shelidonDecember 22, 2021Leave a Comment

It’s not much of a stand-alone tale, more like a Winter Chapter in Michael Ende‘s Neverending Story, a book lot of people talk about and very few people have actually read.

The Chapter in question is Chapter XII, The Old Man of Wandering Mountain, and follows Atreyu’s encounter with the Child-Like Empress. Illuminations for the edition I own are by Roswitha Quadflieg.

At the beginning of this chapter, we find ourselves on top of a mountain, surrounded by everlasting ice and swept by chilling winds.

LONG-THUNDERING avalanches descended from the heights, snow-storms raged between towering ice-coated summits, dipped into hollows and ravines, and swept howling onward over the great white expanse of the glaciers.

The mountain, we soon learn, is the Mountain of Destiny, and one of Fantastica’s laws decrees that no one can attempt to climb it until the previous successful climber has been forgotten. Paying such attention to something is a good way to never get rid of its memory, but we’ll leave this be. Among the Mountain of Destiny’s glaciers, we find some sort of Snow Ents, iced creatures who move very slowly and know nothing of what happens outside of their realm, up to the point where they are convinced to be the only living creatures.

No living creature could survive in that icy waste — except for a handful of gigantic ice-glumps — who could barely be called living creatures, for they moved so slowly that they needed years for a single step and whole centuries for a short walk.

This means that they react with puzzlement and consternation when they see something making its way uphill and that something is the glass litter with which the Childlike Empress has left her Ivory Tower in the previous chapter. Yes, the Empress gets out of the tower, in the book. Forget the movies. The dying empress is looking for the Old Man of Wandering Mountain and she gave orders to be taken through any kind of weather by the four invisible Powers who are moving her litter, in the very little path left by the Nothing that’s eating up her realm.

The litter was moving through a deep ravine, so narrow that there was barely room for it to pass. The snow was several feet deep, but the invisible carriers did not sink in or even leave footprints. It was very dark at the bottom of this ravine, which admitted only a narrow strip of daylight. The path was on a steady incline and the higher the litter climbed, the nearer the daylight seemed. And then suddenly the walls leveled off, opening up a view of a vast white expanse. This was the summit, for the Mountain of Destiny culminated not, like most other mountains, in a single peak, but in this high plateau, which was as large as a whole country.

In the middle of the plateau, they see find a smaller odd-looking mountain, resembling a bit the Ivory Tower, but with blue pillars and stone teeth supporting a gigantic egg. That’s where the Old Man of the Wandering Mountain lives, and the empress must continue alone, on foot. She climbs on a ladder and on that ladder it’s written how she shouldn’t do so, but of course she sees that if you really don’t want someone to visit you, you shouldn’t have a ladder in the first place.

TURN BACK! TURN BACK AND GO AWAY! FOR COME WHAT WILL AND COME WHAT MAY, NEVER IN ANY TIME OR PLACE MUST YOU AND I MEET FACE TO FACE. TO YOU ALONE, O CHILDLIKE ONE, THE WAY IS BARRED, TO YOU ALONE. TURNBACK, TURNBACK, FOR NEVER SHALL BEGINNING SEEK THE END OF ALL. THE CONSEQUENCE OF YOUR INTRUSION CAN ONLY BE EXTREME CONFUSION.

It’s a meeting between the young and not ageing, and the old which was never young, between creation and recording, between the beginning and the end. It’s the place where the snake bites its own tail, closing the circle.