PUTTING YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER
August 30.—Not a word as we crawled from the tent toward nine this morning, and draped the gargoyle with tarpaulins wet from underneath, and sleeping-bags wet from feet and breath. Fred and I were awake, as usual, from a small hour, shooting anxious glances at the Professor, knowing it was no use to rouse his sigh—till I remarked aloud that the sun wouldn’t reach our shelf till four P.M., so he turned over, threw us our pemmican, Simon lit the stove, and we told our dreams.
Just an “I suppose” from Fred, starting ahead, settled our direction, straight up, a bit to the right (S.E.)—Oh, yes, steeper than anything yesterday—houses are not built with such sheer walls as that slope began with, only began. Packs were the same, numb shoulders ached the same under weight of the deadly cheeses, for what use was a depot on that snow clothes-peg? We crawled along a crack in the neve, where you had to punch holes for your frozen hands to hold you there in the crumbly stuff, and looked down a clear 3,000 feet.
Whew! Those next four hours! I had the tentpole, of course—no one would touch it on this stretch. All yesterday’s torture in fears, regrets, from this life-blighting imagination reassailed me on the quivering brink of the end. We stopped, staggered with set faces, crawling around each step-cutter to let him gain the rear; so slowly leaned back to rest, carefully fitting heels into toe-nicks, backing upright against our ponchos; but more often rested with face to the slope, bowing down heads flat over the abyss, to let the packs bear straight down and ease shoulders, so the nether white glare swam upside down between your legs.
... A hundred times I concluded (and am still convinced) that I was not meant to climb mountains; a hundred times more I called myself a fool, seeing the awkward rears of Simon and the Professor; clutching the tent-pole, again and again I turned just for the delicious suffering of seeing the hateful Below spring upward, as in desperation you pound a hurt to kill yourself with pain—to make the worst seem worse, knowing that this is not the moment when I must slip, but this, the next, must be; with Foraker leaping like a rocket into the sky, the far, pond-spattered tundra sweeping skyward in waves, a sort of dullness before the snow chokes off all.. . .
And yet time passed like lightning. I could not believe the man who said that it was 2:20 P. M.
The Professor was in the lead. It was my turn to cut, but he did not seem inclined to take the tent-pole and give me the axe. I offered and offered the pole, but couldn’t tell if he withheld the axe because he thought I’d rather stay behind, or didn’t want to give it up. I was content enough behind, but I felt he thought that he was sort of sacrificing himself to me. “It’s all ice here. Look out,” he would say calmly between most deliberate steps, and stopping to hack a little deeper. “Are they too far apart?”—just the things I should say ahead there, but I was not saying them; that made me feel guilty; words of big consolation; I admired him mightily. Fred and Simon never spoke, except at rests, and then horrible little commonplaces.
Everything was ice, not an inch of neve. It seemed to take ten minutes to cut each step, which then held one toe, or one inch of a mushy, in-trod boot-sole. Nothing for mittened hands to grip. I asked Fred what he thought of climbing with the tent-pole. “Yer couldn’t make me use it on these ice places,” he said. And Simon—think of it—said, “The man with the tent-pole oughtn’t to have to cut steps at all.” But we kept on as before. “It’s getting a little leveler,” said the Professor. It was. And then I would ply him with questions about that leveling, laughingly fishing for more assurances. “Rocks ahead, the edge of a ridge, something, see them,” he said. So there were. “Thank you, thank you,” I said, as if that were all the Professor’s doing. “God! I admire the way you take this slope,” I’d exclaim. And by heaven, with all these mean pages behind, I still do.
We could dig a seat now, on the corniced brow of Fred’s rock ridge, 1,000 feet sheer down, then down 1,500 of black, porcupine-like spires. Lunch? No, no one was hungry. As usual we asked for the barometer. As usual, the Professor said, “It can’t have responded yet,” drawing it from his belt. It was not quite 10,000 feet.
I led at last with Simon’s axe, straight up toward the objective rock slope (N.W.). We were above the balconies over last night’s camp. Soon the snow softened to let you step sometimes without cutting, then again all was steep as ever. On the east, a huge ridge paralleled ours, depressed in the middle with a squarish gap, through which a dark, greenish line wavered in the sunlit haze—low peaks of the Sushitna valley flecking the horizon. So we could see on the great range’s other side. Then toward Foraker, through that gap, gathering all the southern ridges about the final bend in Peters, and yet beyond all, rose and rose a turret-like summit, smooth, white, specked with huge bergschrunds, to a terrifying height. “There’s a high mountain over there,” I shouted, “just appearing. You can’t see it yet. A new one!” “Yes, sir, yes,” said Fred, catching up, and we sat down to gaze and gnaw pemmican.
In half an hour we stood here on the narrow knife of the spur-top, facing failure. Ahead, the zenith suddenly petrified into a big, pinkish-yellow strip of rock, offending the sight as a thunderclap might have deafened. The Professor dropped his pack and ran on, mumbling an order to camp at the first flat spot, dashing through the deep snow toward our coveted ridge, now so black and puny. I saw it was hopeless.
