"Richard Paul Russo - The Second Descent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

would be better. He looked up toward the summit, but it was once again
hidden by clouds and drifting frozen fogs.

тАЬMaybe we could find a way through,тАЭ he suggested, although he
recognized the absurdity of the words as soon as he spoke them.

Neither of the others replied. The three climbers stood together in the
sun studying the glacier, the wide cracks and dark lines of shadow. Almost
certainly a maze with no exit. Below the glacier the mountainside presented
several potential routes, if they could reach them, then the mountain
disappeared in low cloud and haze. Rafael had no idea anymore how far it
was to the base camp, or even how much hiking awaited beyond it.

тАЬWest,тАЭ Iliana finally decided.

Putting the shrouded summit to one side, and the glacier and
shrouded lower slopes to the other, they set off toward the west.

****

For the first time in months, Rafael thinks of his father. His father died
when he was only fifty-one and Rafael twenty-three. A long and painful
death from kidney and liver failure, ravaged lungs, swollen joints, and the
cumulative effect of half a dozen other secondary physiological and
metabolic malfunctions.

His father had been a veteran of the Vietnam War, serving two tours
in the steaming jungles of Southeast Asia. He never talked about those
experiences of his own volition, not even when Rafael, as a teenager,
asked him several times to tell him what those years had been like. Rafael
stopped asking, deciding it wasnтАЩt fair to his father. Even when his father lay
dying in the V.A. hospital and the doctors admitted that most of his ailments
were service-relatedтАФfrequent contact with Agent Orange being the
primary factorтАФhe would not talk about that war.

RafaelтАЩs relationship with his mother is and always has been cool and
distant, which seems to be what she wants, or needs. He was, however,
close to his father, though they really didnтАЩt talk much; when they did, it was
mostly about sportsтАФfootball, baseball, college basketball. Rafael has rich
and vivid memories of long hot summer afternoons, sitting in the backyard
with his father on dirty white plastic deck chairs, drinking cold domestic beer
and listening to baseball games on the radio.

He still misses his father.

****

They hiked and climbed and crawled and pulled and dragged each
other along for nearly three days until they reached a long gently sloping
rock cleft that cut through the glacier, effectively bypassing the crevasses.