Mountains and Substance
Mark Twain, with his bushy moustache and pointy eyebrows, travelled through Switzerland and wrote down many humorous observations over a century ago in graceful yet limpid English. Anyone now attempting to record a travelogue in the same terrain cannot therefore compete in the dimensions of pithy and witty. Unless the author is writing for an audience unfamiliar with Twain. But by this stage of the documented journey, I rule that out.
As an additional constraint, the days when aspiring writers and travellers could simply put on the pith helmet and plunge headfirst into the Oriental places of the world, describing in detail the lurid and lascivious mysteries of the natives, as it were, are no longer available in the post-satellite era. Put a satellite in orbit on Monday. Log in the next day. See it all, be bored by Wednesday, pith helmets shelved and forgotten.
But our rockets only reach terrestrial orbit. Deep space and interplanetary travel have not yet been achieved. The transition from pith helmet to space helmet is still pending.
So, Karl and his fellows were born too late to immerse themselves in the habits of the jungle and desert, and born too soon to probe Mars or drill on the moons of Jupiter. In our present interregnum of male bonding through adventure and discovery of place and, just as importantly, each other’s bodies, we must look elsewhere.
All these constraints combined mean our lot is to go deeper with utmost seriousness. The profound truth in deep mysteries, the traces of which a keen eye, sharp mind and hard dick may be able to sense, that is where we must go. If something is there, find it. Even if it isn't there, poke a bit more, feel it yield and become real.
It was Karl, and there were Alejandro, Martin, Hermann and Hugo. Monsieur Dumont had selected them for the research expedition aimed at the Alps. Seated in perfectly operated Swiss trains, the five young men were engrossed in obscure literature to become familiar with the creative task of adventure ahead.
They were smartly dressed, without helmets on their heads, and had neat haircuts; their rucksacks were orderly placed onto shelves. Their feet were on the floor, not on any opposite seat. Their proper upbringings proved helpful in other words, since Swiss people stab and slaughter annually about twelve persons who put their feet on precious train seats. This is not a joke; I am not violating the Twain constraint. People may believe the greatest risk of harm in the Alps is falling off a cliff, when in fact, getting roughed up by a Bünzli for a minor rule violation is a far greater hazard.
To your average observer, the five men looked like any other group of healthy young men who had plans for long hikes, expensive meals, and crammed and outright intimate sleeping arrangements in tents and chalets in the Alps. If they were touching dicks, or spooned cozily during the night, they would have plausible deniability. A dime a dozen, in other words, which raised no suspicion.
Dumont had impressed on his team that they had to keep their acts secret. Who or what was hunting the secret methods to truth, or working against truth itself, was not known.
If there is one thing every type of historian of Europe agrees on, it is that the Alps are a pivot point in Europe’s long history. They are a point of friction and an obstacle, and therefore, many key moments can be traced to the successful and unsuccessful crossings of said mountains by man and beast. Hannibal, Charlemagne and Napoleon are but three men of note associated with successful efforts overcoming said mountains.
The crossing by the French army invading Northern Italy in 1800 is the best documented crossing of Alpine terrain. Artists of the early 19th century were required to depict the event. As artists do, the good ones at least, the art pieces became imbued with hushed truths and encrypted facts. The style of the time was highly allegorical and neo-classical; therefore, dramatic in composition and colour, while also anatomically precise. The neo-classical muscle butts are a sight to behold!
In other words, a delicate reading of the muscles and veins, of the glances and gazes, of the light and shadow on the canvas was a staircase to hyper-dimensional profundity.
Take, for example, the most famous, muscular and propagandistic paintings by Jacques-Louis David. It depicts the young, crazy-eyed Napoleon straddling a stallion on a snowy mountain path. The pat observation everyone learns to replicate in essays and exams is that the artwork is not showing what really happened. Napoleon was neither in the vanguard nor on a horse. It is a glorified picture in service of conquest, the critical student might note. The lighting does not conform to the black-body solar radiation, the physics student will remark. The stallion’s tail is too long and not well groomed for either health or function, the farm lad likely will point out.
That truth is not good enough. Do not be lazy. Go deeper. Add another couple of centimetres to the effort for greater reward.
Magnify the view and look at Napoleon’s extended right hand, and the keen eye and hard dick shall sense an embedded truth. That hand is not the extended hand of a man pointing in the direction of Italy for mindless troops to follow. It is the gently extended index finger an experienced top would lovingly apply to his bottom’s butt to ease in the impending fuck, to tickle and tease the balls and taint a bit. Leading the way is an intimate act.
Direct your inspection to the background, look underneath the horse, and there observe a few soldiers. A man pushing his cannon upwards toward men walking in front of the hard iron. The man is pushing his mighty tool ever closer to the snugly wrapped goal on the ascent ahead.
“Walking uphill is easier if there is a pair of snugly wrapped and inviting buttocks ahead of you. That is a plain fact,” noted Hermann.
“So are mountain climbs the way you big men of Bavaria discover the urge for sweet butt, as it were,” asked Hugo as he bumped his knee against Hermann’s.
“Very common. But it goes much deeper than that,” answered Hermann. “The Alps can trigger that deep urge in men to grab hold of a nice piece of butt, pin it down to the mountain side, bare it all, and just go wild. Mountains are not simply a question of gravity and friction. Their ability to shape history and create long-lasting political realities is as much founded on what limestone and gneiss demand of male bodies and how these are, in turn, filled with strong fleshy substance. As we all know, in my case, by direct, physical dick-action, the mountainside sausage fest is a concept with dual meanings in Bavaria. That is not a random thing that just stuck with us, like the lederhosen, but it has deep roots.”
The men spent a few minutes in silent contemplation.
