Only the scree fields stretching away in all directions till they disappear into clouds or cliffs.
My sense of direction is all messed up. Around us unfolds an unfamiliar deception of space and motion, as if the horizon is moving away from us in all directions at full speed and the valley is engulfing us in all its magnitude. Time is strangely viscous here, I think in confusion. Then: No, it’s the valley.
Then I see Augustin’s helmet before me again, that red dot slowly shrinking as it drops out of view. I hear a scream—I know it’s in my head, but I immediately look around anyway, my heart thudding, because the silence was ripped apart so suddenly, and the scream echoes so close to where I am that it seems as if it’s coming from the clouds directly above.
I rub my face, contemplate whether I want to waste energy by taking off my backpack to drink some water. I’m startled by a mumble of words and look around again, but I see only boulders. Am I hallucinating? Is it purely disorientation? I can’t answer that.
When I turn around, I see a detached cloud bank rolling toward us, quickly catching up. The cloud looks diffusely white in contrast to the leaden sky and is growing like some monstrous life-form. I call out to Augustin, but he can’t hear me, so I whistle with my fingers. He looks back and I point with my Black Diamonds to what’s creeping up on us from behind.
Augustin waits for me, and by the time I catch up, he has put on his Gore-Tex coat. I quickly follow his example. Just in time, because the cloud rolls over us and the mountain’s cold breath slaps us in the face.
The world changes into a pale white cocoon in which nothing can be discerned anymore.
“Shouldn’t we pitch camp?” I ask. The lack of confidence that I can hear in my voice embarrasses me.
But again, Augustin shrugs. “It’s just a cloud.”
Again, that enviable levelheadedness that makes it so easy to submit yourself to his self-confidence. If only I had a little more of that.
We move on, but now we stay close together and make sure to no longer lose sight of the brook. The sound of streaming water gives us something to hold on to. As long as the water can find the way back to civilization, we can too.
Augustin’s coat is bright red—Just like his helmet was, I think. His falling helmet—and the strap dangling from his buckled ice axe is bright yellow, but even from up close the colors now look dull and lifeless. Visibility is less than thirty yards, where boulders and clouds melt into a bleak haze. It’s a spooky sight. We’re walking through a misty tunnel with an uneven, rocky floor. Now that the view of the valley is obscured, its presence oppresses us all the more. Anyone who has ever been down in a cave or a mine knows what I’m talking about. Invisible expanses can trigger suffocating claustrophobia.
And it scares me.
All of it scares me.
I can’t help it. I think about the practically impossible access to the trail, about the accés interdit sign affixed to the barbed wire. I think about the fact that there are no tracks here. I think about man-made obstacles, about inaccessibility for a reason. I think about the two stonemen we built at the mouth of the valley, swallowed up by the mist. The image casts the shadow of an enormous, ungraspable danger.
I try to force myself back into the walking trance, but I can’t. Ice-cold precipitation starts to lash me in the face, numbs my cheeks, and pierces my eyes even when I squint. I pull my hood tight, but the flapping noise it makes in the wind immediately gets on my nerves. It’s practically impossible to discern between mist and precipitation, and it takes a while before I realize that the sky is full of sleet. It whispers incessantly as it hits the boulders, like a soft patter stealthily following us.
“Hey, come on,” I call to Augustin, when I almost slip on a boulder for the umpteenth time. He halts and looks back. “This is nuts. I don’t want everything to get wet and then have to crawl into our sleeping bags. None of this shit will dry overnight.”
Augustin turns it over in his mind as he looks around him. Snow has gathered on his nose and is dripping off it. Pitching a bivi now, with no idea where we are, doesn’t sound like an attractive prospect to him.
“Listen, it’s still okay. If we keep going for another fifteen minutes, we should get to the lake; it can’t be further than that. At least the ground there should be . . .” He stops halfway through his sentence, looking at his watch. He taps it and presses a few buttons.
“What?”
“It says it’s almost quarter to five. What time have you got?”
Quarter to five? That’s impossible. I fish the iPhone out of my pocket again. The screen is misted up, and as I try to protect it from the snow by keeping it under my coat, I wipe it dry with my fleece.
4:47 p.m.
“Impossible.”
“Did we . . .”
“How is that possible?” I say it in Dutch, but it’s all I manage to say. The last time I checked the time was apparently two and a half hours ago, when the clouds surrounded us. No more than twenty minutes could have gone by since then.
That means we’ve been walking in the valley for over four hours.
“Did we get it all wrong on the col?” I ask.
“It was twelve thirty when we got there. I know, because I remember thinking four and a half hours from the village was good time, considering there were no tracks and even despite our detour in the beginning. And we set off at eight. Nick, what’s going on?”
I have no answer.
“It’s impossible. We haven’t had any serious rises since the col, right? Even by a conservative estimate we must have covered at least six miles. Fuck no, seven and a half.” Which is impossible. Such a distance would have brought us almost to the border with Italy, and there’s no way the valley could be that long. “What does the altimeter say?”
“10,000 feet.”
“You see? We’ve hardly gone up.”
“If it’s right.”
“Isn’t it a GPS?”
“How should I know?” Augustin raises his voice, not much, but enough to alarm me. In this whiteout, all we have is each other, and that unity must be preserved. “I think we should go back, Nick. All the way down. I don’t feel good about this.”
“If it took us four hours to get here, it will be dark before we get to the col. That’s if we don’t get lost in the mist.”
“But there’s no way it could have been four hours!”
“Well, apparently it was!”
“Fuck!” His lower lip is trembling, and he turns away, looking into the snowdrift. I notice for the first time that he is upset. Apparently his self-confidence has its limits after all, although I would have preferred not to have found out.
And I see something else. The snowflakes no longer dissolve when they land on his hood.
“Augustin, relax. Let’s keep calm. We have—”