Ice Plunge Quotes

Not cry. Fly. “I can’t fly,” Bran said. “I can’t, I can’t…” How do you know? Have you ever tried? The voice was high and thin. Bran looked around to see where it was coming from. A crow was spiraling down with him, just out of touch, following him as he fell. “Help me,” he said. I’m trying, the crow replied… The crow took to the air and flapped around Bran’s hand. “You have wings,” Bran pointed out. Maybe you do too. Bran felt along his shoulders, groping for feathers. There are different kinds of wings, the crow said… Bran was falling faster than ever. The grey mists howled around him as he plunged toward the earth below. “What are you doing to me?” he asked the crow, tearful. Teaching you how to fly. “I can’t fly!” You’re flying right now. “I’m falling!” Every flight begins with a fall, the crow said. Look down.

Maybe loneliness is an acquired taste, or maybe it's like plunging your hand in ice water--it hurts like hell in the beginning, and then you go numb.

I saw her, once. “She passed through our village, through fields littered with dead soldiers after her forces overwhelmed the nation of Dumor. Her other Elites followed and then rows of white-robed Inquisitors, wielding the white-and-silver banners of the White Wolf. Where they went, the sky dimmed and the ground cracked—the clouds gathered behind the army as if a creature alive, black and churning in fury. As if the goddess of Death herself had come. “She paused to look down at one of our dying soldiers. He trembled on the ground, but his eyes stayed on her. He spat something at her. She only stared back at him. I don’t know what he saw in her expression, but his muscles tightened, his legs pushing against the dirt as he tried in vain to get away from her. Then the man started to scream. It is a sound I shall never forget as long as I live. She nodded to her Rainmaker, and he descended from his horse to plunge a sword through the dying soldier. Her face did not change at all. She simply rode on. “I never saw her again. But even now, as an old man, I remember her as clearly as if she were standing before me. She was ice personified. There was once a time when darkness shrouded the world, and the darkness had a queen.” —A witness’s account of Queen Adelina’s siege on the nation of Dumor The Village of Pon-de-Terre 28 Marzien, 1402

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.

Hope is a torturous thing. It wrenches one from despair just long enough to allow one to take a breath before plunging her back beneath the icy waters. If it wasn't for those breaths, it would be easy to let ice claim the soul. Easy to let surrender swallow the struggle. But hope - cruel mistress that she is - is not satisfied with so neat an ending. Like a house cat with a tiny prisoner, she wants only to torment the soul again, and again, until it dies from a burst heart.

Though I could agree with him that Miss Gamache had a good heart, I couldn't read her book without wanting to plunge an ice pick into it while screaming, 'That's for chapter four!

A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.

How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? - the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle - as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won't do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

Each of us plunges through our own existence, punching me-shaped holes through days, through weeks, through conversations. We're none of us one thing or the other; we're legion. There's a different Yaz inside your skull for everyday of your life. We deceive others. We deceive ourselves. We keep secrets that even we don't know and hold beliefs we don't understand. And in that state of profound, fundamental, primal ignorance, we still think we can sculpt the clay of our own selves. We think we know what to cut away, that we understand the consequences of excising greed.

Yet even so, Jon Snow was not sorry he had come. There were wonders here as well. He had seen sunlight flashing on icy thin waterfalls as they plunged over the lips of sheer stone cliffs, and a mountain meadow full of autumn wildflowers, blue coldsnaps and bright scarlet frostfires and stands of piper's grass in russet and gold. He had peered down ravines so deep and black they seemed certain to end in some hell, and he had ridden his garron over a wind-eaten bridge of natural stone with nothing but sky to either side. Eagles nested in the heights and came down to hunt the valleys, circling effortlessly on great blue-grey wings that seemed almost part of the sky.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? I change my physiology. If I am near waves, I go surf them. If not, a short, intense kettlebell workout, a bike ride, a swim, a cold shower or ice plunge, Wim Hof or heart rate variability breathing [see Adam Robinson, for a description]. It’s remarkable how the mind follows the body.

That night's dream: a narrow column of dark liquid in a tall glass; a blue-black waterspout plunging from the sky; a swirl of black-fruit icing piped over a pastry hot from the oven; a long, feminine finger laid over lips; a torrent of whispers that that finger cannot hush.

Weather My folder of poems labeled “weather” holds no clues as to whether or not there’ll be any weather to count on, say, a hard rain like “little nails," or that deluge “plunging radiant” now that we’ve plunged into war and wars don’t stop like rain stops like that last slow drizzle onto the old tin bathroom vent sweet hint of growth in the soft wet drift north fire or ice, fire or ice are you breathing, are you lucky enough to be breathing

She raised the dagger and plunged it into Cath’s chest. Catherine gasped, and though there were screams in the courtroom, she barely heard them over the cackle of the Three Sisters. Cold seeped into her from the blade, colder than anything she had ever known. It leached into her veins, crackling like winter ice on a frozen lake. It was so cold it burned. Lacie pulled out the blade. A beating heart was skewered on its tip. It was broken, cut almost clean in half by a blackened fissure that was filled with dust and ash. “It has been bought and paid for,” said the Sister. Then she yipped and launched herself back to the courtroom floor. She was joined by her sisters, cackling and crowding around the Queen’s heart. A moment later, a Fox, a Raccoon, and an Owl were skittering out the door, leaving behind the echo of victorious laughter. CHAPTER 54 CATH STARED AT THE DOORS still thrust wide open, her body both frozen and burning, her chest a hollow cavity. Empty and numb. She no longer hurt. That broken heart had been killing her, and it was gone. Her sorrow. Her loss. Her pain, all gone. All that was left was the rage and the fury and the desperate need for vengeance that would soon, soon be hers.

