What does the poet mean by the line ‘forgotten lies the world below’? in poem A Trek To The Himalayas
Answers
Answer:
The Himalayas, or Himalaya; Sanskrit: himá and ā-laya, is a mountain range in South and East Asia separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The range has many of Earth's highest peaks, including the highest, Mount Everest, at the border between Nepal and China.
A Trek Through the Himalayas – and other poems
by Srinjay Chakravarti
The journey lasts for days and days.
We trek up valley, hill and slope
We carry with ourselves the hope
To traverse strange, untrodden ways.
We enter now a world of clouds.
Along the way we hear the call
Of mountain wind and waterfall.
The pallid mist is spreading shrouds.
At last we reach the final peak.
The summit beckons us to come
The air is cold, our feet are numb.
We climb to reach the grail we seek.
The path is steep and narrow there.
It snakes its way—these stairs of stone
Now mark the route we make our own.
The sunshine gilds the lucid air.
The peak is stark with gelid snow.
We look where sky and earth have merged,
From high above. Our souls are purged.
Forgotten lies the world below.
Returning
These, my days,
have stopped where I myself had stood
just a while ago.
Thus far and no further, they say—
we won’t go any more on foot.
I see them sitting by the river’s edge,
swishing vague feet
in the muddy silence of its water.
I sigh, and start once again.
My body trundles along wearily,
creaking and swaying
under its new, unfamiliar load.
My days, piled upon each other
as though on a bullock-cart,
jostling for space on my back.
Only my feet seem to know
where this rutted track is taking us.
I watch them walk on and on,
till they blur into the spokes
of my uncaring wheels.
The trees and bushes by the road
are overhung with wild creepers
matted and ashen into an ascetic’s unkempt hairs
by the murky light of this my evening.
Underfoot, the dried mud and slush
hardly conceal the stones and boulders
and make for a bumpy ride.
The black basalt shoulders of my road
have their skins stretched
across fleshless old bones.
From the leaves overhead,
clustered spaces of sky
count its ribs with the scraps of light
they sometimes let through.
Countless carts have returned this way,
stripping it of all its clods.
The knobbed tufts of grass
make up the only backbone
that has been spared by the ruts.
My axle wobbles on,
following the spoor of this green spine
into the beckoning darkness.
The Invisible River
In summer, the Phalgu
vanishes under the sand
near the temple town of Gaya.
As a tourist there in May
(India’s cruelest month),
with an empty water-bottle
and a parched throat,
I was at the end
of my trek
and my tether.
I scooped out four or five
handfuls of dust,
and there it was:
water clear as memory
under the smoldering sun
and delicious to the lips.
There is a legend
that the recalcitrant river
was cursed by Sita,
immortal queen of Ayodhya,
to flow beneath
the ground under her feet.
Or so says Valmiki
in the Ramayana.
Perhaps mythopoeic bards can divine
the sources of invisible rivers
without dowsing rods,
without the solipsistic necessity
of heat and thirst