MOUNTAIN

On a cold Sunday morning in January, when thought should have strayed no further than the edge of a warm blanket, the mountain vanished. Swallowed by man-made clouds of smoke from a hundred industrial chimneys in the valley far below, it disappeared as if bewitched by the twitch of a magician’s wand. In the days that followed, with the mystery of its disappearance no closer to being solved due to the lingering cloud wreaths and airborne pollution, it was possible to wonder whether the mountain had ever been there at all. And if this mountain, so grand, so tall, so inextricable from the idea of the nation built around it, could simply vanish without so much as a sigh of regret or whisper of warning, then where did that leave the country, suddenly stripped of its spiritual centrepiece? Were those four islands, so long the drops of destiny on the edge of the world, just rocky outcrops in the vast ocean, like so many thousands of others? Concrete-clad, gaudy, hi-tech rocks, but rocks just the same.

And there I stand, by the crater where it once stood, and ask myself if I can ever be sure of anything ever again. There, with the smoke hanging in the waking light, was more than just a physical void. There, where the mass of rock had been, was nothing, but it was in that corner of each mind that it had always occupied that it was missed most. Without warning or explanation, millions of memories withered, fondly stored fragments of reality transformed into wisps of a dream that no-one could quite remember. And as the days passed, the traces drifted away, lost and eroded as dreams fade with the march of morning, until eventually a day came when the new skyline was all that people knew, and all they could ever want to know. I think it was February.

I could have told them where it went, and why, and how, but they don’t know what I am talking about any more. I tell them about the snow crown, about the firefly trails in the climbing season, about standing above the clouds with a nation at your feet. I tell them about the silence of each dawn up there, about the reassurance it used to provide to sailors, to traders, to tourists, to us all as the highest point on our horizons. I tell them what they are missing, how it took all aspiration with it, how the certainty that once united us is gone too. I tell them these things but they cannot hear me, their ears can no longer make out what I say, just as their eyes can take in a horizon without the ancient queen and not be troubled by her absence.
This was once the land of mountains, but as the buildings rise and the cities swell, those outcrops are shrinking and subsiding, clawed down by the ants at their feet who have their own ideas about heights and hopes and levels. The sun will rise earlier now, there is nothing left to slow it.