Mount Analogue

by Rene Daumal

  “Well argued,” said Sogol, “well argued, but a little too hasty. This would be right if the dry lands had a uniform thickness. But let’s suppose we cut out all the great continental masses on a planisphere in relief, and suspend the whole thing by a string hanging from the central quadrilateral. It is predictable that the great masses of the American, Eurasian, and African mountain ranges, almost all situated below the 50th parallel, will tilt the planisphere strongly toward the south. The weight of the Himalayas, the mountains of Mongolia and the African massifs will even outweigh the American ranges and shift the balance a little towards the east—but I’ll know this only after more detailed calculations. Therefore, we must shift the center of gravity of the dry lands decidedly towards the south, and perhaps a little towards the east. This could lead us towards the Balkans, or even as far as Egypt, or towards Chaldea, the place of the Biblical Eden, but let us not presume … In any event, Mount Analogue remains in the South Pacific. I ask you for a few more days to refine my calculations. Then, we’ll need some time for preparations—both to organize the expedition and to allow each of us to put his personal affairs in order for a long journey. I propose we set our departure for the first days of October; that leaves us two good months, and we would arrive in the South Pacific in November—in the spring.

  “We still have to settle a number of secondary but important problems. For example, the material means of the expedition.”

  Arthur Beaver quickly intervened:

  “My yacht Impossible is a good little ship, it has traveled around the world—she’ll certainly take us there. As for the necessary funds, we’ll see to that together, but from now on I’m certain we’ll find what we need.”

  “For those good words, my dear Arthur,” said Father Sogol, “you have the right to the title ‘Redeemer of Millionaires.’ Still, we have work to do. Each of us will have to do his share. Let’s set our next meeting for next Sunday at two o’clock, if you all agree. I will tell you the result of my final calculations, and we’ll devise a plan of action.”

  After that we drank a glass or two and smoked a cigarette, and by using the dormer window and the rope, everyone went on his own way, deep in thought.

  Nothing much to report happened in the following week. Except for the arrival of a few letters. First of all, a little, melancholy note from the poet Alphonse Camard, who regretted that the state of his health, all things considered, did not permit him to accompany us. Still, he wanted to participate in the expedition in some way, and so he sent me several “Mountain Climbing Songs” thanks to which, he said, “his thought would follow us into this magnificent adventure.” There were songs covering every mountaineering mood and circumstance. I shall quote the one I enjoyed most—although if you have never known the small miseries mentioned here, you will probably find it silly. It really is silly, but, as we say, it takes all kinds to make a world.

  BALLAD OF THE LUCKLESS MOUNTAINEERS

  The tea tastes like tin,

  Twelve sleeping bags for thirty men,

  They stay warm, it’s true

  But into the razor-sharp blue

  Off they go at first light

  Between black and white.

  * * *

  My watch has stopped, yours is off,

  We’re sticky with honey, the sky is all lumpy.

  It’s already daylight when we depart,

  The snow patch is yellow before we start.

  The pebbles are already raining down,

  The cold has made our hands hang down.

  There’s gasoline in the drinking gourd,

  And our fingers feel like gourds, as stiff

  As a sweep’s brush is the rope lift.

  * * *

  The hut was full of romping fleas,

  The snoring defeated attempts at ease,

  I’m getting frostbitten on my ear

  And you look like a duck in gear.

  I don’t have enough usable pockets,

  You found my compass among the plum pits.

  My knife’s forgotten but your toothbrush fits.

  * * *

  For twenty-five thousand hours we climb

  And still we’re stuck far down below,

  The chocolate stopped us up but good,

  We hack our way through the black ice flow

  Like trying to wade around in cheese

  Tasting bitter clouds, we cannot see

  More than two steps ahead.

  * * *

  We halt a while to rest a bit,

  There’s my rucksack frolicking about

  Making my heart skip a beat,

  It gambols off far down below

  Where holes are turning green to black;

  Gurglings and railways, ten thousand sacks

  On the moraine, false sacks and true holes,

  And big, dirt-encrusted boles;

  Finally, here’s my schaos, put your cereal on my back,

  Let’s exchange pits of prudence for prunes.

  * * *

  We’re laughing helplessly at this bad verse,

  Snorting into our beards at the worst,

  The air is crackling with hail

  Our teeth are chattering, our knees fail.

  The rock ledge is impregnable,

  My memory’s blocked, my stomach’s a knot,

  And two fingers are swollen a delicate green.

  * * *

  No one ever saw the summit

  Except on the sardine can;

  We yanked and yanked on all the ropes

  Spent a lifetime untangling the lines on the slopes.

  We fell into pastures, a bovine’s trough:

  “Had a good climb?”

  “Fine, Monsieur, but rough.”

  I received a letter from Emile Gorge, the journalist. He had promised to join a friend in the Oisans in August, and make a descent from the Central Peak of La Meije by the southern face (we know that a stone falling from this summit toward the south takes 5 or 6 seconds before touching the rock). Then he had a report to do in the Tyrol, but he did not want us to delay our departure on his account; moreover, since he was staying in Paris, he offered to place any stories of the journey we wanted to send him.

