Mount Analogue

This incomplete book by Daumal is considered to be a minor classic, symbolic of a man’s desire to reach for the unattainable (I have to admit it didn’t carry any such force for me, though the writing is lyrical at times). It describes the journey of a group of people who have postulated the existence of Mount Analogue, an enormously tall mountain on the surface of the earth, located at the antipode of the CG of earth’s surface land mass…somewhere near New Zealand…It has not been visible till now because a shell of curved space around it shields it from outside view. This makes it take on a hyperbolic geometry, making its peak inaccessible. They find a way to reach the base of the mountain and begin a steep climb.

This is where the novel ends, with a hanging coma. Evidently, Daumal was interrupted by a visitor while writing the novel in 1944 and he left the book mid-sentence. After that, he was never well enough to pick up a pen and continue writing (Shades of the story, “Person from Porlock” in real life!)

A couple of striking lines in the novel:

“Mount Analogue - Its highest summit touches the sphere of eternity, and its base branches out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. Its summit must be inaccessible but its base must be accessible to human beings, as nature had made them. The gateway to the invisible must be visible…”

[…]

“In the beginning, the sphere and the tetrahedron were united in a single, unthinkable, unimaginable form.”