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Imagine that you wish to climb a mountain. You park, lock your car, and walk to the start of the trail
You read the sign.
"4 km to peak"
You start walking.
Not five minutes into the hike you begin to sincerely regret choosing this particular day. The clouds are low today, and you have already ascended into them.
Can you see it? Imagine looking all around you, no sun, no trees, no rocks. Looking down, you can just barely see a your feet at the center of a circle, barely four feet across, of ground. How to proceed?
Think about it, try to find an answer.
Here's a hint:
The ground is sloped.
You follow the slope, always careful yo avoid bashing your shins into some rock or boulder being very careful to avoid walking off an edge, of which there are many.
It's slow going, and by now you are wet and cold. Soon, you will be very cold. Occasionally there is no immediate Up to take, having climbed to the top of some small hump, and you must feel around to find where the ground slopes up agian.
It's much colder now, not because of the height, it's not a very large mountain, but because if the thick wet fog.
After some amount of time, your climb becomes a bit steeper, and there is no more Up to take. You might feel around, but the ground only slopes down and away.
The conclusion you come too, quite reasonably, is that you've made it. You should feel excited.
The damp and cold is like a snake, worming through the folds of fabric intended to keep you warm. Now you're thinking, although it might be a bit too late, about hypothermia.
It's impossible to see any resemblance between this sour of rock and the peak advertised on the brochure, possible because it is impossible to see much of anything at all.
You stand there for a while, possible hours, although it is impossible to tell as the mixture of sweat from the climb and condensation has killed your watch.
Suddenly, a breeze, high above, gouges a ravine in the top of the cloud bank. You know this, because, for a split second, you can see the blue sky, and the bright orange sun, just starting to approach mid day.
But you also see one other thing.
The Peak.
Unmistakable, backlit by the glorious sun, almost perfect, line for line, from the brochure, is the mountian peak, still nearly an hours hike away, a hike that must surely be more vertical than horizontal.
The glimpse lasts no more than a fraction of a second, but during it you learn two horrible truths. One, you are most certainly not at the peak, and two, you will have to spend a significant part of the remaining hike going downhill away from this misleading spur of rock, before you can ascend the true peak.
The cloud cover rolls back in, and the vision is gone. You set about the task of hiking to the peak. During the downhill stretch you nearly collide with another group of hikers using the same "walk uphill" strategy.
You try to tell them about the false peak. They think you're crazy.
It's a much longer hike with the fog. Every now and then you gain dime altitude, but it's slow going. You begin to wonder if you really have lost it.
Then another breeze comes, and you see the true peak for another moment.
The cycle repeats.
Over time you begin to notice you can see further. At first it's by a few feet. Then it's by a few meters. There begins some serious hope of leaving the fog behind, even of reaching the glorious, beautiful, true peak.
I can't say what happens next.
This story isn't about mountians.