"Jeff Long - Angels of Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Long Jeff)

perhaps a cave or a stand of timber on the summit, the scent of moss crossed his
tongue, too. And beneath all the Valley's smells he smelled the storm.
It was going to snow. But not before it rained. And so he kept twisting and fusing his
hands and feet into the indifferent stone, wrestling against the tyranny that hung on
him like a monkey in heat. Nasty as it was, the threat of getting wasted by a Pacific
cold front didn't astonish him. In the pantheistic order of things, it made perfect,
dust-to-dust sense. If he could have spared the motion, he would have shrugged.
Maybe they'd make it, maybe not. Since departing the earth five short days and long
nights ago, the climb had been freighted with miscalculation and fuckups: too little
food, too much water, some important pieces of equipment dropped from numb
fingers, a half day spent following the wrong crack. Any big-wall climb magnifies
such venial errors. A big-wall climb in winter can make them downright carnivorous,
and here it was Christmas Eve. The Duracell batteries in their blaster had given up
the ghost, robbing them of Talking Heads and the Himalayan climbers' standard
Pink Floyd, and John's sole wish was for an end to this combat with gravity, one way
or the other. He was, as they say, running on the little red E. When you pull off a
close one, climbers call it an epic, as in radical. When you don't, you're stuff, so much
meat for the chop shop of mountain lore. Sometimes you can swing in the wind for a
full season before they get you down, meaning the superlong telephoto lenses come
out of storage for ghoulish trophy shots.
John could feel the continent drifting all around him, and he wondered again about
hypothermia. His mane of thick black Apache hair weighed fifty pounds tonight, so it
seemed every time he bent his head back scanning for sign of the summit. Summits
are elusive things. Ever protean, they shift around, encouraging false hope, defying
prediction. Sometimes they leak farther away even as you watch. Other times they
suddenly drop away under the tips of your toes. You can fight a mountain almost to
your coffin, lose fingers to frostbite, your mind to despair, and finally reach the
summit only to find not a damn thing there, just a slag heap without a chin. Or top
out with great ├йlan, only to discover the true summit stands across and then up a ten-
hour knife ridge. The temptations in mountaineering to cheatтАФto quit and lieтАФare
abundant; as always in matters of faith, it's between you and yourself. Tonight there
was no such temptation. Since sharing a palmful of M&M peanuts for supper while

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Jeff Long - Angels of Light


the sun went down and the wind picked up, John and his partner, Tucker, had been
stalled on this final stretch of unyielding rock. They'd taken turns failing on it, and
now they were out of time for failure. First would come sleet perhaps a few degrees
above freezing, then the temperature would show some real downtown hostility.
Soaked, they would lose core heat, turn foolish, get sleepy. By morning they'd look
like two dragonflies shellacked with superglue. John had begun to hate the summit,
which did precisely as much to bridge the gap as loving it would have. The galling
thing was that it hung almost within reach. Just a half pitch aboveтАФforty, maybe fifty
feet more as the rope stretchesтАФthe summit was radiant in a spill of moonlight. All
that divided John's darkness from safe, flat haven was that silvery line. And all he
had to do was touch it. Then he heard the noise. And again, elbows askew, hips dry-
humping in close to the rock, he cowered from the monster.
It sounded like bones loosening as a huge, immaculate sheet of ice peeled loose from