Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  Peter reflected grimly that he had received much silent praise for not saying anything against the guide, who, it seemed obvious, must have lost his nerve in a bad place and left his employers to find their own salvation. This was not fair on Christian; but Christian had tried to break Peter, and had lost the battle.

  Winning that battle was the second most important time. The most important was on the Dent d’Herens two days ago. They’d had no guide since Holz left. Gerry had argued feebly that they ought to hire someone anew in each village, but Peter could not agree. There would be no guides on Meru, and besides, all their judgement needed training. The will could be made to go on to certain death. Yes, but they were not steeling themselves for suicide, but for victory.

  So they had been alone in the thunderstorm on the Dent d’Herens. Lightning split the sky and seared the rock. Peter led, so that Gerry’s faith in him should be made absolute, so that Gerry should almost believe that the lightning and the cannon blasts of thunder were his servants, that he--they were unconquerable. He led on gently up the steep, and Gerry followed. Gerry never showed a sign of fear, but Peter, who knew him, understood that the silently screaming strings of his nerve might snap at any second and leave them helpless and doomed. And himself--he was so afraid, his fear was so overpoweringly strong that each moment of conquest of it, each movement of hand or foot up the ice wall, was like a separate sexual ecstasy.

  They reached the crest. The storm never let up. The lightning shivered through the snow. They could not speak for the click, crack, flash of the bolts around them, and then the appalling blast in the ear, to right and left, down, above, faster than a bombardment, and the black rock smoking under the snow. All the time the heads of their ice-axes hummed in a piercing minor key.

  When they were down again Gerry’s hair was grey at the temple--a dusting of silver so that at first Peter had thought it was snow; but it was not.

  Now, on the Obergabelhorn, Zermatt lay like a fat sheep asleep in its sunny valley below them.

  ‘We’ve done it,’ Gerry said and held out his hand. They looked at each other for a moment. Peter thought, I don’t suppose I’ll ever know a better man; I don’t suppose there is one. He said: ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Gerry.’ He meant it.

  Gerry grinned. ‘My heavens, Peter, you’re going to be the greatest mountaineer that ever lived. You are, dash it!’ He had taken off his hat, and the touch of silver sparkled in the sun; that and the paring down of the flesh were the only changes in him, but Peter knew he’d need time to rest and put on a little fat, physical and spiritual. The main purpose had been achieved. Gerry now knew that the limits of his will were much further beyond ‘normality’ than he had thought.

  Peter said: ‘Let’s go down. The Fentons must have arrived last week. We’ll take a day or two off, and then do some ladies’ climbs.’

  ‘The Furgg ridge of the Matterhorn?’ Gerry said with a grin.

  Peter laughed, and they set off down the north-east ridge towards the Wellenkuppe. When he reached the gendarme blocking the ridge Peter saw that the slope to the left, which they would have to traverse to get past the gendarme, was in poor condition--two inches of wet snow on a thin, icy base. He began quickly and carefully to cut steps, keeping high up on the slope, only a few feet below the lip of the snow, where there was the usual bergschrund between the snow and the warmer rock of the gendarme.

  Half-way across, while Gerry was moving forward to join him and he was drawing in the rope, Gerry slipped. For a fraction of a second he seemed to be suspended there, away from the mountainside, both feet a few inches in the air and the head of his ice-axe glittering like Mercury’s silver staff in his hand. Peter’s own ice-axe was stuck deep into the snow and his ‘dead’ tail of rope was anchored around it. He was not belaying Gerry towards him round the axe, but simply holding the live rope in coils in his hand as Gerry came on. This was fortunate, as it was unlikely that the snow could have exerted sufficient friction to hold the axe in position when Gerry’s full weight came on to it, however well he had used the belay to ease the jerk.

  When Gerry fell, instead of trying to belay, Peter flung himself up the slope towards the lip of the bergschrund, letting go the coiled live rope as he did so. He supposed Gerry fell like a stone down the slope--he did not see, for before he had reached the end of the rope Peter had dived head-first over the lip of snow and into the bergschrund. Then the jerk came, but instead of exerting its power in a straight line along the rope, it came over the angle of snow, and forced the rope to cut deep into the lip of the bergschrund before Gerry’s full weight, and his, came on it. By then they were static, and the rope held.

