THEY RODE in a boat-hulled helicopter with double-barreled jet engines and rotors that twitched like an insects wings in a hovering staccato wheel. Wind and engines were deafening as the military craft faced to sea and ran a hundred miles in search of the British Merchant Navy motor vessel Royal George, upon which Lydia and Marshall would sail to Rotterdam.
A hurricane in the east raged undecided and alone over an empty patch of sea. Just west of the Gulf Stream, the Royal George steamed up and down waiting to see if clear passage would open and in which direction. They were short of crew when they put out of Norfolk with half a cargo of coal, and a man had been swept overboard in the gale. On his telex, Levy had received a full report, and offered to send a replacement for the voyage, to work passage. Thus Marshall was conscripted into the crew.
Though she was the Admiral’s sister, Lydia had never ridden in a helicopter. Nor had Marshall, though he felt at times as if the noise of the rotors—like sudden rain beating on a tin roof—were entirely familiar. The helicopter crew had just returned from Vietnam, and were elated to be alive, frightened of themselves, and remarkably casual with their machine. Partly from habit, and partly for Lydia, the pilot guided his craft through cloud and rain as if he were a skier. He slid down a steep ramp of broken clouds and made a wide circle above the sea. He banked to nearly vertical and looked downward through the side window. He charged ahead and then veered into the soft ceiling. He put music on the communications system, and swayed the helicopter so that they felt as if they were inside a dancing elephant. Lydia loved this, and it showed in her face.
The boys from Dallas and Tucumcari, in fatigues and lifejackets, stared at her without letup. In the gulf off Vietnam, and shuttling inland over dappled plains and muted gunfire, they had wished for such a woman. She put her hand on the gun carriage and looked over the sea, watching the waves drive northeast. She felt that she held the helicopter and its lethal weapons in her hand, that it emanated from her like spokes in the wheel of visual lines made by the airmen in her regard, that by will alone she could direct and co-ordinate its flight that in the slightest movement of her eye, she could turn it and make it sweep down. It did go where she willed, running smoothly over the sea, toying with the storm.
The Dallas gunner cried out, “I have a ship at two o’clock.” They waited for a break in the clouds, and, as soon as they had locked in to a distant form tossing in the spirited sea, made for the ship. Dropping to twenty-five feet above the waves, they sped through mist and spray toward the high steel sides. The crew of the Royal George lined the bridge and forecastle, watching the helicopter approach over the water as if it would smash against the ship. The pilot increased speed and, only a few hundred feet from target, rose rapidly over the masts. Then he went over on his side and circled the Royal George for no reason other than to show that here were men on the sea and in the air, in steel machines knotted in the mane of a hurricane; that the engines were firing and hot; that they could go where they wanted; that in conjunction with the sudden winds and high waves, they were free.
The dazzling blades came so close that they nearly struck the ship. Like that of a muscular bird, a thickened quail, the body of the craft was streamlined with plenty of curved limb. The sound of engines shuddered down the decks like the rain, and coursed over the upturned faces of the sailors as the Royal George yawed, pitched, and rolled. Great waves lifted its bows, lurching along the sides like a flood in a gorge, and men in blue and yellow oilskins rushed to the main hatch cover as the helicopter hovered amidships.
The gunner threw aside nylon webbing at the door and swung out the winch, while the pilot followed precisely every sway of the ship, hand and eye usurping all his vital being. Marshall took the sling and pushed away. He was lowered into the rain, and a minute later he hit a slippery deck. Lydia followed, waving goodbye to Dallas and Tucumcari.
As Lydia slowly descended, the men of the Royal George were astounded—they had not expected a woman. She slipped out of the harness and swept her hands through her hair. So off balance had she rendered the sailors that they looked like prehistoric Britons. Open-mouthed, squat-faced, cliff-eyed, they rocked silently on yellow and blue sea legs like a chorus line of idiots. The officers saw Lydia and adjusted their tunics. Then a wave came unexpectedly from starboard and hit the ship with a ferocious hook. Grasping rails and lines as water poured from the deck into the sea, they rushed inside.
Marshall took Lydia’s hand to help her through the companionway. As they looked back they saw the helicopter making a steady line to Hatteras and Virginia, where the sun would break through. In a confusion of oilskins and a dozen English dialects they looked at one another and realized that they hardly knew who they were. Suddenly they had come into the middle of the sea in hurricane season. The helicopter which had carried them was just a spot, cleaving its way to the coast. As the ship pitched into the storm they were shown down a long narrow corridor to their cabin.
They switched on a tiny light which did no more than accentuate the darkness, and they looked into their young faces dripping and windbeaten. Touching their cheeks together, they embraced in the glare, surrounded by shadow which agitated as if with gnats or smoke. They held one another and moved to stay standing while the ship rolled and the sea broke above them. Though dark, the cabin seemed to open like a flower into a picture of Western landscape, a fountain of colorful images. Marshall did not know if the Lydia he held were the graceful young woman with long perfect hands and silver rings, or the little girl in a gingham dress, in a starry Rocky Mountain meadow. He loved her.
THEY STARTED a tour of the ship in the engine room. The Royal George was brand-new and more automated than a Japanese toy. The engines were run by computers, and adjustments in speed, maintenance, and corrective repair were accomplished electromechanically. Several times a year in major ports an army of technicians boarded with packs of instruments for an overhaul. The regulars had nothing to do but stare at several stories of green enameled iron in the main well; and the catwalks might just as well have been for cats. However, the union was present, insisting that a complement of motormen remain in number sufficient to wipe and fire a sweating gargantuan sea engine of the type that had once swallowed whole the labor and attention of fifty men. Each watch of fifteen congregated inside a white glass-enclosed room suspended in the well, where the walls were filled with registers of lights. They were, to a man, old Scotsmen and Northerners, raised in steam. But they sat silently at consoles and read the Illustrated London News, while they listened to a recorded tattoo of bagpipes and reeds. They were old, white-haired, of deliberate gait and hard methodical breathing. Sunken eyes gazed before them with the expression of an animal brought from its den to a closed operating theater. It was as if they had been kidnapped from nineteenth-century ships. “Isn’t it strange,” said Lydia, when she and Marshall stepped off a ladder in a dim vibrating corridor, “that the future is always obvious when it first appears. That,” she said, meaning the banks of LED and the silent running of the control room they had just visited, no less the passive men whose grace and skill had been prematurely cupped in brain and eye away from hand and body, “is the way it will be. So much intellect and so little else.” They were alone in the dark corridor, on their way to the bridge and the kitchens. “Hold me,” she said.
