Each day up the majestic mountain was a tap-dance of four seasons, with mornings of spring, afternoons of summer, evenings of fall, and nights shivering of winter.  It was a leisurely climb, a thousand feet a day, but then it became winter pretty much all day.  It was a winter still comprehensible to him, until — a further three thousand feet up — it wasn’t.  Everything here felt extreme, a scream to the senses, not winter but some season beyond.  There were still four thousand more feet to the summit.  He stopped to consider that he wasn’t extreme enough to venture into such an extreme situation, not alone.  And, yet, he had made it this far.  Still, though, no thing lived up here, tree or creature, for a reason.  He couldn’t feel the sensation of life return to him till, on his quick descent the next morning, he felt Spring again. He made himself stop and take a look back upon the visible part of his long descent, and felt, as he might have in a revelation, that there appeared to be enough energy in life to survive all the seasons, but not enough to make it through an endlessly extreme one.