Smoke wreathed round him. I saw him turn north and begin to climb.
With this absurd transition into the dimension of height began what must surely be the most extraordinary episode of the entire business. Lyall stalked away from me up the fell. Amazed, I shouted after him. When he ignored me, I could only follow: he may or may not have had suicidal intentions, but he was certainly mad; in either case, if only out of common humanity, I couldn’t just stand there and watch him go.
It might have been better if I had.
He made straight for Raw Pike, and then, his torso seeming to drift legless above the pall of white smoke that hung beneath the outcrop, bore west to begin a traverse which took us into the deep and difficult gullies between Whitegill Crag and Mill Gill. Here, he seemed to become lost for a while, and I gained on him.
He blundered about those stony vegetation-choked clefts like a sick animal, trying to scale waterslides or scrape his way up the low but steep rock walls. His shoes had fallen off his feet, and he was leaving a damp, urgent trail. He ignored me if I called his name, but he was quite aware of my presence, and took a patent delight in picking at his emotional scabs, real or imagined, whenever I got close enough to hear him. His voice drifted eerily down the defiles. The piano seemed to preoccupy him.
“I never broke it,” I heard him say, in a self-congratulatory tone, then: “Nowhere near it, Miss,” mumbled as part of a dialogue in which he took both parts. She didn’t believe him, of course, and he became progressively more sullen. Later, groping for a handhold three feet above his head, he burst out angrily, “You can tell him I won’t be responsible for the bloody things. Staff loss isn’t my problem.” His hold turned out to be a clump of shallow-rooted heather, which came out when he put his weight on it. He laughed. “Go and lick her arse then—”
In this way, he visited almost every period of his life. He met his wife down by the Thames, in a filthy March wind; later, they whispered to one another at night in his Holloway flat. He conjured up mutual acquaintances from Cambridge, and set them posturing like the dowdy flamingoes they had undoubtedly been. And once my own voice startled me, echoing pompously over the fells as part of some student dispute which must have seemed excruciatingly important at the time, and which I still can’t remember.
When he finally broke out on to the east bank of Mill Gill, he stared back at me for a moment as if reassuring himself that I was still there. He even nodded to me, with a sort of grim approval. Then he lurched unsteadily through the bracken to the ghyll itself and dropped his paperbacks into it one by one, looking over his shoulder each time to see if I was watching. He crouched there like a child, studying each bright jacket as it slipped beneath the surface of the water and was whirled away. His shoulders were moving, but I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying.
It was during the latter part of this unburdening that the earth began to shake again—and this time in earnest. I sensed rather than saw that energetic transition of the air. The whole sky pulsed, flickered with lightning, seemed to stabilize. Then, with an enormous rustling noise, the fell beneath my feet shifted and heaved, lifting into a long curved wave which raced away from me up the slopes to explode against the dark rock of Tarn Crag in a shower of small stones and uprooted bracken.
I tottered about, shouting, “Lyall! Lyall!” until a second, more powerful shock threw me off my feet and sent me rolling twenty or thirty feet down toward the road.
Mill Gill gaped. The last paperback vanished. A groan came up out of the earth. Abruptly, the air was full of loose soil and rock-chippings, mud and spray from the banks of the ghyll. Lyall stared up through it at the throbbing sky; spun round and set off up the path to Stickle
Tarn at a terrific rate, his long legs pumping up and down. Rocks blundered and rumbled round him—he brandished his fist at the hills. “Lyall, for God’s sake come back!” I begged, but my voice was sucked away into the filthy air, and all I could see of him was a dim untiring figure, splashing across the ghyll where Tarn Crag blocks the direct route.
I put my head down into the murk and scrambled upward. Black water vomited suddenly down the ghyll, full of dead sheep and matted vegetation. Through the spray of a new waterfall I had a glimpse of Lyall waving his arms about and croaking demented challenges at a landscape that changed even as he opened his mouth. Twice, I got quite close behind him; once, I grabbed his arm, but he only thrashed about and shouted “Bugger off home, Egerton!” over the booming of the water.