He reached into her dress, and with his other hand he felt her back and shoulders while they kissed sadly and almost wildly. They might have gone on that way forever, so rough and alive did it make them feel, had it not been for the sudden appearance of a young rating, who, upon seeing the voluptuous entanglement, perked up to say, “My goodness, in the passageways yet. Well done.”
Whereas the engine room was a leap into the future, the galleys were a throwback to the twelfth century. Long-haired kitchen boys were jammed into corners and below tables, peeling potatoes and shelling eggs. Tremendous pots, cauldrons on tripods, hanging perforated utensils, and wooden boards laden with chopped onions, garlic, and beef were scattered about a cold slippery room filled with jets of vapor from leaky steam valves at the base of the ovens. There were two cooks, Dave and Harvey. Dave was tall and skinny, and resembled a prehistoric bird. Harvey was dark and inexact, and looked like the head of the Guatemalan Secret Police.
As stewards often do at sea, they sailed together in sin, battling for the attentions of the innocent young cookboys, despised by the randy deck force, ignored by the motormen, and cultivated by the officers for whom they cooked and served special meals. In the latter half of the voyage, Lydia was put to work in the galleys. At first Harvey and Dave resented her so intemperately that she moved in between them and took command, improving the cuisine ad infinitum and raising morale among the boys forever under tables peeling or slicing, forever subject to lascivious pinches from above. They came alive in Lydia’s presence, turning from sallow candle-fleshed morons to bright apple-cheeked prodigies. Lydia lay with Marshall in their narrow bed, silvery clouds racing past the porthole on warm southern air, and delighted as he recounted her praise. At her table, the rough and insolent deck force was completely tame. “Tell me more,” she said. “I feel like the daughter of the regiment.”
And then Marshall would repeat what had been said: “This puddings better than me mum’s.” “Does your missus give receipts?” “Hell’s bells governor, I’ve never tasted such great lima beans.” When she appeared in the mess one evening, they broke into spontaneous applause. And every night she would tell Marshall about her day in the “kitchen,” as she insisted upon calling it.
Dave and Harvey were upset and did not speak for a week, except once when Dave was rustling a big basket of fried potatoes and Harvey was slicing cabbages. One of the cabbages rolled off the block and into Dave’s cauldron of sizzling fat. Dave looked at Harvey for the first time in days, and said, “You little devil!”
To finish their tour of the 600-foot bulk carrier, Marshall and Lydia struggled across the deck to the forecastle. Clinging to handles on the anchor winches, they resolved to climb the mast. Marshall loved many things about Lydia apart from the indefinable main elements of their affection. One of these was her willingness to explore. Side by side they had swum raging inlets, roamed the mountains, and pushed through disgusting mushfooted swamps. And she had always remained ready to go. The crow’s nest was sixty feet above the deck—no laughing matter in a hurricane. The spikes by which they ascended were short enough, it seemed, to be stubble on a beard. In wind and rain they went upward into darkness. Because the Royal George was a modern ship, its crow’s nest was well appointed. Enclosed, heated, and carpeted, it was more like an apartment than an observation post. They were comfortable there, bobbing up and down high above a tumultuous killer sea. Swabbed with iodine-colored light and stretching from side to side, the bridge seemed like a wide rectangular eye. The sea was curly and white. Now and then a high part of it struck the ship, a storm within a storm. “This is just like Die Fledermaus said Marshall, “in which a woman suddenly calls for music even though music has been playing for an hour. And when it begins, its as if there has been silence.” Every eighth or ninth wave covered the part of the ship they had crossed to reach the bows. They made note of this in regard to getting back, and realized that it had been only by chance that they hadn’t been swept overboard on the way up.
LITTLE LOVE was lost between the crew and the Bosun, flown into Norfolk because his predecessor had vanished mysteriously somewhere off the Bahamas. The Bosun had one eye, wore a bright green hat, and was the toughest-looking bugger anyone on the ship had ever seen. “He beats up the plumbing at Dartmoor,” they said. To show who was boss, he had eaten his glass, plate, and fork at the hurricane dinner. He hated the crew, and they hated him. He was a fearsome character, and they were a tough bunch. They hated him because he tried to make them work in the storm. He hated them because they were a unique set of work-shirking duds who hadn’t done a day’s labor in their lives. But they did have a case, because the ship was fully automated. A war smoldered in the spray of the hurricane.
At 3 A.M. the Captain sent an order to the helm. They were to steam south and loop around the storm—which seemed likely to hang about for weeks—traversing the Sargasso Sea in an unexpected penetration of tropical latitudes, during which the ship would stop at least once (against company policy, but the Captain was not a company man) for swimming and diving. When Marshall heard the Bosun at his door (“Get up, ye dirty little Yankee fucker”), he dressed, went to breakfast, and, with the rest of the crew, made his way to the main deck. There, a light rain beat steadily; like Charleston in late February it was cold without a hint of warmth but not as cold as the same rain in the North, even if only for the memory of recent balmy days and anticipation of those soon to come. It was a rain of the palms, promising somehow not to betray and kill them with a desertion into unremitting cold.
Twelve men lined up. The Bosun paced before them with a mean look in his eye. His fists were clenched and they beat against his thighs like drumsticks. “Who’s the shop steward?” he asked the first man.
“Fuck you.”
“Who’s the shop steward?” he asked the second man.
“Fuck you.”
He went to the third, fourth, and fifth men, and asked, “Who’s the shop steward?”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you,” they answered.
The Bosun turned away for a moment, and then pivoted around, saying, “Okay boys, today were going to paint the crossbuckle plates. You,” he said, pointing to the first man, an enormous sailor named Roberts, “go get the paint.”
“You get the paint,” answered Roberts, “you silly one-eyed bastard.”
The Bosun sizzled. “What’s your name?” he demanded. Roberts was silent. “I’m going to dock your pay and put you off the ship. What’s your name?” He took out a little notebook.
“Bellchicken.”
“What?”
“Bellchicken’s my name,” said Roberts. “Wonderful Bellchicken.”
“Bellchicken, eh. We’ll see about that. What’s his name?” he asked Marshall, who, because of a sudden adjustment in the line, was standing next in the row.
Marshall replied, “Bellchicken’s his name, Wonderful Bellchicken.”
“What’s your name?” the Bosun asked Marshall. The next man jabbed Marshall in the ribs.
“Van Mushtif,” answered Marshall. “Cock Van Mushtif.” They twittered, and the Bosun felt as if he were beginning to lose control.
