by Paul Watkins
It was as if, in reaching this place, we had stepped backwards through time, to a place where the years were not counted in seasons but in centuries, in the slow creep of the glaciers, almost unmeasurable on the scale of human lives.
We left the cave, our clothes dampened by the dripping air, and after roping up began to drag the coffin through a rock-strewn gully which ran in from the side of the valley.
Halfway up, the gully widened out into knee-deep snow. We were just stopping to put on our snowshoes when the avalanche hit.
First I heard a deep, soft thumping, like the sound of a giant wing beating the air above me. Then the ground began to move beneath my feet. There was no time to be afraid. Next, I had the sensation almost of swimming. For the first few seconds, I thrashed my arms and legs to keep my head above the level of the sliding snow.
But the more I tumbled, the more disoriented I became. Then I was just falling. Whiteness thundered all around me. It tumbled and hissed out of darkness into light. The air was slapped from my lungs and with a glimpse of daylight slapped back in again. I experienced the strange calm of waiting to die. Helpless. Blind. No way to fight the falling. My body shuddered as it struck something hard. But there was no pain, only the knowledge that damage had been done. I grew numb. My limbs became strangers, twisted and contorted as I tumbled down. I clung to the silence deep inside myself, surrounded by the roaring which was all around me and through me and then was gone. The rope wrenched at my waist, putting pressure on my ribs. I felt sure I would be ripped in half. Then, with one last mighty sigh, everything suddenly came to a stop. I could not breathe or move. I opened my eyes and saw only the gray haze of light above. My chest was on fire. Frantically, my arms punched upwards. Sun poured down on me like molten brass. I spat the fire from my lungs and gasped in the cold air. I began to dig my way out, pawing the glassy grit until at last I saw my boots again. Each crossed thread of my clothing was tamped with snow. My socks and the knots of my bootlaces were knotted with ice. Still I could not get up. It was the rope, wound too tight around me. From the pocket of my coat I pulled my old Opinel knife, prized it open, and cut myself loose like a just-born creature slicing its own umbilical cord.
I stood waist-deep in the blinding snow, and it was only when I had untangled my goggles from around my neck and set them once more against my eyes that I could see. In light the color of weak tea, I stared at the debris of the avalanche, which lay in the shape of a fan, dirty and clumped, all the way down to the floor of the valley. The cave had been swallowed up. It was hard even to see where the opening had been.
Looking back up the valley, I saw the rope rise from the snow fifty feet away and the coffin wedged against the gray blade of a rock jutting from the ice below.
Stanley’s face jumped into my head. I glanced around but saw no sign of him.
I began to wade across the slope, calling his name. But he was nowhere. All I could see was the smooth sheet of the avalanche. I reached the rope and tugged at it. The thick brown sinew jumped above the surface of the snow. As fast as I could, I traced it down to where I knew he must be. Then I started digging like a dog. Snow flew everywhere.
I saw his hair first, and then his face, which was turning blue. I raked away the snow around his chest and pulled him up, and when I dropped him down again upon the surface of the slope, he spat a gob of bloody snow into the air and gasped and sat upright. I hammered on his back and he spat up more snow, which melted in bloody slime across his chest. I cut the rope with my Opinel knife and tried to get him to stand. He wobbled on his feet, coughing and retching. I brushed the snow from his hair. His pockets were filled with it.
We were like scarecrows stuffed with ice, which had found its way down our shirts, up our noses, into our ears and which melted now in painful chips like broken glass inside our bellies.
Across the slope, a gust of wind stirred up phantoms of snow. The glittering dust twirled and took on human shapes. I saw faces, shifting as if glimpsed through a curtain of water. I could make out their hands and the rags of clothes and I heard the whisper of voices.
They were like the ancient ghosts of those buried so deep that even their spirits became trapped. Uncovered now by this same avalanche that had almost buried us, they left the frozen wreckage of their bones. They swirled away across the fields of blinding white, brushing past us in a sighing crystal cloud. We seemed to have strayed beyond the boundaries of our world, into a place where neither the living nor the dead were meant to be.
