B
Y THE END OF the following day, despite having removed all the gear from the Rocket to lighten the load, Stanley and I had moved only a third of the way up the Rock. We had followed what I thought was the best route, a gully mostly stripped of snow which zigzagged like a lightning bolt up the southern face. The gully was too narrow for both of us to pull side by side, so one pushed from behind while the other pulled from the front. Above the gully stood a wall of snow and ice and finally, beyond that, more gently sloping ground that led to a large snub-nosed rock at the summit.
We were more exhausted now than we had ever been in our lives. At sunset, we left the coffin wedged between two rocks at the top of the gully and retreated to our tent. The way down took only a few minutes, as we slid from one shifting plate of stone to the next.
I was miserable at how little ground we had gained. Once
more I felt the urge to give in, just to leave the coffin and head back. If anyone ever came out here again and found the coffin, we could say the wind had blown it down from the top. The temptation to do this had grown so overwhelming that it had almost transformed into a need. I knew that if I so much as framed my thoughts with words, it would all be over. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that I would have that lie inside me for the rest of my life. It would eat its way out of me like a cancer. In the end, I knew, the pain I would inflict upon myself later would be worse than anything I felt now.
What was going through Stanley's head I did not know and did not ask. Nor did he question me. It was as if our thoughts had become dangerous, and speaking them would only conjure demons from the crystal air we breathed.
That night, I woke with a start. I went to check my watch but found that it had stopped. Suddenly remembering what it was that had woken me, I crawled out of the tent.
This freezing night had stilled the dripping icicles. The snow along the summit ridge was glittering like broken glass. In the steel-blue light thrown down by the moon, I tossed aside objects from our neatly stacked pile of gear until I came to the box that contained the winch. I tore off the lid and pitched it away. Then I lifted the winch and tried to fit it into my rucksack. But it would not go. I sat down in the snow, chewing my thumbnail, lost in thought and staring at the forked path of the Milky Way, which stretched from the horizon and disappeared into the rocks above my head.
By morning, I had fashioned a set of straps around the winch. I'd used some climbing rope to make a sort of net around the box, then attached the straps from my rucksack.
When Stanley crawled out of the tent, he found me staggering around with the wooden box attached to my back.
Seeing that the lower edge was digging into my back, he retreated into the tent once more and then reappeared with the cutoff piece of his climbing jacket, which he had been using as earflaps on his hat.
He wound this material around the rope which ran along the bottom edge of the box, transforming it into padding.
When I lifted it onto my back and no longer felt the sharp edge of the wood grating against my spine, I knew that this might work after all. It had to work. The only way to haul the Rocket up the rock face was to lift it with the winch.
After a few mouthfuls of cold bean stew, we set off up the gully. Stanley carried our two coils of climbing rope, as well as rock pitons, crampons, and a rock hammer. I climbed with the winch on my back, using our two ice axes like walking sticks as I crept from rock to rock.
We reached the coffin two hours later. A light snow was falling. Flakes dusted the coffin's top, gradually covering it, like tiny pieces of a puzzle being fitted into place.
Leaving the winch behind, I strapped the crampons onto my boots, roped up, and began to climb the slope. After so many days of hauling the Rocket and the last few hours of the box's uneven weight on my back, the climb felt easy as I advanced, stabbing my stilettoed boots into the snow and swinging the axes, one after the other, as I moved.
The slope was covered with a thin layer of snow, which became compact a few inches below the surface. I could feel the axes sinking into the snow and sometimes ringing against ice or rock.
Every twenty feet I hammered a piton, which looked like a thick nail with a ring at the end, into the ice. I threaded the rope through the ring, then rested for a minute before carrying on again.
During these rests, I looked down at Stanley, my eyes trailing along the umbilical cord of climbing rope which connected me to him.
Stanley sat on the winch box, the end of the rope held loosely in his hand, looking up at me. His face was a cat's tongue of pink, blurred with the snow that crossed the air between us.
The ice wall leveled out on a sloping shelf of ground made up of crushed gray rock. From there, perhaps a hundred yards away over a jumbled mass of larger stones, stood the blunted gray pinnacle that marked the summit. Snow blew in my face and gathered in the cracks among the stones. White sky merged with snow, reducing the world around me to the grainy bleakness of a black-and-white photo. Looking out over the precipice, I could see nothing of the glacier, and not even our tent at the foot of the rock.
I hammered a piton into a slab of rock, but the stone was rotten and flaked apart with every blow from my hammer. On my second try, I found a more solid rock. The piton rang as it spiked, unlike the dull thump it had made when piercing the bad rock.
I anchored my second rope and lowered it down to Stanley. While he tied up the winch, I lay on my back on the uneven ground and closed my eyes.
The next thing I knew, Stanley was tugging at the rope to show that the winch was secure. I began to haul it up, hand over hand, and was soon drenched in sweat. When the box at last appeared over the lip of the ice wall, I dragged it all the way to me before releasing my grip on the rope. Then I set my blistered palms in a patch of snow and hoped that the pain would subside.
I fixed the box to the clip at the end of the winch cable and lowered it back down to Stanley. While he attached the cable to one of the holding bars at the front of the coffin, I roped the winch to a large boulder and then sat behind it, sore hands gripping each of the winding handles, waiting for the signal.
I waited a long time, and was just beginning to wonder what had happened when Stanley appeared over the edge of the ice wall, having climbed the same rope I had used. He lay panting on his back for a moment. Then he gasped, “It's all set.”
