Roger sits remembering his life and thinking over these matters, as he tosses granules of rock—little pips—over the ledge into space.
To his surprise, Eileen rejoins him. She sits on her heels, recites quietly,
“Who said that?” Roger asks, startled by the lines.
“Shelley,” she replies. “In ‘Julian and Maddalo.’ ”
“I like it.”
“Me too.” She tosses over a pip herself. “Come join us for dinner?”
“What? Oh sure, sure. I didn’t know it was time.”
That night, the sound of the tent scraping stone, as the wind shifts it and shifts it. The scritching of thought as world scrapes against planet.
Next day they start spreading out. Marie, Dougal, Hannah, and Ginger take off early up the Gully, around a rib and out of sight, leaving behind a trail of fixed rope. Occasionally those left below can hear their voices, or the ringing of a piton being hammered into the hard rock. Another party descends to Camp One, to begin dismantling it. When they have got everything up to Camp Two, the last group up will bring the fixed ropes up with them. Thus they will set rope above them and pull it out below them, all the way up the wall.
Late the next day Roger climbs up to carry more rope to Marie and Douglas and Hannah and Ginger. Frances goes with him.
The Great Gully is steeper above Camp Two, and after a few hours of slow progress Roger finds his pack growing very heavy. His hands hurt, the footholds grow smaller and smaller, and he finds he must stop after every five or ten steps. “I just don’t have it today,” he says as Frances takes over the lead.
“Me neither,” she says, wheezing for air. “I think we’ll have to start using oxygen during the climbing pretty soon.”
But the lead climbers do not agree. Dougal is working his way up a constriction in the Gully, knocking ice out of a crack with his ice axe, then using his fists for chocks and his twisted shoe soles for a staircase, and stepping up the crack as fast as he can clear it. Marie is belaying him and it is left to Hannah and Ginger to greet Roger and Frances. “Great, we were just about to run out of rope.”
Dougal stops and Marie takes the opportunity to point to the left wall of the Gully. “Look,” she says, disgusted. Roger and Frances see a streak of light blue—a length of xylar climbing rope, hanging free from a rust-pitted piton. “That Terran expedition, I bet,” Marie says. “They left ropes the entire way, I hear.”
From above Dougal laughs.
Marie shakes her head. “I hate seeing stuff like that.”
Frances says, “I think we’d better go onto oxygen pretty soon.”
She gets some surprised stares. “Why?” asks Marie. “We’ve barely started.”
“Well, we’re at about four kilometers above the datum—”
“Exactly,” Marie says. “I live higher than that.”
“Yes, but we’re working pretty hard here, and going up pretty fast. I don’t want anyone to get edema.”
“I don’t feel a thing,” Marie says, and Hannah and Ginger nod.
“I could use a bit of oxygen,” Dougal says from above, grinning down at them briefly.
“You don’t feel edema till you have it,” Frances says stiffly.
“Edema,” says Marie, as if she doesn’t believe in it.
“Marie’s immune,” Dougal calls down. “Her head can’t get more swollen than it already is.”
Hannah and Ginger giggle at Marie’s mock glare, her tug on the rope to Dougal.
“Down you come, boy.”
“On your head.”
“We’ll see how the weather goes,” Frances says. “But either way, if we make normal progress we’ll be needing oxygen soon.”
This is apparently too obvious to require comment. Dougal reaches the top of the crack, and hammers in a piton; the ringing strikes grow higher and higher in pitch as the piton sets home.
That afternoon Roger helps the leads set up a small wall tent. The wall tents are very narrow and have a stiff inflatable floor; they can be hung from a single piton if necessary, so that the inhabitants rest on an air-filled cushion hanging in space, like window washers. But more often they are placed on ledges or indentations in the cliff face, to give the floor some support. Today they have found that above the narrowing of the Great Gully is a flattish indentation protected by an overhang. The cracks above the indentation are poor, but with the addition of a couple of rock bolts the climbers look satisfied. They will be protected from rockfall, and tomorrow they can venture up to find a better spot for Camp Three without delay. As there is just barely room (and food) for two, Roger and Frances begin the descent to Camp Two.
During the descent Roger imagines the cliff face as flat ground, entertained by the new perspective this gives. Ravines cut into that flat land: Vertically these are called gullies, or couloirs, or chimneys, depending on their shape and tilt. Climbing in these gives the climber an easier slope and more protection. Flat land has hills, and ranges of hills: These vertically are knobs, or ridges, or shelves, or buttresses. Depending on their shape and tilt these can either be obstacles, or in the case of some ridges, easy routes up. Then walls become ledges, and creeks become cracks—although cracking takes its own path of least resistance, and seldom resembles water-carved paths.
As Roger belays Frances down one difficult pitch (they can see more clearly why their climb up was so tiring), he looks around at what little he can see: the gray-and-black walls of the Gully, some distance above and below him; the steep wall of the rampart to the left of the Gully. And that’s all. A curious duality; because this topography stands near the vertical, in many ways he will never see it as well as he would an everyday horizontal hillside. But in other ways (looking right into the grain of the rock to see if one nearly detached knob will hold the weight of his entire body for a long step down, for instance) he sees it much more clearly, more intensely than he will ever see the safe world of flatness. This intensity of vision is something the climber treasures.
The next day Roger and Eileen team up, and as they ascend the Gully with another load of rope, a rock the size of a large person falls next to them, chattering over an outcropping and knocking smaller rocks down after it. Roger stops to watch it disappear below. The helmets they are wearing would have been no protection against a rock that size.
“Let’s hope no one is following us up,” Roger says.
“Not supposed to be.”
“I guess getting out of this Gully won’t be such a bad idea, eh?”
“Rockfall is almost as bad on the face. Last year Marie had a party on the face when a rock fell on a traverse rope and cut it. Client making the traverse was killed.”
“A cheerful business.”
“Rockfall is bad. I hate it.”
Surprising emotion in her voice; perhaps some accident has occurred under her leadership as well? Roger looks at her curiously. Odd to be a climbing guide and not be more stoic about such dangers.
Then again, rockfall is the danger beyond expertise.
She looks up: distress. “You know.”
He nods. “No precautions to take.”
“Exactly. Well, there are some. But they aren’t sufficient.”
The lead climbers’ camp is gone without a trace, and a new rope leads up the left wall of the Gully, through a groove in the overhang and out of sight above. They stop to eat and drink, then continue up. The difficulty of the next pitch impresses them; even with the rope it is hard going. They wedge into the moat between a column of ice and the left wall, and inch up painfully. “I wonder how long this lasts,” Roger says, wishing they had their crampons with them. Above him, Eileen doesn’t reply for over a minute. Then she says, “Three hundred more meters,” as if out of the blue. Roger groans theatrically, client to guide.