Fourstones

YOUNG MOUNTAIN
VIA FOURSTONES (One big, one small and two good-looking)
MONDAY 25 SEPTEMBER
One of my more pleasureable and comfy - even sybaritic - experiences of married life is to get into bed and, while quietly entering that semi-drowsy state of mind, listen to my partner read out loud whatever it is she is reading in bed at the time. Thus it was that last night, Wenzi read from Han Suyin’s “The Mountain is Young”:

“By the sea, in the plain, in the valley, people talk of mountains, raise their heads to stare at mountains, not knowing this sense of vast fate which is mountains seizing upon the horizon. Here in the mountains at last is no refuge from the overwhelming, the magnificence, the thrall they engender. One becomes lost in smallness under the wavering sky. The true Himalayas, miles above the sea, are still in the throes of creation. The mountains are young, very young, adolescently dino-saurian, terrible with ruthless youth.

“Here is laid out for man to see the turmoil of earth's change since its crust folded and twisted and thrust this corner of the world, the Central Asian plateau with Tibet and Nepal, up into heaven. We become all pettiness in the scale of the enormous upflung rock hurled skywards. Strong wind and water, ice and snow and baking sun have carved their gradual breakdowns into the shapes we see, which like evolutionary mammoths last their aeons of slow travail before vanishing into new forms.”
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Now, I know the Himalayan range is exactly 60 million years old so it was interesting to learn that it is considered ‘Young, very young…and terrible with restless youth’… and as I slipped into dreamland, I thought to myself:

“How wonderfull! Never mind - young or old. Just think, our son has actually been there and has experienced first-hand, the feeling and sensation of being there – not insulated in a cabin or train compartment but actually walking with his own two feet and sensing for himself, with sore muscles and panting breath, the testing effects of this turmoil of earth's change. He has once again, witnessed its crust folded and twisted and thrust up into heaven in this dramatic corner of the world, Tibet and Nepal!
How true, to realise we become all pettiness in the scale of this enormous upflung rock hurled skywards.
RAYMOND E