Patrick Woodhead - The Cloud Maker (2010)

‘Never met anyone so anal about where they clip their hardware,’ Bill noted.

‘You know how it is – the higher up we get, the more stupid we become. At least this way, I know where everything is.’

Despite the dull ache in his head, Bill smiled. Back home, Luca’s flat was one of the most disorganised places he had ever set foot in, surfaces covered with unopened mail and abandoned clothes. Yet out here in the mountains he seemed to undergo a complete character transformation: exact, thoughtful, with no cut corners or laziness.

‘I’ll belay you up there,’ Luca said, pointing forty feet above their heads to a black outcrop of rock, clinging to the vertical ice. Then, with a quick nod to check Bill was ready, he moved forward along the ridge, adjusting the length of the leaches on his ice axes.

Moving up on to the wall so that his hips were almost pressing against it, Luca kicked in his crampons, sending tiny shards of ice tumbling below. With fluid, rhythmic movements, he hammered in his ice axes, working his way higher with each step and taking care to keep his front points balanced on the natural shape of the ice, rather than always kicking new steps. He didn’t look up, minutely absorbed in what was in front of him.

He knew he had to compartmentalise the climb. Had to focus on the first pitch, then the second. Nothing more. Thinking ahead to the summit ridge was just too far away. Above him, the cliff continued vertically for another thousand metres.

Hours passed – the same movements, the same rhythm. The sun slowly travelled across the sky, switching their shadows from right to left as they reflected off the polished ice. Both men moved silently upwards, just a few words exchanged as they handed over the hardware at the end of each pitch.

Luca dug his axes in and spread his legs wider, adjusting his balance. He unhooked an ice screw from his belt and wound it into a smooth patch of ice just by his shoulder. Clipping the rope through the carabineer, he leaned back against it, dropping his weight into the seat of his harness and relieving the intense pressure on his calves. Then he wound in a second screw, clipped in and peered down between his legs.

Following the line of the ropes, he could see Bill fighting his way up. That was the way he climbed when he got tired, always fighting. He would hammer his axes in, spraying ice everywhere, using strength not skill to move himself higher.

Somewhere off to the right, Luca heard a noise and a small collection of rocks, some the size of a man’s head, came clattering down the cliff-face. They were far enough away not to be any danger, but the sight of them bouncing off the granite wall in puffs of dust was unnerving. Even rocks that size would splinter straight through their helmets.

Luca saw Bill tilt his head up to watch the rock-fall and for a moment their gazes met. Neither said a word. Playing these kinds of odds was a choice they never spoke about.

Sending a cloud of frosted breath out into the air before him, Luca looked up, allowing himself a rare moment to check their progress. They had been climbing fast and were nearly two-thirds of the way up the face. A few more hours and they would be under the summit ridge.

As the afternoon dragged on, he felt the pace starting to slow even further. He could hear himself grunt each time he pulled his body upwards and his forearms felt swollen and numb. There was a strange, cramping spasm in his right leg that he knew wasn’t from the cold. He wondered, almost clinically, how much longer his body could bear it.

Longer, he knew, than Bill’s could. Over the course of the last few hours, as Luca had tried to move forward, the ropes would often snap taut at his waist, jerking him to a standstill. He would wait for a minute, allowing Bill to catch his breath, but when he tried to press on, they still wouldn’t budge.

Fifty feet below, Bill could feel sweat mingling with the thin veil of ice across his face before running down into his eyes. Beneath his jacket, his chest rose up and down in ragged bursts and, whenever he stopped to try and steady his breathing, he was hit by a protracted bout of coughing which left him feeling even shakier. He tried to kick in his crampons and get a better grip, but his legs felt wooden and unresponsive, his front points just scraping over the smooth ice. In each hand, the axes felt unbearably heavy, and as he swung against the wall he knew his movements were becoming increasingly desperate.

He stopped again, bracing himself for another fit of coughing. Looking up through his fogged goggles, he could see the outline of Luca waiting above.

‘You all right?’

As the words floated down to him, Bill went to respond, but another bout of coughing tore through him. When it had finished he tilted his head back and, clenching his jaw in anticipation of the pain, yelled out a single word.

‘Rest.’

Even from the distance, Luca could hear the strain in Bill’s voice – you didn’t climb for seven years with someone without being able to instantly gauge their level of discomfort. Judging by the jerky rhythm of the last hour or so, Luca guessed that Bill was now running on empty.

About twenty feet above his head, Luca had spied an outcrop of rock that might be big enough for the two of them to sit on. He had been working his way towards it for the last half-hour. Waiting for enough slack in the rope, he climbed the last few feet and, with trembling arms, hauled himself over the lip. With his back wedged against the ice and his legs dangling over the edge, he heaved back on the rope to take some strain off Bill.

‘Fifty feet more,’ he yelled down. ‘We’ve got our own private balcony up here.’

For hours Luca had had his nose pressed against the mirror of ice, totally absorbed in the climb. Now he sat back in the sunshine, blinking at the world that was spread out beneath him.

Every view was different and no matter how much he climbed, the experience of having a new perspective was always breathtaking. As the sheer scale of the surroundings came into focus, his personal struggle with the mountain seemed to fade, shrinking him to what he was: a tiny human, clinging to a giant aberration of land.

Except that this time the aberration had a strange sense of order to it.

Luca squinted in the bright light, trying to take it all in. To his right stood a ring of snow-capped mountains, flawlessly aligned. His eyes followed the peaks as they curved round in a perfect circle. It was the symmetry that was so extraordinary, as if they had been positioned with a pair of compasses. At the centre lay a blanket of cloud, impenetrably thick.

As he watched, the cloud started to shift. It began to part slowly, changing and reforming, before something began to take shape at its centre. Luca felt his grip slacken slightly on the rope as he leaned forward involuntarily.

Light poured in through the gash in the clouds, illuminating one side, then the next. As the shape beneath finally broke free of its swirling cover, Luca realised that he was staring at a pyramid so perfectly proportioned it had to be man-made.

Except that it couldn’t be. Surely. What else could be in the middle of the Himalayas except a mountain? Looking out across the horizon, he realised it was smaller than the surrounding peaks, but only fractionally. That would make it nearly seven thousand metres high. Absurd to think that humans could build anything so big.

A trembling hand appeared over the ledge beside him.

For a split second Luca just stared at it, his thoughts still on the pyramid mountain. Then, shaking himself awake, he lunged forward to grab Bill’s wrist. He pulled as hard as he could while Bill struggled to gain purchase, his crampons clawing over the dark rock. Long seconds passed before he managed to worm his way far enough on to the ledge. Then he collapsed, flat on his back, the only sound the heaving of his chest.