Perhaps a half-hour’s climb above them the ridge ended. It was not merely interrupted, as had been the case at the Fortress, but ended – for good – and beyond it the mountain soared up in what from below, seemed an absolutely perpendicular wall. Rudi tried to estimate its height, from its base, where the ridge stopped, to where its top, the shoulder proper, loomed like a white-rimmed battlement against the sky. Two hundred feed, it might be; or three hundred; foreshortening made it hard to tell. But height alone, steepness alone, did not matter. What mattered was that there be a way.
Banner in the Sky – a story I remember liking in my childhood, but I only remembered it in very general terms. This time around was nearly as reading it for the first time, but no doubt I had much better understanding of snow and ice and glacier and mountain ridges on this reading as compared to my first. It is a well told story of dreams, broken dreams, determination, and very hard choices.