https://youtu.be/FahxmEAF0AQ
The man stood at the base of the mountain and looked up. It was a long way to the top. His instinct of self-preservation told him to turn around, to walk away from that mountain and never look at it again. But there was a deeper compulsion within him to conquer that mountain, to discover the secrets hidden on its cloud-shrouded peak, and this compulsion overrode all others.
He began to climb.
There was no marked path, and any flat places would last no more than a few steps before they gave way to more jagged pillars of rock. He would ascend halfway up a steep cliff-face, then find that there were no more handholds for him, forcing him to descend and look for another way. Soon, his hands were scratched and bloody from the abuse.
Doubts formed in the man’s mind. What if the mountain was not meant to be climbed? What if it could not be climbed? What if there was nothing at the top? But the man pushed these thoughts away. All his life, he only knew one thing, and that was to face the challenges ahead of him. This mountain was just the next (?final?) challenge. There was no choice but to climb.
The man refused to look down or up to gauge his progress, knowing that his resolve could waver if he saw the true futility of his quest. Instead, he stubbornly focused on whatever obstacle was immediately in front of him, be it an unstable rockslide threatening to send him tumbling off an edge, or a yawning fissure that could not be circumvented and could only be leapt across, or a deadly-tight crevice that must be squeezed through. There were many close calls where he was seconds away from sure death. But the man knew that the true death would have been remaining at the bottom of that gargantuan mountain without having made an attempt to climb it.
His arms ached. His legs screamed in protest. His mouth was parched with thirst. His skin was burned by a too-bright sun. But the man had endured many trials in his life, and would not allow a small amount of physical discomfort to dissuade him from his ultimate goal. Occasionally, he would pass a skeleton, a reminder of those who had tried and failed. He vowed not to be counted among the doomed skeletons on this cursed mount.
Seeing what seemed to be a straightforward path upwards, the man grabbed onto a ledge to pull himself up onto it, hoping to find a brief respite on the flat surface. Instead, the rock gave way underneath his fingers, and he fell onto the rocks below, landing harshly on his side. Blinding pain shot through his body, but he knew he was lucky not to have landed on his back or head. He got to his knees, then, shakily, to his feet, and resumed his journey with a look of grim determination on his face.
Day passed into dusk passed into night, but the man did not rest. The moon provided enough light to see by. At times, progress was steady, and at others, painfully slow, but always, that compulsion in his mind refused to allow him to give up.
He crawled over a steeply-sloped maze of fallen, shattered rock sheets and then, all of a sudden, there was no more mountain to climb. A perfectly flat field awaited him, giving his battered legs a flat place to stand, to rest. Unlike the rest of the mountain, where not even lichen or moss grew, this place was verdant with vegetation: trees, grass, and flowers, all shimmering with dew in the ghostly silver moonlight. His feet cried out in pleasure as the cool dew soothed his bruises and cuts.
The man walked forward, feeling his fatigue already fading away. At the center of this oasis was a pool of water fed by an unseen underground spring. Remembering his thirst, he got to his knees and drank eagerly. Through his muscles, no, through his soul itself, flowed pure radiant joy. The mountain, which had seemed so impossibly tall, was now below him. He had not let it conquer him. Instead, he had conquered it.
As the man gazed into the waters, he thought he could see the rippling, distorted visage of a skinny man, long hair pulled into a ponytail, smiling and waving at him. The man in the water put on a pair of sunglasses. On a whim, the man who had just conquered the mountain reached into his pocket and unexpectedly found that there was another pair of sunglasses there. He took them out and put them on, and when he did so, the identity of the man in the water abruptly became known to him.
“I did this for you, DownToBuck. You, and all who believed in the man whose name is…Ersan Ilyasova!”