by Rene Daumal
So we scoured the area to purchase supplementary food, lanterns, and local clothing. These, although very simple, were much superior to ours, the result of the settlers’ long experience. At specialty shops we found all sorts of dried and preserved food that would be extremely valuable to us. We ended by leaving behind one thing after another, including the portable kitchen gardens Beaver had invented. After a day of dismal hesitation, he burst out laughing and declared that they were “stupid contraptions that would only have given us grief.” He hesitated longer over the respiratory devices and the self-heated clothing. Finally, we decided to leave them, too, even if it meant coming back to get them for a new attempt if necessary. We left all these objects behind in the care of our crewmen, who would transport them to the yacht where the four men would settle in after our departure, leaving the house free for new arrivals.
The question of the respiratory devices had been heatedly debated among us. Should we count on bottled oxygen or acclimatization for tackling high altitudes? Recent expeditions in the Himalayas had not solved the problem, in spite of the brilliant success achieved by the partisans of acclimatization. Besides, our devices were much more refined than the equipment used on those expeditions. They were not only much lighter, but should have been more efficient as well, because they provided the mountaineer not with pure oxygen but a carefully dosed mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide; the presence of this gas, stimulating to the respiratory centers, should have allowed a considerable reduction in the amount of oxygen required. But as we reflected on the problem and gathered information on the nature of the mountains we would have to climb, it became increasingly clear that our expedition would be long, very long; it would surely take years. Our oxygen supplies would not be sufficient, and we had no means of recharging them up there. Sooner or later, we would have to leave them behind, and better to do it right away so as not to delay the acclimatization process. We were assured, besides, that the only way to survive in the higher regions of these mountains was to become progressively accustomed to the altitude, and we were told that the human organism modifies and adapts itself to an extent that we could not yet imagine.
On the advice of our head porter, we exchanged our skis, which he told us would hamper us on uneven terrain, for a species of narrow snowshoes, which were pliable and covered with the skin of a kind of marmot. They make it easier to walk in wet snow, of course, but also to slide quickly down the slopes in a descent; folded up they fit easily into our rucksacks. We wore our climbing shoes to start out, but took along the native moccasins made of “tree leather,” a kind of bark which, when worked, resembles cork and rubber, to wear later. This substance holds the heat in very well, and as it is encrusted with silica, it adheres to ice almost as well as to rocks. We could then dispense with crampons, which are so dangerous at the very highest altitudes because their straps, binding the feet, reduce the circulation of the blood and encourage frostbite. On the other hand, we kept our ice axes, excellent tools that from now on could hardly be more refined than the scythe, for example, as well as our picks, our silk ropes, and a few very simple pocket instruments: compasses, altimeters, and thermometers.
We were grateful, after all, for the rain that allowed us to make so many useful adjustments to our gear. We walked a great deal each day under the downpour to gather information, provisions, and various supplies. And thanks to this our legs got used to functioning again after our long voyage.
It was during these rainy days that we began to call each other by our first names. This was primed by our established custom of saying “Hans” and “Karl,” and this small change was not a simple effect of intimacy. If we now called each other Judith, Renée (my wife), Pierre, Arthur, Ivan, and Theodore (my first name), it had another meaning for each of us. We were beginning to shed our old personalities. Just as we were leaving our encumbering equipment on the coast, we were also preparing to leave behind the artist, the inventor, the doctor, the scholar, the literary man. Beneath their old disguises, men and women were already peaking out. Once more, Pierre Sogol set us an example—without knowing it, and without suspecting that he was becoming a poet. He told us one evening, when we gathered for a meeting on the beach with the head porter and the donkey-driver:
“I have led you here, and I have been your leader. Here I relinquish my general’s helmet, which was a crown of thorns for the image I had of myself. In the untroubled depths of my memory of myself, a little child is awakening and makes the old man’s mask sob. A little child who is searching for a father and mother, who is searching with you for help and protection; protection from his pleasure and his dreams, and help to become what he is without imitating anyone.”
