The locals warned him of the fumes and the guides spoke of men who went up and didn’t come down sane, or didn’t return at all. He, however, never contrived to register such idiosyncrasies spoken by only the foolish and fearful. Since boyhood he had been praised only when he exceeded: when he climbed higher, ran faster, dared further than the rest; applause had come only then, never in the middle, and thus the middle had come to feel like absence. Beneath his boots, the sand shimmered in a pulsating yellow-gold, mica blinking and sparkling with a secret light. It was, in his estimation, a gold-mine of feeling. Each glint struck him like a promise: You will feel again.
That morning, before the ascent, he had poured soda into a thin hotel glass. The fizz rose in frantic effervescence, a thousand bright ascents colliding against the surface and dying. He watched it for longer than he intended. Something about it tugged at him, some almost-thought he couldn’t locate. He swallowed the soda before the thought arrived. The glass went flat on the table beside him. He did not look back at it.
He was a man possessed by an insatiable longing for what he called peakness: a fevered thrill which strips sleep from the soul and replaces it with urge. For years he wandered from country to country, mountain to mountain, fasting and searching, never satisfied. He sought sensation, but not as the layman does; no, he pursued it as a connoisseur of awe, a seeker of the sublime. His friends, or acquaintances for none were close enough, called him reckless, but he was just a lover of heights who feared the plains. He claimed to seek awe, yet secretly he longed to stand where others could not, to look downward and feel confirmed by distance. And so it came to pass, on a day already destined for intensity, that he turned his eyes toward the greatest volcano known to man. He decided to climb.
And yet, in the quiet of his mind, he questioned whether gold, stripped of all pretence, was ever anything more than sun-kissed sand. Wherefore should this mountain differ from the rest? Still, he kept climbing.
As the air grew thinner, the heat heavier, and the world below smaller, he had imagined the ascent to feel holy, but it was merely exhausting. Sweat dripped from his temples. Then the wind came.
It did not howl; it insinuated. It slipped beneath his collar and along his spine like a cool, articulate whisper. It pressed against him not as resistance but as invitation, a roaming hand that seemed to say: Here. For a moment his chest widened, and his pulse sharpened; he felt chosen. The wind curved about him in lucid spirals, lifting the ash in veils that shimmered like annunciation. He inhaled deeply, certain the revelation had begun. A part of him, the part that had flattened the soda glass and walked away, noted that he had been certain of this before. At the Eiger. At Denali. At the rim of Etna in a thunderstorm, arms wide, waiting. He ignored this part. He had become expert at ignoring it.
“Perhaps holiness requires more altitude,” he thought, when the sensation dulled. Therinafter he climbed faster, greed entering his stride. At last, he reached the summit and stood, refulgent as a volcano, proud before the sublimity he had so rigorously pursued. Tremors of the chest, he had hoped; insight, he had expected. But no thunder came. Nothing felt different.
The volcano hissed in a serpentine exhale, curling around his ears like smoke. It pulsed with a steady rhythm, as if the earth itself had fallen into the monotonous cadence of habit. And yet, such pulsing was no stranger to the ordinary: the streetlamp late at night pulsed; all things, in their own way, performed this rhythm. The magma rose now and then, appearing like a well-oiled genie, sleek and obedient, like a ballet of molten obedience. The same exertion from the volcano repeated and the man grew devoid of surprise.
He waited. He spread his arms as if before an audience. Nothing crowned him. No voice addressed him. The wind resumed, thinner now, no longer whispering but brushing past him with indifference. He felt not chosen but exposed.
He laughed, bitterly, and then, because nothing answered him, he grew angry.
The volcano spasmed in hysterical frenzy, rivers of molten chaos licking at the sky. But so too did the city, the market, the traffic. So too did his own thoughts. The world itself was a frenzy. Had he journeyed so far only to encounter the same tumult from which he had fled?
“Give me something,” he shouted into the crater. “Burn me worthy.” The wind tore the words from his mouth and flung them back as ash. In a surge of reckless proof, he stepped closer to the lip than prudence allowed. The stone beneath him fractured. His body lurched forward; heat engulfed him in a suffocating wave. For one suspended instant he believed the mountain had chosen to devour him. He clawed backward, palms striking blistering rock. The skin seared. The smell of himself rose, animal and immediate. He screamed. Not in ecstasy but in accusation, and the sound came out smaller than he intended. The outer layer of his palm clung briefly to the stone before tearing free. He stared at it in disbelief, as though his body had betrayed him publicly.
“You are nothing!” he raged at the mountain.
The volcano answered only with its indifferent pulse.
He remembered a moment, trivial yet revelatory, when he hissed soda into a glass.
His hands throbbed violently now, blisters swelling, skin ruined. The instruments of his reaching, those hands that had grasped cliffs, applauded heights, written dispatches from summits, hung useless at his sides. They would not close without pain. The mountain had taken nothing from him but the illusion of invulnerability; yet the cost felt absolute.
The volcano throbbed, but so did he. The wind whipped around him, hot and dry, and in a kind of mad surrender, he removed his gloves and plunged his hands into the ballet-performing magma. Pain surged upward in furious spirals. White overtook his vision. For a breath he wondered whether this, finally, was the transcendence he had demanded. The throb of human hands met the throb of the earth. The two became indistinct but not because they were one, only because he assigned throb to both. The volcano had never throbbed; only his perception had. He felt an embarrassed clarity, as if he had mistaken his own heartbeat for the voice of God.
He understood then that he had called the wind holy only when it favored him, and cruel when it did not. He had named the mountain sublime only when it promised elevation. All along it had simply been.
He collapsed backward, laughing and howling. Tears dried into salt. The point had never been the volcano. Humanity believes it must climb mountains to find divinity and meaning, yet every height is relative. Every volcano is also a hissing soda. Meaning is absolute, but its source lies within.
As he descended at dawn, his hands raw and trembling, each step measured now not for triumph but for balance, he passed a young guide pouring soda into a glass beside his tent. The fizz whispered softly; the man paused, this time watching. He saw the tiny eruptions rising and dying, tireless, sufficient unto themselves. It seemed less frantic than he remembered, or perhaps he had simply been too frantic to see it before. He smiled faintly and whispered to himself: “The volcano breathes still.” The guide looked at him, puzzled. “No, sir,” he said. “That’s just the soda.” But the man only nodded. Aye, just the soda.
