Bright Air - Barry Maitland [46]
I opened my eyes, groggily trying to orientate myself, and saw a distant haze of dull green. It took me a moment to realise that I was staring at the tree canopy far below. I was hanging upside down.
‘Josh!’ Luce called again.
I called back, ‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Not much.’ Blood was running into my eyes from a cut on my cheek where I’d hit the rock face, but my bones seemed intact.
‘Can you climb up?’
My first thought was, how? Even if I could get myself the right way up, we weren’t carrying Jumars for climbing the slender ropes. Then I remembered I had a prusik loop somewhere in my gear, though I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to remember how to use the bloody thing. It took a while to twist myself upright while the others shouted questions and advice to each other. Should they try to get help? But the mobile phones didn’t work. Should they try to lower me to the ground? Three hundred metres? I thought, no way. So I rigged up the ascender and began to inch my way painfully up the rope.
The evening sun had set the forest ablaze in golden light and purple shadow when Luce finally hauled me onto her ledge, and I thought how cruel of nature, indifferent to my fate, to put on such a show at a time like this. The others wanted to lower ropes and haul me up, but Luce was worried about the condition I was in, shaking with cold and shock, and also about the approach of darkness.
‘We’ll spend the night here,’ she said.
‘Sleep together?’ I stammered through chattering teeth. ‘Is that all you think about?’—for it was true that our lovemaking had taken on a certain intensity of late. She laughed, and began shouting instructions up to the others. One of them, Owen I think, had abseiled part-way down and about twenty metres away to the left, and Luce gave him a list of things we needed, as we’d come up with the minimum of kit. He climbed back up to the top and a couple of them set off on the summit walking track back down to the hut to fetch them for us.
I looked at the narrow ledge we were on, only a few centimetres wide, and wondered how the hell we were going to sleep on that—like bats perhaps, hanging upside down with our toes jammed into cracks. But Luce was placing wedges and flexible friends into the rock all around us, and lacing rope between them to form a sort of cradle. When she was satisfied, she perched beside me and held my hand, and we watched the great shadow of the mountain creep out across the wilderness. The dark was absolute by the time the backpack came bumping down the cliff on the end of a line—a sleeping bag, thick jumpers, a flask of hot soup, water, a couple of packs of dry rations, a first-aid kit and a torch. With them we built our nest safe inside Luce’s rope cobweb, had a meal, then zipped ourselves inside the bag and fell deeply asleep.
We woke to a gleam of golden light. It was the dawn sun, rising directly in front of us. We were pressed very close, our bodies warm despite the chill wind on our faces.
‘My nose is freezing,’ I whispered.
‘Mine too.’ She turned her head and we rubbed our noses together like Eskimos, then lay there watching the world beneath us take shape in the gathering light. Small glinting lakes appeared through the dark forest, and crags, like the stumps of ancient teeth, caught fire in the morning sun. I felt enveloped by the natural world, in a way I never had before. When I thought about it, I was amazed to realise how totally insulated my life had been from this world until I’d started climbing with Luce. Nature to me had been no more than a marginal risk of hurricanes or floods that could be managed with a range of financial instruments. I had only ever seen true wilderness through the filter of a TV screen or an aeroplane window. And now I was about as fully exposed to it as one could be, suspended in a gossamer net high up a mountain face in bright air. Credit derivatives and hedging positions weren’t going to be much use to me here. For the first time I felt I understood about Luce.