Part 23 (1/2)

”We can't go on!”

”But we must! We have no choice!”

”We'll be killed!”

”No, no-we'll stay on the ridge, I know the way!”

”It's too exposed!”

This was the very reason that they must take the ridge. The slopes to either side would be swept by avalanches, and even if they escaped these, they would be likely to wander onto a glacier. The ridge, on the other hand, would be blown clear of snow, providing a rocky road down to safety. It would be windy, but no wind could blow a man from a rock; if gusts threatened to do so, one could always lie flat till they were over.

Irritably he tried to explain this, but Bixby would have none of it. He just shook his head and shouted again, ”We can't go down!” He looked the same as always, face calm, his shouts in a reasonable tone of voice; but there was a stubbornness in him, and when Muir shouted, ”I memorized the way down the ridge,” he stared at Muir as if confronted with a madman. And the thunder crashed, and the hurtling air roared across the ridge, catching on a million jagged lava teeth and shrieking, keening, howling, drowning out mere human voices.

”We must go down!” Muir shouted again. ”We have no choice!”

”We can't go down! It's impossible! We'll be killed!”

”It's stopping will kill us!” Muir replied, getting angry. Stupid man, did he think this block's feeble shelter would be enough to protect them? ”We have no choice!” he repeated.

Bixby shook his head. For an instant he looked like Muir's father, insisting on a point of Bible doctrine. ”I won't go on!”

”We must go on!”

”I won't go on!”

And that was that. There is a stubbornness in fear that will balk at even the most perfect logic. Muir tugged furiously at his beard. ”What do you propose to do!” he shouted.

Bixby wiped the snow from his face and looked around, blinking cowlike. ”The fumaroles are warm,” he said.

”The fumaroles are boiling!” boiling!” Muir shouted. Anger spiked through him, he wanted to grab the man by the coat and shake his courage back into him. ”Superheated poison gas!” Muir shouted. Anger spiked through him, he wanted to grab the man by the coat and shake his courage back into him. ”Superheated poison gas!”

But Bixby was trudging back toward the fumaroles, hunched into the wind, staggering as gusts shoved him from side to side. ”Fool!” Muir cried, and cursed him roundly.

He stayed by the block, searching the clouds for a break that he could use as argument to convince Bixby to continue. But none came; the storm raged on; and suddenly he realized that his anger at Bixby was a transitive expression of his own fear. He could not leave his companion behind; and so now they were both in very great danger.

The fumaroles near the peak were among the last small vestiges of Shasta's volcanic glory. Superheated gases rose through cracks in the long throat, and emerged in a small depression on the western side of the summit, where they heated a mixture of snowmelt, volcanic ash, and sand, creating a patch of boiling black mud.

Muir approached it. In the storm's cold air the patch steamed heavily, making it look like the clouds were pouring out of the mountain as well as rus.h.i.+ng over it: an eerie sight. Bixby was already crouched at the mud's edge. Muir stomped to his side.

Bixby looked up. ”This will keep us safe from frost!”

”Oh yes, safe from frost!” Muir said sarcastically. ”But how will we keep from scalding ourselves? And how will we protect our lungs from the acid gases? And how will we get off the mountain once we soak our clothes? Storm or clear, we'll freeze on our way down! We'll have to stay until morning, and who knows what kind of day it will be!”

Bixby s.h.i.+vered miserably.

Muir held his breath, let out a long sigh. There was nothing for it. They were there. He crouched and looked over the roiling snow-rimmed pit. Wind whipped any warmth coming off the mud directly away; their zone of safety was about a quarter of an acre in extent, but only an eighth of an inch thick. Scylla and Charybdis, embracing.

Muir sighed again and tromped into the mud, sinking immediately to his knees and feeling the heat burn his legs. Jetting bubbles of gas made the mud look like molten lava. But on the windward side of the pool they would probably be safe from the gas. As long as the wind held steady. And it seemed it would; it roared out of the west, cutting through clothing; they couldn't stand in it long. Growling, Muir finished sitting in the shallows of the pool. Hot water seeped out of the mud into his pants, then his s.h.i.+rt and coat. He lay back, his head against the windward s...o...b..nk, his body outstretched in the mud. Spindrift ran across his face. His nose, which had no feeling to it, still conveyed to him the stench of sulphur. The warmth of the mud burned his skin, but he had to admit it was a relief from the fierce wind. A laugh burst from him like gas from the mud; then a jet of rising bubbles scalded his back and he yelped, rolled hastily to the side. He elbowed a snow and mud poultice over the hot spot, dizzy with the carbonic stink. Now he was covered with mud, his coat and trousers completely soaked. Bixby was the same. Standing up would have turned them into ice statues of themselves. They were committed.

