"Kim Stanley Robinson - Kistenpass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

It didn’t. My traverse began to steepen, and I had to work a little. And apparently it was fly season here.
There was only one kind of wildflower to be seen, a yellow thing like a daffodil; and this flower
apparently attracted flies. There were hundreds of them, even thousands, even tens of thousands, all
buzzing in the air. I had never seen flies in the Swiss Alps before, and these were big ones that liked to
land on you and then bite, or maybe it was only an exploratory pinch, but it hurt. I hiked along slapping at
my legs and cursing, and cutting a higher and higher line in hopes of intercepting the trail and then running
to escape them. Eventually I turned and hiked straight up the slope, intent on finding the trail as soon as
possible. The slope steepened again and I ended up climbing a grassy wall, using my hands to pull myself
up from clump to tuft to clump—and here I was only ten minutes into my hike!

Finally I intercepted the trail. It made a decent contour across the slope, as expected, and I did as
planned and ran along it to escape the fly zone. But there proved to be a number of little pastures to pass
through, and the flies pursued me for a long time, because the little pastures all sported summer barns that
were as dirty as any buildings I had ever seen in Switzerland. The Disney spotlessness of the tourist zone
and the German Swiss cantons generally had here given way to a grubby working landscape, hot and
glary and dusty and flyblown. It looked like a ranch in Nevada.

I turned to look south and remind myself where I was. During the ice ages the Alps were covered by
much thicker and longer-lasting glaciers than California’s Sierra Nevada, and as a result the Alps’ valleys
are much steeper and deeper. The high lake-filled basins that characterize the Sierras are extremely rare
in the Alps, because they were ground away, leaving only the famous horns, knife-edge ridges, steep
green walls, and immense gulfs of air. Looking over the five thousand-foot drop of the Vorderrhein
toward Italy, I thought I could see the curvature of the Earth. Well okay maybe it wasn’t Nevada.

Turning back to my hike, I ascended a rocky hill and felt as if I were finally getting down to business. It
was about one in the afternoon. The trail now began switchbacking, up toward a notch in the ridge
above. Granite broke out of the grass, in forms big and small: sand, scree, talus, boulders, bedrock.
Soon there was more rock than grass, and the little meadows that remained were filled with the full array
of Swiss wildflowers, including moss campion, which is like a pincushion of dark moss stuck by a circle
of tiny pink flowers. Moss campion and blue cornflowers were my favorites, and there were lots of both
scattered over the dark orange granite, fine-grained and handsome. Yes, I was finally getting up into the
god zone.



Soon I was through the notch on the ridge, and crossing a small tilted granite bowl above it, where the
rock was half covered with snow. Trail signs pointed to the upper rim of this bowl, called the Cavorgia
da Breil. The low point of the rim was Kistenpass itself. The pass!

I tromped happily up old snow to the ridge, and was soon in the pass. Up there I discovered, as one
often does, that the landscape on the other side of the pass was very different from what I had seen so
far. I was looking north along the western side of a long steep ridge, called the Muttenbergen, which ran
to a peak called the Muttenstock, then dipped and continued up again to a peak called the Ruchi. The
west side of the Muttenbergen dropped very steeply into a lake called the Limmerensee—1200 vertical
meters in less than a kilometer horizontally. The steepness was not continuous, happily, but rather a
matter of two cliffs, high and low, separated by a band about the steepness of a church roof, still covered
with snow. This snowy stretch was called the Kistenband, and my way forward ran over it. The pitch
looked a bit uncomfortable, but given the cliffs above and below, there was no other way forward.
Unfortunately the trail lay under the snow.