by Rene Daumal
Behind the house, a snowy peak peered at us from above its hunched shoulder. In front stood the port, where our ship lay at anchor, the latest in the strangest fleet ever seen. In the inlets along the shore, crafts from all epochs and countries were lined up in rows, the oldest encrusted with salt, algae, and barnacles making them almost unrecognizable. There were Phoenician barques, triremes, galleys, caravels, schooners, two riverboats as well, and even an old mixed escort vessel from the last century; but crafts of recent vintage were much less numerous. We could rarely identify the type or provenance of the oldest. And all the abandoned hulks were calmly awaiting petrification or digestion by marine flora and fauna, the dismemberment and dispersal of substance that are the final ends of all inert things, even those that have served the very greatest designs.
The first two days were chiefly spent transporting our cargo of provisions and goods from the yacht to the house, verifying the condition of everything, and beginning our preparation of the bundles that would have to be brought up to the chalets of the Base in stages involving several journeys. The eight of us did this all rather quickly, with the help of the “Captain” and three sailors.
The first stage would require a full day; there was a good trail, and we could use the large, agile donkeys native to the country. Later, everything would have to be carried on the backs of men. So we had to make arrangements for renting donkeys and hiring porters. The currency problem, which had so intensely preoccupied us, had been resolved, at least provisionally, upon our arrival. The guide who had received us had given us, as an advance, a sack of metal tokens that served here as a means of exchange for goods and services. As we had foreseen, none of our money had any value. Every new arrival or group of arrivals received this kind of advance to cover initial expenses, and one was committed to repay it during one’s stay on the continent of Mount Analogue. But how could it be repaid? There are several ways, and since this question of currency and repayment is at the basis of all human existence and of all social life in the colonies along the coast, I must go into some detail on the subject.
One finds here, very rarely in the low lying areas, more frequently as one goes farther up, a clear and extremely hard stone that is spherical and varies in size—a kind of crystal, but a curved crystal, something extraordinary and unknown on the rest of the planet. Among the French of Port-des-Singes, it is called a peradam. Ivan Lapse remains puzzled by the formation and root meaning of this word. It may mean, according to him, “harder than diamond,” and it is; or “father of the diamond,” and they say that the diamond is in fact the product of the degeneration of the peradam by a sort of quartering of the circle or, more precisely, cubing of the sphere. Or again, the word may mean “Adam’s stone,” having some secret and profound connection to the original nature of man. The clarity of this stone is so great and its index of refraction so close to that of air that, despite the crystal’s great density, the unaccustomed eye hardly perceives it. But to anyone who seeks it with sincere desire and true need, it reveals itself by its sudden sparkle, like that of dewdrops. The peradam is the only substance, the only material object whose value is recognized by the guides of Mount Analogue. Therefore, it is the standard of all currency, as gold is for us.
Truthfully, the only loyal and entirely satisfactory way of paying one’s debt is to repay it in peradams. But the peradam is rare and difficult, even dangerous, to find and collect. Often one has to extract it from a fissure in the rock wall of a precipice, or pry it out from the icy edge of a crevasse. After efforts that sometimes last years, many people become discouraged and return to the coast, where they find easier ways to repay their debt. For this can simply be reimbursed in tokens, and these tokens can be earned by all the ordinary means. Some become farmers, others artisans, others stevedores, and so forth. We do not speak unkindly of them, for they make it possible to buy supplies on the spot, to rent donkeys and hire porters.
“And what if someone does not manage to pay his debt?” Arthur Beaver had asked.
“When you raise chicks,” he was told, “You advance them the grain which, when they become hens, they will repay you in eggs. But when a young hen doesn’t lay when it matures, what becomes of it?”
And each of us had swallowed his saliva in silence.
This third day of our arrival, while I was jotting down these notes, while Judith Pancake was making some sketches on the doorstep and Sogol was racking his brains to solve difficult optical problems, the five others had gone off in different directions. My wife had gone for provisions, escorted by Hans and Karl, who on the way had become embroiled in a very complicated and confusing dialectical debate, it seems, on cruel metaphysical and para-mathematical questions. The issue was chiefly the curvature of time and of numbers: could there be an absolute limit to any enumeration of real and singular objects, after which one would suddenly find their unity again (said Hans) or their totality (said Karl)? In the end, they returned home quite heated and without noticing the kilos of foodstuffs they were carrying on their backs, consisting of fruits and vegetables, some familiar and others unknown to us. For the settlers had assimilated these from every continent, as well as dairy products, fish, and all sorts of fresh food so welcome after a long ocean voyage. The sack of tokens was large, we were not too scrupulous about the expense. And then, said Lapse, what will be will be.