Then I take a dump. Feel better. Take off my clothes and step into the pool. Ice water. But great. I walk along toward the deep end of the pool, the water rising inch by inch, chilling me. Then I plunge below the water. It's restful. The world doesn't know where I am. I come up, swim to the far edge, find the ledge, sit there. It must be about the 9th or 10th race. The horses are still running. I plunge again into the water, being aware of my stupid whiteness, of my age hanging onto me like a leech. Still, it's OK. I should have been dead 40 years ago. I rise to the top, swim to the far edge, get out.

Kissing her mouth, I plunged deep inside of her. I shivered and it had nothing to do with the cool breeze coming through the windows. Her body was made for me. Perfect. And I wanted this moment to last forever.

One thing he shared with the singing bird was a love of rain and especially of storms. He always felt a deep thrill of awe when the pale sapphire cloaks of sky were flung aside and dark raging heavens roared and plunged and cast fire and water and ice upon the earth. Something

Since the sheets were half-flown the sails instantly split at the seams, the maintopsail shaking so furiously that the masthead must have gone had not Mowett, the bosun, Bonden, Warley the captain of the maintop and three of his men gone aloft, laid out on the ice-coated yard and cut the sail away close to the reefs. Warley was on the lee yardarm when the footrope gave way under him and he fell, plunging far clear of the side and instantly vanishing in the terrible sea.

I thought I was hurt in my pride only, forgetting that, when you plunge your hand in freezing water, you feel a bangle of ice round your wrist before the whole hand goes numb.

Winter Landscape, with Rocks Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone, plunges headlong into that black pond where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind which hungers to haul the white reflection down. The austere sun descends above the fen, an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look longer on this landscape of chagrin; feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook, brooding as the winter night comes on. Last summer's reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart's waste grow green again? Who'd walk in this bleak place? Sylvia Plath was one of the first and best of the modern confessional poets. She won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for her Collected Poems after committing suicide at the age of 31, something she seemed to have been predicting in her writing and practicing for in real life.

Howard had a pine display case, fastened by fake leather straps and stained to look like walnut. Inside, on fake velvet, were cheap gold-plated earrings and pendants of semiprecious stones. He opened this case for haggard country wives when their husbands were off chopping trees or reaping the back acres. He showed them the same half-dozen pieces every year the last time he came around, when he thought, This is the season - preserving done, woodpile high, north wind up and getting cold, night showing up earlier every day, dark and ice pressing down from the north, down on the raw wood of their cabins, on the rough-cut rafters that sag and sometimes snap from the weight of the dark and the ice, burying families in their sleep, the dark and the ice and sometimes the red in the sky through trees: the heartbreak of a cold sun. He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it. You could never do it. So buy the gold, warm it with your skin, slip it onto your lap when you are sitting by the fire and all you will otherwise have to look at is your splintery husband gumming chew or the craquelure of your own chapped hands.

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person—he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void— he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.

Cold thermogenesis is a type of cold therapy that uses cold temperatures to create heat in your body. Different types of cold therapies have been around for ages. The ancient Romans took plunges in “frigidarium baths” (large cold pools) and the Norse cracked open icy lakes for a winter swim. Even applying ice to sore muscles is a form of cold therapy. So is finishing your shower with thirty seconds of cold water!

He said on the front step of the Potter house. weeping and cradling his dead wife in his arms. He was still two years from the drunken plunge through the ice of Castle Lake which would kill him, but he was at the end of the last sober day of his life.

It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth’s tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confronted with a fluctuating and unpredictable climate, ‘the last thing you’d want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it’. It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might actually be induced by a rise in temperatures. The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates and increase cloud cover, leading in the higher latitudes to more persistent accumulations of snow. In fact, global warming could plausibly, if paradoxically, lead to powerful localized cooling in North America and northern Europe.

Johann learned what sort of creature he was by accident. One day he slipped on a patch of ice. His ankle turned in the wrong direction and plunged him off a roof like a crow with a clipped wing. The ground swallowed him up, and the crunch of his neck against rock reverberated through every joint in his spine. It shuddered through his limbs and popped out the tips of his fingers and toes, a tiny earthquake that made ruin of his bones. He lay absolutely still for ten minutes, and then he stood up and wrenched his skull back into place. “Well,” he said aloud. “That was fucked up.

Since 1969, more than 30,000 specimens of stone from outer space that have survived their headlong plunge through the earth’s atmosphere have been recovered from the southern continent. One of them, retrieved in 2003, has been proven, thanks to a remarkable analysis by spectrograph, to have once been part of the planet Mars.

I said with men, and with the thoughts of men, I held but slight communion; but instead, My joy was in the wilderness—to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top, Where the birds dare not build—nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river-stream, or Ocean, in their flow. In these my early strength exulted; or To follow through the night the moving moon, The stars and their development; or catch The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim; Or to look, list'ning, on the scattered leaves, While Autumn winds were at their evening song. These were my pastimes, and to be alone... [...]

