God’s Finger

In 1826 the poet Kondraty Ryleyev stood on the scaffold, condemned by the Tsar for treason. The trapdoor opened. The rope snapped. He fell, alive.

They say he turned to the crowd and said Russia was an unhappy country, one that did not even know how to hang a man. By custom, a failed execution could mean a pardon — an act of God overruling the state. A messenger ran to the palace.

The Tsar paused, pen above paper. “What did he say?” he asked. Told the words, he decided to test both God and rope again.

The second time, the rope held.

I don’t know why this story surfaced when I looked at that old photograph of Stephan Siegrist and David Fasel after their winter ascent of Cerro Torre. Maybe because there are moments in the mountains when you feel the rope snap — when you should have been finished, when the odds were done with you — and yet you’re still there, blinking in the light.

Sometimes you get the pardon. A storm shifts. A tool sticks. A cornice doesn’t break. You walk away from something that had already written your name in ink.

And sometimes the rope holds.

The mountains don’t test you twice out of curiosity. They don’t ask what you said the first time.

They just pull the lever again.