French Revolutions

boulders
marooned at the foot of a mountain would have unsettled me, I now thought: I
wish I’d seen that one fall. Fir trees leaned out from the gorge flanks, tilted
at terrifyingly oblique angles towards the omnipotent torrent at the bottom but
still clinging to life. ‘No, no, we’re all right,’ they said to me. ‘It looks
bad, but you’d be surprised what you can get used to.’ Indeed so. I kept my
shades on through the dripping tunnels, oddly exhilarated as I negotiated them
blind, and successfully stifled a retch of panic when the road forked, and
there, neatly curtained by the vertical stone flanks around me, stood the
preposterous 3,000-metre serrations of the Izoard’s next-door neighbours.
    Unable to take these seriously as
sensible adversaries for a bloke on a bike, I fairly whistled up the straight
but steepening D902 into Arvieux, last stop before the end of the earth. Here I
refuelled sensibly: two Mars Bars with banana chasers from the village shop
just as it closed for elevenses, then a gulp from a bidon which eloquently
explained why chlorine has never caught on as a fruit-juice preservative. ‘II
fait chaud,’ remarked the shopkeeper, locking up as I swigged reluctantly on
her threshold. ‘Bon courage.’
    This close, the really high stuff was
hidden by foothills, which at least stopped me losing heart before the first
hairpin. Even so, it was a brutal 4k up to that, a no-nonsense direct ascent
through more scrappy, dandelioned pasture divided by the odd creaking
chairlift. I’d noticed a lot of verge-side glints, and on dismounting to
inspect the source I found myself examining one of several dozen foil pouches.
Neither a condom nor a complimentary toiletry, ‘Speedy Gel’ was, or had been, a
‘concentrated energy product’. The amateurs tackling the Izoard — wherever
they’d got to today — did so to emulate their heroes, on look-alike bikes in
look-alike strips; I supposed that by squeezing a covert sachet of glucose and
amino acids into their mouths they somehow felt they were taking look-alike
drugs. Oh, the shallow, deluded imbeciles, I thought, wondering where I could
buy some from.
    The road curled up and into the
trees. It got steeper, which was bad, but cooler, which was good. I clicked
into twenty-six and got on with it. The eye-stinging sweat came on tap, luring
flies which could only be dispatched with energy-sapping flails, and there was
a new twurrrrr counterpointing the drrr-thwicks, no doubt
something to do with a screw that hadn’t been there when I’d tried to adjust
the dérailleurs that morning.
    Soon I couldn’t flob without
following up with a drowning-man gasp as I tried to suck back that single
missed breath. I desperately wanted to click down to twenty-seven but tried
everything to avoid doing so, experimenting with the ankle flick that had
carried me halfway up the Aubisque until my Achilles tendons sang, then hitting
upon the brilliant scheme of going as slowly as possible without quite falling
over. No one was going up but there were plenty now going down, and I was
surprised to find I had the wherewithal to greet these in the accepted fashion:
clicking up a couple of gears as you heard them approach, lifting three fingers
in nonchalant greeting and attempting to bully that distraught grimace into a
casual vista-surveying gaze.
    Fifteen minutes later the casual gaze
was beyond me; the best I could manage now was the ruby-faced preoccupation of
a constipated toddler. But I was still holding it together when I gritted round
a corner lined with parked cars and rolled up to the surface of Mars. The Casse
Deserte: a devil’s quarry of singed scree and rubble, a vulgar, lifeless panorama
of rusted ballast. Behind me it was all chalets and Christmas trees; I had just
crossed from the Sound of Music to the Sound of Silence.
    Crouching by every other opened boot
was a slightly old, slightly fat man assembling an immaculate bicycle, off to
tame the Casse Deserte. From here the road surface was smooth and fresh, a
black beauty that swept down then across and finally weaved up through the
stacks of rubble like a thread stitching the fragile mountain together. One of
a pair of grey-haired chaps nodded in restrained comradely greeting as he
locked up a Turin-registered Fiat estate and prepared to hoick a tanned leg
over a polished silver crossbar; I nodded back and mimed a request for
photographic assistance. The elder of the two, he soberly complied,