If Uncle Azzie “was indeed paying the bill to fuel the trees – and Charming could draw no other inference from the evidence- then the signs of manipulation were unmistakable. He felt strange now when he considered the ramifications. It made him feel as if he were painted cardboard, a cutout figure pinned to the background. This was frightening, but it came at a time when there was an urgent need to get on through the place. So he saved it for later consideration and moved ahead.
If the things could be turned on, they could be turned off. He sought for the better part of an hour before he located the valve in a ditch. The trees went out when he turned it. How very strange, to set up a thing like this in the first place.
He passed among them.
And so he came to Glass Mountain Village, final base camp and source of provender, sustenance, and souvenirs for those who would climb to the sun-dazzled summit of the great mountain, where, it was said, stood the enchanted castle within which lay the sleeping Princess Scarlet.
The principal industry of the town was to serve those who sought to climb the Glass Mountain. Here came explorers and glass-mountain climbers from all over. The lure of the thing was irresistible.
Charming walked down a line of shops on Main Street in Glass Mountain Village. Many of the shops specialized in glass-mountain-climbing equipment. Glass is a tough substance to scale. To hear the townspeople talk you’d think the glass changed qualities every time a cloud came over the sun. The mountain boasted every kind of glass to be found: Swift Glass and Devious Glass, Tricky Glass and Swamp Glass. There was High Mountain Deadly Glass and Low Plain Bed Glass. Each kind of glass (and Glass Mountain was said to be composed of all of these kinds and more) had its own difficulties, and booklets were available at the shops dealing with the remedies for every variety.
Although some believed that this Glass Mountain was the only place of its kind in the world, unique and unduplicatable, there were intellectuals who insisted that the perennial human custom of climbing glass mountains could only be accounted for by deep historical memories, practically universal to the race of man, of doing so countless times and places in the past. These theorists would have it that Glass Mountain was an archetype of human experience whose physical corroboration was always taking place on innumerable levels, from the first moment of the beginning of the past to the last instant of the furthest unrolling of the future.
The bookstores of Glass Mountain Village were also filled with technical books on how glass mountains had been climbed in this year or that. There were histories, guidebooks, books of interviews with climbers and theorists. There were several shops in town that sold nothing but crampons of all types and descriptions, including diamond-studded ones.
The matter of whether or not to use horses to climb Glass Mountain called up some controversy in the town. In general, it is much more difficult for a horse to climb a glass mountain than it is for a man. Horses’ legs don’t go in the right ways. They are noble beasts, excellent on plains and prairies, agile in forests and pretty fair even in semidense jungle, but just not good at climbing glass mountains. So the custom had sprung up of riding up the mountain on goatback.
To traditionalists, this was unacceptable. Everyone expects Prince Charmings to scale the Glass Mountain on horseback. Generations of illustrators, some of them claiming to be authorized by high spiritual powers, had shown horses climbing glass mountains with Prince Charmings on their backs. The fact is, as learned societies have never tired of pointing out, even if a horse could manage the mountain, it would leave him damaged in spirit and weak in the wind. Despite this, no one liked the idea of goats.
Charming was like everyone else. “Are you kidding?” he said, when told about riding a goat. “No way!”
“In that case,” they told him, “you’ll have to wear crampons and try to get up the mountain yourself.”