Lapse himself had gone for a walk around the little town, chatting with everyone to study the speech and the social life of the place. He gave us a very interesting account, but what happened between us after lunch robs me of any desire to tell you about it. All the same, I will. I scarcely have the heart, but I’m not writing for my own amusement, and some of the details could be useful to you at this juncture.
The economic life in Port-des-Singes is quite simple, if lively, much like what it must have been in a small European town before industrialization; no thermodynamic or electric engine was admitted into the country, and indeed, any use of electricity was banned, which in a mountainous land rather surprised us. The use of explosives was also banned. The colony—mostly French, as I have said—has its churches, its city council, its police force. But all authority comes from above, that is, from the alpine guides whose delegates direct the administration and the municipal police. This authority is uncontested, for it is based on the possession of peradams. The people who have settled on the coast possess only tokens, which allow all purchases indispensable to the life of the body but confer no real power. Once again, let us not speak unkindly of these people who, discouraged by the difficulties of the ascent, have settled on the shore and the foothills, and make their small living there. Thanks to them, thanks to the initial effort they made to come this distance, their children at least do not have to make the voyage. They are born on the very shores of Mount Analogue, less subject to the nefarious influences of the degenerate cultures that flourish on our continents, in contact with the mountain men, and ready, if the desire takes them and their intelligence is awakened, to undertake the great journey from the place where their parents have given it up.
The majority of the town’s population, however, seemed to have a different origin. They are the descendants of the crews—slaves, sailors of all epochs—from ships sailed to these shores throughout the centuries by seekers of the Mountain. This explained the abundance in the colony of foreign types in which one glimpsed the blood of African, Asiatic or even extinct races. Since women must have been rare among these crews of the past, one could only suppose that nature’s harmonious laws had gradually reestablished the balance between the sexes by a compensatory preponderance of female births. In everything I set down here, of course, there are many suppositions.
According to Lapse’s reports from the people of Port-des-Singes, life in the other colonies along the coast is quite similar to this: in each one every nation and every race has brought its own customs, costumes, and language. The languages, however, since the immemorial time of the first settlers and in spite of new contrib
utions made by contemporary settlers, evolved in a particular fashion under the influence of the guides, who have special language. The French of Port-des-Singes, for example, presents many peculiar features, with archaisms, loan words, and also entirely new coinages to designate new objects, such as “peradam.” These peculiarities would be explained later as we came in contact with the language of the guides themselves.
Arthur Beaver, studying the flora and fauna of the region, returned all ruddy from a long walk in the nearby countryside. The temperate climate of Port-des-Singes favors the growth of plants and animals known in our countries, but unfamiliar species as well. Among these, the most curious are a tree-like bindweed, whose power of germination and growth is so great that it is used—like slow dynamite—to dislocate rocks for terracing work; the incendiary lycopodium, a fat puffball that bursts while casting out its mature spores, and then a few hours later suddenly catches fire by a process of intense fermentation; the rare talking bush, a sensory plant, whose fruits form sound boxes of various shapes capable of producing all the sounds of the human voice when rubbed by its own leaves, repeating like parrots the words pronounced in its vicinity; the hoop caterpillar, a multipede nearly two meters long that likes to curl up in a circle and roll at full speed from top to bottom of the rocky slopes; the cyclops-lizard, resembling a chameleon, but with a wide open frontal eye and two others that are atrophied, an animal commanding great respect even though it looks like an old scholar of heraldry. Finally, I must mention, among others, the aeronautic caterpillar, a kind of silkworm which in good weather produces light gases in its intestines and in a few hours inflates an enormous bubble that carries it into the air; it never reaches an adult state, and reproduces itself quite primitively by larval parthenogenesis.
Had these strange species been imported in distant times by settlers from the far reaches of the globe, or were they truly indigenous to the continent of Mount Analogue? Beaver could not yet settle the question. An old Breton, established as a carpenter at Port-des-Singes, had told and sung for him old myths—mingled, it seems, with foreign legends and teachings of the guides—that touched on the subject. The guides whom we questioned afterwards on the value of these myths always gave us what seemed to be evasive answers: “They are as true,” one of them told us, “as your fairy tales and your scientific theories.” “A knife,” said another, “is neither true nor false, but anyone impaled on its blade is in error.”
