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It is, Typoz and there is another similar book (by a woman) which I also have in my attic (the book not the woman unfortunately)
The early morning was perfectly still and silent. James Sevigny, a twenty-eight-year-old university student originally from Hanover, New Hampshire, and his friend Richard Whitmire set out to climb Deltaform, a mountain in the Canadian Rockies near Lake Louise, Alberta. They ascended an ice gully, or couloir, in bright late-winter light on April 1, 1983, roped together and using ice screws in their climb. Whitmire, a thirty-three-year-old from Bellingham, Washington, was in the lead and at one point cut some ice loose. He yelled a warning"Falling ice!"to Sevigny below. The ice catapulted safely past Sevigny, but was suddenly followed by the collapse of a snowfield above the couloir on the north face. A tremendous roar broke the silence, and the bright light was consumed by instant darkness. An avalanche swept the two men nearly two thousand feet to the base of Deltaform. Sevigny was unconscious almost from the moment the avalanche hit. Whitmire might have escaped had the pair not been roped together.
Sevigny regained consciousness, he guessed, an hour later. He was severely injured. His back was broken in two places. One arm was fractured, the other had severed nerves from a broken scapula and was hanging limply at his side. He had cracked ribs, torn ligaments on both knees, suffered internal bleeding, and his face, broken nose, broken teeth, and open wounds was a mess. He had no idea where he was and what had happened to him. At first he thought he might be in Nepal, where he had spent six months trekking a few years earlier. Sevigny had finished his master's degree and at the time of the accident was basically a "climbing bum," living out of his Volkswagen. It took a while for him to recognize the mountain, but gradually Sevigny remembered the climb, and struggled to his feet to look for his friend. Whitmire lay nearby, and from his misshapen body, it was clear he was dead. Sevigny lay down beside him, certain he would soon follow. "I figured that if I fell asleep, it would be the easiest way to go." He lay there for about twenty minutes. Shivers were gradually replaced by the sensation of warmth brought about by shock and hypothermia, and he began to doze off. He realized there was no vast gulf separating life and death, but rather a fine line, and at that moment, Sevigny thought it would be easier to cross that line than to struggle on.
He then felt a sudden, strange sensation of an invisible being very close at hand. "It was something I couldn't see but it was a physical presence." The presence communicated mentally, and its message was clear: "You can't give up, you have to try." It told me what to do. The only decision I had made at that point in time was to lie down next to Rick and to fall asleep and to accept death. That's the only decision I made. All decisions made subsequent to that were made by the presence. I was merely taking instructions. . . . I understood what it wanted me to do. It wanted me to live. The presence urged Sevigny to get up. It dispensed practical advice. It told him, for example, to follow the blood dripping from the tip of his nose as if it were an arrow pointing the way. As he walked, he kept breaking through the crust of the deep snow, and was almost unable to pull his feet back up because of his injuries. Part of the time he crawled. The presence, which stood behind his right shoulder, implored him to continue even when the struggle to survive seemed untenable. And when it fell silent, Sevigny still knew his companion was close at hand. Because of its enormous empathy, he thought of the presence as a woman. She accompanied Sevigny across the Valley of the Ten Peaks, to the camp he and Whitmire had started from earlier that day, a point where he hoped he could find food and warmth, and perhaps help. Such were his injuries that it took all day to make the crossing of about a mile, and his companion was with him every step of the way.
When he reached the camp, Sevigny could not crawl into his sleeping bag because his injuries were too severe, and he could not eat because his teeth were broken and his face was swollen. He could not even light the stove. He sat down and, from the position of the sun, realized it was late afternoon. He believed that in a couple of hours he would be dead, after all. "I recall knowing I was about to die, pathetically, in a fetal position in the snow." He had always felt that he might die while climbing, so it came as no real surprise, but he thought about how devastated his mother would be. Then, at once, he thought he heard some other voices, and called out for help. There was no response. It was at that moment that he felt the presence leave. "It was gone, there was nothing there, there was no presence. There was no one telling me to do anything and I could tell that it had left." For the first time since the avalanche, he was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness:
What I thought then was I'm hallucinating, the presence knows I'm dead, and it has just given up on me. But as it turns out, those were people, and they did come up. One of them skied out and they flew me out that night in a helicopter. In fact, the presence had left because it knew I was safe.
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Malf gave me a like ! Thanks, Malf, I'll treasure it along with the other one you gave me last year :)