Returning from a hunting trip, Orde-Lees, traveling on skis across the rotting surface of the ice, had just about reached camp when an evil, knoblike head burst out of the water just in front of him. He turned and fled, pushing as hard as he could with his ski poles and shouting for Wild to bring his rifle. The animal—a sea leopard—sprang out of the water and came after him, bounding across the ice with the peculiar rocking-horse gait of a seal on land. The beast looked like a small dinosaur, with a long, serpentine neck. After a half-dozen leaps, the sea leopard had almost caught up with Orde-Lees when it unaccountably wheeled and plunged again into the water. By then, Orde-Lees had nearly reached the opposite side of the floe; he was about to cross to safe ice when the sea leopard’s head exploded out of the water directly ahead of him. The animal had tracked his shadow across the ice. It made a savage lunge for Orde-Lees with its mouth open, revealing an enormous array of sawlike teeth. Orde-Lees’ shouts for help rose to screams and he turned and raced away from his attacker. The animal leaped out of the water again in pursuit just as Wild arrived with his rifle. The sea leopard spotted Wild, and turned to attack him. Wild dropped to one knee and fired again and again at the onrushing beast. It was less than 30 feet away when it finally dropped. Two dog teams were required to bring the carcass into camp. It measured 12 feet long, and they estimated its weight at about 1,100 pounds. It was a predatory species of seal, and resembled a leopard only in its spotted coat—and its disposition. When it was butchered, balls of hair 2 and 3 inches in diameter were found in its stomach—the remains of crabeater seals it had eaten. The sea leopard’s jawbone, which measured nearly 9 inches across, was given to Orde-Lees as a souvenir of his encounter. In his diary that night, Worsley observed: “A man on foot in soft, deep snow and unarmed would not have a chance against such an animal as they almost bound along with a rearing, undulating motion at least five miles an hour. They attack without provocation, looking on man as a penguin or seal.

What an understatement to call aura reading fun! As if it weren’t fascinating enough to plunge into the auric effects of the Beatles, Chanel No. 5, and your favorite flavor of ice cream, imagine what happens when you can read auras of your family and friends. Auras reveal juicy stuff about what is really going on with people in areas like love and communication.

Walking alone in the dark early the next morning, New Year's Day, the coming year stretched out like a bleak and endless highway, leading nowhere.... Having held on for months, thinking that that if only we can get through to the new year, now I felt plunged into black ice, in danger of drowning.... Suddenly I understood our friends' concern. Could this be what precedes some kind of breakdown--a sudden shift to feel oblivion as temptation, even as seduction?

Miss Foley had first noticed, some years ago, that her house was crowded with bright shadows of herself. Best, then, to ignore the cold sheets of December ice in the hall, above the bureaus, in the bath. Best skate the thin ice, lightly. Paused, the weight of your attention might crack the shell. Plunged through the crust, you might drown in depths so cold, so remote, that all the Past lay carved in tombstone marbles there. Ice water would syringe your veins.

Miss Foley had first noticed, some years ago, that her house was crowded with bright shadows of herself. Best, then, to ignore the cold sheets of December ice in the hall, above the bureaus, in the bath. Best skate the thin ice, lightly. Paused, the weight of your attention might crack the shell. Plunged through the crust, you might drown in depths so cold, so remote, that all the Past lay carved in tombstone marbles there. Ice water would syringe your veins. Transfixed at the mirror sill, you would stand forever, unable to lift your gaze from the proofs of Time.

shiver at the memory. Jesus, I’m getting hard again. It’s like I can’t get enough of this guy. “Turned you on, huh?” I drawl. “Oh yeah.” He nudges his cockhead forward, and I open my mouth, letting him slide inside. My hands drift around his body to cup his ass. I squeeze and he groans again, pushing in a bit deeper. With my hands occupied, it’s hard to control how much of him I take, but he’s not a jerk about it. He doesn’t plunge deep and force any deep-throat action on me. He seems to sense my limits, the same way he senses shit on the ice—when to pass the puck, when to take his time until that perfect opening reveals itself so he can slap one in.

We had proceeded but a few days, coasting the crushing capes of rock that every where seemed to run out in a diablerie of tusks and horns to drive us from the region that they warded, now cruising through a runlet of blue water just wide enough for our keel, with silver reaches of frost stretching away into a ghastly horizon—now plunging upon tossing seas, tho sun wheeling round and round, and never sinking from the strange, weird sky above us, when again to our look-out a glimmer in the low horizon told its awful tale—a sort of smoky lustre like that which might ascend from an army of spirits—the fierce and fatal spirits tented on the terrible field of the ice-floe.

The golden age of childhood can be quite accurately fixed in time and place [he wrote in Morning and Noon, a volume of early reminiscences]. It reached its apex in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, before the plunge into a motor age and city life swept away the freedom of children and dogs, put them both on leashes and made them the organized prisoners of an adult world. . . . No one was run over. No one was kidnapped. No one had teeth straightened. No one worried about children, except occasionally my mother, when she saw us riding on the back step of the ice wagon and believed, fleetingly, that one of the great blocks of Pamecha Pond ice would fall on us. But none ever did.

