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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
When Sylvain Tesson left the colourful yellow houses of the French Riviera for a ski trek across the Alps with his friend, a high-altitude mountain guide, he didn’t know what exactly awaited him. The trek would turn into an extraordinary adventure.
Over the course of four years they ascended high into the Alps in winter, following the curve of the mountains from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, immersing themselves in a strange white world made entirely of snow. In the bitter cold and overlooked by an empty sky, only the effort of moving forward, one difficult stride at a time, separated the days from one another. And as they trudged onwards, the never-ending white of the high Alps cancelled out all feelings – hope, fear, memory and regret.
What did he stand to gain by inflicting this ordeal on himself? This was no ordinary mountain trek: it was a search for communion with the magic substance of the White.Over the course of four years they ascended high into the Alps in winter, following the curve of the mountains from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, immersing themselves in a strange white world made entirely of snow. In the bitter cold and overlooked by an empty sky, only the effort of moving forward, one difficult stride at a time, separated the days from one another. And as they trudged onwards, the never-ending white of the high Alps cancelled out all feelings – hope, fear, memory and regret. What did he stand to gain by inflicting this ordeal on himself? This was no ordinary mountain trek: it was a search for communion with the magic substance of the White.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quotes
Map
Preface: What Is to Be Done?
Year One: 2018. Freedom
Day One: 8 March
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven
Day Eight
Day Nine
Day Ten
Day Eleven
Day Twelve
Day Thirteen
Day Fourteen
Day Fifteen
Day Sixteen
Day Seventeen
Day Eighteen
Day Nineteen
Day Twenty
Day Twenty-One
Day Twenty-Two
Year Two: 2019. Time
Day Twenty-Three: 18 March
Day Twenty-Four
Day Twenty-Five
Day Twenty-Six
Day Twenty-Seven
Day Twenty-Eight
Day Twenty-Nine
Day Thirty
Day Thirty-One
Day Thirty-Two
Day Thirty-Three
Day Thirty-Four
Day Thirty-Five
Day Thirty-Six
Day Thirty-Seven
Year Three: 2020. Beauty
Day Thirty-Eight: 27 February
Day Thirty-Nine
Day Forty
Day Forty-One
Day Forty-Two
Day Forty-Three
Days Forty-Four and Forty-Five
Day Forty-Six
Day Forty-Seven
Day Forty-Eight
Day Forty-Nine
Day Fifty
Day Fifty-One
Day Fifty-Two
Year Four: 2021. Oblivion
Day Fifty-Three: 8 March
Day Fifty-Four
Day Fifty-Five
Day Fifty-Six
Day Fifty-Seven
Day Fifty-Eight
Day Fifty-Nine
Day Sixty
Day Sixty-One
Day Sixty-Two
From Day Sixty-Three to Day Sixty-Seven
Day Sixty-Eight
Days Sixty-Nine through Seventy-One
From Day Seventy-Two to Day Seventy-Five
Day Seventy-Six
Day Seventy-Seven
Day Seventy-Eight
Day Seventy-Nine
Day Eighty
Day Eighty-One
Days Eighty-Two and Eighty-Three
Day Eighty-Four
The Last Day
Farewell to the White
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quotes
Map
Preface: What Is to Be Done?
Begin Reading
Farewell to the White
End User License Agreement
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White
Sylvain Tesson
Translated by Christine Gutman
polity
Originally published in French as Blanc © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2022
This English translation © Polity Press Ltd., 2025
Polity Press Ltd.65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press Ltd.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6553-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024946044
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Dedication
For AJG, blonde, white, blue
I live not in myself, but I becomePortion of that around me; and to me,High mountains are a feeling …
– LORD BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The white therefore signifieth joy, solace, and gladness, and that not at random, but upon just and very good grounds …
– FRANÇOIS RABELAIS, Gargantua1
The landscape’s infinite variety continually proved to us that we had not yet tasted all the forms of happiness, meditation or melancholy that it possibly contained.
– ANDRÉ GIDE, Fruits of the Earth2
1.
Translated by Thomas Urquhart and Peter Anthony Motteux, Everyman’s Library, 1994.
2.
Translated by Dorothy Bussy, Secker and Warburg, 1949.
PREFACEWhat Is to Be Done?
It had snowed. We could sense it even before looking out of the window. The sky had vanished, the world had gone white. I had spent the night by the wood stove of a mountain hut. My friend, the guide Daniel Du Lac De Fugères, was lying against a pile of ropes.
