On the second night of the climb that had been caught on the exposed cliff face when the foehn struck...
The four figures were as motionless as the mountain they huddled against. Their clothing was stiff with a brittle crust of ice, just as the rock was glazed over with a shell of frozen rain and melt water. It was not yet dawn, but the saturation of night was diluting the east. Ursid could dimly make out the ice-scabbed folds of his trousers. He had been crouched over for hours, staring sightlessly into his lap, ever since the force of the storm had abated sufficiently to allow him to open his eyes. Despite the penetrating cold that followed the storm, he had not moved a muscle. His cringing posture was exactly what it had been when the foehn struck, tucked up as tight a ball as his stance permitted, offering the elements the smallest target.
It had broken upon them without warning, and it was not possible to reckon the time it had lasted - one interminable moment of terror and chaos compounded by driving rain and stinging hail, of tearing wind that lashed around them and wedged itsel between man and rock, trying to drive them apart. There were the blinding flashes and blind darkness, pain from clinging and numbness from the cold. But most of all their had been sound: the deafening crack of thunder at close hand, the persistent scream of the wind, the roar and clatter of the avalanche spilling to the right and left and bouncing in eccentric patterns over the outcropping of rock that protected them.
It was quiet now. The storm was gone.
The torrent of sensation had washed Ursid's mind clean, and thought returned slowly and in rudimentary forms. He told himself in simple words that he was looking at his pants. Then he reasoned that they were covered with a crust of ice.Eventually, he interpreted the pain as cold. And only then, with doubt and wonder, but no excitement, he knew he was alive.
The storm was over, but the dark and the cold only slowly retreated from his consciousness, and the transition from pain and storm to calm and cold was an imperceptible blend. His body and nerves remembered the fury, and his senses told him it had passed, but he could recall neither the end of the storm nor the begining of the calm.
Ursid looked around. The warmth of the foehn had melted the surface snow, and it had frozen again with the arrival of the cold front. AN inch of ice crusted the snow, slippery and sharp, but not strong enough to bear a man's weight. The rocks were glazed with a coat of frozen melt water, impossible to cling to, but the crust was too thin to take an ice piton. In the growing light, he assessed the surface conditions. They were the most rreacherous possible.
One of the other climbers stirred, then another, but there was no motion from the last, nor would there ever be again. The other two climbers looked to Ursid as he outlined their plan for retreat from the mountain face. It would be a slow tedious and extremely dangerous process of hacking a path down.
The descent was torturously slow. The frozen crust of snow was such that at one step the surface was so hard the crampons would take no bite, but at the next the leg would break through to the softer snow below and balance would be lost. The snowfield clung to the face at an angle of 50 degrees, and Ursid had to lean out and down from the edge of each big step to chop out the next with his ice axe. He could not be content with those stylish toe steps that can be formed with two skillful swings of the axe; he had to hack out vast tubs, big enough to hold him as he leaned out for the next, and big enough to allow the others to take a belaying stance at each step.
The routine was complicated and expensive of energy. Ursid moved down alone for one rope length, belayed from above by Farl who, in turn, was held by Anderl. Then he cut out an especially broad stance from the protection of which he carefully guided their dead companion's body down to him as Farl let the burden slip bit by bit, always fighting its tendency to tear itself from his grip and fly down the face carrying all of them with it. When the canvas bundle reached Ursid, he secured it as best he could, driving the spare ice axe into the crust and using it as a tie-off. Then Farl came down to join him, moving much more quickly down the big steps. The third phase of the pattern was the most dangerous. Anderl had to move down half the distance to them, where he could could jam himself into one of the better steps and set his body to protect them through the next repitition of the cycle.
Slow thou their progress was, for Ursid, who had to cut each of the steps and who could rest only while the others closed up from above, it was desperately tiring.
Three hours; two hundred and fifty yards.
Five hours; three hundred twenty-five yards.
and on and on....
One more step and then you can rest... vAnderl called to Ursid, during a brief rest. "You're very good, you know Ursid. I've enjoyed climbing with you."
Ursid forced a smile. "We'll make it."
Anderl grinned and shook his head. " No, I don't think so. But we shall continue with style."
Sixty hours later, Ursid stood at the bottom of the mountain face looking up, a tear in his hard face, three canvas wrapped bundles at his feet. A bear whisper passed his cracked and blue lips.
"I am Ursid.
I am legend."
| Wednesday, October 22, 1997 |
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