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We did that cheerful thing and slept untroubled by heaven.
Our way kept winding right, until we were at a hundred forty-four thousand feet and were mounting the southern slopes. Then it jogged back, and by a hundred fifty we were mounting to the west once more.
Then, during a devilish, dark and tricky piece of scaling, up a smooth, concave bulge ending in an overhang, the bird came down once again.
If we hadn't been roped together, Stan would have died. As it was, we almost all died.
Stan was lead man, as its wings splashed sudden flames against the violet sky. It came down from the overhang as though someone had kicked a bonfire over its edge, headed straight toward him and faded out at a distance of about twelve feet. He fell then, almost taking the rest of us with him.
We tensed our muscles and took the shock.
He was battered a bit, but unbroken. We made it up to the overhang, but went no further that day.
Rocks did fall, but we found another overhang and made camp beneath it.
The bird did not return that day, but the snakes came.
Big, shimmering scarlet serpents coiled about the crags, wound in and out of jagged fields of ice and gray stone. Sparks shot along their sinuous lengths. They coiled and unwound, stretched and turned, spat fires at us. It seemed they were trying to drive us from beneath the sheltering place to where the rocks could come down upon us.
Doc advanced upon the nearest one, and it vanished as it came within the field of his projector. He studied the place where it had lain, then hurried back.
"The frost is still on the punkin," he said.
"Huh?" said I.
"Not a bit of ice was melted beneath it."
"Indicating?"
"Illusion," said Vince, and he threw a stone at another and it passed through the thing.
"But you saw what happened to my pick," I said to Doc, "when I took a cut at that bird. The thing had to have been carrying some sort of charge."
"Maybe whatever has been sending them has cut that part out, as a waste of energy," he replied, "since the things can't get through to us anyhow."
We sat around and watched the snakes and falling rocks, until Stan produced a deck of cards and suggested a better game.
The snakes stayed on through the night and followed us the next day. Rocks still fell periodically, but the boss seemed to be ru
We made three thousand feet, could have gone more, but didn't want to press it past a cozy little ledge with a cave big enough for the whole party. Everything let up on us then. Everything visible, that is.
A before-the-storm feeling, a still, electrical tension, seemed to occur around us then, and we waited for whatever was going to happen to happen.
The worst possible thing happened: nothing.
This keyed-up feeling, this expectancy, stayed with us, was unsatisfied. I think it would actually have been a relief if some invisible orchestra had begun playing Wagner, or if the heavens had rolled aside like curtains and revealed a movie screen, and from the backward lettering we knew we were on the other side, or if we saw a high-flying dragon eating low-flying weather satellites....
As it was, we just kept feeling that something was imminent, and it gave me insomnia.
During the night, she came again. The pi
She stood at the mouth of the cave, and when I advanced the retreated.
I stopped just inside and stood there myself, where she had been standing.
She said, "Hello, Whitey."
"No, I'm not going to follow you again," I said.
"I didn't ask you to."
"What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"
"Watching," she said.
"I told you I won't fall."
"Your friend almost did."
"'Almost' isn't good enough."
"You are the leader, aren't you?"
"That's right."
"If you were to die, the others would go back?"
"No," I said, "they'd go on without me."
I hit my camera then.
"What did you just do?" she asked.
"I took your picture--if you're really there."
"Why?"
"To look at after you go away. I like to look at pretty things."
"..." She seemed to say something.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Why not?"
"...die."
"Please speak up."
"She dies..." she said.
"Why? How?"
"....on mountain."
"I don't understand."
"...too."
"What's wrong?"
I took a step forward, and she retreated a step.
"Follow me?" she asked.
"No."
"Go back," she said.
"What's on the other side of that record?"
"You will continue to climb?"
"Yes."
Then, "Good!" she said suddenly. "I--," and her voice stopped again.
"Go back," she finally said, without emotion.
"Sorry."
And she was gone.
VI
Our trail took us slowly to the left once more. We crawled and sprawled and cut holes in the stone. Snakes sizzled in the distance. They were with us constantly now. The bird came again at crucial moments, to try to make us fall. A raging bull stood on a crag and bellowed down at us. Phantom archers loosed shafts of fire, which always faded right before they struck. Blazing blizzards swept at us, around us, were gone. We were back on the northern slopes and still heading west by the time we broke a hundred sixty thousand. The sky was deep and blue, and there were always stars. Why did the mountain hate us? I wondered. What was there about us to provoke this thing? I looked at the picture of the girl for the dozenth time and I wondered what she really was. Had she been picked from our minds and composed into girlform to lure us, to lead us, sirenlike, harpylike, to the place of the final fall? It was such a long way down....
I thought back over my life. How does a man come to climb mountains? Is he drawn by the heights because he is afraid of the level land? Is he such a misfit in the society of men that he must flee and try to place himself above it? The way up is long and difficult, but if he succeeds they must grant him a garland of sorts. And if he falls, this too is a kind of glory. To end, hurled from the heights to the depths in hideous ruin and combustion down, is a fitting climax for the loser--for it, too, shakes mountains and minds, stirs things like thoughts below both, is a kind of blasted garland of victory in defeat, and cold, so cold that final action, that the movement is somewhere frozen forever into a statuelike rigidity of ultimate intent and purpose thwarted only by the universal malevolence we all fear exists. An aspirant saint or hero who lacks some necessary virtue may still qualify as a martyr, for the only thing that people will really remember in the end is the end. I had known that I'd had to climb Kasla, as I had climbed all the others, and I had known what the price would me. It had cost me my only home. But Kasla was there, and my boots cried out for my feet. I knew as I did so that somewhere I set them upon her summit, and below me a world was ending. What's a world if the moment of victory is at hand? And if truth, beauty and goodness be one, why is there always this conflict among them?
The phantom archers fired upon me and the bright bird swooped. I set my teeth, and my boots scarred rocks beneath me.
We saw the top.
At a hundred seventy-six thousand feet, making our way along a narrow ledge, clicking against rock, testing our way with our picks, we heard Vince say, "Look!"
We did.
Up and up, and again further, bluefrosted and sharp, deadly, and cold as Loki's dagger, slashing at the sky, it vibrated above us like electricity, hung like a piece of frozen thunder, and cut, cut, cut into the center of spirit that was desire, twisted, and became a fishhook to pull us on, to burn us with its barbs.