Hans waves a hand with an architect's pride. Frances sniffs. Arthur says, “It's hard to believe.” He taps the floor. “So the other half of this cave is underneath the talus wash down there?”
“Exactly.” Hans beams. “Though the other half was never a cave. This was probably a small, roughly circular layer of tuff, trapped in much harder basaltic lava. But when the shield broke and the escarpment was formed, the tuff deposit was cut in half, exposing its side to erosion. And a few eons later we have our cozy cave.”
“Hard to believe,” Arthur says again.
Roger sips from the flask and silently agrees with Arthur. It's remarkable how difficult it is to transfer the areologist's theories, in which mountains act like plastic or toothpaste, to the vast hard basalt reality underneath and above them. “It's the amount of time necessary for these transformations that's difficult to imagine,” he says aloud. “It must take . . .” He waves a hand.
“Billions of years,” Hans says. “We cannot properly imagine that amount of time. But we can see the sure signs of its passing.”
And in three centuries we can destroy those signs, Roger says silently. Or most of them. And make a park instead.
Above the cave the cliff face lies back a bit, and the smoothness of the Jasper Band is replaced by a jumbled, complicated slope of ice gullies, buttresses, and shallow horizontal slits that mimic their cave below. These steps, as they call them, are to be avoided like crevasses on level ground, as the overhanging roof of each is a serious obstacle. The ice gullies provide the best routes up, and it becomes a matter of navigating up what appears to be a vertical delta, like the tracing of a lightning bolt burned into the face and then frozen. Every morning as the sun hits the face there is an hour or so of severe ice and rockfall, and in the afternoons in the hour after the sun leaves the face there is another period of rockfall. There are some close calls and one morning Hannah is hit by a chunk of ice in the chest, bruising her badly. “The trick is to stay in the moat between the ice in the gully and the rock wall,” Marie says to Roger as they retreat down a dead-end couloir.
“Or to be where you want to be by the time the sun comes up,” Dougal adds. And on his advice to Eileen, they begin rising long before dawn to make the exposed parts of the climb. In the frigid dark a wristwatch alarm beeps. Roger twists in his bag, trying to turn it off; but it is his tent mate's. With a groan he sits up, reaches over and switches on his stove. Soon the metal rings in the top of the cubical stove are glowing a friendly warm orange, heating the tent's air and giving a little bit of light to see by. Eileen and Stephan are sitting in their bags, beating sleep away. Their hair is tousled, their faces lined, puffy, tired. It is 3:00 A.M. Eileen puts a pot of ice on the stove, dimming their light. She turns on a lamp to its lowest illumination, which is still enough to make Stephan groan. Roger digs in a food pouch for tea and dried milk. Breakfast is wonderfully warming, but suddenly he has to visit the cave's convenient yet cold latrine. Boots on—the worst part of dressing. Like sticking one's feet into ice blocks. Then out of the warm tent into the intense cold of the cave's air. Through the dark to the latrine. The other tents glow dimly—time for another dawn assault on the upper slopes.
By the time Archimedes, the first dawn mirror, appears, they have been on the slopes above the cave for nearly an hour, climbing by the light of their helmet lamps. The mirror dawn is better; there is enough light to see well, and yet the rock and ice have not yet been warmed enough to start falls. Roger climbs the ice gullies using crampons; he enjoys using them, kicking into the plastic ice with the front points of the crampons, and adhering to the slopes as if glued to them. Below him Arthur keeps singing a song in tribute to his crampons: “Spiderman, Spiderman, Spiderman, Spidermannnnn.” But once above the fixed ropes, there is no extra breath for singing; the lead climbing is extremely difficult. Roger finds himself spread-eagled on one pitch, right foot spiked into the icefall, left foot digging into a niche the size of his toenail; left hand holding the shaft of the ice axe, which is firmly planted in the icefall above, and right hand laboriously turning the handle of an ice screw, which will serve as piton in this little couloir: And for a moment he realizes he is ten meters above the nearest belay, hanging there by three tiny points. And gasping for breath.
At the top of that pitch there is a small outcropping to rest on, and when Eileen pulls herself up the fixed rope she finds Roger and Arthur laid out over the rock in the morning sunlight like fish set out to dry. She surveys them as she catches her wind, gasping herself. “Time for oxygen,” she declares. In the midday radio call she tells the next teams up to bring oxygen bottles along with the tents and other equipment for the next camp.