Was this not the same effort pursued by the builders of the Tower of Babel, who, without renouncing their varied personal ambitions, expected to reach the One Eternal Being? In China, it was the “Mountains of the Blessed,” and the ancient sages instructed their disciples on the edge of a precipice …

After making this tour of the best known mythologies, I went on to general reflections on symbols, which I arranged in two classes: those subject only to the rule of “proportion,” and those subject, in addition, to the rule of “scale.” This distinction has often been made. I shall review it all the same. “Proportion” concerns relations between the dimensions of a structure, “scale” the relations between these dimensions and those of the human body. An equilateral triangle, symbol of the Trinity, has exactly the same value whatever its dimension; it has no “scale.” By contrast, take an exact model of a cathedral only a few inches in height. By its shape and proportions this object will always transmit the intellectual meaning of the structure, even if certain details must be examined through a magnifying glass. But it will no longer produce anything like the same emotion, or the same attitudes; it will no longer be “to scale.” And what defines the scale of the symbolic mountain par excellence—which I propose to call Mount Analogue—is its inaccessibility by ordinary human means. Now, Sinai, Nebo, and even Olympus have long since become what mountaineers call cow pastures; and even the highest peaks of the Himalayas are no longer considered inaccessible today. All these summits have thus lost their analogical power. The symbol has had to take refuge in entirely mythical mountains, such as Mount Meru of the Hindus. But if Mount Meru—to take one example—is no longer situated geographically, it can no longer preserve its persuasive meaning as the path uniting Heaven and Earth; it can still signify the center or axis of our planetary system, but no longer the means for man to gain entry to it.

“For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue,” I concluded, “its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The gateway to the invisible must be visible.”

This is what I wrote. Taken literally, my article did, indeed, suggest that I believed in the existence, somewhere on the surface of the globe, of a mountain much higher than Mount Everest, which was, to any so-called sensible person, an absurdity. And here was someone taking me literally! And talking to me about “launching an expedition”! A madman? A joker? But what about me? As the author of this article, I was suddenly struck by the thought that my readers might have the right to ask me the same question. So, am I a madman or a joker? Or simply a scribbler?—Well, I can admit now, even while asking myself these rather disagreeable questions, that deep down, in spite of everything, I felt that some part of me firmly believed in the material reality of Mount Analogue.

The next morning, I called one of the telephone numbers at the corresponding hour indicated in the letter. A feminine and impersonal voice assaulted me immediately, warning me that I had reached the “Eurhyne Laboratories” and asking me to whom I wished to speak. After several clicks, a man’s voice came to my rescue:

“Ah! It’s you? You’re lucky the telephone doesn’t transmit odors! Are you free on Sunday? … Then come to my place around eleven o’clock; we’ll take a little walk in my park before lunch … What? Yes, of course, Passage des Patriarches, and then? … ah, the park? That’s my laboratory; I thought you were a mountaineer … Yes? Okay! We’re on, then? … See you Sunday!”

So, he is not a madman. A madman would not have an important position with a perfume company. A practical joker, then? That warm and resolute voice was not the voice of a prankster.

That was Thursday. Three days to wait, during which my colleagues found me very distracted.

Sunday morning, dodging tomatoes, slipping on banana skins, brushing past sweating housewives, I made my way to the Passage des Patriarches. I passed through a front entrance, questioned the ‘soul of the corridors’—the concierge—and headed towards a door at the back of the courtyard. Before entering, I noticed a double rope hanging down from a small window on the sixth floor, along a bulging, crumbling wall. A pair of corduroy pants—as much as I could see in such detail at this distance—emerged from the window; they were tucked into stockings that, in turn, disappeared in flexible shoes. The person who culminated in this fashion managed, while holding on with one hand to the window ledge, managed to shift the two lengths of rope between his legs, then around his right thigh, then diagonally over his chest up to the left shoulder, then behind the collar of his short jacket, and finally down in front over his right shoulder, all this with one flick of the wrist; he grabbed the lines below with his right hand and the lines above with his left, pushed off from the wall with the bottom of his feet and, with torso erect and legs apart, he descended at the speed of one and a half meters per second, in that style that looks so good in photographs. He had hardly touched the ground when a second silhouette engaged in the same descent. Arriving at the spot where the old wall bulged, this new person was hit on the head by something like an old potato, which squashed on the pavement, while a voice trumpeted from above: “So you’ll get used to falling rocks!” He arrived below, however, not too disconcerted, but failed to end his “rappel de corde” with the gesture that justifies this name and consists of pulling on one of the lines to collect the rope. The two men went off separately and crossed the entryway under the eyes of the concierge, who watched them go by with a disgusted look. I went on my way, climbed the four flights of service stairs, and found this information posted near a window:

Pierre SOGOL, mountaineering teacher. Lessons Thursdays and Sundays from 7-11 o’clock. Means of access: go out the window, take a ledge to the left, scale a chimney, steady yourself on a cornice, climb a slope of disintegrating schist, follow the ridge from north to south skirting around several gendarmes.