The Ice Soldier (3 page)
Invigorated as much by the Englishman's stories as by the Alpine air, Carton accepted. The next day, instead of heading south on his original course, Carton traveled west along a dirt road to the village of Palladino; no more than a cluster of houses on the banks of a lake called Vannino. Palladino was the last outpost before the mountains, and the closest starting point for a voyage across the Dragone glacier.
At Palladino, Carton was met by the guide, who, after hearing Carton's explanation, agreed to take him instead.
At first light the following day, the two-man team set off.
Two weeks later, Carton staggered into Palladino alone, starving, snow-blind, with the skin sunburned off his nose and cheeks and his fingers so badly frostbitten that he spent a week with his hands in a bath of vinegar before he regained feeling in them.
The story he told was that after several days of grueling exertion over the ice of the Dragon's Tongue and up the Dragon's Teeth, the two men reached the tallest of these jagged peaks, shook hands, and started down again across the glacier. They were roped together, testing the snow ahead of them with their long ice axes. At some point on the descent, the guide fell through a thin patch of snow, beneath which lay a
crevasse hundreds of feet deep. Carton was able to roll onto his stomach and jam his ax into the snow to provide an anchor. The ax caught fast in ice which lay beneath the snow, stopping his slide, but when the rope came taut it broke. The guide fell into the abyss, leaving Carton by himself up on the glacier. It took Carton seven days to find his way back to Palladino.
crevasse hundreds of feet deep. Carton was able to roll onto his stomach and jam his ax into the snow to provide an anchor. The ax caught fast in ice which lay beneath the snow, stopping his slide, but when the rope came taut it broke. The guide fell into the abyss, leaving Carton by himself up on the glacier. It took Carton seven days to find his way back to Palladino.
Despite an exhaustive search, the body of the guide was never found.
Having seen that glacier for myself, I knew how lucky Carton had been to survive. To call the glacier the Dragon's Tongue, and Carton's Rock the Dragon's Teeth, was no mistake.
When Carton returned to London, his hands bandaged and face still badly burned, he was front-page news in every paper in the country. Inspired by the unexpected attention, he rented out a small dance hall in Ealing and gave a lecture to a half-filled space about his experiences, which he titled “Peril in the Heights.” It soon became clear that Carton knew very little about mountaineering, but this did not seem to matter. What mattered was that he had survived in spite of how little he knew. Even more important, he knew how to tell the story, hurling himself across the stage, flailing his arms in the air, retrieving from his ice-burned brain the most obscure but telling details.
The next week, he rented out the hall again. This time the place was full.
Throughout the months ahead, two, three, four times, the same people showed up to hear Carton describe the sight of the guide as he slipped away to his death. The eyes of the audience grew wide as he held up his hands and spoke of his frozen fingernails turning black and falling off, of the blood he coughed into the snow as the altitude punished his lungs.
Despite what he had endured, he always finished his talks by speaking of the view once he had arrived at the summit. He told his audience it was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen, like something out of a dream. This view, which only he had ever glimpsed and lived to tell of, since Carton's Rock remained unclimbed except by him and the unfortunate guide, became a thing of mythic beauty, beyond all earthly comparison.
In these lectures, Carton steered clear of formal mountaineering terminology, most of which would have been meaningless to his audience. Instead of
verglas,
for example, he said “icy rock.” Instead of
firnspiegel,
he said “icy snow.”
Col
became ridge,
couloir
became
gully,
and so on.
verglas,
for example, he said “icy rock.” Instead of
firnspiegel,
he said “icy snow.”
Col
became ridge,
couloir
became
gully,
and so on.
The lecture series went so well that the following year, after spending his summer traveling through the Alps, he rented a larger dance hall. The second year's lecture series, given twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday nights, was augmented with paintings of the Alps which Carton hung on easels on the stage. Wearing a tweed mountaineering suit and carrying an ice ax, he walked among these paintings as if he were the “Wild Huntsman” of German mythology.
The hall was always full.
I myself had been to see him, when he came to give a lecture in Oxford. I'd only gone because Stanley had nagged me and Stanley, who had never been to one of Carton's talks, had gone only because his uncle had promised him a free dinner at the Randolph Hotel afterwards.
