Sport... is when you make up rules to make it harder.
George and Ruth Mallory 'How to Climb It!' 1932
Rhododendron: flowering shrub found on the Everest approach hike, now an invasive weed in temperate climates worldwide. Likes high-rainfall peaty soils; does not grow on chalk.
'Context for Climbers' (Yosemite University Press)
I slipped out of the hut just after midnight. Yesterday's unexpected sunshine had softened the snow and now the night frost was hardening it up again. It was good snow, and the forecast was for two more good days. Ahead, something big and black blocked the starlight.
Aconcagua IV.
The Con Brio Face of Aconcagua IV has four routes. Four nasty routes. Pimple, Nirex, Artifex and Bollock are brutal, technical and ugly. Example: Bollock has a finger-crack 120 metres high. No footholds, just a crevice 20 millimetres wide between blank walls of sheared andesite. The walls overhang a bit, but not much. To climb Bollock you spend three months in a gym doing chin-ups and three weeks with your fingers in vinegar.
The four routes were put up thirty years ago and since then not a lot has been done with the Con Brio. I was on my way to change that. I was going to demolish Pimple, Nirex, Artifex and Bollock for ever; and move Aconcag Four up into the top league.
Me! The climber called Quail (no second name). Thirty-seven (count them) years old. No decent first ascent to my credit. In the table of World Mountaineers number 142,706 and falling, and – go on, despise me – a Rhododendron Climber.
Where've you been, on the Moon? No; there's rock on the Moon and some good scree runs. Rhododendron climber: doesn't like chalk. Doesn't like 22nd-century gear, but especially: doesn't like chalk. Chalky fingers, messing up the rockface, messing up the climb itself by making it easier. And all all the other equipment from the last hundred years, the waterproof clothing, the rubber soled boots, the thermal iceaxes. All of it making good hard climbs into boring and ordinary.
I walked under the moon, and my black moon-shadow scampered beside me like a friendly dog. The frost on my face was sharp, sharp in the lungs with every breath, the steel head of the iceaxe cold in my hand. But the cashmere muffler, the silken long-johns caressed my skin, and my iron-shod boots bit into the ice below. As the glacier steepened I started to cut steps , and the chips of ice whispered down the slope into the darkness and silence of the night glacier. After the months of secrecy and preparation, now there was nothing to think about but the crisp blows of the iceaxe, and the grip of the bootnails, and the glacier, and the night. The world slowed down, and it was me, and my good iceaxe, and the good ice of the glacier.
Where I left the main drag up the Arnolfini Glacier I walked downhill along the stony moraine to confuse anyone trying to follow my tracks. It was about three o' clock when I stopped among the broken ice towers. From the top corner of the hanging glacier a tiny, hidden couloir was going to lead me into the heart of the Con Brio Face.
I lowered my aching rucksack onto the ice. Inside that rucksack was my Silent Second. I ordered her from Morag's Mountain Shop at the last possible minute to preserve the secrecy of my route. She came, delivered to the hut, by vacuum tube.
If you climb difficult rock solo but prefer not to get killed, then you need a Silent Second. Morag will sell you one for fifty UNcred. Of course I had to think first, about the Silent Second. This bit of kit wasn't around in 1924 when Mallory summited Everest with his ash-shafted iceaxe. But we're not obsessive, us Rhododendrons. It's not as if the Silent Second makes the climbing easier or more convenient, ascompared with a flesh-and-blood companion.
It's a whole lot less convenient, and slightly less safe. Which makes it okay. Even for someone a bit strict, like me.
• • •
She – my Silent Second – sits on the stone shelf beside me as I write. Now that my companion's in her seventh month I've been taking the Silent Second up on the cliffs above our cave. Carbon and space-laid protein, my Silent Second, and her reel spins without friction on ice that she condenses out of the air. She clamps herself into a crack and watches my rope as I climb, and when I get to the top I whisper her name into my helmet and she loosens for me to pull her up.
• • •
The Southern Cross disappeared behind the nose-to-tailfin airships of the Cumbre Valley. Already lights of other climbers were twinkling below me, over on the Arnolfini. Time to move. I cramponned up between the ice towers, and the thought of the unclimbed climb above me was like the sun that was about to rise above theicefield. And once climbed Rhododendron, it would be a Rhododendron climb for evermore, no chalk, no ugly springwedges, no clutter of gear up the simple rock pitches. I tried to stay calm, but I could feel my heart beating like a loose rope end that snaps in the gale.
