49.8

Evoked by a whole night of strong, whipping wind, a frozen lover came back from his ancient hidden halls to embrace his all-time partner.
Preceeded by a curtain of roaring snow, this old lover approached his always waiting maiden, the mountain. His caress came from the west, his words have always been inaudible and forbidden to human ears, their cold embrace so endlessy desperate to kill whatever creature caught in the vicinity of their secret alcova.
Alpinists, wayfarers and visionaries, perhaps gone mad by what they witnessed up there, have always tried to find a name for this lover. For the almighty, abrasive Lord whose embrace lasts through ages and eons, whose arms may disintegrate ridges and valleys, stone and rocks.

One of my favourite writers, the worldwide famous alpinist Kurt Diemberger, proposed the possibly best definition for what I saw yesterday up there. In 1994, while in London, he published his well known book Spirits of the Air, referring to the ancient Greenland's Eskimo proverb, "Only the Spirits of the Air know what awaits me behind the mountains, but still I travel onwards".

That's what I witnessed yesterday: the eternal, inhuman encounter between the crushing force of a apirit of the air and his motionless, eternal lover, the mountain. A secret, prohibited sight for whatever human; misteriously welcomed for an instant in their haven, while the blizzard raged against my jacket and on the polarizer filter, I saw behind the white fury and recognized what whoever loved a woman will always remember.
The halo of light and breath, the warmth on your hands and mouth just a second before touching her skin. The stolen second of calm and wait before the embrace, before falling into her arms and fragrance.
But this all was on a different scale, too vast and inhuman to be fully appreciated by my limited perception; what I witnessed was just the eternal mating of the elements, making love through the stream of the old, undying song of entropy.

Fallen back unharmed to my narrow world, I still try to suppress my desire to be part of this everlasting intercourse, only sinking through the placid waters of my frustration.

For the color version of this picture:500px.com/photo/23011025