beneath; areas all slit and pocked with little holes and crevasses; and, more often, there were big crevasses, old canyons in the Ice, some wide as mountain gorges and others only two or three feet across, but deep. On Odyrny Nimmer (by Estraven’s journal, for I kept none) the sun shone clear with a strong north wind. As we ran the sledge across the snow-bridges over narrow crevasses we could look down to left or right into blue shafts and abysses in which bits of ice dislodged by the runners fell with a vast, faint, delicate music, as if silver wires touched thin crystal planes, falling. I remember the racy, dreamy, light-headed pleasure of that morning’s haul in the sunlight over the abysses. But the sky began to whiten, the air to grow thick; shadows faded, blue drained out of the sky and snow. We were not alert to the danger of white weather on such a surface. As the ice was heavily corrugated, I was pushing while Estraven pulled; I had my eyes on the sledge and was shoving away, mind on nothing but how best to shove, when all at once the bar was nearly wrenched out of my grip as the sledge shot forward in a sudden lunge. I held on by instinct and shouted ‘Hey!’ to Estraven to slow him down, thinking he had speeded up on a smooth patch. But the sledge stopped dead, tilted nose-down, and Estraven was not there.
I almost let go the sledge-bar to go look for him. It was pure luck that I did not. I held on, while I stared stupidly about for him, and so I saw the lip of the crevasse, made visible by the shifting and drooping of another section of the broken snow-bridge. He had gone right down feet-first, and nothing kept the sledge from following him but my weight, which held the rear third of the runners still on solid ice. It kept tipping a little further nose-downward, pulled by his weight as he hung in harness in the pit.
I brought my weight down on the rear-bar and pulled and rocked and levered the sledge back away from the edge of the crevasse. It did not come easy. But I threw my weight hard on the bar and tugged until it began grudgingly to move, and then slid abruptly right away from the crevasse. Estraven had got his hand on to the edge, and his weight now aided me. Scrambling, dragged by the harness, he came up over the edge and collapsed face down on the ice.
I knelt by him trying to unbuckle his harness, alarmed by the way he sprawled there, passive except for the great gasping rise and fall of his chest. His lips were cyanotic, one side of his face was bruised and scraped.
He sat up steadily and said in a whistling whisper, ‘Blue – all blue – Towers in the depths—’
‘What?’
‘In the crevasse. All blue – full of light.’
‘Are you all right?’
He started rebuckling his harness.
‘You go ahead – on the rope – with the stick,’ he gasped. ‘Pick the route.’
For hours one of us hauled while the other guided, mincing along like a cat on eggshells, sounding every step in advance with the stick. In the white weather one could not see a crevasse until one could look down into it – a little late, for the edges overhung, and were not always solid. Every footfall was a surprise, a drop or a jolt. No shadows. An even, white, soundless sphere: we moved along inside a huge frosted-glass ball. There was nothing inside the ball, and nothing was outside it. But there were cracks in the glass. Probe and step, probe and step. Probe for the invisible cracks through which one might fall out of the white glass ball, and fall, and fall, and fall … An unrelaxable tension little by little took hold of all my muscles. It became exceedingly difficult to take even one more step.
‘What’s up, Genry?’
I stood there in the middle of nothing. Tears came out and froze my eyelids together. I said, ‘I’m afraid of falling.’
‘But you’re on the rope,’ he said. Then, coming up and seeing that there was no crevasse anywhere visible, he saw what was up and said, ‘Pitch camp.’
‘It’s not time yet, we ought to go on.’
He was already unlashing the tent.
Later on, after we had eaten, he said, ‘It was time to stop. I don’t think we can go this