopes cloaked in Himalayan cedars. And then the Fata Morgana which drove you along the roads of northern India becomes reality in one unique, all-embracing view. It is too beautiful to be believed at first sight. To the east and the north from the Banihal Pass the gigantic jagged teeth of the ice-covered peaks rise into the azure of the sky: the Great Himalayas. A densely wooded wreath of high mountains interspersed with snow-clad giants extends in a westerly direction and in a broad circle turns south back to Banihal. Scintillating rice-paddies drop straight from the road into an abysmal depth, down into that legendary valley hidden among the greatest mountain massif in the world; here begins Kashmir. You had longed to find a refreshing and quiet nook where to be lost to the whole world and to put down on paper what you had saved up on the roads through the Middle East. And suddenly, all you want is to forget the typewriter, the piles of photographs and the notebooks. You want to gorge the lenses of your camera with all that beauty. You are like a student who again and again tries a new angle, more attractive light, happier moments in which, for all times, to catch his first love with his camera.