The Crevasse

On the second morning of the crossing, at seven o'clock, the glacier was at its most beautiful and, as Ansel had warned her the day before, at its most deceptive. Overnight snow had smoothed everything into a single white plain, hiding the cracks that, he had told her, could be thirty meters deep. Mireia, who had never set foot on a glacier before this trip, walked fifteen meters behind him, keeping the rope between them tight, exactly as she had been shown.

The previous afternoon, on a slope near the camp, he had made her practice for three hours. She had thrown herself onto her ice axe again and again to stop a fall, and she had tied a prusik knot around the rope with her gloves on. She had also built an anchor from ice screws and a pulley from carabiners and slings. "You'll probably never need any of it," he had said, "but if you ever do, you won't have time to learn it."

She heard nothing. One moment he was there; the next, the snow ahead had opened, and the rope was dragging her forward so violently that she was on her face before she knew she had fallen. Hardly aware of what she was doing, she rolled onto the axe and drove its point into the snow, the way she had been taught. She slid two, three meters, and stopped.

For a long moment she lay there with the whole of his weight pulling at her harness, unable to move. Then, from somewhere below, came his voice, thin and strangely calm. "Mireia? I've hurt my wrist. I can't climb out. You're going to have to build it."

Only later did she realize how long it took: almost forty minutes. Keeping her body pressed onto the axe, she dug through the snow beside her with one hand until she reached hard blue ice. Then she twisted in two ice screws, one slow turn at a time. She joined the screws with a sling, tied a prusik onto the tight rope and clipped it to this anchor. Then, very carefully, she eased her weight off the axe. The screws held. Ansel was hanging from the glacier now, not from her.

The rest was the pulley he had drawn for her in the snow the day before, three lines in the shape of a Z. At the edge of the crevasse she pushed her walking pole under the rope, so that it would not cut deeper into the snow. Then she set up the second prusik and the carabiners and began to pull. Each pull brought him up perhaps half a meter; each time, the prusik caught the rope and held it while she reset the system. It might have been an hour, or ten minutes. She could no longer tell.

At last his helmet appeared at the lip of the crevasse, then his face, white with cold and with something she had never seen on it before, which might have been relief. He hung there for a moment on the rope, breathing hard, and looked across at her anchor.

"You've tied that prusik with two turns," he said. "Three, next time. But it's holding."