Page 92 of A Season in the Snow
Chapter 39
On the morning of the second of January, a well-rested Marco and an overexcited Alice were waiting for the next cable car to take them up to Blofeld’s lair itself at Piz Gloria. Waiting with them, stuffed between the barriers that angled people into the carriage, was a crowd of people in full ski regalia, of all colours, the fabric rustling against itself with every movement. Heads were covered with helmets with chunky goggles atop, the glass marbled with brightly tinted polarised lenses. Skis and boards and poles rested upright in arms and boots clonk-clonked while people shifted their weight, dripping snowy clumps onto the wet floor.
Alice was still feeling the intoxication of New Year’s hope running through her blood and she looked up at Marco from where she was squeezed in next to him. ‘So you come up here and ski down, like these people?’
‘Sometimes. Most people get off at Birg, the stop in between us and Bond World, but you can ski from both.’
‘CouldIski from both?’
He smiled, as if struggling for words that didn’t sound condescending. ‘Well, perhaps one day. It is black runs from the Schilthorn, but from Birg you could do blue and red runs and keep coming back on the cable cars.’
‘Okay. Maybe one day. I’m still definitely a blue run woman at the moment.’
‘You have three weeks to get really good and then you could enter the Inferno.’
She frowned at him. ‘The what?’
Marco pointed to a TV monitor near the queue which showed a promotional video for what looked like a huge ski race inspired by the devil.
‘That’s happening here?’ Alice asked.
‘In the last week of January. The Inferno. Every year, it’s the biggest event in Mürren. Thousands of people come to ski in the race or watch and it’s really fast and really dangerous!’
Alice hesitated. ‘Thousands of people, all here at the same time?’
‘Yes, it’s crazy, but very fun. You’ll start to see over the next two weeks they will start to put wooden devil masks beside pathways to show the route, and all the shops and hotels decorate their windows with devils and fire.’
‘Have you ever done it?’
‘Once.’ Marco laughed. ‘I crashed and had to drop out about halfway down.’
‘Were you okay?’
‘Yes, but everyone is going so fast so if one person wipes out it’s like dominoes. My brother has entered a few times. He’s pretty good.’
‘I don’t think I’ll enter this year,’ Alice joked, but her attention kept pulling back to the TV monitor showing the huge crowd of people. She shook the thought from her head. Totally different place, totally different crowd.Don’t think about it right now.
‘I wonder if Bear’s asleep on my bed right now,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘I took him for a big walk first thing this morning to tire him out. I hope he doesn’t mind me being gone for the whole morning.’
‘He’ll be fine, and I bet he is loving having the chalet to himself. Oh, here comes the cable car.’
They shuffled in, and Alice squeezed her way next to the window on one side. The cable car swept out of the station and into the sunshine, which beamed warm rays into the Perspex box they were crammed into. It glided up, up, up, almost stroking the face of the mountain, whose pine trees poked upwards to meet the sun, and whose snow was glistening and untouched other than by the neat lines of hoof prints left by mountain goats.
Whoosh!Far below them a lone skier appeared, carving elegant trails through the untouched snow, a flash of electric blue ski suit against the pure white. ‘They’ve come from Birg, practising their off piste,’ Marco explained.
At Birg, the majority of the winter sporters departed. Just a few remained, along with those without equipment who were looking for some secret service fun. Alice snuck a look at the faces of two women around her age chatting in Italian, their skis battered and loved, their lift passes dangling, crumpled, from plastic wallets on their jacket sleeves, and their cheeks freckled and suntanned. Alice’s own face had picked up a hint of colour in the winter sun since she’d started ‘hitting the slopes’ in December. She loved each new freckle, and each hint of a goggle line that appeared, as if they were little medals.
On the cable car went, up to kiss the glorious blue sky above, leaving the lower peaks behind it. At Piz Gloria they were nearly three thousand metres above sea level and the panorama of the Swiss skyline that it presented was . . .
Well. When Alice stepped out of the cable car and exited the station onto the viewing deck, she didn’t have any words. The mountain tops stretched before her, behind her, all around her, and she was on top of the world. There was the Eiger, the Jungfrau and the Mönch, and what felt like a hundred other craggy points decorated in blankets of white and flecks of grey stone.
‘What do you think?’ Marco asked, putting an arm around her to keep her warm.
‘It’s very big,’ Alice replied, not doing it justice. ‘Puts life into perspective up here.’
He was quiet, and she realised she kind of wanted to cry, but something about Mother Earth was telling her to be brave, and be present. Also, it was extremely cold up here and there was a good chance that if she cried the tears would freeze on her cheeks.
Alice took a big inhalation of the fresh mountain air and took Marco’s hand, and they spent the next twenty minutes strolling along the viewing deck, taking photos with some strategically placed Bond cut-outs, and making each other laugh with their 007 poses.
