you could weep. Nature had created them in great number, then planted them one by one in the rocky surface, choosing each location as if it were the setting for a jewel. Then the entire scene was cloaked in mist, and as it emerged from the void it revealed a landscape of peaks crowned with pine trees that seemed to be writing upon the sky. The Deep Woods were highly valued by the community of elves and, bathed in the majesty of high-altitude fog, they went there to admire the rising and setting of a sun that glorified every branch and every engraving of foliage. From one summit to the next the elves proclaimed the beauty of the sight, and Petrus grew up with these dawns and twilights that rustled with sounds and poetry. The ridges stretched beyond space, against a golden backdrop sketched with the curve of pines.
There are many mountains worthy of such moments of wonder, but none can compare to these. Fortune had decreed they would be vertiginously high and narrow, and wherever one looked, the slender mass of summits bathed in an ocean of clouds. At times, the trees, set on a single salient peak, were as delicate as lace in the great mossy void. At other times, the entire range rose above the cloudbank and offered up its succession of peaks. But what ultimately enthralled one’s vision was not the unending succession of undulating summits, but the fact that they overlooked a vaporous mass that seemed to give birth to each slope before leaving it with the kiss of a pine tree. Once lost in the sight, where the mystery of creation seemed to have found refuge, it was to encounter simply one’s own self; as if one were a mountain in a storm that turned the world on its head then restored it to the hollow of its own consciousness; and this was what the elves of every province came to seek in the Deep Woods, traveling great distances to stand in the morning to face the mystery above them. Later they would recall the hard rock, which was smooth and affable in places and sharp as a blade in others, and again they would see the landscape of the Deep Woods, the velvet mists, and the beauty of the mountain range, as if it were their own internal landscape.
Quite logically, the province was largely inhabited by elves that were also squirrels, bears, and eagles, who feared neither the steep crags nor the dizzying heights. The villages seemed to have been transported through the ether before being deposited on their high plateaus; and then all was hidden, revealed, and so on, to infinity. And so, everything that was true for the world of elves in general was true here a hundredfold, given the fact that these colossal spires reaching for the sky reserved for the mists valleys that were no less colossal, gigantic expanses where the hand of the elf could not be seen. From Mount Hiei,2 all you could see on the horizon were three needles floating on the magma until, suddenly, ten more broke through the surface, and you felt reborn. The mountains, rising out of nothing, hovered suspended over this absence; through the force of the void, spirit and rock sketched a pas de deux on the summit of existence before turning back to the original nothingness; and these games of hide and seek, of incessant birth and dying, gave the mountain in return the shape of consciousness that it had lacked until then.
It was in such a land that Petrus—who was not yet called Petrus—was born and grew up. He retained a sincere affection for the realms of mountains and the poems of dawn. Lulled by the affection of his family and the favor of the great mists, his first decades were filled with enchantment and love. Far from the sound and fury of the rest of creation, the squirrel elves made up a peace-loving house. They didn’t write poetry, but they gladly partook of the poetry of others and, although they thrilled to the speed of flight, they could remain motionless for long stretches of time. While they were frugal in nature, they knew how to entertain extravagantly, and even though they were far away from Katsura, they were never the last to reply to a summons from the Council. The surrounding landscape described them as well: as obscure as their woods and as noble as their mountains, they