She said nothing. She followed them, step by step. Down, then down, then down again. They helped her in places. Hiking on rock in crampons was awkward as hell, but it was solid too, in that her boots kept sticking in place, not the worst sensation to have, given what a slip might do. Priska confirmed what she felt in her feet; you could spike right into a crack on purpose, and hold firm in a way that bare boots wouldn’t have. That meant the pressure on her ankles was tremendous, and often she found herself right at the edge of her strength, right on the brink of a fall, feet tilted this way and that in ways she never would have chosen. A couple of times her only recourse was to give way and step down another step, too fast, unconsidered, desperate. Every time that happened her feet stuck in some new crack, an unexpected salvation. Fuck! she said, time after time. Fucking hell. It couldn’t last like that. Some step was bound to go wrong. Her heart was pounding, she was sweating, nothing else existed but this steep broken staircase of cracked black rock.
After an endless spell of this work, they got to the ice terrace she had seen from the pass above, which now sloped down as far as they could see, then ended in mid-air. Obviously some kind of cliff out of sight down there, ice or rock, it didn’t matter, it was going to be bad, wickedly bad.
We wait here, Priska told her.
We wait? Mary repeated. For what?
Priska said, They are coming here for us. We’re going to catch a ride.
Thank God, Mary said.
Far, far below, where they could see a different glacier’s surface, on the far side of the firn, she spotted a teeny line of flags. Now there was enough light to see they were orange. After fifteen or twenty minutes, they heard a thwacking from down the valley. Up to them rose a helicopter, with the Swiss white cross on red painted on its side. It took a while to get up to them; it really was a long way down. And the air was thin, she could feel that right in her bones, a weakness she didn’t like to feel.
The helicopter landed loudly and with a great rushing of air, some fifty meters away, on an almost flat stretch of ice. With its rotors still blurring over it in a roar, a helmeted and flight-suited person opened a door in its side and got down and gestured them over to the craft. They ducked and cramponed over to the helo, sat down on the ice and unstrapped their crampons (the others unhooked Mary’s for her), then climbed up metal steps into the cabin of the thing. Here it was just as loud as outside, but after they sat down in the big central chamber, and were strapped into their webbing seats by a crew member, and got their climbing helmets off, they were given earmuff headsets. With those on, the world became very much quieter. And there were voices in her ears.
The discussion over the headset was in Swiss German, so Mary just relaxed and flexed her calves and feet. Right on the verge of cramping, they were, in several different places. Thighs too. She was thrashed and no denying it.
They had put her next to a little window, and as the helicopter rose she looked out: steep black mountains, vast swathes of white snow. Then out over an even deeper valley, immensely bigger, mostly green-walled, and floored by a river, and freeways, train tracks, miniature villages with church steeples and square towers and rooftops, and vineyards rising in rows contouring the sides of the great valley walls, especially the south-facing side to their right. The Rhone River, Mary assumed. If she was right, this was the Valais, one of the biggest valleys in Switzerland.
Down this immense canyon they flew, lower than the mountains to left and right. Then they turned left, southward, and flew up a narrow valley. Mary knew that the Matterhorn stood at the top of one of these southerly valleys, but she couldn’t imagine they would go to Zermatt to hide; and it seemed to her they had flown farther west than that anyway. In the brilliant horizontal morning light, these side valleys were still dark in shadow. She lost her sense of where they were.
Eventually the narrow canyon they were ascending closed on them, and the helicopter descended onto a concrete pad underneath a concrete dam, a dam very tall and very narrow, incurved like dams often were. A surreal sight, a comic-book dam it seemed, exaggerated to caricature.
They got out of the helo, went into a building by the landing pad. Here they sat and ate a quick meal, went to the bathroom, changed out of the snow boots and into more conventional hiking boots.
Not done walking yet, Priska explained. Another short walk.
How short? Mary said, annoyed and fearful; she was tapped out, she could feel that in her legs.
Six kilometers, Priska said. Not so far.
And two hundred meters up, Thomas added, as if correcting Priska. Full disclosure kind of thing.
Mary bit her tongue and said nothing. She was wasted. This was going to be bad.
They left the building. By now it was late morning. The sun stood just over the top of the dam hanging over them. It was the tallest dam in Switzerland, they told her, the
