HALFWAY UP BEN NEVIS, splayed against hollow ice like a cat clinging to a curtain blown out the window of a skyscraper, I realize that falling is out of the question. It's always good to get that worry out of the way. The mountain hurls down another waterfall of spindrift and I duck my head. Wet and heavy as a stream of concrete, the cascade pours
over my helmet and shoulders as I hunch in against the face. It has been raining ceaselessly since the day we arrived in Scotland. The rain is rapidly deteriorating the ice, causing it to randomly collapse. The snow passes around me, slides over a bulge of ice below my feet, and disappears into the clouds.
I resume climbing, sinking my axes in above my head. When I pull up, both picks begin to shear through the ice. It's unnerving. I step up with alacrity, kicking my crampons in with too much force. My boots plunge through the veneer of ice into sugary, bottomless snow. I'm barely attached to the wall. Above me is nothing but plates of gray ice pretending
they are affixed to the rock when I know damn well they're merely suspended on vertical pillows of powder. Down between my feet, the ropes drop into swirling, sepulchral oblivion. I lift out one ax, twirl it, slam in the adze, and gingerly test it. It appears to hold and I continue upward. One of the absurd little secrets to reaching the top of something is
simply to get yourself so far out that retreat is more horrifying than carrying on.
I remind myself that I can never be off-balance. The sick, glorious sport of ice climbing depends on physical equipoise, which depends on mental tranquility, which in turn depends on a smooth blend of faith and self-confidence. I must slow down. I must direct one limb at a time as if I were a dancer deliberately prolonging each movement. If an ax or
foothold fails, I will still be tenuously fastened to the ice at three other points.
I place useless screws in the honeycombed ice as I ascend, recalling with nauseating terror that this route was originally climbed with just one ice ax and no protection. My droop-picked, shark-toothed tools hook into the ice like claws, but the sole ice ax of the first ascensionist had a straight, 90-degree pick with tiny teeth. You couldn't wang it into
steep ice and hang on for dear life—the pick would pop right out. Instead, the climber used the wood-shafted ice ax as precisely that—an ax, hacking out a handhold above his head with the adze, grasping the hold and pulling up on it with one woolly-mittened hand, chopping another pigeonhole, swapping the leashless ax to the opposite hand, and
doing another pull-up. Handholds became footholds, although the deeper and more sound you made them, the more exhausted you became. Hence early masters cut tiny, ephemeral steps. It seems insane, bold beyond believability. And yet I know that this route, The Chute, is just one of dozens put up in Scotland in the 1950s and '60s by a genius named Jimmy
Marshall.
I climb until the ropes go taut, bury both tools, and begin brushing the snow off the walls of rock around me. I'm praying for a crack in which to place protection—knife blade, stopper, chock, cam, anything. But the stone is monolithic. I twist two screws into a smear of ice, sling them, sling my ice tools, equal-tension it all together with one knot,
and scream out a big fat lie: "On belay!"
Dave Getchell and Geoff Heath, my American partners, will simul-climb, one on each rope. Getch is a squirt of a man, far stronger than his ribby physique would suggest. An unregenerate Mainer, he learned to climb New England glace with his father a quarter-century ago, and he can flawlessly duplicate the Scotsman's brogue. Geoff is a stolid, solid Montana
engineer who has been an ice climber ever since the sport became popular in the United States in the seventies.
I suck up the rope, stare out into the vertiginous maelstrom, and keep my ears peeled for signals. I'm still grappling with the thought of climbing this face with one ice ax. The perilousness. The naked insecurity. An uncanny sense of dread begins to well up inside me. Suddenly I catch the wisp of a distant scream. Assuming one of my compadres has slipped,
I brace for the fall, a routine reflex; however, because I do not believe my anchors will hold, my heart plugs my throat and I wait to be plucked into eternity.
But no weight yanks on the ropes. I don't understand. When Getch and Geoff reach the belay I ask if either of them screamed. They shake their heads.
I begin to question myself. Perhaps my ticklish perch and black thoughts inspired fear to fabricate the howl, just as a young child left alone in the dark will hear evil voices.
It's Geoff's lead. He examines my belay and says offhandedly, "Guess I won't fall."
"Welcome to Scotland, laddie," growls Getch in his best through-the-beard burr.
Geoff disappears up into sleet, leading with speed, precision, and no ascertainable doubt. When he brings us up we discover he has placed only three screws in 200 feet, but his belay is reassuringly good, a long sling around a big boulder. Getch takes the gear and leads on while I get out the monocular and scan the couloir, Coire Na Ciste, a thousand feet
below. In the interstices between spinning updrafts and curling mist, I spot something. Perhaps just a tiny ridge of rock high in the snow-choked cwm. I study it until I'm sure.
"Geoff."
We are standing side by side on the two-inch ledge of ice. I hold the monocular against his eye so he won't have to stop belaying. He tilts his head, peers through the spyglass for a full minute, then nods, turns away, and refocuses on Getch climbing silently high above us.
The rock outcrop is the body of a man, lying facedown on the steep cirque, arms folded under his head as if he were napping.
