Solo Faces (8 page)

“Jack!”

The rope went taut. Cabot was hanging above him and off to one side.

“Jack! Are you all right?”

Cabot’s head was bent, his legs dangling. There was no reply.

One man cannot lift another with the rope, he can only hold him. Rand had a good stance but consequences were already seeping into his mind. He let some rope pass through his hands. Cabot’s foot was moving slightly. It touched a hold, perhaps to use it for support, but slipped off. His head hit the wall.

“Are you okay?”

Silence.

“Jack, below you,” he called.

There was a better place farther down. Talking to him as he did, Rand let out more rope. As a piece of clothing can catch on a sliver, something seemed to snag Cabot and he stayed, unseeing, clinging to the rock.

Rand finally worked his way up to him. Cabot’s head turned slightly. His chin, the whole side of his face, was bathed in blood. His eyes were closed like someone fighting drunkenness. Blood drenched his shirt. Rand felt suddenly sick.

“How bad is it? Let me see.”

He half-expected the wet gleam of brains as he removed the helmet. The blood rushed forth. It was dripping from the jaw.

“Do you have a bandage?”

“No,” Cabot barely muttered.

He made one with a handkerchief that darkened as he tied it. He wiped the jaw to see if the flow was stopping. His heart pounded. He tried to see if blood was coming from the ear which meant serious concussion or a fractured skull.

One thing seemed certain even at that moment: Cabot was going to die.

“Does it hurt?”

A slow nod. The blood would not stop. Rand wiped his fingers on the rock and tried to collect fleeing thoughts. He hammered in a piton and clipped them both to it. Cabot’s head had fallen forward as if he were asleep. A thousand feet lay below them. There were two or three hours of daylight left. In any case they could not stay here.

Some distance above was an overhang that might conceal a ledge. That was the best hope. Perhaps he could reach it.

“I’m going up to see if there’s a ledge,” he announced.

Cabot was silent.

“If there is, I’ll get you up. Will you be all right? I’ll bring you up afterwards.”

Cabot raised his head slightly, as if in farewell. His eyes were dim, he managed to part his lips in a faint, terrifying smile, the smile of a corpse. His teeth were outlined in blood.

“Hang on,” Rand said.

A sickening fear spilled through him as he started, nor did it lessen. He was alone, climbing unprotected. He was worse than alone. He made his way upward, chilled by the malevolence of the wall, imagining it might shed him completely by merely letting loose the entire slab he held to.

The last train had long since gone down from Montenvers. The only eyes at the telescope were those of curious guests of the hotel out for a stroll before dinner. What they saw were details of a magnificent landscape, roseate and still. The light was pure, the sky clear. They, as well as all of creation, were unaware of the chill shadow beneath the overhang and the man, heart-empty, who was hidden in it.

He worked slowly outward, hammering pitons into a narrowing crack and standing in his
étriers
—slings which bore his entire weight. The crack stopped. He searched desperately, there was no place for a piton. Leaning out, he reached around the lip and felt for holds. His hand found one. He might be able to pull himself up, brace one foot against the last piton, and somewhere farther on find another. His fingers felt and refelt the unseen rock. He still had the strength for one big effort. He took a breath and swung out, bent backward, his free hand searching. Nothing. He managed to get a little higher. Nothing. A rush of panic. He was feeling about frantically. At the very top of his reach he found a hold. In tribute to his struggle the rock had relented. He pulled himself up and lay panting. The ledge was two feet wide, uneven, but it was a ledge. He set about bringing up Cabot.

T
HE SUN HAD GONE
down behind Mont Blanc. It was colder. The sky was still light, the small Bleuet stove making tea.

Cabot sat slumped and motionless. The blood had dried on his head and face but his eyes, staring down, were vacant.

The cup was passed between battered hands.

“How’s your head? It seems to have stopped bleeding.”

Cabot bared his black-edged teeth. He nodded slightly.

“I think we’re all right for now,” Rand told him.

Cabot was silent. After a moment, he murmured, “How’s the weather?”

The sky was clear. The first pale star had made an appearance.

“We don’t want to fool with the weather,” he mumbled. This seemed to exhaust him. He sank into meditation. Rand took the cup from his hand.