As he spoke, Pierre had been digging in the sand with the end of his stick. Suddenly he stared, crouched down, and picked something up—something that shone like a tiny dewdrop. It was a peradam, a very small one, but his first peradam and ours. The head porter and the donkey driver grew pale and opened their eyes wide. Both of them were old men who had tried the ascent and been discouraged over the matter of currency.
“Never,” said the first, “never in human memory has one been found so far down! On the shore itself! Perhaps it’s just luck. But perhaps we are being given a new sign of hope? To set off once again?”
A hope, which he had thought dead, burned anew in his heart. One day the porter would take to the road again. The donkey-driver’s eyes shone, too, but with envy.
“Luck,” he said, “Pure luck! No one will get me up there again!”
Judith said, “We should all make ourselves some little pouches to wear around our necks for carrying the peradams we’ll find.”
This was indeed an indispensable foresight. The rain had stopped the evening before, the sun had begun to dry the trails. We were determined to leave the following day at dawn. This was our last preparation before going to bed: each of us, with great care, manufactured a pouch for the peradams to come.
[CHAPTER 5]
The night was still settled around us at the base of the fir trees, whose tops traced their high scrim on the pearl-colored sky. Then, low between the trunks, a reddish glow caught fire and several of us saw the sky opening to the faded blue of our grandmothers’ eyes. Little by little the spectrum of greens emerged from the black, and now and then the fragrance of a beech tree refreshed the odor of resin and enhanced the scent of mushrooms. With the voices of rattles, brooks, silvery chimes, and flutes, the birds exchanged their morning greetings. We went on in silence. The caravan was long, with our ten donkeys, the three men leading them, and our fifteen porters. Each of us carried his portion of provisions for the day and his personal belongings. Some of us had rather heavy personal baggage to carry in our hearts, and in our minds as well. We had quickly recovered our mountaineer’s slow, steady stride appropriate at the outset if you want to go a long distance without tiring. While walking, I went over in my mind the events that had led me there—from my article in the Revue des Fossiles and my first meeting with Sogol. The donkeys were, happily, trained not to walk too fast; they reminded me of the donkeys in Bigorre, and I found strength in watching the supple play of their muscles unbroken by useless contractions. I thought of the four quitters who had excused themselves from accompanying us. How far away they were, Julie Bonasse, Emile Gorge, Cicoria, and the good Alphonse Camard with his hiking songs! As if mountaineers ever sing as they walk. Yes, we sing once in a while, after a few hours of climbing over fallen rocks or hiking on the turf, but each man for himself, clenching his teeth. I, for example, sang: “tyak, tyak, tyak, tyak” —one “tyak” per step; on the snow, at high noon, this became: “tyak, chi chi tyak!” Someone else might sing: “stoom, di di stoom!” or: “gee … pof!” This is the only kind of mountaineers’ hiking song I know.
We could no longer see the snowy summits but only wooded slopes interspersed with limestone cliffs, and the rushing torrent at the bottom of the valley to the right, through the clearings in the forest. At the last turn of
the path, the marine horizon, which had continued to rise with us, had disappeared. I munched a piece of biscuit. The donkey’s tail chased a cloud of flies into my face. My companions were also pensive. All the same, there was something mysterious in the ease with which we had reached the continent of Mount Analogue; and then, we seem to have been expected. I supposed it would all be explained later. Bernard, the head porter, was as pensive as we were, but less often distracted. It is true that our attention was constantly captured by a blue squirrel or a red-eyed ermine standing like a column in the middle of an emerald clearing splashed with orange agaric, or by a herd of unicorns, which we had first taken for chamois, that leaped across a treeless outcropping on the other side, or the flying lizard that hurled itself ahead of us from one tree to the next, its teeth chattering. Except for Bernard, all the men we had hired carried in their packs a small horn bow and a bundle of short, featherless arrows. At the first significant halt, a little before noon, three or four of them went off and came back with several partridges and a kind of big Indian pig. One said to me: “We should take advantage while hunting is allowed. We will eat them this evening. Higher up, no more game!”
