Suddenly I see the cross formed by the aircraft.
Two dark crossed lines against the pale suede of the frost. They are not in the triangles of sunlight on the summit but much lower down, near the base of the massif. The silhouette of the aircraft is easily recognizable; it is not a plane that has broken up in a crash, but one that, in attempting to land, has become embedded in the rock and has remained there, welded to this mountain, to this Arctic wasteland, its nights without end.
No thought speaks within me. No emotion. Not even joy at having achieved the goal. Only the certainty of experiencing the essence of what I had to understand.
The sun's breakthrough is weaker now. But the aircraft is still visible. I can even see the gleam of the cockpit. Beneath its glass a glimmer of life can be sensed. A silent life, focused on a past, of which soon nothing more will remain on this earth. The life that our words, clumsily, sometimes refer to as death, sometimes oblivion, sometimes the memory of men.
Then the phrase uttered by that tall old man comes to my mind, as he tried to speak of this life and the distance that separates us from it. "… They can look up to the Heavens without turning pale and upon the Earth without blushing." In a past, long dreamed of and suddenly present, a pilot leaps from his cockpit and stands beside the aircraft, one hand resting on the edge of a wing. I am infinitely close to his silence, I sense the focus of the gaze he directs at the Earth. An old wooden house, lost in the midst of the steppes, a night of war, a woman's slow words, the first ripples of a summer storm, a brief love, whose infinite duration trickles away in a cascade of beads from a broken necklace…
The reverberation from the explosion is a long one and from its echoes arises a prolonged, billowing vibration that becomes increasingly limpid. A resonance that goes on refining itself until it seems to be ringing out beyond our lives, in a distant place, of which this Arctic day is but an ephemeral reflection. Here the echo's notes are fading away, obliterated beneath the hiss of the frost needles the wind sweeps across the ground. But over there the man standing beside his aircraft hears them still. A long farewell song, a song of light.
The ray of sunlight has been gone for a moment now, the cross of the aircraft fades in the swiftly advancing pallor of the night. Snow squalls start to blur the outline of the mountains. I shall not be able to see the rock outcrops noted as landmarks on my outward journey Yet the vibration of the last echo still seems to survive among the summits. A subtle resonance that resists the wind. I sense its vibrations deep within me.
Quite simply, what I must do to find my way back is make sure I keep hearing it.