Antarctica (38 page)

And yet as it got higher it got steeper, and they had to go slower. It was as if they were trapped in Zeno’s paradox, and halving the distance to the top in increments of time that remained the same. Burning and freezing; waiting for Val to screw in ice screws, or screw them out; looking or not looking at the blue gaping fissures in the ice underfoot, each one a potential deathtrap.

Thus it was nearly three in the afternoon when they finally came under the Hansen Shoulder, where a narrow ramp of ice led them right under its exposed rock,
up toward the polar plateau. There was a wide bergschrund gap between their ice ramp and the dolerite of the shoulder, smoothed into a vertical wall by the ablation of the wind. There was also, unfortunately, a tumble of big broken seracs to the left of the ramp as they climbed, cleft with deep crevasses that ran out across the first great drop of the icefall. So they had no room for maneuvering on either side, and could only press onward up the ramp, their crampons sticking in the blue ice as they labored up the slope. But the screen image showed that it would go all the way.

Before they topped out, however, they had to pass a single tall block of ice filling the bergschrund to the right and overhanging their ramp—a smooth bluish fang of ice, a chunk of a serac which must have fallen from higher on the Hansen Shoulder, or across the ramp from the serac field to their left. The width of the ramp as it curved under this serac was just a bit wider than the sledge itself, because a crevasse curved out of the serac field and ran parallel to the ramp on the left. Val saw that this crevasse was a deep one. So they were on an ice bridge, in effect, running up the slope between bergschrund and crevasse. Where the crevasse ran out across the icefall, it was soon filled at its top by a snowbridge, leaving an opening under the snowbridge that was a very considerable ice tunnel. Not an unusual sight, but it added a certain frisson to the narrowness of the ramp, suggesting as it did the depths on each side of them.

Val stopped her group. It looked like the ramp ran all the way around the overhanging block without obstruction, after which it widened again. Very workable, but narrow enough that a fixed line would be appropriate. So she uncoiled one of the ropes, flaking it out neatly so that it would come up after her without knotting.
From her gear sling she took an ice screw—a hollow metal tube, screw-threaded on the outside, with a sharp point on the driving end, and holes in the other end to insert an ice axe for easier turning—and chipped a hole about a quarter-inch deep with the sharp end of the screw, then got it set and rotated it in squeaking at every turn, the first half by hand, the second half with the leverage of her ice axe, until it was almost completely buried. A bombproof belay. She asked Jack to clip onto the screw with a runner, which was a looped piece of webbing, and belay her as she went on up. Then she took off up the ramp, Jack feeding out just enough rope that Val could feel it tugging back on her a bit. Jack somehow always ended up doing this job, and it was true he was good at it; a tight belay, with just the right slack in it, so that the middle of the rope scarcely touched the ice.

Around the corner and above the ice block, Val stopped and screwed in two more ice screws, connecting them by a sling attached to each through carabiners, so that any force that came on them would be equalized. She tied a figure eight in the end of the belay rope, and attached it to the sling with another carabiner.

Before returning to the others she reattached herself to the belay rope with a prussik loop. This was a small loop of rope, tied to the belay rope in a simple knot that tightened and held position when you put weight on the loop, but could be loosened and slid up or down the belay rope by hand when there wasn’t weight on it.

She got back to the others. “Okay, up we go.” She lined the clients along the rope, made sure they were attached to both the rope and their harness, and sent them ahead. They cramponed up the ramp, hunched over a bit. Jack stayed behind to help her haul the sledge up.

The others had all gone around the ice block to the higher belay and gotten off the rope, and Val and Jack had clipped their harnesses onto the belay rope and were just beginning to pull the sledge into line, when the ice block above them leaned over with a groan and fell. Val leaped into the crevasse to the left, her only escape from being crushed under falling ice. She hit the inner wall of the crevasse with her forearms up to protect her. The rope finally caught her fall and yanked her up by her harness; then she was pulled down again hard as Jack was arrested by the same rope below her. For a second or two she was yanked all over the place, up and down like a puppet, slammed hard into the wall. The rope was stretching almost like a bungee cord, as designed—it was very necessary to decelerate with some give—but it was a violent ride, totally out of her control.

