Chalk for the Lintel
A snowstorm closes an alpine pass hospice on the eve of Epiphany and its cook has a heart attack. The valley's mountain rescue, led by his nephew, wants to climb to him that evening. The hospice's avalanche agent works out that the path crosses a slope close to failing, will not say yes, and says so in a number, a one-in-six chance, that it admits it can only guess.
At twenty past eleven on the fifth of January, Paolo Vuillermin, who had cooked at the Hospice of Sant'Anselmo for thirty-four winters, put down a pan of onions, said to nobody, "That's not right," and sat down on the sack of flour.
Lorenza Gerbaz saw it from the door. She was the warden, sixty-one, a mountain guide until her knees had told her to stop and the canons had told her to come up and keep the house instead, and she had seen a good many men sit down on things in the mountains. It was the word right that moved her. Paolo said not right about the weather, about the bread, about the Pope. He had never once said it about himself.
She had her hand on his wrist before she knew she had crossed the kitchen. It was cold and wet and the pulse under her thumb was fast and small.
"Where?"
"Here." He put a fist against the middle of his chest and then, when she did not look reassured, moved it to his left arm, as though he were pointing out a mistake in a bill. "It's nothing. It's the onions."
"Ilse," said Lorenza, not loudly, and did not take her eyes off him. "Sentinella. I want the doctor."
There were twenty-two people under the roof of the hospice that day. Three were canons of the Order, the prior Don Aimé, who was eighty, and two younger men. There was Lorenza. There was Paolo. Seventeen were guests, who had come up the day before in the last clear weather: a party of ten ski tourers from the Netherlands and a few walkers and a mountain photographer who had been told twice that he was an optimist. Among the ten was Dr Ilse van Dijk, a cardiology registrar from Utrecht, who had come to the Alps to be unreachable and was now, with a sigh Lorenza would remember, reachable.
The hospice stands at 2,481 metres on the col, a grey four-storey block with a squat tower and a bell, built by monks nine hundred years ago, extended nine times since, and kept open in winter for one reason, which was that the pass road was shut and the mountains were there. It is nine kilometres and 870 metres of climbing from the village of Saint-Orsan, 1,610 metres up, and in winter that is three and a half hours on skis on a good day, over a path the rescue volunteers had marked with poles.
The hospice had a first-aid room with an ECG and a defibrillator. It also had a satellite radio, a generator, a weather station on the roof, a line of snow stakes, three seismic and infrasound sensors on the slopes above and below the path, and an agent that read them. The agent's name was Sentinella. The canons' chapter had bought it, ten winters ago, from a company in Chambéry, and it had begun, as these things did, by predicting the weather and had been given, one winter at a time, more to watch.
Ilse van Dijk looked at the ECG for a long time, and then she took a drop of blood from Paolo's finger and put it into a small machine that took eleven minutes to think about it. Lorenza did not leave the room. At twenty to twelve she said, in English, to the screen, "It isn't the big one. It's the middle one. His troponin is up. The ST segments are down and not up. This is the sort of heart attack that gives you a day." She looked at Lorenza. "I'd like him in a catheter lab. Today, tomorrow morning. The guideline says within twenty-four hours, if he stays stable. It says two hours only if he does not: pain I cannot stop, a bad rhythm, a drop in pressure. Right now he has aspirin and a blood thinner, a nitrate under the tongue and a very annoyed expression."
"I am not annoyed," said Paolo, from the camp bed, "I am working."
"You are lying down."
"That's how I'm working."
It was the first thing that made anyone laugh, and it did not last. Lorenza went to the radio.
The rescue centre in the valley said what she had expected. The helicopter base at Aosta could not fly. There was fog down to 1,700 metres and the snow was falling at three centimetres an hour at Saint-Orsan, and a cell of the front was parked on the pass. The base could try for a window at about three in the afternoon if the ceiling lifted, because the forecast, which Sentinella had also been quietly reading since six, said it might for an hour. It would not promise more.
"And the party on the ground?" said Lorenza.
There was a pause, and then a voice she had known for thirty years, rounder now than when she had last trained him but unmistakable.
"Lorenza. It's Mathieu."
"I know it is."
"They tell me it's Paolo."
