Year Two: 2019
TIME

Day Twenty-Three: 18 March

From Val-d'Isère to the Rifugio Mario Bezzi via the Col de la Sassière and one other pass

Distance: 15 kilometres

Climb: 1,500 metres

Snow imposes silence on the world. Val-d'Isère was sitting stock-still. We set off from the church - the very spot where our journey had ended one year ago.

'How's that for picking up where we left off?' said Du Lac.

Alas, time had passed. One by one, the days had gone like lambs to an unending slaughter. 'The show must go on!' said Death. My aunt had died two days ago. She was the cool relative: she had lived in the Tropics for fifty years and brought back from her hibiscus nights the art of drinking gin as though it were the classiest thing in the world. She dressed in airy blouses. To the rest of us, who spent our Sundays at the Comédie-Française, she was the aunt who flew in on the floral trade winds.

After a two-year battle with illness, she had appealed to the Leonetti Law, which, since 2005, allowed French medical professionals to put an end to patients' suffering. They were placed under deep and continuous sedation, causing their body to gradually shut down. Deprived of its cerebral command centre, the organism would forfeit. This process, of course, fooled no one. It was polite society's euthanasia - a flick that took a few days to be felt. A way of tiptoeing around the pious and their passion for suffering.

Two days ago, a doctor had come into my aunt's room at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine to perform the task of sending her off to meet her maker. He had asked us to leave. She had turned her pale eyes to us and said, 'Let's go, Doctor.' Those words - her last, or at least the last ones I heard - seemed to me to be among the pithiest of sign-offs.

There was Mallarmé's 'To flee, far off, to flee!' There was Cendrars' 'When you love, you must leave.' And now there was my aunt's dictum.

'Ready?' asked Du Lac.

'May the White be with us,' said Rémoville.

'Let's go, Doctor,' I said.

For 15 kilometres, I repeated the same motions as last year, adjusted my equipment, eased back into the routine. We climbed through a forest clouded by mist. Fortunately, it was smooth going: the trek had resumed. The memories of the last twelve months - shapeless cities, pointless trips, noisy books and fatty lunches - vanished into thin air. The White absolves all. Stem Christiania, forgiveness of sins.

The mountainside led up to the Col de la Sassière, where the summits were enveloped in wisps of smoke. When swept up by the wind, snow turns to vapour.

On the pass, Du Lac put a sling over a spike and attempted to rappel down a couloir. He gave up. We went around the cliff and descended farther on, where the slope widened.

There is a precise pleasure to be had in finding one's way. It is man's oldest occupation. We climbed back up to a small pass at 3,100 metres. The Rifugio Mario Bezzi appeared, confirming that the other side always keeps its promises. The windblown snowpack was fragile. I had forgotten what it was like to ski on gossamer. Fortunately, I had a phrase from The Fire Within as my incantation: 'That nothing around me should ever move again.'1

We arrived at the refuge and supped among friends.

Day Twenty-Four

From the Rifugio Mario Bezzi to the unguarded Rifugio degli Angeli

Distance: 16 kilometres

Climb: 1,500 metres

A long sunrise descent to the abandoned village of San Leonardo. Its buildings stood awaiting their final collapse in a baptismal setting. Wood beams poked through punctured roofs. The ruins sat around a chapel with an inscription on one side: 'May all be well, may the mountains be grand, may life be kind.' With a prayer like that, we'd be covered for weeks.

There was a time when cowbells rang out over these valleys. Mountain pastoralism had forged rugged races - segregated2 and distrustful, they watched over their pastures like they were bank reserves. On our skis, we were merely pantomiming the most mundane of peasant activities: the hike through the mountains.

Making our way up to the Rutor, we paused to stand on a ridge that shot off towards the Rifugio degli Angeli.

A driving snow bore down on us.

'This is no good,' said Du Lac.

He climbed over to some exposed rock, which was slicker but firmer than the draped snow: we might slip on it, but at least these ice-caked boulders wouldn't give way.

