hallucination do not melt the ice it sits on. So the men can agree that, indeed, a hallucination is what it is. Things get colorful with scarlet serpents. “Rocks still fell periodically, but the boss seemed to be running low on them. The bird appeared, circled us and swooped on four different occasions. But this time we ignored it, and finally it went home to roost.”
In Chapter VI (in which easily we might look for marks of gluttony), we find such statements as: “How does a man come to climb mountains? Is he drawn to the heights because he is afraid of the level land? Is he such a misfit in the society of man that he must flee and try to place himself above it? The way up is long and difficult, but if he succeeds they must grant him a garland of sorts. And if he falls, this too is a kind of glory. To end, hurled from the heights to the depths in hideous ruin and combustion down is a fitting climax for the loser for it too shakes mountains and minds, stirs things like thoughts below both is a kind of blasted garland of victory in defeat, and cold, so cold that final action that the movement is somewhere frozen forever into a statue-like rigidity of ultimate intent and purpose, thwarted only by the universal malevolence we all fear exists.” The text has moved from a contemplation of the seven deadly sins to the classical problem of hubris itself.
“I had known that I had to climb Kasla as I had climbed all the others, and I had known what the price would be. It cost me my only home. But Kasla was there, and my boots cried out for my feet. I knew as I did so, that somewhere I set them upon her summit and below me a world was ending.” The world that is ending is the world in which the mountain has not been climbed, and the world that is beginning is the one in which the mountain has been conquered, and Jack Summer, a.k.a. Whitey, is the hero who has conquered it.
The climbers reach a hundred seventy-six thousand feet, making their way along a ledge, till one member of the climbing crew, Vince, calls out, “Look!”
Up and up, and again further, blue-frosted and sharp, deadly and cold as Loki’s dagger, slashing at the sky, it vibrated above us like electricity, hung like a piece of frozen thunder, and cut, cut, into the center of spirit that was desire twisted and become a fishhook to pull us on, to burn us with its barbs.
Vince was the first to look up and see the top, the first to die. It happened so quickly and it was none of the terrors that achieved it.
He slipped.
That was all. It was a difficult piece of climbing. He was right behind me one second, was gone to the next. There was no body to recover. He had taken the long drop. The soundless blue was all around him and the great grey beneath. Then we were six. We shuddered and I suppose we all prayed in our own ways.
In the morning, one more crew member is gone:
“So we were five—Doc and Kelly and Henry and Mallardi and me—and that day we hit a hundred and eight thousand and felt very alone.” (It suggests Kafka’s parable “Fellowship”: “We are five friends . . . and cannot be tolerated with this sixth one.”) Once more the hallucination of the woman joins them. There is a conversation in which she seems strangely present and absent at the same time. “Why do you hate us?” Jack Summer asks.
“No hate, sir,” she said.
“What then?”
“I protect.”
“What? What is it that you protect?”
“The dying, that she may live.”
“What? Who is dying? How?”
But her words went away somewhere, and I did not hear them. Then she went away too and there was nothing left but sleep for the rest of the night.
They climb for another week.
“I’m not worried about making it to the top,” Henry says. “The clouds are like little wisps of cotton down there.”
The purgatorial allegory results with approach of the uppermost level of the lustful—only the woman involved is as cold and stony as Leota Mathild Mason in cold-sleep in “The Graveyard Heart.”
What the text recalls even more than the ascent of Purgatory is Sigfried breaking through the circle of fire surrounding Brunhilde, with the flames themselves taking on the aspect of demons and dragons.
I left Henry far below me. The creature was a moving light in the sky. I made two hundred feet in a hurry, and when I looked up again. I saw the creature had grown two more heads. Lightnings flashed from its nostrils, and its tail whipped around the mountain. I made an another hundred feet, and I could see Mallardi clearly by then, climbing steadily, outlined against the brilliance. I swung my pick, gasping, and I fought the mountain, following the trail he had cut. I began to gain on him because he was still pounding out his way and I didn’t have that problem yet. Then I heard him talking:
“Not yet, big fella, not yet,” he was saying, from behind a wall of static. “Here’s a ledge . . . ”
I looked up, and he vanished.
The seventh and final section—the entrance into the cave at the mountain top—replays the entrance into the cold-sleep bunker at the end of “The Graveyard Heart” without the Grand Guignol of the stake through the heart/womb. The disease Linda’s husband—Carl—is trying to help her survive until it is cured is something called Dawson’s Plague.
A death . . .
A life . . .
A lot of technological hugger-mugger . . .
At the top of a mountain whose peak is forty-two miles high, above the atmosphere itself. Clearly Zelazny is aware of the Puragotrial allegory. (“Tell me what it was like to climb a mountain like this one. Why?”
(“There is a certain madness involved,” I said, “a certain envy of great and powerful natural forces, that some men have. Each mountain is a deity you know. Each mountain is an immortal power. If you make sacrifice upon its slopes, a mountain may grant you a certain grace, and for a time, you will share its power.”)
I think the key to why “Damnation Alley” is less effective than it might be is in Zelazny’s own note: “I wanted to do a straight, style-be-damned action story with the pieces fall[ing] wherever.” Well, when the style is let go, the truth is there’s not that much left to a Zelazny tale—though the results are still interesting.
Zelazny’s own comments on the movie is instructive: there were two scripts, the first of which he was shown, and which was much better than the second which they actually used. It recalls Lessing’s characterization of genius: the ability “to put talent wholly into the service of an idea,” which is what the flexibility of voice that Zelazny’s strives for in his various styles accomplishes in the passages where the style is most in evidence:
The stories, such as the ones here, where the full toolbox is used most artfully.
And that is why one should continue to read him.
—Friday, February 8, 2018,
Philadephia, PA.
Introduction
by Theodore Sturgeon
There has been nothing like Zelazny in the science fiction field since—
