Ambiguities help to blend the two spheres together. Daumal’s text is imbued with this same parallelism between the visible and the invisible—the trek, the characters, and obstacles are all symbolic of the blending of the lower and the higher. Guénon had devoted an entire book, La Grande Triade (The Great Triad), to exploring this symbology. According to him, the base of the mountain, earth (passive perfection—prakriti), is a symbol for personality, designated by the personage Arjuna, the anxious warrior hero of the Mahabharata. The peak of the mountain connects with heaven (active perfection—purusha) and is a symbol for the evolved spirit, designated by the god Krishna, Arjuna’s counselor. This symbology is perfectly enacted in the course of Daumal’s story.

Among the many references to myths, Daumal’s narrator recalls “those obscure legends of the Vedas, in which the soma—the ‘nectar’ that is the ‘seed of immortality’”—is said to reside in its luminous and subtle form ‘within the mountain.’ Now, based on this symbolism, he proposes the physical existence of the ultimate mountain, which must be inaccessible to ordinary human approaches. While existing earthly mountains, even the mighty Himalayas, have been demystified by the profane, he finds the mythic mountains also inadequate because they have no geographical existence. He feels that Mount Meru of the Hindus, lacking real physical coordinates, “can no longer preserve its persuasive meaning as the path uniting Heaven and Earth.” Accordingly, he believes in the material existence of Mount Analogue: “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.”5

With deliberate brushstrokes, Daumal sketches in the essential details of plot and character. One of France’s most eminent literary critics, André Rousseau, in a lengthy chapter, “L’Avènement de René Daumal” (“The Accession of René Daumal”) of his book Littérature du XXième siècle (Literature of the Twentieth Century), recalls René’s description of the effort involved in producing what he called la Chose-a-dire (“the Thing-to-say”). “The Thing-to-say appears then in the most intimate part of oneself, like an eternal certainty.”6 Rousseau felt that there was not a single line in Mount Analogue where la Chose-a-dire does not hit us. Immediately, the proposed mountain-climbing expedition becomes intertwined with a quest for knowledge. The narrator and his soon-to-be-teacher, Sogol, are kindred souls, discovering each other in a manner reminiscent of Breton’s “objective chance,” that is, finding a kindred soul in an anonymous way—in response to an article. Here we see the synchronicity that will occur many times throughout Mount Analogue, the randomness and hidden order that surrounds us. Their chance encounter is also reminiscent of Daumal’s lines in his essay “Nerval Le Nyctalope”: “I was thus being observed! I was not alone in the world! This world which I had thought was only my fantasy!”7 Contrast this with Sogol’s note to the narrator: “Monsieur, I have read your article on Mount Analogue. Until now I thought I was the only person convinced of its existence,” and the narrator’s surprise: “And here was someone taking me literally! And talking about lauching an expedition! A madman? A practical joker? But what about me?”8

The teacher/seeker figure, Pierre Sogol, “with the tranquility of a caged panther,” is a character drawn larger than life, who combines “a vigorous maturity and childlike freshness”9 His thinking is described as being

like a force as palpable as heat, light, or wind. This force seemed to be an exceptional faculty for seeing ideas as external facts and establishing new connections between what seemed to be utterly disparate ideas. [He would] treat human history as a problem in descriptive geometry … the properties of numbers as if he were dealing with zoological species … [and illustrate how] language derived its laws from celestial mechanics.10

Sogol’s varied background recalls both de Salzmann and Gurdjieff, each of whom had many areas of expertise. The seeds of this character were sown back in 1934 when René was sent to collect de Salzmann’s material effects at the Hotel Jacob in Paris after his death in Switzerland on May 3, 1934. He described the experience in a letter to Véra:

It was certainly sad to undo all these balls of string that he planned to unwind himself one day. And to find so many projects started. There were mostly books: algebra manuals, adventure novels, old history books, dictionaries, some perhaps of value, but I felt it useless to take them except for three or four. There remains: pieces of wood, paint supplies, an ax, plus his papers—sketches, studies, projects, plans, etc., and a magi marionnette.11

When we meet the composite character Sogol, he is currently an inventor and teacher of mountaineering, accepting students only if they first scale his Parisian apartment building and enter through the window.

The narrator accompanies Sogol through his laboratory, which he calls his “park.” They meander down a pebble path through plants and shrubs, among which are dangling hundreds of little signs, “the whole of which constituted a veritable encyclopedia of what we call human knowledge, a diagram of a plant cell … the keys to Chinese writing … musical phrases … maps, etc.” The narrator finally realizes the brilliant logic of this information path:

All of us have a fairly extensive collection of such figures and inscriptions in our head; and we have the illusion that we are “thinking” the loftiest scientific and philosophical thoughts when, by chance, several of these cards are grouped in a way that is somewhat unusual but not excessively so … Here, all this material was visibly outside of us; we could not confuse it with ourselves. Like a garland strung from nails, we suspended our conversation from these little images, and each of us saw the mechanisms of the other’s mind and of his own with equal clarity.12

Here, and many times throughout the book we see Daumal’s rejection of busy behavior, overintellectualizing, and his general preference for quality over quantity. This reflects Daumal’s study of Guénon (especially his book Quantity and Quality), and the Hindu preference for being rather than information gathering. In Buddhist literature, the material world is often referred to as the “10,000 beings.” Daumal loves to evoke this image by making long lists of things, both in his novels and in his poetry.

Sogol and the narrator bare their souls for thirteen pages of the first chapter, entitled “The Meeting.” They each share their disinterest and apathy for “this monkey-cage frenzy which people so dramatically call life.”13 Sogol recounts that after having experienced almost every pleasure and disappointment, happiness, and suffering, he felt he had completed one cycle of existence. He joined a monastery where he applied himself to inventing instruments, which rather than making life easier, would rouse men out of their torpor. Two such examples were a pen for facile writers that spattered every five or ten minutes, and a tiny portable phonograph equipped with a hearing-aid-like earpiece that would cry out at the most unexpected moments: “Who do you think you are?”14 With hilarious inventiveness, Daumal applies Gurdjieff’s theory of “alarm clocks”—employing reminding factors and resistances, little tricks to wake ourselves up. It also harks back to the Lilliputians of Gulliver’s Travels who wore elaborate flappers to keep themselves roused.