The Innocent Moon (50 page)

At sunset, after a supper of herb omelette followed by steak and watercress with vintage Bordeaux, a mild wine which after the
third bottle with goat's cheese gave much satisfaction, the three men sauntered across the square of Laruns. The snow of Pic de Ger, eight thousand feet above, glowed pink like a carnation. Infinite peace seemed to dwell up there. A red glint in the pale sky, immensely high under the points of stars, was an eagle soaring above its eyrie.

“The French engineers are the best in the world,” murmured Archie Meek as they gazed up the dark mountain-side, where an iron conduit pipe from the new turbines at the base led up to a tiny cluster of lights.

Phillip continued to carve his initials on a new rowan staff, with an iron spike at the lower end, and a hide strap through a hole in the handle, for security. He had secretly named it Trusty, after spilling wine on it in the restaurant. The old one, bought at Pied-de-Port, had a slight split at the bottom; it would not do to rely on a faulty mountain staff. Barley had said it was impossible to cross over the pass: it was the time of avalanches, and la Corniche, the road cut across the face of the precipice, was choked with fallen ice and rubble. The
patron
of l'Hirondelle had told him that no guide would venture to cross to Argelès even with snow-shoes. All the same, he must go: he had always avoided a direct issue: now, to test his new resolution, he would do what he had said he would do. He had to keep his word to himself: it was a test of character. He was fit; and if it were impassable, as they said, he would return. But at least he must start.

Returning to the auberge, they passed a priest walking across the square. Bevan touched his beret, saying gravely, “Bon soir, mon père.” Phillip repeated the courtesy, the priest replied gently, with raised fingers, and he felt himself blessed.

Twilight filled the Grand' Place. Colour faded from the virgin snowfields above. Stars were now flickering beyond the peaks. He was calm, he had found love, and it was beyond understanding.

*

At 4 a.m., in the electric pallor of dawn, he was awakened by knocking on the door and the voice of the
patron.
Immediately he got out of bed, put on clothes and nailed boots, strapped and shouldered his pack, took Trusty the rowan staff and clattered quietly down the polished wooden stairs.

The others followed, and they sat at breakfast together.

Half an hour before sunrise they set out. Archie and Bevan
had kindly offered to walk part of the way with him before returning to catch the train.

A goatskin filled with wine was slung on a green cord over Phillip's shoulder. In his twenty-pound pack, was wine, bread, butter, cheese, garlic sausage, olives, and half a chicken.

The sun rose bright and hot, the valley road turned and twisted, always rising to a prospect of oaks and pines. They walked easily, passing a cascade, the outer spray of which quivered with sunbows. At a hairpin bend they lay on the grass and rested, for this was the parting place. By climbing directly up the steep hillside of heather and short rough grass to the road above—Phillip could see the stone wall against the sky—several kilometres of road winding back above itself would be saved. They shook hands.

“See you in five days at the Lutetia, Montparnasse. Good luck, you crazy young excelsior merchant, you,” said Bevan, with a smile and a wave of the hand.

*

Up he went, feeling this was indeed adventure. Soon the steepness, about eighty degrees, and the burning sun, made a pause necessary. Water was falling noisily everywhere in runnels and little cascades down the mountain-side. Up again, with pounding heart and heavier thrusts on the five-foot staff. The pressure of the sun standing out of Spain was heavy upon him. Every part of his body was sweating. Archie and Bevan looked very small below. Now their features could no longer be discerned as they waved goodbye and turned back towards Laruns. He climbed up slowly, while his legs began to feel heavy. He could scarcely lift his feet.

God, it was frighteningly hot. His heart made two kettledrums of his ears. He drank water scooped in his hands; but it wasn't enough, he was sweating so. The snow-water made his tongue and throat raw; but he had to drink.

He lay down, and sucked up water every score of plodded steps upwards. But lying at such an angle made him afraid of falling, so to escape the fear he forced his heavy legs to climb.

