Finally, Sogol then relates that he left the monastery, continuing always to question this “grown-up” existence:

Fearing that death I suffer every moment, the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my childhood, keeps asking, as your does: “Who am I?” … Whenever this voice does not speak—and it does not speak often—I am an empty carcass, a restless cadaver.’15

The narrator relates similar existential anxieties from his own childhood, echoes of Daumal’s early experience:

In the evenings in bed, with the light out, I tried to picture death, the “most nothing of all.” In imagination I suppressed all the circumstances of my life and I felt gripped in ever tighter circles of panic. There was no longer any “I.” What is it after all, “I”? … Then one night, a marvelous idea came to me: Instead of just submitting to this panic, I would try to observe it, to see where it is, what it is. I perceived then that it was connected to a contraction in my stomach, a little under my ribs, and also in my throat … I forced myself to unclench, to relax my stomach. The panic disappeared … when I tried again to think about death, instead of being gripped by the claws of panic I was filled by an entirely new feeling, whose name I did not know, something between mystery and hope.16

By the fifteenth page, Daumal has posed the question three times: Who are you? Or Who am I? Together the two characters agree that there must be an answer to this question, there must exist, according to Sogol,

men of a superior type, possessing the keys to all our mysteries. Somehow I could not regard this as a simple allegory, this idea of an invisible humanity within visible humanity. Experience has proven, I told myself, that a man can reach truth neither directly nor alone; an intermediary must exist—still human in certain respects yet surpassing humanity in others.17

This excerpt echoes Gurdjieff’s belief in an “Inner Circle of Humanity,” a group that maintains an inner sanctuary of esoteric knowledge and secretly mediates in human events. It also reflects Daumal’s personal experience in his early years of having failed on his own to find what he was seeking. He thus shares with us his own fortune to have found three of these intermediaries in the persons of the de Salzmanns and Gurdjieff. For him this allegorical tale is less farfetched than it might appear. Just as Sogol suggests, Daumal would not take Mount Analogue “simply as an allegory.”

In chapter 2, entitled “Suppositions,” Sogol spends ten pages providing the scientific data, complete with diagrams, to explain the anomalous properties of Mount Analogue. Because of the invisible closed shell of curvature that surrounds the island, it remains protected from human detection, but not always, not everywhere, and not for everyone. At a certain moment and in a certain place, certain persons (those who know and have a real wish to do so) can enter. This phenomenon is a scientifically embellished metaphor for Gurdjieff’s explanation of how esoteric knowledge is not truly hidden but simply imperceptible to those who are not seeking it. “The Sun has the property of uncurving the space which surrounds the island. At sunrise and at sunset it must in some fashion make a hole in the shell, and through this hole we shall enter!”18 Sogol presents the potential of synchronicity; his logic convinces the group of interested candidates and they all declare themselves willing to make the unprecedented journey.

Daumal provides a biographical profile as well as an actual ink sketch of each crew member, possibly attempting to create each of the twelve archetypes of human beings, as delineated by Gurdjieff. The eight remaining crew members together seem to represent different aspects of a single being. Among them we find the American artist (Judith Pancake), the Russian linguist (Ivan Lipse, probably based on Lavastine), the Austrian brothers—scientist Hans and metaphysician Karl. Four others drop out, epitomizing the stumbling blocks on the path to enlightenment, One is caught up in the joyous dance of maya (illusion), another is trapped in the veil of self-pity, and the others are too full of worldly concerns to leave the dream they inhabit.

By chapter 3, Daumal puts this cast of characters to sea, realistically and metaphorically. “We were not at all cut out to be sailors. Some suffered from seasickness … The path of greatest desires often lies through the undesirable.”19 Finally, in chapter 4, by a kind of syncretism of logic and magic, the sailors manage to penetrate the impenetrable envelope of curved space by doing nothing except being ready. In the true spirit of nonaction, the spirit of the Bhagavad Gita, the sailors are pulled in by a higher force:

a wind rose out of nowhere, or rather a sudden powerful breath drew us forward, space opened before us, an endless void, a horizontal gulf of air and water impossibly coiled in circles. The ship creaked in all its timbers and was hurled up a slope into the center of the abyss, and suddenly we were rocking gently in a vast, calm bay surrounded by land!20

They land, and are welcomed as though they had been expected. When they try to answer Daumal’s favorite question, “Who are you?” they realize that, with the guides (who are in an advanced state of evolution), “We knew henceforth that we could no longer pay the guides of Mount Analogue with words.”21 They gradually orient themselves, wondering why the port of arrival is called “Port O’ Monkeys.” The narrator muses, “this name evokes in me, not too pleasantly, my entire Western twentieth-century heritage—curious, mimicking, immodest, and agitated.”22 Looking out into the port, they view “Phoenician barques, triremes, galleys, caravels, schooners, two river-boats as well, and even an old mixed escort vessel from the last century.”23 The search for consciousness knows no barrier of time, culture, or age; all come as monkeys.

As they prepare to ascend the mountain, they get carried away with their research and analyses of the Asiatic origins of local myths, the peculiar optical conditions of the island’s atmosphere, and endless linguistic, sociological, and religious aspects. Suddenly they are roused by their guide from these preoccupations (“dreams” in Daumal’s words) and realize how their idle curiosity was holding them back from their primary goal.

We knew that nasty owl of intellectual cupidity all too well, and each of us had his own owl to nail to the door, not to mention a few chattering magpies, strutting turkeys, billing and cooing turtle doves, and geese, fat geese! But all those birds were so anchored, grafted so deeply to our flesh that we could not extract them without tearing our guts out. We had to live with them a long time yet, suffer them, know them well, until they fell from us like scabs in a skin condition, fell by themselves as the organism regained its health; it is harmful to pull them off prematurely.24

Here again we see the same little creatures that we met in “The Holy War” and A Night of Serious Drinking—the same physical imagery of foibles and fretting “grafted to the flesh.” Only now, in Daumal’s maturity, he understands that they too play a role in the process of evolution. Each individual had to renounce his current activities to go off on the journey. Later they had to give up their alpinist gadgetry and exploratory instruments for simpler provisions, as they prepared themselves for the mountain ascent.

We began to call one another by our first names … this small change was not a simple effect of intimacy. For we were beginning to shed our old personalities. Just as we were leaving our encumbering equipment on the coast, we were also preparing to leave behind the artist, the inventor, the doctor, the scholar, the literary man. Beneath their old disguises, men and women were already peaking out.25

This concept of removing the trappings of one’s personality and penchants that Daumal alludes to from his earliest writings onward is a common theme to all great works about the spiritual quest.