The Man The Mountain Buried

Chapter Eight: The Air Pocket

Then there was darkness, and a silence so complete it felt solid.

The roar had stopped all at once, the way an avalanche always stops, as if the mountain had simply finished speaking. Luca lay on the floor of the cave with Sigrid pinned under his arm, snow in his collar and grit between his teeth. Somewhere in the black, ice creaked and settled. Then nothing moved at all.

"I can hear my heart," Sigrid whispered. Her voice was very small. "Luca, I can hear my own pulse."

"That's good," he said. "It means you're alive. Don't move yet."

He found his headlamp by touch and switched it on. Her lamp had been torn away in the blast, so his was the only light they had. The beam showed him a cave half the size it had been. The mouth of the Seam was gone, packed solid with a wall of fresh snow from floor to roof. Tons of it lay between them and the sky.

He looked at it for a long moment, and something in his chest went quiet and clear. This was the only place on earth where he had ever felt certain. Up there, among people, he had to guess and lie and wait. Down here, buried under the snow, there were only rules, and he knew every one of them.

"Listen to me," he said. "We have air. Not much, but some. The faster you breathe, the faster it goes. So we're going to breathe slowly. In for four, hold, out for six. Do it with me."

She did it with him. Her breath shook on the first few, then steadied.

He switched the lamp off. "We use the light only when we work. Batteries are air too, in a way. They're time."

He took the ice axe from his harness and went to the plug of snow that sealed the cave. Fresh avalanche debris still held air between its grains for a while, before the cold pressed it hard as concrete. He hacked a channel up into it at an angle, working blind except for short bursts of light, opening a long throat of loose snow to the cave. When he finally stopped and breathed, the air tasted a little less stale.

The cold was the next enemy. It settled into a still body like water into a hole, so he kept her moving. He made her flex her fingers and toes in the dark, stamp her feet and swing her arms, then sit with her back against his chest and their hands tucked into each other's armpits. Every twenty minutes he made her do it all again.

It was near the end of the first hour that she broke. It started as a hitch in her breathing, and then she was gasping, clawing at the dark, saying she couldn't get air. Luca caught her wrists and held them firmly.

"Sigrid. Look at the light." He switched the lamp on and held it between them. "Look at me. You're not suffocating. That's panic, and it lies. Breathe with me. In for four."

He had done this before. Years ago, on a glacier in Pakistan, he had kept three climbers alive for thirty hours under a collapsed wall of ice, talking them through every minute. He had learned then that a calm voice could keep a heart beating as surely as warm blankets. He talked to her now in that same voice, slow and low, until her breathing matched his own again.

When it was over, she sat against him in the dark for a long time. Then she spoke quietly.

"You tied that hitch," she said. "At the Seam, the first night. I've seen it once in my life, in a training film made by a team that died five years ago. You're him."

Luca said nothing for a long time. The ice ticked around them.

Then he told her. He told her about the north face and the day his team vanished under the snow. He told her about five years of hiding, of coming back to Veilhorn with a different name and grease on his hands, waiting for one mistake. Last of all, he told her the name his team had always used for him over the radio, the name the whole world had buried.

"Whiteout," he said.

Sigrid let out a long breath. She didn't say anything, but in the dark her hand found his and held on.

Not long after that, he heard the water.

It was faint, a trickle somewhere below the floor of the cave, almost too soft to catch. Luca put his ear to the ice and listened, then smiled for the first time in days. Glaciers had to drain somewhere. Every summer, meltwater cut channels under the ice and ran down to the valley, and some of those channels stayed open all winter.

He found it at the back of the cave, a narrow hole where the floor dipped and the water ran. It was barely wider than his shoulders. He checked that the pouch with the memory card was still zipped inside Sigrid's jacket, and then he went in first.

For six hours they crawled. They went on their stomachs and then on their sides, pushing through passages so tight that Luca had to breathe out to fit, chipping at the ice with the axe where it pinched shut. The water soaked their knees and froze on their sleeves. Sometimes the channel dropped and they slid down on their backs in the dark. Sometimes it rose and they had to dig. He kept talking the whole time, and Sigrid kept answering.

Then, far ahead, the darkness turned faintly blue.

The glow grew as they crawled toward it, from blue to pale gold to white, until Luca punched his axe through a thin crust of ice and daylight poured in on them. They dragged themselves out at the foot of the glacier and lay in the snow, blinking up at a sky so bright it hurt.

Music drifted up from below. Luca rolled over and looked down the slope.

The finish area of the Veilhorn Cup spread out beneath them, packed with spectators in bright jackets, flags snapping along the barriers and television cameras on cranes above the crowd. A giant screen stood over the finish line. On it, Gunnar Ostergaard stood at a podium with his head bowed, his voice rolling out across the valley through the loudspeakers.

"It is with the heaviest heart," he said, "that I must tell you of a tragic avalanche overnight. My daughter Sigrid and a member of our staff are missing, presumed lost."

Below them, the crowd fell silent.

Sigrid rose to her feet slowly, wet and battered, with the evidence zipped against her chest. Sh

e took Luca's arm, and together they started walking down.