ANARA GREW UP in a valley beneath a tall mountain. In spring flowers carpeted the valley, when the stream at its heart flowed hard and fast with melting snow, and the mountain’s peak, flecked with clouds like rose petals, glowed in the morning sun. Anara, with her feet in the ice-cold water, head cradled in soft flowers, heard the stream sing of its distant home above the valley, above the foothills, above even the high mountain plateaus. How wonderful she thought that home must be, for the valley’s whole life and joy was owed to the stream. The water sounded so eager to tell its tale, Anara felt sad she couldn’t understand. Lying among the flowers, she promised the stream that one day she would take the journey and visit its home. One day, she would climb the mountain.
The seasons and the years went by. Anara was now a young woman. A handsome young man named Chita from a wealthy family in a village in the foothills above the valley asked to marry her.
“To journey upriver, hasn’t that always been your dream?” Anara’s father asked. “Isn’t this your chance?”
“But if I marry Chita, I’ll never go on my journey. I’ll stay in the foothills forever.”
“You’ll have a family and a happy life. Chita is a good man. He’ll take care of you and love you. That will make your mother and I very happy.”
Anara didn’t want to disappoint her parents. She loved Chita. He was a good man. So Anara married him. She packed her possessions and journeyed along the path beside the stream till she came to Chita’s village in the foothills. For the next twenty years this was her home, and she and Chita had three children. Anara was happy. But of an evening she often stood gazing at the mountain peak. Her old dream still called. She wanted to climb the mountain. Half her life was gone, yet she’d travelled a mere few miles of the journey.
Then one day Chita came to her and said, “I know you’re not happy, my love. I know your heart yearns for the adventure you never had. You still long to climb the mountain, as you did as a child. Let me release you from your bond. Our children are grown up. They no longer need their mother’s care. Because of your devotion, they are strong and can fend for themselves. I too can look after myself. But I can’t go with you on your journey. The mountain isn’t for me. The village is where I belong. Everything I love is here. But you must go where your heart takes you.”
Anara knew if she did not accept Chita’s offer, she would never realise her dream. So, after twenty long years in the village, Anara waved goodbye to her family and set off along the path by the stream. Above loomed the mountain. Once again it was spring, and the stream was full and bubbling with melt water. As she climbed, the air grew colder. Every now and again she looked down on the valleys below. Through branches of fir and pine, she saw the glinting roofs of the village where she had lived with Chita, and beyond that she caught glimpses of bright purple flowering meadows. They marked the place she had first made her vow to the stream. It laughed and babbled along side her.
On a stormy night she came across an old woman stumbling along the path. “My husband died in the winter,” the old woman said. “I’m sick. I have no money. I don’t know what to do.”
Anara helped the old woman find her way home.
“Have no fear,” Anara said.“I’m climbing the mountain. My husband gave me money for the journey. I can stay and look after you.”
Anara stayed, and gradually the old woman’s health recovered. Together they made garments and sold them. They were great friends. Sometimes Anara thought of returning down the mountain because she missed Chita and the children. But it meant leaving her friend, and giving up her dream. So she remained, and the seasons passed. Strands of grey twinkled in Anara’s hair, the colour of the ice on the windowsills.
Then one morning Anara took her friend breakfast and found that the old lady had died in her bed. She had died smiling, which comforted Anara, who wept at her friend’s bedside. She arranged the funeral. With a heavy heart, she knew it was time to set off up the mountain.
Not long into the journey she met a shepherd bringing his sheep down the mountain to pasture, for winter was coming. The shepherd had fallen and hurt his knee. “If I can’t get my flock to the valley, they will starve,” he said.
As she helped him herd the sheep down from the high ground, Anara told the shepherd her story. “When I was a little girl the stream tried to tell me about the beautiful place where it was born. I always wanted to visit its home. That’s why I’m climbing the mountain. But it’s of no consequence. We must get the sheep to pasture.”
The shepherd was grateful to Anara, and she spent the winter in the shepherd’s cottage. He was a lonely man and his leg refused to heal. Eventually she asked if she might resume her journey.
“I can’t thank you enough,” the shepherd said. “I wish you luck. But I warn you the mountain is not the magical place you imagine. It’s bitterly cold, desolate and hard.”