The yellow strip shot downward, between ours and the Sushitna ridge; down, down, like a studded bronze door, straight into the reversed head of Peters—three thousand feet down, three thousand feet above; a double door, for a straight gorge cut it in twain, a split not glacier-made, but as if this apex of the continent were cracked like an old plate. Slides roared, the whole swam in snow-mist, and two turret-like summits far and high to the east, grew gold in the late light.
Here, where the black ridge leading to the top of the pink cliffs should have flattened, all was absolutely sheer, and a hanging glacier, bearded and dripping with bergschrunds, filled the angle between.. . . To-morrow? Here in the tent, not a word has been said. I wonder, has any one admitted to himself that we’re checkmated, or would, if he realized it? How sure is the Professor of spending a night on the summit? Looks like another brood of dead chickens....
The old cooking, squirming, changing-sock game is on. I am digging neve to melt—“finest imported neve,” we laughingly call it—from a snow hole at my head, where the kerosene has not spilt to flavor it. Fred glum. Simon at the stove. The barometer has adjusted itself, but only to 10,800 feet.. . .
The Professor has just come in from a long meditation outside. “Never, never,” he says, “have I seen anything so beautiful.” That from him! The Spirit of the North, like Moses, has struck water from the rock. But it’s so. I’ve seen it. No cloud-floor hides the forbidden tundra, no mist softens the skeleton angles of these polar alps; only a wan red haze confuses the deeps of the universe, warning that they, and we, and life at last, is of another world. The tundra dazes; its million lakes, lifted by refraction mid-high on the front range, are shapeless, liquid disks ablaze; and the crazy curves of their shores far below, which may be the dark and sleepless land—no eagle could tell—are walled by pillars of smoky violet, verily from against the sea.. . .
Last night I tried to hide my fear with sophistry.
Now to be honest. I dread the descent more than the climb. I believe that there’s too much ahead in living to have it all cut suddenly off against your will in a fool business; and if it must be, there’s no use shivering about it. If I had any beliefs, I’d put my house in order. Where this sort of thing leads a man, God only knows. Anyhow, we’re not on a shelf that may break off. Good night. Pleasant dreams, and hear me whine in my sleep to the Professor—if I sleep.
August 31.—Alone in the tent. It’s about noon, and the sun is blinding over the yellow wall. No one stirred till late. After breakfast, orders were given not to pack up. Fred and the Professor walked toward the cliffs.... I can see them now, sitting on a cornice where the ridge narrows. They are no longer staring at the yellow wall.
Simon and I have been talking. This is how I did put my house in order: “Simon,” I said, “I want to apologize to you for everything unkind or offensive that I’ve done or said to you on this whole trip.” He laughed, looked away, and said, “Oh, that’s all right.” Tears came to my eyes. Then I felt ashamed, then angry. Then we talked as if we’d been brought up together; he of dangers of ships in the polar sea, I of old days in Alaska. I said that I was certain we could get no further. He changed the subject.
Fred and the Professor have just returned. Neither spoke till right near the tent, and looks lie through snow-glasses. “Make tea, and put a whole can of milk into it,” said the Professor. While taking in the bags and tarpaulins from the sun, I heard Fred say, “It ain’t that we can’t find a way that’s possible, takin’ chances. There ain’t no way.. ..We thought it might be managed on that hangin’ glacier first.” Simon burst out in surprise. “Professor-r-r, you’re not going to give it up, are you?” and began pointing to ridges and glaciers right and left, saying that of course we must go down and then up by them. The Professor tried to reason with him. Simon seemed straining points, but I was shamefacedly admiring his determination, when Fred came into the tent, and said, “A holler like that makes me sick.” Is it a holler? I guess it is, which makes me feel smaller than ever. It doesn’t matter. We’re going to start down.... Something besides courage and determination is needed to climb a mountain like this. Forgive me, if I call it intelligence.. . .
Simon pretended that he wanted to lug down the twenty-pound tin of pemmican, but we kicked it off the ridge, and started descending on the run. How I got over the ice above Fred’s rocks, don’t ask. I’ve heard of persons sweating blood, and red stuff kept dripping from my forehead, as step by step, face outward into the dancing gulf, we tottered over the ice ladder of two days’ cutting. I talked incessantly to the Professor of the various sorts of courage; how easy it had been for me to stand on the crater-edge of Mount Pelee, just after St. Pierre had been destroyed, because life or death there was not in my own hands, as here; and so new problems bothered me about cowardice and responsibility, which I’ve not solved yet. Half way down, the Professor insisted on my taking his axe for the tent pole, for which I put him forever on Olympus, between Leonidas and Brutus. Thus at last we strung along Peters, each stopping dazedly in his tracks now and then to gaze back and upward. Now at the Professor’s and my lone camp of the week ago, we are in our eiderdown, on the ice just above the serac, in the messy disorder that it seems we’ve been living in forever.