With a jolt, I look around me. To the left, to the right, up and down. Nothing; it’s my imagination. The choughs are gone. Deep silence reigns, aside from the gurgling of the brook, somewhere far away.
I see moisture in the air, a single drop breaking free from the steel-colored sky. Suddenly worried about lagging too far behind, I get going again. My nausea has subsided but resurfaces five minutes later. When I look up sometime later, I’m surprised to see Augustin resting under a big, thumb-like rock.
“You okay, buddy?” I ask when I reach him.
He smiles at me; the air has been cleared. “Weird, isn’t it? The spatial effects of this place,” he says.
I nod and lumber on, not prepared to disrupt my cadence, because it’ll cost me the energy I’ll need to pull myself up after a rest. Thinking back, I can clearly recall how bad Augustin is actually looking as I pass him, but I apparently don’t notice it at the time. What he says doesn’t even register. I don’t know what’s come over me.
“I think there are death birds here,” he says confidently. “I keep hearing them. Behind the mountains.”
I laugh—concentrate on your rhythm—and then I pass him. I start counting my steps. To ten, over and over again. If I focus on it, I don’t feel my dizziness, don’t feel the heaviness in my limbs. My hold on the handles of the Black Diamonds weakens, the backpack gets heavier. There’s a pressure just behind my ears, growing constantly, as if I’m sinking deeper and deeper underwater, through a hole in the ice. A hole in the ice or a crevasse. Stupid thought. Why did I just imagine seeing Augustin dangling from a gallows, swinging slowly in the wind, back and forth, back and forth?
I think there are death birds here.
They aren’t behind the mountains. How could he think that? They’re in the crevasses and will come and eat the life out of you, if you fall into one.
“Al . . . most . . . there . . .” I pant to myself. “Step . . . step . . . step . . . just a few more . . .”
[With hindsight, it’s clear we weren’t in our right minds anymore by then. I don’t have another explanation for our behavior. How else could we have assessed the situation so poorly? Or kept making the wrong decisions time and again and, despite the glaring red flags that we should turn back pronto, kept right on going?]
One thing is certain: even before we reach the col, I feel the mountain’s presence at the end of that valley drawing us in and yet, even so, repelling us, as if there is a magnetic field up there that for some unearthly reason keeps changing poles. It splits me in two. I feel that something is terribly wrong, I feel it everywhere, and at the same time I have to go there. The mountain is a seducer. Its mystery an obsession.
And all at once, just before I enter the pass, it’s gone. My horror, my dizziness and nausea, and the way the elements and the forces of the wild suggested the unimaginable, it’s all suddenly gone. The mountains are just mountains—dead rock, solid ground under our feet.
The valley opened up, and we entered it.
??*
It’s an anticlimax.
The Maudit’s summit is in the clouds and refuses to reveal itself. That’s the story of photo 5. By the time we get to the col, it’s twelve thirty [I remember, because after pulling a fleece out of my backpack, I tried checking the weather on my iPhone, but by then there was no data network anymore], and all the surrounding ridges are shrouded in clouds. But despite that, we have a clear view of the valley, as can be seen in the photo.
The valley is a scree basin of gravelly moraines and old snowbanks, mottled by the stream’s muddy outwash. Except where we are, it is enclosed by steep slopes and imposing cliffs. Maybe three miles further up lies the retreating embranchment of a compact glacier. Couloirs of snow rise into the clouds from its higher flanks on both sides of the mighty, uncommonly dark wall that must be the Maudit. At its extremity, where the ice mass’s tongue breaks into a maze of transverse crevasses, is where the glacial lake must be, watching over the valley like a cold eye.
“Bummer, huh?” I comment.
Augustin looks around in clear disappointment. He had expected something more impressive, a view of the summit we came here for. He spreads his arms toward where it should be—forming a capital Y with his Black Diamonds—and whoops as loud as he can: “Heeeeeeyo!”
Instead of his voice echoing and resounding off the cliffs, his call sounds peculiarly flat and quickly dies away. The valley is too big for the echo. We’re too small. There’s a loneliness here, but it’s not the kind of loneliness we’re looking for. The dead silence, the complete absence of trails, and the desolation of the scree fields give the impression that human civilization has turned its back on this place.
With my stomach in knots, I turn around and look to the horizon. Behind the Berner Oberland massif, a dark bank of clouds has formed, and it seems to be building quickly.
“I’m not too happy about the weather changing, to be honest. Do you think it will hold?”
Augustin shrugs. “They said there was only a chance of local thunderstorms. It’ll probably be okay.”
We hear a shrill shriek, and I look up with a start. An alpine chough glides on the rising wind above the valley’s mouth and then nose-dives from on high. I suddenly see there’s a whole flock of them. They’re coming from everywhere, a dark, blotchy swirl like leaves in the wind. I hear their hoarse squabbling and screeching, which sounds almost human but, like Augustin’s whoop, falls flat in the changing atmosphere. The birds perform their wild acrobatics, but suddenly, as if to a signal only they can hear, they hover above the plateau, their weird little feet dangling under their tilting bodies. One of them lands about ten yards away and steps jauntily between the rocks toward us. It folds its wings, pokes a long, bright yellow beak between its feathers, then looks warily at the unexpected visitors on the col. I wonder how long it’s been since they saw a living soul out here.
Augustin grins and kneels, reaches his hand out to the bird and calls to it. The chough stays put, distrusting yet brazen.
Even without looking at the barometer, I know what the coming of the birds implies. Alpine choughs flock to the valley and abandon the mountains to the storm as soon as the atmospheric pressure drops.
As if in confirmation, the bird gives a grim cry, flies up, and dives down with the entire flock in a single turbulent swoop.
[And of course we should have followed them. Of course we should have done the only logical, the only reasonable, the only responsible thing and followed the birds to the valley. But we didn’t. I wish I had an explanation for that, but I don’t.]
“Wow, what a sight,” Augustin says.
We follow them with our gaze till they disappear.
“So these are your death birds?” I ask with a faint smile. The question pops up unexpectedly, as if it had been waiting at the back of my mind all this time, but I’m taken aback by the way it seems to hit Augustin.
“Death birds?”