“I THINK I BROKE A TOOTH,” said Stanley. He stuck his fingers in his mouth, bloody saliva trickling out across his hand. “Thought so,” he said, turning the tooth this way and that, to examine it from different angles. He spat again. The speckles of red sank away into the white.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. My head feels like it’s filled with bees.” Carefully he put the tooth in the pocket of his mountain coat and replaced his goggles, which had been forced down around his neck but at least had not been lost. He tried to smile. “I’m fine,” he told me. “Really, I’m fine.”
Despite what he said, I could tell he had been badly shaken. He must have been in a lot of pain, too, but he was not the type to show it. He could complain easily enough about his badly thought-out mountain jacket, but pain he would not show. Only in the crooked line of his windburned lips could the strain be read.
We made our way back to the coffin and dug it loose from the rock. The top had received a large dent, and some things were missing from the compartment. We had lost our stove and a bag of spare clothing, but the tent, the sleeping bags, and the rest of the food were still roped in.
Compared to others I had seen, this was a small avalanche, barely a shrug of the vast snowfields which lay ahead of us. In the past, I had watched whole hillsides give way. The force of them was almost unimaginable, and I remembered a story I’d once heard of a forestry worker in Glarus, Switzerland. In 1910, he had been thrown two thousand feet into the sky by the force of the air preceding an avalanche. He was carried half a mile and dumped, alive, into a snowbank. The six men he had been working with were all killed. You hear a story like that and you think it cannot possibly be true, but then you see an avalanche, and hear the terrible roar of the falling snow, and suddenly you know that it could happen after all.
Stanley and I had been thrown down some two hundred feet. If the coffin had not become stuck, the slide could have carried us ten times that distance, and would certainly have buried us beyond all possibility of digging ourselves out. If we had been buried, the chances were that no one would ever have known what happened and we would have ended up suspended in time like that lammergeier.
Strapping on our snowshoes, but leaving our crampons attached so that we could keep our grip on the slope, we made our way out of the valley.
By the time we emerged, clouds had come in from the north and the temperature had slid below zero, with the windchill taking it even lower. In the dimming light, I pulled my goggles down around my neck and felt the freezing gusts against my eyes.
We checked our ropes and began to drag the coffin on towards Carton’s Rock, but after two hours the mountain suddenly disappeared behind a wall of boiling white. Only then did we realize we were walking into a storm. We stopped. Now, without the sound of the Rocket sliding over the glacier, we could hear the howling of the storm’s approach.
Stanley’s face was drawn and pale. He had taken off his goggles but the welts around his eyes remained. “Should we turn back?” he asked, raising his voice above the wind.
I went to my pack, which was strapped into the Rocket’s cargo area, and took out a pair of binoculars. Searching the ground ahead of us, I saw a lump of stone jutting from the snow about four hundred meters off. I pointed it out to Stanley. “We could pitch the tent behind that,” I said. “Ride out the storm that way. Stan, the only place behind us is the valley, and the storm will overtake us long before we reach it.”
“I didn’t mean just to the valley,” he said.
His words caught me by surprise. I thought about his brave-face talk of how he would get this done even if it was the last thing he ever did, and it made me angry to hear this from him now. Replacing my goggles, I turned away from him and straightened the harness on my shoulders. Then I began to drag the Rocket forward into the wind. As Stanley’s section of the rope grew taut, I came to a stop. Leaning forward in the traces, I waited for Stanley to make up his mind, to join me or to untie himself and give up.
I heard, even over the sound of the approaching storm, a kind of groaning swear from Stanley. Then the pressure on my harness was released and we were moving forward once again.
We marched as quickly as we could, hoping to reach the rock before the storm rode over us. If we did not get there in time, we might lose our way and never find the rock. And even if we did, without the time to pitch the tent, there would not be enough shelter.
