Maiden of the Mountain

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Soon it would be over, but in the meantime, I was treated to the strange and ponderous retelling of the story of my life.

They say that your whole life flashes in front of your eyes before you die, but when you’re freezing to death at the roof of the world, it doesn’t work that way. Your life unwinds across your memory – all the heaping pile of it – but not in some colorful flash flood of sounds and images, starry and textured by the long decades of human experience. Nothing so spectacular. The spiraling death of the mind is a contemplative thing – slow, deliberate. It stretches out like the ocean waiting to swallow the sun: calm, quiet, enormous.

During the ascent up to Everest’s Camp 4, appropriately called “the Deathzone,” our team passed two bodies entombed in the mountain’s skin. The bright pastel limbs of their jackets jutted out from the snow. Our Sherpa Bishal gestured at them, dour-faced, and hiked on as if they were raccoons bloodied on the highway. There are hundreds of bodies left behind on Everest, and there would be more before sundown.

The mountain swallowed them all at once: Owen, Jonathan, Lily and Bishal. A colossal mass of ice calved and boomed and fell, and they disappeared screaming into the whirling white.

Alone, I wept as the wind sang.

It’s odd, the things one thinks of in his final hours. Faces emerge from the long shadows of life’s long-forgotten chapters, details of such exquisite banality bubbling up from the black fathoms of one’s past. 

The rough texture of the burlap patch that my grandmother sewed onto the belly of my old teddy, Mr. Bear.

The gilt ring pattern on the rims of my wife’s favorite china set. The way she closed her eyes when she sipped at her teacup. English breakfast, lots of milk.

That wood rot smell of the old breezeway in Concord, and the menacing, bulbous white spiders that nested there.

It was in remembering the spiders that she came to me: a figure standing in the deep snow some three meters from the waning fire I’d built in the meager shelter of a shallow canyon wall. The wind grasped and snapped at her clothing – a sheer vestment, dark, hooded, ragged at the edges. A woman; the swell of her hips and breasts apparent beneath her garment. Hers were conjurer’s eyes – gorgon’s eyes – as golden and mercurial as the flames that danced between us. Her face was the color of milk, and just as plain. She might have been anyone.

“Please,” I said, for there seemed nothing else.

“Wanderer,” she began, her voice a slow, deliberate thing, “this place is beyond you.” Her words were perfectly clear, despite the screaming wind. There was a crystalline ribbon behind her voice; ethereal music, like the intonations of a glass harp.

I blinked at her and tried to reconcile myself with whatever reality was left to me. How long had I been hallucinating? How long lost in my carousel of old memories?

She approached. Her long, spindly fingers peeked from beneath the sleeves of her tatters. I saw then that she was barefoot, her milky ankles vanishing into the snow.

“Who are you?” I croaked, and decided at once that I didn’t want to know.

She took a long moment to answer, staring. The wind howled. “We are friend to none, stranger to none.”

“Please,” I grasped at her with a numbing hand.

Her head shook on her long neck. “The cold,” she said, “is a savage foe, ancient and cruel.” She bent and plucked my ice axe from the snow, turning it over in her pale hands. “A man is a clever beast, rife with wiles. But the cold does not sleep.”

Something in my mind sighed and gave way; a mooring, a ballast. The world drifted in the biting cold.

“Why are you here?” I managed, but the reason in me – the cold-blunted intellect – knew already.

She grinned, her cheeks folding into themselves like playhouse curtains. She had changed somehow, and wore a crone’s face now – gnarled, sunken and hideous, the leprous mask of a cannibal witch in a fairy tale.

When one’s blood is cold enough, his brain functions begin to crumble away, snapping and plummeting in glacial sheets.

“It is you who have come,” the crone said, pointing a long finger at me. “We have been here since before mighty Egypt carved herself into the sand.” She sat, and was young again. “Sleep now. There is time yet.”

I slept.

***

It was twilight when I woke, and she was there, watching.

Madness, I thought. I’m lost. Dying.

She studied me with those strange eyes, and seemed to read my thoughts as an ancient diviner might read the future in goat’s blood and chicken bones. I saw something then that I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps I didn’t see it because I hadn’t wanted to, but I suspect now that it’s because she knew I wasn’t ready. Towering crow’s wings folded behind her like the legs of some enormous, antideluvian spider. Barbed with quills and great, ragged feathers, black as jet and frayed with the scouring of eons. They caught snowflakes when the wind whipped up, and swayed like dead cornstalks in a winter field.

I can see them now: little shards of ice caught in those lovely feathers. She is near. Always nearer, and those gorgon’s eyes are ever more seductive; they dance with strange constellations and swirl with the warmth of a lover’s vow.

The icy jaws have relinquished my bones. All is far away. All but she.

She hovers close and the dying light plays across her features. She has changed again: no longer the stranger or the crone, but a maiden, soft and beautiful. Her sheer garment clings to her body as it whips in the wind, and the contours beneath are the apotheosis of a woman as a man might desire her. Shadows swim in the curves of her form, and she is as a statue of antiquity: Venus Genetrix, the mother. And her smile is a mother’s smile. It promises safety and mercy and comfort against all the ills of the world.

Her breath is as warm as Christmas cider, and her kiss just as sweet.