Five hundred feet of ascent opened up the gully and spread Stickle Tarn before us, the color of lead: fifty acres of sullen water simmering in its dammed-up glacial bowl. Up there on the 1,500-foot line, out of the confines of the ghyll, it was quieter and the earth seemed less agitated. But the dam was cracked; a hot wind rumbled through the high passes and gusted across the cirque; and up out of the black screes on the far bank of the tarn there loomed like a threat the massive, seamed face of the Borrowdale Volcanics—
Pavey Ark lowered down at us, crawling with boulder slides and crowned with heat-lightning: the highest sheer drop in the Central Fells, four hundred and eighty million years old—impassive, unbending, orogenetic. A constant stream of material was pouring like fine dust from the bilberry terraces at its summit two thousand feet above sea level, crushed volcanic agglomerate whirling and smoking across the face; while, down by the water, larger rocks dislodged from the uneasy heights bounced a hundred feet into the air in explosions of scree.
Lyall stood stock-still, staring up at it.
Beside him, the dam creaked and flexed. A ton of water spilled over the parapet and roared away down Mill Gill. He paid it not the slightest attention, simply stood there, drenched and muddy, moving his head fractionally from side to side as he traced one by one the scars of that horrific cliff, like a man following a page of print with his index finger: Great Gully, unclimbable without equipment, Gwynne’s Chimney, Little Gully, and, tumbling from the western pinnacle to the base of East Buttress, the long precipitous grooves and terraces of Jack’s Rake.
He was looking for a way up.
“Lyall,” I said, “haven’t you come far enough?”
He shrugged. Without a word, he set off round the margin of the tarn.
I’m convinced that following him further would have done no good: he had been determined on this course perhaps as far back as Cambridge, certainly since his crisis of self-confidence in the cottage. Anyway, my foot had become unbearably painful: it was as much as I could do to catch up with him halfway round the tarn, and, by actually grabbing the tail of his jacket, force him to stop.
We struggled stupidly for a moment, tottering in and out of the warm shallows—the Ark towering above us like a repository of all uncommitted Ordovician time. Lyall disengaged himself and ran off a little way. He put his head on one side and regarded me warily, chest heaving.
Then he nodded to himself, returned, and, keeping well out of my reach, said quite amiably, “I’m going up, Egerton. It’s too late to stop me, you know.” Something detached itself from the cliff and fell into the tarn like a small bomb going off. He spun round, screaming and waving his fist. “Leave me alone! Fuck off!” He watched the water subside. He showed his teeth. “Listen, you bastard,” he said quietly: “Why don’t you just chuck yourself in that?” And he pointed to the torrent rumbling over the dam and down Mill Gill. “For all the help you’ve ever been to me, you might as well—”
He began to walk away. He stopped, tore at his hair, made an apologetic gesture in my direction. His face crumpled, and the Lyall I had beaten up in the living room of his own house looked out of it. “I can’t seem to stop going up, Egerton,” he whispered, “I can’t seem to stop doing it—”
But when I stepped forward, he shook with laughter.
“That got you going, you bloody oaf!” he gasped. And he stumbled off toward the screes.
It really would have done no good to go with him. Once or twice on the long walk back to the dam, I actua
lly turned and began to follow him again. But it was useless by then, distance and the Ark had made of him a small mechanical toy. I called for him to wait, but he couldn’t have heard me; in the end, I made my way up the northern slopes of Tarn Crag (I had to cross the dam to do it—I waited for a lull, but even so my feet were in six inches of fast water as I went over, and my skin crawled with every step) and from there watched his inevitable ascent.
He crabbed about at the base of the Great Gully for a while, presumably looking for a way up; when this proved impractical, he made a high easterly traverse of the screes and vanished into the shadow of East Buttress: to reappear ten minutes later, inching his way up Jack’s Rake—an infinitely tiny, vulnerable mote against the face.
I didn’t really imagine he would do it. God knows why I chose that moment to be “sensible” about him. I sat down and unlaced my boots, petulantly determined to see him through what was after all a rather childish adventure, and then say nothing about it when the cliff itself had sent him chastened away. There was so little excuse for this that it seems mad now, of course: the Ark was shaking and shifting, the very air about it groaned and rang with heat; St. Elmo’s fire writhed along its great humped outline. How on earth I expected him to survive, I don’t know.
