“The Serpent Atop the Mountain” is a dialogue between two Victorian gentlemen, at least one of whom is something of an explorer. It gently pokes fun at some of the tropes of nineteenth century stories of exploration, but there's a real nostalgia here. Nostalgia for an era none of us lived through, where there were still big blank areas on the map.
Maybe there are some imperialist undertones at work in stories like this. Certainly the main narrator doesn't have any excess of sympathy for the people he encounters along the way, which gets expressed in some of the little comments and asides along the way.
The main plot involves the narrator arriving on an island in the Pacific, inhabited by a tribe that believes a serpent god lives on top of the nearby mountain. And there's at least a hint that the narrator serves as a corrupting influence, at least by the lights of the villagers. For one reason or another, at least, soon after our narrator arrives there begin to appear a good many grumbles and doubts about the existence of the serpent god.
Not necessarily because of our narrator, and not necessarily at his instigation. But while he's on the island, a group gathers with the intent of climbing the mountain and proving once and for all that there is no serpent god at the top of the mountain.
It's mostly a lighthearted story, at least explicitly. More than a few of the jokes and asides have some unsavory implications, though.
You could say it's a story about the role of the sacred in society. The villagers’ beliefs and practices certainly look barbaric to the narrator, but they appear to enable a way of life that has persisted for generations. The narrator presents himself as a modernizing figure, liberating these people from the specters of past superstitions. But his point of view is not our own–he's an unabashedly imperialist Victorian figure, making comments and expressing opinions that don't jive well with a twenty-first century sensibility.
To the typical twenty-first century reader, the Victorian explorer is nearly as strange and foreign as the tribe he describes. He is a voice from an ultimately doomed world that is not our own. And his ultimate reflections on the fate of the people he encounters on the island are only his own.
I'm a writer of fiction, it's not my job to tell anybody what they should think. (Thank God!) If I have any job at all, it's to pose people difficult and uncomfortable questions, ideally with a few laughs along the way. It's up to you to decide whether or not “The Serpent Atop the Mountain” succeeds at either one of those jobs. Personally, I think it's one of the funniest stories I've ever had the burden of writing. It's up to you to decide whether that's actually fair or if it's more of an indictment of my own twisted sense of humor. Either way, I won't spoil anything for you, and it's well worth a read.
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The Invisible Woman and Other Stories is available on Amazon Kindle.
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