“Perhaps all mountains are mythological. Their inaccessible high slopes and difficult terrain can easily be imagined to be otherworldly, their masses of rock and ice cast onto the earth by some primordial force in a time far deeper than any human understanding. Even modern scientific explanations can seem just as improbable: the uplifting of immeasurable tons of solid stone, sent aloft by the power of continents slamming into one another as they float on a pool of viscous rock. And so mountains, both real and fictional, whether formed by acts of geology or the creativity of the human mind, tend to drift together and become inseparable in our thoughts and stories - especially for mountaineers.”

“Great mysteries are sometimes born from failed assumptions, but not from ordinary ones. The promise must be specific yet outrageous, widely conceived and wildly pursued - so fantastic that even disproven, the belief remains insatiable. Each seeker’s impressions become like a series of snapshots, an album of sepia-tinged presumptions, an unbound book caught in the wind, never fully assembled.”

“Ultimately, the ‘analogy’ of the peak forms a correspondence between the object and the symbol, the concrete and the abstract, reality and transcendence. As Daumal wrote, ‘its unique summit touches the world of eternity, and its base branches out into multiple foothills in the world of mortals. It is the way by which man can elevate itself to divinity, and divinity reveal itself to man.’”

“Perhaps because a feeling lingers - tenuous, but real, often unconscious - that mountains will always contain portals to something greater. ‘It’s only on the other side of that door,’ Daumal wrote, ‘that real life begins.... The way must physically, humanly exist; without it, our situation would be without hope.’”