It was on one of these walks that Kicky performed his famous rescue act for which afterwards he was unmercifully teased by his family. The whole crowd of them had been for the usual Sunday walk, Kicky, Pem, and the children, and were returning home by the White Stone Pond. It was winter, and the ice frozen upon it about an inch thick, and as they came to the pond they noticed a mob of people shouting and pointing to the centre, where a miserable dog was slowly drowning, the ice having given way beneath him. Nobody was making the slightest attempt to save the wretched animal. Kicky, short-sighted without his glasses, was only aware that a dog was in difficulties in the water—he could not even see the ice. Stripping himself dramatically of his coat, his eyes flashing, he ran a few paces back and then took an enormous header on to a thin layer of ice that barely covered two foot of water. It was a tremendous sight! Cheered and applauded by the crowd, he plunged to the centre of the pond (still only three foot deep) and rescued the yelping dog, which covered his face with licks of gratitude.

FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS NEVER! By the time the kidnapped turquoise-and-chrome car overturns--turns and turns and turns!--in a snow-drifted field north of Tydeman's Corners Legs Sadovsky will have driven eleven miles from Eddy's Smoke Shop on Fairfax Avenue, six wild miles with the Highway Patrol cop in pursuit bearing up swiftly when the highway is clear and the girls are hysterical with excitement squealing and clutching one another thrown from side to side as Legs grimaces sighting the bridge ahead, it's one of those old-fashioned nightmare bridges with a steep narrow ramp, narrow floor made of planks but there's no time for hesitation Legs isn't going to use the brakes, she's shrewd, reasoning too that the cop will have to slow down, the fucker'll be cautious thus she'll have several seconds advantage won't she?--several seconds can make quite a difference in a contest like this so the Buick's rushing up the ramp, onto the bridge, the front wheels strike and spin and seem at first to be lifting in decorous surprise Oh! oh but astonishingly the car holds, it's a heavy machine of power that seems almost intelligent until flying off the bridge hitting a patch of slick part-melted ice the car swerves, now the rear wheels appear to be lifting, there's a moment when all effort ceases, all gravity ceases, the Buick a vessel of screams as it lifts, floats, it's being flung into space how weightless! Maddy's eyes are open now, she'll remember all her life this Now, now how without consequence! as the car hits the earth again, yet rebounds as if still weightless, turning, spinning, a machine bearing flesh, bones, girls' breaths plunging and sliding and rolling and skittering like a giant hard-shelled insect on its back, now righting itself again, now again on its back, crunching hard, snow shooting through the broken windows and the roof collapsing inward as if crushed by a giant hand upside-down and the motor still gunning as if it's frantic to escape, they're buried in a cocoon of bluish white and there's a sound of whimpering, panting,sobbing, a dog's puppyish yipping and a strong smell of urine and Legs is crying breathlessly half in anger half in exultation, caught there behind the wheel unable to turn, to look around, to see, "Nobody's dead--right?" Nobody's dead.

I brushed my teeth like a crazed lunatic as I examined myself in the mirror. Why couldn’t I look the women in commercials who wake up in a bed with ironed sheets and a dewy complexion with their hair perfectly tousled? I wasn’t fit for human eyes, let alone the piercing eyes of the sexy, magnetic Marlboro Man, who by now was walking up the stairs to my bedroom. I could hear the clomping of his boots. The boots were in my bedroom by now, and so was the gravelly voice attached to them. “Hey,” I heard him say. I patted an ice-cold washcloth on my face and said ten Hail Marys, incredulous that I would yet again find myself trapped in the prison of a bathroom with Marlboro Man, my cowboy love, on the other side of the door. What in the world was he doing there? Didn’t he have some cows to wrangle? Some fence to fix? It was broad daylight; didn’t he have a ranch to run? I needed to speak to him about his work ethic. “Oh, hello,” I responded through the door, ransacking the hamper in my bathroom for something, anything better than the sacrilege that adorned my body. Didn’t I have any respect for myself? I heard Marlboro Man laugh quietly. “What’re you doing in there?” I found my favorite pair of faded, soft jeans. “Hiding,” I replied, stepping into them and buttoning the waist. “Well, c’mere,” he said softly. My jeans were damp from sitting in the hamper next to a wet washcloth for two days, and the best top I could find was a cardinal and gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt from my ‘SC days. It wasn’t dingy, and it didn’t smell. That was the best I could do at the time. Oh, how far I’d fallen from the black heels and glitz of Los Angeles. Accepting defeat, I shrugged and swung open the door. He was standing there, smiling. His impish grin jumped out and grabbed me, as it always did. “Well, good morning!” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist. His lips settled on my neck. I was glad I’d spritzed myself with Giorgio. “Good morning,” I whispered back, a slight edge to my voice. Equal parts embarrassed at my puffy eyes and at the fact that I’d slept so late that day, I kept hugging him tightly, hoping against hope he’d never let go and never back up enough to get a good, long look at me. Maybe if we just stood there for fifty years or so, wrinkles would eventually shield my puffiness. “So,” Marlboro Man said. “What have you been doing all day?” I hesitated for a moment, then launched into a full-scale monologue. “Well, of course I had my usual twenty-mile run, then I went on a hike and then I read The Iliad. Twice. You don’t even want to know the rest. It’ll make you tired just hearing about it.” “Uh-huh,” he said, his blue-green eyes fixed on mine. I melted in his arms once again. It happened any time, every time, he held me. He kissed me, despite my gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt. My eyes were closed, and I was in a black hole, a vortex of romance, existing in something other than a human body. I floated on vapors. Marlboro Man whispered in my ear, “So…,” and his grip around my waist tightened. And then, in an instant, I plunged back to earth, back to my bedroom, and landed with a loud thud on the floor. “R-R-R-R-Ree?” A thundering voice entered the room. It was my brother Mike. And he was barreling toward Marlboro Man and me, his arms outstretched. “Hey!” Mike yelled. “W-w-w-what are you guys doin’?” And before either of us knew it, Mike’s arms were around us both, holding us in a great big bear hug. “Well, hi, Mike,” Marlboro Man said, clearly trying to reconcile the fact that my adult brother had his arms around him. It wasn’t awkward for me; it was just annoying. Mike had interrupted our moment. He was always doing that.