After a timeless period he began to chatter aloud with distress, fearful of sunstroke. It was now steeper, he would fall, he could not climb higher, he was terribly afraid. He was stuck there. O Christ, why had he come? His handkerchief, wetted and fixed on head and neck, dried swiftly, and had to be taken off and held in the runnels again every few minutes. The hair of his head, held
under the grey rushing water of a runnel, dried after three minutes in that world of burning blue and blistering sun-pressure. He felt his boots heavy and swinging about as though filled with mercury. The sun cared only for tigers burning bright: a barbaric force, harsh and cruel, waiting to cleave the skull and pierce with radiant death.

A twin fear interlocked his flaring flesh: never could he climb to the top, never could he climb down again. One slip or stumble, and he would slide and roll and hurtle down to the road-ribbon far below.

He must get to the top, and think no more of falling. He never knew how many pints of water he swallowed during that climb to the blue-enamelled rim of sky. His clothes, including jacket and tweed plus-fours, were wringing wet with the sweat of his appalling exertions. Somehow he reached the wall above, clawed himself over flakes of rock, and lay beside a heap of stones, feeling knotted and writhing painfully within, with a need to escape the light of the sun.

He lay there for some time, while his life clarified with the slowing of his heart beats. After a further rest he walked on up the rough and narrow track. It ran with rillets of water, glistening in the sun. About a kilometre onwards it vanished under the edge of the melting snow.

He was alone in a world of white and blue. He sat down, removed boots, stockings, coat, shirt, and vest. They were heavy as though dipped in water. Near him a small bird like a pipit fluttered into the sky, volplaned down with tail spread, singing as it dived to the tip of a rock just visible above the undulations of snow. He squirted some wine from the goatskin, which held a litre, into his mouth, and sang in his happiness.

When the sun had dried one side of his shirt and vest he turned them over. He was not hungry, but perhaps it was wise to eat. One sniff of the food made him ravenous. He warned himself to eat less quickly, to chew each mouthful thirty times. Hunger refused the order; but he was wise enough to keep some food for a reserve in case they lost themselves in the mountains. They? Yes, he and his other self. Both of them were comforted by the sight of the spiked staff of mountain-ash, with its leather hand-thong, set upright in the snow.

There were ten more hours of daylight. Why hurry? He removed his plus-fours, and stood naked in the snow. He had a snow bath, and ran round in the dazzling whiteness. Then he
remembered about snow-blindness, and closed one eye, keeping it for a reserve.

An eagle with ponderous and wheeling flight drifted through the pale sky above. Was it the eagle he had seen the evening before? It swooped down, falling beyond the line of the snow, to rise again some moments later. As it flew over again with slow flaps he could see the dark markings on the wings which spanned, the
patron
had said, over ten feet. He drew the spiked ashpole nearer, testing old bayonet-thrusts and parries learned in the War. The bird soared indifferently over.

Flowers of an intense deep blue, the mountain gentians, grew on the sward where the snow had melted. All the long winter and spring they had been awaiting the life-giving sun. He knelt down and let their colour enter into his eyes. Breathing deeply he stood upright before rubbing himself with more snow. Hurray! He drank water, sucking it from a little pool; dressed; humped pack, slung wine-skin with its gay red tassel over his shoulder, and went on.

The snow was so bright that he had to peer through his lashes, with the lids of each eye almost touching. He prodded the snow before each step. It was deep. The staff sank to his wrist at every thrust. After a while it became tedious to test the way like that, so he went on at a less cautious pace, which increased to between walking and running, for in this manner his boots would scarcely break the top crust formed by an indecisive thaw hardening again in the late night. If he fell into a hidden crevasse, then he fell. Onwards, as rapidly as possible! Setting his map roughly by the sun, he took a line under the Pic de Ger.

After about half an hour's hopping and plunging across dazzling snowfields he saw a line of dark dots receding in the distance towards a vast sheer perpendicular wall of mountain. They were stone-heaps, hidden by snow, except their tips, and obviously marked the line of the road. He followed them. The line led on towards and into the dark-brown precipice face many thousands of feet high. Looking at the map, he saw that here began la Corniche.

