With extreme caution, gazing intently upward, expecting Augustin to fall on me any moment and plunge us into darkness, I stand in the loop. The swinging intensifies. I tense up, slip back five inches. It’s only the Prusik knot. It locks, and I work my way up.
After repeating this maneuver three times, I suddenly shoot down two feet in a sickening air pocket. Silence. Then again, at least three.
From the darkness of the glacial cave comes an insane cackling that makes all the muscles in my body go weak at once. I feel hot dampness trickling down my thighs and realize I’ve lost control of my bladder. At first, I don’t understand where the sound is coming from, because its echoes resonate off the ice walls all around me. Then I recognize Augustin’s voice. But instead of feeling relief, I am beside myself with some sort of terrible primordial fear. He must be dead. Only the dead are capable of producing such distorted cackling—not animal, not human, but almost human.
“Augustin!” I scream. Abruptly he falls silent. I hear the rustle of clothes scraping against ice and drop another five inches. “Augustin, don’t move!”
The rope scrapes over the edge, ice particles spatter in my face. Then the cackling again, hollow and hysterical.
With cramped upward jerks, I start prusiking madly up the rope. My body starts to swing, my stomach muscles are burning, I spin around like a pendulum gone wild. When I get to the first brake knot, which is impossible to untie on the tight rope, I have to untie both Prusiks and tie them again above the knot, which costs me time I’m afraid I don’t have. Sobbing with exertion and despair, I inch higher and higher, while the loop of the rope hanging on my harness steadily grows. I have my eye on a blue ice ledge several yards under the bridge, which leads to the right, away from Augustin, away from the edge, upward to a balcony of piled-up snow and ice. To climb up to Augustin and to see what is waiting for me on the other side of that edge, whether it’s dead or alive—and in case of the former, to see what terrible thing has possessed him—I can’t do it.
When I reach the ledge, I take both ice axes and hook them behind it with a stifled groan. I pull myself in toward it with both arms, but I fear I will swing back as my belay on the rope is pulling me away from the wall. Dismayed, I let one of my axes dangle on the wrist strap and start jerking at the Prusik knot. It’s stuck. I have to shift my balance off the wall in order to relieve the pressure on the knot. My cramped muscles are trembling, and I think I’m going to fall. Then the knot unlocks, and with a last burst of strength I’m able to lift myself onto the ledge. I suck air into my lungs, and with my weight finally off the rope, I try to calm the dizzying spin of my thoughts.
The ledge is the upper edge of a disengaged, upright ice slab. It’s a foot wide, and there’s a pitch-black, narrow crack between it and the wall. After carefully working myself up, I am able to find a precarious balance on the spikes under my shoes, my face pressed against the cold wall. Inch by inch I shuffle to the right, sliding the Prusik with me, not thinking about what would happen if I lost my balance and fell off the edge.
I reach the other side on quivering legs and hammer my axes into the balcony’s jumble of snow and ice. Even before lifting myself onto it, I see black holes glimmering through. The platform is no more than an accumulation of fallen blocks of ice, frozen tight and filled with snow, hovering above an enormous depth. Still, it is my oasis, a safe haven compared to being anchored to Augustin’s wobbly, dead-alive body. I twist an ice screw into the wall, and as soon as I’ve anchored myself to it with a sling, I collapse onto it, panting with exhaustion.
It has become darker.
I hadn’t noticed it before, because I was too preoccupied with trying to extricate myself from my perilous position and because my eyes have become accustomed to the diffuse light. But it’s darker now, the shadows are creeping upward, and, suddenly alarmed, I sit up. It couldn’t be evening already, could it? By no means do I want to spend the night here.
I take out my iPhone and wait impatiently till I can enter the code. A shock of disbelief when I see it’s 8:17 p.m. So it’s true. Despite knowing better, I fervently hope it will find a carrier, and when it doesn’t, I’m so disappointed that I burst into miserable tears. Safe? How could I think I was safe? I’m trapped, and it will get pitch-dark very soon. The glacier up there, the storm’s constant rush—it’s a different world, guarded by reticent, overhanging walls of ice, as distant as the sun and the moon.
I just can’t accept the fact that I won’t get out of this crevasse tonight. The prospect is terribly demoralizing, but no one will come and look for us. I could never climb out of this place in the dark
(if you can at all . . . )
and seeing as I have to fend for myself, I’ll have to try my luck by daylight. I feel sorry for myself, feel damned, refuse to accept my fate. Not like this. Never in my life have I felt so estranged from myself, so alienated from life and so close to death.
I open WhatsApp. Your last message: “Love you. Be careful.” You almost never say “Love you.” I try not to read it as a prophetic farewell. I remember typing it, the day before he died. Normally I wouldn’t have said it, but it was on the spur of the moment, an emotional impulse. Now I’m glad I at least let him know . . .
With a stab in my heart, I turn off the phone to save battery power. Even though the phone is useless and it’s the circumstances that force me to turn it off, it feels like I’m severing my last link to home.
I have the impulse to scream, to call for help, but if I give in to it, I know I’ll never be able to stop. It’s completely pointless; the echoes will turn against me. I start to shiver. Now that I’ve stopped moving and the adrenaline’s effect has worn off, the cold penetrates my bones like an assassin. With a sudden decisiveness I take my Petzl out of my backpack and stretch the band over my helmet. The bright beam reinvigorates me and I start searching my backpack, watching my breath disappear in tiny clouds. If only I’d brought my down jacket. Fortunately, I find my neck gaiter. I take off the helmet, pull it over my head, replace the helmet, and put on my gloves. There. At least I’ll keep warm a bit longer.
I hear stumbling and feel two gentle tugs on the suspended rope.
“Augustin?”
The beam cuts through the dark, and wherever I shine it, shadows move, shapes that come out of the depths of the sparkling blue-and-silver walls where my headlamp can’t reach, and that dance away from the edge of where I can see. I try to believe they’re a play of the light, unwelcome and unnatural in this lifeless place, but I can’t help thinking that some of them look like horribly deformed people.
Then I hear the cackling again.
And something cackles back.