Tomasz Wieliczko: The Silent Range, Kartoniert / Broschiert

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The bus died on the third pass, and Jan Kowalczyk took that as a good sign. He had spent eleven years listening to mountains tell him no. A dead engine above three thousand metres was just the latest voice in the chorus. Around him the other passengers were arguing with the driver in three languages, none of them agreeing, all of them angry. Jan unstrapped his pack from the roof rack, dropped it in the gravel, and stood looking east where the ridge line cut into a sky so pale it was almost white. The range did not appear on any map he trusted. That was the whole point of coming. He was forty-one years old. His knees had opinions now. His right shoulder clicked when he lifted his arm above horizontal, a souvenir from a rockfall in the Pamirs that had taken two of his friends and left him with a limp in his paperwork and nothing wrong with his legs. He was built narrow and hard, the way men get built when they walk uphill for a living. Grey coming in at the temples, which his wife had liked and which he had decided to keep. His wife was dead. That was two years ago. He still thought of things she had liked. The road behind him ran west to a village with a name he could not pronounce, and past that a town with a name he could, and past that the world he had left. Ninety kilometres of dust and riverbed, six weeks of paperwork, one bribed official in an office with a broken fan, and then this: a valley floor the colour of wet slate, a river the colour of milk, and a wall of mountains above that nobody had bothered to draw correctly. He had a permit for one mountain. The permit named it 6, 412 and gave its coordinates to the minute. The mountain he was looking at was not 6, 412 and was not on the permit. It was taller. It had a northern face that fell away in one clean line for two kilometres without a break, and Jan had been thinking about that face every night for four years, ever since a drunk Kazakh geologist had shown him a satellite photograph in a bar in Almaty and told him the picture was wrong.