“A while ago, when we were walking up here, you said you heard death birds behind the mountains.”
“Oh yeah, I said that, didn’t I?” Augustin looks away, and his voice sounds strangely remote. It’s as if he’s allowing the words to hover between us, as if he’d rather read them from a distance before he’d be willing to accept that we’d lost control for a while. “I don’t really know.”
He remains silent and I think that’s all he has to say on the matter, but all at once he resumes. “Don’t you know the stories? Death birds are said to guide the souls of fallen climbers out of this world. If you believe what the old guides and mountain folk say, at least.”
“And do you?”
He smiles. “Did you know mountain rescuers often find fallen climbers without their eyes? By the time they find the bodies, the birds have already gotten to them. Ravens, jackdaws, crows; they pick out the eyes and swallow them up.”
“Jeez, really?”
“Ask one of those guides. They say the birds do it so the soul is free to escape. Otherwise it’s doomed to stay and haunt the place it was found in. But sometimes the soul doesn’t want to leave and it lingers inside the bird for a while. They say that if you listen, you can hear their screams coming from the mountains at night.”
Neither of us speaks. I suddenly feel a strong urge to text you, but when I take my phone out of my pocket, I again see that there is no connection. That’s often the case in these remote valleys. The steep slopes surrounding the intermediate dales block the signal.
I turn off the screen and put it away. “Should we look for a place to bivi around here or keep going some more?”
No, let’s go back, I think. Back down to the valley.
Augustin nods. “Let’s set up camp by the lake. The terrain is almost even, an hour’s walk at the most. We can make it before the storm. The ground there should be softer, and when it clears up tonight, we’ll have a good view of tomorrow’s route.”
It doesn’t take long before we’ve hoisted our backpacks, but before we depart, Augustin does something unexpected. He piles up a dozen or so flat stones, creating a stoneman. I hesitate for a moment but then follow his example. Marked territory. This is our valley. Before you know it, two stonemen stand on the col, overlooking the valley together, at the mercy of the mountain.
One for Augustin, one for Nick.
Then we’re off, and the stonemen dissolve into the gray mass behind us.
The Valley of Unrest
Notes by Sam Avery
Now each visitor shall confess
The sad valley’s restlessness
Nothing there is motionless—
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
—Edgar Allan Poe
1
It was dark the first time we went to Grimentz, cuz Nick hated people staring at him. Nick totally Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, shoulders hunched deep in the Hilfiger parka, collar at attention, and a felt hat he normally didn’t wear, over those bandages. It left only a narrow open strip through which his eyes peered, dark and watchful like a deer’s.
Unwrap him and there’d be nothing underneath. A pitch-black void. His deer eyes two poached eggs in the air. Ghost eyes. A hovering hat.
His wanting to show me the Maudit, or the access to it at least, ended as a letdown—or should I say relief? As the day progressed, the sky became overcast. It even rained. Now the pine tree shapes pierced the low-hanging clouds. Your million-dollar mountain view obliterated by a black broth that dissolved into the highest branches.
During the walk to the village, Nick told me his own ghost story. What it was like for him to have his self shoved aside and the mountain take charge.
How he saw only his pale reflection staring back at him through that imaginary window. The mouth a dark, gaping well. The eyes two gazing dark pits that reached all the way into the distant night. And in those holes, the tumbling red dot that was Augustin’s helmet just kept falling and falling and falling and falling.
This story, Nick told me the whole thing without looking at me even once. Both of us staring ahead at the road, Grimentz’s lights looming up in the mist ahead of us.
Nick said he’d been reluctant to tell his story cuz it brought Augustin back from the dead. Especially here, so close to where it happened. Nick looked up into the mist, and I wished he hadn’t. He looked in such a specific direction that it seemed like he thought that up there, behind the invisible mountains, Augustin was still waiting, clinging on to some mute semblance of life from which he couldn’t be saved but couldn’t completely die from either. A sad, lost soul frozen into the glacier.
“The good news,” said Nick, “is that I haven’t felt it here yet. The pressure seems to be gone. Did you feel anything about me?”
I lied.
I mean, why make him feel bad? Buck him up, even if you know better. Go Nick! A million years of power, spray it with some fresh mountain air and—wham!—you’re cured.
We strolled into the village, past the dark, idle cable car terminal. Motionless steel cables suspended in the mist, reaching for the abandoned pistes on the higher slopes. There was a Coop here. A boulangerie-patisserie. There were outdoor supply stores, an école de ski, a guides de montagne, an Office du Tourisme. Shopwindows loaded with twenty-four-karat-gold-inlay Cartier watches. And of course chalets for rent. Chalets for sale. All the elements a luxury Swiss resort needs to be a luxury Swiss resort. And still, it all felt wrong. The mist weighed on the village, compressing its air, silencing it. No sounds. No burbling water, no barking dogs, no tourist voices. Grimentz was in limbo, an interseasonal purgatory, silently awaiting the arrival of winter. And it was waiting for something else. That feeling, that certainty, I couldn’t shake it.
I said, “I don’t like it here at all.” Slowly climbing the steep street, I said, “I feel really lousy. Uncomfortable.”
“The mist is kind of gloomy, isn’t it?”
“It isn’t the mist. It’s just . . . creepy. Don’t you feel it?”
Nick shrugged. “Last night, you slept at an altitude of over 5,000 feet. The mountain air may be differently charged, maybe that’s what you feel. But I don’t think so. Usually, a tangible difference in pressure comes only before a storm. The air is still now.”