“Did you forget to strap it?” I ask.
Augustin shakes his head in disbelief. “That was so fucking stupid.”
“Jesus.”
“No! How could I forget that!”
I shrug, more matter-of-factly than I actually feel. “Oh well, it’s gone. Nothing you can do about it now. Focus, man, we’ve still got a long way to go.”
Augustin can’t get over it. That he could be so stupid as to make such a mistake. Eighty euros, that helmet had cost him. I chuckle. Ask him if he wants to go and get it. Augustin stares into the precipice, as if he’s seriously considering the possibility. No way—far in the distance, the glacier lies glistening in the sun, torn and beyond reach.
I make it clear to Augustin that I want to get the hell out of here. The air is still and vigilant, the light dazzlingly bright. Far below us, the shadow of an alpine chough is circling, and I can’t help feeling that we’re prisoners here, above the world and isolated from everything. The image of a person falling is still imprinted in my mind. I feel my stomach clench at the thought that this is the same abyss I have to lower my legs into shortly in order to traverse the last stretch of Le Bourrique. Right now, I’ve gotten used to the ridge’s solid comfort and I’m not looking forward to trading it in for the depths.
I wiggle back and forth, stare intently at the anchor, familiarize myself with the rock’s grips. I triple-check the clove hitch and figure eights Augustin has tied into the rope. Yes, I want to get going, but a big mistake like not buckling your helmet only happens when you’re at the end of your focus. And the image of me becoming that red dot disappearing into the abyss is haunting me a bit too vividly.
Two hours later we reach the shoulder: an eagle’s nest on the mountain’s northerly corner where the crest breaks off into the steep north face, coated with overhanging ice seracs. That’s where I discover what will seal both our fates.
Our track from the way up bends to the left over a knife-edged snow ridge that is the sole access to the glacial basin below. It’s almost three and the early morning’s cold has made way for a lazy summer heat, which brings new dangers. In the blazing sun the snow has become mushy. It requires utmost concentration on the ridge. Our track is boot-wide with gaping drops to the left and to the right. Mushy snow means you can slip with every step.
So it’s not surprising that Augustin urges me to hurry up. As he shortens the rope, I gaze at the overlapping mountain ridges in the west, gradually curving northwards until they descend into the hazy Rh?ne valley. I love recognizing the shapes of the snow-covered peaks. They form a chain of souls detached from the life below, inert above a silent, motionless world. Their names pass before me like a mantra: Obergabelhorn, Dent d’Hérens, Dent Blanche, Grand Cornier, Pigne de la Lé . . .
“Hey, look,” I say.
Augustin follows my finger for a second, but his mind is on his rope. “What?”
“See that peak, beyond the Grand Cornier’s right buttress?”
“Which one?”
“The pointy one. The dark one.”
He gazes through his sunglasses, still disinterested. “What about it? Nick, the snow isn’t getting any better.”
“Which is it?”
He shrugs. The peak is now hidden behind calm, afternoon clouds, which cling to the valley’s eastern slopes and cover the lower peaks in the Val d’Anniviers, but something about the way the light falls and the play of the cloud fragments caused it to catch my eye in the brief moment it was visible. It leaves an afterimage of what the Swiss call a formsch?ner gipfel: a dramatic, sharp, two-topped pyramid—a perfect mountain.
A mountain as a child would draw it.
And it throws me, because even though I am usually a walking encyclopedia of alpine peaks, I have no idea which I’m looking at.
Then it happens.
It suddenly materializes out of a halo of dispersing clouds, first obscure like a motif, then clear and unimaginably fierce against a pastel-blue sky. It happens with such astonishing speed that it seems like a mirage. Dark, jagged flanks veined with snowy couloirs come into view. The sun falls in an explosion of light on the ice field between the two horned summits and transforms it into a blinding mirror that sparkles like a beacon across the valley. Even behind my shades I have to squint. Incredible! So beautiful! Enraptured, I start to grin. I feel reborn. The dangers of this place and what happened to Augustin’s helmet, it’s all meaningless now. All that matters is this mountain and its numbing beauty.
“Wow,” Augustin says. “See that?”
I snatch the Landeskarte from the front pouch of his backpack and unfold it. Augustin leans over and together we follow the curves of the ridges we’ve come to know so well, the glaciers in between, the contour lines and the names, and compare what we see on the map with the landscape at our feet, in order to determine which is the peak that so enchants us.
“Look, there it is.” My finger points to a high, nameless combe on the map, east of the Moiry glacier. It lies high above the reservoir and the village of Grimentz, which both are hidden in the depths behind the hazy ridges, invisible to us from our eagle’s nest. My finger hovers above an intersection of notched crests. “Le Maudit,” I say. I weigh the name in my mouth, decide it sounds good. “That must be it.”
“Elevation 10,863 feet,” Augustin reads out and looks to the other side of the valley. “Impossible.”
We stare indecisively to the west. Considering the surrounding peaks, I estimate it more around 11.5K or even 12K. A minor summit compared with the 13ers and 14ers that crown the ridges more to the south, but definitely quite a bit higher than the map says.
“That’s strange,” I say. “It’s almost certainly a typo.”
“Is that really the one? It could be . . . that one. What’s that called?” Augustin gazes at the map and puts his finger on a peak. “The Dent des Rosses.”
“No, that’s in front of it. Look, it juts right out of the glacier. And diagonally to the right, a bit to the west, puts you . . . here,” I say, and I poke my finger in an area with no other mountain but the Maudit, a rocky point that, according to the map, should rise two or three hundred yards above the ridge before it falls steeply to the Val d’Herens in the west. I check and double-check but it just doesn’t add up with what we see before us. Sure, altitudes are difficult to gauge from afar. From new angles, landmarks change shape, increase or diminish in size, or sometimes even completely disappear from view. Maybe, in this case, the illusion of height is created by the peak’s isolation, or the way it protrudes like an island out of a sea of clouds.