Nirgal asked his escorts to stay in the station and wait for him; he wanted to hike alone. They protested, but the glacier in summer was free of snow, the crevasses all obvious, and the trail well clear of them. And no one else was down there on this cold summer day. Nevertheless the members of the escort were uncertain, and two insisted on coming with him, at least part way, and at a distance behind—”just in case.”

Finally Nirgal nodded at the compromise, and pulled on his hood, and hiked down the ice stairs, thumping down painfully until he was on the flatter expanse of the Jungfraufirn. The ridges that walled this snow valley ran south from the Jungfrau and the Monch respectively, then after a few high kilometers dropped abruptly to Concordiaplatz. From the trail their rock looked black, perhaps in contrast to the whiteness of the snow. Here and there were patches of faint pinkness in the white snow— algae. Life even here— but barely. It was for the most part a pure expanse of white and black, and the overarching dome of Prussian blue, with a cold wind funneling up the canyon from Concordiaplatz. He wanted to make it down to Concordiaplatz and have a look around, but he couldn’t tell whether the day would give him enough time or not; it was very difficult to judge how far away things were, it could easily have been farther than it looked. But he could go until the sun was halfway to the western horizon, and then turn back; and so he hiked swiftly downhill over the firn, from orange wand to orange wand, feeling the extra person inside him, feeling also the two members of the escort who were tagging along some two hundred meters behind.

For a long time he just walked. It wasn’t so hard. The crenellated ice surface crunched under his brown boots. The sun had softened the top layer, despite the cool wind. The surface was too bright to see properly, even with sunglasses; the ice joggled as he walked, and glowed blackly.

The ridges to left and right began their drop. He came out into Concordiaplatz. He could see up glaciers into other high canyons, as if up ice fingers of a hand held up to the sun. The wrist ran down to the south, the Grosser Aletschgletscher. He was standing in the white palm, offered to the sun, next to a lifeline of rubble. The ice out here was pitted and gnarly and bluish in tone.