Maisan (馬耳山) — Horse Ear Mountain

In the heart of the Jinan basin in North Jeolla Province, two bare rock spires thrust upward from a hollow where nothing else stands. In the Silla era it was called Seodasan (西多山); in the Goryeo era, Yongchulsan (龍出山); in the early Joseon period, Sokkumsan (束金山). That the name changed three times means no one was ever able to pin down what it was with a single word.

Only after King Taejong declared that the peaks resembled the ears of a horse and gave the mountain its present name did people begin to feel, at last, that they had tamed it. Yet the mountain is nothing more than gravel that sank to the bottom of a lake some one hundred million years ago and was thrust upward by the force of the earth's crust. One wonders how many people, knowing they are climbing a mass of stone that once rose from beneath the water, could make the ascent without unease.

Across the slopes of the spires, hollows are pocked into the rock face as though something pressed outward from within. Geologists call them tafoni, but among the villagers there has long circulated a saying: these are the places where the mountain opened its own mouth. The explanation that the weathering begins not at the surface but from the inside strikes the ear as stranger still.

In spring and in autumn, there comes a moment when the ratio of light to shadow between the two peaks shifts. In that instant, it is said, no eye can judge which of the two stands higher. The story of a man who stared too long, lost all sense of direction, and descended the wrong way entirely still drifts somewhere through the streets of Jinan town to this day.