No trouble among the ice towers, and the couloir – I hadn't let myself believe in the couloir. But it was there.
Dawn seeped into the couloir as a bold new route seeps into the imagination of a lonely climber. A climber who spends long nights in front of old photos, and traces the shadows of the background in a what had been conceived as a romantic evening porno-shot, the crucial groove line crooked in the elbow of a naked sky-diver.
I looked up between the high walls opening onto the pale dawn sky. Steep, but not too steep for the crampons: black walls looming: lovely.
I looked out for the chimney in the right-hand wall, the slab below it: there would be handholds, the lie of the cleavage planes meant the handholds would be there. My route was not going to be a difficult one. It was going to be easier than Pimple, Nirex, Artifex or Bollock. It was going to cut across each one of these four disgusting lines and chop them to bits. It was going to by-pass the finger-crack of Bollock with a descent and a sly wriggle and an airy traverse sideways between the overhangs.
The couloir double-kinked and ducked beneath a chockstone. I decided that I should not publish my route. It would be, like the Fulton Traverse Line on Everest, a secret jewel passed from one climber to a trusted rope-companion. Rock Gymnasts arriving at the top of Pimple or Artifex with their a squalid little bags of chalk and their spring loaded clamps would wonder at so many Rhododendron Climbers on Aconcagua IV: so many not-particularly-good Rhododendron Climbers: so many Rhododendron Climbers with quiet smiles on our faces and a couple of simple rope slings around our shoulders.
Sunlight struck the ice like a fanfare of trumpets. Above me the couloir ran out against an impassable wall. but below the wall I saw the chimney and the slab-terrace leading out and up to it. I saw something else.
I saw small white marks, all up the slab. Marks that had been left by someone else's fingers on the rock. Someone else's chalky fingers.
• • •
Two more of the creatures came up the valley this morning. The black shadows of them flicked across the icefield. They came in low over the buttresses and headed down the glacier. The wind of them shook the stone inkwell where I keep my pens, the inkwell that once belonged to Dante Alighieri.
Dante's inkwell clinks against the other pot, the yellow-green one glazed with the ashes of Adolf Hitler and containing the remains of the finest climber the world has yet known, Bofors Creetchie. The creatures pass, and the sun warms the rock of our shelter as before. Even the harshest sound cannot shatter daylight. (But I have long stopped trying to read omens.) I have 500 sheets of handmade Kashmiri paper and I hope they will be enough. They cost me my ice-burner and we have nothing else to trade apart from the ice-axe, and I'm not going to trade the ice-axe. I also have pens: not steel ones, though steel will be manufactured again one day, but raven feathers, gathered from their nests above our cave.
She's been grinding ink in our stone mortar, but when the creatures that are loose in the world pass over she comes and stands behind me where I write.
"Those creatures have grown, Quail. All the time, they're getting bigger."
I rise and put my arms around her, and I feel the hardness of her belly. She reaches and replaces my pen in Dante's inkwell.
"I'm thinking of calling the book 'The Hole Under Jerusalem'," I tell her. "Is that catchy enough, do you think? It's important for people to understand what's happening, and many are learning to read now. At Lhasa they were showing a flat film. They shone it through glass onto a piece of wall. Maybe Morag wll make my book into a flat film. Like the one we saw in the Eighth Circle."
She says: "I worry, Quail. This book writing – it's just so slow. And those flying things are getting bigger. I worry about the child."
"The child will be safer here than anywhere." The old base camp is visible across the glacier with its graves of climbers. "And the altitude – she'll grow big lungs. We'll raise us a mountaineer.“
• • •
Despite myself, I stopped on the way down the glacier and looked back. The chalk marked up the route, robbing those who follow of the excitement of working it out as we climb. Chalk marks, condemning my classic Rhododendron line to the miserable status of a rather easy route in the 'Anything Goes' tendency. But I had to wonder:. The crack traverse high on the route: did it go the way I'd worked out from the photographs and the geology of the rocks? Had the chalk-boy ahead of me enjoyed, as I'd expected to enjoy, the sudden step to the slab above the overhangs? Or maybe the way turned by the little chimney further left.
Despite the strengthening sunlight, I couldn't spot the line of the chalk marks higher up. It didn't matter. Wherever it went, the route was ruined.
And me with it, as I was about to show myself, on the southern side of Everest.