Poison Wall
One really difficult iceclimb is going to change his life. [Short story 1100 words 5 mins
All day the mountain was in cloud, the hoar-frosted rocks bending into the mist and the wind, grey on grey. Just before sunset the pointed fang of rock, the Stinger, emerged into the light. The frost that coated the overhangs was textured like moss or like sea foam, pastel-painted in turquoise and peach and in the shadows almost crimson. As the sun dropped below the western ridges the colour drained upwards, the mountain top faded to blue-grey above the drifting clouds like a reef of the sea. Down inside the cloud, the climber switched on his helmet torch – the battery was almost gone – and set the spring wedges that would hold him secure in his sleeping sack.
The ledge was not long enough to lie down. The rock walls, coated in ice, faded into darkness on either side. The sleeping bag was stiff and damp after two nights on the mountain, he had to push his feet through the folds of the material. The smell inside the sleeping bag reminded him – he couldn't quite place what it reminded him of.
His helmet pinged, a message from Starryeyes421. Starryeyes421 is his ex-wife. Are you going to get killed?
What sort of question is that. He sends back a quizzical-smile emoji, puts away the phone.
No starry eyes here, the night encloses him like a concrete wall an arm's length away. Like the concrete wall of the sixteenth floor's shared toilet, in the tower where he works. His hands under the floorboards, while Mr Melchior says the seat of the toilet's broken again. He should get a handrail, Mr Melchior should.
'Are you saying I'm too old to use the toilet? Just because you're a mountain climber, you think everybody else can't use the toilet.'
He straightens up, the big wrench in his hand, speaks politely to Mr Melchior. Through the frosted window, it has a clear patch in the very middle, far away through the very centre of the frosted window the white triangle, sharp and pointed, the size of his fingernail.
The mountain. The Stinger, wrapped in the concrete wall of cloud and darkness. Climbed twice before, and five failed expeditions. Five climbers have died, two in falls and three trapped in a blizzard, trapped on a high ledge. But nobody has climbed the Poison Wall, up the overhanging side of it.
Inside his sleeping sack, he talks into his social media feed. We're now, he says, at 4720 metres. Give or take. Which is higher than any previous expedition on the Poison Wall. Hey, it's unexplored terrain. Exciting!
He pauses, listening to the soft wind across the corners of the rockface. Looks like I might even climb this thing. Which is –
He pauses again. Then he cancels the message, switches off the phone. In the morning he climbs on, driving his two axes into a band of grey ice. Hanging from his axes, resting on a screw twisted into the ice, then climbing onwards again.
Towards evening the ice thins out, the tips of his axes hitting against the yellow limestone rock. The band of ice divides, on the left it’s even thinner, rock showing through; on the right the same. Ahead, the band of ice continues with shadows in it where the rock is close below. He climbs up through the overhang, and then the ice is getting thinner again. Too thin.
He finds a crack in the rock underneath the ice. Drives in two metal pitons, hangs up the sleeping sack. His food is gone but he still has a litre of water. He half dozes, half sleeps, in the nylon bag swinging above a thousand metres of empty air, at the top end of the climbable ice. A rope end in the wind taps against the rock.
In the bus coming south. Trying to sleep with the studded wheels rattling on the ice, feeling the ice below the bus right through the headrest. The mountain is bigger now, through the steam of condensation on the dirty window, big as his thumb. There are indigenous people on the bus with heavy black hair hanging over their faces. One of them is carrying a live hen, the hen dangles tied by its feet. So long as the hen is upside down it hangs unresponsive, but when the indigenous person lays it in the parcel shelf it raises its head and looks around with its little yellow eye.
Now on the mountain in the hanging sack, folded in the cloud as if waiting to be born, he talks into his phone. So maybe my life, not done much so far. (Sad emoji here.) But this mountain, by the unclimbed Poison Wall… Not just unclimbed, two web-stations have named it unclimbable. Can't be done is what they said.
At daybreak his phone pings. His follower Pinknose has liked his post about the mountain.
And will they find him, when the spring comes, hanging from these two pitons curled up in his bag, curled in a lump? Better to be climbing better to fall, than dangling in the bag. They’ll find him in the spring when the snow melts, find him in the avalanche cone at the foot of the face, his body broken but strangely peaceful gazing up at the great overhang of the ice. At the Poison Wall, climbed higher than any previous person. He clips into the two pitons, folds up the sleeping sack.
He climbs downwards, down through the overhang, kicking his toes into ice below him that he cannot see. The thin ice cracks under his two axes.
Still alive, he reaches where the ice divided in the shape of a cross. He climbs the thin ice on the right, iceaxes sparking off the rock just below the ice.
Five hours later, he reaches the summit. The narrow crest of rock drops to glaciers on either side. The place that's been in his mind for three years now, four years even. With no water or food, he can't linger. He fixes the first rope, and abseils down the easier side of the mountain.
‘So where were you,’ the building supervisor asks. A middle aged woman with dyed green hair, Mrs Halloway. ‘Mr Melchior has broken the shower again. You need to get up there and fix it, there's water flowing over the tiles.’
‘He looks tired,’ Mrs Halloway said, when Mr Melchior came round to complain. ‘Maybe we've been working him too hard.’
The concrete walls close in; floor tiles damp under his knees. Through the frosted glass, the mountain shows.
No bigger than his fingernail.1
Images: Muztagh Tower, Karakoram (first ascent by Joe Brown, Jon Hartog, Tom Patey and Ian McNaught-Davis 1956 ) by Kogo, Wikimedia Commons
The Majakka high-rise building in Kalasatama, Helsinki, Finland: Markus Säynevirta (Wikimedia Commons)
Trango Towers, Karakoram, Pakistan
In June I posted on the mountain story ‘The Symbol’ by Virginia Woolf. Here I’ve sort of imitated the structure and perhaps the mood of Woolf’s story.
