by James Salter
The emptiness of space was draining his strength from him, preparing him for the end. He was nothing in the immensity of it, without emotion, without fear and yet there was still an anguish, an overwhelming hatred for Cabot who hung there, unwilling to move. Don’t give up here, he was thinking. He was willing it, don’t give up!
When he looked, Cabot had taken another step.
That evening they were on a ledge far up the face. The overhangs barring the top were above. They had not noticed, until late, the arrival of clouds.
The first gusts blew almost gently but with a chill, a warning of what was to come. In the distance, the crackling of thunder. Rand waited, hoping it would fade. It came again. It was like an air raid drifting closer but still it might pass them by. The clouds were more dense. The Charmoz was disappearing, going dark. Lightning, brilliant in the dusk, was hitting the Brévent. The face of the Dru was still clear, softened by the late hour. The thunder crackled on.
Rand felt helpless. He saw the storm approaching, coming up the valley like a blue wave with scud running before it. He sat watching it fearfully as if it might notice him, veer his way.
Then he heard it, a strange, airy sound all around them. He recognized it immediately, like the humming of bees.
“What’s that?” Cabot said.
“Hold on,” he warned.
They were in clouds. In a matter of seconds the Dru had gone. They could see nothing. The sound seemed to come from directly overhead and then from closer, almost inside their ears.
“It’s getting louder.”
Rand did not reply. He was waiting, barely breathing. The mist, the coldness, were like a blindfold. He listened to the eerie, growing hum.
Suddenly the dusk went white with a deafening explosion. Blue-white snakes of voltage came writhing down the cracks.
Lightning struck again. This time his arms and legs shot out from a jolt that reached the ledge. There was a smell of burning rock, brimstone. Hail began to fall. He was clinging to his courage though it meant nothing. He could taste death in his mouth.
Cabot was huddled at his side; he had ended the day moving even more slowly than before. Corpselike in darkness he sat, the earsplitting claps of thunder like the end of the earth itself not even stirring him, a dead weight that was dragging Rand down. There was another flash of lightning. The pathetic figure was clearly visible. Rand stared at it. What he saw he never forgot. It reached across ghosted days to haunt him forever. Half-hidden beneath the bandage, open and gazing directly at him was an eye, a calm, constant, almost a woman’s eye that was filled with patience, that understood his despair. Is he alive, Rand wondered? The eye shifted, gazing slightly downward.
An immense explosion. He trembled. There were nine hours until dawn.
15
THE STORM STOPPED AT midnight. Afterward it froze. Their clothes were wet; the hail had turned into snow. From time to time there came breaks in the cloud when it was possible to see a little, even in darkness, and then the thick wave returned, in absolute silence, sweeping in as if to bury, to obliterate them. Rand was shivering. It was an act of weakness he told himself, but he could not stop.
Finally the sky grew light. There were storms still hanging in the air. Their gear was frozen, the ropes stiff.
They managed to make some tea. In the distance, like hostile armies, an endless line of black clouds was moving. If the weather held, they might try to reach the top. Rand sipped the tepid, metallic-tasting liquid. He had no resolution, no plan.
For an hour they moved dazedly among the heaps of gear. To straighten it out required the greatest effort. The temptation to sit down and rest was overwhelming. There was snow on every bit of rock, in every crack. The sun was hitting the ridges to the west. Rand was still shivering. It seemed to him to have gotten even colder.
The rock, when he touched it, was like the sides of a deep, sunken wreck. He blew on his fingertips to warm them. His arms and legs felt weary. He heard the sound of birds darting near. For a moment, in fantasy, he dreamed of soaring, arms outspread, skimming as they did, the face.
Cabot seemed stronger, he moved more easily. Above them the mountain had massed its final obstacles. Everything was leaning outward, walls, fragments, dark broken roofs.
“We’ve got to get above this while the weather is good.”
“Tell me,” Rand muttered. He felt a strange reversing of things. Instead of being encouraged, he felt drained, as in the final laps when, having given all, one is passed. A single thing sustained him: the summit was near.
“We’re going to make it,” Cabot said later. He was like a captain coming back to the bridge, a bloody figure borne forward to make himself seen.
A final overhang, the last rope-lengths, and they were there. It was nearly noon. Green valleys, glaciers shone below. They were above all but the highest peaks. They stood in silence, too deeply moved to speak. The bivouac spot at the base seemed weeks, even years behind. They still had to descend into a notch and climb some more to go down, but that was not important. The West Face was below them.
Cabot surged ahead. He led the way. He was moving quickly, almost with too much haste, especially on rappels—descent by means of the rope. Descending is always dangerous, the worst is over.
“What’s the rush?” Rand reached out to hold him back.
“Let go.”
“You’re kicking stuff down.”
“Stop worrying,” was all he said.
That night they stumbled into the Charpoua hut and slept for eighteen hours. When they reached Montenvers a large man came out of the hotel. He was a reporter from a Geneva paper.
