The valley beds were like deep graves,
the sides of the mountains like the collapsing walls of a grave. The
very mountain-tops above, bright with transcendent snow, seemed like
death, eternal death.
There, it seemed, in the glamorous snow, was the source of death, which
fell down in great waves of shadow and rock, rushing to the level earth.
And all the people of the mountains, on the slopes, in the valleys,
seemed to live upon this great, rushing wave of death, of breaking-down,
of destruction.
The very pure source of breaking-down, decomposition, the very quick of
cold death, is the snowy mountain-peak above. There, eternally, goes on
the white foregathering of the crystals, out of the deathly cold of the
heavens; this is the static nucleus where death meets life in its
elementality. And thence, from their white, radiant nucleus of death in
life, flows the great flux downwards, towards life and warmth. And we
below, we cannot think of the flux upwards, that flows from the
needle-point of snow to the unutterable cold and death.
The people under the mountains, they seem to live in the flux of death,
the last, strange, overshadowed units of life.
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