At Their Feet

A short walk between two base camps in Nepal, and a thought that has stayed with me since.

In March this year, I walked from Machhapuchhre Base Camp to Annapurna Base Camp. On the map it is the last short stretch of a long trek, a couple of hours at most. Somewhere on that stretch I had a thought that I have not been able to put down.

There was snow all around us. Mist kept rolling in and hiding half the view. We had been walking towards these mountains for days. I had expected to be awed when we finally reached them, and I was ready for it. Even so, it was too much to take in. Everything was larger than my eyes knew what to do with. I would look up at a ridge, and the ridge would keep going.

Machhapuchhre, the fishtail peak, is revered as an abode of Shiva. No one is allowed to climb it. Annapurna, where we were headed, is named for the goddess of food and nourishment, a form of Parvati, Shiva’s consort. I had known both names since I was a child. That morning, for the first time, I was walking from the foot of one to the foot of the other.

The thought came on its own. I was walking from his abode to hers.

Then I noticed the water. Streams from the glaciers ran down the valley between the two mountains, under the snow and over it, finding their way lower. Where I come from, washing someone’s feet is one of the oldest ways of showing respect. You do it for a guest, for a teacher, for a god in a temple. And here were the rivers, coming down from the mountains and flowing through the valley, as if they were washing the feet of the two gods.

I kept turning that picture over as I walked. The mountains rising above us. Their feet resting in the valley. The water flowing beneath them. And us, a thin line of small figures with walking poles, making our way between the two.

The signboards had told me where we were going. Base camp: a place to start from, a target for the day. Thinking of these places as feet told me where I was. After days of walking, I had reached only the feet of something whose size I could barely hold in my mind. I had not climbed anything. I had come just close enough to look up.

Standing there, it was easy to understand why people have revered these mountains for so long. I could imagine someone arriving in this valley centuries ago, long before there were trekking routes, tea houses or signboards. They would have looked up at the same peaks and seen the same water flowing through. They would have felt that they were in the presence of something far greater than themselves. Calling it a god would not have been a leap. It would have been the obvious word.

I grew up with these names and these stories. Shiva on his mountain. Annapurna feeding the world. I knew them the way you know things you were told as a child, without ever having to picture them. Walking through that valley gave them a place. The stories now had a landscape, and the landscape had the stories.

Even now, months later, when I remember that stretch of the trail, I do not think of the cold or the snow. I think of the water flowing through the valley, and of us walking slowly from one abode towards the other, somewhere at their feet.