I could, I suppose, have turned back then. But Mayne had a confident air. He was never at a loss for direction. And I was feeling quite at ease now on my skis. The stiffness had worn off and, though the going was hard and I was out of training, I felt quite capable of making it. It was only the solitude and the lurking belief that we should have had a guide on a run of this sort that worried me.
Once I did say, ‘Do you think we ought to go over the top on to the glacier without a guide?’
Mayne was making a standing turn at the time. He looked down at me, clearly amused. ‘It’s not half as bad as landing on a shell-torn beach,’ he grinned. Then more seriously, ‘We’ll turn back if you like. But we’re nearly up to the worst bit. See how you make out on that. I’d like to get to the top at any rate and look down to the glacier. But I don’t want to do it alone.’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I’m quite all right. But I just feel we ought to have had a guide.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said quite gaily. ‘It’s almost impossible to lose your way on this run. Except for a spell at the top, you’re in the pass the whole time.’
Soon after this it began to get very steep. The pass towered ahead of us, itself like the face of an avalanche slope. And on each side of us, we were hemmed in by real avalanche slopes that swept high above the pass to the dark crests. It was no longer possible to zig-zag up the slope. It was too steep. We began side-stepping. The snow was hard like ice and at each step it was necessary to stamp the ski edge into the frozen snow to get a grip. Even so, it was only just the inside edge of the ski that bit into the snow. It was hard, tiring work.
But there was nothing dangerous about it so long as the skis were kept firm and exactly parallel to the contour of the slope.
For what seemed ages, I saw nothing of the scenery. Indeed, I did not even look up to see where we were going. I just blindly followed the marks of Mayne’s ski edges. My eyes were fixed entirely on my rhythmically stamping feet, my mind concentrating on maintaining my skis at the correct angle. The higher we climbed the more dangerous it became if the skis faced fractionally down the slope and began to slide. So we progressed in complete silence, save for the stamp of our skis and the crunch as they bit into the icy snow.
‘Snow’s drifted up here,’ came Mayne’s voice from above. ‘Have to take our skis off soon.’
A few feet higher up I saw the first sign of rock. It was a small outcrop, smooth and ice-rounded. Then I was up with Mayne. The slope was less now. I stood up and looked about me, blinking my eyes in the sunlight. We were standing on the rim of a great white basin. The snow simply fell away from under our feet. The slope up which we had climbed fanned out and mingled with the avalanche slopes that came in from either side. I could scarcely believe that those were our ski marks climbing up out of the basin — the tracks showed clearly like a little railway line mapped out on white paper.
I looked ahead of us. There was nothing but smoothed rock and jagged tooth-like peaks. ‘That’s Popena,’ Mayne said, pointing to a single peak rising sharply almost straight ahead of us. ‘The track runs just under that to the left.’ The sun was cold — the air strangely visible, like a white vapour. It was a cold, rarefied air and I could feel my heart pumping against my ribs.
A little further on, we removed our skis. It was just drift snow here and, with our skis over our shoulders, we made steady progress, choosing the rock outcrops and avoiding the drifts.
At last we stood at the top of the pass.
The main peaks were still above us. But they only topped our present position by a few hundred feet. We were looking out upon a world of jumbled rocks — black teeth in white gums of snow. It was cold and silent. Nothing lived here. Nothing had ever lived here. We might have been at one of the Poles or in some forgotten land of the Ice Age. This was the territory of Olympian Gods. The dark peaks jostled one another, battling to be the first to pierce the heavens, and all about them their snow skirts dropped away to the world below, that nice comfortable world where human beings lived. ‘Wesson should bring his camera up here,’ I said, half to myself.
Mayne laughed. ‘It’d kill him. He’d have heart failure before he got anywhere near the top.’
It was cold as soon as we stood still. The wind was quite strong and cut through our windbreakers. It drove the snow across the rocks on which we stood like dust. It was frozen, powdery snow. I could sift it through my gloved hands like flour. Here and there along the ridges a great curtain of it would be lifted up by the wind and would drift across the face of the rock like driven spume. There was no sign of the blue sky that had looked so bright and gay from Col da Varda. The air was white with light.
