Chapter 7

Prince Charming ran until his legs grew numb and his lungs fiery. At some point, he collapsed and slept.

When he awoke, he saw himself to be in a sunlit meadow. At the far end of it a mountain rose into the sky, a gigantic Matterhorn of the Imagination, a dream mountain of multicolored glass. In front of the mountain, and block­ing further access to it, was a dense forest of what looked like metal trees. Charming advanced upon the strange forest and regarded it. The trees were made of thorned stovepipe, and the tallest of them was not over seven feet in height. As he approached, the trees began to emit a yellowish gas which quickly caught fire, sparked by igniters located below-ground.

Prince Charming might not have known what these were, save that he recalled seeing Azzie studying a slip of paper which he later left lying upon his desktop. Curious, Charming had looked at it. It proved a receipt from the All Spiritual Regions Gas Company for payment for gas to power flame trees.

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."

"Me wear crampons?" He had the common superstitious awe of these useful objects.

"They are what all the climbers wear."

"No thanks. You're not going to get those things on me."

"If you don't wear them, you'll never get to the top. It's all glass, you know. Slippery."

Charming, like so many young men in those days, had prejudices against both goats and crampons. Sighing, he chose at last what seemed the lesser evil.

"So all right already, saddle me up a goat!"

* * *

Not even all the goats make it up Glass Mountain. That must be understood by those who think a goat is all it takes to win a princess. It's just that you need to use a goat even to get into the running. If at the very end, you want to substitute a horse for your goat, after the feat is accomplished, and have your portrait painted that way-well, a horse looks better than a goat, and it can be arranged.

And so it was that at last Prince Charming found himself racing upward on goatback until he came to the entranceway to a great castle whose battlements rose high into the air. Ahead of him was a staircase. He knew he had arrived when he saw the cardboard sign on an iron stanchion. It read, YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT THE ENCHANTED CASTLE. THE SLEEPING PRINCESS IS IN THE FIRST CHAMBER TO THE RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS. CONGRATULATIONS.

With a tremulous feeling in his thumbs, Prince Charming performed the final climb over the barbican, endured the icy swim across the moat, and then, dripping wet, went down the gallery and through the turret passageways, and finally through the outer rooms where ensorcelled servitors snoozed, to the staircase with upward curves of great cruelly, to the flagstones of the outer chamber.

He opened the door and took two steps inside. In the middle of the room he saw the bed, a high four-poster. Lying on it, eyes closed, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was the one whose miniature he had fallen in love with. But in person she was incomparably more lovely than her painted representation.