“What happened?” he asked. Cabot looked like the victim of a fight. “Were you hit by rockfall? When? How high up were you?”
He spoke calmly, intimately. He wrote down nothing. He knew the mountains well, having climbed himself. There was an ease about him, that of an aristocrat who has been out in the garden and is wearing old clothes. He knew the entire history of the Dru and how it had been climbed. His eye was sharp, his nose even more so. Ils livraient leurs vies à la montagne—they bared their lives to the mountain, was the closing line of his article, les étalant à son pied. They laid them at its feet.
The climb was one thing, its confirmation by such a man was another.
That night at dinner in Chamonix, Cabot sat in a yellow sport shirt open at the neck. The bandage was white on his darkened face. He had asked for a table in the back. He had a slight headache, he admitted, but he was elated.
“The best climbing writer in Europe,” he said. “I never thought he’d be up there.”
“How did that happen?” Rand asked.
Cabot smiled, a smile of warmth and affection. He was pouring out wine. “He knows the Dru. If he writes about you, that’s all you can ask.” He was interrupted by the handshake of a noted guide who had made many first ascents. Rand’s hand was grasped as well. “Thank you. Merci.”
“Who was that?” Carol asked.
Glory fell on them lightly like the cool of the evening itself.
Glancing at her husband, Carol commented, “I did expect you to take better care of him.”
“I never thought we’d make it,” Rand confessed.
“You must have.”
“It was foolish.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Cabot said. His face was blue on one side, handsome on the other, like halves of a personality. “It would have been foolish if we died.”
“Yeah, I know. It was superb,” Rand murmured.
“Wait and see.”
“He was lucky it hit him in the head,” Carol remarked. “It could have hurt him.”
They had a large dinner, over which they lingered. Cabot was telling all he remembered: nothing from the time he was hit until he said, go on, come back for me, and Rand had told him simply, I can’t. Then came the storm. Carol was listening vaguely—there is a drunkenness that seems like wisdom.
“What’re you talking about?” she
said.
“I’m telling about the storm.”
“The same one?”
“Don’t interrupt,” he said.
Disconsolately she leaned her head on Rand. He could smell her hair, feel her warmth, it was calm, unending, like fields which stretched out of sight. She’d been waiting for her husband for four nights and days.
“Isn’t the storm over yet?” she muttered.
“Oh, what’s the use?” he said.
“Your head still hurt?”
He seemed not to hear.
“Did you see Noyer come over and shake our hands?”
“Is that who it was?”
“Was, is, and will be.”
“Let’s go home,” she said. “I’m sleepy.”
“Let’s go,” Rand agreed. His happiness had passed its limit. He was tired. He wanted to lie beneath the stars, look up at them, no nearer or farther away than they had been two nights before. As he stood, the chair fell over. The waiter hurried to pick it up. He was a climber himself.
“Good night,” he said to them in English.
Rand turned at the door. He was tall, eccentric, haggard. At that moment, though he did not realize it, he was launched on a performance which would become irreversible as time went by. On his face were weariness and the haze of ordeal. He raised an arm.
“Good night,” he said. After a moment, “Superb …”
16
HE WAS FAMOUS, OR nearly. There was a tent somewhere back in the trees, where like a fugitive he had a few possessions, those he needed, rope strewn in dense coils at his feet, heaps of pitons, boots. Almost less than ever was known about him now. There were stories that missed him completely, like confused shots fired in the dark.
He became even more elusive, at least for a time. It only fed the rumors. Every tall, dirt-glazed American was thought to be him. He was seen and talked to in places where he’d never so much as set foot.
A passion for climbing had come over him. As soon as he finished one, he was ready to start another. He climbed the Blaitière with Cabot and then went back with Bray to the Dru and did the regular route. He was either insatiate or absolutely exhausted but then would rise fresh the next day. He was swept up in it entirely as if for the very first time. When he climbed, life welled up, overflowed in him. His ambitions had been ordinary, but after the Dru it was different. A great, an indestructible happiness filled him. He had found his life.
The back streets of town were his, the upper meadows, the airy peaks. It was the year when everything beckons, when one is finally loved. The clippings were folded and put away. He pretended to scorn them. He kept them despite himself. The true form of legend, he believed, was spoken. He did not want to be catalogued in newspapers, he said, read and discarded like sports scores and crimes.
“Everyone’s written about their climbs,” Cabot argued, “Whymper, Hillary, Terray. How else would you know about them?”
“What about the ones we don’t know?”
“For instance?”
“Have you ever heard the way they climbed the Walker? Three of them came over from Italy, they didn’t even know where it was. They asked the guardian at one of the huts, where are the Grandes Jorasses? Up there, he said. That’s how they found it. I don’t know if it’s true; it’s what they say.”
“It’s only in about ten books. It was Ricardo Cassin,” Cabot said.
“Well, it wouldn’t mean as much if I’d read it. I don’t think it would.”
“How do you know?”
