Jirisan (智異山)

At the southern end of the Baekdudaegan spine, the mountain spreads its body across three provinces and five counties. Three peaks — Cheonwangbong, Banyabong, Nogodan — anchor some twenty ridgelines that stand ranked like folding screens, and between them lie valleys beyond counting. The mountain's circumference alone stretches 320 kilometers. That a person who enters might never find their own way out is not, in the least, strange.

From ancient times this mountain was called a spirit mountain, a *yeongsan*. Believing that divine presences dwelled here, people raised old temples and carved out places of prayer. Yet there is something people seldom speak aloud: Jirisan has always been a land for the hunted. Records tell of a Mahan king who fled an uprising and raised a walled city in Dalgung Valley, and after him came righteous armies, Donghak rebels, and partisans, each in turn concealing themselves within the mountain's darkness. What the mountain has harbored was never wisdom alone.

Throughout the Dalgung Valley area, place-names that appear in no historical record have drifted down through oral tradition — a mountain pass named for two generals, the outline of a fortress wall said to have been built by a king. Scholars refuse to accept them as established fact, yet the local people still hesitate to speak those names aloud. They believe that to call something by name is to invite an answer.

Even the origin of the mountain's name is unclear. The interpretation that "the foolish who linger here grow wise" was attached in later ages; it is thought that in truth the name is a native Korean word whose meaning no one ever knew, simply transcribed into Chinese characters. A mountain whose name has had its roots erased. No one thinks to ask what has filled that absence.

Among hikers, a quiet word still circulates. On days when the fog lies thick and you lose your way along a ridge, you can hear the footsteps of someone walking just ahead. Follow them, and sometimes a path appears — and sometimes the sound leads only deeper in. As for what owns those footsteps, even those who made it back were never able to say.