By Vebjørn Sand

"Let's go monk hunting," said Ivar. We were stretched out on a mountain ledge in Athos. Far below us the Agean Sea shone blue, and the sun was at its hottest. Four months earlier there had been other black creatures in our zoom lenses - penguins. Their abode was the enormous ice shelf which marks the beginning of Antarctica.
At the end of 1994, Ivar Tollefsen and I had recently returned from the subcontinent of Antarctica. We were spending some time in Athos, working on the text and paintings from Queen Maud Land for a book about the expedition.
At the foot of Mount Athos, for the past thousand years, Greek orthodox monks have dedicated their lives to work and prayer. Among historians and scholars all over the world, the monastic community on the peninsula in the north of the Agean Sea is considered to be one of the most well preserved and living cultural treasures of our time. From its foundation in 969 AD down to the present, very little has changed.
The monks have erected a chapel on the top of Mount Athos, an altar closer to Heaven. This serves to give us some idea of the religious conception of mountains in ancient times: the place on earth where one is closest to heaven. Down the ages, mountains and hilltops have been the scene of initiation into insight and wisdom. The mythology of ancient cultures was closely bound up with mountains. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the mountains also had their significance, not as the dwelling place of the Almighty, but as the place where Man came into contact with Him. Here, offerings were made, and altars built; and chapels too.
Mountains have lost their mythic significance for modern man. We have forgotten the words of the psalm, "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully." Mountains are the object neither of fear or prayer, but tourism.
On Monday, 10 January, 1994 at 21.00 hours, our whole assembled party planted the Norwegian flag on the summit of the highest mountain in Norway's Antarctic territory! But of our thirteen-man Antarctic expedition from Norway, there probably was not one of us who gave David's psalm so much as a thought. Yet when we first came to the mountain world of Queen Maud Land, I felt that we still had a remnant of reverence and awe. We were the first human beings there on a journey of exploration in a mythic and enigmatic land.
But we came also as conquerors, invaders from the modern world with our sponsor pennants ready for every peak which was attained. Where our forefathers would have built altars and sacrificial places, we built our cairns.
In my mind's eye I can still see the great icy spaces, the ice shelf and the mountains of Queen Maud Land, rising up like everlasting cathedrals in the wilderness of white. Against a pure light surface and sky, lonely rocks rise up and I think of gothic church spires. In Queen Maud Land, which is just about as far away as you can get, it is easy to think about incomprehensible things, the land still belongs to the realm of dreams.

Athos, 21 June 1994