I recall last night’s hoarse screams and shiver involuntarily. By daylight, the memory seems distant, but I can hardly blame myself for believing he was possessed or dead, when he screamed like that.
I gently shake his shoulder, take off my gloves and put my fingers to his lips to feel if he’s breathing. Nothing. I want to know for sure and reach under the lined collar of his Gore-Tex coat for his neck.
Augustin rolls over and his hand grips my leg like a spider.
“Jesus Christ!” My scream echoes shrilly against the ice walls. I leap backwards, flail my arms, and almost fall off the bridge.
Augustin opens his eyes, but there aren’t any. Because the death birds ate them up last night. Where his eyes should have been, two big, black holes are staring at me.
“I’m so cold, Nick,” he whispers. White clouds of breath rise from his lips. “So cold . . .”
It isn’t real, I think, but sheer, stone-cold panic grabs hold of me and I throw myself back against the crevasse wall. Not real, it’s making you see things. Like yesterday when Augustin’s Seiko said our altitude was over 16,000 feet—not real. It’s trying to unhinge you now that it has lost its hold on you.
I squeeze my eyes shut, shake my head, cover my face with my hands. When I look again, I see spots.
The holes where his eyes should have been are staring into me as he lies there, utterly motionless. There aren’t even any eyelids. Only those two deep, dead tunnels, in which the vacant, riveted stare looks like it’s been torn away from some distant place—a horrifying, charged place.
“Help me, Nick.” His whispering is almost inaudible. “I’m so, so cold . . .”
“Jesus Christ, Augustin, you’re still alive!”
But is he? If his eyes have been picked out and his soul has escaped, is what remains of him really alive?
Augustin lifts his arm, and his stiff fingers reach helplessly for me. No way am I coming any closer. No way am I going to touch him. Still, I notice that my feet are making their way toward him. I have to get real and convince myself it’s an illusion that it’s really Augustin and that he needs my help.
“Hey, man . . . how are you feeling?”
No answer. I come closer.
That hand, reaching out for me. Those holes for eyes.
I need all my willpower to hoist him up by his shoulders. I don’t dare look into that bewitched face. Any moment, I expect something awful to happen. But Augustin doesn’t budge. His body has gotten precariously cold. Making sure his thighs don’t turn the wrong way, I tug him into a sitting position against the perpendicular edge. The relief I feel when I let go of him is immense.
Augustin turns his face up to me. I get the feeling that he’s trying to tell me something but isn’t able to, as if last night’s trauma not only robbed him of his soul but also of his ability to speak. Something is glimmering in the holes where his eyes should be, like mist on distant arctic plains. His mouth forms inaudible words that reveal a bleak emptiness.
“Listen,” I say, in an attempt to appear as matter-of-fact as possible. It’s a childish thought, but if I don’t let on that I see it, maybe it won’t see me either. It feels like my only chance. “I’m going to have a shot at climbing out of this place, okay? When I top out, I’ll get you out of here too. I have enough gear for a Flaschenzug, so I’ll haul you up. It’s going to be all right. The sun is shining out there. Can you see it? You only need to hold on a little longer. When I get you out, we’ll call for a helicopter.”
I realize it’s all very iffy—if I manage to climb up, if I’m at all able to haul Augustin up, if my iPhone finds a carrier—but it’s all I got.
If it’s still Augustin.
I reach for his gear loop to take his ice screws and Prusiks and get all queasy when I see that the black holes are following my hand intently.
My heart thumping, I turn my back to him.
I quickly start twisting an ice screw into the wall. With four screws, I can more or less belay myself during my kamikaze climb on the traverse and the tower. I estimate the roof to be about fifteen yards up. If I go in four-yard pitches from screw to screw, the most I could fall is eight yards. If I manage to top out on the glacier and make an anchor there, I’ll have to rappel all the way back down to free the rope and climb up all over again, but better safe than sorry.
Before the ice screw is halfway in, my hand seizes up.
It is completely light now, and the sunlight is glaring through the opening in the dome. It entrances me, and I immediately forget about Augustin. The light possesses an intensity so sublime that, after last night’s cold threat, it endows the ice vault with the appearance of a cathedral, with sparkling walls of snow crystals. It’s so beautiful! All the tribulations melt away in that light, make way for the essence of what I’m really here for: the longing for the immutability that only mountains possess, a longing that, in all its vulnerability, I can find only in this landscape. When I gaze up from the ice bridge at that sacred light, it overwhelms not only my soul; it hijacks my every movement.
And without giving the rope or the screw a second thought, without even seeming to have any control over it, I start climbing the ice wall head-on.
[Honestly, Sam, I have no idea how I got out of that crevasse. I don’t know why I abandoned the safe plan of traversing to the left, or how I succeeded in free soloing fifteen yards of rock-solid, overhanging ice and in dragging myself through those crumbling crusts and powder snow avalanches over the cornice and onto the glacier. There are people who are capable of those kinds of feats, but there are also people who can run the hundred-meter dash in less than ten seconds, and I’m sure not one of them. I don’t remember anything besides climbing in a trance of power and topping out onto the glacier in bright sunlight, and that I was no longer afraid of whatever was haunting Augustin, and that was that.
I keep thinking about Augustin pulling me up during the ascent over the ice-covered slabs on the north face. Truth is, I don’t really believe in the kind of superhuman strength, powered by adrenaline, which they say enables you to do things in extreme circumstances that you normally couldn’t. Not to this extent, anyway. There are simple laws of nature that limit human ability.
And that raises the question: Did the Maudit really let me go?
Sometimes I think I’m about to wake up only to discover that I’m still trapped in the crevasse.
That I’ll still be hearing Augustin’s screaming all around me when the death birds release his soul.
And then, Sam? What then?