The Mountain Does Not Want You

February 1, 1959  ·  Kholat Syakhl

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Entry I  —  Camp, 11:43 PM

The others are already asleep. I can hear Zolotaryov's breathing — that thick, wet rattle he has when the cold gets into his chest. Outside, the wind has found the frequency of a voice. Not a human voice. Something older. Something that has been practicing.

I came on this expedition because Dyatlov asked me. Igor always asks in a way that makes refusal feel like cowardice. The Ural Mountains in February, he had said, grinning like a boy who has discovered something wonderful and terrible. The Mansi call it Kholat Syakhl. Dead Mountain. He said it like a joke. I laughed, because I was an idiot, because I was twenty-two and had never heard a mountain think.

But I hear it now.

It is thinking about us.

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Entry II  —  11:58 PM

I went outside to relieve myself and stayed longer than I should have. The sky here is obscene — so many stars it looks like something torn open, leaking light. The snow reflects them back. You stand between two skies and feel yourself dissolve.

I was dissolving when I saw the first one.

A light. Orange-white and slow, drifting above the ridge to the northwest. No aircraft moves like that. No aircraft holds still like that, hovering, considering. No aircraft then tilts — tilts — as if bending its head to look at something very small below it.

At me.

I went back inside. I did not write this down immediately. I sat for eleven minutes staring at the canvas wall of the tent while the wind spoke in its not-quite-voice, and then I wrote this down, and I am going to try very hard to sleep.

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Entry III  —  February 2, 1:17 AM

Someone cut the tent open from the inside.

I know this because I watched Igor do it. He was not screaming when he cut it. He was utterly silent. His eyes were open and full of something I will not describe — the way a wound is full of something — and he slit the canvas in three long strokes and crawled out into the minus-thirty darkness without his boots, without his coat, without any explanation.

We all followed. This is the part I cannot explain to you, the part I cannot explain to myself. There was no discussion. There was no screaming. There was simply the understanding — sudden, totalizing, the way you understand a fist coming at your face — that we could not stay inside. That the inside had become wrong. That something about the geometry of the tent, the particular angle of our bodies within it, had become incorrect in a way that would shortly become fatal.

Nine of us walked out into the dark in our socks.

The snow was blue. The mountain was watching. The light had moved closer.

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Entry IV  —  still moving

We separated. I do not know why. Groups of two and three peeling off in directions that made no sense, heading downhill, away from camp, away from warmth, away from everything that had ever protected us. It was like watching a flock of birds startle — that same panic-elegance, that same terrible coordination that looks like choreography until you understand it is only fear.

Lyudmila was making a sound I had never heard a person make. Low and rhythmic. Liturgical. As if she were praying in a language she did not know she knew.

I grabbed Rustem's arm. His face, when he turned to me — God, his face. He looked like a man who had just heard the worst news of his life and was still in the first white second of it, still in the moment before the understanding lands.

"Don't look at the treeline," he said.

I looked at the treeline.

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Entry V  —  [time unknown]

There are shapes in the cedars that are not trees.

They are not moving. That is the most frightening thing. Everything in a storm moves — branches, snow, the shadows that chase each other across the white — but these shapes stand absolutely still. Tall and thin and patient in a way that suggests they have been patient for a very long time and are quite prepared to be patient for much longer.

They are watching us with the focused, unhurried attention of something that has already decided. We are not yet dead. I do not think that is kindness. I think it is the same way a cat watches a mouse it has already tired of chasing — that calm, that certainty, that leisure.

Rustem is gone. I don't know when he left my side. The wind is very loud. My feet are wet and then they stop being wet because they stop feeling anything at all. This is, I am told, how it begins.

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Entry VI  —  cedar tree, lower slope

I climbed the cedar. I don't know why I climbed the cedar. My hands are wrong bleeding and I am fifteen feet off the ground in a blizzard in my socks and I can see further now and I wish I could not see further now.

The light is directly above the tent. Directly above where we were sleeping twenty minutes ago. It is not orange anymore. It is white. The white of bone. The white of salt. The white of the inside of something you are not meant to see the inside of.

Below me, Doroshenko and Krivonischenko have built a small fire. Their faces in the firelight are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen — two human faces, firelit, ordinary — and I realize I am crying and I realize my tears are freezing before they reach my jaw.

don't look up don't look up don't look up

I looked up.

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Entry VII

I am going to try to describe what I saw and I am going to fail to describe what I saw. This is not false modesty. This is the nature of the thing. It is like asking a man born blind to describe the color of the ocean — the equipment simply does not exist. The human brain was not built with the necessary rooms.

I will say this: it was interested in us. Specifically, individually interested, the way a doctor is interested in a specimen. I felt it move through me like a hand through water — not painful, not violent, something worse. Something intimate and indifferent at once. Like being read. Like being read and finding yourself uninteresting.

And then a sound. Not the wind. Not an animal. A sound like pressure, like the world being squeezed, like the frequency of a bell that has been struck so hard it will ring forever, and—

·

Entry VIII  —  [note: handwriting deteriorates significantly here]

I cannot something happened to Lyuda. I could hear her from the ravine. Her voice changed. That's all I'll write. Her voice changed in the way that a voice changes when — no — the sound of her —

The shapes have left the treeline.

They are walking toward me. Or what I am calling walking. What they are doing is not walking but I don't have another word. They move the way shadows move when the light source changes — not the legs, not the body, the whole thing at once, here and then less here and then more here, closer without crossing the space between.

I am going to put this journal inside my jacket. I am going to put this journal inside my jacket and I am going to run walk calmly to the ravine where I heard the others.

it's already behind me isn't it

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Entry IX  —  final entry

They will find us in the spring. I know this now with the same certainty I know my own name, and it is cold comfort — cold being the operative word, cold being the everything, cold the last sense I have left. I cannot feel my hands. I am writing this from memory, from muscle, my fingers moving because they remember moving.

The mountain did not want us here. The Mansi knew. The Mansi knew and named it and kept away and we came anyway because we were scientists and scientists do not believe in the things that mountains remember. We were wrong not because the supernatural is real but because some things are more real than we are. Some things are so real that they make us less real by proximity. That is what it felt like — to be made less real. To feel the outlines of yourself go soft.

I am lying in the snow now. There is a strange warmth, and I know that the warmth is lying to me, and I am grateful for the lie. Above me the sky is still obscene with stars.

The shapes are standing over me. They are not touching me. They are simply watching. And the watching is enough. The watching is more than enough. Something about being truly seen — seen all the way down, seen past the name and the face and the history, seen to whatever is underneath — is the last intimacy.

The light is everywhere now.

The mountain is very very cold.

The journal ends here.

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Kholat Syakhl  ·  61°45'32"N  ·  All nine were found  ·  No cause determined