It was morning, the light still new. Unknown sentinels stood distant, pale. He could have them, he had only to go forth. He was like the sun, touching remote peaks, they awoke to his presence. The thought of it made him reckless. He felt an immense strength. He saw an immortal image of himself high among the ridges—he was willing to die to achieve it.
“I don’t want anybody to know how we climbed the Dru, only that we did it. Let them imagine the rest.”
“That’s nice, but there are a thousand climbers out there,” Cabot gestured vaguely.
“So?”
“Only the names of a handful are going to last.”
“That’s too much like everything else,” Rand said. The confusion of what he was feeling kept him from speaking. What he had done, what he would do, he did not want explained. Something was lost that way. The things that were of greatest value, that he had paid so much for were his alone.
He felt solitary, deep, like a fish in a river, mouth closed, uncaught, glistening against the flow. He saw himself at forty, working for wages, walking home in the dusk. The windows of restaurants, the headlights of cars, shops just being closed, all of it part of a world he had never surrendered to, that he would defy to the end.
Late in the season Remy Giro took him to the home of a man named Vigan. It was in an old, established section overlooking the town. Henri Vigan was past forty, familiar in mountaineering circles although only a passable climber himself. He had inherited some factories from his father; they were near Grenoble. He greeted Rand warmly,
“I’m so pleased to meet you,” he said. He was open in manner, generous, a man one likes on sight. “You’re a native of Chamonix, I think, more than I am. Vous parlez français?”
“He’s a wolf,” Remy said. “He lives a secret life, he travels alone.”
“All the better,” Vigan remarked.
“An Alpha wolf. The leader.”
“That’s what I imagined. What can I get you to drink?” Vigan asked.
The edge of Rand’s beard had turned gold with the summer. His lips shone in its halo. He accepted a glass of wine.
“Let me introduce you to some of my friends,” Vigan said.
Confident faces, unrecallable names. The guests were scattered in groups throughout the house. Some seemed to know him, others not to care. They were talking, laughing, at ease. All this had existed when he was sweeping floors up behind the Hôtel Roma, when he fell into bed at Christmas drunk from a bottle of wine. He wanted to avenge himself. He could not be had so cheaply. He was not theirs for a handshake and a compliment.
“Catherin, I think you know …”
“Yes,” she said, “thank you.” She shook hands. She apologized for it with a helpless gesture. “So frog,” she explained.
Languid, graceful, she was the salesgirl from Remy’s shop. He was unnerved without knowing why.
“I didn’t know you spoke English,” was all he could say.
“Yes. A little. Some.” Her teeth were narrow and white. Her shyness, which he had not noticed before, was extreme. “That was quite an adventure you had on the Dru. Your friend was very lucky.”
“Oh, you heard about that?”
She didn’t reply. It was as if she disapproved of the inanity of his answer.
“Is he still here?” she finally said. “I haven’t seen him.”
“He went to Zermatt. He’s doing the Matterhorn.”
“And you?”
“Me?”
“You didn’t go?”
“I decided to stay here.”
They were interrupted by Vigan who returned with someone he wanted to introduce. There was some conversation, mostly about the excellence of the season and certain routes climbed so often that excrement was a problem on them, a new objective danger, they good-naturedly agreed.
Catherin had wandered into the garden. It was the hour of evening when, viewed from Les Tines, the Dru is bathed in a vast, almost rose-colored light. The swallows were circling. The last, melancholy sounds of a tennis match drifted up through the pines from the Mont Blanc Hotel. The unhurried way she had left, the possibility of its meaning, that there was someone with her, someone she had returned to, filled Rand with bewilderment, almost panic.
In the garden he was relieved to find her alone. She was gazing out over the town, the lights of which were just beginning to appear.
“Tell me something, why did you pretend you didn’t speak English?”
“I did
n’t pretend,” she said. She was reserved, polite. She was interested in certain things and those things only. “Why did you decide to stay here instead of going with your friend?”
“I had no plans.”
“That’s it, you see. Neither did I.” She had a slow smile, one reluctantly given. He had no idea what she thought of him or what she was thinking at all.
17
SHE LIVED NEAR THE cable car station in a house with stone gateposts and an iron fence. It had been a large villa but there had been a decline in its status, like the palaces taken over by troops in a revolution. It contained a number of ill-defined apartments. The walls were bare, the plaster faded.
They drove back from an evening in Argentière, it was their first. He knew much more about her. Her father was English. She liked to joke. At the same time she kept a certain distance—it was like a dance. He might touch her, she would not protest, but she would do no more than patiently submit.
“You’re very strange,” he told her.
“No, I’m not strange,” she said. “I’m quite ordinary.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Too ordinary.”
“Then what am I?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have an opinion.”
“Not yet,” she said simply.
“Have you always lived in Chamonix?”
“Oh, no. I just came here for fun. I liked it, I liked the people.” She had stopped the car. “This is where I live,” she commented.
He turned his head. There was a ghostly building set back from the street.
“That’s a big house.”
“There are three families in it.”
“It must be big. Can I come in?”
“Oh …I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Really, it’s not that interesting.”