Free Solo Faces by James Salter Page A

were more than he had ever seen. The coldness of the night increased them. They quivered in the thin air. On the dark horizon was the glow of Geneva, constant through the night. A meteor came down like a clot of white fire. An airplane passed to the north. He felt resentment, despair. His eye went down the wall, a thousand feet. He was falling, falling. Cabot never moved; from time to time he moaned.
    At first with only the slightest changing of the sky’s tone, dawn came. The blue became paler. The stars began to fade. Rand was stiff, exhausted. The huge dome of Mont Blanc soared into light.
    “Jack. Wake up.” He had to shake him. Cabot’s eyes flickered. They were the eyes of a man who could do nothing, who was dissolute, spent. “It’s daylight.”
    “What time is it?”
    “Five-thirty. Beautiful morning in France.” His fingers numb, he somehow lit the stove and got out food. Without seeming to, he tried to examine the inert figure.
    “I feel better,” Cabot unexpectedly said.
    Rand looked at him,
    “Do you think you can make it down?”
    “Down?” There was a pause. “No.” He was like a powerful beast that has fought and is bloody and torn, seems killed but suddenly comes to its feet. “Not down,” he said. “I’m all right. I can make it.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “I can make it,” Cabot insisted.
    “The hardest part’s ahead.”
    “I know.”
    Rand said no more. As he was putting things away and sorting out gear, he tried to think. Cabot was strong, no doubt of it. He seemed in control of himself for the moment. They had come a long way.
    “You’re sure?” he asked.
    “Yes. Let’s go on.”
    At first he could not tell, the start was slow. They were stiff from long hours and the cold. Rand was leading. Soon he saw that Cabot could barely climb. He would stay in one spot as if asleep.
    “Are you all right?”
    “I’m just taking a little rest.”
    They proceeded with frightening slowness, as one does with a novice. From time to time Cabot would make a gesture: it’s all right, I’ll just be a minute, but it was nearly always five or ten. Rand had to pull him up with the rope.
    They had passed the bloc coincé and begun an inside corner where two great slabs of rock met like an open book. It seemed they were not really here, they were part of some sort of game. They were going through the motions of climbing, that was all. But they could not go down. The time to have done that was earlier, not after they had struggled up an additional five hundred feet. They were near the place where the first party to climb the face had retreated, going around to the north side and descending. Exactly where that was, Rand did not know. He looked for the bolts that had been placed years before but never found them.
    They came to a wide slab, chillingly exposed. The holds were slight, hardly more than scribed lines. There was no place to put in a piton. As he went out on it, Rand could feel a premonition, a kind of despair becoming greater, flooding him. It is belief as much as anything that allows one to cling to a wall. He was thirty minutes crossing as many feet, certain as he did that it was in vain.
    “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he called.
    Cabot started. He moved very slowly, he was moving by inches. A third of the way across, he said simply,
    “I can’t make it.”
    “Yes, you can,” Rand said.
    “Maybe there’s another way.”
    “You can do it.”
    Cabot paused, then tried again. Almost immediately, his foot slipped. He managed to hold on.
    “I can’t,” he said. He was done for. “You’ll have to leave me here.”
    Silence.
    “No, come on,” Rand told him.
    “I’m going back. You go on. Come back for me.”
    “I can’t,” Rand said. “Look, come on,” he said casually. He was afraid of panic in his voice. He did not look down, he did not want to see anything. There is a crux pitch, not always the most technically difficult, where the mountain concedes nothing,