'I wish I had your sublime self-confidence,' I said.
I suppose I had spoken with a shade of bitterness, for he looked up and patted my arm. 'It'll come,' he said. 'It'll come. A couple of successes and you'll never listen to advice again — until it's too late. I'm at the top now. Nobody can teach me anything about cameras. But it won't last. In a few. years' time younger men will come along with new ideas which I shan't be able to see, and that'll be that. It's the way it goes in this racket. Engles will tell you the same.'
I left him then and went out on to the belvedere. Mayne was waiting for me there. Just a couple of successes! It was so easy to talk about it. And I hadn't even begun a script. The wood of my skis was actually warm to the touch as they stood propped against the balustrade in the sun. But though the sun was warm, it made little or no impression on the snow, which remained hard and frozen.
We started up across virgin snow until we hit the track to the Passo del Cristallo. It was not really a track — just a few ski marks lightly dusted over with a powder of snow that had drifted across them during the night. The run looked as though it was little used. 'You know the way, I suppose?' I asked Mayne.
He stopped and turned his head. 'Yes. I haven't done it this year. But I've done it often before. You don't need to worry about having no guide. It's quite straightforward until we get up near the top of the pass. There's a nasty bit of climbing to do to get to the top of it. We'll be just on ten thousand feet up there. We may have to do the last bit without skis. Then there's the glacier. That's about a kilometre. There should be plenty of snow on it. After that it's quite a simple run down to Carbonin.' He turned and plodded on ahead of me again, thrusting steadily with his sticks.
I think if I had had the sense to look at the map before we started out, I should never have gone on that particular run. It is not a beginner's run. And it looks a bit frightening even on the map. There's at least a kilometre on the way up to the glacier marked with interrupted lines, denoting 'difficult itinerary'. Then there is the glacier itself. And both on the way up from Col da Varda and on the way down to Carbonin, the red hachures of avalanche slopes are shown falling down towards the track on every side.
As we climbed steadily upwards, zig-zagging in places because of the steepness of the entrance to the pass, I had a glimpse of what was to come. The outer bastions of Monte Cristallo towered above us to the left, a solid wall of jagged edges. To our right, a great field of snow swept precipitously down towards us, like a colossal sheet pinned to the blue sky by a single jagged peak. It was across the lower slopes of this that we were steadily climbing. There was no track at all now. The wind whistling up the pass had completely obliterated the marks of the previous day's skiers. We were alone in a white world and ahead of us the pass rose in rolling downs of snow to the sharp rock teeth that marked the top of the pass. The sunlight had a brittle quality and the bare rock outcrops above us had no warmth in their colouring. They looked cold and black.
I could, I suppose, have turned back then. But Mayne had a confident air. He was never at a loss for direction. And I was feeling quite at ease now on my skis. The stiffness had worn off and, though the going was hard and I was out of training, I felt quite capable of making it. It was only the solitude and the lurking belief that we should have had a guide on a run of this sort that worried me.
Once I did say, 'Do you think we ought to go over the top on to the glacier without a guide?'
Mayne was making a standing turn at the time. He looked down at me, clearly amused. 'It's not half as bad as landing on a shell-torn beach,' he grinned. Then more seriously, 'We'll turn back if you like. But we're nearly up to the worst bit. See how you make out on that. I'd like to get to the top at any rate and look down to the glacier. But I don't want to do it alone.'
'Of course not,' I said. 'I'm quite all right. But I just feel we ought to have had a guide.'
'Don't worry,' he said quite gaily. 'It's almost impossible to lose your way on this run. Except for a spell at the top, you're in the pass the whole time.'
Soon after this it began to get very steep. The pass towered ahead of us, itself like the face of an avalanche slope. And on each side of us, we were hemmed in by real avalanche slopes that swept high above the pass to the dark crests. It was no longer possible to zig-zag up the slope. It was too steep. We began side-stepping. The snow was hard like ice and at each step it was necessary to stamp the ski edge into the frozen snow to get a grip. Even so, it was only just the inside edge of the ski that bit into the snow. It was hard, tiring work.
But there was nothing dangerous about it so long as the skis were kept firm and exactly parallel to the contour of the slope.
For what seemed ages, I saw nothing of the scenery. Indeed, I did not even look up to see where we were going. I just blindly followed the marks of Mayne's ski edges. My eyes were fixed entirely on my rhythmically stamping feet, my mind concentrating on maintaining my skis at the correct angle. The higher we climbed the more dangerous it became if the skis faced fractionally down the slope and began to slide. So we progressed in complete silence, save for the stamp of our skis and the crunch as they bit into the icy snow.
'Snow's drifted up here,' came Mayne's voice from above. 'Have to take our skis off soon.'
A few feet higher up I saw the first sign of rock. It was a small outcrop, smooth and ice-rounded. Then I was up with Mayne. The slope was less now. I stood up and looked about me, blinking my eyes in the sunlight. We were standing on the rim of a great white basin. The snow simply fell away from under our feet. The slope up which we had climbed fanned out and mingled with the avalanche slopes that came in from either side. I could scarcely believe that those were our ski marks climbing up out of the basin — the tracks showed clearly like a little railway line mapped out on white paper.
I looked ahead of us. There was nothing but smoothed rock and jagged tooth-like peaks. 'That's Popena,' Mayne said, pointing to a single peak rising sharply almost straight ahead of us. 'The track runs just under that to the left.' The sun was cold — the air strangely visible, like a white vapour. It was a cold, rarefied air and I could feel my heart pumping against my ribs.
A little further on, we removed our skis. It was just drift snow here and, with our skis over our shoulders, we made steady progress, choosing the rock outcrops and avoiding the drifts.
At last we stood at the top of the pass.
The main peaks were still above us. But they only topped our present position by a few hundred feet. We were looking out upon a world of jumbled rocks — black teeth in white gums of snow. It was cold and silent. Nothing lived here. Nothing had ever lived here. We might have been at one of the Poles or in some forgotten land of the Ice Age. This was the territory of Olympian Gods. The dark peaks jostled one another, battling to be the first to pierce the heavens, and all about them their snow skirts dropped away to the world below, that nice comfortable world where human beings lived. 'Wesson should bring his camera up here,' I said, half to myself.
Mayne laughed. 'It'd kill him. He'd have heart failure before he got anywhere near the top.'
It was cold as soon as we stood still. The wind was quite strong and cut through our windbreakers. It drove the snow across the rocks on which we stood like dust. It was frozen, powdery snow. I could sift it through my gloved hands like flour. Here and there along the ridges a great curtain of it would be lifted up by the wind and would drift across the face of the rock like driven spume. There was no sign of the blue sky that had looked so bright and gay from Col da Varda. The air was white with light.