I know, he said. It’s okay, he said. But everything good about this morning suddenly seemed out of balance. Disrupted.
“Where’s the mountain where it happened?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t too much of a bet.
“You can’t see it from here. It’s on the other side of that ridge.” He pointed to the eroding scree on the right, steep and incised by avalanche gullies. “When we go to Grimentz, I can show you the col at the entrance of its valley. The col where Augustin and me made the stonemen.”
Hearing Augustin’s name, here, so close to where he died, gave my guts a nasty squeeze. Since we got here, we’d shut up about the incident and the real reason we were here.
“So if you go all the way up, right here, you could look down into the valley?”
Nick’s brain machinery churning. “I don’t know. The main crest is higher, I think, out of sight. But theoretically you’re right, yes. Only . . .”
“Only what?”
“I’m not sure what you’ll see. We trekked through the valley for hours and hours before we reached the glacier. When the clouds closed us in, you know? The valley couldn’t have been that long. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t jibe with the map or the surroundings.”
“You guys were disoriented.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
We didn’t say anything for a while.
And me, totally Sam Avery: “We can book a helicopter flight. That way you can see it.”
I saw Nick go stiff. “I don’t want to. Too dangerous.”
“Looking at it is dangerous?”
No answer.
And I gazed at the mountains and thought about teeth again. And in my thoughts they were all rotten.
At the Mountains of Madness
Nick Grevers’s manuscript (part 2)
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peer out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even though we had no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially different from those already seen and traversed.
—H. P. Lovecraft
The morning after our ascent of the Zinalrothorn, we woke up refreshed, and any premonitions and irrational fears we might have felt seemed frivolous. Our muscles were warmed up by the sun, our spirits nourished by the light. In the distance, at the end of the valley, the mountains were beckoning, sparkling like rough diamonds on the necklace of a new day.
Plus, by then I already realize that there’s something strange going on with the Maudit. But instead of taking it in as a threat, it magnetizes me.
The mystery calls.
Google is of no help. Connected to the campsite bar’s wireless, we try different searches, but nothing. Neither on Bergtour.ch nor on SummitPost, Camptocamp, or Hikr. Strange, since those websites are more or less the modern alpinist’s bible. But the signal is crappy, and after sitting around for ages waiting for a couple of low-res pics of the area to load, we lose our patience.
We swipe through our own pictures from the last two days instead. There are a couple of really good ones—like the one with Augustin dangling in midair from Le Rasoir you saw on Instagram.
[At that moment, we didn’t give it much thought, but if you think about it, it’s striking. Even a bit creepy. The AMC has a fast 4G network, so this morning I googled the Maudit again and it’s remarkable how little has been documented about it. Try for yourself. It’s mentioned in passing in a number of French descriptions of the crest that curves to the north between the Val d’Anniviers and the Val d’Hérens, but there isn’t a single trip report to be found. I also can’t find any good close-ups. There are a couple of panoramas taken from the north, but because of its unfavorable geographic location, most of the peak is either hidden behind the ridges that frame the Moiry reservoir, or it’s practically invisible against the Pennine giants on the border with Italy. The only concrete reference I found is in a scan of an old (and actually quite sinister) clipping from Le Nouvelliste from 1957, about an accident on the Maudit in which seven alpinists lost their lives. It’s in French and I can’t completely figure out what it says. I saved the JPEG; maybe you can translate it for me when you get back.
I don’t know why it didn’t register that sunny day in the campsite bar. It’s not a total surprise that my internal blueprint of the Alps appears to be incomplete, but the fact that the internet is of no avail in a time when practically every molehill has been plowed up and has its own hashtag is more than a little alarming to me.]
We ponder all day on what to do. When evening falls, we drive up to Grimentz, precisely the sleepy town with luxury chalets and closed-for-the-season ski lifts I’d expected it to be. A sanctuary for timid mountain folk and affluent summer visitors. From the narrow alleyways of the village center, flush against the slope, we can see the entrance to the Moiry valley, where the paved road winds upward toward the reservoir. More to the west, almost imperceptible, lies the col to the much narrower, higher-situated basin from where we should be able to access the Maudit. The mountain itself is invisible from here. The evening is brooding, the colors vivid; the twilight brings out faceted, deep-blue and green hollows in the densely wooded slopes.
In an inn smelling of brick oven and melted cheese, we get two foaming steins of draft beer. The only other guests are a couple of old-timers from the village who nod curtly when we walk in. Above the bar hangs an old-fashioned birdcage. As I drink my beer, my gaze is constantly drawn to the dark shadow shuffling inside it. A crow. Or a chough.
Neither of us can make a decision about tomorrow’s plans. Until Augustin goes to the washroom, returns, and gives me a smiling jerk of the head toward the downstairs. I follow him to the lower level, where a series of framed photos and old engravings adorn the walls. Chalets with snow-covered roofs, panoramas taken from the ski runs above the village, men in traditional attire in front of a crevassed glacier.