Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow by Maria Coffey

Author:Maria Coffey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312339012
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

A month after I stood in that phone booth in Vienna, Chris Bonington received the roll of film, the evidence of the body on the mountain. He sent the images to Hilary and her mother-in-law, who by details of clothing identified the body as Pete’s remains. For Hilary, it was an affirmation of her long-held belief that Pete hadn’t fallen. If he’d died violently, she had always claimed, she would have sensed it. I, too, was relieved, for during the weeks of waiting I’d begun to dread what the discovery of Joe’s body might unearth in me. But I felt compelled to see the photograph, to understand what death on a mountain looks like.

When Hilary and I next met, she handed me a large brown envelope containing a copy of the black-and-white photograph, then quietly withdrew. I recalled my husband’s gentle warning in Vienna about the destructive powers of the elements; I thought I was prepared. But the image I saw twisted my heart so hard, I cried out loud: desiccated skin drawn tight over bones, hair bleached bone-white, the head uncovered, the hand lying gloveless in the snow, the posture one of repose, of surrender. As shocking as the ravaged body, however, was the supreme bleakness of the place where it lay. Pete Boardman’s shell, leaning against a bank of snow on the Northeast Ridge of Everest, is fixed in my memory as an image of profound loneliness and desolation. When I cried over it, I cried for Joe, too, for the fact that he had perished so far from warmth, from life, from my love. “This is a desperate place,” he wrote to me from Everest Base Camp a few weeks before he died, describing the high winds, the bitter cold, and the barren, unforgiving landscape of the mountain. And now I saw, truly, what he meant.

I gave the photograph back to Hilary. Alone, in the meditation room of her Swiss home, she set a match to it. She watched as the image of her husband’s body caught fire and curled up in the flames. Then she gathered the ashes, took them to India, and placed them in the River Ganges. “I know Pete’s mother still has his picture,” she said. “I know that Chris [Bonington] made copies of the slide. But it doesn’t matter that they still exist. The picture is in my mind, but the actual burning of the picture is also in my mind. It was a very integrative moment when I did that. It meant that he could physically disappear.”

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