Echo Thomas Olde [ENGLISH]

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

"The manuscript of Nick Grevers (part 2)"

I could not help feeling that they were evil things – mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
– H.P. Lovecraft..

1.

(Can a man become possessed by a mountain? And I am not referring to just obsession, the fever that every climber knows to have to go up again when one is in the valley, but to real possession, as in the old horror stories. It takes quite a bit of mental flexibility to take such a thing for granted, but there is at least a certain logic in the fictional reality of such stories, because the main character is possessed by a ghost, a demon, a devil; something that is, in a sense, human or once was. But can a man become possessed by the soul of a mountain, something which is not only not human, but which, moreover, can have no will or purpose? I'm writing these words from my hospital bed at 11 p.m. The AMC is silent after all the commotion of the past few days. My MacBook screen is bright, the lamp next to my bed is on, the curtains are drawn, the darkness is locked out.

Yet I feel that power wafting around, up there in that valley. It bulges over the edge of the col and here, in Amsterdam, my whole body feels cold, as if it stretches right outside the window. In the background I constantly hear that noise, like the whisper of falling snowflakes, or the approaching rumble of gathering forces. I'm startled when I hear footsteps in the hallway. I'm scared of a shadow. Ever since I woke up in this nightmare I've been living with the unimaginable and coming to terms with what happened there. I know that's impossible. Because in moments like these I think that darkness can do anything, as if it could lash out at me from that forgotten place in the Alps, as if it could drive me insane just writing these words down, as if it could even affect you will have, just by reading about it. Because we went to climb the Maudit, Sam. Despite everything.

There is a hole in my memory after my collision with Augustin on the moraine. The psychotherapist says that amnesia is normal after a coma and a traumatic experience, but something else is going on. It's not just when you can't remember how you got home after a drunken night out. Something happened to me the moment Augustin's elbow touched my cheekbone and I slammed into the spur of that glacier wall. And most frighteningly, I seem to have lost control of my own will after that. And that is the story of photo 8 to 16. Shapes. Whimsical, screaming horizons, black silhouetted against the dark blue of the dying light. Higgledy-piggledy. This is the only footage I have of the Maudit, Sam, and it tells a story of madness.

I don't remember taking these pictures but they are on my GoPro and judging from the light it must have been not long after the collision on the moraine. The longer I look at them, the more they seem to confirm what I already know: something has taken over us and sent us up that mountain.) I remember nothing of the night in the bivouac. Not even from the start of the climb. I only remember moments, fits of a fever dream. There comes a time when we walk into a bitterly cold tunnel of gusts and darkness, my crampons crunching through a frozen crust of glacial snow. This tunnel is the whole world. Somewhere, far away, I worry that I can only see the rope being pulled in front of me in the cone of light of my Petzl headlamp. The stiffening stream of ice particles lashing my cheeks makes me sleepy and drifts my mind.

I think I'm the last human on Earth, but instead of fear, that thought gives me comfort. There comes a moment when it is light and now I understand why I couldn't see anything in the dark: we are closed in by the clouds. And I'm not alone at all. How could I have thought that? Augustin is there, too, and I feel a brief but fierce pang of jealousy as I see him clamber up the clouds through the snowdrift, as if he had control of the weather. The idea amazes me more than it amazes me. When I climb in his footsteps through the steep snow wall a moment later, I think: How did he do that? There comes a time when something from the whiteout under my feet shoots past me and almost throws me off balance. I ram my ice axes deep into the wall and a frontal wave of powder snow blows over me.