It was enough. Wang’s Gully was a broad weathered chute, cutting up through steeper cliff ridges like a giant shattered culvert. Most of the day Sax followed Ann up smaller gullies within the body of this larger one, scrambling up waist-high steps, using his hands most of the time, but seldom with the feeling that a fall would kill him, or do much more than sprain an ankle. “This isn’t as dangerous as I thought it would be,” he said. “Is this the kind of climbing you always do?”

“This isn’t climbing at all.”

“Ah.”

So she went up slopes steeper than this. Taking risks that were, strictly speaking, unjustifiable.

And indeed, in the afternoon they came to a short wall, cut by horizontal fissures; Ann began to climb it, without ropes or pitons, and gritting his teeth, Sax followed. Near the top of a geckolike ascent, with his boot tips and gloved fingers all jammed into small cracks, he looked back down Wang’s Gully, which suddenly seemed very much steeper in its entirety than it had in any given section, and all his muscles began to quiver with some kind of fatigued excitation. Nothing for it but to finish the pitch; but he had to risk his position time after time as he hurried higher, the holds getting slimmer just as he was becoming of necessity hastier. The basalt was very slightly pitted, its dark gray tinged rust or sienna; he found himself hyperfocused on one crack over a meter above his eye level; he was going to have to use that crack; was it deep enough for his fingertips to gain any purchase? He had to try to find out. So he took a deep breath and reached up and tried, and as it turned out it was not really deep enough at all; but with a quick pull, groaning involuntarily at the effort, he was up and past it, using holds he never even consciously saw; and then he was on his hands and knees next to Ann, breathing very heavily. She sat serenely on a narrow ledge.

“Try to use your legs more,” she suggested.

“Ah.”

“Got your attention, did it?”

“Yes.”

“No memory problems, I trust?”

“No.”

“That’s what I like about climbing.”

Later that day, when the gully had lain back a bit, and opened up, Sax said, “So have you been having memory problems?”

“Let’s talk about that later,” Ann said. “Pay attention to this crack here.”

“Indeed.”

• • •