The Ice Soldier Read Online Free

revealed that he was suffering from gout and would not be able to make use of the guide he had hired. The Englishman kindly offered to let the guide take Carton instead, and even offered him the use of his mountaineering equipment.
    Invigorated as much by the Englishman’s stories as by the Alpine air, Carton accepted. The next day, instead of heading south on his original course, Carton traveled west along a dirt road to the village of Palladino; no more than a cluster of houses on the banks of a lake called Vannino. Palladino was the last outpost before the mountains, and the closest starting point for a voyage across the Dragone glacier.
    At Palladino, Carton was met by the guide, who, after hearing Carton’s explanation, agreed to take him instead.
    At first light the following day, the two-man team set off.
    Two weeks later, Carton staggered into Palladino alone, starving, snow-blind, with the skin sunburned off his nose and cheeks and his fingers so badly frostbitten that he spent a week with his hands in a bath of vinegar before he regained feeling in them.
    The story he told was that after several days of grueling exertion over the ice of the Dragon’s Tongue and up the Dragon’s Teeth, the two men reached the tallest of these jagged peaks, shook hands, and started down again across the glacier. They were roped together, testing the snow ahead of them with their long ice axes. At some point on the descent, the guide fell through a thin patch of snow, beneath which lay a
crevasse hundreds of feet deep. Carton was able to roll onto his stomach and jam his ax into the snow to provide an anchor. The ax caught fast in ice which lay beneath the snow, stopping his slide, but when the rope came taut it broke. The guide fell into the abyss, leaving Carton by himself up on the glacier. It took Carton seven days to find his way back to Palladino.
    Despite an exhaustive search, the body of the guide was never found.
    Having seen that glacier for myself, I knew how lucky Carton had been to survive. To call the glacier the Dragon’s Tongue, and Carton’s Rock the Dragon’s Teeth, was no mistake.
    When Carton returned to London, his hands bandaged and face still badly burned, he was front-page news in every paper in the country. Inspired by the unexpected attention, he rented out a small dance hall in Ealing and gave a lecture to a half-filled space about his experiences, which he titled “Peril in the Heights.” It soon became clear that Carton knew very little about mountaineering, but this did not seem to matter. What mattered was that he had survived in spite of how little he knew. Even more important, he knew how to tell the story, hurling himself across the stage, flailing his arms in the air, retrieving from his ice-burned brain the most obscure but telling details.
    The next week, he rented out the hall again. This time the place was full.
    Throughout the months ahead, two, three, four times, the same people showed up to hear Carton describe the sight of the guide as he slipped away to his death. The eyes of the audience grew wide as he held up his hands and spoke of his frozen fingernails turning black and falling off, of the blood he coughed into the snow as the altitude punished his lungs.
    Despite what he had endured, he always finished his talks by speaking of the view once he had arrived at the summit. He told his audience it was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen, like something out of a dream. This view, which only he had ever glimpsed and lived to tell of, since Carton’s Rock remained unclimbed except by him and the unfortunate guide, became a thing of mythic beauty, beyond all earthly comparison.
    In these lectures, Carton steered clear of formal mountaineering terminology, most of which would have been meaningless to his audience. Instead of verglas, for example, he said “icy rock.” Instead of firnspiegel, he said “icy snow.” Col became ridge,