With a group of friends I set out in search of the Mountain which is the path uniting Earth with Heaven and which must exist somewhere on our planet and must be the abode of a superior humanity; this was proved to our reason by the man we shall call Father Sogol, the most experienced of us in things of the mountain and the leader of the expedition.

And now we have landed on the unknown continent, this kernel of higher substances implanted in the earth's crust, protected from the eyes of the curious and the greedy by the curvature of its space — like a drop of mercury, impenetrable by virtue of its surface tension to the finger that seeks its center.

By our calculations, thinking of nothing else, by our desires, abandoning every other hope, by our efforts, renouncing all bodily comfort, we gained entry into this new world. So it seemed to us.

But we learned later that if we were able to reach the foot of Mount Analogue, it was because the invisible doors of that invisible country had been opened for us by those who guard them. The cock crowing in the milky dawn thinks its call raises the sun; the child howling in a closed room thinks its cries open the door. But the sun and the mother go their way, following the laws of their beings.

Those who see us, even though we cannot see ourselves, opened the door for us, answering our puerile calculations, our unsteady desires, and our awkward efforts with a generous welcome.

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RENE DAUMAL

Mount Analogue

A Novel of Symbolically

Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures

in Mountain Climbing

translation by Roger Shattuck

(Penguin)