by Mark Helprin
According to Alessandro this was simply because people who lived in the mountains knew that all the truly great things had al ready been accomplished. They did not need to imagine ladders that would lead to heaven, or things of massive size that would astound the heart, because they had them in such profusion that it was difficult to get from town to town, and because of them the sun itself often was denied a chance to shine, or forced to break in gold through opaque ridges of ice and snow whiter than physics would allow.
At noon the scale of the landscape was shockingly apparent, and everything but the mountains seemed freakishly small. The very sky had relinquished a third of its volume to the thrones of rock and ice, and though the massif was half a day in the distance, it rose so high that Alessandro and Rafi felt as if they were standing within arm's reach of a tall garden wall.
No end was apparent to the silvery creases glinting amid folds of ox-blood-colored rock, to the shattered glaciers that poured from between spires and sheer walls, and to the meadows large enough to hold a city. Engraved upon the electrifying height and mass of the rock were inverse wells, steeples, and gleaming towers that echoed thunder and spun lightning like wool.
Alessandro and Rafi leaned back against their equipment, hands shading their eyes, heads tilted. After the train left, the sun went behind a mountain, and though they themselves were soon covered in cold shadow, the cathedrals ahead still shone.
THE FOLLOWING day they made two trips to their campsite at the top of a wide meadow, next to a wall of pines. On the first trip they carried their equipment, and on the second, ten days of provisions. They ate in the hotel restaurant before setting out in the afternoon. Ascending with their heavy frame packs was agony, and by the time they reached their camp it was dark. They left the packs leaning against a tree, and slept as if they had died.
The tent was big enough to stand up in, and they hung their climbing equipment from the ridge poles—ropes, slings, iron pins and chocks to drive into cracks in the rock, carabiners, ice axes, crampons, smoked glasses. Alessandro held aloft a sack of pitons and jangled them. "Many more people in the world hunt whales or train elephants than know how to use these," he said.
"So?" Rafi asked.
"More people are freaks in sideshows than know how to use these."
Rafi stared at him blankly.
"More people," Alessandro continued, undeterred, "have eaten dinner with the King of England."
"But the King of England has dinners for hundreds of people."
"That's true. However, he's been king for only a short time."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that we are more or less alone, and that the places we're going to are often places where no human being has ever been—ever, since the beginning of time. You'll feel it when you're there. It's different from anything you've ever felt."
The left side of the tent was Rail's, the right Alessandro's. Provisions and clothing were piled in a ridge down the center. They made a kitchen in the space in front of the tent, building a stone firebox and a table, and arranging sectioned logs as chairs. They got their water from a waterfall that was ejected horizontally from the mountain wall before it fell fifty meters into a rock cauldron perpetually filled with spray. The jet of water, as thick as a train, was so fast and powerful that they could stand next to it and see their reflections in its smooth wall. Not a drop left the confines of the ice-cold beam. To get water, they merely touched it with their fingers and bled a stream into their buckets.
"It's wasteful not to turn off the faucet when you're done," Rafi said as a million tons of water passed by.
The first night, they boiled dried beef, potatoes, mushrooms, and various greens, in the purest water of the world. They had carried up four bottles of beer, and these they drank with their soup as they looked at the lights of Barrenmatt. Except as suggested by a vague pink glow in the western sky, above a distant town, no other lights were visible. The stars were not yet out, the air was warm, and they were slightly drunk on the beer and the altitude. That day Alessandro had spent ten hours going over the equipment and its use.
"I can talk all I want," he said, swaying slightly in the dark. "We can sit for days, with you memorizing knots, technique, and rope handling, but in the first hour of climbing you'll learn more than anyone can tell you in a month—because your life will depend on the knots, the way you place a piton, and how you run the rope."
"Sometimes, Alessandro, you sound like a rabbi."
"I've never heard one. Do they sing?"
"Others sing."
"Aren't you afraid? Most people are terrified the night before they climb, although they call their fear anxiety. I breathe hard as I'm walking through the pastures to the base of the wall, but as soon as I cease to think of anything but the rock and the route up, I lose my fear."
"I'm not afraid," Rafi said.
"Why not?"
"If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today."
By ten o'clock they could hardly keep their eyes open. After boiling their pots and utensils clean, they stumbled into the tent and fell on their blankets.
Alessandro tried to lift his head to see the moonlight on the mountains that shone in the distance over the meadows and the great spaces of blank air, but he couldn't move. When his eyes closed, he forced them to open, but in two breaths they were closed again, and in another he was deep asleep.
THE NEXT day they climbed a hundred-meter wall. The base wasn't far from the waterfall, and they heard the roar of water below them and the sound of the wind whistling over the top of the rock far above. Rafi asked why they were going to carry oilskins. It would be hard enough to pull oneself up the face of the rock while bearing the weight of rope and iron.
"What if it rains?" Alessandro asked in turn. "What if the temperature drops, and a wind rises? You might be seventy-five meters up, with twenty-five to go. You can't afford to be too cold or too wet.
