Mysterium
Page 25
* * *
TROY TOILS on in silence, in the deathly hush of nothingness. The spell of vitality he felt at the start of the day has melted away. In this vertical desert of ice he is small, he is helpless, he is alone. Something near despair hovers in the vastness above. Not a sound other than what is inside him, the churn and throb and pant of a man subjugate to something beyond. He leans into the wind and presses on, every boot track he leaves in the snow an imprint of will. He sees himself writing scroll across the face of the mountain. Indelible. Not to be forgotten.
He walks over the frozen dunes with arms hung loose at his sides, his head lowered, his eyes set upon the patterns the wind has glyphed in the snow. Like the writing of the ancients. Messages left for him to decipher. He looks up only occasionally to the pyramid, the zenith appearing at times to be rearing closer to him; at other times it is grown farther away than it has ever been. He does not look behind him, does not see the dark speck that Wilder has become on his retreat back to Camp III.
He has the sensation of moving under water in slow motion. He has lost his sense of distance; no longer has he any idea of time. There is a certain derangement necessary in the going on. Yes, he knows this. He climbs as one possessed, borne aloft by some unexplainable impetus. A quest of transcendence. No more feelings. No reason. Only striving. Step, rest, take breath, take breath, take breath. Breath that fills him up again to step. Then step again, rest again, breath again. The snow is floury and deep, the going agony. He falls to his knees and slumps forward onto his ice axe, settles his head on his hands at the adze. He is thinking about how long he can go on when he is startled to his feet. A voice. He looks up, scans his whereabouts. No one. Ha! It is only the sound of himself again. He sees an easier line to take. Up and over to the right. Up and out of the trough. He traverses into harder and grainier snow, the pitch turning steep as a church roof, but his boots sink in only up to the ankle now. Clouds pulse in the distance. He has again the feeling there is someone walking behind him. His breath is like the voice of someone other. His footfalls like the words of another.
Lack of needed oxygen in the blood; a body and mind in rapid decay.
He does not believe in ghosts.
He walks in a swelling mist, crystals twisting past in bodily shapes. Beside him, enormous torsos of cornices. The way begins to plane out. A most hollowed experience. Yes. He belongs no longer to the world below. The clouds break apart like a cracked egg, spilling out a yolk of sun, spilling out life all about him. The air is revealed in a rare transparency, the landscape the quintessence of purity. The crust of icy diamonds he walks upon ring like chimes beneath his feet. How to describe the wonder of this? Wind silent. Air of glass. The sun touching him like love. Above him nothing but sky. Man is not meant to be here. Yet he stands here. He stands at the top with the cruel and beautiful Mysterium beneath his feet.
And then he sees it. The white bird winging across the vastness before him. Boreal, accidental, rapturous. Cryptic, with quills of snow. Moving without sound into the silence. Fading into shadow until it is gone from sight.
* * *
WHAT, THEN, is the impulse, the thymos, the voluntary pathos that drives the seeker? Is the striving in a climber, in each man or woman alive, as with every animal, not the same as that within any force of nature? The contest of existence, the noumenal force we are born to, the thing in and of itself, this, life’s essence which a human is but a mirror to, just as the moon is a mirror to the sun. Birth and death belong to this essence, the natura naturans, the mysterium tremendum propelling all into being. Even in the presence of quietus, we need not fear being cleaved from the unity and eternity of nature. Thus death cannot be seen as an end, but only as part of an entirety. Nothing divine dies.
EPILOGUE
Five years after the death of Sarasvati Troy, the Indian Army sent seven men from their parachute regiment to make a lustrum attempt of Mysterium’s east and main summit. After their success, the soldiers down-climbed to a high-altitude plateau between the two peaks, where here they placed a pile of memorial stones for the girl who had been christened with the bliss-giving goddess’s name. They camped that night near their shrine of cairns under a veil of rainbow-colored cloud, a nimbus halo’ing a golden full moon. One of the men, arm raised and hand outspread, entombed the moon finger to thumb so to frame the colorful aureole.
The next day, in gloriously brilliant sunshine, the troop began its descent through a steep pass of new-fallen snow, where here they were swept away to their breath-taking end.
ALSO BY SUSAN FRODERBERG
Old Border Road
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Froderberg was born in Washington State and grew up hiking and climbing in the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades. She worked as a critical care nurse in Seattle before moving east to study medical ethics and philosophy at Columbia University, where she received her PhD. Mysterium is her second novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Map
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
PART I
1. Alpine Journal
2. Sara Troy
3. The Sarasvati Party
PART II
4. The Gorge
5. The Sanctuary
6. The Summit
EPILOGUE
Also by Susan Froderberg
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Susan Froderberg
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71810-7
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Endpapers map © Jeffrey L. Ward