It often happens that the pleasure that everyone takes in recalling his store of remembered scenes is more intense, for example, in those who on the one hand are prevented by the tyranny of physical illness and the hope of a cure from seeking in nature pictures which resemble their memories, but on the other can still hope that they will soon be able to do so, so that their attitude toward these scenes remains one of desire, of appetite, and they do not consider them simply as scenes, as pictures. But even if they could have remained mere pictures for me; if, recalling them, I could simply have gazed upon them, they still immediately recreated in me, in my whole being, by the power of an identical sensation, the child, the adolescent who had first seen them. It was not just the weather outside that had changed, or the smells in my room, but inside me there was a change of age, the replacement of one person by another. The smell of the twigs in the icy air was like a piece of the past, an invisible ice-floe broken off from a distant winter and floating into my room, striated here and there with a perfume or a light as if by different years into which I found myself plunged once again, swept away even before I had recognized them by the light-heartedness of hopes long since abandoned.

Her hands found the button of his jeans, and then glided his zipper down. She wasted no time in seizing his cock with her hand, stroking him up and down as he pulled down his pants, then his boxers. He stopped her only so he could sheathe himself. And when he looked back up, she'd removed her robe, which fell around her in waves like drizzled icing. As he did, she began to guide his cock to her entrance, stroking her clit with the tip of him. He was already so fucking hard, and he hadn't even sunk into her yet. "Ready?" she breathed into his ear. He nodded, and his hands found her hips. His fingertips dug into her as he eased himself inside her, so slowly he could barely breathe, and they both moaned as she cradled him with her pussy. She braced her hands against the table as he slid further, burying himself deep inside her. Fuck. How did Nina feel so good? They both paused, him filling her. She stretched and tightened against him. He hadn't even begun to fuck her the way he planned to, but she already felt better than anything he could've imagined. He rocked into her, hitting her core deeper, and her head rolled back as a moan escaped. She fit around him in such a silky way that he already knew he'd want every waking moment to be inside her. She moved back and forth on his dick, his hands steadying her hips. He wanted to make sure that every time he pumped into her, she felt all of him. He was going to delve into her so deeply that she'd have no other choice but to come all over him. He needed to feel her heat pulsing against him. Her breathing quickened, and she said, "I need you." All he wanted was to hear this woman moan so loudly that he'd be able to hear it whenever he closed his eyes. So when he slid his cock back inside her, he made sure to push until he was all the way in. She arched her back in response, and he slowly pulled out, then pumped back in. Their moans, their thighs meeting and the slap of his balls against her ass were the only sounds in the room. He reached toward her heavy breasts and pinched one nipple tightly as he continued to fill her. "I'm..." She couldn't get the words out, but he knew what she was trying to say. She was going to come. He moved the hand that pinched her nipple down to her clit and gently rubbed. "I'm almost there," she said. He grunted in approval and pushed into her slower, bringing his length almost fully out, then plunging back in. She tightened around him. As her groans reached a crescendo, he knew he was going to erupt as well. He thrust hard and deep until his aching cock came.

In one of our conversations, she told me about Finland’s development of sisu, a rough cognate for grit. Etymologically, sisu denotes a person’s viscera, their “intestines (sisucunda).” It is defined as “having guts,” intentional, stoic, constant bravery in the face of adversity. 21 For Finns, sisu is a part of national culture, forged through their history of war with Russia and required by the harsh climate. 22 In this Nordic country, pride is equated with endurance. When Finnish mountain climber Veikka Gustafsson ascended a peak in Antarctica, it was named Mount Sisu. The fortitude to withstand war and foreign occupations is lyrically heralded in the Finnish epic poem, The Kalevala. 23 Even the saunas—two million, one for every three Finns in a country of approximately five and a half million—involve fortitude: A sauna roast is often followed by a nude plunge into the ice-cold Baltic Sea. If Iceland is happier than it has any right to be considering the hours the country spends plunged in darkness each year, Finland’s past circumstances, climate, and developed culture have turned it into one of the grittiest. Finland’s educational system is also currently ranked first, ahead of South Korea, now at number two. 24 The United States is midway down the list. 25 In Finland, there is no after-school tutoring or training, no “miracle pedagogy” in the classrooms, where students are on a first-name basis with their teachers, all of whom have master’s degrees. There is also more “creative play.” 26 Perhaps the tradition of sisu and play, I suspect, are part of the larger, unstated reason for its success. 27 “Wouldn’t it be great if you heard people talking about how they were going to do something to build their grit?” Duckworth asked.

