This is a piece I originally worte in Danish, but I translated it as good as I could today. Comments are most welcome, also, if anyone cold help me make the English better, I would be thankful
A cairn raise out of the fog’s embrace.
Look around! The fog lurks around us. In it’s drowsy grey-white dress it slowly slides among us. The fog is silent – all silent. It just is there, calmly and patiently it slowly walks around – observing us, confining us. It transforms all our surrounding into drowsy, grey silhuettes. The many tiny birches which are our only company here – now they are just grey ghostlike shadows in the fog. It’s a damp fog – it carries a rainy day without drops. One could be tempted to believe it’s only task is to lurk around and make everything moisty. The birches bow in the fog. They all carry tiny drops, tiny shining drops.
It is now 13 days since we left the last whispering sound of spinning car tyres on the road behind. For 3 days we have now been wandering among the drop carrying birches. Now it is 6 days since we last saw one of the evergreen spurs that with cold dignety carries a half rainy weather on it’s heavy branches. It is 5 days ago we left the last muddy path and seriously walked away. The same day we saw the last distant cottage below us, under a modest abyss. Yesterday morning we saw a songbird – it was the last time we heard anything – it sang, in it’s loneliness, then it flew away. We all though we could hear it’s distant stroke of wings because the fog is so silent. Yesterday evening we ate our last meal. We didn’t sleep at all during the night. This morning we lost our bearings so we don’t even know where we are.
Look around! The distance becomes further between the drop carrying birches. Still grass is growing below our feet – so wet and heavy. We walk upwards, slowly upwards. There, just ahead a cliff is towering, a clenched fist from the bedrock below. Now we move further up, above the treeline, up to where only the fog is left. I don’t know what you others think but I’ve started to doubt weather the world outside this mountain still exists. We have left the landscapes of mankind behind, we’re gone, lost where no paths lead.
There are no people up here where the fog is lurking and the wind is weeping Yes! We haven’t told you yet, but it has started to blow. A damp grey wind soughs above us where no paths lead. We walk upwards, still upwards. Despite none of us knowing where we are we keep walking upwards. I walk in front, you in the back. I found myself a solid walking stick 5 days ago. On your back hangs your hunting rifle which you fired 4 days ago with a fog tearing sound against a bird you nevet hit. By the way, behold the many tiny tracks in the shiny-drop-carrying mountian heather. 3 lemmings lies dead over there. Their fur is soaked, a small stripe of blood is blurred by the fog’s moist. The one’s stomach is open and it’s guts hangs half way out. A sharp beaked mountain creature must have come by. What birds live up here I wonder. Does the crows come up in these foggy heights where the greyness of the moist reigns?
Further up the wind gets colder, under our feet lies dirty remnents of snow that haven’t bothered to melt during spring. The cold and the moist penetrate our shoes and make our feet numb and cold. Our fingers in the leather gloves starts to get stiff from cold too, and the closer we gets to the frost up in the fog, the more they start to quiver and tremble. The heather still grows here between lichen covered rocks, and small streams of clear ice water trickle downwards, down the sloping landscape until they disappear in the fog and later in the abyss. Lonely juniper bushes rise stubbornly among the bigger and bigger lumps of snow. It is now 2 days ago I slipped on the moddy path and lost our flashlight in a brook so it died out. It is 5 minutes ago I felt on my facial skin that the temperature has dropped below the freezing point and the moist in the air changed slough to become biting freezing fog. Judging from the grey tones around us the sun most have set a place far off in the west.
Here where no path leads we have nothing to do, all we do is venturing further up. I can feel the moist freezing to ice in my beard here where the rocks are splippery of hoarfrost and snow. Now we are soon as high up as we can get, and it’s 13 days, 8 hours and 22 minutes since we left E26 a place far, far down there. We are on the wast mountains width of culd and grey which we can’t see for the fog that has held us captured for so long. We don’t feel that we walk the final steps upwards, because our bodies are numb of cold and our thoughts are emptied by the blindness the fog has caused. The wind don’t whistle, it roars when it isn’t stopped by anything but us. So here we stand! Here we stand looking around on the top of the world while the cold is biting us.
A cairn raise out of the fog’s embrace towards north as a silhuette in the grey. It raise as a finger pointing towards the night’s pitch-black sky, as it would direct us away from the bedrock below. To weak to exchange words nor looks we sit down together under the cairn, and crumb together to hide our faces from the frost cold wind. Without knowing we collapse on the ground while the frost takes up residence in our bodies and the snow lies in metre thick layers over us.
A cairn raise out of the fog’s embrace somewhere high up in the mountains.