I began to wind the winch, and it soon became clear to me that I would not have been able to complete the task alone. Stanley and I took turns cranking the handles, while the teeth of the winch clicked slowly and the cable sawed into the ice. Unfamiliar rhythms pounded in my head, and were answered by the tom-tom drumming of my heart. Fragments of songs tramped tunelessly across my mind. Sweat poured out of me. My arms began to shake convulsively.
At last, after over an hour, the snout of the coffin appeared at the top of the wall.
We then had to fix more ropes to it and drag the coffin onto the ground where we stood.
When this was done, I lay on my side, shoveling snow into my mouth with bloody hands and choking it down along with all the grit that it contained.
Then it was time to drag the coffin once again.
In that final stretch to the summit, the coffin screeched over the sharp, upended stones, pitching forward and clattering down. The runners were torn from their mounts, but we no longer cared. The fins of the cargo space were smashed first one way and then another and then they, too, ripped from their welded seams. The coffin's sides were gouged with
streaks of stone and lichen. We shoved it forward, torn hands leaving red smears across the metal. The body thumped about inside, and a half-mad part of me was glad to think of that as I slammed my boot into the coffin and noticed the dent of my heel in the once-sleek structure. I noticed the same wild look on Stanley's face that I knew must be on mine. With gritted teeth, he shoulder-barged the coffin, falling as his balance slid away and cursing as he tumbled down among the stones. At last, we reached the base of the pinnacle and could go no farther. We collapsed against the wreckage of the coffin, our panting breaths fogging the air.
The snow had stopped. The clouds had blown away. I had not noticed it until now.
Bronzy light fell warm upon our faces, polishing the stones on which we lay.
Clambering to my feet, I looked out over the glacier. The ice was like a sea of molten lava, and even when I put the goggles back against my eyes, the light was too strong to see anything other than the blazing reflection of the sun.
For a moment, surrounded by this fierce glare, I thought back to the miraculous light of the alpenglow which had appeared around us all those years ago and the nameless fear its memory had brought me ever since the day I fainted on the hill behind my father's house. But this sun sparked no nightmare in my head. It was as if the bad dreams were being burned away and the space they left behind made clean and new again.
A faint breeze brushed against the tatters of my clothes, cooling the sweat of the climb.
Below me, in the gullies which spread like fingers down the slope of Carton's Rock, crumbled snow and shingle debris showed where avalanches had come to rest. On the other side
of the rock, the slope sheared away, dropping almost vertically onto the dirt-rimed glacier.
I was surprised to feel no sense of achievement. Nor did I feel any lack of achievement. The only thing I felt was exhaustion.
Stanley stood beside me. “I suppose we'd better read the poems,” he said.
I had completely forgotten about them. I reached inside my coat. The leather envelope was still there. With the blade of my Opinel knife, still sharp despite being peppered with rust from lying in the damp wool of my jacket, I cut the stitches from the leather. The hide was dark with moisture, its once-neat rectangular shape now warped and crushed. Working the tip of the knife along the white threads, I popped them loose and emptied out the contents of the envelope.
Along with a bundle of paper, I was surprised to see two small cigars drop into the snow. Quickly, I picked them up. “I hope you've got some matches,” I said.
Stanley's eyes were fixed on the cigars. “How thoughtful,” he said, with such sincerity that he seemed ready to take back every rotten thing he'd ever said about his uncle. Stanley rummaged in his pocket and his hand emerged with a bashed-up yellow box of Swan Vestas. Hesitantly, he shook the box, and we were both relieved to hear the rustle of matches inside. He tossed them to me and I handed him the poems, on which the handwritten ink had blurred like the colored paper of a litmus test.
“I think you should be the one to read them,” I said.
Stanley shrugged. “I'll do my best.”
I lowered myself onto the coffin, ready as an audience of one.
While Stanley glanced through the poems, I cut the ends
of the cigars with my knife and then, with my jacket pulled up over my head and both cigars clenched between my teeth, carefully scraped the red heads of the matches against the ragged striking paper on the side of the box. The first two blew out before they even reached the cigar, so I struck three of them at once, and soon a blue haze of tobacco smoke was wafting out from under my soggy woolen tent.
I shrugged my jacket back over my shoulders and held one of the cigars out to Stanley. “Which poems did he choose?” I asked. “Or did he write them himself?”
Stanley seemed to be frozen, just staring at the paper.
From far away across the glacier came the rumbling thunder of another avalanche.
“Stan,” I said quietly, still holding out the cigar.
“He never climbed it.”
“Climbed what?” The smoke pinched at my eyes.
“This!” He jammed his heel into the snow. “This rock!” Then he plucked the cigar from between my fingers, and in the moment when he set it between his teeth, I was startled by how much he looked like his uncle.
I, in turn, snatched the paper from his hand and began to read.
“My Dear Boys,” the letter began. “By now, if all has gone well, you will be on the top of Carton's Rock. And so, I hope, will I. I am glad to have made it at last, in body if not in spirit. I could not have done it without you. I mean this literally, as I must now confess to you that your first ascent of my mountain is mine as well.”
I raised my head from the letter. The sun poured into my eyes, the full shield of its blaze against my face. The shadows of ridges, invisible before, now cast themselves across the chalk-white fields below.
Stanley lay on his back, eyes closed, laughing quietly.
“What's so bloody funny?” I shouted.
He just shook his head and laughed again.
When my eyes returned to the pages, shards of sunlight remained branded on my sight.
The letter went on to explain how Carton and his guide, Santorelli, had come within sight of the rock on their third day of trekking across the glacier. Shortly afterwards, a blizzard had come down upon them. As they pressed on, hoping to find some shelter from the storm, the ground gave way beneath Santorelli and he fell into a crevasse. The rope held, and Carton had the presence of mind to fall upon his ice ax, which prevented him from being dragged down into the crevasse as well.