Even with sunglasses on the light was extremely bright. The sky was a dark cobalt. Snow covered most of the mountainsides, but granite thrust through the snow everywhere, especially on the north sides of the great masses, where the cliffs were too steep to hold snow. Up here the Alps no longer resembled an escarpment at all; each mass of rock had its own look and presence, separated from the rest by deep expanses of empty air, including glacial valleys that were enormously deep U gaps. To the north these macro-trenches were very far below, and green, or even filled with lakes. To the south, however, they were high, and filled only with snow and ice and rock. On this day the wind was pouring up from this south side, bringing the chill of the ice with it.
Down the ice valley directly south of the pass, Nirgal could see a huge crumpled white plateau, where glaciers poured in from the surrounding high basins to meet in a great confluence. This was Concordiaplatz, they told him. Four big glaciers met, then poured south in the Grosser Aletschgletscher, the longest glacier in Switzerland.
Nirgal moved down the terrace to its end, to see farther into this wilderness of ice. At the far end he found that there was a staircase trail, hacked into the hard snow of the south wall where it rose to the pass. It was a path down to the glacier below them, and from there to Concordiaplatz.
Nirgal asked his escorts to stay in the station and wait for him; he wanted to hike alone. They protested, but the glacier in summer was free of snow, the crevasses all obvious, and the trail well clear of them. And no one else was down there on this cold summer day. Nevertheless the members of the escort were uncertain, and two insisted on coming with him, at least part way, and at a distance behind — “just in case.”
Finally Nirgal nodded at the compromise, and pulled on his hood, and hiked down the ice stairs, thumping down painfully until he was on the flatter expanse of the Jung-fraufirn. The ridges that walled this snow valley ran south from the Jungfrau and the Monch respectively, then after a few high kilometers dropped abruptly to Concordiaplatz. From the trail their rock looked black, perhaps in contrast to the whiteness of the snow. Here and there were patches of faint pinkness in the white snow — algae. Life even here — but barely. It was for the most part a pure expanse of white and black, and the overarching dome of Prussian blue, with a cold wind funneling up the canyon from Concordiaplatz. He wanted to make it down to Concordiaplatz and have a look around, but he couldn’t tell whether the day would give him enough time or not; it was very difficult to judge how far away things were, it could easily have been farther than it looked. But he could go until the sun was halfway to the western horizon, and then turn back; and so he hiked swiftly downhill over the firn, from orange wand to orange wand, feeling the extra person inside him, feeling also the two members of the escort who were tagging along some two hundred meters behind.
For a long time he just walked. It wasn’t so hard. The crenellated ice surface crunched under his brown boots. The sun had softened the top layer, despite the cool wind. The surface was too bright to see properly, even with sunglasses; the ice joggled as he walked, and glowed blackly.
The ridges to left and right began their drop. He came out into Concordiaplatz. He could see up glaciers into other high canyons, as if up ice fingers of a hand held up to the sun. The wrist ran down to the south, the Grosser Aletschgletscher. He was standing in the white palm, offered to the sun, next to a lifeline of rubble. The ice out here was pitted and gnarly and bluish in tone.
A wind picked at him, and swirled through his heart; he turned around slowly, like a little planet, like a top about to fall, trying to take it in, to face it. So big, so bright, so windy and vast, so crushingly heavy — the sheer mass of the white world! — and yet with a kind of darkness behind it, as of space’s vacuum, there visible behind the sky. He took off his sunglasses to see what it really looked like, and the glare was so immediate and violent that he had to close his eyes, to cover his face in the crook of his arm; still great white bars pulsed in his vision, and even the afterimage hurt in its blinding intensity. “Wow!” he shouted, and laughed, determined to try it again as soon as the afterimages lessened, but before his pupils had again expanded. So he did, but the second attempt was as bad as the first. How dare you try to look on me as I really am! the world shouted silently. “My God.” With feeling. “Ka wow.”
He put his sunglasses back on his closed eyes, looked out through the bounding afterimages; gradually the primeval landscape of ice and rock restabilized out of the pulsing bars of black and white and neon green. The white and the green; and this was the white. The blank world of the inanimate universe. This place had precisely the same import as the primal Martian landscape. Just as big as it was on Mars, yes, and even bigger, because of the distant horizons, and the crushing gravity; and steeper; and whiter; and windier, ka, it pierced so chill through his parka, even windier, even colder — ah God, like a wind lancing through his heart: the sudden knowledge that Earth was so vast that in its variety it had regions that even out-Marsed Mars itself — that among all the ways that it was greater, it was greater even at being Martian.
He was brought still by this thought. He only stood and stared, tried to face it. The wind died for the moment. The world too was still. No movement, no sound.
When he noticed the silence he began paying attention to it, listening for something, hearing nothing, so that the silence itself somehow became more and more palpable. It was unlike anything he had ever heard before. He thought about it; on Mars he had always been in tents or in suits — always in machinery, except for during the rare walks on the surface he had made in recent years. But then there had always been the wind, or machines nearby. Or he simply hadn’t noticed. Now there was only the great silence, the silence of the universe itself. No dream could imagine it.
And then he began to hear sounds again. The blood in his ears. His breath in his nose. The quiet whir of his thinking — it seemed to have a sound. His own support system this time, his body, with its organic pumps and ventilators and generators. The mechanisms were all still there, provided inside him, making their noises. But now he was free of anything more, in a great silence where he could actually hear himself quite well, just himself on this world alone, a free body standing on its mother earth, free in the rock and ice where it had all begun. Mother Earth — he thought of Hiroko — and this time without the tearing grief that he had felt in Trinidad. When he returned to Mars, he could live like this. He could walk out in the silence a free being, live outdoors in the wind, in something like this pure vast lifeless whiteness, with something like this dark blue dome overhead, the blue a visible exhalation of life itself — oxygen, life’s own color. Up there doming the whiteness. A sign, somehow. The white and the green, except here the green was blue.
With shadows. Among the faint lingering afterimages lay long shadows, running from the west. He was a long way from Jungfraujoch, and considerably lower as well. He turned and began hiking up the Jungfraufirn. In the distance, up the trail, his two companions nodded and turned uphill themselves, hiking fast.
Soon enough they were in the shadow of the ridge to the west, the sun now out of sight for good on this day, and the wind swirling over his back, helping on. Cold indeed. But it was his kind of temperature, after all, and his kind of air, just a nice touch of extra thickness to it; and so despite the weight inside him he began to trudge on up the crunchy hardpack in a little jog, leaning into it, feeling his thigh muscles respond to the challenge, fall into their old lung-gom-pa rhythm, with his lungs pumping hard and his heart as well, to handle the extra weight. But he was strong, strong, and this was one of Earth’s little high regions of Marsness; and so he crunched up the firn feeling stronger by the minute, also appalled, exhilarated — awed — it was a most astonishing planet, that could have so much of the white and so much of the green as well, its orbit so exquisitely situated that at sea level the green burst out and at three thousand meters the white blanketed it utterly — the natural zone of life just that three thousand meters wide, more or less. And Earth rolled right in the middle of that filmy bubble biosphere, in the right few thousand meters out of an orbit 150 million kilometers wide. It was too lucky to be believed.