And then she says, “I feel all these footsteps come loose from the stairs and move forward in the void, then plunge… a crowd falling…” And she digs in her heels. I look through the spaces between the iron steps at the colorless flow of the river down below, transporting chunks of ice like white clouds. In a distress that lasts an instant, I seem to be feeling what she feels: that every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one, opens into another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss.

the Mediterranean region’s climate started to warm and become wetter starting 18,000 years ago, archaeological sites become more numerous and widespread, creeping into areas now occupied by the desert. The culmination of this population boom was a period called the Natufian, dated to between 14,700 and 11,600 years ago.7 The early Natufian was a sort of golden era of hunting and gathering. Thanks to a benevolent climate and many natural resources, the Natufians were fabulously wealthy by the standards of most hunter-gatherers. They lived by harvesting the abundant wild cereals that naturally grow in this region, and they also hunted animals, especially gazelle. The Natufians evidently had so much to eat that they were able to settle permanently in large villages, with as many as 100 to 150 people, building small houses with stone foundations. They also made beautiful art objects, such as bead necklaces and bracelets and carved figurines, they exchanged with distant groups for exotic shells, and they buried their dead in elaborate graves. If there ever was a Garden of Eden for hunter-gatherers, this must have been it. But then crisis struck 12,800 years ago. All of a sudden, the world’s climate deteriorated abruptly, perhaps because an enormous glacial lake in North America emptied suddenly into the Atlantic, temporarily disrupting the Gulf Stream and wreaking havoc with global weather patterns.8 This event, called the Younger Dryas,9 effectively plunged the world back into Ice Age conditions for hundreds of years. Imagine

Peeling a tomato: Plunge a tomato into 2 cups of boiling water, leaving it submerged for 1 minute. Meanwhile get a bowl of ice water ready. After 1 minute has passed, place the tomato into the ice water. Leave for another minute. The skin should be easy to take off.

She felt as if her life had been built on a sheet of ice as thin as paper, and now the ice was beginning to crack, threatening to plunge her into the icy darkness below.

Lotus Cloud wakes up, hops happily from bed, plunges her head into a pail of ice cold water, bellows "eeeeaaaaAAAARRRRGGGGHH!", runs a comb through her hair, looks around to see if there is anyone handy who feels like making love, hops back into bed if that is the case or into some clothes if it is not. Then she dives out the door - or window, it doesn't matter - to see what wonders the new day will bring, and since Lotus Cloud views the world with the delighted eyes of a child everything is equally marvelous.

Jean-Rose told me today that someday my social cache will be built upon how few wrinkles I have on my face. She gave me a bar of Pears glycerin soap to wash my face with, prescribed ice-water plunges to keep my skin firm, and handed me a jar of Pond's Cold Cream to apply before bed each night.

It was an amazing vision. Few stretches of Central Europe have been the theatre for so much history. Beyond which watershed lay the pass where Hannibal's elephants had slithered downhill? Only a few miles away, the frontier of the Roman Empire had begun. Deep in those mythical forests that the river reflected for many days' march, the German tribes, Rome's Nemesis, had waited for their hour to strike. The Roman limes followed the river's southern bank all the way to the Black Sea. The same valley, functioning in reverse, funneled half the barbarians of Asia into Central Europe and just below my eyrie, heading upstream, the Huns entered and left again before swimming their ponies across the Rhine - or trotting them over the ice - until, foiled by a miracle, they drew rein a little short of Paris. Charlemagne stalked across the corner of his empire to destroy the Avars in Pannonia and a few leagues southwest, the ruins of Hohenstaufen, home of the family that plunged Emperors and Popes into centuries of vendetta, crumbled still.

Where the white sea dragon moved, black blood sprayed. And just when the soldiers mastered their terror enough to launch arrows and spears at the opalescent scales enforced with Spidersilk, she twisted and flipped back into the deep river, vanishing beneath the ice. Spears plunged into the turquoise waters, missing their mark, but Lysandra was already racing past.

Then, I asked her, “Do you have any new letters from Zeryth? About Threll?” Willa’s silence plunged my heart into ice water. “He says that things are a bit…” Her voice trailed off, the musicality flat. “Things are a bit complicated there.” My fingers tightened around the bedsheets. “Complicated?” “I suppose with that Lord dead, there’s been some struggles…” Willa coughed. I wanted to yank the words from her. “But it’s just a period of change. Things will calm down.” I did not trust myself to open my mouth.

HOW TO BE COOL Swim. Most swimming pools are quite a bit cooler than the body; lakes and oceans definitely are. Incorporate swimming into your regular exercise regimen. Do a polar bear plunge. Many cities have cold water swim clubs; look one up and join it. Cold water plunges are more fun with other people. Visit the baths. Russian, Turkish, or Korean, proper baths have cold plunges. Some gyms have cold plunges too—if they don’t, a cold shower will do. Take cold showers. If it’s too intense to start cold, then start warm and gradually turn it colder. It helps you wake up, too. Build a cold plunge. Fill a bathtub or large plastic tub with cool water. Add ice. Enjoy. Turn down the thermostat. Let the air be a touch cold rather than a touch hot. Others can choose to wear extra clothing if desired. This also improves alertness and saves money. Exercise outdoors. Whatever the activity, do it outside. With gloves and a hat you can wear only a t-shirt, even in winter.

