The mountain commands my attention out this open window. I see WH Murray up there, clinging to a buttress, balanced, rope dropping downwards from his waist; or crossing a glacier, intent on scaling the rock face no one has yet climbed.
The blackbirds have ended their evensong; now the night’s breeze is left to the rush of the river tumbling over stones rounded from eons of burnishing, the screeching and twittering of the late birds, and the ubiquitous barking dogs. And over it all, the silence of the mountain.
Glasses on; glasses off. Write. Gaze. Listen.
The mountain glows in the dimming light. A snow-blanketed glacier plunges down, pelting headlong towards the valley in frozen semi-stasis. A ridge sharpens into focus, slicing diagonally down from a lesser peak, cutting off the glacier’s exit. Buttresses crag greyly, shoring up the long southwestern flank. In the centre, a jumble of rocks slice skywards, forming a square-cut-diamond shaped mountainette. Around it the glacier flies, as a Maserati around a curve at Le Mans. As the twilight deepens, the mountain’s snows glow brighter, casting into relief the rocky crags and buttresses thrusting their plumbeous masses into the night sky.
