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

Well, a line of bootprints in the snow showed me where the trail no doubt ran. I took off and followed
them. The Kistenband: it was a good name. I was no longer surprised that a feature like this had a name;.
I had learned that the association of the Swiss with their Alps had gone on so long that were names for
practically everything you could name, right down to individual boulders. Ötzi the Alpine Man could have
named this band five thousand years ago.

The line of bootprints in the snow ran a little closer to the lower edge of the Kistenband than I would
have liked, but the untrodden snow above it was much slippier, so there was no good alternative to
following the tracks. The bootprints were only semi-frozen at this point in the day, both slick underfoot
and with a tendency to collapse down and to the left. Where the Kistenband ended the cliff fell away so
steeply that I could see not see anything of the lake below, but only knew it was there because of my
map, which showed it was a long narrow reservoir, a thousand meters lower. Knowledge of this drop
was making the Kistenband begin to seem a little too steep. The bootprints got softer by the minute, and
with every step I slid a little down and to the left. Walking poles would have been great, an ice axe even
better, but I had not expected snow. It was August 12 th, and I was only at 2700 meters on a
west-facing slope, and in the Sierras. . . well, I had already learned the Alps were not the Sierras. Now I
was learning it again. All I could do was go slow, and pay really close attention to my footing, staring at
the snow under me until my pupils had contracted to pinpricks. Whenever I paused to look up the world
had the dim look of a photo negative. The sky looked dark, even the snow itself looked dark.

This went on for what seemed like a long time, but in fact the Kistenband is only about a kilometer long,
and my traverse probably took no more than half an hour. But it’s a big world at times like that. Every
time I slipped chunks of ice clattered down to the left and disappeared over the cliff, and while it seemed
likely I would be able to drag myself to a halt if I fell and slipped myself, it wasn’t the kind of theory you
want to give a practical test.

So when I came to the widening at the north end of the Kistenband, where the slope lessens, I stopped
and took a breather. There was a spur just below me to my left, jutting out over the Limmerensee, and to
my surprise a little roof top poked out over the last rock. I walked over and found a tiny shed tucked
under the spur. Possibly an emergency hut; but its door was locked, and there were no signs on it.
Maybe it was a storage shed for cowherds, or trail crews. In any case there it was. The top of the spur
above it was clear of snow, and had a magnificent view; and I was past the crux of the hike, and
suddenly hungry. I sat down to eat my lunch, feet kicking over the edge of the rock.

Checking out the next section of my hike, behind me and to my right, I could see that the ridge of the
Muttenbergen curled like the top of a question mark, arcing from the Muttenstock to a peak called the
Ruchi to another called the Rüchi. Tucked in the curve of the question mark was a snowy basin called the
Mutten, filled for the most part by an icy lake called the Muttsee. I could see the trail as a line of
bootprints running across the snow covering the rib that held the Muttsee in place, and there on the rib
stood a little square dot, black in the piebald mix of snow and rock. My map identified this building as the
Muttseehutte, SAC (Swiss Alpine Club). When I got there it would be caffe fertig time for sure.

Under my feet the space over the Limmerensee looked like an enormous roofless room, long and
narrow, with the lake as its blue carpet. The wall on the other side of the lake was a horizontally banded
cliff, rising sheer from the water to my own height; above that it broke up and lay back in a wild jumble of
snow and boulders, ending in a jagged skyline that ran from peak to peak—from the Vorder Selbsanft to
the Selbsanft to the Hinter Selbsanft to the Vord Schiben to the Hinter Schiben. All these names made
sense in relation to my vantage point, as if they had been named from there.