“Oh my!”

“It’s the mountain, Rick,” I said, not yet too scared to play the imperturbable or, if you like, insensitive Englishman. “It’s the bloody mountain, old fellow. He, she or it is throwing rocks at us. We ought to be flattered. Are you flattered?”

“I want out.”

He turned to go but I caught his sleeve.

“This is a sheer gift for a writer. Just think, Rick. Now we can describe what it sounds like to be missed by a cannon ball. What wouldn’t Tennyson have given?”

“We better get back, Wilf.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“There’s no knowing what might be going on up above, Wilf. I know mountains. I was born—why, it could be a real slip, real dangerous.”

“Currently.”

“Yeah.”

“As of this moment in time.”

“Yeah.”

“The lightning never strikes twice in the same place. We ought to see where it struck.”

Securely prevented by the dense fog from experiencing the hideousness of the drop, still unperturbed and wishing to show this young man who had unexpectedly revealed a too profound concern for his own safety, I stepped to the rail.

“Aw—c’mon Wilf!”

“I can’t see a thing.”

Still unperturbed, I put my hand on the rail and leaned out. The rail went with me.

The next few seconds can be described in a few words or a few hundred. My instinct—voluble as ever—is for the hundreds. It’s not just that I make my money by selling words but that these seconds were very important seconds as far as I was concerned. The first of them, I have to confess, was an hiatus, a nothing. The second was a contraction, a shock too immediate to be called belief or even apprehension. It was, if you like, the animal body’s awareness, alerted to death so near, the falling to it. The third second was more human in a way—the rail now moving out and down faster and more easily—was blind terror which I became, awareness of blind terror, blind terror aware of itself and, shot through the terror, incredulity. Then the animal took over, every nerve, muscle, heart beat, at top energy and speed, bent on denial of destruction. My wits were gone. My hand, as it clutched and fell with the rail, was vitalized to the point where it might well have squeezed the wood small to its own crippling deformation but nowhere was the wit that would have made me let the thing go. My other hand struck out blindly to where there might be solidity, found it, clutched what felt like a plant and my body turned head over heels so that I landed against the cliff on the other side of the rail with a blow that knocked the breath out of me. The rail dropped away from my one hand as the shock opened it for me. That hand, without asking any permission, grabbed. I was on my back, heels dug in, hands gripped. I was sliding steeply, inch by inch.