by Paul Watkins
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 clothes—his red neck scarf, the pale blue of his canteen—as 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.
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.
Stanley was nearly frozen. We hung his wet clothes inside the tent, where they steamed and smelled as our bodies heated up the space. Shuddering inside our sleeping bags, we shared a cigarette, forehead to forehead in the confines of the tent. The harsh smoke burned in our empty stomachs.
Once I had warmed up a little, I went outside to check that our cargo was battened down for the night. When this was done, I stood staring up at the rock. Automatically, my eyes began to trace the paths of routes that we might take. The rock itself was a mass of intersecting gullies, some choked with snow and others whittled clean by the wind. The high point was rounded, like the ball of a shoulder, on the western edge of the rock. A summit ridge ran evenly across the top of the rock, but if it was wide enough to cross or whether it was mined with overhanging cornices of snow, I could not tell from where I stood.
I crawled back inside the tent. The last sound I heard before I fell into the chasm of sleep was the wind, piping its strange music as if from the land of my dreams, not from the frozen world in which my body lay.
<
br /> THIRTEEN
BY 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. W
e 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.
