MOUNTAIN: A Novel

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by Clement Wood

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BIRTH

I

High places have always held for a man a spell and a mystery. He could not traverse the windy ways of air, the spacious trails of the birds; but he could climb these rocky steeps, as hard-won steps toward the billowing mountains of clouds, and the beaconing stars, and the sky-homed mystery of mysteries. The hills were a fastness to daring souls, yielding far vistas of shrunken valleys. They were a menace to the low-dwellers: out of the heights fierce warriors darted, like plunging eagles or swooping hawks, to plunder the placid wealth below. Men were their bone-whitened victims, and their lengthened, pliable arms.

The chill mantle of snow, the provocative veiling of clouds, rested upon them; their streams were arteries to the valleys below, offering life to tree and beast and man, and later an easy path to the shore and the sea. They were size made tangible, power made visible. From their crests the lightning flamed, the hoarse tongue of the thunder spoke. The mountain in labor sometimes brought forth a mouse; sometimes, a rain of fiery death to the Herculaneums cowering at its foot. Ararat and Nebo, Popocatapetl, Pelion and Pelé, Olivet and Calvary, were hills. It is no wonder that men sought them: Mahomet in the end went to the mountain. It was on Olympus that Jupiter held his home; it was from storming Sinai that Jehovah thundered.

Four low hills lay side by side, near the center of a southern state. They stretched their prone forms, like four gray and red-brown serpents, from the piney foothills above the Black Belt to the craggy Appalachians. Their visible bodies were parallel; but their rocky skeletons, that jutted into water-worn summits, were not. The two outer hills were like the top halves of the shells of a huge bivalve; their gray structure, chipped by the persistent artisanship of time, still indicated that they had once folded high above the two central heights. The stony structures of the latter leant toward one another; they were now taller and of a darker hue than their gray outposts.

It was the second hill, as you came from the east, that was called simply "the mountain." It ran almost due north and south; its western half was a steep and even slope, its more gradual eastern side was toothed with countless prongs flung into sunrise lowlands, brought up abruptly by the sandstone crags to the east. The crest of the mountain was indented irregularly by rounded gaps or passes, like pie-crust carelessly forked.

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