They stopped in Grindelwald, and in the station Nirgal followed his escort onto a much smaller train, which led them up and under the immense north wall of the Eiger. Underneath this wall of stone it appeared only a few hundred meters tall; Nirgal had gotten a better sense of its great height fifty kilometers away, in Bern’s Monster. Now, here, he waited patiently as the little train hummed into a tunnel in the mountain itself, and began to make its spirals and switchbacks in the darkness, punctuated only by the interior lights of the train, and the brief light from a single side tunnel. His escort, about ten men strong, spoke among themselves in low guttural Swiss German.

When they emerged into the light again they were in a little station called the Jungfraujoch, “the highest train station in Europe” as a sign in six languages said— and no wonder, as it was located in an icy pass between the two great peaks the Monch and the Jungfrau, at 3,454 meters above sea level, with no point or destination but its own.

Nirgal got off the train, trailed by his escort, and went out of the station onto a narrow terrace outside the building. The air was thin, clean, crisp, about 270 K— the best air Nirgal had breathed since he left Mars, it brought tears to his eyes it felt so familiar! Ah, now this was a place!

Even with sunglasses on the light was extremely bright. The sky was a dark cobalt. Snow covere d most of the mountainsides, but granite thrust through the snow everywhere, especially on the north sides of the great masses, where the cliffs were too steep to hold snow. Up here the Alps no longer resembled an escarpment at all; each mass of rock had its own look and presence, separated from the rest by deep expanses of empty air, including glacial valleys that were enormously deep U gaps. To the north these macrotrenches were very far below, and green, or even filled with lakes. To the south, however, they were high, and filled only with snow and ice and rock. On this day the wind was pouring up from this south side, bringing the chill of the ice with it.

Down the ice valley directly south of the pass, Nirgal could see a huge crumpled white plateau, where glaciers poured in from the surrounding high basins to meet in a great confluence. This was Concordiaplatz, they told him. Four big glaciers met, then poured south in the Grosser Aletschgletscher, the longest glacier in Switzerland.

Nirgal moved down the terrace to its end, to see farther into this wilderness of ice. At the far end he found that there was a staircase trail, hacked into the hard snow of the south wall where it rose to the pass. It was a path down to the glacier below them, and from there to Concordiaplatz.