He said, “You British bastards! I’m putting every one of you on report. I don’t know who you are, but I will. Give me your names!” He moved to the man next to Marshall, a Cardiff giant of nearly seven feet, with a frightening black beard and piercing eyes.
“Name!”
In a deep boomament of near-Welsh, the giant said, “My name is Weeny, Weeny Allison.” He blew a kiss and mimed a curtsy.
The Bosun wrote in his book and moved on. “And you?” he inquired of the next man.
“Brutus, sir.”
“And you?” he asked a frail buck-toothed Scotsman.
“Pale Horse.”
“You bastard.” The Bosun stepped to the next man. “And you?”
“Pale Rider.”
At the point of giving up, the Bosun came to a middle-aged Londoner whose real name was Greylock Oceanard, and he did give up, throwing his notebook over the side and leaving the deck force until the afternoon, when he found them huddled on the hawsers in the forecastle, exchanging stories and shivering as the ship made for the south. Roberts was telling of the time when he was chased from a theater for yelling slogans, and in his dash to escape had not looked to check traffic. A bakery van loaded with dough had been barreling down the street, and had been forced to stop short at forty-five mph. The wet dough hurtled from the rear and pressed the. driver against the windshield. He was all right, but when they pulled him out they discovered that he had cut quite a cookie, and people from miles around came to see.
The Bosun entered the forecastle. “To work, boys,” he said, and they obliged only because they wanted exercise.
Lieutenant Buff-Wibbin came to direct the cleaning of Hold Two. Some of the men went single file down a set of steel rungs, while others slid down ropes to the floorplates sixty feet below (about twenty feet under the water line) and stood in an open-roofed steel cavern as big as a playing field. The sides sloped to nests of perforated beams and arches hidden in darkness, holding innumerable warrens, landings, and plateaus. Everything was covered with grain dry enough not to rot, and wet enough to smell like the first days in the creation of whisky. In addition to the grain, wooden beams and planks were scattered about, the remnants of dunnage placed to retard undo shifting of cargo.
Lieutenant Buff-Wibbin smoked a pipe and was regarded as a fool. He was lowered in the big iron vessel into which they would dump grain and planks. The chain was not quite long enough, leaving the vessel and Lieutenant Buff-Wibbin swaying to and fro several feet above the floor. He remained inside, surveying his crew of skeptics. Not only did they lack faith in him, but they had taken on the glazed, ward-of-the-state, vacant look they always had directly before the assignation of tasks. Buff-Wibbin was quite familiar with this. Swinging in his steel bucket, he began to throw out brushes and brooms, crying, “The thuds will wake the duds.” They took the tools and ran up the steep sides, often as not sliding back. But after a dozen tries they all made it into the darkness, where they found comfortable places amid the beams.
“Aren’t we going to work?” asked Marshall.
“We are working,” someone replied, “and working bloody hard, I might add.”
“Oh.”
“Not only that, but were getting danger pay.”
“Danger pay?”
“That’s right. It’s dangerous here, especially in a storm. So, we get danger pay.”
“Even if we don’t move?”
“Who’s to know?”
“If there’s not a kernel of grain in the bucket, Buff-Wibbin will know.”
“The bucket will be full in two hours.”
“We are going to work.”
“Certainly not. Buff-Wibbin will do it.”
Sure enough, when Marshall peered out, there was Buff-Wibbin, shirt off, sweating, frantically throwing boards into the bucket, and sweeping great piles of grain. “Are you active up there?” he called out. “I know you’re not working,” he said. “I know it as surely as I know that Mozart was an Italian!” Eventually he visited each perch, where his men huddled like thatch-makers in a hay shortage.
“Our eyes are adjusting to the darkness,” they said.
“Well, get on with it,” snapped Buff-Wibbin, indignantly showing them how. They made token movements of their brushes and brooms, passing them back and forth in the air a few times as if to expel the curse of activity. Buff-Wibbin swept out all the grain in three minutes. Then he moved across a beam to another group, and Marshall heard the pitter-patter of wheat pouring over the rusted plates fronting the abyss.
When Buff-Wibbin had just about finished loading the bucket, an old Cockney stepped out of the shadows and bellowed, “It’s tea toime! As union members, we demand our roite to tea toime! I’ve been on the sea for most of me loif. No upper-class fairy is going to take away my tea!”
“All right, all right,” said Buff-Wibbin, “come down for tea.”
But first they had to dump the grain overboard. When they came up on deck they saw that the weather had changed. The sea was high and white; waves crashed; but the sky was clear blue and no longer a jungle steambath. The bow wave of the Royal George was like an unloosed bale of pure white cotton. Near the horizon a destroyer took water over its decks as it plowed east on patrol. Tracers of foam covered even the deep troughs as the sea seemed to cast up energy.
They guided the bucket over the rail and watched as the golden grain flew in a shower down to the agitated waters. The heavy planks blew like chaff. Suddenly, Buff-Wibbin called out, “Cable!” as the bucket began to fall. Every man snatched the cable, and strained with bare hands to keep it from being lost. It was extremely heavy, and there was not enough slack for belaying. It gradually pulled them across the deck, until the lead man, Roberts (or Bellchicken), was pushed against the rail. Like a tug team at Darbydale Fair, they pulled rhythmically until their muscles seemed to be on fire. They succeeded in holding it. Sweating and inflamed in the middle of the line, Marshall heard the Captain on the P.A. system. Marshall had never seen the Captain, who must have been as quick as lightning, for in no time he had directed thirty men to the cable.
But just before they arrived, the bucket had touched the sea and taken on some water. The more water it took the more it closed on the waves and took water. The thirty of them cut their hands and smarted. For many minutes they held, dripping wet despite the cold wind, hearts beating like fast engines. The skin on the soles of their feet began to blister from tension against the deck. Breathless and white, Bellchicken was crushed on the rail, and the bucket was about to sink like a stone. But none thought to give up. Buff-Wibbin had rigged a splice, and calmly asked if they could move the cable a few feet so that he could join it to the broken end from the winch.
The Cockney counted to three, and they all pulled so hard that their faces got red and purple, and snakelike veins stood out at their temples. The bucket rose a few feet, Buff-Wibbin and the carpenter looped the ends and bolted them fast, and the Chief Officer started the winch. They hauled it up. It was half full of sparkling ice-cold sea water. They put their hands in it and some even tasted it. Then they started for the showers. Tired as athletes, their blood pounding and their muscles hard and taut from half an hour’s agony, they went to change for tea—to which, as union members, they were indisputably entitled.
