The Black Mountain

If you want to know from which side the wind blows, climb on the ridge of a black mountain after midnight and walk and walk and walk. The fog is deep, the wind atrocious, the skin of the mountain is all that has been left after a nuclear fall-out. There is not a single light, no star, no moon. Everything is dark and thick with biting dampness. The skin of the mountain is hard and corroded. You can follow the ruts and pray for your ankles. You are a company of indefinite shadows. They might be the ghosts of souls caught in a stasis between heaven and hell. They have found their home here and wait for visitors anxiously. They do not speak, these thin mists, they mark the way, which is a difference between smaller grey and bigger black darkness.

When the silhouette of the corrugated road starts to slope down after an hour or two (time equals eternity here), when your ear feels like a looted chapel, when you are beginning to believe you have won, the mountain will clutch your foot in one unguarded moment and pull you towards itself with such ferocious force that you believe at the first moment the foot has stayed in her possession. It turns out after a few seconds of a clean shock it hasn't. Yet the mountain has showed you at whose mercy you walk. Do not tease the black mountain even in your thoughts! It is the back of an ageless leviathan who knows more about this earth than you can ever hope to realize.