...of mountains

To left, to right, in front, behind, stand the mountains; it is they who have modified life in the valley in this way. They are responsible for this asperity and this mystery. For the mountains are living creatures; they have bodies, they have eyes, they breathe. Their vast domes are bellies, their crests bear the awe-inspiring traces of the orders they have given, once and for all, to everything around them: be hard, be hard. In the silence, in the emptiness, be hard. They rise up, bloated, sharp-pointed, massive, into the four corners of the sky; some of them even appear to be petrified in a dizzy equilibrium, seated, immovable, yet tilted in such a way that they ought to have fallen centuries ago, to have fallen softly in on themselves and dissolved into avalanches of sand. They have grown according to some confused plan, wide wrinkles of molten lava, waves of magma petrified in the act of rushing downwards. And then they stayed like that, just as the pacified earth left them, grotesque and inaccessible. The harmony of silence is already at the heart of their contortions. Their life is no longer the life of movement, of a volcano, but a weight of simple calm and menace. Tons, millions of tons of stubborn, grandiose silence, a paralysed anger that crushes everything, holds everything quelled beneath its plinth.

[The World Is Alive, from Fever, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]