The Great Oxygenation Event was contemporaneous with one of the most severe ice ages this world has ever known, an event known to geo-nerds as the Paleoproterozoic Snowball Earth episode.* This was probably no coincidence. At the time, Earth’s climate was likely being kept above freezing by a methane greenhouse. Methane is such a powerful infrared absorber that a very small amount of it can significantly warm a planet. It is also, however, an organic molecule that is easily and eagerly consumed by oxygen. So when all that oxygen released by the cyanobacteria built up in the atmosphere, it quickly destroyed the methane greenhouse, the atmosphere suddenly became more transparent to infrared radiation, and the temperature plummeted, plunging our planet into a complete global freeze. Such a deeply frozen condition could even potentially become a permanent dead-end state for a planet like Earth.

Groups of people who shared painful experiences, such as plunging their hands into ice water, were more tightly bonded and cooperative than other groups, according to a recent series of experiments.

Pragmatist William James put the matter with characteristic realism: Atheists are like people who live on a frozen lake surrounded by cliffs that offer no means of escape. They know that the ice is melting and the inevitable day is coming when they must plunge ignominiously into the water. This prospect is as meaningless as it is horrifying. The Christian too must endure the chill and the inevitability of death, but his faith enables him to endure them much better. When it comes to suffering, James writes, “Religion makes easy and felicitous what is in any case necessary.” When it comes to death, he adds, Christianity offers at least the prospect of the afterlife and the chance of salvation. “No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of chance makes the difference . . . between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.”7

The caresses made Katie shiver as if she’d been plunged into ice water,

These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath. [....] The ice cracks beneath him.

He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband’s boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it. You could never do it. So buy the gold, warm it with your skin, slip it onto your lap when you are sitting by the fire and all you will otherwise have to look at is your splintery husband gumming chew or the craquelure of your own chapped hands.

He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband’s boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it. You could never do it. So buy the gold, warm it with your skin, slip it onto your lap when you are sitting by the fire and all you will otherwise have to look at is your splintery husband gumming chew or the

Her world was lonely and silent. Now that there was open water, there was no longer the crash of the ice pack, the long, low grind of the floes churning against one another, the deep and sudden splash of water as masses of the pack broke off and plunged into the sea, or the staccato burst like rifle shots that echoed across the island as the ice expanded. There was only the sound of her own voice as she spoke to Vic. She fussed over the cat like a mother and picked up and held her in her arms and talked to her like she had talked to Crawford and the others. Vic was a warm, breathing creature, who responded in purrs and rubs and an occasional meow. Ada thought she would go insane without her.

He walked out onto the frozen lake—cautiously, at first, but when he found that the icy surface seemed solid, he walked and slid ahead more quickly, until he reached a point where he could no longer make out the lakeshore through the night around him. Now he was surrounded on all sides by smooth ice. This distanced him somewhat from earthly complexity and chaos, and by imagining that the icy plane extended infinitely in every direction, he obtained a simple, flat world; a cold, planar mental platform. Cares vanished, and soon his perception reentered that state of rest, where the stars were waiting for him.... Then, with a crunch, the ice beneath Luo Ji’s feet broke and his body plunged straight into the water. At the precise instant the icy water covered Luo Ji’s head, he saw the stillness of the stars shatter. The starfield curled up into a vortex and scattered into turbulent, chaotic waves of silver. The biting cold, like crystal lightning, shot into the fog of his consciousness, illuminating everything. He continued to sink. The turbulent stars overhead shrank into a fuzzy halo at the break in the ice above his head, leaving nothing but cold and inky blackness surrounding him, as if he wasn’t sinking into ice water, but had jumped into the blackness of space. In the dead, lonely, cold blackness, he saw the truth of the universe.

Chivalrous or not, there was no denying that of the 1,667 men on board, only 338, or 20.27 percent, had survived as compared with a 74.35 percent survival rate for the 425 women. On April 21 the bodies of the Titanic’s victims began to be pulled out of the north Atlantic by the Mackay-Bennett, a cable ship that had been sent out from Halifax with a hundred tons of ice and 125 coffins on board. The Mackay-Bennett’s captain described the scene as resembling “a flock of sea gulls resting on the water.… All we could see at first would be the top of the life preservers. They were all floating face upwards, apparently standing in the water.” John Jacob Astor’s body was found floating with arms outstretched, his gold pocket watch dangling from its platinum chain. To the ship’s undertaker it looked as if Astor had just glanced at his watch before he took the plunge. It is often written that Astor’s body was found mangled and soot-covered and that he must therefore have been crushed when the forward funnel came down. Yet according to three eyewitnesses, Astor’s body was in good condition and soot-free, and like most of the other floating victims, he appeared to have died of hypothermia. On April 25 the body of the Buffalo architect Edward Kent was recovered. In the pocket of his gray overcoat was the silver flask and ivory miniature given to him by Helen Candee on the grand staircase, and these were later returned to her by Kent’s sister. Frank Millet’s body was found on the same day and identified by the initials F. D. M. on his gold watch. The next evening the Mackay-Bennett left for Halifax with 190 bodies on board, another 116 having been buried at sea. A second ship, the Minia, had arrived on the scene, but after a week’s search it retrieved only seventeen bodies, and two other ships would find only an additional five. The Mackay-Bennett landed in Halifax on April 30 to the tolling of church bells and flags flying at half-staff. Horse-drawn hearses took the bodies from the dock to a temporary morgue set up in a curling rink.

