North Face Read Online Free PDF Page B

and the resistance of the intellect to new ideas. Little by little the spirit would have ceased to answer the eyes, the mind would quietly have taken over. A fine day, a temperate breeze, an interesting conformation there in the hills. “I only have relinquished one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway.” William Wordsworth.
    Perhaps it had been some inner reluctance to make the test which had sent him, when he left the school, to London. At the time he had only said to himself that no one attracted more than five seconds’ notice there. From this point of view, it had been quite a success. His friends had well-defined orbits, easily avoided; he had existed for some months untroubled by any human contacts beyond those involved in saying “Yes, thank you,” to a mercifully laconic landlady, and “No, thank you,” to the varied assortment of prostitutes whom he attracted by a tendency to take long walks at night. They seemed to have a sixth sense for him (like flies for a carrion, he thought) but with practise were easily out-manoeuvred, except when they emerged from doorways in one’s path. With all these assets, it was a pity that London had to produce its customary effect in the end. The half-felt surrounding swarm, the great skep in which it was a social distinction if one had space to breathe, began to affect him like the smell of a rank sick animal in a room. When he took to staying in all night as well as all day, he knew that this could not go on much longer. Why should it? It was time now for the mountains. The matter of training would right itself; and at last, there, so would everything else.
    He reached Scotland well aware that he was not fit to climb, and spent a week walking himself into condition. It took him another week to know what had happened, and several more to believe it.
    If his nerve had gone, or his staying-power, he would have been presented with an object in life, and an unimpaired promise beyond it. Indifferent to death, he had been at the top of his form, and it had shown him the truth. The contact was broken. The technique was exercise; the route a mechanical problem; the summit a terminus. Two two-thousands of feet made exactly four.
    Always when he had come to the hills happy in himself, which was good, they had freed him from himself, which was better. When he had come with what had seemed at the time like trouble, they had lifted it and left him again with something fit to lose. What he brought them now was not acceptable; they handed him back to himself to keep. He had wrestled with them, for a blessing at first like Jacob with the angel, then in anger and for revenge. He had always hoped, when his time came, to die on a climb by some mischance not shaming to his skill. Now, taking meticulous care on increasingly severe routes, he refused to a treacherous ally the satisfaction of killing him; he could manage without this final humiliation. He had done nothing unjustifiable by the strictest standards, except to climb alone. He did not feel qualified, now, to lead a party, and saw no reason why other leaders should be responsible for him on a rope. In their place, he would have preferred to pick someone else.
    He might still have been there, defying emptiness, if he had not had the folly (or the wisdom) to repeat a climb that he had first made with Sammy when they were both twenty-five. On a night in May they had camped high, and in the first twilight done a short but exacting route, with one unexpectedly tense moment: reaching the ridge, they had confronted the sunrise on the other side. Above a world folded in every dark gradation of shadow, the sky rose in profound transparencies of green and blue; a vast wing of cloud, shaped like immortal speed, swept the zenith with a deep but brightening fire purer than snow. They had taken out their food; discussed, now that there was time, the awkward rock-fall in the chimney; and stopped talking to watch the sky. Presently, between