It was necessary to s.h.i.+ft position frequently, to immerse an exposed limb, or expose a boiled one. The pa.s.sage of time was marked by pain. The storm continued unabated, and the two men lay isolated by the shrieking wind, so that each might have been there alone except that occasionally Muir would raise his head and cry out, and Bixby would shout something back, and both would subside into solitude again. Snow fell so thickly that they breathed it. It settled on the exposed parts of them, and packed to a rime so hard that they crackled when they s.h.i.+fted.

The sun had apparently set, and it was dark. Muir could see nothing but blackness. At times the mud seemed blacker than the sky; then the sky would seem blacker than the mud. As black as the world had been during his episode of blindness, so many years before. He saw the file leaping into his eye, the aqueous humor draining into his hand, the swift darkening in his sight on the wounded side, and then, that night as he lay trembling in a strange bed, the relentless darkening on the other. Until he was left in total darkness. That fear had been the worst of his life; this was nothing to it, a natural darkness, a storm in its fury to be watched and loved. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, and see. see. He had been blind for three weeks, three full weeks of doctor's a.s.surances and secret terror; and when his sight had returned he had walked out of his life and never returned, never looked back, tossing away the destiny that his father and country had thought proper for him, farming, inventing machinery, all that; he abandoned all that and gave himself to the wilderness. So that, properly speaking, it was in fact a blessing to be here boiling in a volcano's caldera with a blizzard thick about his ears. Part of nature's bounty- He had been blind for three weeks, three full weeks of doctor's a.s.surances and secret terror; and when his sight had returned he had walked out of his life and never returned, never looked back, tossing away the destiny that his father and country had thought proper for him, farming, inventing machinery, all that; he abandoned all that and gave himself to the wilderness. So that, properly speaking, it was in fact a blessing to be here boiling in a volcano's caldera with a blizzard thick about his ears. Part of nature's bounty- Groans from Bixby broke his thought. He saw the lump of the man, rolling to escape a fumarole, struggling to keep from sinking. In some places the mud was viscid clay, in others black tea, whistling in its pot. Lumps of something, perhaps soaked pumice, floated under the surface, and he tried arranging a bed of the lumps under him to protect him from rising gas jets, but they kept slipping away. The wind still howled, but the clouds were thinning; the snow blowing across their bodies must have been spindrift, for he saw a star. If you can see one star, press on! as the saying had it. But not tonight.

Soon the clouds scudded off east, and starlight bathed the scene. The familiar patterns sparked the night sky, drawing around him all the other nights he had lain out in the world. The eye is a flower that sees the stars. If they had continued their descent, they would now be down on the snow slopes, where starlight would have made darkness visible, and guided them home. Instead, soaked as they were, and with a mile of wind-ripped ridge to negotiate, they were going to have to spend the night. But he said nothing. It was done. And his fault really, for staying on the peak so long. Besides, the sight of the stars brought it to him that whatever the discomfort, they were likely to survive; so it did not signify. He had spent many a cold night on a mountain. It could even be said that the boiling mud made this night less miserable than some, though-the skin of his back suddenly flaring-none other had been so purely painful. Still, he was used to pain, accustomed to it. He had grown up with it, working a hardscrabble farm for his father, a mean, small-minded man, a lesson in how not to be a Christian, all those days spent studying the Bible while his boys worked to get his bread, and then beating them with switch, belt- His leg was on fire. He pulled his knee up into the icy wind, and for an instant smelled the gas. Once his father had set him to digging wells, and seventy feet down seeping gas had overwhelmed him, he had swooned and had only just come to, only just dragged himself far enough up the rope ladder to breathe good air, and live. He lifted his head and shouted at Bixby. ”Still there, Jerome?”

