Continued, Country People
It is our habit, when asked to imagine a mountain, to think only of its exterior, its peaks and crags, its wooded slopes and tumbling waterfalls, the creatures that inhabit it, the circling birds and chattering squirrels, the climbers scaling its turrets with their picks and ropes.
But this is only a small part of a mountain, the thinnest of veneers.
What of the cathedral within it? What of the molten channels snaking through our volcanoes, the granite slabs that compose our cordilleras, the deeper folds of schist and gneiss, the strata and unconformities, the slate and sandstone?
Because a mountain is also this. Or might I say: a mountain is mostly this.
For every terrestrial stream, there run a thousand below the earth.
For each pond, a hundred inner seas. And waterfalls, and airy marbled chambers painted with every color of the atmospheric rainbow, and more.
That is a mountain. The one we see is but a fleeting apparition.
It is as if I were to ask you, “What makes a man?” and you think only of his skin.