  Sogol had received a very long and very moving, vibrant emotional missive from Julie Bonasse, torn between the desire to follow us and her devotion to her art—this was the cruelest sacrifice the jealous god of Theater had ever asked of her … and perhaps she should have rebelled, and followed her egotistical inclination. But what would then become of her poor dear little friends, whose suffering souls she had taken under her wing?

  “What?” Sogol asked me after reading me this letter, “It doesn’t bring tears to your eyes? Are you so hardened that your heart doesn’t melt like a candle? I was so moved by the idea that she might still be hesitating that I immediately wrote to encourage her to stay with her souls and her sublimities.”

  Finally, Benito Cicoria had also written. A deeper examination of his letter, which was a dozen pages long, led us to the conclusion that he, too, had decided not to accompany us. His reasons were presented in a series of truly architectural “dialectical triads.” Impossible to summarize; for this we would have to follow his entire construction, and that would be a dangerous exercise. I will cite a line at random: “While the triad possible-impossible-adventure might be regarded as immediately phenomenizable and therefore as phenomenizing in relation to the first ontological triad, it is so only on the condition—frankly, epistemological—of a dialectical reversus whose prediscursive contents is nothing but a prise de position historique implying the practical reversibility of the ontologically oriented process—an implication which only the facts can justify.” Certainly, certainly.

  In brief, four wet blankets, as the popular expression goes. Eight of us remained. Sogol confided to me that he had expected some to quit. It was for that very reason that he had claimed, at our big meeting, that his calculations were not yet complete, when in fact they we
re. He did not want the exact geographical position of Mount Analogue to be known outside the members of the expedition. We shall see later that these precautions were in order, and even inadequate. If everything had gone precisely according to Sogol’s deductions, if one element of the problem had escaped him, this inadequacy of precautions could have ended in disaster.

  CHAPTER 3

  In Which We Make the Crossing

  Improvised sailors—Pitching in—Historical and psychological details—Measuring the power of human thought—That we can count to 4 at the most– Supporting Experiments—Provisions—Portable kitchen garden—Artificial symbiosis—Heating devices—The Western portal and the sea breeze—Trial and Error—If Glaciers are living creatures—The Tale of the Hollow-men and the Bitter-Rose—The Currency question

  The following October tenth, we embarked aboard the Impossible. There were eight of us, remember: Arthur Beaver, owner of the yacht; Pierre Sogol, leader of the expedition; Ivan Lapse, the linguist; the brothers Hans and Karl; Judith Pancake, the high altitude painter; my wife, and myself. We had agreed not to tell our respective friends the precise goal of our expedition; for either they would have thought we were crazy, or more likely they would have believed we were making up nonsense to conceal the true purpose of our enterprise, and that might have generated all sorts of speculations. We had announced that we were going to explore a few islands in Oceania, the mountains of Borneo, and the Australian Alps. Everyone had made arrangements for a long absence from Europe.

  Arthur Beaver had the good grace to warn his crew that the expedition would be long and possibly risky. He discharged and compensated those of his men who had wives and children, and kept only three roughnecks, not counting the “Captain,” an Irishman and an excellent navigator for whom the Impossible had become a second skin. We decided that the eight of us should replace the missing sailors, and anyway this would be the most interesting way to employ our time during the crossing.

  We were not at all cut out to be sailors. Some suffered from seasickness. Others, who were never such masters of their bodies as when they were hanging over an abyss of icy rocks, could scarcely tolerate the little boat’s long glides down the watery slopes. The path of greatest desires often lies through the undesirable.

  The Impossible, with its two masts, sailed on whenever the wind was favorable. Hans and Karl managed to understand the air, the wind, and the sail with their bodies, just as they understood the rocky slopes and the rope. The two women worked all sorts of miracles in the galley. Father Sogol seconded the Captain, took our bearings, distributed tasks, helped us get our sea legs, and kept an eye on every detail. Arthur Beaver swabbed the deck and oversaw our health. Ivan Lapse taught himself mechanics, and I became a passable stoker.

  The necessity of intense communal work bound us to one another as if we had been a single family, and a pretty unusual family we were. We formed an odd assortment of temperaments and personalities. To tell the truth, Ivan Lapse sometimes found that Miss Pancake hopelessly lacked any sense of the proper use of words. Hans eyed me skeptically whenever I ventured to talk about the “exact” sciences and thought my remarks disrespectful. Karl had trouble working with Sogol, who, according to him, smelled foul when he perspired. Dr. Beaver’s satisfied expression every time he ate herring irritated me. But it was dear old Beaver who, in his capacity as physician and ship’s master, was vigilant that no infection took hold in either the body or the psyche of the expedition. Whenever two of us began to get on each other’s nerves, annoyed at the way the other walked, spoke, breathed, or ate, he always intervened at the right moment with gentle mockery,

  If I were writing this story the way it might be written collectively, or the way each of us tells his own story to himself, noting only the most glorious moments in order to construct a continuous imaginary line, I would leave out these little details; and I would say that our eight hearts beat as one from morning to evening and from evening to morning with the same desire—or some such lie. But the fire that kindles desire and illuminates thought never burned for more than a few seconds at a time; in between, we tried to keep it in mind.

