THE HIMALAYAN ODYSSEY
The mind is on a trek
Through rugged mountains of despair,
Such desolation, such untraversed terrain,
No man has stepped foot here;
I am in Concordia.
Huge peaks of the Karakorum
Rise to belittle me.
For them it’s
So easy.
The mighty Indus bursts its belly;
The full flow of glacial melt
In high summer
Mixes gold with sand grain
And both are one.
Such awesome power
Overwhelms the soul,
Numbs the mind,
The senses weaken,
The spirit feels confined.
Space is deceiving
And so is time.
What peace, if any, awaits me here?
These dunes never end,
What appears so near
The feet cannot transcend
And a whole day’s walk goes by.
II
The Baltis are deaf;
Their ears tuned to silence,
The everlasting silence
Of the mighty Karakorums,
Mother of stone,
Such wonders you conceive,
How can one so small
Dream of measuring their scale?
Yet here I am,
On a trek of the soul
To do precisely that.
Is it wrong to imagine
All will be well;
The will will soar
Above such terrible foes
The heart shall transcend
The loftiest powers
And all will be,
As it must be
For the wings of a Shaheen?
The snow clad terrain cannot answer,
The dunes play with the wind,
The orchids bloom,
And fire burns my veins.
The ascent is on my mind,
These mountains are my domain,
I trek the forests of despair
And am light as the wings,
Soaring, always soaring.
III
The Markhors and Ibex
Sacrificed by the Buddhists
Find a new life in stone.
For centuries undiscovered,
They breathed free of men,
And now the archaeologists gaze
to decipher all it means.
The roar of the mighty Indus
Deafens even such dreams.
Rocks of magnificence,
Rocks of time,
Rocks the waves
Could never wash away,
Such Godly power
Runs in their veins,
And yet in their core,
In their heart of granite
Is a water’s drop.
Give me such power
To stand my passions,
Burn to a brown,
Be hard as stone,
And yet in my epicenter
Carry the softness
Of a tiny drop.
But these brittle bones squeak.
Each footstep is a mile,
Where time and space stand still
The mind moves ever so slowly,
How will the wings carry?
IV
The plains left behind
Were soft and easy,
Their lush body
An unending series
Of gold and green,
Wanted to hold me.
Here the Indus
Eased its tension,
Spreading at will,
No rocks to cope with,
No frightening gorges,
No need to argue
At a high pitch,
It gently goes
Listening to the kingfisher,
Always the kingfisher.
But my heart could not stay.
In these silent wastes,
Only spirits roam
Searching an illusive peace;
The primal union of man and stone.
Poem by Raja Changez Sultan
Raja Changez Sultan is a poet and a painter in the same breath. In no other instance is this more apparent than in the union between the poem The Himalayan Odyssey and his landscape series of the same name. During his tenure as a senior official in the tourism sector, RCS travelled extensively in the northern areas of Pakistan – home to the highest peaks of the world. These majestic ranges seem to now live inside of him and their reverence can be felt in both his poetry and his painting.
