Leave a great lump of a planet's crust floating around untethered and sooner or later its going to run slap bang into another, even bigger bit. Crumpled fenders are not in it, what you get is mountains.
'So what?' I hear you say, and 'Don't blame me! Accidents will happen!'
The trouble with mountains is that they wear up. One billennia you have all these super spiky peaks, with cute little halos of cloud; the next, all you've got is a dusty plain. It happens all the time. In fact, that's how our rocky hero got started. Just as it had got used to being a range of mountains, it was converted into a great flat desert.
Horrifying? I should say so! As would our hero, if it could have found a voice. It was obviously time to go. Well, would you hang around after such a shock? Actually there wasn't much choice; the whole locality was on the move.
So began a tectonic mystery tour that took it past both ends of the Earth and twice round the middle. Lumps were knocked off the edges, chunks got chipped off the top. Its underside was scraped smooth as a baby's bottom and it was squeezed so thin you could have used it as gigantic dinner-plate.
Eventually, it found itself enjoying an aeon or two of peaceful immobility. Once again, it took on the role of a contented home-town rock, smugly satisfied with its position in the local strata. Employed, you might say, in a sedimentary capacity. But nothing lasts, that we have already seen.
One sultry overheated millennia the peace was shattered. Hooligans had come to town! A gang of volcanoes rampaged through the neighbourhood. They shoved the elder rocks aside, thrust themselves into every nook and cranny, split companions forever asunder, destroyed and disrupted. Red-hot lava went everywhere!
After that, of course, things could never be the same. The big rusty slab survived the ordeal, at least in part. From what had been a huge plate of iron-rich sandstone, the volcanoes had cooked a most rare and beautifully perfect crystal of magnetite.
Again the rock, now much reduced in size, became a tectonic tourist, travelling the world until, one day, in the middle of an enormous jungle swamp, as it was resting in a bank of clay
Surprise! Surprise! Along came a large grey animal, with a big-eyed bird sitting on its rump. 
'Dig here,' said the bird, splashing down onto the mud.
'Well why not?' said the large animal, and with rooting tusk and probing trunk, revealed the beautiful crystal.
'My my,' said the learned owl, blinking up at its friend the elephant, 'It's an absolutely spiffing range of mountains!'
For a moment the elephant looked confused. It picked up the crystal and examined it closely. Was this really what the wise old bird had claimed? The owl was rarely wrong, and was also his friend, so it must be true.
'Mountains? Well I never,' said the elephant, somewhat lamely, 'You certainly don't see many of those around here!'
mad-poet
i enjoyed that verry much well done and thank you