Himalayan fury

Their laughter light and true in the still air, two teenage sweethearts perch on a dry stone wall by a locked and sun-dappled monastery. Shafts of light on far-off hills. Phewa lake in the valley below looks as small and inviting as an English mere in summer. Kites wheeling on thermals.

An idle circling of the small stone building and I turn my gaze north-east. The Annapurna massif is by a comfortable distance the biggest mountain I have ever seen – and I can barely see it; for only its lower slopes are visible in faint pencil etchings of ridges and ravines. The rest is an undeniable presence masked by storm clouds now materialising in the valley between my small ridge and the mountain. I eat my lunch and watch the onset of this new weather, this new mood. There is something appalling and malign in the prospect developing before me: the hidden mass of rock, the steady insistence of thunder and the gothic, creeping aspect of the vapours drawn upwards to the summit: the mountain Gods demanding protection against prying, mortal eyes. When I turn my back to it I feel as if I am presenting a vulnerable point to an enemy, and a particularly booming peal of thunder seems like a warning to leave, or a dare that I should stay. The laughing couple leave and the temperature drops.

The Sarangkot ridge where I now stand was in mid-morning a drab mono-green of drooping woodland. Now, wind animates once listless trees into a hypnotic swaying. They move like coral in an ocean current, their colour darkening. Slowly at first, they come alive with feeling, these ancient things awakening to a life of new possibilities, each tree moving to a different tune. My body tenses – a protective sensation borne of the expectancy of imminent violence. Rain sweeps in, the cold seeps in through my jacket linings. The swaying symphony is now a crescendo, the canopy a mass of swirling branches and manically bending trunks: wooden dolls hideously tossed by a madman. The clouds in front of Annapurna darken to the colour of a bruise. The sun is obliterated.

Everything is weather now. The naïve picture-book world of identifiable forms, of birds and pretty lakes, has been smothered.