A frozen gully climb

Text 1: The Chimney, by Douglas Rennie

An original twentieth-century memoir.

We started up the gully at first light, two of us, in a silence so complete that I could hear the snow settling on my hood. The mountain above was invisible. The cloud had come down in the night and sat on the corrie like a damp blanket, and the walls of the gully rose on either side of us into a grey nothing, streaked with ice the colour of old teeth.

Climbing ice is not like climbing rock. You do not hold the mountain; you stab it. Axe, axe, then the front points of one boot, then the other, kicking in with that dull, satisfying crunch, then the axes again, higher. Each placement is a small argument with the ice, and the ice is in no hurry to agree. Below me, Iain paid out the rope with the patience of a fisherman, his face a pale blur turned upward.

Halfway up, the gully narrowed to a chimney choked with a bulge of blue ice, overhanging slightly, dripping. I hung beneath it for a long time. My calves burned. My fingers had gone past pain into a kind of wooden absence. Spindrift poured down the chimney every few minutes in a hissing white river and filled my collar, my sleeves, my eyes. I remember thinking, very clearly and calmly, that this was a stupid way to spend a Saturday.

Then I swung the axe once more, high and to the left, and it bit, and held, and I pulled, and kicked, and was over.

At the top the cloud thinned, quite suddenly, as if someone had drawn back a curtain, and there was the whole of the range laid out beneath a sky of hard, washed blue, every summit glittering, every ridge sharp as a blade. Iain came up and stood beside me, and neither of us said anything for a while. Then he took out a squashed bar of chocolate, broke it in half with great ceremony, and handed me the bigger piece.

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