(The following account was found in the personal journal of the famous photographer Henry Ott after he was believed to have died in an avalanche in the mountains of Pakistan. His body was never found.)
The mountain was colder than usual on the day I saw her. I had arrived in the central mountainous region of Pakistan after three nightmarish days of travel through airports, cities, villages, back-roads, and finally the tundra that lay at the feet of the Safed Koh range – which means “white mountains.” After a week of getting lost, trudging along through the foothills below the steep slopes, and trying to fix my broken GPS, I gave up and headed back to base camp to pack up and go home. My dream of photographing the snow leopard in the wild seemed laughable. I hated giving up, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I had made some poor decisions, things that novices would avoid. I had even gotten my feet soaked after stepping foolishly on thin ice and falling up to my shin in freezing water. The danger of frostbite threatened soon after. If I failed to build a fire and dry my feet out immediately, my feet – down to the deepest tissue next to the bone – would freeze solid. This would mean certain amputation or death. I was too far out in the colder regions to risk treating frostbite. Thawing my feet would be possible if I built a fire and heated some water to a tepid temperature for soaking; but if cold air touched my feet again after being thawed, the damage would be irreversible, and I would lose the use of them permanently. I would then be too crippled to walk and would die unless someone found me. I had broken my radio and satellite phone when I fell through the ice. I was cut off from help. Getting back to camp and building a fire was my only hope. If I could just prevent the frostbite, I would be fine.
Then I saw it. Its hungry white face floated in the distance behind the trees like a ghost, as it ran along the slope of a hill. With a backdrop of snow and rocks behind it, the black speckles on its fur made it nearly invisible. It saw me. It smelled my scent on the wind. It stood motionless, watching me with curiosity. I cursed my icy feet, and with painful winces, hobbled quietly closer to the cat. I could barely breathe. The snow leopard stood within ten feet of me, but it refused to budge. I wasn’t hiding behind anything, and I felt naked before its cattish gaze. It felt as if we had arranged our meeting ahead of time and were about to begin an earnest conversation. I lifted my camera and captured some of the most stunning photographs I had ever seen in my life. It watched me passively, licking its chops, blinking with its wintry black and white feline eyes, and breathing with a steady, relaxed rhythm. And it was so beautiful. More beautiful than my memory can recall. I mostly recall the feeling of breathlessness as I watched it watch me. I went through half of my camera’s digital film. Still it watched me. After taking as many pictures as I could, I lowered my camera with a deep sense of satisfaction and locked eyes with the leopard. Our staring match must have lasted several lifetimes – at least it felt that way. Finally, it sighed. A puff of white billowed from its nostrils. It turned and left as quietly as it had come.
I limped back to the base camp with a pale face and trembling fingers, like Moses after returning from Mount Sinai in the presence of the divine. The worst day of my life had quickly become one of the best. I had a fire going, and I warmed my feet just in time. The threat of frostbite dissipated, and I was in a good mood. I opened a bottle of wine to celebrate and drank it in my tent as the sun went down. I dug a book out of my bag and began reading to relax. I found some jerky in my pack. Wind beat against the walls, and the canvas whipped me in the face several times. It was a strange night – more surreal than I had expected. I had just photographed a snow leopard in the wild, escaped certain death, and now lay in a sleeping bag in the middle of Pakistan, eating beef jerky, drinking red wine from Napa Valley California, and reading The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien with a flashlight. I read about elves walking up steep hills covered with forests. They were walking to the secret groves and woody palaces of Rivendell, singing songs along the way. It was the perfect chapter to read that night. Everything felt like magic. I could smell the pine trees just outside my tent. The wind was howling, as if singing its own primal song. Wolves were howling further away. I could smell the snow, if that makes any sense. It’s the smell that I always imagined diamonds to have – a sort of crystalline smell that makes me feel like I am drinking ice-cold water and smelling rain falling on pungent soil at the same time. Fortunately, I remembered to turn my flashlight off before falling asleep. I was drowsier than usual after a long day in the mountains (which may have been the red wine’s work). No dreams came.
The next morning, I packed my gear and began the long journey home. It took two hours to descend into the warmer plains that spread before Safed Koh. Hills, forests, and cliffs interrupted the flat grassland at regular intervals. At one such interval, I came across a beautiful waterfall plummeting into a wide, placid lake. The warmer elevations meant I could comfortably strip off my clothing and bathe without fearing hypothermia – as long as I didn’t stay in too long. The water was warmer than I had expected. And deeper. I decided to have a little fun. I climbed to the top of the waterfall and steeled my nerves, preparing to dive into the lake. That’s when it happened. A mist formed just beyond the edge of the rock where the water poured over the lip. It was a thick fog – like the tule fog back home in the San Joaquin Valley of California where I grew up. After staring at it for a few moments, I dismissed it as some explainable anomaly of air currents and moisture, and I prepared to leap into the air. With a cry of both fear and excitement, I ran towards the edge, leaped into the air, and felt the coolness of the mist as I plunged towards the lake. I closed my eyes, waiting for the splash of impact. It never came. The stomach-turning drop of gravity ebbed away; the feeling of floating weightless replaced it. Had I blacked out during the impact? Was I already in the water? I looked around frantically, but found no trace of water anywhere. I certainly wasn’t wet. Wisps of mist entangled my limbs. I was floating in mid-air. A patch of the fog cleared; I gasped and almost stopped breathing. I was rising higher, not falling. The waterfall was now hundreds of feet below me. The Safed Koh mountain range grew closer with every moment – far closer than I had gotten in my hikes. Soon its peaks greeted me, and I was high enough that it became harder to breathe. It would have taken days to reach this point by climbing. A few minutes later, I rose to the highest summit of the largest mountain. Still I rose. The Safed Koh now loomed below me. My heart was beating out of my chest with adrenaline. The freezing air had turned my body pale blue. Seconds later, I passed out from oxygen deprivation. Wild thoughts filled my mind in those final seconds. Had I died? Was I rising to Heaven? The last thing I saw before the world went black was my camera. In my absent-mindedness, I had forgotten to remove it from my neck after stripping my clothes off to jump into the water.
When I woke, I was no longer floating. I felt something prickly rub against my arms. My body was warmer. I was wearing clothes. An overwhelming fragrance rushed into my nostrils. I opened my eyes. My arms had been scratching against grass. My clothing, a dark green color, was strange looking – like plain linen pajamas, but with an organic solidity to them, as if knit from the veiny thinness of leaves. As I blinked and looked around, my mouth dropped open in wonder. Hundreds of thousands of flowers of every shape, texture, and color surrounded me as far as my eyes could see. The sky shined with a cloudless blue. The air was warm and sunny – probably in the mid-seventies. A light breeze swept across my face; thick plumes of flowery fragrances rushed into my nose and made me sneeze.
“I’ve never seen so many flowers,” I said.
“It took a year to coax that perfect smell from this land,” said a female voice from behind me. My heart leaped in my chest, and I spun around. The most peculiar, and yet the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, stood before me.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 1:23PM
