To reach the summit, one must proceed from encampment to encampment. But before setting out for the next refuge, one must prepare those coming after … - René Daumal

Besides, often at difficult moments you'll catch yourself talking to the mountain, flattering it, cursing it, making promises or threats. And you will have the impression that the mountain answers you if you speak to it properly — by becoming gentler, more submissive. Don't think the less of yourself for that; don't be ashamed of behaving like those our specialists call primitives and animists. Just keep in mind, when you remember these moments later on, that your dialogue with nature was just the outward image of an inner dialogue with yourself.

"The Kaffir, who tended the garden and looked after the chickens, in Cracow, used to sleep in the pigeon loft. He said it was "very good for the breath": One night, I had this terrifying dream. A huge corkscrew, which was the earth, was spinning round, turning on its axis and twisting in its own spiral, just like the signs outside American barbershops, and I could see myself, no bigger than a bug but not hanging on so well, slither and stumble over the helix, and with my thoughts sent whirling down moving staircases made of a priori shapes. Suddenly, the fatal moment, there is a loud crack, my neck snaps, I fall flat on my face and I emerge in a splash of sparks before the Kaffir who had come to wake me. He says: "Did you have an attack of the nasties, then? Come and look at this": And he leads me to the pigeon loft and gets me to peep through a hole in the wall. I put my eye to it. I see a terrifying sight: a huge corkscrew, which was the Earth, was spinning round, turning on its axis and twisting in its own spiral, just like the signs outside American barbershops, and I could see myself, no bigger than a bug, but not hanging on so well....'

Eyes popping, the bumps on his forehead lit up, his moustache bristling, little Sidonius began the story again, which slotted into itself endlessly like the popular refrains everybody knows. He spoke feverishly, mangling his words. I listened, paralyzed with horror, at least ten times to his appalling rotating story. Then I went off to get a drink."

There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know. . .