AFTER A few days, they outran the storm’s southern foot. No longer did they feel the lash of waves, roll between water cliffs, or take shocked coronets of spray. But hour by hour they went steadily into the tropics and motored over the pastel beauty of the sea.
As if they were on a cruising yacht, the officers opened bridge windows and stood in the light winds. Never quite used to such easy passage, sailors congregated on deck to enjoy the spring of it, the feeling of faraway fires in an island forest, the light blue of the sky south of Bermuda where the waters were not vexed. Lydia felt linked by her femininity to the quiet colors of the sea. Like a dog in a car approaching home, Marshall grew excited because something in him could feel the inner breezes and timeless clock of Jamaica. Just beyond the horizon, it seemed, were the island valleys. There, was a place where dying came painlessly, where heat and magic made even indifferent lives worthwhile. Marshall realized that he had never told Lydia about Jamaica. She thought that she knew, because of Charleston, where the sun also beat down, but there was a difference, which Marshall easily illustrated in his tale of Rica Vista—where time moved in an intoxicating circle. When Lydia closed her eyes and lay back in imagination of island ease, she saw the red earth, ice-cold streams, and an infinity of baking green. But Jamaica was too far southwest, and they gave themselves over to the pull of their voyage.
Ships are either living or dead. Those living seem to be as small and agile as ponies, linked with the wishes of their passengers, somewhat afraid of the night, alive for the first time. The Royal George moved toward the center of the sea. On the chart it was a wide blue belly. Even the Captain, experienced and disciplined as he was, lusted for the unmarked blue, trackless and magnetic, an open space in the cells of the world, as flat and easy as a savanna.
The pressure to continue an evasionary course was strong, moving upward from the ranks until the officers might have been crushed between the power of their Captain and the weight of their crew. But the Captains eyes were clear, and (at the cost of $10,000 a day) he went considerably farther south of the storm than was necessary—not just for an excursion, but because he was always driven to explore silent places where no others went and from which merchants withheld the throb of their traffic. Lying off the trade routes, the center of the sea was not frequented. On old maps it held cherubim with faces and bodies reddened as if from tropical sun. It was an unnecessary place—caught with weed, slow, pointless, diversionary.
The Royal George pushed south by day, and by night as well when soft stars emerged brightening the velvet. The bow wave had become so smooth that it rolled like a geometrician’s perfect wheel, or the exact traveling helix of Teferides. Marshall remembered how in their process across the sky starry nights were linked to the raucous geared lines of machines. Cosmas Indicopleustes had seen the perfect crystal box, and Marshall had a nagging and persistent vision of star tracks scratched parallel, forever, and completely, across its top. This etching cannot be described and far surpassed the deepest gravure on Achilles’s silver shield; for it was not images, but the soft clear sticks of language arranged in magical pattern, which mind drew from eye like buckets from a well.
Late one afternoon the Captain strode onto the bridge. To his attentive officers he commanded: “Full stop.” Then he said, “We shall halt until further notice. I want complete radio silence: the radio officer will disconnect his equipment, lock his doors, and neglect his log. Engines and auxiliary power will be shut down. No work of any kind will be done. The stewards will put up sandwiches and such for several days. No music will be played. Lock the beer locker. The smoking lamp will be out. Discord among the crew will be met with severe discipline. These are orders, gentlemen. Carry them out.”
After half an hour the ship went dead in the water, and they discovered that the breeze and the waves had been their own creation. For without the ships motion the sea was an endless smooth turquoise with only an occasional touch of wind. Though weakening, the sun was strong enough to burn, and the crew got all rosy. By order, there was no work.
Instead, the Captain sent out the boats to reconnoiter a circle of ten miles around the ship. Heavy launches and forty-foot lifeboats were lowered with great caution and ceremony. Lifejacketed, Marshall, Lydia, and the crew manned them with the intent to explore. In a near-nitrogen rapture, they pulled apart from the mother ship. The heat and the green met at the horizon in waves of air and light. In a motor launch with the stewards, who (except for Dave) were virtually midgets, Marshall and his bride skimmed over the sea until the Royal George was only a small block on the blue prairie.
Patches of weed, sometimes miles in circumference, covered the sea. Often, the mats were so dense and piled that it was possible to walk across the top. Dave and Harvey guided the launch and moored it to an island of sargassum. Though they thought it was all “silly,” they did it for Lydia. She and Marshall jumped onto the dry crispy weed and ran across it as if on a giant mattress. The sun was hot, and as they ran they liberated perfume from sea berries crushed underfoot. Finally, at the base of a gray-green rill, out of sight of ship and launch, in the middle of deep ocean, they lay on the fragrant undulating mat and slept in the sunlight. After a few minutes they awakened filled with incredible desire and made love in the lee of the rill, in the open heart of nowhere.
Heading back, they peered over the gunwales through impossibly clear water. Far below, strange animals proceeded with their daily intercourse. There were the Great Slick Eels—150 feet long, as thick as trees, as sinuous as whippers’ whips at carnivals, with heads larger than horses, and huge idiotic smiles. These Great Slick Eels hunted the foolish and fatuous Agrolian Fish—600 pounds, completely round, gaps in its front teeth, and scores of useless little legs. They saw the fabulous Shmata Ray, as lithe as linen in the wash, as colorful as a Third World flag, moving in the deep with short repulsive jerks. Then there was the Noiseless Laughing Dill, a huge columnar Coelacanth which Lydia swore was wearing opera glasses. Harvey and Dave thrust their heads into the salt water and observed with wonder the Honey Fish, the Water Bat, the Decapus, and the Optamoovulgian.
Speechless from what they had seen, flushed and burnt from the sun, the crew hoisted up the boats and went to fetch their mattresses. Then they lay on top of the hold covers as afternoon turned into evening, when the stewards brought around sandwiches and bottles of tea. When darkness came they looked at its starred walls as the Christians must have done on the first night that they had driven the Moors from Granada. Then the Scottish cabinboys discovered that the fish were luminous and blinking, coiling in the waters like Broadway. The mats too were lighted by organic phosphorescence, and as night proceeded they grew brighter and brighter. When everyone was nearly asleep and only the Captain stood, staring from the bridge to the sky, they were awakened and energized by the rising moon, which danced self-contained on the horizon and twisted in distant sea vapor as hot as a flame in a cup.
They were resting on a deluge of bioluminescence. Planetary groups lit the ship’s sides and were visible on the horizon for 360 degrees. Their pulsations and patterned telegraphy, as some slipped out of sight in the curve of a wave and then returned, were like the winking lights of a computer panel or the blackened mantle of a glittering city seen from the air. What shakings and awe must the first navigators have had when becalmed perhaps forever in the center of an infinite half-sphere, the sky and floor of which ticked clear celestial and diffuse animal light. The Royal George was surrounded by glassy glowing waves—an evening of silence for the assembled crew.