  After a minute’s struggling, Peter managed to turn himself right way up. Hauling on the rope, he reached the lip and peered over. Gerry was lying flat on the slope, his head downhill, the rope still firmly tied to his waist but also caught in a loop round one foot. He had his ice-axe in his hand but was not moving at all. He did not seem to know what was holding him, nor whether he dared change his position in the slightest to find out.

  Peter called: Anchor yourself with the axe, Gerry, then I’ll free the rope from your foot.’

  After a long time Gerry’s voice came up, small and far away. ‘All right, Peter.’

  So they did it, and in five minutes they were back on the steps; in another fifteen, off the slope. Gerry threw himself down in the snow and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Pheeew!’ he said, and then, later: ‘What a damned fool I am. Perfectly good steps, snow nothing worse than we’ve crossed a hundred times--might have killed you too.’

  That was true enough. The slope was very steep, and about a thousand feet below were cliffs, rocks, and the head of the glacier. Peter did not know why Gerry had lost his footing, but it would serve no purpose to reproach him. He told him instead not to be an ass.

  Gerry got up. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I must concentrate more. I suppose I was thinking of being down, of meeting Emily and Peggy again, hot baths, food ... Lead on, Macduff.’ Peter saw that he was favouring his left foot, and his ankle seemed to hurt a bit.

  It seemed a long way down, over the Wellenkuppe, down the long ridge, along the edge of the glacier, down into the rocky valley, past the Trift Hotel with the people sitting out in the late-afternoon sun, their climbing boots changed for shoes; on down in steep zigzags beside the shouting Trift River, into the trees. Gerry was in front then, and they could see, through the pines, the back of the Edelweiss Hotel, and beyond it the blue-gold air and then the farther slope. There, just after they entered the trees, when the river’s noise was silenced and their boots fell quietly on the pine needles, Gerry stopped short and gasped: ‘Peggy, Emily!’ The two girls were coming towards them, and saw them, and broke into a run.

  For a moment they were all running together, the girls high-coloured, Peter and Gerry sunburned nearly black, all fit and young and running easily. Then two of them, Emily and Peter, stopped running at the same time, so it was the brother and sister who met first, and hugged each other happily. Then Peggy came on towards Peter much more slowly, her lower lip trembling and her hands out. Now was a moment when, by simply taking both those hands and looking into those moist blue eyes, he would commit himself to her.

  He held still; she walked more slowly, and at last they shook hands as friends. ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ she said tremulously.

  Beyond her he saw Gerry hugging Emily with the same kind of boisterousness he had used to Peggy; then he swung her round at the full stretch of his arms, her long dove-grey skirt whirling in the air, but she was only smiling, not laughing, and when he set her down, she said: ‘You’re thinner, Gerry.’

  ‘Of course I am,’ he cried. ‘Lost pounds of useless fat. Feel my muscles.’ He held out his flexed arm, but Emily did not touch it or even look at it; she was looking at Peter. ‘Hello, Peter,’ she said. ‘You look just the same. What happened to Gerry’s ankle?’

  ‘I sort of sprained it,’ Ge
rry said. ‘It’s nothing--but it’s getting stiff. Let’s go on down.’

  They started on again, Emily Fenton in the lead, then Gerry, then Peggy, and himself last. He recalled that he had not said a word in all the interchanges, and still he could not, though Peggy, walking directly in front of him, kept glancing back at him with a smile.

  Emily said: ‘Did you do all that you said you were going to in that letter you wrote just after Peter arrived?’

  ‘Yes--and more,’ Gerry said. ‘Didn’t we, Peter? Twenty-three major peaks in fifty-three days, sometimes two a day, and in all weathers.’

  ‘Any narrow squeaks?’ Emily’s voice was casual.

  Gerry fell into the trap and said eagerly: ‘Oh, yes, two or three. You see, we’ve been taking calculated risks all the time, pretending that each mountain, however unimportant, is Meru. The worst was today--and solely due to my carelessness. Peter saved my life.’

  It was Peggy who stopped and swung around, exclaiming: ‘Oh, Peter! What happened?’