The path left the forest and descended by brightly sunlit clearings to the rushing torrent that sped along, surging loudly as we forded it. We raised clouds of iridescent butterflies from the humid bank, then began a long trek across exposed stones. We came back to the right bank, where an airy larch forest began. I was sweating, and I was singing my hiking song. We seemed to grow more and more pensive, but in fact we were less and less. Our path climbed over a high rocky ridge and turned to the right, where the valley narrowed into a deep gorge, then pitilessly twisted through a steep scrub of junipers and rhododendrons. We arrived at last in a mountain pasture drenched with countless streams where small, plump cows were grazing. Twenty minutes’ walk through the soaking grass brought us to a rocky plateau shaded by small junipers, where we found several structures of dry stone crudely covered with branches; this was our first staging area. We still had two or three hours of daylight ahead of us to settle in. One of the shelters was to serve as a storage space for the baggage, the other as a dormitory—there were planks and clean straw, and an oven made of large stones. A third shelter, to our great surprise, was a dairy: jars of milk, slabs of butter, runny cheeses seemed to be waiting for us. Was the place inhabited? Bernard’s first concern had been to order our men to put down their bows and arrows in the corner of the dormitory that was reserved for such things, their slingshots too, for several of them were armed. Then he explained it to us:
“It was still inhabited this morning. Someone must always be here to tend the cows. Besides, it is a law that they will explain to you up there: no camp must ever remain unoccupied for more than a day. The previous caravan probably left one or two men here and is awaiting our arrival to go on. They saw us coming from a distance and left immediately. We’ll let them know we’ve arrived, and at the same time I’ll show you where the trail up the Base begins.”
We followed him for several minutes along a wide, rocky ledge to a platform that allowed us to see the head of the valley. It was a kind of irregular oval, into which the gorge emptied out, surrounded by the high rock walls of the summit from which, here and there, hung the tongues of glaciers. Bernard lit a fire, threw on some damp grass, then looked attentively in the direction of the oval. At the end of a few minutes, from a great distance, came an answering signal, a thin white plume of smoke hardly distinguishable from the slow mist of the waterfalls.
Man becomes highly alert in the mountains to any sign indicating the presence of his peers. But this distant smoke was particularly moving to us, this greeting addressed to us by strangers climbing ahead of us on the same path. For from now on the path linked our fate to theirs, even if we should never meet. Bernard knew nothing about them.
From where we stood we could follow with our eyes nearly half the second day’s journey. We had decided to take advantage of the fine weather and leave the following morning. Perhaps we would be lucky enough to find our guide at the Base that very day; but perhaps, too, we would have to wait for his return from another trip, long or short. The eight of us would leave with all the porters but two, who would stay behind to tend the cows, while the donkeys and their drivers would descend once more to take on new supplies. We calculated that in eight trips the donkeys could transport all the necessary provisions and clothing from the house on the coast to Prés-mouillés (Damp-Meadow)—the name of the first staging area. During this time, we would shuttle back and forth with the porters between Prés-mouillés and the Base; we would have to make at least thirty trips, with supplies weighing ten to fifteen kilos. Taking into account the likelihood of some bad weather, this would take us at least two months, and we would thus have accumulated at the Base enough to subsist for two years. But two months of cow pastures!—animal is something like a cross between a field mouse and a marmot. He was coming to warm himself in the first rays of the sun. With a well flung stone I hit his head, fetched him, cooked him on a fire of rhododendrons, and devoured the tough meat. With regained strength I slept an hour or two, then I hastened down to Port-des-Singes, where my wife, my son, and I celebrated our reunion after such a long absence. I could not, however, persuade them to come back up with me again that year.