In the distance the lights of Chamonix were visible. As it grew darker they became more numerous, distinct. They meant warm meals, conversation, comfortable rooms, all of it unattainable as the stars. It was colder now, it had come quickly, covering the peaks. The long vigil of night began.

Cabot was covered, hands in his pockets, bootlaces loosened. The wall was in shadow, the brown of ancient monuments. A feeling of intense isolation, a kind of claustrophobia came over Rand. It was as if he could not breathe, as if space were crushing him. He fought against it. The three cold stars in the belt of Orion shone above. His mind wandered. He thought of condemned men waiting out their last hours, days in California, his youth. His feet were cold, he tried to move his toes. Hours passed, periods of oblivion, of staring at the stars. There were more than he had ever seen. The coldness of the night increased them. They quivered in the thin air. On the dark horizon was the glow of Geneva, constant through the night. A meteor came down like a clot of white fire. An airplane passed to the north. He felt resentment, despair. His eye went down the wall, a thousand feet. He was falling, falling. Cabot never moved; from time to time he moaned.

At first with only the slightest changing of the sky’s tone, dawn came. The blue became paler. The stars began to fade. Rand was stiff, exhausted. The huge dome of Mont Blanc soared into light.

“Jack. Wake up.” He had to shake him. Cabot’s eyes flickered. They were the eyes of a man who could do nothing, who was dissolute, spent. “It’s daylight.”

“What time is it?”

“Five-thirty. Beautiful morning in France.” His fingers numb, he somehow lit the stove and got out food. Without seeming to, he tried to examine the inert figure.

“I feel better,” Cabot unexpectedly said.

Rand looked at him,

“Do you think you can make it down?”

“Down?” There was a pause. “No.” He was like a powerful beast that has fought and is bloody and torn, seems killed but suddenly comes to its feet. “Not down,” he said. “I’m all right. I can make it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I can make it,” Cabot insisted.

“The hardest part’s ahead.”

“I know.”

Rand said no more. As he was putting things away and sorting out gear, he tried to think. Cabot was strong, no doubt of it. He seemed in control of himself for the moment. They had come a long way.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Yes. Let’s go on.”

At first he could not tell, the start was slow. They were stiff from long hours and the cold. Rand was leading. Soon he saw that Cabot could barely climb. He would stay in one spot as if asleep.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m just taking a little rest.”

They proceeded with frightening slowness, as one does with a novice. From time to time Cabot would make a gesture: it’s all right, I’ll just be a minute, but it was nearly always five or ten. Rand had to pull him up with the rope.

They had passed the
bloc coincé
and begun an inside corner where two great slabs of rock met like an open book. It seemed they were not really here, they were part of some sort of game. They were going through the motions of climbing, that was all. But they could not go down. The time to have done that was earlier, not after they had struggled up an additional five hundred feet. They were near the place where the first party to climb the face had retreated, going around to the north side and descending. Exactly where that was, Rand did not know. He looked for the bolts that had been placed years before but never found them.

They came to a wide slab, chillingly exposed. The holds were slight, hardly more than scribed lines. There was no place to put in a piton. As he went out on it, Rand could feel a premonition, a kind of despair becoming greater, flooding him. It is belief as much as anything that allows one to cling to a wall. He was thirty minutes crossing as many feet, certain as he did that it was in vain.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he called.

Cabot started. He moved very slowly, he was moving by inches. A third of the way across, he said simply,

“I can’t make it.”

“Yes, you can,” Rand said.

“Maybe there’s another way.”

“You can do it.”

Cabot paused, then tried again. Almost immediately, his foot slipped. He managed to hold on.

“I can’t,” he said. He was done for. “You’ll have to leave me here.”

Silence.

“No, come on,” Rand told him.

“I’m going back. You go on. Come back for me.”

“I can’t,” Rand said. “Look, come on,” he said casually. He was afraid of panic in his voice. He did not look down, he did not want to see anything. There is a crux pitch, not always the most technically difficult, where the mountain concedes nothing, not the tiniest movement, not the barest hope. There is only a line, finer than a hair, that must somehow be crossed.

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.

T
HE 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.