The Blue Ice

by Innes Hammond

skis, the wind cold on my face, Faint behind me came Sunde's shouted 'Good luck!'

Then I was alone and the only sound was the hiss of my skis and the quiet whisper of the wind brushing the snow like sand across the valley.

In places the ski tracks I was following were already half obliterated. In other places they ran deep and clean as though Farnell and Lovaas had only just passed. The down stretch to the valley floor was all too short. Soon I was climbing steadily. The path became steeper, winding in giant zigzags up the shoulder of a mountain. That climb seemed endless. I climbed until my limbs ached and became like liquid. The path went up and through a litter of boulders till all the mountain tops for miles were visible, their smooth ice caps glinting in the moonlight — so cold and remote, like pictures of the south pole.

But at last I reached what Sunde had called the Driftaskar. I paused at the top of the pass. The moon was high overhead now. The wind had risen and all about me the powdery top layer of snow was on the move, sifting across the rocks like the sand before a desert storm. The place was as desolate and white as the moon itself viewed through a telescope. I put on a windbreaker and then began to descend. There was no clear run, for the ground was strewn with rocks. But it was easier going. And after the sweaty heat of climbing, the cold night air chilled me to the bone.

Shortly after this I crossed a stream and began to climb again. After that I don't remember very much about the journey to Gjeiteryggen. I only know that the country I passed through was wild and desolate, that as dawn grew nearer it got unbearably cold, and that I was stiff and dead with tiredness. I kept on repeating Sunde's words over and over again as I trudged on through the snow — 'You goner move fast. They bin gaining on us all evening.'

Often I thought I'd lost the way. The ski tracks vanished, obliterated by the snow. Then in panic I'd have recourse to map and compass. But always, sooner or later, in some spot sheltered from the wind I came upon them again. The moon sank towards the west and soon its light began to fade as a cold, grey luminosity spread over the mountains. Dawn came creeping like death across a snow-clad world. And I barely noticed it. I was beyond caring. With head bent I somehow kept going. But it was will-power, not the strength of my limbs that drove me. And all the time I kept on thinking — the others can't be going on like this, without pause, unendingly. But always the tracks of their skis ran ahead of me to prove that they had.

The moon sank at last behind the mountains. The snow on the mountain tops no longer glinted like sugar icing at Christmas time. It was grey and cold and the first light of day stripped the place of all beauty, leaving it bleak and empty. I was conscious then of the utter loneliness of these mountains. In summer a constant stream of walkers would tread this path. But now, with the mountains still in the last grip of the winter snow, there was nobody. I remembered Sunde's wizened, friendly face and wished he were with me. Only the half-obliterated ski tracks that showed where the route was sheltered from the biting wind linked me with any other human.

I was descending now to a long, frozen lake. In the valley below me the water was not frozen. It ran swift and black, like a jagged crack in the white carpet of the snow. At the bottom I stopped behind a tall rock and rested. I set my pack down on the snow and had an early breakfast of more flatbrod and brown cheese. I felt dazed and numb. Nothing was real. And when I went on, my movements were automatic as though I were skiing in my sleep.

Thin clouds streaked the paling sky and as I worked my way along the lake they became suffused with a pink glow. The glow grew until the whole sky flamed a violent red. It was a beautiful, terrifying sunrise. The sun came up, a red angry disk, bloodying the showy summits and casting an orange glow over everything. The sky reddened till it blazed with crimson. Then slowly it faded until all that was left was a cold, watery sunlight that had no warmth nor any promise of warmth. The last tinge of pink clung to high-piled cumulus lying to windward along the ·Norwegian coast.

At last I stood on the shoulder of a hill, leaning wearily on my sticks and looked down on Gjeiteryggen. The hut was without beauty. It was painted a dirty red and it stood there like a barracks in one of the most hideous stretches of country that I have ever seen. A broken series of lakes, frozen and piled with snow, lay about it in a semi-circle. Between the lakes were the black marks of moving, unfrozen water. The hills in which the lakes huddled were smooth. The boulders that littered the place were smooth. Only here and there a rock showed a jagged edge, as though smashed by a giant sledge hammer. The place was marked and scored and hammered out by ice. It was an awful, unhappy place.