106; (= p. 163).
43. Ibid., p.79; (= p. 113).
44. Ibid., p. 114; ( p. 175).
45. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 222.
46. R. Daumal, letter to Dessaignes, in Sigoda, René Daumal, p. 233.
47. Véra Daumal, in Mount Analogue, additional notes, p. 118.
Something new in the author’s life—Symbolic mountains—A serious reader —Mountaineering in the Passage des Patriarches—Father Sogol—An internal park and an external brain—The art of getting acquainted— The man who turns ideas inside out—Confidences—A satanic monastery —How the devil for the day led an ingenious monk into temptation—The industrious Physics—Father Sogol’s malady—A story about flies —The fear of death—With a raging heart, a mind of steel—A mad project reduced to a simple problem of triangulation—A psychological law
Everything I am about to tell began with a scrap of unfamiliar handwriting on an envelope. On it was written my name and the address of the Revue des Fossiles, to which I contributed and through which the letter had tracked me down, yet those penned lines conveyed a shifting mix of violence and sweetness. Behind the questions I was forming in my mind about the sender and the possible contents of the message, a vague but powerful presentiment evoked in me an image of “a pebble in the mill-pond.” And from deep inside me the confession rose like a bubble, that my life had become all too stagnant of late. When I opened the letter, I could not have told you whether it had the effect of a revitalizing breath of fresh air or a disagreeable miasma.
In apparently one seamless movement, the same swift and flowing hand had written the following:
Monsieur,
I have read your article on Mount Analogue. Until now I thought I was the only person convinced of its existence. Today there are two of us, tomorrow there will be ten, perhaps more, and we can launch the expedition. We must make contact as soon as possible. Call me when you are free at one of the numbers below. I expect to hear from you.
Pierre SOGOL,
37, Passage des Patriarches, Paris
(This was followed by five or six telephone numbers which I could call at different hours of the day.)
I had almost forgotten the article to which my correspondent referred, which had appeared nearly three months before, in the May issue of Revue des Fossiles.
Though flattered by this show of interest on the part of an unknown reader, I felt a certain discomfort at seeing a literary fantasy taken so seriously, almost tragically. Yes, it had intoxicated me at the time, but was now a rather distant, retreating memory.
I reread the article. It was a somewhat hasty survey of the symbolic significance of the mountain in ancient mythologies. The different branches of the symbolic had been my favorite study for a long time—I naively believed that I understood something about the subject; furthermore, as a mountaineer I had a passionate love of the mountains. The convergence of these two very different kinds of interest in the same subject, mountains, had colored certain passages of my article with a definite lyricism. (Such conjunctions, incongruous as they may seem, play a large part in the genesis of what is commonly called poetry. I offer this remark as a suggestion to critics and aestheticians attempting to shed light on the depths of this mysterious language.)
The substance of my article was that in the mythic tradition, the Mountain is the connection between Earth and Sky. Its highest summit touches the sphere of eternity, and its base branches out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the path by which humanity can raise itself to the divine and the divine reveal itself to humanity. The patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament behold the Lord face to face on high places. We have Moses’s Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo, and in the New Testament the Mount of Olives and Golgotha. I even found this old symbol of the mountain in the scientific pyramidal constructions of Egypt and Chaldea. Moving on to the Aryans, I recalled 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.” In India, the Himalayas are the abode of Shiva and his wife “the Daughter of the Mountain,” and of the “Mothers” of all worlds—just as in Greece the king of the gods held court on Mount Olympus. In fact, in Greek mythology I found the symbol completed by the story of the rebellion of the children of Earth who, with their terrestrial natures and terrestrial means, tried to scale Olympus and penetrate Heaven with their feet of clay.
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