mugs of hot Oxo. We put on the harnesses and tested the lamps, and laid out the ropes and karabiners. I felt stressed about small things, such as John making me pour away my chemically purified water because it wasn’t hot, and would freeze solid in my uninsulated water bottle. As we left the hut, I realized the stress was fear, pure and simple. I was walking out at half past one in the morning into a biting wind, my way lit only by the shallow pool of blue-whitelight from my head-torch, wearing a harness and carrying an ice-axe, to climb an enormous active volcano. I was warm, but I shuddered. Elcita looked nervous; I straightened out her hood and joked with her; she looked very small. We all did.
We began the slow drudgery of walking a zigzag path up the last of the soft ash. In the dark, you had no feeling of where you were on the mountain, but the path felt recklessly steep. Each breath out formed a little cloud of ice crystals. Each cloud expanded with a minute crackling sound like distant static. My eyes were glued to my feet. I only saw what came within my vision without lifting my head. Needles of falling snow entered the enchanted circle of the lamp. Our lights produced the strange impression that we were walking on a rounded but narrow ridge, and that the ground fell away steeply on both sides.
It was over an hour before we reached the edge of the ice, and put on our crampons and roped up. Hoeni, the doctor, was rehearsing the symptoms of acute mountain sickness to the guides: ‘And if I vomit you are to take me down straight away, that is a very dangerous sign.’ They nodded in agreement. John roped himself to Elcita, and then Elcita to me. ‘You have to keep the rope off the ground but not taut. If it’s taut, you can pull the other person off balance. If it’s too slack and someone falls, they’ll build up too much speed before the rope bites, and pull everyone down. You must always have the ice-axe on the uphill side and the rope on the downhill. That way, if you slip you don’t land on your own axe and stab yourself to death, and the rope falls away from you not under your feet.’ We listened like hawks, but there was no more. He marched into the blackness.
Crampons do everything you want and more: the only thing that might fail is your nerve. From time to time, we came to fields of horizontal crevasses and zigzagged between them, at one time walking an eighteen-inch-wide bridge between two deep blue chasms. Had I been alone I would have frozen with fear but Elcita crossed without pausing and I followed, gluing my eyes to her crampon bites in the snow, then looking ahead to the beauty of a row of icicles beneath a lip of ice, like a stringed harp.
The next section seemed more or less straight up. I could not work out whether facing the slope, feet splayed, was better than turning a shoulder and stepping up half-sideways, feet parallel: I fidgeted between the two methods. We came round a shoulder, and the snow seemed to dive away deep into darkness below and right. I felt every step was a risk, and looked up to keep my mind away from the fall. There were other groups, higher up the mountain, little chains of lamps vanishing above us. Hoeni, who had been ahead of us, stood bent over at the next hairpin, gasping for air, Fabián’s arm around her shoulder. ‘Down,’ she said, ‘down.’
The next stretch was much steeper. We entered a gully and each step needed a light kick into the face of the ice to make a foothold. Every single step, I bedded the ice-axe in the slope above me, becoming a three-legged animal in a monotonous routine: kick, breathe; axe, breathe; kick, breathe; axe, breathe. The huge mountain was reduced to three feet of iced snow in front of me, the crunch of the crampons, the rasping of my breath, the punch of the axe. It was aerobics from hell, my calf muscles screaming with lactic acid they were unable to disperse. I thought of half-remembered lines where Faustus swears that if
We began the slow drudgery of walking a zigzag path up the last of the soft ash. In the dark, you had no feeling of where you were on the mountain, but the path felt recklessly steep. Each breath out formed a little cloud of ice crystals. Each cloud expanded with a minute crackling sound like distant static. My eyes were glued to my feet. I only saw what came within my vision without lifting my head. Needles of falling snow entered the enchanted circle of the lamp. Our lights produced the strange impression that we were walking on a rounded but narrow ridge, and that the ground fell away steeply on both sides.
It was over an hour before we reached the edge of the ice, and put on our crampons and roped up. Hoeni, the doctor, was rehearsing the symptoms of acute mountain sickness to the guides: ‘And if I vomit you are to take me down straight away, that is a very dangerous sign.’ They nodded in agreement. John roped himself to Elcita, and then Elcita to me. ‘You have to keep the rope off the ground but not taut. If it’s taut, you can pull the other person off balance. If it’s too slack and someone falls, they’ll build up too much speed before the rope bites, and pull everyone down. You must always have the ice-axe on the uphill side and the rope on the downhill. That way, if you slip you don’t land on your own axe and stab yourself to death, and the rope falls away from you not under your feet.’ We listened like hawks, but there was no more. He marched into the blackness.
Crampons do everything you want and more: the only thing that might fail is your nerve. From time to time, we came to fields of horizontal crevasses and zigzagged between them, at one time walking an eighteen-inch-wide bridge between two deep blue chasms. Had I been alone I would have frozen with fear but Elcita crossed without pausing and I followed, gluing my eyes to her crampon bites in the snow, then looking ahead to the beauty of a row of icicles beneath a lip of ice, like a stringed harp.
The next section seemed more or less straight up. I could not work out whether facing the slope, feet splayed, was better than turning a shoulder and stepping up half-sideways, feet parallel: I fidgeted between the two methods. We came round a shoulder, and the snow seemed to dive away deep into darkness below and right. I felt every step was a risk, and looked up to keep my mind away from the fall. There were other groups, higher up the mountain, little chains of lamps vanishing above us. Hoeni, who had been ahead of us, stood bent over at the next hairpin, gasping for air, Fabián’s arm around her shoulder. ‘Down,’ she said, ‘down.’
The next stretch was much steeper. We entered a gully and each step needed a light kick into the face of the ice to make a foothold. Every single step, I bedded the ice-axe in the slope above me, becoming a three-legged animal in a monotonous routine: kick, breathe; axe, breathe; kick, breathe; axe, breathe. The huge mountain was reduced to three feet of iced snow in front of me, the crunch of the crampons, the rasping of my breath, the punch of the axe. It was aerobics from hell, my calf muscles screaming with lactic acid they were unable to disperse. I thought of half-remembered lines where Faustus swears that if
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