The mountain “cirques” and ridges actually cut the great sky in two and you can only join the two pieces of it at the top.
However, when, after another forty minutes of picking our way upward, we did actually reach the summit no new sky greeted us. Indeed, I shrank back aghast from the dreadful view that I saw. For the mountain swept downward in long, swift and severe lines into a funnel of Erebus darkness. We stood perched at a gigantic height above the world, and it was black night with an abyss both behind and in front of us.
You could stand on the top of the mountain and see the two dreadful views, on the one side scores and fifties of wrathful, staring mountains and on the other a purgatorial abyss for lost souls.
We dared not start a descent so we slept on the top of the mountain. I lay on a narrow ledge and slumbered and waked. And Vachel, who was hypnotised by the abyss, would not lie down for fear he might fall off or might get up in his sleep and jump. So he sat like a fakir the whole night long, looking unwaveringly on one fixed spot.
“Our friends all lie in their soft beds with their heads on pillows of down,” I thought, “far away in the valleys and across the plains, in snug, comfortable homes, and we lie on rocky, jagged edges on the very top of a great mountain, far from human ken.”
We seemed as much nearer the stars as we were further away from mankind. Venus was like a diamond cut out of the sun, and she lifted an unearthly splendour high into the sooty devouring darkness of the night. In other parts of the sky the meteors shot laconically in and out as if on errands for the planets. Cold winds ravaged the heights, but they did not roar. For the forests were far away. And there was no sound of waters—only the long slow threatening roll and splurge of loose rocks continually detaching themselves from the heights and slipping downward to perdition.
I lay and I lay, and Vachel sat unmoving, and we heard, as it were, the pulse of the world. We did not see humanity’s prayers going up to God. We only saw the stars and the night.
If you join the mountain-peak club
You’ll notice the old members stare at you,