Then they started from fright, for the Captain had arrived with the grace of a ghost, and stood tall in his white uniform amid the reclining men. Seldom did he move among them. Close to seventy, he had been an admiral of the Royal Navy, who, upon retirement, could not stand to part from the sea. When the water was as smooth as a mirror, pastel by day, rich and blue-hearted by night, he grew restless.
“For those of you who would wonder,” he said, largely in pretext, “we are at the center of the sea, off the trade routes, where few have seen fit to travel. To the northwest is North America”—he pivoted and faced the various directions as he spoke, as accurately as a compass—“to the southwest, Brazil with its jutting northern chin, and then the Amazon and the white Andes; to the southeast, Africa, being worth three or four continents; to the northeast, Europe, the clockmade heart of a mechanical world. We are roped between the four, nearest the dry shelf of Spain.
“Half a thousand years ago the Spaniards, as if sprung from seed, burst in virility upon the sea and passed this point in little ships to find and conquer a new world. Since that time we have been retracing and elaborating their routes, but have none of our own. Since that time we have become as immobile as whales upon the beach—fat, shoddy, recreant, dissolving. For there is only one condition in which a man’s soul and flesh become as lean and pure as his armor; in which he finds in the art of his language and the awe of his music, unification with his own mobile limbs; in which he can find entertainment so intense as to draw him without a twitch into complete abandonment of the things of the world; in which he gathers speed and rises to his natural task as if he were an eagle destined for flight or a porpoise propelled in arcs across the water.
“Do you doubt me? Doubt not. I learned in Algeciras what this was, as I looked upon the Spanish walls which are not walls, as the lines of earth and sea were solid in one piece inviting passage, as the poverty appeared infinitely rich. I learned in the blink of an eye. I learned as the thin slapping music beat to ceilings and beams, as the percussion of dancers’ feet seemed to exhort going out beyond the harbor and into the straits—beyond the straits.
“Doubt me not. A pair of dancers was dancing twenty years ago when I thought that I had settled in. We touched at Algeciras for only a day. The secret was that they moved when they did not, and did not move when they did. They wore black, and were as concentrated as birds startled upon alarm. Their dance was like that of the bees, for God in heaven they retracted and they turned and they jugged and they jiggled, and her back was as smooth as the gust from a fan, a sweep of vanilla, and in their movements unknown to them they pointed always west and to the sea. Though they moved up and down and to right and left, the lay of their furious dance pointed west and to the sea.
“It was that way too, five hundred years ago, when from Spain’s jutting shelf they moved to fullfill the neglected task, their dancers doubtless pointing them. They found a new world with twenty-thousand miles of spine, peaks we have yet to climb, plains like seas, plants and animals humorous, terrifying, and new. Like bees, their passionate dancers had pointed them. I fear that I will die before I see such dancing anew, directing us after half a thousand years outward and to the heavens, where we must go if we are to be men.
“For we are on the brink of new worlds, of infinite space curtains drawn and colored like silks, luminous and silent, moving slowly and with grace. We have come to the edge. Our children will view a terrible openness, and the vastness will change us forever and for good. I will never see it. I am seventy and I wish only to see dancers who will arise to set the right course.
“In my heart of hearts at seventy on this ship stalled in the middle of the sea and stars, I wish for the dancers who will arise as did their predecessors in one wave linked with the past, moving when they do not move, not moving when they move. When I had passed half a century, I was awakened in the fury of a dance in Algeciras. Though a captain for many years, it was that day by the curve of her back that I became a Captain and a man—when I watched history artfully running its gates with iron grasp and steel-clad direction.”
ROTTERDAM IS approached rapidly from the sea through sand-flanked jetties. On the beaches, tents stood for the last of the holidays. The light was dimming as the Royal George dashed in past the Hook of Holland, and, when finally it was moored in a forest of tanks and spires, darkness spread across the flat as if a Flemish devil had sucked away the light through a crunchy reed.
Marshall did not like it when Lydia kissed the crew goodbye. He resented that she pecked in affection at Wonderful Bellchicken and Greylock Oceanard, though he knew that as she kissed the bashful bastards of the deck force, she was extending as well his deep fraternity caught behind the proper ice of manhood.
Then in a taxi to the city he ravished her and she ravished back. Hegenbuckle, the Dutch taxi driver, nearly crashed into a limestone mile post, a bus stand with a soup advertisement, and a group of sweet daisylike schoolgirls on bicycles, because he was glued to the mirror in which Marshall and Lydia kissed with such verve that the glass fogged.
As they rode through the flats of Rotterdam they paused momentarily to see great constructions of flame and spidery steel spreading for mile upon mile around them. Sparkling refineries beat against the clouds with bright ventilations of pulsing fire, drawn and tenuous like cotton candy, orange and upward in an explosion of the new virtues, an exposition of a new lifeblood. Certain fools thought that this was chemical engineering, a studious necessity, an obvious alacrity, a logical linkage. It was nothing of the kind, but rather a portrait by complications, an abstract of humor from above as impennous necessities were snared by thematic joking.
Rather than lose his mind, Hegenbuckle spoke. “I have noticed,” he said, “that you are Americans. I told from her chestnut hair, her green eyes, her face worthy of a princess, and her long and articulate fingers—a very Dutch attribute. She is undoubtedly of the South, of Virginia, and a Jewess.”
“Yes,” said Lydia.
“I have been learning English. Since the time of Erasmus we Dutch have envied English. What an ecstatic language, a language to fill the boots of the greatest dream, a language of milk, a language of jewels. In itself it is worth more than nations. It strives and it loves, in words and phrase. Needless to say, like the water-bug, or the needle, we too love it and respect it as our king.”
“It is everyone’s king,” said Lydia, squinting through the windshield as rain came down and wet the fields as green as watermelons.
“He’s mad, isn’t he?” asked Marshall.
“No, he’s not mad—just a little confused,” answered Lydia.
At the train station, Hegenbuckle refused payment, saying, “It is not necessary. I never accept fares from Captain Keslake or his men. I am delighted to serve him, for I too have memories, of the flaming places of Djakarta and unkindled Curaçao. Throughout the Netherlands and throughout the world, they are quiescent and self-serving, dwellers on the human condition, lookers to the self, incapables of independence, living shanties of bastardized language, mechanicals who draw downward. But some day,” he said, lifting hands and eyes gradually in imitation of ascension, “we will rise. Rotterdam will be an old city like old wood. We will breathe easily as the universe opens to us. And the world will cease to agitate and boil.”