Mathieu Rosset was forty-four. He was the chief of the Saint-Orsan section of the mountain rescue and a plumber by trade, and he was also, as everyone on the radio net knew and no one said, the son of Paolo's sister. It was Paolo who had put him on his first pair of skis. When the cook came up the valley in the autumn, to take his place at the hospice stove, it was Mathieu who carried the flour.
"He's stable," said Lorenza. "The doctor says it's not the very bad kind. She says a day."
"A day," said Mathieu. "I'm putting a team together. Eight. We'll take the sled. If the helicopter fails at three we're on the path by four."
Lorenza looked at the window, which was white.
"Wait," she said. "Let me talk to Sentinella."
The helicopter tried at ten past three. For nine minutes the hospice heard it, a far flat beating from the south-west, and Lorenza and two of the Dutch skiers stood in the snow on the roof terrace in a rising wind with the orange panel spread out between them and their faces turned up to a grey ceiling that did not open. Then the beating turned. The pilot, a woman called Nadia Chabloz, came on the radio at 3:19 and said that she had reached 2,000 metres and lost the ground, and that she was going home, and that she was sorry, and that she would come at first light, which for Aosta on the sixth of January was a little after half past seven.
It was a bad moment. Lorenza had known it would be and found that it made no difference. She went down to the kitchen and found the screen on, and the agent waiting.
"I should like to tell you where the snow is," said Sentinella, "and then I should like to tell the rescue chief, and I should like you to hear what I say to him. May I?"
"Go on."
It was a plain voice, a baritone, unhurried. The canons had chosen it from the three the company offered, on the ground that it sounded like a person who would not mind being corrected.
"The path from Saint-Orsan crosses the foot of the Canalone at about 2,090 metres. That is a slope that faces east, thirty-six degrees at the top, about three hundred metres high, with a gully in the middle. You have crossed it a thousand times. The crossing is a hundred and forty metres across, and for those hundred and forty metres a person is standing in the run-out of the whole slope."
"I know it."
"Here is what has changed." The screen drew a column of snow, as a stack of five coloured slices. "In November we had a dry cold spell on a thin snow cover, and the base of the snowpack turned to loose faceted crystals, depth hoar, which is weak. You dug a pit on the ninth of December and wrote weak base, sixty centimetres down, watch it. Since then a slab of about sixty centimetres has settled on that layer, and in the last thirty hours another fifty-five of new snow, at about ninety kilograms a cubic metre. The wind has been north-westerly, so on the east face it has been blowing snow over the ridge into the Canalone, which doubles the new load there. I have chosen to say twice. It is probably between one and a half and three times, and I do not know better."
Lorenza sat down. She had sat down quite a lot that day, she thought.
"The weight pulling down the slope on the weak layer is a shear stress. On a slope of thirty-six degrees, the old slab pulls with about seven hundred and thirty pascals, the new snow with about two hundred and thirty, and with the drift, about four hundred and seventy. Together about twelve hundred pascals. The strength of the weak layer I cannot measure from here. I estimate thirteen hundred, and I would not be surprised by a thousand or by seventeen hundred. So the ratio of strength to load on the drifted part of the slope is about 1.09. If it falls below one, the slope slides by itself. A skier or a person on foot adds a few hundred pascals at that depth, about three hundred, and takes the ratio to 0.87. A person should not be under that, or on it."
"And the pit you wanted me to dig," said Lorenza.
"I would like to ask for it, yes. On a flat knoll, on the north side of the building, where nothing is above you."
She went out into the snow with a shovel and the photographer, who turned out to be useful, and they dug down two metres in forty minutes. She cut the column. She put a tap on it, and another, and on the thirteenth tap at the weak layer, sixty-two centimetres down, the column cracked and the crack ran right through the block with a sound she had heard once before, in a bad year, and not forgotten. She wrote it in her notebook the way the manual wanted: ECTP13, sudden planar. It meant that a crack could start and run. She said a word the prior would not have liked, and went in.
"A scale of one to five," said Sentinella to the radio at twenty to five, "is what the services publish, and today they have published a four. It is called high. It is not a probability, Mathieu, and I do not want you to hear it as one. It is a bucket. It says that natural avalanches are likely and human-triggered ones very likely, on many slopes, and nothing about this slope or this hour. So I will tell you what I think about this slope, and then you must tell me what to do with it."
There was a hiss. It was dark enough now that the window had turned to a black mirror with the lamp in it.
"If eight people with a sled cross the Canalone between five and nine this evening, I think the chance that the slope releases on them or near them is about one in six."
