Mountains
There was a time when your average man didn't know about mountains. He was middle-aged and tired, worn down from the boss who was mountains and mountains bigger than him in many important respects, and he didn't know about mountains. He knew about coke and caffeine and the medleys they play at sports events, and death in the jungle and death on the sideboard and death at various sports events, and Christchurch and Scotland and even Kilimanjaro, but blow us all to heaven if he knew about the mountains involved, if he knew about the way you can regulate your fires using a mountain, chastise your relatives using a mountain, forget important appointments using a mountain. He didn't know a thing!
So when your average man went to Kenya, looking for weevils and other exotica advertised in Bad News Okay, he wasn't looking at mountains. He wasn't going to be standing in various flatlands, looking at mountains. Nor climbing those mountains. Nor looking up close for a claimant to the mountain failing which he would take the mountain himself, at least for the week. Your average man was in Northern Tanzanian boutiques combing fleas from his hair onto chinoiseries, buying scrap and soap, lounging in chairs from the dynasties, eating the cookies and soups there offered. He was chasing the girls and boys away from his brocade pouch. He was lathering up and reading the gloss on African hostage events, and hoping for luck with the madman, Charles, and lunching at Billboard Finesse, and hoarding his rare sanity against stock futures.
That is why we know nothing about the death of Kilimanjaro, except that it involved the waylaying of several important personages from the routes they were accustomed to following home in the cool summer dusk after the twenty-four-hour housefly dies, and that it was enormous and left these several important personages buried in ash for a good ten centuries. And that is why we will invent its death, put it on the table of everyone's kitchen as if it were known, and ten years from now no one will know the difference. The wife will come home and see Kilimanjaro as if it were yesterday, the husband and children will romp and decide things, large-scale guests will sit at the window and chew, chew, chew, as they glean the last droplets of talk about Kilimanjaro from slow passers-by--everything will have happened there as we have predicted, and it will have always been so.