"But look at the sky!"
Alessandro studied the sky. A few matronly clouds were gliding across a field of blue, their origins beyond the cliff top unseen. "A huge thundercloud might be just beyond the rim," he said, still looking up. "Ten seconds from now we could be in a rain and lightning storm the likes of which you've never seen.
"What we're going to do is relatively simple," Alessandro said as he uncoiled one of the climbing-ropes. "I'll start to climb while you belay me from the ground. As I go up, I'll bang in a pin here and there, or set a chock in a crack. Then I put a runner on it, and clip a carabiner onto the runner. I pass the rope through the gate of the carabiner. Now the rope is anchored to the rock at that point, so, if I fall, I fall past it and the rope doubles over the carabiner: you would feel an upward pull. You'd let the rope slide around your body and through your hands, and you'd stop it gradually to break my fall.
"You see those ledges and trees? The first is about forty meters up, and the second about thirty more."
Two tiny splays of vegetation projected from what seemed to be sheer overhanging rock. Rafi looked dubious. "Trees?"
"Dwarf pines. The trunks are probably three times as thick as your arm, and can support the weight of fifty men. The roots are strong enough to split granite, and they penetrate far into the rock. The pine itself is sinewy and dense. These are the belay points we'll use today. They're easier than just using the rock. When I get to the first belay, I'll tie myself in and bring you up.
"As you ascend, you remove the pins I've driven and knock out the chocks. Unclip the carabiners and loop the runners over your head. Should you fall, you won't fall. I'll be holding you on a taut rope all the way up. When you join me at the belay ledge, you tie in to the tree, give me the stuff you've collected on your way, and off I go, repeating what we've just done. The space between belays is called a pitch. Three pitches, here," he said, looking up and shielding his eyes, "and we're at the top."
"What happens if you fall?"
"I can only fall twice the distance
of the length of the rope between my last setting of protection and the point where I start to fall. If the holds are poor, I'll be putting in protection frequently, so if I do fall, it won't be far. Then I gather my wits and begin to climb again, like a spider."
"And if you're injured or unconscious?"
"Lower me."
"The first tree is forty meters..."
Alessandro stepped back to re-estimate. It seemed that in the mountains his head was always bent back and he was always squinting. "More or less."
"The rope is fifty meters long. How am I going to lower you down to me? I would need forty more, or you'd be hanging in the air and I'd have no rope to play out."
"That's one of the reasons the second man carries another rope, the other being that the first man, by the time he gets to the belay point, may already be carrying the entire weight of the rope that's tied to him. Why make him carry two, especially when he's more exposed to falling because he isn't top-roped like the second man?"
"I would tie them together, then."
"In a fisherman's knot, a double fisherman's knot, if you please, before you take the first rope from around your waist, of course."
"It's an ingenious system," Rafi stated.
"It's a beautiful system," Alessandro said.
"The refinements are even better. For example, I don't tie the rope around my waist. Instead, I use some runners and attach myself to the rope with a figure-eight knot and a carabiner. And wait until you see how we rappel down. It's like flying."
"I hope this doesn't turn out to be like the cathedral, Alessandro."
"There were practically no holds at the cathedral. I couldn't drive any pins, and we had to climb in the dark."
"I know."
"And here no priests are going to run out to scream at us, because the Church didn't build these mountains, God did. I'm going to climb. Don't pull on the rope, or you'll pull me off the rock. Watch me. If I fall you'll see it before you feel it on the rope. You can be prepared for the uptake."
Rafi looked very serious.
"I'll see you up at the first tree." Alessandro stepped to the base of the wall and pushed a rack of carabiners and pitons around to his back. A wide crack went almost all the way to the first belay point. Halfway up, it disappeared at a series of ledges that looked like they might offer good holds. Then it resumed, tapering off a meter or so below the tree. The rock there was completely smooth. Rafi didn't know how Alessandro was going to get past it.
Alessandro started smoothly and slowly. At first he breathed hard and was conscious of the ground. Then, as he rose, he forgot about the ground, forgot about his breathing, and forgot about everything in the world except the route and his strategy for climbing it.
He stopped only to hammer in a piton after he had gone about ten meters. The crack was both wide and deep, it had many good handholds around the edges, and his momentum had carried him quickly and far.
"I'm putting in a pin here," he shouted as he hammered it into a narrow crack paralleling the larger one, "because the cracks getting more difficult and I'm high enough to want insurance." When the singing of the alpine hammer against the iron reached a very high pitch, Alessandro holstered it and clipped a carabiner through the hole in the piton. "I'm not using a runner here," he called down. "The crack is relatively straight, so even without a runner the rope will follow a vertical line. That's what you want: if it zigzags from place to place you get a lot of friction at the angles, which translates into weight as you pull the rope up after you. When your protection or the route itself goes to the left or right, you use a runner to stretch out to a center line where the rope can run unimpeded. Understand?"
"Yes!" Rafi called up.