If I had to name the single thing which first drew me to mountaineering, it would be the darkly resonant voice of Henry Carton. Even Stanley, who had almost turned into an art form his ability to remain unimpressed by everything he saw or heard or did, became swept up in the momentum of his uncle's words.
Carton spoke with such urgency that it seemed as if his very life depended on our seeing what he was trying to describe. He talked in epic phrases. Even the way he paused to catch his breath had something grand about it. Sometimes he clawed at the air, grasping for images like a man catching leaves as they fluttered to the ground before him. Other times, his head thrashed from side to side, as if the colors which vibrated in his head would burn through the bone casing of his skull if he did not set them free with words.
For Carton, the Alps were the ultimate proving ground. Up there, all that one could be and all that one was would become clear. Carton was the only man I had ever heard use the word
honor
who wasn't trying to sell me something. In the Alps, Carton told us, no climber could be sheltered by his wealth, or by his social connections, or his clever turns of phrase. In the mountains, you learned who you were, for better and for worse.
honor
who wasn't trying to sell me something. In the Alps, Carton told us, no climber could be sheltered by his wealth, or by his social connections, or his clever turns of phrase. In the mountains, you learned who you were, for better and for worse.
“There are those who climb,” he said, “and those who dream of climbing. For some, the dream is all they need, and perhaps they are the lucky ones. But not all of us can be content with dreams alone. We are drawn up to the stony rafters of the world, like migrating animals who travel thousands of miles without knowing why they do this, only knowing that they must. Those who have been to these places know that they are not only worlds of rock and snow and ice. They are worlds of bleak but unforgettable beauty. To those who climb, the mountains are part of a dream, which we all have when we are young. It is the dream of wanting more than anything to know who you really are. The poet Friedrich von Schiller once wrote, âHold Fast to the Dreams of Your Youth.' This we must all do, or else we risk forgetting what it means to be alive.”
Carton finished his lectures so exhausted that it was hard to imagine how he would ever be able to speak of the mountains again. But he did. Night after night, his energy never subsiding.
It wasn't long before he bought the dance hall outright and rebuilt it as his own club. Few of its members were actual climbers. The Climbers' Club had no membership criteria other than that people had to be interested in mountains or, failing that, at least interested in Carton.
Carton also gave private lectures, in which he guaranteed to reveal information “too horrific” for his regular audiences. For this, he charged extraordinary amounts of money and never revealed the names of those people who received the private lectures. He also swore these private audiences to secrecy, forbidding them to disclose the “terrifying facts” kept hidden from the regular audiences. Because no one knew who these private audiences were, the rumors surrounding their identities soon included most of the famous people in Britain, including the royal family. And because swearing a group of people to secrecy was a virtual invitation to gossip, more rumors emerged concerning the “facts.”
This was, of course, exactly what Carton had hoped for.
One story was that Carton had discovered the remains of an actual dragon frozen in the ice and had shown his high-paying audience one of its teeth. Another story was that Carton had been guided back to safety by the ghost of a mountaineer who had died on the Dragon's Tongue over a century before. Carton never admitted to any of these, but he never denied them, either, so the rumors flourished.
Carton was a force of nature, so much larger than life that he became, in the eyes of his audiences, as mystical a presence as the mountains he described.
His only critic was a man named Joseph Pringle. Pringle was a small, slope-shouldered man with big ears and impossibly small eyes. He rarely smiled, and his fashion sense had come to a halt some fifty years before. His clothes were almost exclusively black, and instead of a tie, or any modern concept of a tie, he wore a large floppy neck scarf knotted into a bow. The neck scarf shambled off down his front and across the lapels of his heavy woolen coat, which buttoned all the way up to the throat but on which only the top button was fastened.
Pringle had spent many years climbing, particularly in the Alps, and had several first ascents to his name. Like Carton, Pringle had originally been sent to the Alps by a Harley Street doctor, although in Pringle's case in the hopes of curing chronic eczema. Pringle's eczema remained unchanged, but he fell in love with the Alps and soon became what was known as a “peak bagger,” obsessed with being the first to climb as many mountains as he could. One story often told about Pringle was that while vacationing in Turin, he read about a man who was attempting a small but unclimbed peak in the Cottian Alps near Monte Viso. Unable to rein in his competitiveness, Pringle decided he would get there first and steal the prize of first ascent. He raced up to the mountains, half-killed himself climbing the peak, and when he returned, ready to gloat about his victory, learned that this unnamed man attempting the climb was, in fact, himself.
