From then on, Stanley and I were more or less comfortable on our bed of tin foil, both of us wrapped in pieces of silk parachute to keep warm, letting clumps of chocolate dissolve inside our mouths and smoking our carefully rationed supply of cigarettes.
The candle ran out, but it no longer mattered. I drifted off to sleep, dreaming that the storm had quit and we were on our way again.
Sliding back into consciousness again, I realized that something was different. I blinked, but my eyes were useless. I sniffed but smelled nothing other than my own stale breath. Suddenly I knew what it was. It was quiet.
The storm had finished.
I nudged Stanley awake.
We dug our way out yet again and crawled into a world lit almost bright as day by the full, white face of the moon.
Standing, we looked around us. As far as we could see, the rolling surface of the glacier was covered with glittering snow. It was as if the stars themselves had fallen from the sky and come to rest among us.
In the distance stood Carton's Rock. The black stone seemed to merge with the night sky, leaving the streaks of ice and snow suspended like flames in the night.
Stanley's breath plumed about his head. The sheepskin jacket, which had begun to come apart, hung in shreds from his arms and his back.
We swept off as much of the snow as we could from the Rocket, then sat down with our backs against the ice. For a long time, we looked at Carton's Rock drifting in the strange sapphire light.
The next morning, after a few hours' rest inside the plane, we woke to find light streaming in through the sides of the hole we had walled up with plywood. After removing the plywood, I poked my head out through the opening and watched the rising sun spread like an egg yolk across the snow.
Leaving the plane, we had to put our goggles on. It was too bright for the naked eye to see. And it was hot. We soon shed the remains of our extra clothing. The Rocket, too, gave up its crust of ice, and we gorged on beans and ham before shouldering our traces and heading out again across the glacier.
The willow wands we had planted to mark our path had all been blown away. I wondered how far they had gone. With the force of the storm, there was no telling. I imagined them spun into the sky and falling to earth in some Italian's garden like toothpicks from the gods.
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WE MARCHED UNDER THE fierce and cloudless sky.
The silhouette of Carton's Rock stretched across the empty whiteness.
We stopped to stare at a leaf which had been carried in by the wind. Its edges were trimmed with the rusty browns and
reds of autumn colors. Where the leaf lay on the ice, the sun had warmed it, melting a perfect indentation.
Then we moved on.
Our skin burned into painful maps of red, with tiny blisters pebbling our noses, ears, and cheeks. Only the space around our eyes, protected by the goggles, retained its original paleness. Our lips became horribly chapped, and whenever I relaxed my hands, they curled into clawing fists around the memory of the rope.
Sometime around noon, Stan and I dropped in our tracks. We lay like overridden horses, wheezing with exhaustion.
“Get up,” I told him.
“You get up,” he replied.
The coffin loomed between us. Sometimes it clicked in the sun, like a car with its engine just switched off.
“You get up and then I'll get up,” I mumbled into the snow.
“First you get up.”
I rose to my knees, head hanging down, my mittened hands like the paws of a half-invented beast, then staggered to my feet. “On your feet,” I told the figure sprawled on the other side of the coffin.
Slowly, Stanley turned his head. The one glass eye blinked back the sun. Then, with a curse, he stood.
Occasionally, we would crawl into the shade of a tarpaulin and pull the goggles from our faces. No expression showed on Stanley's face, which looked to me as if it had been chipped from pink granite.
It was early evening when we reached that hard gray line of shadow cast down by Carton's Rock. As soon as we crossed into it, the cold closed around us like a trap made out of light.
We had gone only a few feet when I heard a groaning
sound from the snow beneath my feet. Stanley was walking away to my left, so that we pulled the Rocket behind us in the V formation we had found to be most effective.
Slowly we both came to a stop.
The earth grumbled again.
Stanley and I looked at each other.
And then suddenly he was gone.
The coffin jerked across the snow towards him, and I watched in amazement as the rope which connected me to the coffin snapped tight like a whip, tore me off my feet, and pulled me forward, facedown in the snow. And then I was being dragged, my guts jammed up under my ribs and the wind jolted from my lungs.
I raised my ice ax, jammed it into the snow, and leaned on it with all the strength I had left. Chips of snow and ice sprayed up around the ax blade, spitting into my face. As suddenly as it had started, everything came to a stop. For a moment, I just lay there, the pressure of the rope still painful across my middle, drawing the air carefully into my chest. As soon as I had my breath back, I called out to Stan.
There was no reply.
I called again.
This time, I heard his voice.
I turned my head slowly, afraid that my grip on the ice ax would slip.
The rope which attached him to the coffin disappeared into a small hole in the ground.
“Get me out!” he called, his words muffled underground.
I could hear his ice ax clacking against the ice walls of a crevasse as he tried to find a grip so he could begin climbing up. Judging from the length of the rope before it trailed into
the hole, I knew that he could not be more than ten feet down. I looked around for a place to anchor the rope, but there was none. “Prusik knot!” I yelled. “Tie a Prusik knot!”
We both carried extra lengths of rope for tying these knots, which would allow us to climb up the main rope without the risk of sliding down again. The knot could be slid up the main rope and then pulled taut by the weight of the climber. In this way, Stanley could, at least in theory, haul himself out of the hole.
The coffin shifted, with a dry, grating sound.
