From Cap de Hault to Frenchman’s Lease
Lies seven miles of moving ice,
A lady comes there once or twice a year
To view that precipice.
The glacier, that tortuously
Grinds along that deep moraine
Is known to all as ‘Adam’s Fault’,
And Eve despairs the bleak terrain.
Eve Grise de Mare du Montalban
The countess from her place of fame,
Who played coquettish with her fan
When first to Adam’s Fault she came.
Gervase and I both courted Eve
But she played him, and then played me,
The contest was uneven, for
Gervase was old nobility.
We both enjoyed a hearty climb
And took our contest to the ‘Fault’,
Who first would conquer Frenchman’s Lease
And reach the peak, should win it all;
The right to ask the lady’s hand,
To claim the prize of her by right,
The loser, then, would quit the scene,
Would disappear him, overnight.
The day was cold, a storm was due,
We set out with our picks and rope,
The ice was clear as rippled glass
As we ascended up the slope.
We’d made three of the seven miles
Before the storm burst over us,
Gervase was slightly in the lead
But stopped beside the Fault to rest.
The glacier was close beside
When I pulled up to shelter, then
A crevice, fifteen metres wide
Had opened up, quite close to him.
Gervase half turned, the blinding sleet
Reduced our vision down to naught,
He sought direction with his feet
And pitched head first into the Fault.
The depth seemed bottomless, I heard
Eventually, a distant thud,
Gervase had hit the glacier floor
And I was certain he was dead.
The storm, in one short hour had flown,
I turned and headed down again
To summon help, but he was gone;
I never saw Gervase again.
A year had passed, I asked my Eve
Her hand in marriage, and she wept;
I knew she loved Gervase, not me,
But he had gone… She would accept;
On one condition, that we two
Would journey back to Adam’s Fault
Each year, until the glacier
Delivered up its grisly vault.
I had agreed, for then I knew
How slow the glacial ice would flow,
To bring that body down the Fault
Might take a hundred years or so.
But warming of the planet’s face,
In recent years, increased its speed,
Though forty seven years had passed
Gervase would surface soon, indeed.
Last season, workers on the slopes
Had claimed to see a darkened shape
Deep in the ice at Cap de Hault,
But too deep to negotiate.
My mouth went dry, and I perspired
To think of that unholy hour
When Eve would see her love, Gervase
And set that love, again, on fire.
This year, I begged her not to go:
‘We’re getting old, too old for this,’
I pleaded, but her mouth was set:
‘We must be there for our Gervase!’
A week went by, and then the call:
‘A man lies underneath the ice,
We see him clear,’ the worker said,
‘He’s staring, looking up at us!’
So Eve and I walked up the slope
To see Gervase, entombed in ice,
He looked much as I’d left him there,
Eve sighed and wept: ‘My poor Gervase!’
‘He’s just a boy!’ she sobbed, and looked
Surprised he wasn’t old, like us,
The world had aged, and so had we
But he had travelled with less fuss.
And so I’m back, have locked our room
And left Eve to her love, Gervase,
I have a need to write my gloom
Before they take him from that place,
For when they pull that body free
From fifty years of shifting ice,
She’ll see what she’s not meant to see
Emerge from that old precipice.
For when they roll him from his bed
While Eve looks on, remembering,
I’ll long have left this place of dread,
One bullet, swift, dismembering,
Will leave no pain, no guilt behind
Unlike the corpse of her Gervase,
Unlike the ice pick in his spine…
The shock and horror, on her face!
David Lewis Paget