The contemporary sexual visuals were oversaturated with studio-lit productions from urban studios or grainy recordings from student dorm rooms. Men’s imaginations have been narrowed to a thin band on the spectrum of joy. A deliberate return to the rugged outdoor foundations was needed for the five men on the train. Their mission demanded thus. So they soaked up the views of the neatly framed lake filled with milky turquoise glacial waters outside the train window. So too the meadow on which cows, horses, and stable boys have been active over at least the previous two millennia. They absorbed the sexual aura of the views and exercised their minds.
The step from that to imagining Hugo as an early 19th-century French soldier was easy. Hugo had something eternally French about himself. There was something in how he moved, how he leaned back or forward at a table, the way he preferred his trousers to wrap around his body based on intimate experiences of spanking when he transgressed, or the wavy shape of his hair on account of how the Atlantic winds had blown through it his entire life. The French body expressed all that and more in circuitous ways, now and back then.
His trousers were the standard-issue dark blue sort. Hugo had received them when he joined the French Army the previous year. He was a simple kind of man, and therefore, he had no strong opinions about the revolution in 1789. Or maybe it wasn’t simplicity, but a question of not being that annoying, preachy type of person who claimed to know all that was right and wrong, good and bad in this world.
Regardless, he had been happy to put on the uniform and be trained. Moving alongside other men in tight marching formations was rather nice, he thought. More than rather nice, to be honest. Sometimes, nice is reason enough to do something.
Before the dark blue ones, Hugo’s trousers had been the ones of a farmhand. Very practical, sturdy, easy to pull up, and easy to pull off. With legs and butt wrapped in that fabric, he and his mule had hauled bottles and flour from the villages up to the town market. It was arduous work. The wind added to the force pushing against his travels to the town. But it was good. It had its rewards, too, not just the measurable ones in the marketplace.
One immeasurable reward of windy, uphill walking was that nice and firm muscles grew and filled out Hugo’s simple trousers. A good frame for varied and strong action, one could say. Though a measuring tape could be employed to put numbers on the growth, the reward was not a question of a centimetre here or there. The essence of man and his mule could not be reduced to mere numbers.
According to some thinkers, we only become aware of ourselves by becoming aware of others being aware of us. Not my opinion, yet, there is insight embedded in that. Hugo, with pants straining against his buttocks’ full girth, became aware that there almost always was a farmhand working the fields next to the road when Hugo walked to and from the town. It did not make sense to scythe the grass up there at the times the farmhand was doing it. For example, the farmhand would have to walk more and rather than moving along the contour, he had to move downhill, which made the sweeping motion more strained.
Yet he did. And not just that. The way he stopped his work to look at Hugo walking past created strange tingling sensations in Hugo’s body. And most peculiar of all, it made Hugo understand his body, his wavy hair and especially his ass more deeply. He pulled his trousers on in the morning with the awareness that the substance in his flesh could make a man voluntarily take on harder work, accept more strain and sweat more. That felt good.
Though it would take more effort to clarify in full what happened and in what order, we know with unquestioned certainty that before the harvest season came to an end that year, the farmhand explored Hugo’s body in great detail. Bent over a strong lap, partially hidden in a ditch in the lush French fields, Hugo felt for the first time a man gently grope his naked ass, tickle his butthole and soon enough, with the help of natural lubricant, insert first one finger, then a second. The gentle action spread out, and the farmhand groped the entire body, as if milking it of that hypnotic substance.
Gentle actions by men are bound to escalate. So, to the mounting sounds of Hugo’s groans of joy, the symphony of muscular buttocks spanking was added. Hugo was intensely aware of his body in the more senior farmhand’s secure and muscular hold. Yet somehow, Hugo knew it was he who, in turn, had a hold on the farmhand, who was grunting and drooling just as much as he was exploring Hugo’s ass and body.
As with many first encounters between horny men, this one ended abruptly. A particular tender spot was fingered and another spanked, so Hugo yelped loudly from the combined sensations. That startled the mule, which ran off. Hugo jumped up from the ditch and ran after; in the rush, he had to leave his trousers behind. Though Hugo caught the mule in short order, he experienced what many aroused young men have experienced before and since: sprinting with an erection, grinding and slapping against the body, leads to orgasm. So with a mule in hand, bottomless with rosy buttocks exposed, Hugo stood next to a ditch and grunted and wiggled as he sprayed thick strands of sperm into the lush French fields in the summer of 1799.
If we look at fields and their natural bounty, I mean truly inspect them with keen vision, we can see the outlines of young men’s bodies caught in sexual ecstasy, mule in hand, wind in hair. The moments that alter awareness leave a mark.
“It would make sense to place French men, like Hugo, with superb asses and with that special substance in the vanguard,” noted Martin. “Not only is it about keeping warm during the night when crossing the frozen Saint-Bernard Pass. It is about wanting to push ahead, to put in that extra effort. The reward of fucking a nice ass is great, but it is more than that. It is a kind of bodily awareness of pursuit.”
“So is that part of Napoleon’s tactical genius? He knew to put sexy boys in the vanguard and voila, half of Europe conquered?” wondered Alejandro.
“Or is it that we French are just so hot and sexy that this order of things just happens organically?” asked Hugo, flexing his body a bit for effect.
“This is not cause and effect. This is mystical,” interjected Karl.
“Regardless, the friction of the Alps, how it reaches into men’s bodies and awareness, clearly mattered,” stated Hermann. “Hot and heavy, man-on-man bodily action, was an irreducible factor in the crossing of the Alps in 1800. We are barely scratching the surface of this. Our work has barely begun.”
The men returned to their books and papers. Profound knowledge is a serious and manly business. No wonder the crotch areas of the shorts of the five men were bulging with promise and joyful awareness.
