The night fell heavy on the heights of the mountain and the man could not see anything. All was black. The moon and the stars were covered by a heavy fog buffeted by equally weighty sheets of freezing rain. There was zero visibility.
As he was climbing, only a few yards from the safety of a niche where shelter awaited him, he slipped and fell into the air. With each passing second, his weight increased the velocity of his falling descent. He could only see black spots as he rapidly fell. He was terrified by the dreadful sensation of being sucked inescapably to ground by gravity.
As he sailed through the darkness, his consciousness was gripped with the fearful awareness of his impending demise, and he reflected in those fleeting moments of all of the good and bad episodes of his life. Suddenly, he felt the safety rope tied to his waist pull taut. In the midst of his fear he had forgotten about this last line of defense for climbers. With a massive jerk, he felt his breath squeeze from his lungs as his body came to an abrupt halt. He was no longer falling. He was hanging in midair.
Although relieved, he was very cognizant of the fact that the rope—only the rope—was now his singular lifeline. In that moment of stillness, he also realized that he had no idea where he was in relation to the mountain or one of its handful of ledges. He was floating somewhere between life and death and the only thing separating him from either was the rope. As he hung helpless, he found himself drifting into an even deeper depression. As he swung himself to-and-fro looking for some contact with the mountain and hopefully a shelf that would offer him safe footing and the opportunity to shelter himself from the elements, he felt nothing but the open freezing air. When the thought of death was so prevalent just moments ago as he was falling, the certainty of that fate had produced within him a feeling somewhat of peace. Now, however, he was petrified with the fear of hanging in this apparently inescapable void. His inability to comprehend where he was, coupled with the knowledge that he could not survive this night of freezing rain tethered as he was, led him to become increasingly despondent. In the depth of that desperation, he found himself screaming repeatedly, “Oh God, please help me!”
All of a sudden a deep and all-encompassing voice seemed to emanate from within his very core. “What would you have me do?” came the reply.
Looking around in the pitch black of night, the man shouted, “Save me, my Lord!”
“Do you really think that I can save you?”
“Of course. I have faith that you can, Lord.”
“Then cut the rope tied to your waist.”
There followed a moment of total silence, then the man became enveloped in fear, and then in doubt. “I have swung as far as I can and felt nothing,” he thought to himself. “My feet can’t touch anything. This rope is the only sure thing keeping me from the abyss. Lord, Are you sure?”
There was no answer. The man decided to try one more time to swing and touch something that might assuage his fear and give him confidence. With all the energy he could muster, he swung himself around in a wide arc, but he touched nothing but the freezing night air.
“I can’t! I can’t!” he cried. He just couldn’t bring himself to cut the rope. Instead, he held onto it with all of his strength.
As morning broke the next day, the sky was clear. By mid-morning, a rescue team arrived at the scene.
They found the climber dead and frozen, his body hanging from the rope, his hands gripping it tightly.
The rescuers were astounded and perplexed by the tragic sight they beheld, for the dead man was swinging less than six feet above the safe ground of an out jutting ledge.
“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” ? William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Have an AWE-full Weekend!
William J. “Bill” Bacqué