I had the urge to get up and walk out into the silence. The White harbours mysteries. Snow imposes the sky’s thoughts on the earth. But the fog, with its cadaverous hue, discourages exploration. No one wants to walk into a morgue at dawn. And yet one need only lift that outer shroud.
‘Du Lac,’ I said, ‘Why don’t we head out into the White? There’s something there for us to find.’
‘What is to be done?’ Lenin famously asked. The Russians loved this question. They would later ask themselves a different one: ‘What have we done?’
If History has proved to us that, no, better days are not ahead, geography, on the other hand, has kept its promises. It has taught us that life lies in movement. Du Lac said, ‘Let’s ski across the Alps!’
He had it all planned out: we would set out in winter from the Mediterranean, where the mountains sink down into the palm fronds. We would head northeast, following the Alpine curve all the way to Trieste, the impossible city on the Adriatic generally regarded as the end of the Alps. Our trajectory would take us right along the axial ridge. We would sleep in mountain refuges and shelters. It would be a cavalcade on skis from sea to sea. A world entirely of snow! Hundreds of kilometres to cover, one stride at a time. What sounded like slave labour was really a godsend: happiness is keeping busy.
Even the easiest climb dissolves time, expands space and pushes the mind deep down into the depths of the self. Consciousness is obliterated by the snow’s blinding glare. Moving forward is all that matters. Everything else – memories, regrets, desires and remorse – is erased by physical effort.
But what would I achieve with this months-long Alpine expedition? What did I stand to gain by inflicting this ordeal upon myself? I didn’t know then what I know now: this was no mountain trek. This was communion with a substance. Perhaps my long-held dream of transforming travel into prayer would come true at last.
On a March morning one year later, we stood, skis in hand, on the beaches of Menton, a French village near the Italian border. Prior to that, I had taught Du Lac Paul Morand’s maxim: ‘“Elsewhere” is a more beautiful word than “tomorrow”.’
We had answered the question What is to be done? – we knew where to go.
Year One: 2018FREEDOM
Day One: 8 March1
Menton to Olivetta via the Col du Berceau
Distance: 13 kilometres
Climb: 1,300 metres
Behind us, the yellow houses of Menton unfurled like stairs down a blossoming slope. We dipped our fingers in the water to taste it. I licked my index finger, for the sea is the salt of the earth, then Du Lac muttered, ‘Let’s go. We don’t belong here.’ I, too, knew my share of departing words. From Rimbaud: ‘I’ll buy a horse and ride away.’ From Montaigne: ‘One must always have one’s boots on and be ready to go.’ From Ms Despentes: ‘We’re getting up and we’re getting the hell out.’2 From Gide: ‘One of the great rules of art: Do not linger.’ And the most beautiful of them all, from Christ in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Come, follow me.’
Du Lac had his principles: ask nothing of anyone, keep it short, find poetry in stealth. Another expression of his: ‘Move along, we’ve got everything to see.’
Our adventure would unfold over four winters at a rhythm of three to four weeks of skiing each year. Governments, in their fight against a global pneumonia, would soon place societies under house arrest. The freedom to leave would become a political issue. Getting up and getting the hell out wouldn’t be so easy any more. One day, here in France, we would be ordered to fill out and flash a permit just to go and pick violets on the embankment across the way.
The staircases of Menton turned into a road which turned into a trail which turned into a path. Pebbles clattered out the familiar music of a walk through the garrigue. Limestone boulders smelled of sunlight. Maritime pines gave way to their cousins from Aleppo, the latter more accustomed to fighting (against sloped terrain). How many more mountain passes until we reached the Adriatic? Would we even manage to make it across all of them?
After a 1,300-metre ascent, we crossed the Col du Berceau. On the other side, to the north, was Italy. The forest trail was white. It had been just five hours since we left the sea and already we were encountering snow. This year it had fallen at lower altitudes. Italian squirrels had left tracks in it. Our trek from the sea to the mountains mirrored the amphibious thrust that first drove species out of the water hundreds of millions of years ago.
We made our way down to the village of Olivetta, through brambles, ruins and terraced slopes. The rugged landscape echoed with the hymn of a world gone by, where the territory was controlled by those who lived on and from it. We spent the night at an inn where Du Lac downed a bottle of grappa. Having given up alcohol myself, I watched my friend wistfully and let him in on the Russian method for a good night’s sleep:
One glass: No need for a lullaby!