A croak. Something about the cold. Still there. Muir settled back into the mud. Forget that whole world, that whole life, the way it could make his stomach knot. Look at the stars. The eye is a flower that sees the stars, immersed in primal cold and heat. His left foot squelched in its boot, propped on the s...o...b..nk. Wiggle the toes against wet leather, make sure they were still there. No. They were cold past feeling, only a certain vague numbness; while his right foot burned, scalded so that he nearly shouted, and certainly groaned. Leg yanked up; the wind wrapped the wet trouser to his leg and froze his thigh, while the foot still throbbed with the pain of the burn.

”Are you suffering much?” Bixby called.

”Yes!” Fool, what did he think? ”Frozen and burned! But never mind, it won't kill us!” As long as they weren't overcome by gas. A jet of bubbles pushed at his backbone, he rolled and shoved mud over the scalding spot, hitting at it furiously with a fist gone numb with frostbite.

Each hour was a year. The stars were in the same places they had been when they first became visible; so not many years could have pa.s.sed. Concentrating on the stars near the horizon, he tried to see them creep west. That one, nearly occluded by a low wall of lava: focus on it, watch it, watch it, watch it... had it moved? No. Time had stopped. They had continued the descent, perhaps, and died in the attempt, and now they lay in some well-bottom h.e.l.l of his father's stripe, or in a circle of Dante's inferno, in which heat and cold mingled without moderating the other, creating a pain unfamiliar to those in the simpler circles. He could hear their moans- Ah, that star was occluded. Half an hour had jumped past all at once. As if time were a matter of instantaneous jumps, from one eternal moment to the next-which in fact it often seemed to him to be, as during those sunny warm afternoons when he would lie in a Sierra meadow by a chuckling stream and watch the clouds, dreaming of nothing, until with a jerk he would return to the meadow and the shadows would be stretching twice as long as before, over perfectly sculpted patches of meadow gra.s.s, the larks singing ”we-ero, spe-ero, we-eo, we-erlo, we-it.”

Drifting in and out. A call to Bixby got a feeble response. Still alive if nothing else. A bubble burst, splashed hot mud over his face, and he spluttered and wiped his nose clear. He couldn't feel his left arm, or make it move; he wasn't sure when that had happened. That was his windward side, so presumably it was benumbed in the onslaught of air. He tried to dip the arm further under the mud, to bury it. Not a process one would want to carry too far, descending limb by limb into black muck. Now the arm seemed to be burning; was that a fumarole bubbling up? No. In fact he had accidentally plunged the arm into the s...o...b..nk; his right hand confirmed it. But how the skin burned!

Then a gas bubble lifted his knee, and the back of his leg felt like glacier melt had been poured over it; it ached with cold, the knee joint creaked with it! He groaned. Cold now scalded and heat froze, and he didn't know which was which!

Perhaps it didn't matter. Caught between cold reason and hot pa.s.sion, ignorant flesh always paid the price. One could never tell which was which. Outrageous pain! Better to leave all that behind.

A solution occurred to him. He stood up. He looked back down and saw his body lying there, stretched out in the mud, mostly submerged. A sponge, soaked in immortality. A ma.s.s of eternal atoms, bound together in just that particular way, to witness the beauty of the universe.

Yes: he stood there gazing down at his boiled and frozen body. Somewhat bemused, he tried a few steps; circled the mud patch; then took off across the windswept snow, toward an exposed rock outcropping. There was a building there, a small square cabin, white in the starlight. As he approached he saw that its walls were made of pure white quartz. Its door and windows were edged with quartz crystals. The door and the roof were made of slate, all dotted with lichen. The windows were thin smooth sheets of water.

He opened the door and walked in. The table was a slab of glacier-polished granite. The benches around it were fallen logs. The bed was made of spruce boughs. The carpet was green moss.

It was his home. He sat on one of the logs, and put his hand on the table. His hand sank into the granite. His body sank into the log, and then into the moss, and then into the quartz.

He felt himself dissolving out into the great ma.s.s of the mountain, tumbling slowly down through the rock. He had melted into Shasta. The mountain mumbled in his ear ”I am.” With a puff of its cheeks it blew him aloft, threw his atoms out into the sky. They tumbled off on the wind and dispersed to every point of the compa.s.s, then fell and steeped into the fabric of the land, one atom in every rock, in every grain of sand and soil, like gas in mud, or water in sponge, until his body and California were contiguous, united, one. Only his vision remained separate, his precious sight, the landscape's consciousness soaring like a hawk over the long sand beaches, the great valley, the primeval sequoias, the range of light-but the mountains were different-blinding glaciers covered all but the highest peaks, fingered down through the hills, and cut Yosemite's walls. Then they retreated, dried up and ran away.