Hard pellets of snow rattled across the ground towards us, bouncing up into our faces and tearing at our windburned cheeks. Ice crystals rattled against the lenses of my goggles.
The wind grew stronger. We were leaning into it, far beyond the point of normal balance, teeth bared. The noise of the storm was a constant rolling thunder on our ears. As hard as we pulled the Rocket, it seemed to be pulling just as hard in the opposite direction, as if we were locked in a tug-of-war with the ghost of Carton himself.
The white wall was closer now, towering above us and seeming to devour the earth over which it passed.
Stanley’s words began to repeat in my head, like a grim echo of Sugden’s demand that we turn back from our mission during the war. I had dismissed Stanley’s wanting to turn back as simple cowardice, but now, with this storm about to break over us, I wondered if he was the one being reasonable, and not me. I had been thinking of all of this in terms of how we would be judged when we returned. There, in the back of my mind, sat a jury made up of people like Sugden, Pringle, my father, and even Mrs. Reave. And there were the dead as well: Carton himself, and the faces of Whistler, Armstrong, and Forbes, already fading into impressionistic blurs as my memory slowly washed away their features, like the stone angels in the Palladino cemetery.
But out here, I had to force myself to understand, the only decisions that mattered were the ones that kept us alive, no matter how they would be seen when we returned. Only we could know what we were living through. Only we could make a balance of the danger and the drive to succeed. If I allowed myself to forget that, the chances were that we would not be coming back.
The wind was all around us in an awful banshee squall which vibrated through my body as if it meant to shake apart my bones by the force of sound alone.
Plumes of snow were rising from behind the rock, corkscrewing like devil horns into the air.
I turned to look at Stanley. I could not see his face, only his stooped form and the mechanical rising and falling of his legs, almost lost in the seething snow.
I realized now that we would have no time to pitch our tent, nor would it have done us any good to try to find shelter inside it. This storm was too strong. It would blow the canvas to shreds. We should have gone back down into the valley. At least there, the wind might have left us alone.
My eyes were playing tricks on me. The streaks of snow on the rock seemed to be changing shape, forming letters and numbers, then disappearing again into meaningless blurs of white. Then the letters reappeared again. It was maddening. I could even read them now, a huge letter J and under it the numbers 231135.
I turned my head just in time to see Stanley raise his arm and point towards the stone. His mouth moved but his words were lost in the wind.
Looking back at the rock, I realized suddenly that it was not a stone at all but the tail fin of a plane. The ridge of snow that trailed off to its left must be the rest of the plane.
We were close now. There was no doubt about the letters. Windblown snow poured like an inverted waterfall from behind the tail fin. The ground shook underneath us. The sky had disappeared.
We reached the fin, which was much larger than I had thought. Wind shrieked around the weather-beaten metal.
Stanley and I tore off our harnesses and undid our ropes. Then we began kicking and clawing at the ridge, moving away the snow until we reached the side of the aircraft. My gloved hand passed over the olive-painted metal, feeling the bumps of rivets, but no way in.
Then Stanley cried out. He was farther down the ridge and had found a hole in the side of the plane. It looked like some kind of doorway. He bent down and scrabbled inside. I saw his feet kicking like a swimmer’s, and then he was gone. A second later, his head reappeared and then an arm, beckoning me in. I left the Rocket and dove at the hole, flailing my way into the dark and then falling onto some kind of step. From there, I rolled onto a narrow, bumpy floor.
Outside, the storm had overtaken us. Only the dimmest yellowish light showed through the hole in the snow.
I covered my face with my hands, feeling the torn wool of my gloves clogged with ice. I was sure this wind would rip the plane apart. I imagined Carton’s coffin being swept away back in the direction we had come.
Stanley crawled over to me and we lay there, listening to the storm. The wind changed pitch, growing even stronger, and the sloping metal walls groaned around us.
