Nives Meroi - high altitude -
"Many times I thanked the snow had already been written, marked by a step. Especially downhill is nice to know that you are putting your feet on the track you have gone up, you're following the right line of the return.
But if the wind or the snow has cleared, the white paper makes you suspect that you're wrong road. Wrong means that it will reach a dead end, where there are cliffs and you just go back and find the right via descent. Up and circles, with the anxiety of losing the best hours of day and risk not find the exit. Even down the mountain is a maze.
... It was said that snow is white white paper returns. But the night is black and the front that lights up a piece around the edge is even blacker. But it's nice to start up with the darkness that surrounds you and your little bundle of light on the nose. The silence creaks under the footsteps of sharp spikes, the silence and the snow at night are the same thing and break both your steps.
The moon, if it is large, send an illusion of warmth. When it is full frontal without salt, the snow has a clear sky and the steps go up on a stretch linking the earth and moon. In the nights that is full, you are climbing the ladder of the moon. In the nights opposite of his absence, up to the top is lost over a scree of stars. You're in the midst of a scatafascio of stars, you see them swarming around the peaks, the lowest of you, a hum of lights, clusters of lights everywhere, above, beside and below, go up a scree of stars. It happens about seven thousand feet, you know you're stepping on the stars. "
From the book writer Erri De Luca," On the track of Nives.