  Happily, the difficulties of daily work, in which everyone played his vital role, reminded us that we were on this ship of our own free will, that we were indispensable to one another, and that we were on a ship, that is, a temporary habitation meant to transport us elsewhere; and if anyone forgot this, someone quickly reminded him.

  In this regard, Father Sogol had told us that some years earlier he had made a few experiments meant to measure the power of human thought. I will report only what I grasped of this. At the time, I wondered if one should take all this literally, and always preoccupied with my favorite studies, I admired Sogol as an inventor of “abstract symbols”—an abstract thing symbolizing a concrete thing, contrary to custom. But since then, I have noticed that these notions of abstract and concrete have no great signification, as I should have learned by reading Xenophon of Elis, or even Shakespeare: a thing either is or is not. Well, Sogol had tried to “measure thought, not the way psychometricians and testing experts do, who only compare the way one individual performs this or that activity (often, moreover, entirely alien to thought) to the average performance of other individuals of the same age. Sogol’s aim was to measure the power of thought as an absolute value.

  “This power,” said Sogol, “is arithmetical. In fact, all thought is a capacity to grasp the divisions of a whole. Now, numbers are nothing but the divisions of the unity, that is, the divisions of absolutely any whole. In myself and others, I began to observe how many numbers a man can really conceive, that is, how many he can represent to himself without breaking them up or jotting them down: how many successive consequences of a principle he can grasp at once, instantaneously; how many inclusions of species as kind; how many relations of cause and effect, of ends to means; and I never found a number higher than four. And yet, this number four corresponded to an exceptional mental effort, which I obtained only rarely. The thought of an idiot stopped at one, and the ordinary thought of most people goes up to two, sometimes three, very rarely to four. If you like, I will repeat several of these experiments with you. Follow me carefully.”

  In order to understand what follows, it is necessary to repeat the proposed experiments in all good faith. This requires a certain attention, patience, and mental calm.

  He went on as follows:

  “1) I dress to go out; 2) I go out to take the train; 3) I take the train to go to work; 4) I go to work to earn a living … Try adding a fifth link, and I am sure that one of the first three, at least, will vanish from your mind.”

  We did the experiment: he was right—and even a little too generous.

  “Take another type of chain:

  “1) The bulldog is a dog; 2) dogs are mammals; 3) mammals are vertebrates; 4) vertebrates are animals … I am going further: animals are living beings—but voilà, I’ve already forgotten the bulldog; if I remember the bulldog, I forget the vertebrates … In all orders of succession or logical divisions you notice the same phenomenon. That is why we constantly mistake accident for substance, effect for cause, means for ends, our ship for a permanent habitation, our body or our intellect for ourselves, and ourselves for something eternal.”

  * * *

  The holds of the little ship were filled with various supplies and instruments. Beaver had studied the question of provisions not only methodically but inventively. Five tons of various foods were to be enough to keep all eight of us, plus the four crewmen, in good health for two years, without relying on any fresh food along the way. The art of nourishment is an important part of mountaineering, and the doctor had brought it to a high degree of perfection. Beaver had invented a “portable kitchen garden,” weighing no more than five hundred grams; it was a mica box containing synthetic soil, in which he had planted certain extremely fast-growing seeds; every two days, on average, each of these devices produced a ration of green vegetables sufficient for one man
—plus a few delicious mushrooms. He had also tried to employ modern methods of tissue culture (instead of raising cattle, he asked himself, why not raise steaks directly, but the results were merely heavy and fragile installations and revolting products, and he had given up these attempts. It was better to do without meat).

  With Hans’s help, Beaver had, on the other hand, perfected breathing and heating devices that had served him well in the Himalayas. The breathing device was very ingenious. A mask of elastic fabric was fitted to the face. The exhaled air was sent through a tube into the portable kitchen garden, where the chlorophyll of the young plants, superactivated by the ultra-violet radiation at high altitudes, separated from the carbon dioxide and provided the wearer with supplemental oxygen. The action of the lungs and the elasticity of the mask maintained a slight compression, and the device was regulated to ensure a high level of carbon dioxide in the exhaled air. The plants also absorbed the surplus of exhaled moisture, and the warmth of the breath activated their growth. Thus the animal-vegetable biological cycle functioned on the individual scale, which allowed a sensible economy of provisions. In short, we brought about a kind of artificial symbiosis between animal and vegetable. The other nourishing elements were concentrated in the form of flour, solidified oil, sugar, powdered milk, and cheese.

  For very high altitudes, we were armed with oxygen tanks and the refined respiratory devices. I will speak in good time of the discussions stimulated by this equipment and its eventual fate.