He was invisible for minutes at a time even on the easy stretch up to the ashtree at the entrance of Rake End Chimney, inundated by that curtain of debris blowing across the sheer walls above him. He tried confusedly to scale the chimney; failed; trudged doggedly on up, the temperature rising as he went. A smell of dust and lightning filled the air. Negotiating the fifty-degree slope of the second pitch, he was forced to cling to the rock for nearly half an hour while tons of rubble thundered past him and into the tarn below. He should have been crushed; he must have been injured in some way, for it took him almost as long to complete fifteen yards of fairly simple scrambling along the Easy Terrace.
Perhaps I remembered too late that Lyall was a human being; but from that point on, I could no longer minimize the obsession that had driven him up there. When some internal rupture of the cliff flooded the channels above him and turned the Rake into a high-level drainage culvert, I could hear only that despairing mumble in the cottage at night, the voice of his wife; when he windmilled his arms against the rush of the water, regained his balance and crawled on up, insensate and determined, I bit my lip until it bled. Perhaps it’s never too late.
In some peculiar way the Ark too seemed to respond to his efforts: two thousand feet up, spidering across the Great Gully and heading for the summit wall, he moved into quietude; the boulder slides diminished, the cliff stood heavy and passive, like a cow in heat. Down below, on Tarn Crag, the earth ceased to tremble. Stickle Tarn calmed, and lay like a vat of molten beryl, reflecting the vibrant, acid sky; there were no more shadows, and, when I took off my shirt to dip it in the Tarn Crag pool, I felt no movement of the air. Hundreds of small birds were rustling uncomfortably about in the heather; while up above the blind, blunt head of Harrison Stickle, one hawk wheeled in slow, magnificent circles.
Twenty minutes after his successful negotiation of the Great Gully intersection, Lyall crossed the summit wall. There I lost him for a short period. What he did there, I have no clue. Perhaps he simply wandered among the strange nodulate boulders and shallow rock pools of the region. But if any transition took place, if his sour and ludicrous metaphysic received its final unimaginable blessing, it must have come there, between summit wall and summit cairn, between the cup and the lip, while I fretted and stalked below.
All this aside: suddenly, the peaks about me flared and wavered ecstatically; and he was standing by the cairn—
He was almost invisible: but I can imagine him there, with his arms upraised, his raw wrists poking out of the sleeves of his tweed jacket: no more unengaging or desperate, no stranger than he had ever been among the evening mists of Cambridge or the broken milk machines of Holloway: except that, now, static electricity is playing over him like fire, and his mouth is open in a great disgusted shout that reaches me quite clearly through the still, haunted air—
For a moment, everything seemed to pause. The sky broadcast a heat triumphant—a long, high, crystalline song, taken up and echoed by summit after summit, from Wetherlam and the Coniston Old Man, from Scafell Pike and the unbearable resonant fastnesses of Glaramara, never fading. For a moment, Lyall stood transfigured, perched between his own madness and the madness of an old geography. Then, as his cry died away to leave the cry of the sky supreme, a series of huge cracks and ruptures spread out across the cliff face from beneath his feet; and, with a sound like the tearing of vast lace, the whole immense facade of Pavey Ark began to slide slowly into the tarn beneath.
Dust plumed half a mile into the air; on a mounting roar the cliff, like an old sick woman, fell to its knees in the cirque; the high bilberry terraces poised themselves for a long instant, then, lowering themselves gently down, evaporated into dust. Millions of tons of displaced water smashed the dam and went howling down Mill Gill, crashing from wall to wall; to spill—black and invincible, capped with a dirty grey spume—across the valley and break like a giant sea against the lower slopes of Oak Howe and Side Pike. Before the Ark had finished its weary slide, the valley road was no more, the New Hotel and Side House were rubbish on a long wave—and that pit of ashes, Lyall’s house, was extinguished forever.
