Declare

lake, and the only thing that kept him from falling to his knees was the recollection that this was not in fact Noah’s Ark.
    The thing was huge, probably six stories tall, and rectangular— more like a long building imbedded in the ice than like any kind of ship. It hung above him out there, viewed almost end-on, and he could see that the underside was flat; the roof, which extended out past the high walls, was nearly flat, with a low peak at the center. The blacker squares of windows fretted the top edge, and a rickety wooden staircase, clearly of newer origin, had been erected across the flat front face and down to the ice.
    Snow whirled in dust-devil arabesques across the lifeless ice of the lake below the thing, and in the atonal whistle of the dry wind Hale was sure he heard familiar chords, as if the mountain were a vast Aeolian harp, wringing music from currents that came down raw from the stars. Under it all throbbed an alliance of subsonic tones that resonated unpleasantly in the tiny pulsing focus of Hale’s ribs and made connected thought difficult.
    Derringer, he told himself as he stumbled out across the ice; then, in terrified derision and self-contempt, Derringer? I’d do them more harm throwing it at them.
    His balance was going—he had to keep glancing at the surface under his boots to assure himself that he was still vertical—and he sat down hard on the ice, resolved at least not to kneel. He clutched the drogue stone that hung in front of him, glad of the cross cut in its face.
    From over the shoulder of the mountain, on the side by the Abich I glacier, he heard booming and cracking; and then the earthbound thunder sounded to his right, and he saw that it was the noise of avalanches, galleries and valleys of snow moving down from the heights and separating into fragments, then tumbling and exploding into jagged bursts of white against the remote gray sky before they disappeared below his view.
    The cracks and thunders made syllables in the depleted air, but they didn’t seem to be in Arabic. Hale guessed that they were of a language much older, the uncompromised speech of mountain conversing with mountain and lightning and cloud, seeming random only to creatures like himself whose withered verbs and nouns had grown apart from the things they described.
    The music was nearly inaudible to Hale’s physical eardrums, but in his spine he could feel that it was mounting toward some sustained note for which tragedy or grandeur would be nearly appropriate words.
    Silently in the vault far overhead the clouds broke, and tall columns of glowing, whirling snow-dust stood now around the black vessel, motionless; Hale reflected that it must be noon, for the shining columns were vertical. The mountain and the lake and the very air were suddenly darker in comparison.
    The columns of light were alive, the fields of their attentions palpably sweeping across the ice and the glacier face and the mountain, momentarily clarifying into sharp focus anything they touched; for just a moment Hale could see with hallucinatory clarity the woven cuffs of his sleeves.
    Angels, Hale thought, looking away in shuddering awe. These beings on this mountain are older than the world, and once looked God in the face.
    Which they will never do again, he told himself, and which I may, God willing. Against this spectacle he mentally held up his remembered view of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, especially as he had seen it in a dream, in which the cathedral had been the prow of a ship laboring through a black ocean.
    He rocked forward on the gravel-strewn surface, and by pushing downward with his hands he was able to stand up, shakily.
    He looked back toward the gap he had climbed out through, and saw two unsteady figures step down onto the ice—one had a snow-whitened beard, and he knew they were Mammalian and Philby.
    A new, louder note grew out of the mountain’s resonance, and resolved itself, incongruously, into the whine of a turbine engine. The sound was droning from the void behind him, and Hale rocked around to look northwest—and he was disoriented to see the nose and glittering edge-on rotor disk of a helicopter hanging out there in the sky. It was growing in apparent size, clearly speeding toward the Rabkrin position.
    Even as he watched, two spots of fluttering white glare appeared below the onrushing cabin; but only a moment later the craft was climbing and banking to the east, and the machine-gun slugs blew a