WHAT IS COURAGE?
August 29.—To-day we did not quite wait for the sun, and by ten o’clock were discarding the superfluities which your expert in “traveling light” always lugs to the very highest point to throw away. I left my binoculars (the Professor wanted me to quit my camera. Not I, as I think all his films are over-exposed) and the others abandoned enough wool underwear for a winter camp. “We need to concentrate on food, not clothing,” announced the Professor, throwing away a sweater; and we started to break trail in the blazing, non-thawing sun, through eight inches of soft snow, toward the foot of this great spur or bergschrunds jutting from below the steep southwestern shoulder of McKinley.
The Professor says he is sure that its steepness must relax on its far, or eastern side, hidden from us by the spur. This seems plausible, and gives me hope, even considering how height and distance in this cold, dustless air, where 6,000 feet look like 60, and a door-step may be a half-mile cliff, knock imagination into a cocked hat. Of course we should have reconnoitered the slope, but how could we, with winter coming on, and our one sack of beans and one of flour five hundred miles from the coast? We have provisions for ten days, half of which was to be cached at to-night’s camp, which was to be just below the steep place, at 10,000 feet, the Professor was certain; to serve as our base for the final attack and as a refuge in case we are driven back. Idle dreamer! You see, his programme is to reach the summit in about five days, returning in two or three.
The slope began easily, up the rough path of an old avalanche, but the packs were the sort that make you wonder how you can stagger on another ten minutes. We broke trail in turn; fifty paces each, then a rest, then, as we got used, seventy-five paces, and in an hour or so, a hundred. No one had spoken. Fred’s “pass” to the Sushitna still gaped into blue sky, and the sheer 1,000 feet we’d risen above Peters seemed 200. Resting, we stamped a foot-hold in the neve, turned our backs skittishly to the slope, leaning against it on our packs; and once, doing so, came our first warning. Simon lost balance, and began to slip, slip, slip, as Fred caught him, and manoeuvered him to safety, i e., saved his life. We all looked at each other and laughed, even Simon, all wiping the sweat from our burning faces with our arms; looked at our black-goggled eyes, which transform each fellow creature into a stranger; Fred a severe person, the Professor a funny big man, and Simon an aged down.
Furtively, imperceptibly, the steepness had stolen a march on us. Neve ridges and humps of avalanche ‘gave the only footing. As one line of foot-holds gave out, we had to sidle dexterously to another. In time the slides had scattered none at all. The steeper slope was swept clear and hard. Steps had to be cut.
Fred was ahead. He cut, cut, cut, with the crossheaded axe, slowly; laboriously balanced on one leg, trying the hole in the hard neve with the other foot; a new game for him, for us all; hole after hole, foot after foot. The slope braced upward into the bulging, overhanging walls of a huge bergschrund suspended over our abyss; higher, more of them hung, ending in two gigantic balconies, foreshortened against the sky. At last we could cut either to the right (southeast) toward the rocks which Fred had wanted to climb at the end of the spur (we’ve been going up its face), or to the left (northeast). We agreed, with no discussion, on the left.
We have only three ice-axes. Never giving them a thought this morning, all were gobbled up when we started, and I was left with the long willow tent-pole. It was never meant to balance you in half-cut steps that may or may not hold your toe, nor to clean out the granular stuff doused into one by Simon’s laboriously lifted, stocking-stuffed hind leg. At the first shifts in cutting, no one wanted to trade an axe for the pole so I could cut. When at last I palmed it off on Simon, I wasn’t too dexterous with the iron on the growing steepness. Soon they complained that I cut too far apart.
Yet we had risen. At last! A mountain looming through Fred’s pass. “Foraker,” said the Professor. * though so small, distant, and snowless. It was two o’clock, the barometer only in the eight thousands, and it seemed you could spit into the tromped circle of last night’s camp, and its black speck of superfluities. Someone said “Lunch,” and when each had caught up, turned and staggered into his foot-shelf, I produced one of the red cheeses. The Professor cut it, and each mouth spit out its first bite—salter than salt salmon, it is, here where water is worth its price in—oil. But each cached his piece in his red bandanna, and turned to pemmican, which pleased Fred, as the chunk in use is wrapped in a towel in his pack.
