Using imagery from fields as far apart as the Gospels, classic mythology, and modern astrophysics, in his book The Mystic Mountain, Dunstan Massey explores what some might call the chimerical hope of a risen life. Nevertheless, one is allowed to ask, will the Mourner, bereaved by the sudden death of Miriam, his wife, and his young son Jonathan, ever know consolation for their loss, or even see them again? In his desolation edging on despair, the Mourner is accompanied by three mysterious voices. He asks them at the sill of the grave, “Shall they rise, these dead?” As if in reply, the consolers lead him on a long visual search for the transcendent answer: will it be here, where death’s inevitability and finality have shattered his hopes? Or, could it be beyond death? The cry, the craving of the human heart, will never rest, save in a deathless state of infinite joy. We strive for it here, but find it not. Only the Infinite One who chose to die for love can give it when he calls us—so come as I call thee, my sister and brother and mother, unto me.

Travel with Joe on his adventure to find his queen and his past. Go back to a forgotten age of creatures and the world - to a realm of amazing discoveries.

"A superb account of a pilgrimage. . . . Characteristically beautiful, though uncharacteristically haunted." —Pico Iyer, New York Review of Books "Thubron walks for the dead and writes for the living, and I can't remember when I have been so thoroughly and deeply moved by an author's outward journey inward." —Bob Shacochis, Boston Globe New York Times bestselling author Colin Thubron returns with a moving, intimate, and exquisitely crafted travel memoir recounting his pilgrimage to the Hindu and Buddhist holy mountain of Kailas—whose peak represents the most sacred place on Earth to roughly a quarter the global population. With echoes of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, Peter Hessler’s Country Driving, and Paul Theoroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Thubron’s follow up to his bestselling Shadow of the Silk Road will illuminate, interest, and inspire anyone interested in traveling the world or journeying into the soul.

In this study, which is first of all a folk-lore study, we pursue principally an anthropo-psychological method of interpreting the Celtic belief in fairies, though we do not hesitate now and then to call in the aid of philology; and we make good use of the evidence offered by mythologies, religions, metaphysics, and physical sciences.