But Pringle was old now and his days of climbing were over. He had instead become a curator of sorts. Throughout his life, the man had gathered thousands of pages of information about the Alps. He subscribed to every mountaineering journal and read every book on the subject of climbing. Few of these escaped his criticism. There was almost always some error which required a letter from him to the editor demanding a
correction. For example, if a climber spoke of having been able to see Monte Rosa from the summit of the Breithorn on a certain day, Pringle would consult the weather bulletins, all of which he had saved, and if the bulletin had indicated cloud, he would be sure to send a scathing letter discrediting the climber's claim.
correction. For example, if a climber spoke of having been able to see Monte Rosa from the summit of the Breithorn on a certain day, Pringle would consult the weather bulletins, all of which he had saved, and if the bulletin had indicated cloud, he would be sure to send a scathing letter discrediting the climber's claim.
Pringle's appearance at a lecture on the subject of Alpinism would send a shudder of dismay through any unfortunate speaker walking out onstage. During the lecture, Pringle would take notes on a miniature chalkboard which he carried with him. The tapping and scratching of the chalk on the board was enough to ruin anybody's concentration. At the end, when the floor was opened for questions, Pringle's stubby arm would be the first to rise.
He was so nitpicky in his fact-checking, and so blunt in his delivery of the truth, that Pringle had managed to make enemies of almost everyone in the climbing community. Most people were too terrified to speak ill of him. He had made a business of ruining reputations, and it was with particular energy that he set about ruining Carton's.
For Pringle, the disregarding of a fact was a personal insult. Facts were for him the most beautiful of all things, as hard and precious as diamonds. But for Carton, that diamond fact was a thing to be held up to the light, to be twisted and turned and examined for its angle of greatest interest. And if he believed that the fact might be of better use to him if it was held up in just such a way, or turned even slightly, to achieve that particular wide-eyed look of wonderâpart horror, part fascination, part incredulityâhe would make it so. Each summer he returned from the Alps with new and hair-raising stories for his audiences.
He also accumulated a collection of artifacts which had
been expelled from glaciers. Anything which fell down a crevasse would, sooner or later, be tombed in ice and carried through to the glacier's end. The movement of these glaciers had been studied enough that when something, or someone, disappeared down a crevasse, it could often be predicted to within a year or two when that thing or person would reappear.
been expelled from glaciers. Anything which fell down a crevasse would, sooner or later, be tombed in ice and carried through to the glacier's end. The movement of these glaciers had been studied enough that when something, or someone, disappeared down a crevasse, it could often be predicted to within a year or two when that thing or person would reappear.
Carton established contacts among the Society of Alpine Guides and quietly bought up the relics of mountaineering disasters. These included ice axes, clearly marked to men whose lives had ended decades before and whose bodies had never been found. He purchased the bones of Alpine cave bears, which had been extinct for thousands of years. There were shreds of clothing, spewed out in slow motion by the ice; their tattered edges seemed to prove the violent ends of those who had once worn them.
And then there was Archie.
One year, thirteen members of the Climbers' Club were invited to a Saturday lunch in the club's dining room. There was some uneasiness as to why Carton would have chosen thirteen people, when the superstition attached to the number still meant that hotels did not have a thirteenth room, that hunting parties never comprised thirteen people, and that you did not invite thirteen people to a luncheon.
The guests arrived to find fourteen places laid for dinner.
Who was the fourteenth guest? they asked.
Carton would not say.
Just as the meal was about to begin, Carton rang a small brass bell and the waiters wheeled in something that caused two people, both of them men, to faint.
It was a skeleton sitting in a chair. The bones had been wired together and then strapped to the chair, but not before it had been dressed in a gray suit with a red tie bearing a white
skull-and-crossbones design. The skeleton had been wired in such a way that its arms were folded across its chest. This, combined with the grinning teeth, served to give Archie a cheerful and irreverent expression, much like Carton himself.
skull-and-crossbones design. The skeleton had been wired in such a way that its arms were folded across its chest. This, combined with the grinning teeth, served to give Archie a cheerful and irreverent expression, much like Carton himself.
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