A second: No need for a blanket!
A third: No need for a bed!
He went to bed with his visions; I went to bed sober and thus alone. Sea, snow, squirrels: a good day.
Day Two
Olivetta to the Col de Turini via the Col de Brouis
Distance: 21 kilometres
Climb: 1,800 metres
We hiked to the Col de Brouis, then climbed 700 metres up a valley of limestone and gypsum. When we reached the snow line at 1,600 metres, we put on our skis. This was our blessing ceremony, with neither prelates nor liturgy. Nothing but the click of our boot buckles. The sea was still visible down below – a black abyss.
From now on we belonged to the mountains. The snow would be our perfect whole: the bride, the veil, the vow; sexual purity and cosmic force; the matrix of forgiveness and cleansing which we would seek never to leave.
We headed for the Mercantour military trail, an old border route. We had to trudge up slopes of warm snow pricked with willows and larches. ‘It’s like glue!’ said Du Lac. The trees resembled feather dusters. We contorted our bodies to pass under the branches. We reached the ridge. The winter of 2018 had been a snowy one. Rarely had we seen this much fresh powder! It spilled over the cliffsides. It frosted the mountains like a cake. Skiers had been swept away by avalanches. Every day on the radio we heard: Tourists buried! My friends had warned me: ‘Don’t go! This year is cursed. Du Lac is insane!’ Friends who dream of putting you in handcuffs have a funny way of showing their affection …
We skied along the white trail at an altitude of 2,000 metres. Here and there, barracks and fortlets rose up like altars. We perused these black ruins looming in the middle of a winter wonderland. Long ago, this ridge was ablaze with war. Men fought each other to the death here in the mid-eighteenth century, then again during the Revolution. Bonaparte earned his stripes on the peaks of the Authion, which were re-fortified in 1930 and re-conquered in 1945. In this realm of snowcrowned pines, battles had served to define the borders of a nation nowadays peacefully inhabited by citizens who no longer cared for them.
This year, activists in Mercantour National Park and the Tinée Valley were taking in exiles from the Sahel and the Middle East. Hannibal’s elephants, Italian peddlers and bootleggers, the wolves of the twentieth century and the refugees of the twenty-first: they all knew the way. Every rampart has its weaknesses. Police were out patrolling for migrant smugglers and their clients. Yesterday in the forests we had crossed paths with gendarmes and legionnaires. Between patrols, members of humanitarian organizations assisted solitary men and entire families coming from Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali. These poor souls had crossed the desert and the sea to at last reach the fortress gates. These migrants weren’t migrating. They were fleeing the war of Islam. Only Christian shores would give them safe harbour.
Du Lac and I weren’t children of exile. We had a place to sleep. We were skiing in pursuit of a childhood dream: bunking off in the great wide open. We enjoyed connecting inaccessible places via impassable routes. This obstacle course was our game, and crossing a border on foot an exercise which we marked with a ‘Ciao bella!’ to the white peaks. We had backing. Someone was waiting for us somewhere. That is the definition of wealth.
At eight p.m., in the glow of our headlamps, we knocked at the door of a hotel on the Col de Turini.
The next morning we would head back out, having forgotten all about the exhaustion of the day before. Night, sweet remission.
Day Three
From the Col de Turini to the unguarded Refuge des Merveilles via the Pointe des Trois Communes and the Pas du Diable
Distance: 12 kilometres
Climb: 1,000 metres
This morning, the summits of the Pointe des Trois Communes loomed over the white clearing like a sine wave between heaven and earth: glossy pink below, pastel blue above. After a 300-metre climb, we emerged from a forest of crystal pick-up sticks. We followed a ridge, staying far enough from the edge so as not to break the cornice, yet not so far down as to trigger an avalanche. In short: we were tiptoeing over Fabergé eggshells. At the end of the tightrope lay the Mercantour.
The wind whipped up at noon and sleet came smacking down. For weeks, I would endure this alternation between mercy and punishment. Every time the world revealed its beauty to me, I would have to pay for the pleasure with a few good slaps in the face!