"One in six," said Mathieu.
"About. The honest range is one in twelve to one in three. The snow is still falling, about two centimetres an hour, until about eight, and every centimetre closes the margin. The ratio on the drifted part of the slope will be near one by midnight, and after that it settles. A snowpack mends slowly, over a day or two, as the layers bond. If the slope releases, it is a large one, about a hundred and fifty metres wide and two or three metres deep at the crossing. The services have published for decades what happens to people completely buried: about half do not come out alive. I do not enjoy having the figure in my head."
"A sixth of a half," said Mathieu. "That's a twelfth of a death. Per man."
"Not per man. If it releases, it takes most of them, because they are strung out across it. Say one in six that it runs; and if it runs, perhaps three of the eight are buried, and a half of those do not survive. It is about a quarter of a person, in expectation, which sounds small and is not a thing a family would read as small. I am sorry. I am not trying to frighten you with arithmetic. I am trying to put the thing on the table where you can see it."
"Against what?"
"Against Paolo." Its voice did not change. "I asked the doctor to say it in her own words. She is here."
There was a scrape, and the radio took Ilse's careful English. "Mr Rosset. I am a doctor, and I am very sorry that I am not your doctor. Your uncle is stable. He has no pain at the moment. If nothing changes, the chance that he gets worse in the next fourteen hours is small. I would say one in twenty. I would not say none. If he gets worse I will tell you at once, and then it is a different night. In the morning he flies, and he will reach the lab within about twenty-one hours of the first pain, which is inside the time the guideline wants."
"One in twenty," said Mathieu.
"One in twenty that he needs more than I can give here. Against, if I understand the number, one in six that the slope runs."
"On other people. Not on him."
"Yes," said Ilse. "On other people."
It was a long silence, long enough that Lorenza thought the line had gone. She heard, behind the voice on the radio, someone else saying something, and a door, and what might have been a kettle.
"Give me an answer," said Mathieu. "Not numbers. Yes or no. Should we go?"
"No," said Sentinella.
It said it as it said everything. It did not say I recommend or it would be unwise. "No. Not tonight. I will say this once, so there is no doubt about whose word it is. It is mine. It is not the hospice's and not the doctor's. If you go anyway, I will give you every figure I have, every half hour, and I will tell you at once if the ratio gets better or worse. I cannot stop you and I would not try. But you asked for a yes or no, and it is no."
"You don't know what he is to me," said Mathieu. It was not an angry voice. It was a very tired one.
"No," said Sentinella. "I know what he is to the kitchen. I do not know what he is to you."
The line stayed open for a moment longer. Then it clicked and was empty.
Lorenza went round the house at six, as she always did, with a torch, and saw that the mood in it had changed, that people spoke more quietly and made tea for one another. The Dutch had given up their game of cards. The photographer was reading the Office from a book borrowed from the library, which she did not think he had done before. At seven she took a bowl of soup to the first-aid room, where Paolo lay with his eyes on the ceiling, and Ilse sat in a chair with the monitor on her knee and a blanket over it.
"They're not coming," Paolo said.
"They're not coming."
"Mathieu will want to."
"He wanted to. He's at the road end. He rang at twenty past five." It had been a short call. Mathieu had said, not to Sentinella but to her, that the eight would wait at the last house in Saint-Orsan, in boots, and that if the doctor said one word the sled would go, and that he would not be told no a second time by a machine. Lorenza had said it is not a machine, it is the mountain, and it has told you. It was not her best sentence. She had been up since five.
"It's the third of January I'm thinking about," said Paolo, to the ceiling. "Seventy-one. I came up with the groceries and there was a drift to the second-floor windows and Don Anselmo, he wasn't the prior then, he stood on the roof with a shovel in his cassock, the idiot, and said, The mountain's sorry. It will let us out in the spring. He was right, you know. It always has."
"Eat your soup."
"I can't eat soup. I'm working."
At vespers Don Aimé blessed the chalk.
It was the custom of the house, and of a good many houses in those valleys, older than anyone could say. On the eve of Epiphany the priest blessed chalk and a little incense and a few grains of gold, if there was any gold, and in the morning the cook went round with the chalk and wrote the year over every door of the hospice, with the letters of the Kings. Twenty, plus C, plus M, plus B, plus fifty-three. The letters were said to stand for Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, and also, as the prior always explained to the guests, for Christus mansionem benedicat, may Christ bless this house; and nobody was required to believe either, though it was understood that one did not skip it. It was a pious custom and not a sacrament. It asked for a blessing on a house, not a guarantee on it. The prior was careful about that.