Our valiant little torch couldn’t withstand this and finally went out, plunging us into darkness. Hard pellets lashed my exposed face and hands. It was ice…hail. Oh, hail no! I thought, although I didn’t think anyone would have appreciated the wordplay

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things. OLIVIA VANDERGRIFF SNOW IS THIGH-HIGH and the going slow. She plunges through drifts like a pack animal, Olivia Vandergriff, back to the boardinghouse on the edge of campus. Her last session ever of Linear Regression and Time Series Models has finally ended. The carillon on the quad peals five, but this close to the solstice, blackness closes around Olivia like midnight. Breath crusts her upper lip. She sucks it back in, and ice crystals coat her pharynx. The cold drives a metal filament up her nose. She could die out here, for real, five blocks from home. The novelty thrills her. December of senior year. The semester so close to over. She might stumble now, fall face-first, and still roll across the finish line. What’s left? A short-answer exam on survival analysis. Final paper in Intermediate Macroeconomics. Hundred and ten slide IDs in Masterpieces of World Art, her blow-off elective. Ten

Well then,” I said, “let’s get beyond the gossip and into the heart of the matter, the nub of the mystery. None of your disciples, from Marc Andreessen to Nick Szabo—has fully explained it. They prefer to talk of the ‘Byzantine Generals’ problem” or the double-spending conundrum or remembered lessons and lemmas from computer science classes. Even, if I may say so—my time with you being limited—even you yourself. You fail to illuminate the inner sanctums of your system.” “The ‘inner sanctums’? Bitcoin is a currency and a payment network, not a religion. What do you mean by ‘sanctums’?” “I mean the place or the process—I don’t know which—where your empty bits become valuable coins. Where and how does the transubstantiation occur? Is it in the ‘mine’? Or in the ‘mint’? How does it happen? Alchemy? Magic? Hope and change? Overclock your CPUs and GPUs, plunge them into the ice of liquid nitrogen, and prove your useless work? Then you just may win some chump change of coins that don’t even clink or tinkle?” I have to admit today that the chump change has been piling up.

Each of us plunges through our own existence, punching me-shaped holes through days, through weeks, through conversations. We’re none of us one thing or the other; we’re legion; there’s a different Yaz inside your skull for every day of your life. We deceive others, we deceive ourselves, we keep secrets that even we don’t know and hold beliefs we don’t understand. And in that state of profound, fundamental, primal ignorance we still think we can sculpt the clay of our own selves, we think we know what to cut away, that we understand the consequences of excising greed.

During the ice age around 425,000 years ago (five ice ages before the most recent glaciation) a vast lake of water became trapped between the Scottish and Scandinavian ice sheets and the 30-kilometre-wide ridge of rock then still linking England and France. This lake was filled with meltwater from the ice sheets as well as the discharge from rivers like the Thames and Rhine. And with no outlet to escape through, the water rose and rose, until inevitably it began to spill over the top of the land bridge. These colossal waterfalls scooped out vast plunge pools on the channel floor and gouged backwards through the barrier until this natural dam collapsed. The entire trapped lake emptied itself as a catastrophic megaflood, widening the gaping breach in the barrier and carving the landforms on the floor of the Channel we can see with sonar today. This first megaflood 425,000 years ago

Around 12,800 years ago, it was as though an enchantment of ice had gripped the earth. In many areas that had been approaching terminal meltdown full glacial conditions were restored with breathtaking rapidity and all the gains that had been made since the LGM were simply stripped away: 'Temperatures ... fell back on the order of 8-15 degrees centigrade ... with half this brutal decline possibly occurring within decades. The Polar Front in the North Atlantic redescended to the level of Cabo Finisterre in northwest Spain and glaciers readvanced in the high mountain chains. With respect to temperature the setback to full glacial conditions was nearly complete ...' For human populations at the time, in many except the most accidentally favoured parts of the world, the sudden and inexplicable plunge into severe cold and aridity must have been devastating. And in the Karakoram-Himalayan region, as in other glaciated areas, it is very likely that it was accompanied by a significant readvance of the ice-cap that previously had been in recession for some 7000 years.

But as we all began to move, we heard that throaty rumble come surging up the mountain. Suddenly, the blizzard detonated all around us. It crescendoed into a deafening roar. A thick wall of clouds boiled across the South Col, wrapping us in white, blotting out every discernible feature until the only visible objects were our headlamps, which seemed to float in the maelstrom. Neal Beidleman later said it was like being lost in a bottle of milk. It quickly became incredibly cold. I grabbed Mike’s sleeve. He was my eyes. I dared not lose contact with him. We instinctively herded together; nobody wanted to get separated from the others as we groped along, trying to get the feel of the South Col’s slope, hoping for some sign of camp. We turned one way, and that wasn’t it. We turned again, and that wasn’t it. In the space of a few minutes, we lost all sense of direction; we had no idea where we were facing in the swirling wind and noise and cold and blowing ice. We continued to move as a group, until suddenly the hair stood up on the back of Neal’s neck. Experience and intuition told Beidleman that mortal danger lurked nearby. “Something is wrong here,” he shouted above the din. “We’re stopping.” It was a good decision. We were not twenty-five feet from the seven-thousand-foot vertical plunge off the Kangshung Face. From where we stopped the ice sloped away at a steep angle. A few more paces and the whole group would have just skidded off the mountain. When we stopped something else stopped, too—that internal furnace that keeps you alive. The only way to stay warm in those conditions is through constant activity. To stand still is to freeze to death, which already was happening to me.