There, as I breathlessly gaze up at the Maudit, I experience the immense power of that life, and set against it, I perceive my own story as a grain of sand in the palm of my hand. It is completely overpowering, it is stupefying and overwhelming, and it is terrifying at the same time.
And if that were all, you could say I had some kind of mystic, transcendent experience. Some sort of insight inspired by having faced nature and the immensity of her dimensions. But there’s more, something that excites a terrible premonition deep inside me.
You know it as a climber; this “soulification” gives every mountain its own specific character. Mont Blanc is a sleeping giant. If you observe its massif and satellite peaks from the slopes above Geneva, you can even discern a head in it. Gran Paradiso is a gentle old lady. She admits hundreds of people to her snow-white flanks every day. Zinalrothorn is a young soul, rough around the edges, who viciously bares his teeth, but that’s just a recalcitrant child’s bravado.
As a climber, you connect briefly with that soul, and you make an agreement with it . . . but it’s not a friendship. The mountain lets you in and the mountain lets you out, if it is well-disposed toward you. In the evening, you look over your shoulder one last time at the summit at the far end of the valley. You nod to each other in mutual respect—you got away with it this time. But you never forget that the mountain will always have the upper hand. Scorn it for even an instant and it will strike back mercilessly.
As I look at the Maudit, I realize this mountain’s soul is old and dangerous. I see it as an evil, dark blot. A cancer spreading over the valley. I suddenly become dead scared.
We are unwelcome here. I can feel it all over.
“Augustin!” I shout, as loud as I can. I listen tensely for his reply, but the valley answers only with a ghostly echo that is blown away in the intensifying wind.
Then I see him.
About eighty yards ahead, a natural embankment stretches all the way out to the lake. On it, silhouetted against the decor of the gaping mountain face, sits Augustin. Motionless, with his back to me. Staring up at the peak. The scene I am witnessing seems to be proceeding in extreme, silent slow motion.
As on the Maudit’s highest flanks, a layer of fine powder snow has gathered on Augustin’s hood, his shoulders, and in the folds of his coat, as if he’d been outside in the storm for hours. And just as the snow, spit by the icy wind from the highest crests, swirls in a cloud of ice particles, the snow swirls up from Augustin, too, perfectly mirroring the mountain.
Augustin and the Maudit: it’s like elves are dancing around them. A whirl of light borne on the music of the wind.
[If I ever believed in souls, Sam, it was then.] Not daring to breathe, I watch as, riding the spiraling snow, they break free—Augustin’s soul and the mountain’s soul. They commence their enchanting courtship, rising into the red sky. They make love. They become one.
I only barely recall putting on my shoes or grabbing stones to weigh down the bivi sack, but that’s what I must have done. On stiff legs I follow a trail of snow-covered boulders. When I look up, the magical scene has dissolved. The day is coming to an end, the mountain is shrouded in shadows.
Augustin is still there, as motionless as before, but the glow is gone, the snow is no longer swirling. Now he is sitting in the dark.
“Augustin. Hey, Augustin.”
I climb the moraine and approach him warily. I don’t want to startle him. The wind has erased Augustin’s footprints in the snow. How long has he been out here? I wonder. When I reach him and kneel before him, his face is lost in the shadow of his hood.
But I can see his eyes, the Maudit’s horned summit reflected in their feverish luster.
I say his name again, but Augustin keeps staring inexorably at the mountain, as if it has him completely in its power. I feel a wave of nausea when I see that his eyes aren’t blinking, not even from the wind blowing against his corneas. I take off my glove liners and snap my fingers in his face. The spell appears to be broken. He looks at me, but I still have the feeling that he doesn’t see me, that he’s staring right through me at something only he can see.
“There are holes in the ice,” he says, and I think, We shouldn’t be here. Even the death birds have gone away.
“Augustin, hey man, quit being so freaky, okay?”
I get the sudden urge to see his face. Without his face, with only those floating, possessed eyes, it could be anyone sitting there.
As I reach my hands out to carefully take off his hood, Augustin says, “Augustin ist tot.”
Even someone who speaks as little German as I do knows what that means. Dead? My guts turn, and I imagine that when I remove his hood there will be nothing underneath it, only the empty abyss of a crevasse.
“Augustin, cut it out. What are you doing out here in the cold? How long have you been sitting there?”
Just before my fingers touch the edge of his hood, he springs up. The force of his revival startles me, and I seem to sense something invisible shooting past me, something with the pulling force of profound depths.
“I think it would be best to take the east ridge,” he says. He gestures to the jagged left skyline. “I think we can access it via the ribs or through the couloir back there, if it’s in any condition. I think that’s the least difficult route. We’ll have a better view in the morning, but I don’t want to wait till first light.”
His voice sounds strangely toneless, and it takes a while before I realize that he’s talking about climbing the Maudit. The concept seems so preposterous to me, I can hardly believe it. After what I just saw, after my epiphany, we’re supposed to attempt climbing up those flanks? Us? The arrogance; the hubris! Are we to take on the wrath of a god?
“Augustin, listen . . .”
“Or do you want to try the west ridge? Looks steep, but it’s okay with me if you think—”
“No way are we going up there, not today and not tomorrow.”
“What do you mean?” For the second time in a short while, I’m startled. His words are venomous, caustic. Augustin isn’t himself. Something about this situation is very wrong, and I can’t put my finger on it.
His coat was completely covered in snow. That means he must have been out here long before the storm started to wane. When you couldn’t see jack shit. How did he even know the embankment was here?
I have to clear my throat before my voice can say out loud what I’m thinking in my head. “I think it’s best that we go down, Augustin—”
“Are you nuts?”
“And not tomorrow morning, but now. We can use the last of the light. After that, we have our headlamps. The weather cleared up some now, and if we follow the brook we won’t get lost, even with the dark and the snow.”
But that’s what you thought on the way up. Until the valley decided to screw with your minds. Who says it won’t do it again if you try to escape?
Augustin’s voice sounds soft and icy, like glacial wind. “Go ahead if you like. I’m going up.”
“Don’t be an asshole. You know how precarious that terrain is. Can’t you see? You have no idea what you’ll find up there or how you’ll come down.”