THE concentrated vehemence of a mountain halted against the sky in a thin line of thwarted hostility. A waterfall hurdled its crazed parabola between gray rocks, flying into a stifled scream of motion far below. When the pine trees moved a mathematician solved his problems, and his acrid exultation hypnotized the air. The pungent truculence of earth that had never been stepped on raised its brown shades.
Eric Lane stopped in an alcove of pine trees; lifted a pack from his back; pitched his tent; and broke dead pine branches across his knee. There were scars on his face where philosophies had broken and died and the beaming redundancy of one that survived. For Eric believed that the visible and audible surface of man’s conduct and dreams, when interpreted and compared, could reveal his frustrated hungers. Metaphysics, to him, was a beggar rattling his chains into insincere victories of sound—a beggar painting seraphs upon the strained finality of his brain.
Eric looked up from his task of breaking dead pine branches. A first shade of twilight climbed the mountain, like a dazed negro runner. The mountain impassively confessed that its vehemence had been a lie. It met the sky with an immense line of collapsed reticence. The waterfall became the squirming of a white hermit who finds a black stranger invading his cell. Twilight was a body gradually returning to the festooned skeletons of the pine trees. The rocks were enticed into attitudes—one was a giant fondling the spear that had wounded him; another curved over like a gray serf who had broken his back. Eric stared at a huge rock standing on the mountainside and outlined against the distant base of a second mountain. It held the tensely embalmed profile of a woman. Her rigidly woebegone features had withdrawn from some devil’s cliff of desire; they made a line of incomplete crucifixion. Her hidden eyes germinated into ghouls stealthily absorbing the gray harvest of her face. Designed by a shattered surmise her face retreated from the valley. Her forehead was like a sword cracked in the middle; her nose and lips were the remains of an autopsy on emotion. Demons and virgins had gained one grave in the grayness assailing her face.
Eric regarded her at first with a celebrating scepticism; then sallowness slowly marked his face into a hanging scroll of terror. Lightness vanished from his black hair and it became a charred crown. He tottered three steps in the direction of the rock-face and then, with unannounced dexterity, a smile revived his face. The diminutive city of his mind had sent its lord-mayor to restore him. Eric returned to his task of breaking dead pine branches. The diminutive city of his mind sent slender pæans into electric threads. Eric kindled the branches into a fire, and a carnival of flames pirouetted into startled death. Eric stretched his arms out, like a concubine stroking the walls of her black tent, and his face became idly immobile. Then he altered completely, in the leap of a moment, as though slipping from a loose costume with infinite ease. His face stiffened into the unearthly equilibrium of thought witnessing the torture of emotion. The fire, to him, became a gaudy funeral-pyre. When sleep finally interfered with his face he dropped slowly to the ground, like satiated revenge.
When he awoke, morning assaulted the gaunt scene with unceremonious clarity. The mountain became a senseless giant; the waterfall changed to a commonplace ribbon: and the pine trees blended into the lethargy of dwarfs. The gray rock on the mountain was still gashed into the face of a woman but her outlines were those of a transfigured virago. Eric strapped on his pack; gazed down at the rock, with the smile of a merchant emerging from drunken memories, and strode toward it. When he reached it he hammered away a flat fragment, for remembrance, and returned to the mountain path, with an expressionless face.
Eric Lane ended his lecture on scientific philosophy and tapped a desecrating hand, for a moment, on the profile that had told me a story during his talk. He had left the mountain pass but he was unaware of that. He would have laughed at the idea, like a beggar who rattles his chains into insincere victories of sound. Of that, too, he was unaware.