Alessandro clipped the rope into the carabiner. "If I fall I can only fall twice the distance that I go from this piton. Climbing!" he shouted, and continued up after leaning out and tilting his head to see where he was going to go and what he was going to do to get there. The handholds became footholds, and, as he rose, everything ahead and above was a promise fulfilled.
Alessandro had been following a fissure into which he was able, when he wanted, to insert half his body from head to toe, after which he had simply to bend his knee and sit back, and he was completely wedged in, free to drive a piton, rest, or survey the route above. As the crack narrowed he had to turn his feet sideways, and he found himself searching the rock face alongside for handholds for his left hand as the right worked the main fissure. Even then, he could rest simply by letting his body lean to one side and torquing his feet solidly into the crack. He did this to put in a piton and, subsequently, five meters above it, while setting a chock in the narrow crack itself.
A chock was an iron bolt into which several holes had been drilled to make it lighter for a climber's use. Where the crack was narrow, or where he could slip it into a little hole and turn it so it was blocked, he could put a runner through it, attach a carabiner, and clip the carabiner around the rope. When the crack began to fade as he was coming up to the ledges, he set a chock and told Rafi what he had done.
Then he moved over the ledges, as if they were a ladder, to the beginning of the next crack. He put in a piton relatively early, and soon found himself almost at the top, about a meter below the tree.
The tree was very obliging. As little trees on rock walls often do, it dipped down in a U shape before it rose again, as if it were attempting to meet him. He was still an arm's length short of it.
The rock between Alessandro and the tree was completely smooth. From the ground, he had thought that the chances were good that he might find a handhold visible only from up close. It did not need to be too solid, as he required only that it help him pivot upward in one cavalier motion and leap for the tree.
The rock looked polished. "I'm a meter under the tree," he called down, "and the rock is as smooth as glass. I'm going to do something that's really out of order, but I have no choice. I hadn't planned to show you artificial climbing today. Now you'll get to see it."
He jammed his feet into the crack, held on with his left hand—thirty-five meters above the ground—and removed a piton from the rack. "I'm going to drive in a pin as high as I can." He moved his left hand up the crack until it no longer fit, and put the piton over it with his right hand, pushing it in until the tip held, and balancing it on his left hand's upturned index finger.
He delicately unholstered his hammer and tapped the head of the piton until he was able to drop his left hand to a more solid hold and swing hard at the piton, which went in and stopped at its neck, with the characteristic singing noise.
"It's solid," he said, testing it by hitting it sideways with the hammer. He holstered the hammer, removed a carabiner from the rack, clipped it through the eye of the piton, and attached the rope. "Now I'm protected, but I still have to get up, so I'll take another carabiner and clip it through." Then he took two runners and looped them together into what the French call an étrier, and affixed one end to the carabiner.
Grasping the piton, he climbed the two-step ladder until he was standing on the higher step, bending over in a bowed position so as to keep hold of the piton, which was now only a short distance from his left foot. He was so badly balanced that he didn't dare look up. Rafi held his breath.
In slow motion, Alessandro raised his right arm as high as he could, but it was still two hand-lengths away from the curve in the trunk of the tree. He turned his head upward just as slowly, stopped, and lifted his eyes to the top of their sockets so that, without further endangering his stance, he could see how far he had to go.
Then he simply stood up straight, as if he were standing on the floor of a cafe in Trastevere, and caught the tree like a trapeze artist. In two seconds he was sitting on the ledge, fussing with his equipment.
When he had tied himself to the tree, pulled up the slack in the rope, and passed the rope around his body into the belay position, he called out to Rafi: "Climb!"
The minute Rafi's hands touched the rock, h
e knew that everything had changed. The sun had come around the cliff now and the air was warmer, even hot. He could smell pine resin on the updrafts that brought the sound of the steadily thundering waterfall. The world and the blue sky were behind him, and he walked up the crack as if it had been a ladder. A shock ran through him and he feared to trust what he felt so strongly. He had not been born, it seemed, to be either a butcher or a lawyer, but to do this. The length of his arms and legs, the strength of his hands and fingers, and his extraordinary and newly discovered balance saw him up the first pitch.
When he wedged himself in to knock out Alessandro's well placed pins he did not shiver or shake the way new climbers often do, and he was happy all the way up. He didn't ask for advice, he needed no tension on the rope, he climbed twice as fast as Alessandro had expected, and at the stretch below the tree he absolutely astounded his teacher.
Instead of using the étrier and abandoning it on the piton, he knocked out the piton, racked it, and looked up.
"Now what are you going to do?" Alessandro asked. "I'll have to pull you up."
"No," Rafi said as he began to climb, using an almost imperceptible handhold. When his hands had moved as high as they could inside the narrow crack, he began to bring up his feet. Soon he had formed himself into a bow, with his hands and feet sharing the same nearly impossible hold. "No tension," he said as Alessandro looked on in amazement. Then, just as Alessandro had done, Rafi stood up, but in the inhospitable crack rather than in a solidly anchored étrier.