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or more ahead, a tiny reed receding on the long, steep plain whiskered with
tufts of green spring grass. Not far from here, down on the Nevada piedmont,
Paiutes used to quarry obsidian for arrowheads, and magnesium was being mined
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in huge sci-fi concrete tombs lit with eerie green vapor lights. In the far
distance a handful of Sierra peaks bragged along the horizon. There was Mount
Florence and the back of Unicorn Peak. But where was
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light he really? What was he really doing here? He felt
like he was soaring high above the earth and yet at the same time trapped in
the cold mud. Christ, he cursed. I'm just an ape flapping my wings. He'd come
such a long, long way to find the source of the
Nile, to reach the South Pole, to track Friday's footprint on the beach. And
this was where he'd gotten. A country ravaged by the hand of God. We're
running and we're scared, he thought, watching Kresinski. But what were they
fleeing? A creature, to be sure, but a creature that was invisible, monstrous,
and irrational. The smuggler had become their dragon. Slaying it would never
restore the Valley's innocence, though.
Nothing would. Nothing could. They themselves had violated the pact.
Descending from the dome, he slipped on his pack straps and continued along
the trail. Several times he fixed on a certain rock or tree in the distance
and swore that would be his end point. He would go that far, no farther, then
turn around and find
Liz and leave the Valley forever. But each time he reached his landmark, he
went farther. It was a habit. Climbers always need to see where the crack will
lead.
Another few feet, another pitch. Pretty soon you're standing on the summit. In
a way he was just climbing another mountain by following this trail. In his
mind, anyway, it felt the same: You reach, you grab.
Moving steadily along a high, narrowing ridge, he followed a rocky tongue to
where it abruptly ended and dropped away. Below, some hundred feet down, a
sharp igneous spine led off into the distance. On either side the spine gave
way for another five hundred feet to open space and wind. His first reaction
was to be annoyed and blame his own inattention. Very obviously he'd taken a
wrong turn somewhere. And yet
Kresinski's footsteps led right up to the edge. Then John saw a faded-green
rope dangling over the left-hand corner and remembered the stories told in
Camp Four about a steep, frightening bottleneck on what they'd dubbed the
Great Spice Road.
This rope on this cliff had cut miles off the regular trail, but it had also
cost much time, for thousands of pounds of marijuana had needed to be hauled
up by hand. The wind was picking up a little, swinging the rope like a lazy
cat's tail, and individual pellets of snow spun past. One of John's fingers
throbbed from old frostbite, and he pulled his headband down over the tips of
his ears. Enough. This had to be halfway.
Now he could turn around and return to the Valley. They'd offered themselves
as bait, but the dragon hadn't budged. Aloud, he said, "Adios," in part to
Kresinski, in part to the voyage, the lake, and the revenge. He backed away
from the edge. But his pride complained. He was reluctant to turn back because
it would confirm his legend of abandonment. Two went up; one came down.
As if on cue, he heard a scant ounce of noise on the forward horizon, a faint
"pip" too bass for a marmot. He inspected the skyline, and there,
ridiculously, was Kresinski's tiny figure flapping its arms. "Jackass." John
frowned. A moment later he heard the minuscule peep again and shook his head
at it. Had the King been trying, he couldn't have seemed more trivial. The
whole venture was deteriorating into a nasty little
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light cartoon. Time to bag it and haul on out of here
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before the day turned him into a stick figure, too. But John hesitated anyway.
He took stock. They'd covered at least fourteen miles since dawn, and the lake
was supposedly twenty miles in by this route.
Doing some hasty math, he calculated that it would actually be quicker to go
up to the lake and descend by his shortcut than to double back along the path
already covered. The day brightened for him. By going to the lake he would
actually be accelerating his departure from it. Also, he now admitted, there
was something undeniably magnetic about the lake. That little scoop of water
had given birth to much legend, both good and bad. One more look and he could
really say good-bye.
He'd done too many climbs to expect any sort of punctuation at the lake, of
course.
There was no end to the circle any more than there was a one and only summit.
From every summit, you always saw other summits, that was in the topography of
ascent.
Indeed, climbers take their bearings off other mountains and past ascents and
future summits the way sailors once did off the stars. One last look at the
lake, John told himself, and his compass would be set. He would know there was
nothing else to be pulled from the lake, or from the walls or the Valley
itself. He could be at peace with his escape into the future, wherever else it
lay. So he didn't turn and leave. Plowed by the wind, he stepped up to the
edge and looped the rope between his legs and across one shoulder and
decisively lowered himself down to the thin spine of igneous rock.
The spine was so narrow he had to straddle it, a leg on each side. Hastily he
pulled the rope free of his body and inched himself forward with dwarf
evergreens whistling far below. It was hard enough to move along the spine
with twenty pounds of down and food in his pack, and he wondered what it must
have been like for all those people carrying sixty-, seventy-, and
ninety-pound packs. At last the extrusion widened, and he was able to stand
and carefully balance across the remaining hundred yards to less threatening
ground. He picked up Kresinski's tracks again and headed upslope across
ragged, stubby grasses that had no smell because the wind was so hungry.
It took him another half hour to reach Kresinski. At the top of the vast,
inclined grassy plain, hiding from the wind behind a solitary boulder,
Kresinski was sitting inside his pack. It was a mountaineer's bivouac. He'd
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