Turn your light off, he called. Save power!
The words rang clear in the pre-dawn. Already, forms were emerging from the landscape, with the buttresses hanging like scabbards, obscure, sinister. I paused. Now there was stillness. My breath turned into steam, illuminated against the grit-flecked ice, which seemed to tremble with the softer clock critch, clock critch of Matt catching up. Neither of us had spare batteries, so I followed his counsel. The face had been steepening up nicely, from fifty-five, to sixty, to sixty-five degrees. Beneath us, the drop seemed infinite. You couldn’t see the bottom.
Alright.
I began climbing again, enjoying the exertion and the chill of the air on my lungs, finding the regular, mindless beat. This was feeling easy. We didn’t need a rope and there was no spare time to gear up and bimble about on these lower slopes. Later, the face would warm up and the stones would be flying down the runnels, and the route would get harder. For now, it was just clock critch, clock critch, clock critch… Yes, we’d definitely get the Nordwand in the bag today, there was no question…
Whoaah!
The yell slashed across the mountain. I jerked my head around. A shape slithered and cartwheeled, clattered and bumped, disappearing into the greyness…
Mate?
Echoes of my voice bounced off those high walls, reverberating in the hollowness, mixing with tones of those conceited ghosts, trapped within this graveyard prison. That was him that fell, because nobody replies, and no shadow works its way methodically upon the cold.
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