A Tranquil Star Read Online Free PDF

other one anyway—and be satisfied with that. Carlo, in perfect bad faith, said with a few harsh, cackling syllables that my proposal was fine but, then again, ‘by the easy northwest ridge’ we could reach the Tooth of M. in half an hour; and that it wasn’t worth being twenty-one if you didn’t allow yourself the luxury of taking the wrong path.
    â€œâ€˜The easy northwest ridge’ was described rock by rock in the battered guidebook that Carlo carried in his pocket, along with the wire I mentioned. He took this guidebook along not because he believed in it but for the exact oppositereason. He rejected it because he perceived it, too, as a constraint, and not just any constraint but a bastard creature, a detestable hybrid of snow and rock and paper. He took it with him into the mountains to scorn it, delighted if he could catch it in error, even if that error was to his own detriment and that of his climbing companions.
    â€œThe easy northwest ridge was truly easy, in fact elementary, in the summer, but the conditions we found that day were difficult. The rocks were wet on the side that faced the sun and glazed with ice on the side in the shade; between one rock spike and the next were pockets of wet snow where we sank up to our shoulders. We arrived at the right peak at five, two of us dragging ourselves pitifully, while Carlo was seized by a sinister hilarity that I found slightly irritating.
    â€œâ€˜How will we get down?’
    â€œâ€˜We’ll figure it out,’ Carlo said, and added mysteriously, ‘The worst thing that happens is we taste bear meat.’
    â€œWell, we tasted it, bear meat, in abundance, during the course of that night, the longest of my climbing career. It took us two hours to descend, feebly assisted by the rope. I’m sure you know what an infernal instrument a frozen rope is: ours had become a stiff, evil tangle that got caught on all the outcrops and clanged against the rock like a steel cable. At seven, we reached the shore of a small frozen lake. It was dark.
    â€œWe ate the little we had left, built a useless wall of stones to shelter us from the wind, and lay down on the ground to sleep, huddled side by side. We took turns—the man in the middle slept while the others acted as a buffer. For somereason I can’t explain, our watches had stopped—perhaps because we had forgotten to wind them—and without watches we felt as if time, too, had frozen. We stood up now and then to get our circulation going, and it was always the same: the wind was always blowing, there was always a semblance of moon, always in the same spot in the sky, and in front of the moon a fantastic cavalcade of ragged clouds, always the same. We had taken off our shoes, and put our feet in our backpacks. At the first ghostly light, which seemed to radiate not from the sky but from the snow, we got up, our limbs numb and our eyes glazed from sleeplessness, hunger, and darkness, and found our shoes so frozen that, when struck, they rang like bells. In order to put them on we had to sit on them for half an hour, as if we were hatching eggs.
    â€œBut we returned to the valley on our own: and when the innkeeper asked us, chuckling, how it had gone, all the while stealing glances at our two-day stubble, we answered without hesitation that it had been a great outing, paid the bill, and left without losing our composure.
    â€œThat was bear meat. Now, you must believe me, gentlemen, many years have passed, and I regret having eaten so little of it. I think and hope that each of you has gleaned from life what I have—a certain measure of ease, respect, love, and success. Well, I’ll tell you the truth, none of these things, not even remotely, has the taste of bear meat: the taste of being strong and free, which means free to make mistakes; the taste of feeling young in the mountains, of being your own master, which means master of the world.
    â€œAnd, trust