He went on until the road was blocked. Glissades of snow and earth and rock had buried slantingly all except the outside edges of the parapet. He regarded it with dismay. To go on meant that he would have to pick his way along the parapet. The parapet was made of flakes of rock, set side by side, as in dry Devon walling. They were not held by mortar, nor even by
earth. Some were loose. Below the parapet was a drop of more than a thousand feet. He did not know what to do; his mind abdicated for some moments; it was too late now to turn back; he must go on.

Under a fearful impulse he found himself creeping quiveringly past a break in the parapet, and on for a hundred yards or so. By this time his whole body was shaking with the appalling vision of an endless peril stretching in front. While he crouched there, now desperately afraid, he heard a dull rumbling across the valley, and a shock of terror transfixed him. He had lost the power to move.

*

The rumbling was made by the multitudinous echoes of an avalanche. Many fragments of ice and rock were spinning and bounding down the brown sheer above, each lump of ice or stone taking great spinning jumps as it preceded the mass. He felt he was done for, and gave a cry. The void below the parapet on which he was hunched was a thousand-foot drop. He prayed instinctively. A curious phenomenon then occurred; he saw the face of Francis Thompson quite near him in the sunshine, like a child's transfer fixed instantaneously in the air; and found himself making with his left hand the sign of the cross on his chest. Immediately terror was unfixed from his limbs. Seeing a tunnel twenty yards away, he moved automatically along the loose parapet towards it and fell on hands and knees in the shelter, while with a thunderous rolling roar the avalanche came down and carried away the parapet of damp earth-bonded scree which his feet had trod a moment before.

When all was quiet again he listened to the mewing of two eagles soaring across the valley below, and watched their brown hollow-winged flight cutting into and sweeping through each other's orbit. Up and up they soared, and passed beyond the shoulder of the Grand Pic de Gabizo.

Could he get back the way he had come? It was the only thing to do. He suppressed imaginative pictures of himself falling. By leaning inwards and clinging with taloned fingers to the brown glissade, by tapping foot-holds with the welts of his boots into the hard ice-slush wall which slanted at an angle of about eighty degrees above the precipice he managed to get back to the track of his footsteps beside the stone-heaps nearly covered with snow.

Fear had shaken him; he sat down; he could not rest; but the
thought of darkness in a temperature below zero drove him to his feet. There was only one thing for it: he must get down below the precipice, risk falling into crevasses, and climb the mountain-side about four kilometres farther on. It would be rough going and other avalanches might come down; he must go on. The sun was already in the western half of the sky. The travellers' hut he had passed was locked, but if the farther slope was unclimbable, he could as a last resort return and break open the door.

The map showed the village of Arrens not far away, in the valley beyond the Col de Soulor. Calm now, he began to climb down among fallen rocks, past patches of snow and the noises of rapid water. The going was easier than he had anticipated, but the heat was great. Every bone in his feet now felt inflamed. A sense of urgency drove him on; he wanted to have done with it, it was really a stupid thing he had done. He must not force himself forward mentally, but go steadily and thoughtlessly.

And after a couple of hours he began to realise that he would get through to Argelès. What should he say to her? The idea had been to ask her to marry him. Formally; chivalrously. He remembered Spica, and her words, What would
you
do with a wife, my poor boy? He could not imagine Annabelle as his wife—she would not be Annabelle. What had they in common? Only a hectic flush of romantic, bitter attraction. Annabelle gave way to Barley; he thought of their expeditions together on the Norton, of swimming in the pools of the gravel-pits in the estuary; and imagined himself with her, himself steady and cool. He was free of Annabelle! He began singing at the top of his voice, and the echo was thrown back by the massif of Gabizo.

The climb up the farther wall of the valley went easier, for he went methodically, breathing slowly and deeply, imagining himself to be an old tranquil man. Above the edge he found the road again, and to his joy this was open, covered with snow only in patches amid sky-reflecting water. Sheep were grazing on the grey-green grass. He had come through! He swung along at about seven kilometres an hour, almost running, thinking how easy it had been. Anyone could have done it. At the same time he dared not stop: if he sat down he felt he might not be able to get up again.