Climbing Days by Dan Richards

Author:Dan Richards [Dan Richards]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571311941
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

I saw crevasses lurking, ghostly stretch marks in the ice; thin shadow fissures like the marbling of clouds: hidden mantraps, unseen pitfalls, gravitational rendition. ‘It will eat you.’ I thought back to Tim’s Cairngorm caution. Once recalled, it was hard not to think of the landscape in terms of malevolence and hunger.

There are pictures of Dorothea crossing chasms on snow bridges in Climbing Days – thin rib gangways, ‘curled and knife-like edges’ above unknown depths. In a photograph15 she pads out gingerly, thin thread rope around her knickerbockered waist, tall axe prodding ahead: a wary stick figure on the rime roof of a fathomless cathedral; a huge glacial maw leering beneath.

Fifty pages later there’s a shot of the Cabane de Bertol – the caption reads: ‘The Bertol Hut (11,155 ft.) perched like a medieval castle.’ It doesn’t look anything like a medieval castle; adjoining potting sheds on a silver rock mohawk maybe; ‘perched’ is right though – a small black building with a pitched roof perched beyond the reach of frozen white horses, on an iron-filing outcrop below a pyramidal nub. T. S. Eliot & Co. would have certainly blanched at the prospect.

Today, by contract, Bertol sleeps eighty on four levels – ‘five dormitories of sixteen beds equipped with duvets Nordic’ and has ‘a panoramic dining room …’ Things have changed. The sheds are gone, replaced with a multistorey insulated bunk fort. Now Bertol looks like a castle, or rather a Maunsell army fort of the type still stalking Red Sands in the Thames Estuary; a martial thought reinforced when a red helicopter approached up the valley and dropped a large net to the Bertol crew.

Tim joined me on the terrace and we watched the staff fill the webbing with luggage and boxes of uneaten provisions – a lot of wine, we noted. A minute later the helicopter returned to collect the filled net on a hook at the end of a cable. One of the guardians – a tall bearded man in his thirties dressed in plaid – manhandled the airdrop hawser in the downdraught, signalling, arm aloft. His hands seemed huge, even in work gloves, and all the time the noise: a thunderous chug – our clothes flayed and saturated in the whipped air. Then gone, away and dwindled in a moment. The staff said farewell and sped off down the ladders to the glacier below. One of the three had a guitar which lent the scene a slightly madcap Beatles air: HELP! on a budget – the sort we’d require forty-eight hours later.

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