Four hours later, his groping hand found the edge of a narrow rock ledge. He levered himself up, turned, and sat down with his feet dangling over eternity. The tops of the pines were so far below now that they had lost all individual definition and were just a rich green spiky carpet. He snubbed off the safety line to a bolt some earlier climber had left sunk in the rock.
“Off belay!” he called down to where Louise waited on a similar ledge a hundred feet below. He took a sparing swig of water from the canteen. He was starting to steam in the warming midmorning sun.
“Tension!” came Louise’s distant response.
Runyan immediately took up the slack on the safety rope by drawing it through the bolt until it was taut but not tight. He held the line in his hands as she started up, feeling her as a deep sea fisherman will feel the marlin delicately mouthing his bait fifty fathoms below. As she climbed, he kept drawing in the rope to maintain that even tension which gives the climber a feeling of confidence and thus reduces the chance of accident.
Louise carefully followed the taut rope up the nearly vertical face, using the handholds and bolts and chocks which Runyan had left set for her. All her energies were concentrated on the climbing; no room left for anything else. Every movement of the hand, every placement of the foot, had to be thought out beforehand, then performed without hesitation and with absolute precision. Dancing had never required such precision.
Her jitters were gone, and the residual stiffness from yesterday’s practice climbs had long since worked itself out of her muscles. She was loving it; even the sweat which bathed her body and stung her eyes was given a sensual quality by the edge of danger always present.
She paused to clear the chock she had just passed; the downward pressure caused by the weight of a climber’s body was what wedged chocks so firmly into fissures in the rock; by pulling upward, she reversed that pressure and freed it. She clipped it, jangling, with the others on her belt, and looked up to seek out the next handhold. She was a hell of a lot better at this than she had been even an hour before.
They ate lunch on another ledge nearly a thousand feet further from the valley floor, Spam sandwiches washed down with tepid canteen water. From here the hotel, the camp grounds, the road, even the river and the forests far below them just weren’t relevant any more.
“Like all the shit one gets himself into,” said Runyan.
He so precisely voiced Louise’s own thoughts, that she said, “What?” in a rather startled voice.
He swung an arm to indicate everything below. Louise nodded, then suddenly clutched his arm, galvanized by an impossibly wide flat rakish black shadow drifting far out from the cliffs.
“Golden eagle,” said Runyan. It wheeled in the sunlight; a wash of pale gold flashed momentarily on the back of its neck.
“He gets to live like this all the time,” she mused.
Runyan looked over at her. The wind, midday hot, tugged at their clothes and riffled their hair. He nodded.
“I love you,” he said in a voice muffled by the last of the sandwich he was chewing.
She whirled to stare at him. “What did you say?”
Runyan licked his fingers and wiped them on his trousers as he pushed himself back from the lip and stood up.
“We’d better get going.”
“What did you say, damn you?”
“That we have to get cracking if we don’t want to spend the night slung in hammocks halfway up this mother.”
“You’re a real bastard, you know that, Runyan?”
“I’m glad me poor mither isn’t here to hear you say that,” he said in a broad Irish brogue.
They both laughed, and the moment passed. Runyan clipped one of the carabiners from his belt to a bolt driven into the rock behind the ledge. Louise looked up, craning back a bit trying to see what was above them. It looked like there was nothing above them. A vertical rock face without the slightest sign of any hand or footholds. She had learned enough in this long day to recognize that.
“I hate to mention it,” she said, “but where are we supposed to go from here?”
Runyan was tying one end of the Gold Line through the carabiner. He jerked it, hung on it with his full weight. He nodded and came erect. “Sideways,” he said.
Louise looked horizontally along the rock face. There were handholds, all right, but they looked pretty scary to her. She felt a sudden hollowness in the pit of her stomach.
“Sideways,” she said in a flat disbelieving voice.
“After I do a little maneuver called a pendulum,” he said. “It looks a lot more spectacular than it is.” He tested the rope again, then began slinging it around him, getting ready to rappel down it. “What it really is, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”
Moyers, full of a good lunch from the hotel dining room, belched almost delicately as he picked his way up the dry stream bed toward the frightening sheer rock face which one of the waiters had called the Royal Arches. He could see nothing resembling arches in the mound of granite rising ahead of him. Neither could he see anything resembling Runyan and Louise.
He began glassing the rock face with his binoculars. Suddenly Louise leaped out at him. She was alone on a rock ledge, peering carefully down.
Down?
The roving glasses found Runyan a hundred feet below, lashed to the far end of a line fastened somehow beside Louise. Runyan was leaning back away from the rock, almost out at a right angle to it. Even as Moyers picked him out, he turned to his right and began running along the face of the cliff. It was the damndest thing Moyers had ever seen, and the most unexpected. He could not have been more surprised if Runyan had spread his arms and started to fly.
At the far end of the arc controlled by the length of the safety line, Runyan whirled nimbly and began running in the other direction as fast as he could, out to the other extremity of the arc in a sort of giant pendulum. At the end of this run, he stretched as far as he could, and tried to jam his hand into a crack in the rock face. He missed by scant inches.
As his momentum failed, Runyan whirled and started his run back the other way again, bounding across the face of the mountain as if he possessed seven-league boots. At the far end he returned, running faster, stretching further — and managed to jam his fingers into the crack and hold himself there against the backswing gravity. He had made it.
Moyers lowered the binoculars. Sweat was standing on the back of his neck. He didn’t like the bastard, but he had to admit that had been something to see. Without the glasses, the two climbers were merely flecks of colored confetti against the grey rock and black shadow of the cliff face.
He took his cassette recorder from his pocket and said, “Subject is attempting a climb on the Royal Arches. I am told this is usually an overnight effort. I will continue to observe the subject as I am able to do so.”
Runyan was safely on the mountain until the next day. Which meant, Moyers thought, that he had lost all options except the one Moyers had chosen for him.
The westering sun pushed heavy shadows out across the valley floor over half a mile below. The wind was cooler, with a hint of evening in it, as Runyan worked his way across the forehead of a great slanting expanse of bald rock, an “aid climb” using chocks and pitons. Above him he could see the Jungle, as the foliage which rimmed the crown of the Royal Arches like a receding hairline was called. He crawled the last few feet, stood up, and yelled down at Louise.
“Off belay.”
Seventy-five feet below the balding crown of rock, Louise began her traverse, following the safety line along the trail of chocks and pitons Runyan had left for her. Her movements were now quick and sure despite her fatigue; she had come a long way figuratively as well as literally during that day.