After a minute, I pulled my hands from my eyes and looked around. There was almost no light now. The hole through which we’d crawled had already been covered by snow, dampening the noise of the storm, which we could feel more than we could see, in the shuddering of the ribbed fuselage. I fished in my pocket for my torch and switched it on. The air glittered with tiny drifting crystals of snow. The torch beam passed over tangles of wire hanging from the ceiling. Lifting myself up, I saw that the narrow floor space on which I lay was made of plywood, and the bumps were in fact empty bullet cases, each one the length of my palm and as thick as my thumb.
Stanley raised his head up off the floor. Immediately in front of him was a low, curved dome of metal, looking strangely like an eyeball in the half-light.
Attached to a metal post directly behind me was a large machine gun, pointing at the ceiling. A snake of ammunition wound out of the breech, the copper-headed bullets sheathed with ice. There was another large post on the side through which I had crawled into the plane, but only a shred of torn metal where a second gun must once have been fixed.
It looked like an American machine gun, probably a .50-caliber, in which case I guessed this machine was one of those B-24 Liberators I had once seen flying overhead.
Towards the front of the plane lay a tangle of boxes, a large yellow object rounded at both ends like a giant vitamin pill, and, at the bottom of this heap, a pair of legs in heavy, rubber-soled boots.
I did not register any sense of horror at seeing the dead man. Perhaps this was because, to judge from the ferocity of the storm outside, I had narrowly escaped becoming one myself. Maybe it was also because he must have been dead for a long time. Instead of sadness or revulsion or pity, I found myself preoccupied with little details, like the way the rubber soles had been worn down at the heels, the way his legs were wrapped in some kind of sheepskin trousers with a shiny lacquer finish on the outside of the leather.
The dead man, and everything else which jammed the passageway, must have been thrown forward by the impact of the plane hitting the glacier. I knew that somewhere up ahead of it must be the cockpit, unless the whole front of the plane had been sheared off in the crash.
Stanley got up and hobbled over to a seat built into the wall just to the left of the jammed corridor. Above the seat was a small table, on which rested a radio receiver. Next to it was a Morse code tapper. The plate and the receiver were completely covered in a thin layer of frost. Stanley wiped away some of the crystals, revealing a metal plate on which the Morse code alphabet had been printed. Then he cleaned off the receiver and read aloud the white letters printed on it
s black surface: “Signal Corps. U.S. Army Air Forces. BC-348-C.”
“I thought this was an American plane,” I said, my breath fogging the still air. I remembered what Carton and Lindsay had told me at Achnacarry, about planes crashing into the mountains. I wondered if the men who flew this plane would have made it home safely if we had managed to put the beacon on Carton’s Rock.
“Are you all right?” asked Stanley.
I told him what I was thinking about.
“It may be true that they would have reached home, but if they had, you and I would now be dead out there in the snow.” Stanley pressed absentmindedly at the Morse code tapper. “You didn’t bring any food in, did you?”
I shook my head.
Stanley peered around at the metal sides of the plane. “I think I know how my uncle feels right about now,” he said.
“I wonder how long the storm will last,” I said.
Then we were both silent, as if some answer from the storm itself might reach us on the moaning wind outside. The arched walls shuddered all around, planting in my rattled brain the thought that we had somehow stumbled into a real rocket ship and the noise of the storm was the sound of our engine as we climbed up through the airless stratosphere.
TWELVE
TWO DAYS LATER, the storm still screamed around the carcass of the plane, which groaned as if it were a living and tormented thing.
Inside the creaking hull, we lived in dead men’s clothes and passed the time by smoking dead men’s cigarettes. After my torch batteries gave out, the only light came from a candle lamp which Stanley had been carrying in his pocket. He had forgotten to store it away the last time we made camp and had been too lazy to unpack the bag where it belonged. We rationed ourselves to a few hours a day, crowding around the greasy flame like two pale and gloomy moths.