I ask him if he’s ever had to call mountain rescue, and he shakes his head again. I tell him about the one time I had to. It was years ago, on a remote mountain called La Grivola, in Northern Italy. We unexpectedly got stuck in a thunderstorm and were forced to leave the ridge and descend through a disastrously steep labyrinth of unstable ribs and avalanche troughs. After hours-long precarious rappelling on self-made, flimsy anchors and a fall of my climbing buddy Wilco, whom I scarcely managed to hold, we were trapped. The rope was stuck in a crack somewhere above us and I didn’t dare put all my weight on it to climb back up. The deteriorating conditions and Wilco’s fall had shaken us. We decided to call a chopper . . . but had no signal. Eventually, the solution was at hand: I cut the rope, and we had just enough left to reach the glacier.
“Good job,” Augustin says soberly. “In the mountains, you’re responsible for your own actions. If you put yourself in a position where you’re dependent on other people, you’ve made a mistake. You got yourselves in trouble and got yourselves out again.”
Cutting that rope dug a 250-euro hole in my study budget that year, but at least I got my life back.
Wilco, not so much. After that summer, we lost touch, and three years later he made a mistake while rappelling in the Dolomites and plummeted 1,000 feet to his death. I felt completely hollowed out when I read the email.
We listen to the clattering of the cover, the whispering of the snow.
Why aren’t we discussing the questions that so urgently need to be addressed? Instead, my mind keeps flipping back to Augustin’s death birds. The birds that supposedly carry the souls of fallen climbers from this world.
Augustin never really answered my question about whether he believed in that story.
They say that if you listen, you can hear their screams coming from the mountains at night.
I think about the alpine choughs on the col, with their shrill cries as they came to ascertain our arrival before beginning their descent into the valley. The one that landed, it haunts my exhausted mind. The way it fixed its angry, lidless black eyes on us. If that’s what’s in store for the soul, then death robs us of all that is human.
The warmth from our bodies and the still, stuffy air in my cocoon make me drowsy. To my astonishment, I feel myself slipping away into a haze. I fight the urge to sleep, which suddenly seems seriously perilous in this place. But my fatigue gets the best of me, and as I relentlessly drift over the edge of consciousness, the last thing I realize, brief but highly alarming, is that I am not alone in this twilight zone. Something is pressing against the outside of my sleeping bag, raking its way toward the tight hole that hides my face. And for a second, I can almost smell the musty odor of feathers and the stench of carrion it exudes.
??*
The silence wakes me up with a start. It’s as if a great force that had at first held me prisoner violently flings me out of my reverie and pops all the synapses in my brain. My eyelids fly open on total darkness. My eyes are gone, I think, the dream’s blind terror still swirling in my memory.
Then I feel the weight of the sleeping bag against my cheeks and understand where I am.
I sense that Augustin isn’t there before I see it. The familiar pressure of his body in the cramped bivi sack is gone. Panic erupts from deep within, and I struggle out of my sleeping bag, yank the claustrophobic hood up.
For a second, I don’t understand what I’m seeing, because it’s still light out and the surroundings are bathed in an unearthly orange-yellow glow. Was I asleep for such a short time? The wind is still raging. Eddying dark gray and purple-black cloud banks are still obscuring the valley mouth, but it has stopped snowing, and a sudden gap in the clouds reveals where we are. We’ve come further into the valley than we realized. I see that we’re in a rolling, rocky bed opposite a steep moraine bank. The blanket of snow has assumed the color of the disappearing sun, but the light lacks the richness and cold beauty of a normal sunset in the mountains. It has a feverishly pale sheen that imparts a feeble, sickly air to the surroundings.
“Augustin? Augustin!”
He is nowhere in sight. His backpack, his crampons, the stove, they’re all there, untouched. Where on earth is he? Why didn’t I notice him leaving? I look into the bleak northerly emptiness and thoughts of the unthinkable immediately start to haunt me. My vulnerability strikes me with terror. I grapple upright in order to look uphill behind the bivi boulder.
[Sam, how can you put an image into words that changes your life at a single glance? A single moment, rising on the mind’s horizon, that is so all-encompassing, that evokes so many frozen emotions and is so rich in monumental beauty and unimaginable horror, that any attempt at describing it would destroy it, annihilate it, render it formless, like the erosion of exposed landscape. Is it even possible?
Okay, well, let me try.]
It turns out that we have set up our bivouac very close to the lake. In fact, we have gone partially past it; the brook’s snowy bed curves toward the western basin and the lake is to our right, just slightly higher than our camp. Behind it, the glacier looms as a silent witness to our error. The tongue is twisted and fractured, causing hundreds of jagged cracks to form where the glacier and the moraine meet. Higher up, the wind blows up a ballet of spiraling cloud fragments and wisping powder snow—but higher still, there’s a gap.
Through it rises the Maudit—shockingly close, amazingly grand, ablaze in the setting sun’s dying light.
Its north face towers hundreds of yards above us, uncommonly dark, an impregnable fortress of majestic pillars that cast deep shadows in the intermediate grooves and are too steep for the snow to stick to. My god, what a mountain! The astonishing brightness of the evening light and the face’s proximity suck me in and induce the dizzying illusion that I’m falling. Or maybe it’s the mountain that is falling toward me, the cliff’s chaotic labyrinth collapsing over me. It takes my breath away, and I can’t help but stagger backwards, a few stumbling steps in my socks over the bivi sack. My gaze follows the razor-sharp crests high above. A perfect shape, crowned with improbable mushroom-shaped cornices hanging from its horned summits, the right one higher than the left. In the lee between them, the ice field, like an eye bleeding in the last of the evening sun.
This mountain, the Maudit, it is more phenomenal than a cathedral. It is a sanctum.
[I hope I don’t sound too New Age, Sam, but standing there at the foot of the Maudit, I can see right through to the mountain’s soul. I’m not religious. I don’t believe in destiny, in omens, in birds that carry the dead’s souls to another world. But I believe in a mountain’s soul, in the invisible power of the geological processes that pump life into earth’s mountain ranges. You can feel their souls when you climb their flanks. Gurus, monks, and prophets came down from the mountains and interpreted them as divine revelation, but you don’t need to be a spiritual seer to feel life in rock and ice. As a climber, you feel it anew every time: the significance of birth, life, and death spanning millions of years, during which the seasons tick by like our heartbeats.]