THERE WAS a train to Paris, which took many wonderful hours. On board were hundreds of musicians from New Orleans completing a vast worldwide tour. They played continuously as the train crossed Belgium and northern France. They were not practicing, but rather they played because they could not stop.
Fat, brown, and bullet-shaped, Malcolm Tucker led his band in Marshall and Lydias car, and made his drummer base the tempo on the knocking of the tracks. Across heavily breathing countryside the train traced a steady line like ink from a mechanical pen. Malcolm Tucker had an uncanny resemblance to Monroe, but Marshall never had a chance to ask about it, for he and Lydia were held in their seats by the internal combustion of the music. When Malcolm Tucker played “Blue’n the Blues” over and over again, they were pushed against the furry backs of their chairs as if by a wave. New Orleans appeared before them hot and gleaming near the lapping Gulf.
“I know this music,” said Lydia. “I grew up with it. It’s the music of the South, a distillation of war, slavery, and death, the unleashed human spirit cavorting in mathematics without symbols, flowing from weighted souls. Malcolm Tucker sure can play.”
They reached Paris in the middle of the night. As if summer had come again, fiery music resounded through the train shed. Marshall and Lydia went with the herd of musicians through dark and silent streets lined with trees which had just begun to lose their leaves. In the attic of the Hotel Scribe, among giant drums pulling elevator cables, overlooking the arched and bow-shaped roofs of Paris, the musicians continued to play—slowly, slurring, half-dead. They played as they lay in their beds, as they ate, as they shaved. The roof vibrated. The sky was confused, having once looked down upon the ground of the Scribe when a farm had been there, and, before that, when it was green and waxy, a wolf-filled wood.
Lydia took off her dress and washed at a pink lavabo by the bed. She lay back against Marshall, and he kissed her on the long, straight side of her face. As his forehead brushed against the soft hair of her temple, he tasted cold water. She told him to wash, and after he did and the blood had stopped beating in his eyes, when it was mild and soft, they lay back and listened to the arrogant strutting music. The warm autumn was soon to be cold and clear.
In the morning, the musicians got each other up like a row of rising mah-jongg pieces. Malcolm Tucker lay in his undershirt, bunched-up on the bouncy bed. The pianist ran into the room.
“Hey Malcolm. Hey Malcolm. Wake up. Those white kids is gone.”
“Gone? Let’s see.” The two of them went to look. They stood in their underwear, exhausted but itching to play, and their faces had furrowed looks.
“They sure move fast, Malcolm. They gone.”
“That’s right, but we’re always around, travelin’ from place to place, crossin’ paths and such. It’s hot, Lewando. Why don’t you go down and see if you can get us a pitcher of ice-cold tomato juice with vanilla.”
“You bet,” said Lewando, pulling on his shirt.
Marshall and Lydia were bleary-eyed, on yet another train, rushing to the cool of the Alps and the sea-green of Chamonix. Lydia was pale, but she looked magnificent. Marshall watched her as she slept, alarmed that his all-too-active eye had seen her as purer than alabaster. But then, far above misty rows of pine the mountains appeared in sunlight, white ice reflecting in seething bursts like cannon fire in a battle. Lydia awoke and peered through the glass at the ice ramparts. Her face was indeed as smooth as alabaster, and she had magic in her eye.
When they arrived in Chamonix they were extremely tired, but Marshall had a certain affection for viewing recurrent images from exhaustion. In the same way that the static and scratches on an old record can make it more hypnotic than if it were clear, so too the veil of fatigue can enhance the always incomprehensible greatness of mountains. They found that when they were tired there arose within them a driving power seldom utterly allayed, an imagination by which they could effortlessly travel the peaks, catapulted by self-generative vigor.
Many a traveler has arrived in Chamonix late in the day and ignorantly wandered off to climb the mountains, as if they would succumb to so casual an assault. Marshall and Lydia saw from the unparalleled height and distance of the white world spread before them that they had to approach slowly. After they left their knapsacks at a little pension, they walked until the streets began to fade and clean meadows overtook them. They wound on an earthen path to the top of the hill which in that valley is such a nuisance to roads and railways. It allowed a long uninterrupted view of high fields, mountain walls, and mute bays of ice stopped still as if the world were only a photograph of itself. The great glaciers called out with cold Alpine names—Miage, Bionassay, Tacconaz, Bossons, Tour, Argentière, and the Mer de Glace. But for the few thin lines of the téléphériques, and a hut or two amid the mountains the great space before them was as uninhabited as the sea. It took such mighty leaps, and its spires thrust so high, that to look upon the depth and distance of it shocked and beat upon one’s insides as if a shell had exploded nearby.
Somewhere at the junction of the Vallee Blanche (a great white wave which came tumbling in stillness from Mont Blanc) and the Mer de Glace (an enormous river of ice), Metzner lived in a wooden hut. He stayed on the glacier for months, despite the chance of being buried in an avalanche from the Vallee Blanche or swallowed in a crevass of the Bergschrund—where, in sharp and fickle disorganization, the glacier began.
“I know from men like that whom I’ve met in the Sierras, that they don’t like to talk. Complete isolation stops the tongue. They become entrapped in their own silence,” said Lydia, gazing at the dance of clouds above the timberline. She knew almost surely that he would then contradict her, for she could sense the tension to which he was often subjected because he didn’t really know who he was, because his mother (and possibly his father) had died by violence—and because he was, perhaps, a bastard. In these times, he drew away from her and became cold, possessed, and tormented. He had told her that more than anything in the world he hated hardening to her, but that he found a certain satisfaction at being driven, at being the agent of inevitability, at suffering the pleasurable siege of determination. She hoped for him someday to rid himself of those driven strengths which took him from her. They were, after all, about to venture onto the glacier in fulfillment of the first steps. As if he had not heard her, Marshall stared at the path leading to the mountains. “Marshall,” she said, “I think that men like Metzner become too embittered to remember anything reliably...”
“That’s so,” replied Marshall. “But I know myself from complete isolation, that memory sharpens until it is a scalpel which cuts out the heart. Every detail has an edge, and the details swarm at you like gnats. I believe that the keenness of his memory will compensate for his reticence. First, though, we have to find him.” He motioned at the array of distances before and above them. “Look.”
