The Teaching Mountains

Alpine folklore ultimately teaches humility. These mountains strip away human pretense, revealing our size against geological time, our warmth against cosmic cold, our brief lives against eternal ice. The spirits here—White Ladies, dragons, Wild Huntsmen—embody forces that existed before humans and will outlast us.

Yet the relationship need not be adversarial. Alpine communities thrived for millennia through recognizing the mountains as inhabited rather than empty, as partners rather than resources. The White Ladies guide those who approach with respect. The servants aid families who maintain proper relationships. Even dragons sleep peacefully when their territories remain inviolate.

Modern climbers might use GPS instead of reading cloud signs, synthetic fibers instead of blessed wool, and weather forecasts instead of tempestaire warnings. But the mountains themselves haven't changed. They still demand respect, still harbor mysteries in their heights, still kill the arrogant and spare the humble according to laws older than any human civilization.

In the French Alps, where glaciers calve icebergs into valleys that once held tropical seas, where peaks young by geological standards pierce skies that remember when earth had no oxygen, mythology isn't primitive superstition but sophisticated adaptation. These stories encode survival information, ecological wisdom, and above all, the recognition that we walk through a world inhabited by more than our eyes can see.

The White Ladies still dance on moonlit glaciers. Dragons still sleep coiled in mountain hearts. The Wild Hunt still gathers souls from crevasses that swallow the unprepared. And in valleys where church bells ring across meadows starred with gentians, where wooden chalets perch impossibly on slopes that avalanche everywhere except there, humans still live in negotiated peace with powers that could erase them with a shrug of stone shoulders.

The Alps teach patience, respect, and the terrible beauty of limits. Their mythology, written in avalanche and encoded in survival, reminds us that we are guests in a vertical world where the only safety lies in acknowledging our place as suppliants to forces magnificent in their indifference and generous to those who remember they walk on borrowed ground, breathing borrowed air, warmed by borrowed sun, in the shadows of peaks that touch the ceiling of the world.# Chapter 7: Corsica - Island of Granite and Ghosts

Corsica rises from the Mediterranean like a mountain cast into the sea, its granite peaks catching clouds while its shores bask in crystalline light. This is the Île de Beauté, the Island of Beauty, but beauty here has thorns. In the maquis—that impenetrable tangle of aromatic shrubs that covers much of the island—bandits and resisters have hidden for centuries. In mountain villages accessible only by vertigo-inducing roads, vendettas passed through generations like heirlooms. And in the space between life and death walk the mazzeri, dream-hunters whose visions determine who lives and who dies.