The Professor sighed—and led on. Now we cut steps in regular turn, the leader waiting after a hundred steps or so till the others had filed past, the man behind him cutting, as he fell to the rear, and so on, etc. Slowly we were forced to the sheer west edge, under the upper balconies. Should we try the narrow shelves that might run along its brow, or still zigzag up the steepening slope among the bergschrunds?—which last was chosen to be done, as nervelessly and carelessly as before. Fred settled it by saying, as he pointed to the right, “Hadn’t we better take that swag?” as if we were driving horses on the tundra. He can’t swallow, nor can I, these technical terms of alpining; a rucksack we call a backpack-serac, he daren’t pronounce, it’s “that steep place,” and a bergschrund is “them overhanging humps.”
The swag started all right, then led straight up over the back of a big hump. The Professor led, cutting very slowly, shouting back how to avoid a hidden crevasse. Looking downward, the sheerness appeared poisonous to me, and I tried to think that I’d stick, in falling, on the fractional level just below, where loose masses of snow from the last slide from this very place still hung.
As the steps changed from a stairway to a step-ladder, the other three betrayed no excitement, no uneasiness. Neither did I at first, but I felt both; not dizziness, not vertigo, but simply the lightning, kaleidoscopic force of imagination, looking down the sheer two thousand feet, from where we clung by our toes, resistlessly told over how it would feel, how long it would last, what the climax in sensation would be, were I to fall. As hour succeeded hour, I lived each minute only to make the false step, cursing inwardly, but only at what then would be said by our civilized friends, their pitiful comments on this party, that with no alpine experience just butted blindly in to the highest mountain on the continent. Thought of that angered me. Cold feet, you say? Perhaps. But the personal test is yet to come. Courage is only a matter of self-control, anyway—and the tyranny of imagination.. . .
Climbing McKinley with a tent-pole! Sometimes I boiled in those dizzy, anxious places that I had put myself in such a position with such men. My blind neglect of the Professor’s silence on alpining now reproaches in another way. It’s not bringing out his lack of staying power, as I thought, but his foolhardiness. Yet I must reap my own sowing. Once I asked if it wasn’t customary to rope on such steep slopes, but no one but Fred answered, and he, “Y’ain’t goin’ to ketch me tied up to no one. A man don’t want to take chances with any one but himself, haulin’ him down from these places.” And right he is.. . .
One requisite of the explorer—besides aversion to soap and water—is insensitiveness. I understand now why their stories are so dry. They can’t see, they can’t feel; they couldn’t do these stunts if they did. But the sensitive ones can’t have their cake and eat it, too. They feel, but they can’t do. As for me, is the doing of a thing to be no longer its end, as was in the old adventurous days? The telling of it the end instead? So I can’t help admiring Simon and the Professor and their callousness, which is not bravery, not self-control. Their brains do not burn, horrifying the present with visions of the supreme moments of life. But it’s better so. Where would we be, if there was another fool like me along? . . .
The Professor has been a real companion the last two days; intelligent and sympathetic. Probably he realizes that this is the final effort, and is making a grand play to come up to scratch. At any rate, tonight I’m convinced that he’s really trying for all he’s worth to get up McKinley; that this is the actual bluff I promised myself to make on the mountain. Even if we fail, the worst suffering will be over—the days following the first repulse—and then, Oh! how I shall feel for him, perhaps an undeserved pity, but it will turn all the tables of my regard. I shan’t be able to help that. We are trying, damnably trying.... And all my righteous disgust and revulsion of race toward Simon have vanished. To-day we exchanged the brotherhood that civilized people do not fool themselves into believing is always the heroism of explorers in a tight place. I know it’s hollow and meaningless; take away the danger, and all will be as before. But it’s heroic while it lasts. And I’ve often felt I’d die for the semblance of such a thing in this life.. . . Forward and back, into the future and past, you can’t see very clearly in these places. The brain works too fast, and your capacity to bear cold and hunger appalls.. . .
I am morbid? Perhaps—but this is no place for cold sanity, for me, at least; though Fred and I on reaching this camp had a boxing-match—for warmth.
It was five o’clock and we were right under those balconies of the sky. One way led up, straight over the shoulder of a bergschrund, jutting like a gargoyle from a skyscraper. We climbed it; there seemed no lead further. The Professor said, “Camp anyhow, and we’ll see.”