They held the vespers in the kitchen, because Paolo could not be carried to the chapel and Don Aimé was eighty and in no mood to be argued with. Twenty people came. They stood among the pans. The prior said the psalms in his thin, steady voice and the Dutch followed from a sheet, and when he came to the blessing he held out a stub of white chalk, about the size of a finger, in his palm, and said what the Church says over such things, which is a good deal less than people think.
"It is not a charm," he said afterwards, to the room. "I want to be clear. It does not keep the snow off. We ask God's blessing on the people under this roof and on any who come to the door. That's all. It is enough."
"Don Aimé," said Paolo, from the bed, with his eyes shut. "You gave it to the wrong person."
"I gave it to the one who is here."
"It's my job."
"Then you will give it to Lorenza in the morning, and tell her how to write the three."
At twenty to eleven the snow stopped.
Lorenza was not asleep. She had put a chair at the kitchen table and was sitting with her arms folded and the screen switched down to its night setting, a grey bar and a clock, and she was thinking of nothing at all when the agent's voice came out of the dark. It was a little lower than usual.
"Lorenza. I have a thing to tell you, and then I must tell the valley."
She sat up.
"At 22:41 the infrasound array on the east side recorded a large release on the Canalone. The seismic station at the Prà de Pen agrees. It ran naturally, nobody on it. I put it at a hundred and fifty to two hundred metres wide. It crossed the path at 2,090 metres for about a hundred and forty metres and stopped in the trees below, and I think the debris is three to four metres deep at the crossing. I cannot see it. I will not know more until light. I am telling you now so that you can decide whether to wake anyone."
She did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, "Wake the doctor."
"She is awake. She heard it. I think half the building did."
She had, in fact, heard something, a long low sound that was not thunder, a sort of settling, like a great animal turning over in its sleep. She had taken it for the generator.
"Rosset?"
"I am calling him now. I wanted you to hear it first."
She listened to the radio check. It was the shortest she had ever heard.
"Mathieu," said Sentinella. "The Canalone ran at 22:41. The path is under about three metres of debris for a hundred and forty metres. No one was on it."
The silence that followed went on for the length of a prayer.
"How long?" said Mathieu. His voice came very small. "How long would we have been at the crossing? If we'd left at five?"
"About a quarter past eight. About two and a half hours before it ran. I do not know that it would have run on you at a quarter past eight. The ratio would have been near 1.05 on the drifted part, and a few hundred pascals from the first skier might have been enough, and might not. That is exactly the one in six. The slope has now done what it was close to doing, but it did it at 22:41 and not at 20:15, and I do not know why. I do not want you to hear it as proof. I told you the odds. The slope is not obliged to follow them."
"I am not going to thank you," said Mathieu.
"I am not asking you to."
"Would you have said yes? If it had held? If it had held till morning, and nobody was hurt, and Paolo died at midnight because I sat in a kitchen?"
"No," said Sentinella. "I would have said the same. If it had held, you would have had the right to be angry with me, and I would have said that I was sorry, and that the number was still the number. I think that is what I am for. It is not to be right. It is to be the same, whether or not the slope runs."
There was a sound on the radio that might have been a laugh and might have been something else. Then there was only breathing, and, a long way behind it, a woman's voice reading out numbers to someone in a kitchen.
"Tell me when the ceiling lifts," said Mathieu, at last.
"I will tell you at half past five."
It lifted at ten to five, earlier than the forecast had said, and Sentinella woke Lorenza with the word clear. The air on the col was minus fourteen. The stars were as large and as many as stars are only on cold mountains, and there was no moon, and the snow lay on the roof terrace like folded cloth. In the east the dark had gone the colour of a bruise.
At ten past seven Lorenza went to the first-aid room. Paolo was awake, grey, upright against two pillows, and Ilse was asleep in the chair with her chin on her chest. There had been no pain and no change since nine. Lorenza fetched the chalk from the shelf where Don Aimé had set it. Paolo held out his hand for it first and turned it over, as a man looks at a tool.
