TERNITY isn t what it used to be. Time was when moun-<br > tains were gods and， like the gods， eternal.<br > Who wouldn t assume that mountains have been there，<br >unchanged， since the beginning of time? Seldom was perma-<br >nence so manifest， so easily turned in(o myth. From Olympus，<br >Zeus lobbed thunderbolts. Prometheus was chained to the Cau-<br >casus. Popocatapetl was the entrance to hell， Agoeng the navel<br >of the world. Chornolungma was the goddess mother of the<br >world and Kailash the throne of Shiva. Haraberagaiti fastened<br >heaven to the center of the world. Gods infested Fuji， Khumbila，<br >Shasta， Denali， Katahdin: "l~acoma actually was god. All were<br >peaks where earth met the divine.<br > In Hebrew legend， God tossed lumps of dirt over the water to<br >make land， and the pebbles inside the clods exploded to<br >become mountains. Another }]ebrew legend has mountains<br >darting about like birds until the deity captured them and fas-<br >tened them down. Hopi myth has it that Poqanghoya squeezed<br >the higher places on earth in order to solidify them， while he<br >kindly left the lower places soft enough to hoe.<br > Christian tradition， too， has its share of mountain stories. In<br >the Bibie， mountains breached the ocean to give Adam and Eve<br >a place to stand on the third day of Creation. According to the<br >seventeenth-century English theologian Thomas Burnet， God<br >punished Adam and Eve s original sin by triggering a kind of<br >cosmic meltdown: the sun heated the world so intensely that it<br >cracked like an egg， releasing water that had been waiting<br >