We have camped, and on not ten square feet of primeval level. We’ve dug into the neve wall to get enough flatness to spike the tent, and contorted ourselves to place within again, I still on the windy side. And the wind is rising from the darkening white ridges and each unplanetary depth. The silk overhead shivers like cobweb, and jam down my head and cover up as I can in the soft snow, it steals through and stabs. Even in our warmth we’re numb, tired, disappointed. We have come only half as high as the Professor hoped; we are only halfway to the top of the great snow spur, to the base of the doubtful rocks, to the camp for the final climb where the cache is to be made. So this brood of the Professor’s chickens does hatch out dead.
“Tea or pea soup?” someone has just laughed. That will be the tag by which we will recall and laugh over this adventure. Simon has just remarked this. Thus, you see, self-consciousness is inseparable even from this sort of heroism. Perhaps after all it were best for us to slide off this gargoyle quietly as we sleep—as it keeps haunting me we shall—or better, that this ugly white beak shall fall with us senselessly in the night. I have just touched on the possibility of this, aloud, and Simon remonstrated, adding, “We don’t want to speak of such things, even if we feel them!” What sickening insincerity, as if that could make the snow any firmer!—to choke the dizzy sense of danger, which is the very thing that’s brought us here—as if in this quivering suspension over the vast polar world, it were not criminal to be acting a part.. . .
Fred watches Simon fussing with the stove, much annoyed. The Professor is scribbling in his notebook—inches, feet, and degrees I suppose. How warmly the tea went down!—with dirty chunks of the crumbled zwieback, which the Professor draws from a white bag and throws at us with a “Here’s your ration, Dunn.” Two cups each; first you dip it out of the pot, then when it’s low enough, you pour, spilling* it on the sleeping-bags. Fred has corralled the empty milk can from Simon. We can’t afford to melt snow for a “squeeze.” Then the pemmican—all you want. It’s scraping the roof of my mouth sore. Simon is telling how to run an auto. We are all laughing now. This is all a great joke; there’s something very devilish about just being here. Everyone is in a bully humor, more tolerant of his fellows than ever before on the whole trip. For aren’t we the only ones in all this dastardly white world? How would it pay for the only four creatures in the universe to be the least at odds? We depend on one another. And yet, perhaps our devotion is—only the warm tea.. . .
I have been outside, forgetting to undo the safety pin that holds the flap, and nearly tearing down the tent—as Fred almost just did. The finnsku do not give a sanded footing, and you slip around on the inches of the gargoyle, expecting to be floating down through mid-air, your stomach feeling inside out.. . . Not an acre of the forbidden tundra was to be seen. Through Fred’s gap, which leads even west of Foraker, and circling the dead, whitish granite of the front range and its three crocodilian glaciers, sleeps a billowy floor of summer cloud, into which the sun is blazing a vermilion trail, lighting the gentle Siwashes of Bristol Bay far west, perhaps, or a slow-smoking island off the coast of Asia.
That vast, glimmering floor of cloud! At last, the silvery lining for us of what may be gloom to all the world, an enchanted plane cutting the universe, soft and feathery, yet strong and bright like opal—for us and us alone; veined and rippled, dyed with threads of purple, rose, and blue, where Foraker rises pale with late sunlight, like the ramparts of a new-created heaven, blushing a moment for us alone.. . .
I can feel the death-like silence. No one is asleep, yet no one dares move, lest he tell his neighbor he’s awake. A cold blue from the nether world forms with the awful twilight a sort of ring about the tent, which magnifies the texture of the silk, and rises and falls as I lift my head from its pillow of trousers and pack. It is a sort of corrupted rainbow, or what the halo of a fallen angel might be like, I think—the colors burned and wearied out. The world below is swinging on through space quite independently of us, at least. I am not cold, but I shiver, and shiver; think and think of everything I have thought and feared to-day, and the little of it put down here. And if I doze I seem to be at the very instant of slipping off the gargoyle in the finnsku.. . .
We hang our snow-glasses on the tent-pole, knotting the strings around it, so they dangle down. They look very funny up there, motionless above me—four of them, mine the lowest.