I watched the ruin without believing it. I remember saying something like, “For God’s sake, Lyall—” Then I turned and ran for my life over the quaking crag, east toward the safety of Blea Rigg and the fell route to an Ambleside I was almost frightened to reach. As I went, an ordinary darkness was filtering across the sky; a cool wind sprang up; and there were rain clouds already racing in from the Irish Sea along a stormy front.
Even allowing for the new unreliability of the press, esoteric explanations of the Great Langdale earth movement—activity renewed among the Borrowdale Volcanics after nearly five hundred million years; the unplanned landing of some enormous Russian space probe—seem ridiculous to me. Beyond the discovery of that poor woman, there were no witnesses other than myself in the immediate area. Was Lyall, then, responsible for the destruction of Pavey Ark?
It seems incredible: and yet, in the face of his death, insignificant. He carried his own entropy around with him, which makes him seem monstrous, perhaps; I don’t know. He believed in an executive misery, and that should be enough for any of us. It hardly matters to me now. Other events swept it away almost immediately.
As I stumbled through the dim, panicky streets of Ambleside in the aftermath of the earthquake, the Patriotic Front was issuing from dusty suburban drill halls and Boy Scout huts all over the country; and by noon England, seventy years too late, was taking her first hesitant but heady steps into this century of violence. Grouped about the warden’s radio in the still, stupefied night, we could have guessed at something of the sort. I understand now why the Durham students were so affected: students have suffered more than most as the Front tightens its political grip.
In dreams, I blame Lyall for that, too; equate the death of reason with the collapse of Pavey Ark; and watch England crawl past me over and again in the guise of a burnt woman on her desperate journey to the head of a valley that turns out every time to be impassive and arid. But awake I am more reasonable, and I have a job at the new sports shop in Chamonix. It’s no hardship to sell other climbers their perlon and pitons—although the younger ones will keep going up alone, against all advice. Like many of the more fortunate refugees I have been allowed to take a limited French nationality; I even have a second-class passport, but I doubt if I shall ever go back.
Walking about the town, I still hate to look up, in case the cruel and naked peaks surprise me from between the housetops: but the pain of that wound is at least explicable, whereas Lyall—
Everyone who ever met Lyall contributed in some small way to his death. It might have been averted perhaps, if, in some Cambridge mist of long ago,
I had only come upon the right thing to say; and I behaved very badly toward him later: but it seems as futile to judge myself on that account as to be continually interpret g and re terpreting the moment at which I was forced to realize that one man’s raw and gaping self-concern had brought down a mountain.
And I prefer to picture Stickle Tarn not as it looked from the 1,600-foot contour during Lyall’s final access to rage and despair, but as I remember it from my Cambridge days and before—a wide, cold pool in the shadow of an ancient and beautiful cliff, where on grey windy days a seabird you can never identify seems always to be trawling twenty feet above the water in search of something it probably can’t even define to itself.
The Roaches
THOMAS M. DISCH
Miss Marcia Kenwell had a perfect horror of cockroaches. It was an altogether different horror than the one which she felt, for instance, toward the color puce. Marcia Kenwell loathed the little things. She couldn’t see one without wanting to scream. Her revulsion was so extreme that she could not bear to crush them under the soles of her shoes. No, that would be too awful. She would run, instead, for the spray can of Black Flag and inundate the little beast with poison until it ceased to move or got out of reach into one of the cracks where they all seemed to live. It was horrible, unspeakably horrible, to think of them nestling in the walls, under the linoleum, only waiting for the lights to be turned off, and then . . . No, it was best not to think about it.
Every week she looked through the Times hoping to find another apartment, but either the rents were prohibitive (this was Manhattan, and Marcia’s wage was a mere $62.50 a week, gross) or the building was obviously infested. She could always tell: there would be husks of dead roaches scattered about in the dust beneath the sink, stuck to the greasy backside of the stove, lining the out-of-reach cupboard shelves like the rice on the church steps after a wedding. She left such rooms in a passion of disgust, unable even to think till she reached her own apartment, where the air would be thick with the wholesome odors of Black Flag, Roach-It, and the toxic pastes that were spread on slices of potato and hidden in a hundred cracks which only she and the roaches knew about.
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