Parabola's Winter 1988 issue: The Mountain Why climb a mountain? Why willingly undergo the dangers and tortures of such a struggle, risk life itself, suffer from frostbite, sunburn, snowblindness, hunger and thirst and total exhaustion, for no greater reward than that of standing for a few moments in a high place? To this quite rational question, the mountain climber has only what seems a rather lame answer: Because it is there.    But what does this really mean? Certainly not just that the mountain is simply over there on the horizon, but that it is There, maybe so close that it occupies all the space there is, and there is no movement or breath possible except by way of it. The only ones who can hope to reach the summit are those for whom the climb is no longer a choice but a necessity, for whom the mountain is there in that imperative sense. --from the editorial Focus Cover: "Mount Analogue" by Jane Rosen All rights reserved. Photograph by David Heald. In this issue:

• "This Land of Snow Ridges"
  - A conversation about mountains and Tibet with Thubten Jigme Norbu
• Mount Analogue / Part One
  - "The Letter"
• "Sacred Mountains" by Edwin Bernbaum
  - Evocations of mystery, meaning, and divinity
• "Monte Perdito" by P. L. Travers
  - First steps up the staircase on the pilgrim path
• Mount Analogue / Part Two
  - "The Encounter"
• "The Garden and the Glass Mountain" by Paul Jordan-Smith
  - Finding the way in and the way up
• "The Mountain of God" by Richard Temple
  - The iconography of spiritual evolution
• Mount Analogue / Part Three
  - "The Meeting"
• "The Four Sacred Mountains of the Navajos" by Trebbe Johnson
  - Defining the universe both above and below
• Mount Analogue / Part Four
  - "The Sea-Crossing"
• "The Way of the White Clouds" by Lama Anagarika Govinda
  - Mount Kailas as the universal center
• "The Threshold of the Mountain in Dante's Divine Comedy" by Helen Luke
  - Moving through Purgatory towards Peter's Gate
• Mount Analogue / Part Five
  - "The Arrival"
• "Fabulous Climbers" by Rob Baker
  - The Capricorn as sea-goat, crocodile, and unicorn
• Mount Analogue / Part Six
  - "The First Camp"
• "The Way and the Mountain" by Marco Pallis
  - A leading traditionalist's discussion of the ascent
• Mount Analogue / Part Seven
  - "Traces"
• "Keeping Still"
  - The Mountain trigram in the I Ching
• "Interior Resonances"
  - A Conversation with Jack Daumal