"Never trust a Gringo." Jonathan was relaxed and confident. One thing was certain: Jean-Paul was an amateur. "You had some purpose in coming here, I imagine."

Jean-Paul examined the palm of one hand, rubbing over the lines with his thumb. "I think I shall return to my room, if you don't mind. I have made an ass of myself in your eyes already. Nothing can be gained by deepening that impression."

"I think I have a right to some kind of explanation. Your entrance into my room was—irregular?"

Bidet sat heavily on the bed, his body slumping, his eyes averted, and there was something so deflated in his manner that Jonathan had no qualms about the fact that his gun was now within reach. "There is no more ridiculous image in the world, Jonathan, than the outraged cuckold." He smiled sadly. "I never thought I would find myself playing the Pantaloon."

Jonathan experienced that uncomfortable combination of pity and disgust he always felt toward the emotionally soft, particularly those who lacked control over their romantic lives.

"But I cannot become much more ludicrous in your eyes," Bidet continued. "I imagine you already know about my physical limitations. Anna usually tells her studs. For some reason, it inspires them to greater effort on her behalf."

"You are putting me in the awkward position of having to declare my innocence, Jean-Paul."

Jean-Paul looked at Jonathan with hollow nausea in his eyes. "You needn't bother."

"I'd rather. We have to climb together. Let me say it simply: I have not slept with Anna, nor have I any reason to believe that advances would be greeted with anything but scorn."

"But last night..."

"What about last night?"

"She was here."

"How do you know that?"

"I missed her... I looked for her... I listened at your door." He looked away. "That is despicable, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is. Anna was here last night. I met her in the hall, and I offered her a drink. We did not make love."

Jean-Paul picked up his gun absently and toyed with it as he spoke. Jonathan felt no danger; he had dismissed Bidet as a potential killer. "No. She made love last night. I touched her later. I could tell from—"

"I don't want to hear about it. I have no clinical curiosity, and this is not a confessional."

Jean-Paul toyed with the small Italian automatic. "I shouldn't have come here. I have behaved in poor taste; and that is worse than Anna, who had only behaved immorally. Let me ascribe it to the stress of the climb. I had had great hopes for this climb. I thought if Anna were here to see me climb a mountain that very few men would dare to even touch—that might—somehow. I don't know. Whatever it was, it was a senseless hope." He looked over at Jonathan with beaten eyes. "Do you despise me?"

"My admiration for you has found new limits."

"You phrase well. But then, you have the intellectual advantage of being emotionless."

"Do you believe me about Anna?"

Jean-Paul smiled sadly. "No, Jonathan. I don't believe you. I am a cuckold, but not a fool. If you had nothing to fear from me, why were you lying there on the floor, anticipating my revenge?"

Jonathan could not explain and did not try.

Jean-Paul sighed. "Well, I shall return to my room to blush in private, and you will be freed from the duty of having to pity and detest me." In a gesture of dramatic finality, he snapped back the slide of the automatic, and a cartridge arced from the chamber, struck against the wall, and bounced onto the rug. Both men looked at the shiny brass with surprise. Jean-Paul laughed without mirth. "I guess I am deceived more easily than I thought. I could have sworn this gun was empty."

He left without saying good-night.

Jonathan smoked and took a sleeping pill before attempting sleep again, this time in his bed, considering it now safe with the same kind of superstitious faith in anti-chance that prompts bomber pilots to fly into ack-ack puffs, or woodsmen to seek shelter from storms under lightning-cleft trees.

EIGER: JULY 11

The only sounds they made as they walked single file toward the base of the mountain were the soft trudge of their footfalls and the hiss of Alpiglen grass against their gaitered boots, wet and glistening with dew. Bringing up the rear, Jonathan looked up at the mountain stars, still crisp and cold despite the threat of dawn to mute their brilliance. The climbers walked without the burden of pack, rope, and climbing iron. Ben and three of the young climbers who camped on the meadow had preceded them carrying the heavy gear as far as the foot of the scree slope. The team responded to the silence, the earliness of the hour, and the weight of their objective with that sense of unreality and emotional imbalance common to the verge of a major climb. As he always did just before a climb, Jonathan attended hungrily to all physical stimuli. Within his body he followed the tingle and ripple of anticipation. His legs, tuned high for hard climbing, pulled the flat land under him with giddying ease. The chill brush of predawn wind on the nape of his neck, the smell of the grass, the organic viscosity of the dark around him—Jonathan focused on each of these in turn, savoring the sensations, gripping them with his tactile, rather than mental, memory. He had always wondered at this odd significance of common experience just before a hard climb. He realized that this particularization of the mundane was a product of the sudden mutability of the world of the senses. And he knew that it was not the wind, the grass, the night that was threatened with mortality; it was the sensing animal. But he never dwelt on that.

Jean-Paul slackened his pace and dropped back to Jonathan, who resented this intrusion on his sacramental relations with simple sensation.

"About last night, Jonathan—"

"Forget it."

"Will you?"

"Certainly."

"I doubt it."

Jonathan lengthened his stride and let Jean-Paul fall behind.

They approached the fireflies of light that had directed them across the lea and came upon Ben and his group of volunteers laying out and checking the gear with the aid of flashlights. Karl considered it necessary to his posture as leader to issue a couple of superfluous instructions while the team quickly geared up. Ben groused heavily about the cold and the earliness of the hour, but his words were designed only to combat the silence. He felt empty and useless. His part in the climb was over, and he would return to Kleine Scheidegg to handle the reporters and watch the progress of the climbers through the telescope he had brought for the purpose. He would become an active member again only if something happened and he had to organize a rescue.

Standing next to Jonathan, but looking away up toward the mountain that was a deeper black within a blackness, Ben pulled his ample nose and sniffed, "Now you listen to me, ol' buddy. You come off that hill in one piece, or I'm going to kick your ass."

"You're a sloppy sentimentalist, Ben."

"Yeah, I guess." Ben walked away and gruffly ordered his young volunteers to accompany him back to the hotel. When they were younger and more dramatic, he might have shaken hands with Jonathan.

The climbers moved out in the dark, scrambling up the scree and onto the rock rubble at the base. By the time they touched the face proper, the first light had begun to press form into the black mass. In that cringing light, the rock and the snow patches appeared to be a common, dirty gray. But Eiger rock is an organic tonic gray, produced by the fusion of color complements in balance, not the muddy gray that is a mixture of black and white. And the snow was in reality crisp white, unsooted and unpitted by thaw. It was the light that was dirty and that soiled the objects it illuminated.