  He told them simply how Gerry had slipped and how he’d jumped into the bergschrund. Gerry cut in to repeat that he’d been careless and that he owed his life to Peter’s quickness. Peggy said: ‘Thank you, Peter. He’s my favourite brother.’ ‘And that awful Cousin George would have inherited, too,’ Gerry said. But Emily said: ‘Surely the slope must have been in a bad condition? Why didn’t you go down the south-east ridge, instead of over the Wellenkuppe where you have to get round that gendarme?’

  Her voice was sharp, and Peggy said at once, almost as sharply: ‘How can you ask questions like that, Emily? You weren’t there to decide.’

  And Gerry said suddenly in a loud voice: ‘On Meru there won’t be any south-east ridge.’

  ‘That’s the second time you’ve mentioned Meru,’ Emily said. ‘Where is it? I’ve never heard of it.’

  The existence of Meru was now ‘official,’ and there was no reason why Gerry shouldn’t have told Emily about it at least six months ago. When he answered, his voice was defensive. ‘Surely I must have told you?’ he said.

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me,’ Emily said.

  ‘It’s a mountain, in Parasia--between Western Tibet and the Karakorams, I suppose you’d say--twenty-seven thousand, one hundred and forty-one feet high. Peter and I are going to climb it.’

  They were swinging on down the rough path all the time, and by now had reached the top of the open fields directly above Zermatt. The sun had dipped behind the Matterhorn, and the valley was in deep, barred shadow.

  Gerry took off his hat and wiped his brow. Emily chose that moment to turn and speak to him, but she said only: ‘Gerry---‘ then stopped. Peter thought: She’s seen the silver in Gerry’s hair. Her eyes lit with a sudden brilliant flare and slid to him and for a fraction of a second held his. She looked really beautiful.

  Gerry stopped and put on his hat quickly and said nervously: ‘What’s the matter, old girl?’ But by then Emily had turned again and started to move faster than before, and she only answered: ‘Nothing. I thought I saw something up the hill.’

  Soon they were in Zermatt, and Mr and Mrs Fenton were hurrying forward across the hotel lounge to hug Gerry, and Peter was shaking their hands and smiling and laughing among them all, while Emily stood a little aside, an expression on her face which he recognized, for he had seen it often enough on his own while standing in front of the mirror, thinking, the shaving brush in his hand. She was deciding that she could no longer drift, that she had to do something, that whatever she did was going to be hard. He could have sworn that she was also, still more like him, forcing herself to the realization that the hardest course might be the best. She looked magnificent, wholly alive. Peter thought that even Christian Holz had never been more fully alive than he had made him, through hate.

  They arranged to gather in the coffee-room for a big supper in a couple of hours’ time, and then Peter made his excuses and went up to the room reserved for him, undressed, and sank back with a sigh into a large hot bath.

  Chapter 10

  He had left the bathroom window a little open so that the steam would not fill the room, and through that tiny crack, flowing in amongst and between the cloud-banks of steam, came the music of a waltz. He listened idly, but wholly committed, his eyes closed and his hand with the scrubbing brush waving in time to the lilt of the music--Tales from the Vienna Woods. He heard the band, and in his mind saw the narrow street and saw the people sitting out there. Mostly they had evening dress on by now, at least outside the Cervin where the band was, and were sipping wine and aperitifs, but among them were a few men just down from the mountains, their big boots set foursquare under the small tables, and the veined glasses fragile as crystal flowers against the coiled rope and the hard glitter of the axe heads.

  The Archduke would be there, with the veiled woman; the Archduchess never came to Zermatt, and the veiled woman never went to Cannes, it was said. A sensible arrangement. The Crown Prince and Princess would be there--an earnest, childless young couple; and the Black Macdonald, the saturnine laird who always climbed in full Highland kit; and the Spanish grandee with a hunched back, and a name two sentences long; and, in a class by himself, the Old Man--he who had brought wealth to this village and Switzerland, and was the high priest and first prophet of mountaineering.

  He began to scrub his fingernails.

