The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [47]
“Hurry it up,” yelled Japhy from a hundred feet ahead. “It’s getting awfully late.” I looked up to the peak. It was right there, I’d be there in five minutes. “Only a half-hour to go!” yelled Japhy. I didn’t believe it. In five minutes of scrambling angrily upward I fell down and looked up and it was still just as far away. What I didn’t like about that peak-top was that the clouds of all the world were blowing right through it like fog.
“Wouldn’t see anything up there anyway,” I muttered. “Oh why did I ever let myself into this?” Japhy was way ahead of me now, he’d left the peanuts and raisins with me, it was with a kind of lonely solemnity now he had decided to rush to the top if it killed him. He didn’t sit down any more. Soon he was a whole football field, a hundred yards ahead of me, getting smaller. I looked back and like Lot’s wife that did it. “This is too high!” I yelled to Japhy in a panic. He didn’t hear me. I raced a few more feet up and fell exhausted on my belly, slipping back just a little. “This is too high!” I yelled. I was really scared. Supposing I’d start to slip back for good, these screes might start sliding any time anyway. That damn mountain goat Japhy, I could see him jumping through the foggy air up ahead from rock to rock, up, up, just the flash of his boot bottoms. “How can I keep up with a maniac like that?” But with nutty desperation I followed him. Finally I came to a kind of ledge where I could sit at a level angle instead of having to cling not to slip, and I nudged my whole body inside the ledge just to hold me there tight, so the wind would not dislodge me, and I looked down and around and I had had it. “I’m stayin here!” I yelled to Japhy.
“Come on Smith, only another five minutes. I only got a hundred feet to go!”
“I’m staying right here! It’s too high!”
He said nothing and went on. I saw him collapse and pant and get up and make his run again.
I nudged myself closer into the ledge and closed my eyes and thought “Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,” and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, “When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.” The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah’s straw mats. Now it was enough to make my heart pound and my heart bleed for being born at all. “In fact when Japhy gets to the top of that crag he will keep climbing, the way the wind’s blowing. Well this old philosopher is staying right here,” and I closed my eyes. “Besides,” I thought, “rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything.” Suddenly I heard a beautiful broken yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity in the wind, and looked up, and it was Japhy standing on top of Matterhorn peak letting out his triumphant mountain-conquering Buddha Mountain Smashing song of joy. It was beautiful. It was funny, too, up here on the not-so-funny top of California and in all that rushing fog. But I had to hand it to him, the guts, the endurance, the sweat, and now the crazy human singing: whipped cream on top of ice cream. I didn’t have enough strength to answer his yodel. He ran around up there and went out of sight to investigate the little flat top of some kind (he said) that ran a few feet west and then dropped sheer back down maybe as far as I care to the sawdust floors of Virginia City. It was insane. I could hear him yelling at me but I just nudged farther in my protective nook, trembling. I looked down at the small lake where Morley was lying on his