the lake a perfect mirror reflecting the sky and mountains with their stars and trees and wonderful sculpture, all their grandeur refined and doubled, — a marvelously impressive picture, that seemed to belong more to heaven than earth.

From the side, a whole range; from the end, a single peak;
far, near, high, low, no two parts alike.
Why can't I tell the true shape of Lu-shan?
Because I myself am in the mountain.

It is remarkable how, as you are leaving a mountain and looking back at it from time to time, it gradually gathers up its slopes and spurs to itself into a regular whole, and makes a new and total impression.

One does not see the size of a mountain until one draws away from it. But away in the distance we turn and look and wonder. Have we really come so far? How did we manage to overcome so many serious difficulties in such a cruel and unequal struggle?

We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain.

Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and aretes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.

I was convinced that Lake Como was a large basin of water similar to the Tahoe, also surrounded by immense mountains whose slopes reach the shores, but here the lake is not a basin, since the banks are articulated like those of a stream and is a quarter or two thirds wide of the Mississippi. Along the coast there is not a single strip of flat land, but endless chains of mountains which suddenly emerge from the lake surface and rise towards the sky for one hundred or two hundred feet, constantly varying in shape. The rocky ridges are covered with numerous plant species and dotted with white villas that peek through lush foliage. Even on the top of the promontory we saw pretty little houses perched on picturesque pinnacles, more than a thousand feet above our heads.

Picture this: A mountain splintering the sky like a broken bone, its western precipice plummeting onto jumbled scree.

No lake so still but it has its wave.
No circle so perfect but that it has its blur.
I would change things for you if I could; As I can't you must take them as they are.

I stood in the middle of the room and began to study the pictures in the house. I had often looked at these ten- or even twenty-centimeter mountains which seemed to have been made sometimes of porridge, sometimes of bluish sago pudding, sometimes a mash of curds—sometimes even like an upturned bowl with Eiriks Glacier underneath; and I had never been able to understand where I was meant to be placed, because anyone who comes from the north and has lived opposite a mountain cannot understand a mountain in a picture in the south.

For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue,” I concluded, “its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The gateway to the invisible must be visible.

A veces nos encontrábamos en la cima de una montaña con precipicios a nuestros pies que parecían prontos a tragarnos: era tal su profundidad que nuestra mirada no podía sondearla. Otras, era un pueblecito encantador con sus graciosos chalets y su campanario sobre el cual se balanceaban suavemente algunas nubes resplandecientes de blancura. Más lejos, un vasto lago, dorado por los últimos rayos de sol y cuyas ondas serenas y puras reflejaba el azul del cielo y del fuego del poniente, presentaba a nuestros ojos maravillados el más poético y encantador espectáculo que se pueda imaginar. Al fondo del vasto horizonte se veían las montañas cuyos contornos imprecisos hubieran escapado a nuestra vista si sus cumbres nevadas brillando al sol no hubieran venido a añadir un encanto más al hermoso lago que nos cautivaba.

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

As on the crystal surface of a lake
The trembling shafts of sunlight mirrored are,
Leaping to roof-top, and, at random glancing,
Sparkle and gleam, in all directions dancing.