“The voice of the stream has echoed in my mind since I was a little girl. And I must discover what it’s trying to say. Goodbye, my friend.”
Once again it was springtime. The sky above Anara’s head was bright blue. She climbed all day and at night found places to sleep among the rocks. She took bread to eat, which she was careful to make last. The air became thin, making it difficult to breathe. The top of the mountain seemed no closer. She left the trees behind, and came into a bare, jagged country of rocks and thin wispy grass. She followed what remained of the trickling stream.
Higher still she reached the mouth of a cave. She thought it seemed like a good place to spend the night. Going inside, she was surprised to see an old man sitting in the darkness.
“Who are you?” Anara asked.
“Call me a hermit,” the old man said. “I’ve lived here more than thirty years. You are the first person I’ve seen since I left my home.”
Anara told him how she too had left her family in the foothills of the mountain, and was searching to find the source of the stream.
“There is nothing,” the old man told her. “Higher up the mountain you’ll find only grief and misery. The air is impossible to breathe, the cold is too intense. There’s no water. The source of your precious stream is a lifeless frozen rock. I have seen. But I never went back and told anyone because, like you, I wanted to be the bearer of joy. Instead I found only misery.”
That night a blizzard blew up. Inside the cave was bitterly cold. In the morning the thin, sick old man said to Anara: “Take my advice. Go down before it’s too late. Don’t let the mountain shatter your dreams. Go down, and tell people what they want to hear. Tell them that the source of the stream is something beautiful beyond what they can imagine. Please go to my family and tell them the same. Tell them you met me, and that I live in a place of great wonder and happiness. Give them my love, but on no account tell them the truth. Will you do that for me?”
Anara saw that the old man was close to death.
“I’ll take you down the mountain with me,” she said.
“No,” he said.“I can never go back. All I ask is that you promise to tell my family.”
“After I’ve climbed the mountain,” she said.
“No,” he insisted. “Go down now.”
The old man was very weak. Anara laid blankets on a sled and wrapped them round him. When the weather eased she started the long descent. But the snow grew worse again. She took shelter with the sick old man. Anara fell heavily asleep. When she woke next morning, the old man was gone. Despite searching and calling, she couldn’t find him. She carried on the rest of the way to his village. When she found his family, she told them what he had asked. She said there existed on top of the mountain a place so beautiful it was beyond imagining, and she was going there. Their father and grandfather had found peace there, and he wanted them to know.
Then Anara set off up the mountain again. The villagers thought she was mad. Winter was coming and shepherds were descending with their flocks.
She followed the stream. Snow began to fall, and the thin air made her breathless. On she trudged. She passed the cave where the old hermit had spent his days, and she remembered his warning. She was alone now. There was no other living creature. At this altitude nothing lived. There was just barren rock, ice and fog. Cold burnt her hands, the freezing wind gnawed at her face. She bent down into the fog swirling at her feet, and felt a faint trickle of water inching down the mountainside, its voice all but silent. She had to put her ear close to the ground to hear it.
How, she asked herself, can such a wasteland give rise to so much beauty in the valleys and foothills below? Truly, the mountain was nothing but desolation. There wasn’t even a view. The fog, those beautiful clouds that sunrise turned into rose petals when seen from the valley below, brooded over everything like a heavy pall of grief. Was this the home the little stream remembered and sang of? Or was its song in reality a celebration of release from captivity in the ice?
“I can’t follow the song home,” Anara told herself, “because no home ever existed.”
She sat on an austere crop of rock. Suddenly the fog rolled back, and the mountaintop blazed through. It was ancient, unimaginably so. It kept its wisdom folded up inside a vast inscrutability.
The hermit was wrong. The shepherd was wrong. This icy place was beautiful because of what it contained. The song of the stream celebrated nothing: not home, not freedom. The stream was simply an outpouring, an exuberance tumbling downhill, an energy of beauty flowing through the valley, where it turned into purple flowers and sheep, and girls named Anara. Anara’s feet were already carrying her home. Filled with energy she ran over the hard stones beside the stream. The stream and its song were an overflow. That was the stream’s whole life and joy. Life is the joy of melting and running downhill. Easy. But for that, one needs a mountain.