I had told you I was leaving. I meant it, too. The bags were by the door and the plan was the valley and the train and one last look over my shoulder, and I had even said the goodbyes out loud, which is usually the point of no return. And then I stood on the step with the morning coming up pink over the ridge and I could not make my feet do it. It was too much to walk away from. I had not had enough. There is a kind of greed that a beautiful place turns on in you, where one more day never feels like plenty. So I tore up the plan. I am staying a couple more days. I have never once regretted staying somewhere longer, and I have regretted leaving early more times than I can count.
Which is how, on a morning I had meant to spend on a train, I found myself going up instead of down. For three days I had looked at these mountains, and now we finally went up into them. There is a difference, I have decided, between a mountain you admire from a meadow and a mountain you stand on, and the difference is the whole point. So we left the house early, before the cloud could think about coming down, and took the first cable car of the morning. I watched the meadow with our little maso on it drop away beneath my feet until it was only one pale roof among the green, and then not even that.
The going up is its own event. The cabin swings out over nothing and the floor of the world falls away and, for a moment, your stomach stays behind on the platform. I am not entirely brave about heights, which I only remember at the exact instant it is too late to do anything about them, and I stood very close to the glass with both hands on the rail and pretended to be photographing the view when really I was just holding on. Then came the top station, the doors opening onto cold, thin, bright air, and all of it forgiven at once.
Up there the light is a different substance. It is thinner and harder and comes at you from the snow and pale rock as much as from the sky, so that everything is lit twice, and a person standing on a terrace at that altitude looks, I think, better than they have any right to. We had coffee first, because you always have coffee first, at a long wooden table outside a rifugio with the whole range laid out beyond the railing like weather happening beneath us. I have had coffee in a great many beautiful places. I am not sure any of them beat a small, strong cup on a mountain hut terrace, your hands cold around it and nothing but peaks for a hundred miles.
Then we walked. Not far, and not heroically, whatever the boots in the photographs might suggest, but out along a high path with the ground dropping away on one side and the rock rising on the other, and the Tre Cime standing there at the end of it exactly as they do in every picture and still, somehow, a shock. You think you know what they look like. You do not. Photographs make them handsome. In person they are simply enormous and completely indifferent to you, three great teeth of pale stone with cloud pouring around their feet. Standing beneath them, you feel the particular smallness these mountains seem to specialise in, which is not a bad feeling at all once you stop resisting it. I sat on a warm rock for a long time and did not say anything, and neither did anyone else, which is the highest compliment a view can be paid.
We ate at the hut, the way you are meant to, a bowl of barley soup and a board of speck and cheese and dark bread, the plain, strong food of high places that tastes like nothing much down in the valley and like the best meal of your life at two thousand metres. The photographer took almost nothing over lunch, which is how I know he was enjoying it. There was a table of hikers next to us with real sunburn and real tiredness on them, the earned kind, and I felt a small fraud in my summer dress with my soft afternoon behind me. Then the sun came around the corner of the terrace and I stopped feeling anything except warm.
We saved the coming down until the light went gold. That is the trick nobody tells you about mountains. The hour before the last cable car is the one worth staying for, when the crowds have gone down ahead of you and the rock turns first amber and then a pink that does not look real, while the shadows pour long and blue into every valley at once. We stood on the ridge and watched the peaks catch fire and go out, one after another, west to east, and I thought about the house waiting for us down in the dark with its yellow windows, and how strange and lucky it is to have both in one day, the roof and the summit, the kept thing and the enormous one.
I came down quieter than I went up. Height does that. It rearranges the proportions of things, so that on the way home in the last cable car, swinging down through the blue air towards the lights, the small worries I had carried up with me had somehow been left at the top, too heavy to bring down. There is one more day here. I have stopped counting them the way you count down a holiday and started counting them the way you count something you are trying to keep. Tomorrow the valley, the town, the shops, a last dinner. Tonight, the whole range going dark outside the window, and me at it, not wanting to sleep and miss the mountains turning black.
V.
More images from the Dolomites
This is the fourth of my Dolomites diaries. You can read them all, along with where to stay, the walks and the passes, in my complete guide to the Dolomites.