He tumbled, soared west. It was night, now, and below lay the bay like a sparkling black map, the black water crisscrossed with bridges of light, the surrounding hills dotted with millions of white points like stars, defining towers, roadways, docks, arenas, monuments; a bay-circling city, impossibly beautiful. But so many people! It had to be thousands of years in the future, as glaciers were thousands of years in the past. He was soaring through time, out of the knife-edge present, back to glaciers and forward to supercities, perhaps ten thousand years each way. An eyeblink in the life of stones, and the Sierra would stand throughout; but chewed at by the future city as much as by the ancient glaciers, perhaps. Sheep cropped meadows to dust in a single summer; and the shepherds were worse. And if so many came to live by the bay....

Curious, fearful, he tilted in his flight, soared east over the great valley, through the gold-choked foothills, up among the peaks. He rose in a gyre and stared down at starlit granite. There a valley had been drowned, a shocking sight. Wheel, turn, soar, take heart: for all was dark. Not a light to be seen, the whole length of the range. The backbone of California, gleaming in moonlight.

This much beauty would always be in danger, there was no avoiding that. Its animals must defend it. All its animals. He soared over the highest peaks, and then looked back; a full moon bathed the great eastern escarpment with white light. Death Valley burned, Whitney froze- His ankle was in a fumarole, his head in the muddy s...o...b..nk. He s.h.i.+fted, saw that the wheel of stars had turned nearly a quarter turn. He took several long deep breaths. His vision cleared with the cold air, he returned to the moment and his bed in the mud. He could feel his lungs and his mind; beyond that, he and the mountain still seemed one undifferentiated ma.s.s, which he felt only in a distant, seismic way. But now he knew where he was. For a while he had soared on a great wind through time, but now he was just John again, flat on his back, and numb with cold.

Still, he remembered the vision perfectly. That was quite a voyage great Shasta had sent him on! Perhaps visions like that were why the Indians wors.h.i.+pped it.

As for what he had seen... well, the habitable zone was never thick. Caught between the past and future, we squirm in a dangerous eighth of an inch. Perhaps it was like that always. The atmosphere, for instance, was frighteningly thin; hike for a day and you could ascend the larger part of it, as when climbing Shasta itself. The landscape was tightly wrapped in a thin skin of gas. And the earth itself rolled in a thin temperate sphere around the sun, a zone of heat that neither boiled the seas nor allowed them to freeze solid; that sh.e.l.l might only be a few feet thick, or an eighth of an inch, who knew? It was a miracle the earth rolled within that sphere! Delicate, precious dewdrop of a world, hung in the light with the nicest precision, like every dewdrop in every morning's spider-web....

The wheel of stars had turned again. Bixby was s.h.i.+fting, muttering as in a dream. The sky in the east was the black nearest blue. And then the blue nearest black. Light seeped into the world as if vision were a new faculty, a sense born instant by instant, to creatures formerly blind. The stars began to slip away; he watched a dim one grow fainter and then wink out of visibility, a strange moment. The eyes are flowers that see the stars.

Bixby croaked something about leaving. But they were on the western side of the peak, and it would be hours before the sun appeared. Meanwhile it was cold beyond movement. When they s.h.i.+fted, their coats crackled as if made of thin gla.s.s.

The sky, though cloudless, was a dull and frosty blue. He could see nothing of the earth but their mud patch, and the snow and lava bordering it. He still felt part of the mountain, with no discernable break between his skin and the mud. As the morning light blossomed it seemed to fill him, pouring through his eyes and down into the rock; he felt himself a conduit in a vast interconnected totality, an organism pulsing with its own universal breath. The heat at his core caught and burned, so that he was warm enough to melt his coat's sheath of ice; that was heat displaced from the volcano, which was heat displaced from the sun; which was heat displaced from the heart of the Milky Way; which was heat displaced from the heart of the universe, from that original heart's diastolic expansion. No dualism was significant in the face of this essential unity: he was an atom of G.o.d's great body, and he knew it. The landscape and his mind were two expressions of the same miracle.

On the lonely peak of a nearly extinct volcano, two black specks of consciousness observed the morning light.