Finally, with my genitals reduced to only one and a half times their normal size, I took stock of our situation. We had come down somewhere on the Swiss side of the Jura Mountains, the range that separates Switzerland from France. The Jura isn’t an Alpine range; the peaks are only about half the height of the Alps, but they rise as high as 6500 feet above sea level, which is high enough for year-round snow on some of the slopes and icecaps on the crowns. Also, night had just fallen, which increased the cold.
We weren't dressed for it. Dickson -- dark blue suit with a subdued pinstripe, very pale TV-blue shirt, and conservative blue tie with a subdued blue design—was already showing signs of color coordinating his skin to frost-blue from the cold. As for myself -- turtleneck shirt, undershirt, black shoes and black socks; th-th-that’s all folks!-—I might easily have qualified to star in a stag movie if not for the fact that the cold was now quickly shriveling my once swollen organs.
Having assessed our circumstances, I started down the mountain. Dickson brought me up short. The gold, he pointed out, had been dropped out of the plane behind us. A good guess was that it had landed somewhere in the foothills near the base of the mountain on the other side. Which added up to our having to climb the mountain and make our descent down the opposing slope.
Three hours later, we still hadn’t reached the top. It was a helluva lot tougher going than either of us had anticipated. The powdery snow slipped away from under our feet. The ice beneath it, combined with the insecure footing of the terrain of the mountain itself, made each step a perilous experiment. And then came the avalanche!
It started with the dropping of an icicle. It was a sharp icicle, pointed as a dagger. It plummeted from somewhere above us and narrowly missed Dickson’s throat.
“Assassination attempt!” he gasped. “[Expletive deleted]!”
“By Mother Nature,” I said, intending it to be reassuring.
If the reassurance didn’t quite succeed, it was because Ma Nature was just beginning her onslaught. The initial icicle must have been a hinge of some sort joining an ice wall to a ledge. Now, slowly, the wall itself began crumbling and panes of ice seemed to be falling out of the sky onto our heads. The first of these were thin as window glass, but as the whole ice-wall structure began to slide the slabs got heavier and heavier. Dickson and I crouched under an overhanging ledge and watched the crack-up.
Now the hurtling ice slabs were mixed with pebbles and rocks. We had to hold our hands in front of our faces to keep from being pelted and slashed by the variety of small missiles being tossed off by the larger pieces. Above us, larger and larger chunks were breaking off the mountain itself.
One of the most terrifying things about an avalanche, we learned, is the noise. It had started out with an occasional light thud. Then the thuds had run together and the sound was like hail on a rooftop. The sound became louder as if the hailstones were becoming larger and larger (which, in a sense, they were). It was like the rumble of distant thunder, then as ear-splitting as the clap of a thunder cloud bursting directly overhead. One such clap quickly followed another, each louder than the one before. Physical pain pierced our eardrums with each impact now.
The ground under our feet shook. Boulders careened through the air, scant inches away from us. A wall of sludge and ice piled up around us on the ledge. Dickson stared at it with blank panic. Any path which might have led upward (or downward, for that matter) from the ledge was obliterated by it.
“I’ve been in tight spots before.” I tried to snap him out of it.
No response.
“Haven’t you?” I prodded him.
Was that a flicker of memory that lit up his heady eyes?
“Haven’t you been in tight spots before?” I pushed.
It worked. It started him talking. At first it was a mishmash, sort of like ]ob listing his past troubles, a half-incoherent mumbling that only slowly began to make sense. When it did, I realized that Dickson was telling me a tale of his own “tight spots.” Pieced together, it went something like this:
One night, shortly before his term as President of the United States was at last aborted, Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson lay awake in his bed at the White House, tossing and turning, unable to relax. After an hour or two of trying to fall asleep and failing, the frustration got to be too much for him. He decided to get up and take a walk.
It was about midnight when, fully dressed, Dickson let himself out of the back door of the Executive Mansion and started walking aimlessly down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a weekday night and the Washington streets were nearly deserted. He walked aimlessly for what seemed a very long time. Finally he came to the mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
He crossed the mall and walked up the steps of the Memorial. The giant statue towered over him as he stood in front of the pillars framing it. Even Nicholas Dickson couldn’t help but be affected by the sense of presence of the great man which the statue fostered. He was, in fact, overcome by a feeling of awe.
Without knowing quite how he came to be doing it, Dickson found himself talking to Lincoln-—not the statue so much as the man—telling him his troubles, confiding in him man-to-man, President-to-President.
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear, Mr. President,” he confided to the Lincoln statue, “things have never been worse!”
Dickson went on to speak in detail of his accumulating troubles. He spoke of the I.L.L. Affair, and the Buttermilk Fund, and “the Flushers”; and of revelations of the buggings of various friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family; and of the break-in authorized by him into the office of an indicted political opponent’s astrologer to ransack the stargazer’s files for evidence which might prove useful in prosecuting the Zodiac expert’s client; and of income taxes, and Enemies’ lists, and persecutions by the press; and of the possibility of impeachment by the Congress; and of many, many more presidential woes which were besetting -- nay, beleaguering!—him. And at last, with the recital drawing to a close, he came to the latest and most pressing of his travails.
“It’s Nat,” he confided to Lincoln. “My wife, let there be no question about that. Dragging out this [adjective omitted] laundry is dragging down Nat. She’s quite upset. Now I’m not used to that, Mr. Lincoln. This problem of mine with Nat is high on the agenda. Yes, indeed. But I don’t know what the [expletive removed] to do about it. What shall I do about my wife, Nat, Mr. Lincoln?”
Dickson stared up at the silent, brooding statue. He did not, of course, really expect an answer. And at first there was none. Indeed, it was almost supernaturally still.
Then Lincoln spoke. The statue? The ghost of Abraham Lincoln? A Lincolnesque voice inside Dickson’s head?
Dickson wasn’t sure then. He Wasn’t sure now. Probably he never would be sure.
“What shall I do about my wife, Mr. Lincoln?” President Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson had asked.
And the answer came in deep, sepulchral, Lincolnesque tones:
“Take her to the theater!”
By the time Dickson finished relating this experience, the avalanche had subsided. Debris, however, had walled in the ledge so that we could barely make out the moon which was now directly overhead. To attempt to climb higher before daybreak was hopeless. We had no choice but to settle down to spending the rest of the night on the ledge. With the rising sun, hopefully, we’d be able to dismantle the ice wall and continue our trek upward to the crest of the mountain and then down the other side.
It was damned cold, and being bare-bottomed didn’t help. Dickson’s teeth were chattering too, despite the fact that he still had his pants. Add to this the narrowness of the ledge, and if we were going to catch any sleep we had little choice but to snuggle.