At four p.m., halfway up a 45° slope, I was balancing on the edges of my skis whilst attempting to tighten my mitten when my pole slipped out of my hand and went plummeting 100 metres down into the rocks below. I had kicked off my crossing of the Alps with a rookie error. Ski mountaineering is a quadrupedal pursuit. Now three-legged, I made my way over to a ledge. Then, with no reproach, Du Lac set off down a couloir and around the cliff to fetch my pole. I waited, mortified. It was a long half hour. Frozen in place, whipped by the wind, I imagined he would never reappear. Suddenly, as the winds gusted to 80 kilometres per hour, he came loping up the embankment across the way, pole in hand. A few chamois took in this spectacle from the cliffside of the Pas du Diable. I reunited with Du Lac down below the pass.
We had been roaming the mountains together for fifteen years. We first met on his return from Mali, where he had pulled off the first 8a climb on the sandstone cliffs of the Hand of Fatima. He told me the story of mountaineers who had climbed to the top of one of the towers. They were convinced that they were the first, until they discovered shards of pottery: ancient Africans had managed to climb up there! His outlandish stories never got old. Du Lac held his liquor and I slept little in those days. We scaled buildings. We dangled from balconies. We got on famously.
Nothing predisposed this world bouldering champion, high mountain guide and trailblazer of the extreme to rope himself to me. Yet we both loved climbing for the same reason: it was the best escape from boredom. You climb, you get away, and who cares what happens when you get back? Pierre Mazeaud – the first Frenchman to climb Everest – had phrased his sociopolitical manifesto as a life mantra: ‘I embraced Gaullism and put the anarchy in mountaineering.’
Climbing was a liturgy of unfettered movements and unbreakable bonds. On slabs of granite or limestone, we paid tribute to the (not-yet-dead) god Pan. ‘All that shows is beautiful,’ said Priam as he stood on the ramparts of Troy. ‘All that is devoid is divine,’ we added. The mountain was our church, and the exhaustion we felt after a day of climbing was the proof of our faith. For how could the sensation of being alive on the edge of the abyss bear anything but the name of God?
Climbing allows Morand’s man in a hurry to buy himself time. In a few hundred metres, he crosses the full spectrum of emotions: joy, fear, hope, fulfilment. What a rush!
We felt right at home on cliffs where we had no business being. I followed Du Lac all around. I belayed him on difficult pitches. He pulled me up whenever I got stuck. We moved swiftly, our speed sharpening our perception. Our greatest pleasure was to run ourselves ragged on the rock face and then, come evening, toss our sleeping bags into a cave and drink the wine we had hauled up. The fire crackled, shadows danced, we smoked cigars, our forearms bulged with lactic acid. These harmless revels disturbed only the centipedes. Beneath the rock ceiling, Du Lac gave free rein to his playful vigour. A stream of bottles and books poured forth from his backpack. He boasted an endless supply of friendship and a strong back. After a day spent navigating the hanging gardens of the abyss, there was nothing better than those palaeolithic alcoves, those starlit nights spent roasting thoughts over the embers. Sometimes we would read poetry aloud. Who is to say our singing hasn’t been absorbed into the rock strata?
We spent hundreds of nights in nooks of quartz or salt-plated limestone. In Yemen, above the Gulf of Oman, we opened a 500-metre route, flushing out scorpions with our torches. In Baffin Bay, we climbed day and night under the rays of a sun that never set. We got caught in a storm on the summits of the Grands Charmoz; almost split our heads open on the Pic de Bure; slept like princes on ledges no wider than a bedside table atop the Grandes Jorasses. From the Hoggar Mountains to Mont Blanc, from the Verdon Gorge to the rock faces of Spain and Italy, we forged our conviction that salvation lay in escape. And no sooner were our vows of ‘never again’ forgotten than we took to preparing our next cavalcade. We were always setting off anew. Movement was the answer.
Behind the Pas du Diable, the wind had died down. We skied for 2 kilometres on smoothed cream, up to the Refuge des Merveilles. In March, the site was unguarded. We shovelled our way up to the door, then crept through the snow trench and into the hall left at the disposal of evening visitors. Firing up the oven, bringing the temperature up to 10 °C, heating our soup: the exhilarating pursuit known as survival.
A dry respite after a devilish day along the Pas du Diable. Marvellous Merveilles.
Day Four
From the Refuge des Merveilles to the Madone de Fenestre via three passes
Distance: 12 kilometres
Climb: 1,000 metres
Scraping across a landscape for eight hours requires inner resources. Poems are recited, faces recalled, songs sung. In flat geographies (steppes and arid plateaus), these are my remedies against boredom.