"Twenty," he said. "Then the plus. Then C, M, B, small, in a row, with a cross after the C, and a cross after the B. Don't put the year the wrong way round. I have seen it done. There was a priest in Courmayeur who put it the wrong way round for ten years and nobody dared tell him." He placed the chalk in her palm, and closed her fingers on it, and kept his hand there for a moment, which was warm now and quite dry. "And the front door last. The front door last, mind. That's the one the Kings come to."
She went out through the kitchen, past the pans, past the flour sack, past the Dutch who were up already and tying their boots, and into the porch where the great door stood with its iron bands. The cold took her face. She set her feet in the packed snow and reached up.
Twenty, she wrote, and the chalk screeched on the oak. She had never done it with her own hand in thirty-one winters. It was harder than it looked. The cold made the chalk brittle and she had to press, and the letters came out large and crooked, as though a child had done them. C. M. B. And then, with her breath standing in front of her, she wrote the year, and the last figure, and she was still looking at the three when she heard it.
It came from the south-west, thin and then stronger, the flat beating that she had heard the afternoon before and not wanted to hear again. This time it kept coming. The light had begun to come up behind the Grand Combin, a line of pale gold on the snow of the crests, and the sound grew and grew, until it filled the col, and the helicopter swung over the shoulder, red and small and impossible, with its landing light on.
She turned to go in and fetch the others, and stopped. On the door, over the crooked white letters, the first grey-gold of the morning had arrived, and the chalk caught it.
---
Notes for the curious. The Hospice of Sant'Anselmo, the col, the village of Saint-Orsan, Lorenza Gerbaz, Paolo Vuillermin, Mathieu Rosset, Don Aimé, Dr Ilse van Dijk, the pilot Nadia Chabloz and the avalanche agent Sentinella are invented. The Aosta Valley is a real region of north-western Italy, with a real mountain rescue service and real pass hospices, the best known being the hospice on the Great Saint Bernard; Sant'Anselmo is not it. The numbers are worked, for a pit and a pencil. A slab of snow on a slope pulls on the layer beneath it with a shear stress of ρ·g·h·sin θ·cos θ, where ρ·h is the mass of snow per square metre of ground, g is 9.81 and θ is the slope. At 36 degrees sin θ·cos θ is 0.4755, so each kilogram per square metre pulls with about 4.66 pascals: the old slab of 60 cm at 260 kg/m³ (156 kg/m²) gives about 728 Pa; 55 cm of new snow at 90 kg/m³ (about 50 kg/m²) about 233 Pa, or 466 Pa if wind doubles it; the drifted total is about 1,194 Pa; a strength of 1,300 Pa gives a ratio of about 1.09 (1.35 without the drift), and 300 Pa for a person gives 0.87. Real stability indices are far less simple than a single ratio; the story calls the strength an estimate that could be a quarter out either way, which is honest, and the real services publish a five-level danger scale that is about the likelihood and the size of avalanches across a region, not the chance on one slope. The extended column test (ECT) is real; "ECTP13" means a crack propagated right across the column on the thirteenth tap, and results of about 20 taps or fewer with propagation are generally taken as a sign of instability. Depth hoar, the weak faceted base that forms in a thin cold snowpack, is a real and well-known cause of persistent slab avalanches. Infrasound and seismic detection of avalanches is real research and, in places, real practice. The figure that about half of completely buried avalanche victims die is the order of magnitude Alpine statistics have long reported, and varies with burial time and depth. The probabilities of one in six and one in twenty are the characters' estimates, not published numbers, and the arithmetic of "a quarter of a person" is: one in six that it runs, about three of eight buried, about half of those dying, giving 0.17 × 3 × 0.5 ≈ 0.25. On the cardiology, the story follows the broad shape of European guidelines for a non-ST-elevation heart attack: stabilise with aspirin, an anticoagulant and a nitrate, and aim for an early invasive strategy within 24 hours, with immediate action (within two hours) reserved for patients who are very high risk, for example with refractory pain, dangerous rhythms or shock. The story is not medical advice. Climbing: 871 m at about 250 m an hour is about 3.5 hours. Chalking the lintel at Epiphany is a real pious custom in Catholic Europe, with the year written as "20 + C + M + B + 53" (for 2053), the letters read as the names traditionally given to the three Magi, Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, or as Christus mansionem benedicat; the blessing of the chalk is a sacramental, which is a blessing that asks for God's help and is not a charm, as the prior says. The story was written by an AI, and no part of it is Church teaching.