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

the rock and cocked the flesh against whatever flakes and crystals might catch it. The
hand stuck with satisfactory firmness, and he pulled up against it, releasing with his
lower fist so he could jam that, too. The smoothness of the move pleased him. If only
the rest of the crack would go this well. He was taking things one inch at a time, and
his frown ebbed. Except for the hunger and cold and impending storm, and those
two fingernails he'd torn clean away yesterday morning opening a fisherman's knot,
and the sapping ache in both knee joints, this was where he loved it most, on the far
jagged edge of the world. True, you took more pain up here what with the sun and
the wind and the god-awful sheerness picking you bare, but then again where else
was everything so obvious? It wasn't so much easier to seeтАФespecially for John with
his talent for finding the labyrinth in each and every event, even this straightforward,
squared-off crack in the rockтАФas it was just plain easier to do. Up here it was like a
Clint Eastwood movie, where the metaphors are always blunt. Physical. Where what
you touchтАФand nothing butтАФthat's what you get.
Over his shoulder, the distant storm was boiling to a soft crescendo. You could see
lightning glittering like hungry eels in the snow clouds, but not a sound escaped the
roiling violence. Since three o'clock that afternoon, he and Tucker had been
monitoring the slow, black tidal wave of clouds that now engulfed half the sky. What
had begun as a bud on the west of what an ice climber named Bullseye liked to call
Our Video was now bending to flood the moon, his only source of light. In Islam, the
new year cannot begin if the moon is covered. So it was for this orphan of the Jesuits.
Forty feet more to 1987.

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Jeff Long - Angels of Light


Two ropes were knotted at John's waist. One bellied out into open space, arcing
down and then back into the wall where the far end was tied to Tucker. The second
rope fed through a series of rusting pitons and nuts fixed into the wall. It was this
second rope that was supposed to catch John if he fell.
He pinched a slight granite flake and shifted his weight from the toe of one foot to
the other. It was a wintry motion, slow and brittle. The moon, carved white, hung
beside his feet. Forty feet more, he coaxed himself. Forty feet into midnight and he'd
be up. There he would anchor the ropes and haul their gear up one line while Tucker
ascended the other. Forty feet to reentry, to the horizontal planet where trees grew
upright and he could stand without clinging, where he could forget the aggravations,
the paranoia, the stink of old human shit waiting on the ledges, the community
dandruff in his lukewarm Cup-a-Soup.
He'd been here before, muscling against the elements, hugging close to big walls
while exhaustion or fear or storms or the mountain itself conspired to dislodge him.
He'd always survived, sometimes just barely, but never stupidly. Sports Illustrated or
People or the Chronicle, one of those, had made much of this obstinacy after his
haunting fiasco in the Andes on the South Face of Aconcagua, attributing his
"barbarian survivability" to his aborigine past. "Grandson of a Chiricahua Indian
shaman, half Indian and magician himself, Coloradas can stick a finger or toe to
almost any surfaceтАФgranite, brick, or the sandstone of his native desert spiresтАФand
it will stick like a spot weld. One of the nation's premier rock climbers, a natural-
born mountaineer...." A grim, cold cuate, shivered John. Beat, froze, and forty feet
short. He eased upward, locking his taped knuckles harder inside the ungiving