We finally reached the top of the highest mountain. For some minutes, the old man seemed too tired to speak.
‘Not long ago,’ he said at last, ‘I guided people up this mountain. But about three years ago a terrible thing happened to me. No living person has seen anything like it. My body and my mind were broken by the six hours of terrible fear that I went through that day.
You believe that I am a very old man. I am not. In less than a day, my hair changed from black to white. My body became weak. Walking makes me shake. A shadow now scares me. I feel nervous when I am on this little mountain. Did you know that?’
The “little mountain” was about five hundred meters high. I was nervous. Below us, the mountain fell away in a straight wall of black shining rock. I fell to the ground in fear. For a few minutes I could not look up at the sky or out at the sea.
