Free Amsterdam by Ian McEwan Page A

thunder of the stream was the very language of threat. His shrinking spirit and all his basic inclinations told him that it was foolish and unnecessary to keep on, that he was making a mistake.
    Clive kept on because the shrinking and apprehension were precisely the conditions—the sickness—from which he sought release, and proof that his daily grind—crouching over that piano for hours every day—had reduced him to a cringing state. He would be large again, and unafraid. There was no threat here, only elemental indifference. There were dangers, of course,but only the usual ones, and mild enough—injury from a fall, getting lost, a violent change of weather, night. Managing these would restore him to a sense of control. Soon human meaning would be bleached from the rocks, the landscape would assume its beauty and draw him in; the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be set free.
    Today, however, this beneficent process was taking longer than usual. He had been walking for an hour and a half and was still eyeing certain boulders ahead for what they might conceal, still regarding the somber face of rock and grass at the end of the valley with vague dread, and still pestered by fragments of his conversation with Vernon. The open spaces that were meant to belittle his cares were belittling everything; endeavor seemed pointless. Symphonies especially: feeble blasts, bombast, doomed attempts to build a mountain in sound. Passionate striving. And for what? Money. Respect. Immortality. A way of denying the randomness that spawned us and of holding off the fear of death. He stopped to tighten his bootlaces. Farther on he took off his sweater and drank deeply from his water bottle, trying to eradicate the taste of the kipper he had unwisely eaten at breakfast. Then he found himself yawning and thinking of the bed in his small room. But he could not possibly be tired already, norcould he turn back, not after all the efforts he had made to be here.
    He came to a bridge across the stream and stopped to sit down. A decision had to be made. He could cross here and make a quiet ascent up the left side of the valley to Stake Pass, or he could continue to the very end of the valley, then scramble up three hundred feet or so of steep slope to Tongue Head. He didn’t really feel like a hand-over-hand scramble, but neither did he like the possibility that he might be giving in to weakness, or to age. Finally he decided to stay by the stream—the exertion of a climb might help jolt him out of his torpor.
    An hour later he was at the end of the valley, facing the first steep incline and regretting his decision. It was beginning to rain hard, and whatever the claims made for the expensive waterproofs he was struggling into, he knew the physical effort of the climb was going to make him hot. Avoiding the slippery wet rock lower down, he picked a route over high, turfed banks, and sure enough, within minutes the sweat was pouring into his eyes along with the rain. It bothered him that his pulse was so rapid so soon and that he was pausing for breath every three or four minutes. An ascent like this should have been well within his powers. He drank from the water bottle and pushed on, taking advantage of his solitude to grunt and moan loudly at each difficult step.
    With someone else along he might have made a joke of the humiliations of growing older. But these days he had no close friends in England who shared his compulsion. Everyone he knew seemed perfectly happy to get by without wilderness; a country restaurant, Hyde Park in spring, was all the open space they ever needed. Surely they could not claim to be fully alive. Hot, wet, panting, he strained to heave and lever himself onto a grassy ledge and lay there, cooling his face on the turf while the rain beat upon his back, and cursed his friends for