I kicked my feet deeper into the snow, to find a better grip. The side of my face rested against the edge of the ax head, the other end being buried into the snow. My hands were cramping. The bulge of the leather envelope containing Carton's poems jabbed into my chest from its pocket in my coat. As the minutes went by, I could feel the growing strain in my elbow joints and in the muscles under my arms. I just lay there and tried not to think. The cold worked its way up through my trousers. My toes went numb. The rope never slackened. Sometimes, I felt it jolt as Stanley moved around inside the crevasse.
Then I heard a gasp and saw Stanley's hand fly up out of the hole. The next thing I saw was his leg, and then the other leg, and finally the rest of him. For a moment, he lay at the side of the hole, then he scrabbled forward, until he was lying by the coffin.
He had lost his goggles, and his clothes were soaked from butting up against the wall of the crevasse. Other than that, he seemed unhurt.
As soon as I knew he was clear of the hole, I pulled up the ice ax and stepped over to the coffin. I dragged it away, keeping
an eye out for sunken areas in the snow, in case another crevasse might be lying just beneath the surface, or the same crevasse might spread wider underground than it appeared.
While I was doing this, I saw Stanley struggling to untie the rope around his middle. His half-frozen hands clawed at the knot until it came loose. He breathed in shallow gasps, a strand of spit dangling from his lips. He pulled the rope away and let it drop at his feet. Then he turned and began running back in the direction we had come from.
“Stan?” I said, but my voice was faint. I did not have the strength to stop him, but only watched as he clomped away, chunks of snow kicking up from his boot heels. I wondered how far he would get.
He passed through the arc of shadow and out into the sun. The colors seemed to jump back into his clothesâhis red neck scarf, the pale blue of his canteenâas he left this cage of black and white. Without his goggles, he must have been blinded immediately. His arms began to flail, the weight of his damp clothes and his climbing boots dragging him down. He carried on another few paces and then dropped. He seemed to fall in slow motion, landing on his knees and then pitching facedown into the snow. Condensation rose from his clothes as if he had become a pile of smoldering rags.
I began to walk towards him. I got as far as the rope allowed before the weight of the coffin brought me to a stop, making me feel like a chained dog. I did not have the energy to undo myself from the rope. I just stood there.
At last, Stanley rose to his feet. He slapped the clumps of snow from his trousers, then turned and began walking back towards me.
It was not until he slipped again into the grayness of the
shadows that I could see he had been crying. Now that the colors had gone from him again, and with condensation still rising from his body, he resembled nothing more than the burnt-out stick of a match.
Still leashed to the coffin, I held out my arms to him.
He stopped a few paces out of reach.
Slowly, I let my arms fall to my sides. “It will be all right,” I said, realizing as the words left my mouth that this was the same thing Dr. Plunkett had told me when I'd brought my father's dog to be put down.
“My goggles,” said Stanley, fingertips dabbing at his tears. “I think they might be on a ledge down there.”
Five minutes later, with Stanley anchoring me, I crawled forward over the uneven snow, feeling sick as the ground shifted beneath my chest. I reached the edge of the hole and looked down.
The crevasse spread wide beneath the hole, like the inside of an egg on whose thin crust I was now lying. The central part of the cavern disappeared into darkness. It seemed to reach into the belly of the earth. The air was stale. No sound came from below. Even the rivulets of water that dribbled down its walls were silent. I could make out the brittle teeth of icicles hanging down from the roof of the cavern. The snow along the sides was frothed into huge mushrooms. The wall Stanley had climbed to the surface was scarred where he had kicked away the icicles and trampled the delicate coral of frost. And there were his one-eyed goggles, just as he had said, resting on a lip of ice by the surface. I reached down with my ice ax, hooked the goggles by the strap, and, lifting the ax, slid the goggles down until they stopped against my hand.
I slithered back, hearing icicles snap away from the ceiling
just beneath me and fall, crashing like glass, down the black throat of the crevasse.
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BY NIGHTFALL, we had reached the first outcrops of boulders that lay around the base of Carton's Rock. At one of these, we stopped to gather water from an overhang, where urgent Morse code droplets fell into the canteens gripped by our shaking hands. Looking down at my feet, I noticed that where my boots had left their imprints in the snow the space was red as blood. I looked at the heels of my boots, to see if I had somehow injured myself without feeling it. But there were no wounds, and now Stanley had noticed the same gory slush in his own bootprints. As we moved on from the place where we had stopped, the red marks faded away. When they had gone completely, and the marks of our boots had returned to their usual ghost-white shells, we looked back at the boulder, almost as if expecting to see the stone rear up like a gashed and crippled animal and fall back dead into the snow.
We made camp in a small clearing which was protected from the wind by two arms of rock. They reached down like an embrace around our little tent. In this place, tall pillars of ice had grown from steady streams of water dripping down during the day and then freezing again at night until they resembled the ruins of a second Parthenon.
Our dinner was a handful of broken biscuit crumbs which I gathered from the bottom of my pockets.
High above us, the wind whistled as if through a giant organ pipe, sometimes playing single long notes and then changing pitch and screeching crazily until it died down again.
I felt like a castaway who had found an island after days of
drifting in the ocean. At first, I was overwhelmed by a sense of relief at having reached something solid, where I could shelter from the wind and hide away among the overhanging stones. Hiding from what, I didn't know. Maybe just from the openness of the white tundra. To lean against the cold solidity of rock helped chase from my head the demons which had found their way into my skull these past few days. I wanted to stay here. I could not stand the thought of going back out onto the glacier. But this relief was replaced almost immediately by the knowledge that we could not remain long. There was no food. No way to make a fire and keep warm. And what shelter this place offered was little more than a place just to curl up and die.