One of these myths conveyed this message in so many words:
In the beginning, the Sphere and the Tetrahedron were united in a single unthinkable, unimaginable Form. Concentration and Expansion mysteriously united in a single Will that desired only itself.
There was a separation, but the Unique remains unique.
The Sphere became primordial man who, wishing to realize separately all his desires and possibilities, broke into pieces in the shape of all animal species and the men of today.
The Tetrahedron became the primordial Plant, which similarly engendered all plants.
The Animal, closed to external space, hollowed himself out and developed lungs, intestines and other internal organs to receive nourishment, to preserve and perpetuate himself. The Plant, blossoming in external space, ramified externally to penetrate nourishment through roots and foliage.
Several of their descendants hesitated, or wanted to stay on both sides of the fence: these became the animal-plants that populate the seas.
Man received a breath, a light of understanding; he alone received this light. He wanted to see his light and to enjoy it in multiple shapes. He was driven out by the force of the Unity. He alone was driven out.
He went out to people the lands Out There, suffering, dividing against himself, multiplying out of the desire to see his own light and to enjoy it.
Sometimes a man submits in his heart, submits the visible to the power of light, seeks to return to his origin.
He seeks, he finds, he returns to his source.
The odd geological structure of the continent endowed it with the greatest variety of climates, and in three days’ walk from Port-des-Singes one finds the tropical jungle in one direction and glacier terrain in the other, as well as steppes and sandy deserts. Each colony had been founded in the place most like the native land of its settlers.
For Beaver, all this was yet to be explored. Karl proposed to study the Asian origins he thought he detected in the myths Beaver had gathered. Hans and Sogol planned to install a little observatory on a nearby hill, where under the peculiar optical conditions of the country they would perform the standard measurements of parallaxes, angular distances, meridian passages, spectroscopy, and such, on the principal stars, to deduce precise notions about the anomalies caused in cosmic perspective by the shell of curved space surrounding Mount Analogue. Ivan Lapse continued to pursue his linguistic and sociological research. My wife was burning to study the religious life of the country, the modifications (and especially, she assumed, the purifications and enrichments) brought to the churches by the influence of Mount Analogue—whether in dogma, ethics, rites, liturgical music, architecture or the other religious arts. Miss Pancake would go into partnership with her in these last areas and especially those of the plastic arts, while pursuing her main work of documentary sketches, which had suddenly taken on considerable importance for the expedition since the failure of all photographic attempts. As for me, I hoped to draw precious elements from the diverse materials collected by my companions in order to advance my research on the symbolic. In so doing, however, I did not intend to neglect my main job, which was to keep the record of this expedition—the record that was later reduced to the account you are hearing now.
While giving ourselves over to these areas of research, we planned to profit from them to enlarge our stock of provisions, to do business perhaps—in short, we would not be wasting our time.
“So when are you leaving?” shouted a voice coming from the road one day, while we talked together about all these engrossing projects after lunch.
It was the guide delegated to Port-des-Singes who had interrupted us, and without waiting for an answer he continued on his way at that steady pace mountaineers have, scarcely seeming to move.
This woke us from our dreams. Thus, before even taking the first steps, we were slipping toward abandonment—yes, toward abandonment, for it was abandoning our goal and betraying our promise not to spend a single minute satisfying useless curiosity. Suddenly, our exploratory enthusiasms and the easy pretexts we’d parried seemed rather pathetic. We could hardly look at each other. We heard Sogol’s voice growl under his breath:
“Let’s nail this nasty owl to the door and leave without looking back!”
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.
Our four crewmen were playing cards in the shade of a pine tree, and since none of them intended to scale the heights, their way of passing the time seemed reasonable. As they had to accompany us to the Base, however, and help us settle in there, we called on them to assist us in preparing for the departure, which we fixed for the following day, come what may.
Come what may … is easier said than done. The next morning, after we had worked hard all night to prepare the baggage, everything was ready, the donkeys and porters assembled, but it began to pour. It rained all afternoon, all night, it rained the next day, it rained buckets for five days. The roads were washed out, surely impassable, we were told.
We had to make use of this delay. First, we rethought the necessity of our material
goods. All kinds of observational and measuring instruments, which had seemed to us more precious than anything, now seemed laughable—especially after our unfortunate photographic experiments—and several proved utterly useless. The batteries of our electric lamps did not work. They would have to be replaced by lanterns. In this way we got rid of a great many encumbering objects, which allowed us to carry more necessary provisions.