mountains and seas

Some of my happiest days have been spent by the sea. And one of the things that always gave me much pleasure as a child was looking at the ripple marks on the sand. It is pretty, isn't it?

It is wonderful to stand in clear moving water and watch it sparkling in the sunlight. A foot below the surface is a clean, white, sandy bed. It is marked with row after row of wonderfully defined and marvelously regular wavy marks. Here and there, this bed is marked with an occasional irregularity. Instead of spoiling the symmetry of the marks, this occasional mark enhances it. Instead of despoiling the prisine beauty of the bed, it speaks of the life that exists there: these marks are the tracks of starfish, the front porches of shellfish.

Now that I have moved here, the sea is what I miss most. And so  I was absolutely thrilled when I came across just such a sandy sea bed. And absolutely thrilled as I looked at the bed and thought of all the stories it told. The gentle sea, with its moving, dancing wavelets. The pulse of tides. The marks of an animal as it moved across the bed in search of food, shelter, love. What matters it if all this happened millions of years ago?

Because what I was looking at was the floor of the Tethys Ocean. wow.

The fossil ripples are visible on the road from Mussoorie to Tehri, between 4-5 kilometers from the Woodstock School. Keep a sharp eye open, and you are bound to see them.