Man received the light of understanding. He wanted to see his light and enjoy it in multiple shapes. He was driven out by the force of the Unity.37

The form of Mount Analogue is a first-person narrative written in an understated, documentary style. It is the same style that we find in a dozen of his letters written to Véra, Jack, Jean Paulhan, Renéville, and others, while in the mountains during the years 1937 to 1943. Comprising thirty-two pages, these letters give lyrical, firsthand accounts of life in the mountains and include his experiences with the hardy mountain people. He describes his mountaineering training and how he would climb every other day, until walking on horizontal land seemed a little strange:

There is nothing quite like the mountains for teaching slowness and calmness; there are climbs which take an hour of absolute slowness: left foot, right hand, walking stick here, right foot, walking stick there, body weight left, left hand … and here nervousness would kill. Once on top, the body discovers its paradise, which is taking off one’s shoes and drinking a mouthful of wine mixed with snow gathered along the way.38

His description of the névé or glacier snow in Mount Analogue is lifted right out of his epistolary description to Rolland de Renéville where he lists ten different kinds, such as “wheat snow,” “diamond snow,” and “carpet snow.”39 One ten-page letter to his brother Jack is so replete with technical, montagnard jargon, that Daumal included thirty-six explanatory footnotes. Likewise, the detail of Mount Analogue reflects his expert knowledge of the subject, yet he never overburdens the novel with excess technical jargon that would intrude on the main poetic thrust.

The lightness and lyrical quality, reminiscent of Vedic poetry, is especially present in those mountain letters. It is clear that, in spite of his tubercular condition, Daumal was in his element several thousand feet up: his natural humor bubbles up everywhere to celebrate the mountainscape. These qualities emerge in Mount Analogue in a particular pattern: the beginning chapters are pervaded by a subtle humor, the middle chapters become more technical and scientific, and the final chapters achieve a joyful lyricism and exaltation. This progression gives a certain dramatic momentum to the voyage and climb.

The overall taste (rasa) of the book would fall into the Hindu category of “marvel,” as in A Night of Serious Drinking, for a sense of marvel and strangeness is intended, in a very matter-of-fact way, from the first page. Whenever a camera was used on Mount Analogue, nothing would appear on the developed film. Some of the flora of Port O’Monkeys include the incendiary lycoperdon, which would spontaneously ignite through intense fermentation, and the talking bush, whose fruit in the shape of resonant gourds could reproduce all the sounds of the human voice when rubbed by its own leaves. Yet the down-to-earth reporting makes the strange phenomena—such as herds of unicorns, seem absolutely plausible. The casual tone belies the weightiness of the ideas behind the bare facts of the allegory.

I munched a piece of biscuit. The donkey’s tail chased a cloud of flies into my face. My companions were also pensive. All the same, there was something mysterious in the ease with which we had reached the continent of Mount Analogue; and then, we seem to have been expected.40

In this book Daumal presents, in a veiled manner, many aspects of the teacher-disciple relationship of the esoteric tradition and of the Gurdjieff Work in particular. One important concept is the linkage that exists between seekers. One can never advance farther up unless one prepares for those behind. In the narrative, the guides explain to Sogol’s band that each passing group must leave their encampment stocked with provisions for the next caravan. When the party sees the distant white smoke from the group ahead, they feel a mutual support: “For from now on the path linked our fate to theirs, even if we should never meet. Bernard knew nothing about them.”41 In the notes that he made for future additions to the novel, he talks further about the traces left by one seeker for another, warning the climber not to leave traces of false starts and mistakes. “Answer to your fellow men for the traces you leave behind.”42

All seekers are linked through a hierarchy of evolved souls such as “the high mountain guides.” Everything happens through the unfolding of a divine plan. When they wonder how they came to land, “we came to understand later that this was not by chance, that the wind that had sucked us up and led us there was no natural and fortuitous wind but a deliberate blast.”43

In the last paragraph of the notes, the narrator lists the many factors that contributed to their successful entry: their calculations, their efforts, and their renunciation of bodily comforts. “So it seemed to us. But later we knew that if we had been able to reach the foot of Mount Analogue, it was because the invisible doors of this invisible country had been open to us by those who guard them.”44

The interpenetration of the symbolic and the concrete—of fiction, fantasy, and the actuality of Daumal’s own experience of the Gurdjieff Work and even of mountain climbing—makes the novel a real manual for the aspiring seeker. It is an itinerary of Daumal’s many paths, showing how they all come together in one.

Thus Daumal uses fiction to present another crucial aspect of the teacher-disciple relationship. According to Ouspensky, “The first and most important feature of groups is the fact that groups are not constituted according to the wish and choice of their members. Groups are constituted by the teacher, who selects types which, from the point of view of his aims, can be useful to one another.”45 Yet the teacher does not clear the same single path for all disciples.