Ta Shu nodded, thinking it over as he jammed down a second helping of chili and camp crackers. He ate, Val thought, like a man who had been seriously hungry at some time in his life.
“A worthy goal,” he remarked between gulps. He got up and went over to the faintly roaring stove to refill his bowl. The others looked at each other.
Under his breath Jack announced, “And there’s your fortune cookie for the day.”
The next morning Val decided to agree to follow the Norwegians’ route. She could see, on both her screen and when looking up at the ice fall, a makable route to the very far right of the funnel, up and under a small nunatak on the edge of the polar cap called Helland Hansen Shoulder. So she told the others, and Jack nodded complacently, and they packed the camp into the sledge and took off.
It should have been easier than it was. It was the least steep part of the funnel, after all; Val could see why the Norwegians had trended to this side. But something—perhaps the slight lowering in the height of the polar cap, reducing the thickness of the glacier’s upper section—had caused the ice across the whole chute to break up. Possibly it was crossing an underice rock ridge between Mount Engelstad and the Hansen Shoulder, for it looked on the map like they might be two exposed parts of a curved saddle overrun by ice.
In any case, it was very hard going. They zigged and zagged, from one narrow ramp or block of ice up to the next, sometimes crossing snow bridges over narrow crevasses, other times physically hauling the sledge over even narrower breaks in the ice, all of them pulling together. In sections like these the Norwegians had each dealt with their own sledges and dogs, and reported in their journals that they had become quite calloused to the incessant danger below; they photographed each other straddling crevasses to look down into them, or eating lunch with their feet hanging over the edges of them. But the NSF would not of course sanction any such cavalier approach, and in zones as fractured as these Val’s group had to rope up and treat it like any other serious climb, which was only appropriate. So Val went ahead and screwed in ice screws, and belayed the others up and over any serious exposure; then they hauled up the sledge; then she went back down to remove the ice screws, and climbed back up again and carried on. It was slow work, and hot and cold in turns, depending on whether they were making adrenalated climbing moves or standing around stamping their feet waiting for the others to do the same. Even the smartfabrics were not up to that kind of alternation, and as the sun wheeled over and stood right at the top of their route, blazing down at them in a photon deluge, the temperature differentials became more and more extreme and uncomfortable; a hundred degrees of subjective difference between sun and shade, one’s face and one’s back; and nearly two hundred degrees’ difference between work and rest. Even Val was uncomfortable, and this was really what she loved doing above all else. If she had been without clients, alone or with other climbers, she would have been in that state of hyper-alert attuned-to-landscape no-mind that was the zen of climbing, the great joy of it, the source of the addiction. As it was, however, the objective dangers underfoot were great enough to put her in a high state of apprehension for her clients’ sake. A guide was only as happy as her least happy client, and right now she was surrounded by a bunch of frost-flocked insect-eyed mute people, Ta Shu and Jack enjoying themselves, the rest really eager for this part to be over.
And yet as it got higher it got steeper, and they had to go slower. It was as if they were trapped in Zeno’s paradox, and halving the distance to the top in increments of time that remained the same. Burning and freezing; waiting for Val to screw in ice screws, or screw them out; looking or not looking at the blue gaping fissures in the ice underfoot, each one a potential deathtrap.
Thus it was nearly three in the afternoon when they finally came under the Hansen Shoulder, where a narrow ramp of ice led them right under its exposed rock, up toward the polar plateau. There was a wide bergschrund gap between their ice ramp and the dolerite of the shoulder, smoothed into a vertical wall by the ablation of the wind. There was also, unfortunately, a tumble of big broken seracs to the left of the ramp as they climbed, cleft with deep crevasses that ran out across the first great drop of the icefall. So they had no room for maneuvering on either side, and could only press onward up the ramp, their crampons sticking in the blue ice as they labored up the slope. But the screen image showed that it would go all the way.
Before they topped out, however, they had to pass a single tall block of ice filling the bergschrund to the right and overhanging their ramp—a smooth bluish fang of ice, a chunk of a serac which must have fallen from higher on the Hansen Shoulder, or across the ramp from the serac field to their left. The width of the ramp as it curved under this serac was just a bit wider than the sledge itself, because a crevasse curved out of the serac field and ran parallel to the ramp on the left. Val saw that this crevasse was a deep one. So they were on an ice bridge, in effect, running up the slope between bergschrund and crevasse. Where the crevasse ran out across the icefall, it was soon filled at its top by a snowbridge, leaving an opening under the snowbridge that was a very considerable ice tunnel. Not an unusual sight, but it added a certain frisson to the narrowness of the ramp, suggesting as it did the depths on each side of them.
Val stopped her group. It looked like the ramp ran all the way around the overhanging block without obstruction, after which it widened again. Very workable, but narrow enough that a fixed line would be appropriate. So she uncoiled one of the ropes, flaking it out neatly so that it would come up after her without knotting. From her gear sling she took an ice screw—a hollow metal tube, screw-threaded on the outside, with a sharp point on the driving end, and holes in the other end to insert an ice axe for easier turning—and chipped a hole about a quarter-inch deep with the sharp end of the screw, then got it set and rotated it in squeaking at every turn, the first half by hand, the second half with the leverage of her ice axe, until it was almost completely buried. A bombproof belay. She asked Jack to clip onto the screw with a runner, which was a looped piece of webbing, and belay her as she went on up. Then she took off up the ramp, Jack feeding out just enough rope that Val could feel it tugging back on her a bit. Jack somehow always ended up doing this job, and it was true he was good at it; a tight belay, with just the right slack in it, so that the middle of the rope scarcely touched the ice.
Around the corner and above the ice block, Val stopped and screwed in two more ice screws, connecting them by a sling attached to each through carabiners, so that any force that came on them would be equalized. She tied a figure eight in the end of the belay rope, and attached it to the sling with another carabiner.
Before returning to the others she reattached herself to the belay rope with a prussik loop. This was a small loop of rope, tied to the belay rope in a simple knot that tightened and held position when you put weight on the loop, but could be loosened and slid up or down the belay rope by hand when there wasn’t weight on it.
She got back to the others. “Okay, up we go.” She lined the clients along the rope, made sure they were attached to both the rope and their harness, and sent them ahead. They cramponed up the ramp, hunched over a bit. Jack stayed behind to help her haul the sledge up.
The others had all gone around the ice block to the higher belay and gotten off the rope, and Val and Jack had clipped their harnesses onto the belay rope and were just beginning to pull the sledge into line, when the ice block above them leaned over with a groan and fell. Val leaped into the crevasse to the left, her only escape from being crushed under falling ice. She hit the inner wall of the crevasse with her forearms up to protect her. The rope finally caught her fall and yanked her up by her harness; then she was pulled down again hard as Jack was arrested by the same rope below her. For a second or two she was yanked all over the place, up and down like a puppet, slammed hard into the wall. The rope was stretching almost like a bungee cord, as designed—it was very necessary to decelerate with some give—but it was a violent ride, totally out of her control.