Reading that made Roger feel strange. Someone had lived an hour very like his day on the polar desert, out in the infinite void of nature. And what had seemed to Roger rapture had driven Pip insane.
It occurred to him, as he stared at the thick book, that perhaps he had gone mad as well. Terror, rapture—these extremities of emotion circumnavigate the spirit and approach each other again, though departing from the origin of perception in opposite directions. Mad with solitude, ecstatic with Being—the two parts of the recognition of self sit oddly together. But Pip's insanity only shocked Roger into a sharper love for his own experience of the “heartless immensity.” He wanted it; and suddenly all the farthest, most desolate reaches of Mars became his special joy. He woke at night and sat up to watch dawns, a flower in a garden of rock. And wandered days like John in the desert, seeing God in stones and frost and skies that arched like sheets of fire.
Now he sits on a ledge on a cliff on a planet no longer his, looking down on plains and canyons peppered with life, life created by the human mind. It is as if the mind has extruded itself into the landscape: each flower an idea, each lizard a thought.... There is no heartless immensity left, no mirror of the void for the self to see itself in. Only the self, everywhere, in everything, suffocating the planet, cloying all sensation, imprisoning every being.
Perhaps this perception itself was a sort of madness.
The sky itself, after all (he thought) provides a heartless immensity beyond the imagination's ability to comprehend, night after night.
Perhaps he needed an immensity he could imagine the extent of, to feel the perception of it as ecstasy rather than terror.
Roger sits remembering his life and thinking over these matters, as he tosses granules of rock—little pips—over the ledge into space.
To his surprise, Eileen rejoins him. She sits on her heels, recites quietly,
"I love all waste
And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be."
“Who said that?” Roger asks, startled by the lines.
“Shelley,” she replies. “In 'Julian and Maddalo.'”
“I like it.”
“Me too.” She tosses over a pip herself. “Come join us for dinner?”
“What? Oh sure, sure. I didn't know it was time.”
That night, the sound of the tent scraping stone, as the wind shifts it and shifts it. The scritching of thought as world scrapes against planet.
Next day they start spreading out. Marie, Dougal, Hannah, and Ginger take off early up the Gully, around a rib and out of sight, leaving behind a trail of fixed rope. Occasionally those left below can hear their voices, or the ringing of a piton being hammered into the hard rock. Another party descends to Camp One, to begin dismantling it. When they have got everything up to Camp Two, the last group up will bring the fixed ropes up with them. Thus they will set rope above them and pull it out below them, all the way up the wall.
Late the next day Roger climbs up to carry more rope to Marie and Douglas and Hannah and Ginger. Frances goes with him.
The Great Gully is steeper above Camp Two, and after a few hours of slow progress Roger finds his pack growing very heavy. His hands hurt, the footholds grow smaller and smaller, and he finds he must stop after every five or ten steps. “I just don't have it today,” he says as Frances takes over the lead.
“Me neither,” she says, wheezing for air. “I think we'll have to start using oxygen during the climbing pretty soon.”
But the lead climbers do not agree. Dougal is working his way up a constriction in the Gully, knocking ice out of a crack with his ice axe, then using his fists for chocks and his twisted shoe soles for a staircase, and stepping up the crack as fast as he can clear it. Marie is belaying him and it is left to Hannah and Ginger to greet Roger and Frances. “Great, we were just about to run out of rope.”
Dougal stops and Marie takes the opportunity to point to the left wall of the Gully. “Look,” she says, disgusted. Roger and Frances see a streak of light blue—a length of xylar climbing rope, hanging free from a rust-pitted piton. “That Terran expedition, I bet,” Marie says. “They left ropes the entire way, I hear.”
From above Dougal laughs.
Marie shakes her head. “I hate seeing stuff like that.”
Frances says, “I think we'd better go onto oxygen pretty soon.”
She gets some surprised stares. “Why?” asks Marie. “We've barely started.”
“Well, we're at about four kilometers above the datum—”
“Exactly,” Marie says. “I live higher than that.”