As they made downward, the city began to light up softly. They saw cows plodding through a gate, directed by a little boy with a switch in his hand. The copper-colored bells made them remember that one cow in Columbine had been given a bell, and that at night in their separate cabins they had heard it. They would rest on Sunday, outfit themselves the next day, and begin practice climbs to break in boots, clothing, and equipment. They were both fairly competent mountaineers, experienced on rock and ice.
Marshall flung open the wooden shutters and a world of mountains flooded into their room—thousand-foot pitches covered in ice, vertical faces of a half a mile, white massifs in direct moonlight. They slept as one can sleep only high in the mountains, after a hard day, in pure air, in a country at peace.
CLOSING A curtained door behind them, they called at the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix. Because it was the beginning of an unheralded holiday about which they had heard only vague rumors in too rapid French, one man alone was in the office. He was an old veteran who observed the mountains but did not climb. He looked like a kindly baker with silver-gray hair, and would have been easily believable in a white apron instead of his dark blue suit with several enameled pins on the lapels.
They told him their needs, and he responded with the care of someone who has spent decades climbing rock walls thousands of feet above nothing. His accent was so French that it had a life of its own, and it seemed as if there were four people in the room.
“I am aware of Professor Metzner, and I can tell you that if you wait two weeks or perhaps three you can find him then in less than a day. The téléphérique goes to a point relatively near the Bergschrund. Or, if you wish, you may take a helicopter and the process will demand only an hour or two. But you will have to wait two weeks or more.”
“We can’t afford to stay for that long. Why two weeks? Are your guides that busy?”
“To the contrary, they have practically all returned to their winter professions. The season is over. You could get a dozen in no time if it were not for the Vent du Souverain. No one will go up, no one can go up, in the Souverain. The téléphériques cannot function, and conditions become absurdly dangerous, worse than the most savage day in winter. No one, except perhaps Gaston Reynelle. But I would not advise it. It is too dangerous, and though he is the greatest Alpinist in the world, he has never seen the Vent du Souverain, for the last one occurred just before the First World War. I was merely a child. Gaston was not even born. No, no, yes, yes, even his father was not born!” he said, holding up his finger, allowing Marshall to see how the sign for exclamation had originated.
“Monsieur,” said Lydia with an elevated dignity reminding the old guide of days when he had assisted on royal climbs, “please tell us about the Vent du Souverain. It is something of which we do not know.”
“They have felt it already in Zermatt and Argentière, which means that it will entrap the valley within a day. It is something from ancient times, and it arrives without much warning every half century or so. It is ... it is a rare and miraculous condition brought about by the conjunction of Arctic and African winds. They meet in the Alps, twist above the mountains, and... lutter.”
“Struggle.”
“No, more precisely...”
“Wrestle?”
“Yes, wrestle. Le combat entre les vents. (The French language is the most magnificent. It is our king. Its sounds are so beautiful that they are better than most nations, and thus synonymous with France.)
“The northern wind always subdues the one from the south. When they have stopped winding about the summits, they fall to the valley, the hot wind underneath. In the valley it becomes like summer. The fields are dry and everything is hot, as hot as the Sahara. One can hardly move... immobilité. But above!” He became excited, and, as old Frenchmen often do, proceeded to publicly amaze himself. “But above! It is unbelievably cold. Avalanches tumble into the valley and turn into rivers which boil and vaporize before they can put even a drop into the dry bed of the Arve. While the air above is clear and dense, the air below is thin and molten hot.
“Thus at night it curves into a mirror which gathers or rejects the light. Sometimes the moon appears blindingly—a hundred times its natural size—and the mountains are roofed with white. We watch then the mountains of the moon itself. Sometimes the stars shower upon us and each man and woman shudders and fears. And sometimes it is absolutely and completely black—a void.
“This occurs once in a half century, for two weeks or more. No one can come or go because of the cold in the passes. Everyone must sleep in tents. Forests of them spring up in the high meadows where the people try to catch some cool air—always to no avail. The populace is alternately gay and deeply sad. In the last Vent du Souverain my grandfather lost his life. Whereas the Swiss remain perfectly safe, the French are drawn by passion. From our meadow we saw a sphere of ruby-red fire at the summit of the Drus. My grandfather believed that it was God, and he set off at midnight across the Mer de Glace; foolish old man. He died within a wave of ice and forty years later his remains were spewed by the glacier. On his face was still an expression of wonder.
“I know of this professor of yours. He is not wise. In the Souverain, the glacier undergoes violent contractions, and becomes most dangerous.”
“And no guide will work except Gaston Reynelle?” asked Marshall.
“Perhaps not even he, though his will and determination have won him many triumphs. He has gone alone to rescue the rescue party. When just a boy, he climbed the Southwest Pillar of the Drus—the Col Bonatti—alone, at night, in winter! The other guides cannot speak to him because they become paralyzed with envy. He has no friends. When he is not in the mountains, he works in his father’s blacksmith shop—Reynelle et Fils, Rue Rebuffat, 24. Perhaps he will listen to you and, more than likely, he will venture into the Souverain, for it is his nature to be arrogant.”
Gaston Reynelle was dark and thin. His expression was so intense that his eyes burned like rays. Marshall and Lydia looked through the window of 24 Rue Rebuffat and saw Gaston in an enormous room, striking hot metal on the strong absurd face of an anvil. He sweated, and his concentration was a marvel to behold as every sinew in his body struck at the red, and sharp metallic sounds rang out amid the darkness. His face was leathern and angular, his hair curly and black. One could see by the sheer musculature of his chest and arms that he drove himself beyond his own limits.
It was stirring and pitiful to see him pounding life into the metal. They knew that he was using up his mortality rapidly and without reward. But the metal glowed before him, his brow was furrowed, and the arm wielding the flying hammer flew. At times he would sigh and breathe deeply, unaware that he was being watched. He threw out his lean arms like a ballet dancer and stretched his neck. He seemed then to be caressed by an abstract spirit.
Embarrassed to watch, they knocked on his door and went inside. He looked at them with a fiery clasping eye. His strength circled them on a beam.
“Yes? May I help you? At your service,” he said, abandoning his ecstasy at banding the expansion of metal.
“Are you Gaston Reynelle?”
“I am Gaston Reynelle. In all of France and all the world there is none better in the mountains.”
“Then we have come to the right place, for we need a guide to lead us in the Bergschrund of the Mer de Glace.”
Gaston smiled. The fire beat and echoed behind him. “Certainement!” he said. “But in no circumstances for any reason will I take such a beautiful woman into the mountains during the Souverain.”
“She can climb.”
“I will not.”
“She is skilled.”
