He’s right. Despite my fear, despite the storm, despite the fact that we may not be able to come down anymore in these conditions, I feel strong and want to continue to the summit. Whatever power is present here, it has got a hold on me too.
If you were to ask me to provide a route description for the Maudit, I wouldn’t be able to. My fear was too paralyzing and my excitement too liberating to form a clear recollection. I wouldn’t even venture to estimate the difficulty, because conditions on the mountain were bordering on epic. But it was the toughest climb I have ever done, and despite the influence of that strange, hypnotizing power surging through my body, at many times I remember thinking, I’m going to die here.
The most precarious moment I recall is when we traverse an overhanging and intimidating-looking rock pillar. Augustin has rounded it via perpendicular, ice-covered slabs and a twisting vein of blue ice on the north face. He now belays me up. Visibility is practically zero, but I’m still aware of the electrifying heights around me that seem to hollow out my stomach. Icicles hang from the rocks like a predator’s fangs. I try not to think about how vulnerable I am, and I surrender to the wall in a dreamy concentration of axe hammerings and power surges in my legs.
Bereft of solid ground beneath my feet, adrenaline rushes through my veins as lactic acid rapidly wears out my muscles. My breath comes in gusts and my calves tremble from the exertion. I feel more confidence in the security offered by the rope than in my own abilities. When the blue vein dead-ends, I slam my axe right through the treacherously thin ice curtain, and the scent of cordite bursts out of the rock under it. The impact shoots to my elbow and makes me lose my balance. Just in time, I manage to regain it. I don’t even have time to scream.
Increasingly panicked, I look up at what is waiting. The terrain forces me to search for delicate holds in slippery rock, into which I can hook my axe’s spike. I feel the front spikes of my crampons move—carrying my full weight in 0.1 inch of ice. If I rest now, I will waste energy and fall. But I can’t keep this up much longer. And Augustin has cleared this so easily! Didn’t even put in a screw for extra security. If he had fallen, he would have disappeared at least thirty yards into the north face. Am I such a wimp?
Smash! one, Smash! two, Smash! three steps higher. The spikes of my crampon scrape over rock and I fall. I see wind, I see ice flashing past, I see my axes swaying on my wrist straps. Then Augustin has locked off the rope to arrest the fall and I’m left suspended in my harness. It’s over before I realize it has begun.
No, it isn’t. Because the next moment I’m pulled up. I scrabble up the slab with the spikes of my crampons, vainly try to get a grip, then break the icicles off with my axes before I get staked right into them. They drop into the abyss like shattered glass.
Augustin is lending me a hand. It doesn’t take long before I’m past the outcrop and the incline eases out, allowing me to scramble over mixed terrain, up to his anchor. When Augustin sees my bewildered face, he bursts into whoops of laughter.
“Fuck, I was fit to drop,” I pant. “Thanks, man.”
[Was I aware right then that it’s literally impossible to pull a man’s weight up on a rope? I don’t know, Sam. Yet it happened.
Because Augustin was in a hurry.]
The next moment I recall, I’m alone. I don’t know where Augustin is. He’s gone ahead, unroped, to look at how the route proceeds, but he hasn’t come back. I don’t care. Somewhere deep inside me, an alarming fear flares up, because I know he’s gone beyond a state of confusion and his actions have now become dangerously reckless and irrational, but that feeling is dulled, doesn’t seem to matter.
The Maudit is my mountain, not his.
I feel its charge: it flows from the rocks through my fingers, as if a battery is buried under the mountain’s surface, crackling with static electricity. Never have I felt so strong, so resistant to the pounding machinery of time. It’s an overwhelming sense of individuality, of my own power. The high-voltage kick juices me up, as if I’m on speed.
And just as every mountain stands alone, I refuse to allow anyone to share it with me.
Maybe it was only a matter of several hours that I moved on like this, but it seemed timeless to me. No before, no after, only an endless pushing forward induced by that raw, elementary soulification that has animated my body. I don’t think about the rope buried in my backpack for a second, nor about the notorious reality of one misstep and you’re dead. Could I have stopped if I had become aware of what I was doing? Heck, I don’t want to stop. I don’t feel the Maudit; I am the Maudit. The mountain is a geological E-bomb.
How close I came to my own death I don’t know, but I think it was extremely touch and go. I’m scared to think what would have become of me if the possession, which was growing ever stronger during the climb, hadn’t suddenly let go of me on the summit. Because that’s what happened.
It felt like something alive, something almighty, something completely insane had caught sight of me for an instant . . . and then lost interest at the last minute.
??*
[I realized I was standing on the summit only when I had it in my hand. Literally. The Maudit’s summit is a two-by-five-inch piece of gneiss—the same piece of gneiss I was holding in my hand a couple of days ago when I woke up in the middle of the night in the corner of the hospital room. You know I always keep them as trophies: the top rock, the handful of snow I scoop from the summit, melt into a little plastic screw cap bottle, and pour into a glass flask at home. I sticker them; I label them. They tell the stories of my personal triumphs.
Once again, I ask myself how the summit ended up in my hand on the night of the disaster. I can’t explain it. The rock had to have been in the inside pocket of my Gore-Tex coat the whole time, and my parents were supposed to have brought it home along with the rest of my stuff. So how did it get here, to the AMC?
It’s a simple piece of rock, irrelevant to the mountain. That this of all rocks was forced to the surface in millions of years of rising continents is sheer coincidence. Yet I believe that it was my salvation. Because it has symbolic value to me. All the mountains whose summits I added to my collection lost their magnetism, after I conquered them.
Maybe that’s why picking up the Maudit’s summit somehow took the sting out of it—because I was immediately back in myself.]