The Beckoning Silence Read Online Free Page B

it.
    ‘Do you know what Alea Jacta Est means?’ Tat asked as he drank deeply from a cold pint of beer.
    ‘No,’ I said, thinking about the name of the climb. ‘It’s Latin, isn’t it?’
    ‘Yeah, that’s why I asked,’ Tat said. ‘You were taught Latin, weren’t you?’
    ‘I was so bad at Latin I spent most of the classes standing in the corner for failing to know the past pluperfect conjugation of some obscure verb. Never even understood what past pluperfect meant, let alone gerundives . And those damn stupid sentences you had to translate, “Labienus, having sacked Gaul, returned to Rome.” Who the hell was Labienus? That’s what I wanted to know but nobody knew. He was just this guy with a vaguely embarrassing name who kept sacking things and then going home. It used to drive me mad …’
    ‘But you’re not bad at languages,’ Tat interrupted my rant. ‘You speak French and Spanish.’
    ‘I understand more Spanish than I can speak and I used to be able to speak French, but not Latin,’ I replied. I finished my beer. ‘So what do you think it means?’
    ‘I’m not sure. My Latin is a bit rusty, just what I learned as a medical student, but I think it means, “Only yourself to blame . ” Good, eh?’
    ‘It’s about right,’ I laughed. ‘Except I would have been blaming you,’ I added.
    ‘Only for as long as it took for us to hit the ground.’
     
    The following winter Tat and I returned to find Alea Jacta Est in much better condition. We climbed the route without problems and Tat was proved right. It was a superb climb. It was also the last ice climb we were to do together.
    I later learned from Margaret Colwell that the name Alea Jacta Est actually meant The die is cast. Margaret said it was a loose translation but she was sure the word jacta was the Latin verb, ‘to throw’ and Alea meant ‘dice’, hence a gamble, a wager. A literal translation would be, the die is thrown, or cast. In good conditions the route name did not seem especially apt but in the dangerous state that we had first attempted the climb it was all too true. In effect, it was something that I felt it had always been – an unacceptable gamble, a last throw of the dice, a wintry version of Russian Roulette.
    ‘ Alea jacta est’ had seemed a naggingly familiar phrase, reminding me vaguely of my miserable Latin lessons. Later I was to learn that the reason it was familiar was that it was what Julius Caesar famously uttered as he crossed the Rubicon, a river that no Roman general was ever allowed to cross as it was tantamount to a revolt against the Republic. Once he’d thrown the dice by crossing the river he had no choice but to press on, overthrow the Republic and set up his Imperium. He was then assassinated in Rome for precisely this act.
    It was a huge gamble that Caesar took, knowing the implications of his decision and knowing also that there was no turning back. I wish I could have claimed to have been so decisive.

2 Intimations of mortality
     
    I hadn’t liked the look of the seracs at all. Through the binoculars they had appeared even more threatening than when seen with the naked eye. I had turned away from the view of Chaupi Orco’s south face and glanced towards where Yossi Brain was crouched by the gas stoves. A huddle of tents had been pitched on the gritty ice of the glacier. A few parallel crevasses bordered the farthest tent and beyond that the glacier swept in a sinuous crescent down towards the green pampas of the Lago Soral valley.
    ‘Yossi,’ I called and he looked up from the steaming pans. ‘Have you got a moment?’ I nodded my head to one side to indicate that I wanted to speak with him in private, out of ear-shot of the clients. Yossi stood up and ambled over to me. He was a tall man, thin-faced with a shock of long straw-blond hair tied back in a pony-tail.
    ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked as we walked a short distance across the glacier.
    ‘Well, I may be paranoid but I