An earsplitting thunderclap. When Augustin slips, it happens so fast I have no time to react. The rope’s loops are yanked out of my hand and I stare as they disappear behind him, twisting in the air. I understand my mistake but refuse to believe it; I keep thinking I will arrest his fall. It is the voice of denial. Before the jolt comes, I have time to think, So this is how it must end? The fall I’d always dreaded.
Was it a rash decision induced by the threat of the storm and the Maudit? Was it the deceptive proximity of the glacier with its hidden crevasses that had brought me to tie us in as one should on a glacier but never, ever in steep snow? Or did I merely fall prey to the age-old law that stipulates that climbers lose so much concentration on their way down that they end up making the fatal mistakes they always thought they never would?
A massive blow on my midriff yanks me off the wall. I fly forward, momentarily weightless, carried by the wind, too fast to breathe. Then the fall explodes in a wave of blinding white. My helmet protects my skull as I roll over my head, but my head snaps back and something cracks in my neck, spouting hot, numbing fluids through my muscle tissue. The fall flings me downward in dizzying somersaults, which causes my axes, one dangling from my wrist strap, the other on my harness’s gear loop, to bite at me like grinding teeth. The second axe’s spike digs deep into my thigh and I try to scream, but my mouth fills up with powder snow, which has the consistency of ice-cold feathers. There’s something relieving about it, and I think, At least I’m going to die with a mouth full of velvet.
There’s no stopping it. My momentum shoots me past Augustin, pulling the rope tight again so that I yank him from his downward slide into a silent, forward somersault. Before you know it, we’re tumbling down in a tangle of rope, backpacks, and climbing gear. Something tears in my groin. The wind lashes my ears, the snow flashes by and I catch a glimpse of the glacier, now frighteningly close. For a blinding split second, I’m pierced by fear: the bergschrund! Then it’s already behind us and we land with a smack on the snow cone spearheading the flat glacier.
It’s a cruel prank the Maudit is playing. We slide sixty, seventy yards further and are starting to slow down. My thoughts are left behind, frozen somewhere into the wall we came down from, but I seem to intuit that we’ll come to a stop, wounded, battered, but alive. Then the glacier splits open under Augustin and he sinks down a gaping black hole. The knots don’t catch; the snow is too powdery. It all happens so quickly I can’t do anything. I career toward the crevasse, on my back. Following a load of snow, I disappear into undulating darkness.
With my eyes squeezed tightly shut, I feel the acceleration. I don’t dare look at my grave. I only perceive its awful darkness, its ice-cold breath. Then the tug on the rope, the pendular motion, the crash against solid walls.
Everything goes quiet.
??*
I swivel slowly.
I haven’t lost consciousness, not for a moment, but I’m completely confused. I don’t understand what happened or how my surroundings could have changed so quickly from the mountain flank’s open expanse to this enclosed tomb. On both sides rise solid blue, unforgiving walls of cracked ice. The weight of my backpack has pulled me backwards and I’m dangling upside down, entangled in a jumble of coiled rope. Spinning, I work my way out of the loops, let the excessive rope slide away from me, and pull myself up by my lifeline, until I’m sitting right side up in my harness.
The silence is terrifying. The gloom crawls up on me from the crevasse. I look up, following the rope, and see that it’s hanging from a bridge of brittle ice connecting two opposing walls, about ten yards above me. Thank goodness it didn’t snap. The glacier’s architecture doesn’t conform to any esthetic conventions, but it is formed by millions of tons of ice that violently tear themselves loose and scrape against each other. The crevasse is a labyrinth of cracked ledges, unstable bridges, and balconies formed by frozen, conglomerated snow. Far above me, I see the hole in the roof we came through. It is by sheer coincidence that my fall followed a free trajectory and I didn’t get my spine shattered on jagged ice sculptures.
The thunder rolls over the glacier. I hear its muffled echoes vibrate softly against the crevasse’s walls. The toll has been paid. The mountain lets out a satisfied rumble.
Augustin. Where is Augustin?
With a shock, I realize how precarious my situation is. The only thing holding me aloft is the counterweight of Augustin’s body, which must be lying on the snow bridge. Is he dead? Or just unconscious? I observe impassively that it won’t alter my fate. Any moment, my weight can pull him off the edge, or the fragile ice that holds him there can break. Rigid with fear, I quit twisting and turning. Under my dangling feet, the excess rope disappears into a subterranean darkness. It completely swallows up my attention. It is so dark down there that I can’t even see the end of the rope.
“Augustin!”
I hear sheer panic in my voice. Only the echo comes back, then dies away against the ice.
Suddenly a high-pitched, dismal whistling resonates. A gust of wind that seems to be coming from deeper down the cavern. It finds me and slowly starts to sway me. Oh Jesus, stop swinging! I have to do something. The harness is blocking the blood flow to my legs and they’re starting to numb. If I do nothing, I will lose my strength and die here, mad with fear, when the ice bridge collapses and we plunge into the gaping gorge
(where the death birds are waiting)
or, in the unlikely event that doesn’t happen, dangling and miserable, of thirst and hypothermia.
With utmost care, I try to stretch as far as I can, but the walls are beyond my axe’s reach. My only hope is to go up on the rope, while my movements continuously tug on Augustin’s deadweight.
Indecisively, shivering helplessly, I almost allow the panic to overcome me. If that happens, I’m done for. I force myself to subdue my fears. It’s just like on the summit: I can’t do anything about how we got here, but I can concentrate on the next step.
I take off my gloves and click them onto my harness. I carry two Prusik cords on me, and after carefully fishing them out, I start winding them around the rope. The Prusik knot is a fantastic mechanism that, when taut, locks on to the rope but when slack can move freely. Positioning two of them on top of each other on the rope gives you a belay and a leg loop, which then allows you to inch up the rope by alternatingly shifting your weight from one to the other. I slide my belay knot as far up as possible, then test it by hanging on it. It locks tightly. I immediately start swinging around, but I can’t do anything about that. The real test will come when I stand in my leg loop.
I use my left leg because the right one was wounded by the fall. I don’t know how badly—there’s a dull, throbbing pain in my thigh muscle. I’ll worry about it later.