This is the personal blog of alisonraymond

Again and again I return to this story, tweaking a word here and an idea there. It was the thought that I could explore the natural history of something normally brief and frightening that drew me to writing some years ago. Maybe one day I shall add the last comma or delete a capital and declare it finished, but then again, perhaps the writing is like the story, a life in itself!

Taster:
They say pride comes before a fall, but what of the fall itself? In this allegorical tale I wanted to explore the ‘downs’ in life’s. What can we learn from these times and is it possible to experience joy in the times when misfortune takes control and we are powerless.

Roan Septhill had no recollection of when he fell from Montevite’s peak,
But then, when does a fall begin?
Is it when the cliff top crumbles into the void?
Or that first slip on the wet grass at the path margins?
Does it begin with the stumbling run towards the precipice?
Or is that moment concealed in the blast of the gale, the momentary loss of balance, the lurch from the safety of the beaten track onto the green and treacherous slopes?
Perhaps the fall begins in the glossy pages of the tourist guide, drawing the unwary to the mountains with promises of vistas unseen?

The moment of Roan Septhill’s fall was a mystery, but the hardships of the ascent and the bliss of the time spent upon the bare summit were crystalline in his memory. Every pace had been a challenge, every step placed with renewed confidence that the top was a little nearer and each twist and turn in the crooked path etched in pain and pleasure upon his being.

Sometimes, when the gradient eased a little he would leave the well trodden route and set off up the scarp slope hoping to cut off the next hairpin and thereby to reach the summit a little sooner.
Sometimes his exertions were rewarded as he hauled his aching frame, exhausted onto the higher pathway, where he lay drawing deeply upon the cold upland air which suffused his very soul with the joy of achievement.
More than once he had been driven back by the impenetrable thorn bushes which thrive in these untrodden reaches and he was forced to rejoin the loose column of walkers with only scratches and blood to show for his enterprise.
He recalled the occasion an earnest looking young man and his lady friend had been passing and Roan Septhill had all but fallen at their booted feet as he tumbled out of the gorse.
How startled their faces!
but, after a moment to compose themselves they had passed on, the man shaking his head while the girl pulled him close and whispered in his ear.
Roan knew that they thought him a fool; Surely no wise man would venture so high with neither equipment nor knowledge.
He was tired, cold, exhausted and in pain from the many minor injuries sustained along the way, yet there he was, alive, on the ascendant and learning as never before...and it felt good.

How vivid was that moment when he raised his tired eyes and saw neither grass, nor gorse nor bare rock face, but only blue sky ahead and Roan Septhill stood upon the peak with the mountain spreading from the soles of his trainers in all directions until the lower slopes were lost in cloud far below.

This was his peak. He was king of the castle. He walked his territory, inspecting the little cairns of small stones raised by previous incumbents. He patrolled the edges where the flat top rolled off into space. Sometimes, leaning out to release a gobbet of saliva into the void, he would smile when no sound indicated that the fluid had failed to impact upon a hard surface. Roan had marvelled at the endless stream of walkers clearly visible on the lower paths. Like ants on a mole hill they came from every direction all seeking the peak…His peak.

[More:]

Others made that last valiant effort that brought them to the summit and they too knew Roan's joy that day.
Some were scarcely able to lift their tortured bodies over the lip that ran around the peak, and they would lie, sometimes two or three minutes, upon their bellies, red faced and panting hard, their hands scrabbling upon the flat, bare rock while their feet thrashed the unresisting air.

Roan could have helped. From where he stood, three paces would have taken him to any point on the lip and just a single hand would have offered the necessary purchase to bring another walker atop Montevite.
But then again, they seemed to make it on their own, so, beguiled by his achievement, Roan Septhill enjoyed his mountain top in peace, in solitude.......all alone.

Just once during that long afternoon fear broke in upon Roan Septhill's tranquillity. "If all these others are mounting the summit," he reasoned, "there will soon be no room and I shall be forced from my peak!"
He turned his head to look around and seeing only three others, he turned his entire body through three hundred and sixty degrees. Only seven souls, himself included, stood upon that rock and each stood separate from the next and not a word was spoken.

On the lower paths the stream of ants was still continuous into the cloud far below and here at the top the successful were still hauling themselves over the lip to join the few on the summit, but, he perceived, others were leaving.

Roan noticed the older gentleman to his left as he turned quite suddenly from the view to which all seemed riveted and with a little shrug stepped briskly to the lip. He had a military bearing, rosy cheeks, straight back and a confident gait. A young woman was struggling over the top. The old chap stepped back smiling as if to allow her more room and then, as she continued to writhe, he leant down, grasped the webbing of her rucksack and, chuckling, dragged her to the security of flat rock. A tip of his hat and he was gone, over the lip and strolling down the lower paths.