“One month later, as I was about to take the mountain trail again, I was called before a tribunal of guides to answer for the murder of that old rat. How they had learned about the business I don’t know. The law is inflexible: I was forbidden access to the mountains above Présmouillés for three years. After these three years I could ask to leave again with the first caravan on the condition, however, that I repair the damage my act may have caused. It was a hard blow. I was forced to take up my life once more, temporarily, at Port-des-Singes. With my brother and my son I devoted myself to agriculture and animal husbandry in order to furnish provisions for the caravans. We also organized companies of porters whose services could be hired as far as the forbidden zone. Thus, while earning our living, we retained our connection with the mountain people. Soon, my brother, too, was eaten up with the desire to leave, with that need for the heights that gets into your blood like a poison. But he decided he would not leave without me and wanted to wait for my sentence to expire.
“At last the day came! I proudly carried with me in a cage a fat rock rat whom I’d easily captured and would free as I passed the place where I had killed the other one—since I had to ‘repair the damage.’ Alas, the extent of the damage was only about to be revealed. As we were leaving Prés-mouillés, at sunrise, a terrifying noise rang out. The entire slope of the mountain, which was not yet cut through by the great waterfall, crumbled, burst, exploded into an avalanche of stones and mud. A cataract of water carrying blocks of ice and rock fell from the tongue of the glacier that dominated this slope, and hollowed out centuries. Several of my ancestors left for the mountains and became guides. But my parents, afraid to see me leave as well—I was their oldest son—did everything they could to keep me from answering the call of the mountains. To this end they pushed me to marry very young. Down below I have a wife whom I love and a grown son; he could do the climb now, and she could too. After my parents’ death—I was thirty-five years old—I suddenly saw the emptiness of my life. What then? Would I, too, go on raising my son so that he in turn would perpetuate the line, and so on? What for? I am not very good at expressing myself, you see, and at that time I was even less so. But I felt squeezed by the throat. One day I met a high altitude guide, in transit at Port-des-Singes, who had come to buy provisions from me. I pounced on him, shook him by the shoulders, and I could only shout at him: ‘why, why?’
“He answered me gravely: ‘It’s true. But now you should think: ‘how?’ He spoke to me at length that day and the days following. At last he gave me a date for the next spring—it was autumn then—at the chalets of the Base, where he would form a caravan in which he would include me. I was able to convince my
brother to come with me. He, too, wanted to know why, and wanted to leave the confines of the lower regions behind.
“Our caravan of twelve people worked well and managed to settle in at the first camp for the winter. Spring came again, and I decided to go back down to Port-des-Singes to see my wife and my son in the hope of preparing them to accompany me. Between the chalets of the Base and this place where we are, I was caught in a terrifying torment of wind and snow that lasted three days. The trail was cut in twenty places by avalanches. I had to bivouac two nights running without sufficient food and fuel. When the weather cleared, I was a hundred paces from here. I stopped, exhausted with hunger and fatigue. At this period, the livestock had not yet climbed as far as Prés-mouillés; I would have found nothing to eat there. Then, on the slope of fallen rocks in front of me, I saw an old rock rat come out of his hole. This the younger members of the expedition were a little impatient at the prospect.
We could scarcely talk up there on our platform because of a high and powerful waterfall that thundered down a few hundred meters away. A footbridge, if one can call it that, made of three or four cables strung from one bank to the other, spanned the gorge where the waterfall rushed. We would have to cross it tomorrow morning. Just before the waterfall stood a kind of tall cairn surmounted by a cross—a wayside cross or burial mound. Bernard looked in that direction with a strangely grave expression. Then he abruptly pulled himself away from his thoughts and made us return to the refuge, where the porters should have prepared the meal. Indeed they had, and thanks to their ingenious management we scarcely had to touch our provisions. They had gathered excellent mushrooms along the way, and cut various species of thistle buds, all extremely good raw or boiled. And the game was much appreciated by all, except for Bernard, who would not touch it. We had also noticed that he made sure no one had moved the bows and other weapons since our arrival. But it was only after the meal—at sunset, which lit the wooded summits downstream with glorious color—only then, while everyone was digesting around the fire and asked him about the monument we had noticed near the great waterfall, that he opened up to us.