“I will not.” He struck his iron hammer against glowing steel and sparks flew as if to underline his determination. “I will not. Women are too beautiful. I will not!”
LYDIA SAT sadly on the balcony of their room as Marshall and Gaston made their way toward the summit of Mont Blanc, over which they would pass to descend through the Vallee Blanche and the Bergschrund. She cried like a leaf. Even though she had urged Marshall to go without her, she disliked breaking with their practice of sharing. But it was done, and she was left to see the Vent du Souverain in the valley, while they climbed.
Chamonix was broiling and dry. Above, the snow raged and the cold air was blue. She took off her sunglasses and turned her clear face to the distant round dome of Mont Blanc. With a sweet nearsighted stare, she gazed at it, and then rested her cheek against her bare shoulder, feeling that Marshall had left her when she loved him most. Determined to see the valley and its pastel tents in the heat of the Souverain, she wept nevertheless for being left.
Though not too well versed in technical climbing, Marshall exceeded himself early on, and Gaston was pleased as they crossed the lower glaciers and wound among the hills of ice. They traversed snowfields, pushing against the cold. They made their first camp as night fell and the stars battled above them. Lydia lay sweating in her bed, her arms outstretched for Marshall. Marshall held his own body to fend off the cold, and hallucinated images of terror and madness. Gaston, the brave one, screamed in his sleep.
When morning arose in a blaze, Marshall and Gaston, entranced and enraptured, progressed upward amid swirls of ice and fresh snow. Between them was Gastons dark purple rope. Four times, Gaston fell into newly covered crevasses. Marshall was pulled to the edge as if by a team of panicked horses, but he always dug his crampons into the singing ice and arched himself over his ice axe, digging deep into the pure white until he ground to a stop while Gaston hung tensely in the middle of the crevass, slowly spinning, looking above to see if Marshall would hurtle over the blue edge into a shared death. Then Marshall would belay Gaston and rig a Bilgiri, pulling him up rapidly. Gaston was so rugged that he insisted on forging ahead despite the falls. They traveled thin cornices in slow-paced agony, chests aching, mouths burnt by subzero air. Sometimes a hundred yards took an hour. The atmosphere was in attack and warred to break their momentum. But they continued past delicate white edges and over brittle constructions of ice, until they reached the summit of Mont Blanc. After a circling and dizzy look at the green world gone afire below them, they started for the Vallee Blanche.
They had to cross a spine of ice so thin that it was necessary to cut not the customary steps but handholds, so that they could hang on either side. Marshall suggested that if they both fell, they would balance out. “Don’t be a fool,” said Gaston, indicating the thin ice wall between them. “The rope would be severed immediately. We are moving across a knife.” But they managed to negotiate even this upturned blade of ice and arrive at the Vallee Blanche.
They commenced their glissade, perhaps the longest ever, for the extreme and sudden cold had flattened the rills and laced over the gaps of the valley, into which they slid as fast as skiers, leaving two three-line tracks. Balanced on ice axes and heels, they fell through couloirs of virgin snow. Curtains of white leaped up behind them. They willingly flew off cliffs, landing in the snow, getting up again, sliding downward until their great hour was finished and they slammed into the forest of ice in the Bergschrund. Somewhere in the upright glittering mass, Metzner had his hut.
In the valley, Lydia made the rounds of pastel tents and documented with her Leica the gentle goings-on of the Souverain. Then she threw away her film and joined a group of red-collared Savoyards on a trout hunt in the stopped pools of the rivers upper tributaries. They dashed and splashed about, catching the trout in their hands with great glee. At night tents glowed from the braziers within. Lydia found a family with whom she took up residence. They made punches of purple wine and mountain flowers in ice. Only when the moon covered the valley like a bright inner lid of a sarcophagus did she glance at the mountain walls where Marshall was making his way.
After days of searching the Bergschrund, Marshall and Gaston had run out of food. They gnawed the ice for water. At night in their frail one-man tents they nearly froze, and they spent the cold days in fear and trances. The air slit their lungs like a sword as they climbed with crampons, ice axes, and ice screws, up and down the Bergschrund, finding not a trace of Metzner or his camp. There had been much shifting of the glacier. Gaston said that he had undoubtedly been buried.
“In fifty years his body will be thrown out at the base of the Mer de Glace, and they will say, ‘Here is the professor who perished in the Souverain half a century ago.’ ”
They started the descent. Gaston kept falling into hidden crevasses, but Marshall had become so experienced at rapid belaying that he allowed Gaston to drop only a foot or so. He was shocked beyond speech when Gaston angrily ordered him to be less efficient, saying, “Let me fall five or ten meters without interruption. I like it.” Because Gaston had to work with his hands to place ice screws when they went up steep walls in the undulating surface, the tips of his fingers began to turn black. Both he and Marshall worried about their feet, which they had not felt in a long time, but Gaston said that if there were no pain, there was probably some hope—a paradox which startled Marshall from an icy reverie in which he had concluded that his life was not quite his own, his history was growing suspiciously powerful in its influence on his present, and coincidences were too many. His origins pulled hard, and he wondered if he were caught in an elaborate bittersweet play, the esthetics of which were formed around inevitability.
Halfway down and halfway through his thoughts he bumped hard up against Gaston. Preoccupied, he had been following the rope like a Chard Ox. His face stung, and he had nearly knocked Gaston into a deep crevass. Gaston neither reprimanded nor thanked him, but simply stared down. Marshall saw too, and even in the cold a chill ran along his spine. Hanging on a climbing rope 150 feet down from the lip of the chasm and 500 feet from the almost imperceptible ice-blue plates at the bottom was a dead man. His hands were frozen onto the rope, which he had gripped just above his head so that his arms were arched symmetrically. His face was upturned toward the light. He spun around gently.
Gaston retreated about twenty feet and hammered both his and Marshall’s axes into the snow until the heads were a few inches above the surface and a foot apart. He took the rope and secured its center with an ice piton in back of the axes. He passed the ends through the carabiner hole at the top of each axe, and threw them over the crevass edge. He fixed one end of an auxiliary rope to an ice screw, and threw it over the edge next to the other ropes. He then rigged a bunch of slings, dropped his pack, and linked onto the two ropes. “Bilgiri,” he said to Marshall, who nodded. “It was easy before, but here it will be fifty meters—not so easy. You will have to read the ropes carefully.”
Gaston rappelled off the ice walls until he was deep in a world as blue as the sides of a high barrier reef. In a short time he was close to the body. Certainly Metzner, it was an old man clad in bright orange. His hair was white, and his wide-open eyes were blue.