Roan watched this fellow, his jaunty yet unhurried pace as he progressed down the mountain against the human tide on the ascendant, greeting everyone he passed.

Roan saw others leave after that; some leaving the summit as they had arrived, others choosing to shuffle over the lip at a different point to explore a new face on the descent and to end up who knows where?

"What fools!" he thought to himself "All that time and effort to climb up, a quick look around and they're on their way down again. Well not me, this is my peak; I have earned the right to be here and I am staying!"

Oh yes, this bit was very clear indeed in his memory!

But what of his fall!

Not a thing!

Had he slipped?
Had he too decided to leave the peak after all his resolve to stay? Become lost in a wisp of cloud perhaps, and wandered over the precipice?

Had he been striving to help another walker to mount the summit only to be hurled into the void as panic overwhelmed the struggler?

Or heaven forbid! Had he been pushed from his eyrie by another who was covetous of his achievement?

Nothing, not a hint of a shadow of a clue. Roan Septhill knew only that he had fallen, was falling!
“To fall”. Roan pondered the verb. “It’s strange,” he thought, “not a word that is generally used to describe an event actually taking place. ‘He’s heading for a fall,’ we say, or ‘She had a nasty fall’.”
Roan knew he had fallen and yet here he was, not fallen, but falling;
And falling, Roan Septhill quickly learned, had its own natural history, stages in its progress just like the toil of the long climb up. But, unlike the ascent there were no decisions about shortcuts, no choices to accelerate or reduce the pace. Now gravity alone ruled his progress, and Roan Septhill, a man in control, had lost control…The hard ground by which he had directed every foot step was replaced by the endlessly yielding caress of the mountain air rushing past.
That first moment when he realised that the solid Earth had given way to sky and the void, had been filled with panic. Limbs flailed in a hopeless effort to find purchase; he screamed a long wail of desolation as the severed peak retreated above and eyes bulged as he strove to penetrate the clouds which hid the hard ground and his inevitable death. In his mind he thought himself dead already and could only look on like a soul unfettered, separated from the earth, from humanity and from the body accelerating towards destruction. But Montevite had been a long hard climb up and, even in freefall the descent was to be protracted. The thrashing arms and legs slowed and the face, rent and contorted in terror relaxed to an enraptured gaze, body and soul reunited as fear receded.
Roan Septhill turned his face slowly from the impenetrable mist below and looked about him. The cliff face only a few metres away rushed past and rock and gorse and ascending walkers vanished above him into cloud as he fell. A young man on the rising path looked in horror as Roan passed. An eagle rose, startled from a ledge but Roan Septhill found that a smile stretched his lips. From deep inside his chest a chuckle arose to break between his teeth like a wave against chalk cliffs. A moment later came laughter, unrestrained gales of laughter which echoed against the rock face upon which his feet would no more tread, nor, he realised, wish to tread. The cool slipstream of fragrant mountain air caressed his cheek as a lover to her swain or as a mother to her newborn child.
How mighty the mountain, how great his fall and how immeasurable his joy in falling now! Roan Septhill learned that to fall is to fly, that to project one arm from his body would turn him from face-down position onto his side. A further adjustment of his limbs brought him onto his back to watch the high crags receding. A little practise, and soon his descent was glorified by swooping dives, somersaults and sojourns far from the face of Montevite. Here he would sport with the stooping peregrine before returning to the blurred rush of the grey and green cliff by the twitch of a finger in the air stream which was his world.
The walkers on the mountain seemed now as bonded slaves chained to the rock by gravity and fear, condemned to pursue the peak on aching and blistered limbs; longing for glory at the top yet doomed to find only more bare rock. They saw only the sad demise of a once successful man but Roan knew freedom now and he wept joy.
Passing a narrow mountain ledge, Roan saw the elderly, military gentleman who had left the summit in his moment of rapture, still walking briskly against the stream and greeting everyone he passed. Roan Septhill fancied that the old gent had even doffed his hat and smiled at him as he fell; and he understood that just as there are many routes to mount the peak, so there are many ways of descent and all can have their pleasures.
He prayed; to whom he wasn’t sure. He asked that his blessing, his bliss might come to others when they stood atop Montevite.
He would die; he knew that now. Somewhere in the clouded valley, sharp rocks lay to snatch his life in an instant; but Roan Septhill would never see that moment. It would burst from a cloud quicker than the eye could register, but until it did, he knew that now, at last, he was living; living as mankind is destined to live; Soaring with the eagles.