But the belay above held, and the belayers too. As soon as she stopped bouncing, however, she twisted and kicked into the ice wall with both front point crampons, then grabbed her ice axe and smacked the ice above her with the sharp end to place another tool.

A moment’s stillness. Nothing hurt too badly. She was well down in the crevasse, the blue wall right in front of her nose. Ice axe in to the second notch, but she wanted more. Below her Jack was hanging freely from the same rope she was, holding onto it above his head with one hand. No sign of the sledge.

Voices from above. “We’re okay!” she shouted up. “Hold the belay! Don’t move it!” Don’t do a thing! she wanted to add.

“Jack!” she called down. “Are you okay?”

“Mostly.”

“Can you swing into the wall and get your tools in?”

“Trying.”

He appeared to be below a slight overhang, and she above it. A very pure crevasse hang, in fact, with the rest of the group on the surface several meters above them, belaying them, hopefully listening to her shouts and tying off, rather than trying to haul them up by main strength; it couldn’t be done, and might very well end in disaster. Val didn’t even want to shout up to tell them to tie off; who knew what they would do. Not wanting to trust them, she took another ice screw from her gear sling, chipped out a hole in the wall in front of her, set the screw in it, then gave it little twists to screw it into the ice. Its ice coring shaved out of the aluminum cylinder. A long time passed while she did this, and it became obvious that they were underdressed for the situation; it was probably twenty below down here, and no sun or exertion now to warm them; and sweaty from adrenaline. They were chilling fast, and it added urgency to her moves. She had to perform a variant of the operation called Escaping the Situation—a standard crevasse technique, in fact, but one of those ingenious mountaineering maneuvers that worked better in theory than in practice, and better in practice than in a true emergency.

The screw was in, and she clipped onto it with a carabiner and sling attached to her harness, then eased back down a bit. Now both she and Jack had the insurance belay of the screw.

From the surface came more shouts.

“We’re okay!” she shouted up. “Are the anchor screws holding well?”

Jim shouted down that they were. “What should we do?”

“Just hold the belay!” she shouted up anxiously. “Tie it off as tight as you can!” More times than she cared to remember she had found herself in the hole
with the clients up top, and they had often proved more dangerous than the crevasse.

She tied another prussik loop to the belay rope, then reached up and put her right boot into it. Then she stood in that loop, jack-knifing to the side, and unclipped her harness from the ice screw, then straightened out slowly as she slid the prussik attached to her harness as high on the rope as it would go. When she was standing straight in the lower loop, she tightened the upper prussik, then hung by the waist from it, and reached down and pulled the lower one up the rope, keeping her boot in the loop all the while. There was the temptation to pull the lower loop almost all the way up to the higher one, but that resulted in a really awkward jackknife, and made it hard to put weight on her foot so she could move the higher one up. So it was a little bit up on each loop, over and over; tedious hard work, but not so hard if you had had a lot of practice, as Val had, and didn’t get greedy for height.

“Jack, can you prussik up?”

“Just waiting for you to get off rope,” he said tightly.

“Go ahead and start!” she said sharply. “A little flopping around isn’t going to hurt me now.”

Soon enough she reached the edge of the crevasse, and the others on top helped haul her over the edge, where she was blinded by the harsh sunlight. She unclipped from the belay rope and went over to check the belay. It was holding as if nothing had ever even tugged on it. Bombproof indeed.

Then it was Jack’s turn to huff and puff. Prussiking was both hard and meticulous, accomplished in awkward acrobatic positions while swinging in space all the while, unless you managed to balance against the ice wall of the crevasse. Jack appeared to be making the classic mistake of trying for too much height with each
move of the loops, and he wasn’t propping himself against the wall either. It took him a long, long time to get up the belay rope, and when he finally pulled up to the point where the others could haul him over, he was steaming and looked grim.

“Good,” she said when he was sitting safely on the ramp. “Are you all right?”

“I will be when I catch my breath. I’ve cut my hand somehow.” He showed them the bloody back of his right glove, a shocking red. The blood was flowing pretty heavily.

