Accessible by reasonably good roads most of the year; pass open from the North, July & August. At 1973m. a resthouse, from which one can walk, or ride by cable car, to the western summit. The eastern face should not be attempted without a guide. for David Kalstone
-Until, the next morning in the sun, there
It was, framed in the window, looking like
The intense pictures of itself, which all
The night before while the ravening black
Swallowed the hills, engorged the dim vales, sucked
Up starlight through holes in the pines, and coughed
At the half-latched gate, all the night before
He lay awake, trying to remember:
Snowy veils of spume blown across the gorge;
A view shot upward dizzyingly while
The unseen ravine somehow made itself
Known, out of the picture; even the mere
Gorgeousness of depth, rock and height had dimmed.
His cold remembrances raved in the dark,
Houring after images. Midnight
Was no minimum, though: no skier whizzed
Past its momentary flatness, down one
Half parabolic dream of slope and up
Its opposite. The deadly hours which
Followed neither sank nor rose toward the day,
But merely stretched. The pictures were all wrong,
Those which came. They were pictures of pictures,
Or views of noise: postcards of roaring, as
Of mighty waters from the top of Mount
Throwdown; illuminations of the blasts
Hammering the clear tops of Mount Windows.
Or else they mirrored certain infamous
Peaks, quite as if to lead him by the head
To some mad eminence—say, the summit
Of Nayvel, to howl a loud howl like, “Down,
Be thou my Up” Or else they reflected
The ludicrous Snifflehorn rising from
His flat face on the plain bed, pictures far
Too close to themselves, and too close to him.
No, there were to be no comparisons—
Nor of the splendid reals of the morning
With night’s thin images, nor of the blaze
Of day with what lay banked in a black stove,
Nor of the pictured with the picturing.
For he awoke to a deluge of light,
And, rising far beyond that light in which
His eyesight gleamed, the old and the famous
Peak, preposterous-that was what he faced.
And if it had been cut out of cardboard,
Cardboard would serve. It always had: inside
Contours part jagged, part caressingly
Smooth-for even children were trained to trace
Its silhouette that they might come to know
It-there was only the unmarked flatness
Of surface fused to its depth. What he saw
Was not a picture of his seeing, nor
An image of his dimmest sleep. And, say,
That there was no cardboard (or, if there were,
A little azure hat for the mountain,
Doing no harm), say that the crookedness
Of its high tower was a beckoning,
And that it was a place to get to- —still,
Cardboard is as cardboard does: biting out
Its part of the available blue and
Masking some gummier construction taped
Behind it, emptiness and passe-partout.
And yet the vision of it hung there seemed
A vision as of something rounded, cut
Into by the wild blades of icy air,
Scooped and shaped if only by its shadows,
Troughed by a glacier and likely as not
Hacked out with caves and rock-studded
across An unseen face. And he knew a cold wind,
Then. It brought with it, as it might carry
A distant shouting among its own yells,
A blast of glimpsing from afar, a speck
Of mountaineer against the blue, plunging
Slowly from the far summit. Then the wind
Died. Frost on the glass outside gleamed under
The mounting sun, the cold snowfields stretching
Between his crying eye and that height, the
Fell beacon, gray, unsurmounted with light.
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