They crunched up the high glacier at a steady pace. The creak and scritch of their crampon straps and points were the only sounds. Once they heard the clatter of a rock falling. Other than that, windless silence. Black sky, filled with stars. Milky Way almost setting in the west, like a noctilucent cloud. Thomas was following a series of flags that flew from wooden sticks, set into cans filled to the top with cement. Mary shuddered to think of carrying the cans up here, they had to weigh twenty kilos at least, but now they stayed put, and guided the way up to the pass. Priska said they were threading some crevasse fields. They would move the flags when the glacier’s ice moved, she said, although that wasn’t such a problem on this one, which had melted up to a kind of minimum remnant, an almost stationary ice field. Priska and Sibilla tried to point out some crevasses to her as they passed them, but Mary couldn’t see them. Slight depressions in the snow blanketing the ice; maybe firn rather than ice; she would have walked right over them. A bad idea. Walking by one of the flags, she saw by her headlamp glare that both cans and flags were painted orange. By starlight they were gray.
After two hours of this ascent, they came to the top of the glacier and faced the black rock of the pass. There was a short and steep-sided gap between the ice of the glacier and the black rock. This gap was the bergschrund, they told her. Famous for presenting a problem in getting from glaciers onto headwalls, sometimes a terrible problem. Happily this bergschrund had a staircase of sorts hacked into the ice side under their feet, its shallow irregular steps much punctured by crampon tips, leading down to the black rock and ice blocks junking up the bottom of the dark little ravine. Tricky work, once they got down there; Priska and Thomas actually took her by the hands and watched her footwork with her, and she took their support gratefully. I’m fifty-eight years old, she wanted to tell them. This isn’t my kind of thing. I’m a city gal. From the bottom of the slash it was eerie to look up and see just a narrow band of stars overhead.
On the rock side of the bergschrund they climbed by spiking their crampon tips into cracks in the rock. This seemed like a bad idea, but in fact her boots stuck on the rock even more firmly than they had into ice. And the rock wall proved to have setbacks in it, almost regular enough as to have been cut by and for people, though Priska said they weren’t.
Then they topped the wall, and were hiking scratchily, as if on tiny stilts, over almost flat slabs of black rock, leading them slightly up between vertical black walls to each side of them. It looked like a roofless hallway, carved by Titans. Priska, in full tour guide mode despite or because of the surreal weirdness of it all, told her that joint faults in the rock had allowed the glacier, when it had been so high as to cover this entire section of the ridge, to pluck and shift loose blocks out of this passage, pushing them probably to the south, as they would see shortly. Now the missing fault block made a break in the ridge, the notch they had seen from below, as squared off as if drawn by a plumbline and carpenter’s level. Very surreal. Not to mention the thought of an ice sea so high that it had covered this part of the range, and presumably all the rest of the Alps, all except for even higher ridges and peaks. Just another Swiss alpine pass, Thomas and the others seemed to suggest by their attitudes, but Priska was obviously proud of it. Each pass in the Alps had its own character, she said. Most were well known since the middle ages, or perhaps long before, back to the time when people had first come to these mountains thousands of years ago. Like the Ice Man, found emerging from a glacier in a pass to the east of here. He had crossed his pass five thousand years before. Or failed to cross, Mary thought but did not say.
So they walked through the notch of the Fründenjoch. It was like passing through a hallway from one world to another. It only took about five minutes. They were just thirteen meters short of a three-thousand-meter pass, Priska said. People often jumped up to pretend to touch that three-thousand-meter height above the oceans. Swiss people, Mary thought. She couldn’t have jumped an inch off the ground.
When they came to the far end of the notch, dawn was flooding the Alps to the south. The raw yellow of morning. A new world indeed. Alpenglow stained east-facing peaks pink; slopes facing the other points of the compass were mauve or purple or black. The ice below them was a rich creamy blue, the sky overhead a clear pale gray, tinged by the yellow light in the air. Peaks extended to the horizon in all directions, and to the south another great range paralleled the one they were crossing. Below them a long sinuous glacier was flanked by black lateral moraines. The Kanderfirn, Priska told her. Not bare ice but firn, which gave it its velvety look. A dark turquoise velvet, very strange to see.
Directly below them lay a drop of empty