“Shit,” she said, and hacked some firn off the ramp to give to him. “Pack this onto it for a while until the bleeding slows.”

“A sledge runner caught me on its way down.”

“Wow. That was close!”

“Very close.”

“Where is the sledge?” Jorge said.

“Down there!” said Jack, pointing into the crevasse. “But it got knocked in and past us, rather than crushed outright by the block. I gave it a last big tug when I jumped in.”

“Good work.” Val looked around. “I’ll go back down and have a look for it.”

“I’ll come along,” said Jack, and Jim, and Jorge.

“You can all help, but I’ll go down and check it out first.”

So she took from her gear sling a metal descending device known as an Air Traffic Controller, and attached it to the rope, then to her harness using a big locking carabiner. She leaned back to take the slack out of the rope between her and the anchor, then started feeding rope through the Air Traffic Controller as she walked backward toward the crevasse, putting her weight hard on the rope. Getting over the edge was the tricky part;
she had to lean back right at the edge and hop over it and get her crampon bottoms flat against the wall, legs straight out from it and body at a forty-five-degree angle. But it was a move she had done many times before, and in the heat of the moment she did it almost without thinking. After that she paid the rope slowly up through the descender, one hand above it and one running the rope behind her back for some extra friction. Down down down in recliner position, past the ice screw she had placed, down and down into the blue cold. She was keeping her focus on the immediate situation, of course, but her pulse was hammering harder than her exertion justified, and she found herself distracted by an inventory that part of her mind was taking of the emergency contents of everyone’s clothing. This was no help at the moment, and as she got deeper in the crevasse she banished all distracting thoughts.

Just past the tilt in the crevasse that blocked the view from above, there was a kind of floor. Her rope was almost entirely paid out, and she had not tied a figure-eight stopper knot in the end of the line, which was stupid, a sign that she wasn’t thinking. But it got her down to a floor, and it was possible to walk on this floor, she saw, still going down fairly steeply; and as she saw no sight of the sledge, but a lot of chunks of the broken ice block leading still onward, she called up that she was going off rope, then unclipped, and moved cautiously over the drifted snow and ice filling the intersection of the walls underfoot—a floor by no means flat, but rather a matter of Vs and Us and Ws, the tilts all partly covered by drift. There was also no assurance at all that it was not a false floor, a kind of snowbridge in a narrow section, with more open crevasse below it; she would have stayed on rope if there had been enough of it. As it was she crabbed along smack against the
crevasse wall, hooking the pick of her axe into it as she went, testing each step as thoroughly as she could and hoping the bottom didn’t drop out from under her.

She moved under the snowbridge she had noted from above, and the crevasse therefore became a tall blue tunnel. She moved farther down into it. Sometimes ice roofed the tunnel, other times snowbridges, their white undersides great cauliflowers of ice crystal, glowing with white light. The view from below made it clear why snowbridges over crevasses were such dangerous, things, so tenuous were they and so fatally deep the pits below them. But that was why people roped up.

The tunnel turned at an angle, and then opened downward, into a much larger chamber. Val kept going.

This new space within the ice was really big, and a much deeper blue than what she had come through so far, the Rayleigh scattering of sunlight so far advanced that only the very bluest light made it down here, glowing from out of the ice in an intense creamy translucent turquoise, or actually an unnamed blue unlike any other she had seen. The interior of the space was a magnificent shambles. Entire columns of pale blue ice had peeled off the walls and fallen across the chamber intact, like broken pillars in a shattered temple. The walls were fractured in immense translucent planes, everything elongated and spacious—as if God had looked into Carlsbad Caverns and the other limestone caverns of the world and said No no, too dark, too squat, too bulbous, I want something lighter in every way, and so had tapped His fingernail against the great glacier and gotten these airy bubbles in the ice, which made limestone caves look oafish and troglodytic. Of course ice chambers like these were short-lived by comparison to regular caves, but this one appeared to have been here
for a while, perhaps years, it was hard to tell. Certainly all the glassy broken edges had long since sublimed away in the hyperarid air, so that the shatter was rounded and polished like blue driftglass, so polished that it gleamed as though melting, though it was far below freezing.