We skied across impermanence. Unstable as it was, we were forced to keep moving. Staying still could trigger a slide. Keep moving or die: the motto for treacherous days like this.

In the event of an avalanche, the transceivers strapped to our chests would emit a signal. Our friends would comb through the snow. Perhaps we would be rescued. A helicopter would come for us. The state would take care of us. Then, once we recovered, we would do it all over again.

For millennia, man had fought to claim a patch of land, work it, erect an altar, sacrifice a bull, then build a city with a museum and statues on pedestals. Stay in your place, farm it and pass it down. That was the ambition.

Until things changed radically. In the twentieth century, mercantile humanity swung into action, decreeing that all things must move. Movement was only legitimate insofar as it was permanent. Goods derived their value from their mobility. Henceforth there would be no rest. In the global bazaar, men were monads, possessions products, History tectonics and nations plasmas. This perpetual movement might as well have been called the Fall. 'Sic transit gloria mundi,' said the Romans. 'Worldly glory is transit!' replied the times. In The Failure of Technology, Friedrich Georg Jünger (Ernst's brother) gave a pithy definition of this tumult: the mobilization of the immobile.3

'The world is changing, let's change with it,' said the political staffers of mercantile democracies. Slaves to inevitability, they would go on to admit, 'Let's just try to survive under the avalanche, for we can do nothing.'

The sun was still beating down on the terrace of the Rifugio degli Angeli. We sat there on the cast-iron sundial until it dipped behind the summit. The sundial had become useless; shadow had suddenly chilled the sky. We took one last look at Mont Blanc before shutting ourselves away in our sheet-metal shelter, under the pile of six blankets with which we would fend off the -9 °C night.

Day Twenty-Five

From the Rifugio degli Angeli to La Thuile via the Rutor Glacier

Distance: 10 kilometres

Climb: 500 metres

We had developed a routine. We would get out of bed and fold our blankets. Du Lac would fire up the camping stove. Rémoville would prep our skis and smooth our climbing skins. I would thaw my pen on my stomach and write a few sentences. My two friends would observe the weather. We would drink coffee whilst reading off the names of the mountain passes that awaited us. Then, one hour after waking, we would file out on our skis: Du Lac leading the way, me in the middle, Rémoville bringing up the rear.

Under perfect azure skies, Du Lac led us to the foot of the Rutor pyramid. We walked along it, 150 metres below the summit, on a 55° incline. We skirted the ridgeline without looking down at the crevasses. Ice axe in hand, I struggled to keep my balance on Du Lac's thin track. Then we made wide curves down the satiny slopes that would take us to Italy. Below us, a shadowland of forests and the veins of a railway. In the sky, the proudest of guards standing at attention: Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, Grandes Jorasses, Grand Capucin. A landscape fit to grace a box of Swiss chocolates, towering over a model train set diorama.

To get to the village of La Thuile, Du Lac decided to cut straight through the forest. Grasping from tree to tree, we made our way down rocky cliffs with our skis on.

We basked in the sun on the terrace of an Italian inn until four p.m., puffing away at Toscano Extra Vecchios (the only cigars that don't go out until their smoker does). Du Lac was drinking a bottle of chianti. Rémoville was on the phone, having intimidating conversations with his Parisian colleagues.

White was the colour of time lost then found. On a page of my notebook, I assembled the heraldic motifs of the White coat of arms, an alliance founded on four words: substance, patience, temperance, sequence.

Substance: One with time, we climb. This journey into Duration is the opposite of accounting. Rather than chop up the hours, we are absorbed by them. We climb, we heave, we gasp for breath. Time passes, skis scrape, the heart pounds, the hours whisk us along in a continuous flow. Suddenly, we're there. The river has deposited us on its banks.

Patience: Acceptance is key. Patience - not strength - prevails over enormity. Just think of the bison migrating across the prairie: slow, plodding, unfaltering. One goal: to get where they're...