Her face, lit by a single candle, turned upwards, and she gazed through the silent trees. High on the huge face above, a point of light moved slowly across to the edge of the ice-field and paused. Already she could hear the muffled clatter of falling stones...
…A sunlit breeze filtered through whispering pine trees and danced on the twisted cock of the crag beneath which he slept. Awakened by the soft warmth of dawn, he was touched by a new and deep happiness, and as if to reassure himself of its origin, he drew one arm from his sleeping bag to grasp a small pocket in the rock above. Instinctively he made tiny adjustments to his grip, delighting in the roughness of crystal against fingers. Then his muscles tensed and a thrill ran through his whole body. Above, fired red against the rippling glow of the sky, a squirrel crackled from branch to branch.
There was the day he soloed The Wall and played to the upturned heads below. Afterwards they betrayed the hills for a sweaty bar and he boasted of the difficulties and dangers of. the climb, speaking with the smile of death. Later, walking alone to his tent under a myriad stars, gazing at the outline of ancient hills, he relived a taut sequence of difficult moves and the humility of a slipping, misplaced foot. Reaching the foot of the crag, he lay instead on the heather, balancing the rising moon on a distant ridge.
He remembered his first solo on ice. Singing wildly into the wind and exulting in his ability to live where he could so easily choose to die. The buffeted thud of the axe, the torn sweep of the mountain through the mist, the sting of spindrift and the screaming delight of the struggle across the plateau: all this numbed his mind and he thought it a reason to live.
He lay in the dark of his tent, music plugged ecstatically into his ears, limbs stretched limp with weariness. A distant rumble of thunder penetrated his throbbing mind and dragged his thoughts back to the mountain: the urgent tension of a runneled couloir, the grating, tenuous bite of his crampons, the stomach-turning sweep of ice and the obscene blue slits of crevasses thousands of feet below. He remembered not the beauty of dawn but the danger it brought: the crash of ice as he traversed blindly beneath the seracs, the rattle of stonefall, the careless tiredness of released tension, the dull haze of the washed-out summit view, the stifling tedium of the glacier heat and the blistering descent through the forest. Yet this was all he had and as the music grew to a climax, he realised that this was what he should die for.
Somewhere in his mind a decision, balanced precariously on a hollow pyramid of experience and decaying ambition, is taken and he moves out onto the sickeningly steep, grey, pitted ice. His movements automatic and perfectly executed, his brain screaming in a tortured frenzy of commitment and danger as the stones whistle incessantly past. Be knows only now that he is alive, and now struck, falls, dies, a pathetic bundle polluting the whole length of the face with his blood...
Thoughts and memories of the climber, poised on the cold rocks at the edge of the icefield.
Dawn came quickly with a savage beauty, an arrow of fire winging around the infinite horizon, throwing countless distant ridges into jagged relief against cold pink haze. A wash of delicate blue engulfed the stars and the face was bathed in a chill breath of cosy light. In the valley below a single tiny light melted into the grey mists of morning. He turned towards the rising sun and began to descend.