One can also occupy one’s mind by climbing a slope as though it were a ladder through time, associating altitudes with dates in History. Du Lac and I cobbled together a motley timeline, its lack of rigour made up for by the creativity of its references. Setting out at 800 metres, we greeted Charlemagne. At 1,100 metres, we rubbed shoulders with the Knights of the Round Table. At 1,500 metres, we reached the New World, and at 1,700, the reign of Louis XV. Napoleon followed at 1,800 metres, then came Hugo’s exile, the Belle Époque, Apollinaire’s death, the Armenian genocide, Aéropostale, the Yom Kippur War and the liberation of Palmyra. Beyond 2,018 metres, we were in the realm of science fiction. Eventually, we would reach a pass. We would have to come back down: the story of mankind is not an infinite race to the top. In History as in mountaineering, what goes up must come down. The Refuge des Merveilles sat at 2,110 metres. Beyond Stanley Kubrick.
We crossed three passes on our approach to the Madone de Fenestre, a high-altitude hamlet inhabited by a lone guardian. The final stretch was steep. When the incline exceeded 40°, we had to attach knives to the bottoms of our skis. These aluminium teeth would give us a better grip on the snow. It felt like I was scratching porcelain. Du Lac zigzagged down the slopes, pivoting abruptly and breaking his lines into short dashes. He moved about with his poles like a grasshopper, pulling off stem Christiania turns with vigour. ‘The zeal of the convert!’ I would shout to him, following in his wake. I, who never felt the slightest vertigo on rocky cliffs, was terrified of snowy slopes. Their curtains of pleated ice warped my perspective. Slipping is a scarier prospect than freefalling.
We reached the pass. It was time to doff our skis, pack away our knives, adjust our poles, peel off our climbing skins3 and put them in pouches to keep them warm, switch our bindings to downhill mode and draughtproof our jackets. This would be my ritual for the weeks to come. I prayed it would become second nature. Du Lac called these moves transitions. And so we had gone from conversions to transitions: a manifesto of modern life. These manoeuvres were quite a production. I fumbled through them. My muddled movements slowed Du Lac down. Unlike me, he always had everything he needed on hand. Logistics was an art and I would have one hundred days to perfect it.
At the Pas de Colomb, the Tinée Valley unfurled before us. Three years ago, I had hobbled my way to this very spot. At the time, I was trying to bounce back from an accident that had robbed me of something dearer than life itself: vitalism! I had called that journey of self-recovery ‘the black paths’4 and had hiked for three months across France, along the brambly trails that ran from the Mercantour to the Cotentin Peninsula. My strength had returned and, as I stood atop the cliffs of La Hague, at land’s end, I hurled my sorrows into the sea. That day, I shouted: ‘Back, death!’
This time, I was venturing into the White. And I was counting on the substantific colour to grant me joy. Sojourning on snow-covered landscapes is a bloodletting for the soul. You breathe in the White and make tracks through the light. The world bursts open. You gorge yourself on space. The clouds of existence part before your newly cleansed gaze.
Below the pass, the Madone de Fenestre stood as a Romanesque summary: a chapel surrounded by its brood of houses. Before starting the descent, Du Lac said to me, ‘Tomorrow, we’ll be there.’ And with a precise finger, he pointed to a vague spot.
Under the snow, the world withdraws. Only a few calligraphic brushstrokes remain. Peaks, cliffs, ridges and pillars hover in a white dream, reduced to their expression lines. Snow enhances whatever it touches; it confers beauty. Pure, it reveals just enough. Magical, it fills empty space with an invisible principle, annuls imperfection, preserves protrusions. Whiteness forgives superfluity – by concealing it.
I had set out to push myself to annihilation on this simplified topography. My white crossing would be the ultimate journey: a weightless drift through the notion of a landscape.
For weeks, Du Lac and I would glide across this non-place located at the crux of silence. I might just as well have sailed across the ocean. I would have bathed in blue anxieties. The windless days would have given me the same feeling of dematerialization. But I would have had to steer the vessel and I don’t like sitting around. I prefer the finer art of the ski trek: the long uphill slog, the brief glide, the occasional fall.
Day Five
From the Madone de Fenestre to Le Boréon via the Pas des Ladres
Distance: 8 kilometres
Climb: 500 metres
Nicholas Roerich, a painter revered by the Slavs yet quite unknown to the French, made an entire style out of white. His snow smoothed out the matrix, simplified the world. In Tibet, Russia and Mongolia, he painted glossy reliefs on which tiny characters – Buddhist lamas