  Peggy had never looked better. Also, she had turned into a woman during these seven years, not so much in any change of figure, though she had lost her puppy fat, as in a quality of ripeness. When he was at Cambridge she had always seemed less ready than Emily. The dances, the expeditions to London, the theatres, the discussions on Art and Life, always seemed enormous undertakings to Peggy, almost as though she was afraid of anything with horizons wider than the confining (but sheltering) walls of the play-room. Her admiration for him had the same quality. She was like the twelve-year-old girl who crouches in worship of her brother, aged fourteen, who comes from a mysterious, dangerous world and stands in a lordly manner in front of the play-room fire, legs apart, hands in pockets, and talks about swots, lines, tannings, gatings, coll pre’s. Peter thought that in her private heart Peggy had felt the same awe for the ordinary world, towards which she had been growing up. She had not then been ripe for it. Now she was, as Emily had been even then.

  He got out of the bath and began to dry himself. The faint music still filled the room, but now he was seeing Peggy as mistress of his bungalow in Rudwal--the D.C.’s house with the big garden and the staff of fourteen. She was ready for that: calm--no, placid; her happiness like water in a well, deep, its quality unguessable; motionless. Peggy in camp? Yes, there too, unchanged. She would admire the startling sunsets and exclaim when the cough of the leopards sawed the night; but the circle of lamplight in the tent would give her no vision of the dark beyond, only of what it so warmly, tenderly embraced.

  Then suddenly it was Emily across the table. For her it was the enormous unknown of the darkness beyond that held the secrets of ecstasy, not the closed circle of the light. And when the sun had sunk, round and burning yellow, with tongues of fire leaping from the rim and the western trees like black fingers across it, it was not the streaked sky nor the bowl of dusty, visible glory that she stared at, but beyond the sun, and into the uttermost depths of the sky, where there was night, a blue and swimming sea of night, and a million flares, unseen, unknown.

  There was an unease at the pit of his stomach, such as he always felt when alternatives began to take shape and he knew that soon he must do what he must--reach out across the ice cliff, where the bottom waited silently for him, and a great river was a flash of thin light below; step up into the wind; clench his fist and strike at the armed giants that barred his path.

  A low voice said: ‘Peter, are you dressed?’

  He raised his head. It was coming from the door--a woman’s voice. He went over and answered as quietly: ‘No.’

  ‘I want to come in.’ It was Emily Fenton.

&nb
sp; ‘Wait a moment.’ He pulled on his trousers, a shirt, and his dressing-gown, and opened the door. Emily stepped in quickly.

  He left the door open; she was an unmarried girl. She made a short gesture that he should close it. He did so.

  ‘The people aren’t in the rooms on either side,’ she said. ‘I saw them both downstairs.’

  He waited, surveying her as he had not done since the first time they met. After a time, to break the taut silence in which she was staring at him with her eyes gleaming and her lips tight, he said: ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  She shook her head, and he lit a cheroot. ‘It’s a habit I got into in India,’ he said, looking at her over the top of his cupped hands. She was in evening dress, a cloak thrown over her shoulders, and her skin pale ivory. Her eyes were very grey and her hair a deep, thick auburn.

  She spoke suddenly. ‘You’ve got to let go of Gerry.’

  The tension in her face relaxed. She’d got it out at last; it had been hard, almost incredibly hard for her, but she’d done it. She had taken the difficult course.

  ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘Because you’ll destroy him if you go on the way you are,’ she said. ‘He’s not like you, and he never can be. Climbing--this idea of his--yours--that he should prepare himself for India and become a governor--all you’ll do is break him.’ She was standing close to him, speaking fast but firmly. ‘Can’t you see that you’re breaking his nerve now? You talk about strengthening it, but all people aren’t like you, thank God’--this with sudden real viciousness. ‘He’s a gentleman. It’s no use trying to make a Napoleon out of him because he isn’t one, and I don’t want him to be one. Nor does he.’

  He felt himself rising to the challenge, his personality coming together from the diffused state caused by relaxing in the bath, the long tour done and the mountains conquered.

  He said: ‘Is Gerry a child? It’s easy enough to untie the rope.’

  ‘Like Christian Holz?’ she said. ‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard. He’s given up working, poor man. No, it’s not easy for Gerry to untie the rope.’ She made a small movement of her hand that dismissed the anger that had been growing between them. This was too important to be angry about, it said: we are talking in an area where the rules of good manners don’t apply--just as I have passed beyond another set of rules by being with you, in your bedroom, behind a closed door.