The Mountain Hut

The forecast had promised clear skies until evening. By two in the afternoon the clouds had swallowed the ridge, and by three Ingrid could not see her own boots. She found the hut by luck more than skill: a squat stone shelter wedged under an overhang, its tin roof drumming in the wind.

Someone was already inside, coaxing a tiny gas stove to life.

'Join the club,' he said. 'I'm Rafa. There's soup, if you like lentils.'

She liked lentils very much at that moment. They ate sitting on the bench with their backs against the stone wall, wrapped in their sleeping bags, while the storm hurled hail at the single window. Rafa was a surveyor from Valencia, walking the high route alone to clear his head after a bad year. Ingrid was a nurse from Bergen doing the same thing for the same reason. They found this extremely funny.

The temperature dropped as the night went on. The stove ran out of gas at nine. They lay in the bunk room in separate sleeping bags, talking in the dark, until Ingrid admitted she could no longer feel her feet.

'We could zip the bags together,' Rafa said. 'Purely for survival.'

'Purely,' she agreed.

It was not purely for survival. Body heat, it turned out, was an excellent remedy for many things. They kept each other very warm until the wind dropped, a little before dawn.

In the morning the sky was blue and endless and the peaks gleamed with fresh snow. They walked the rest of the high route together. It took them two days longer than planned.