The print had lived for fifty years in a biscuit tin, and Malcolm carried it up the valley in a freezer bag inside a hardback book, which he had judged the safest place for it. It showed a wall of ice filling the head of the valley, grey-white and ribbed. A small figure in a dark jacket stood on a rock in the foreground, one arm raised against the glare. On the back, in his grandfather's pencil, were a date and four words: "Still bigger than I expected."
那张照片在饼干盒里放了五十年，马尔科姆把它装在一只冷冻袋里，夹在一本精装书中，带着走上了山谷，他认为这是最安全的地方。照片上是一堵冰墙，填满了山谷的尽头，灰白色，带着棱纹。前景的一块岩石上，站着一个穿深色夹克的小小身影，一只手臂抬起来挡着强光。背面是祖父用铅笔写的日期和一句话：“还是比我想象的大。”
The path followed a river that was the colour of weak tea and then, after the second hour, the colour of milk. Malcolm had read the trail notes the night before. The end of the glacier was now about five kilometres further up than the old maps suggested, a sentence he had read twice without taking in. He climbed steadily, stopping at each new bend to compare the print with the view, and the ridgelines matched, every one, with a precision that made the missing part easier to see.
小路沿着一条河，河水起初是淡茶的颜色，过了第二个钟头，就变成了牛奶的颜色。马尔科姆前一晚读过步道说明。冰川的末端，现在比旧地图上标的位置，大约又往上退了五公里，这句话他读了两遍，却没有真正读进去。他稳稳地往上爬，每到一个新的拐弯就停下来，把照片和眼前的景色对照，山脊线都吻合，一条不差，那么精确，反倒让缺失的那一部分更容易看出来。
By midday the valley held nothing but gravel, meltwater and the occasional boulder the size of a van. The ice, when he finally saw it, was a long way off and a long way up, a pale tongue wedged into a notch between two peaks. Nowhere between him and it was there any trace of the wall that the print showed. Beside the path ran a line of scraped rock, thirty metres above his head, which he understood after a moment to mark the height of the glacier on the day his grandfather stood here.
到中午，山谷里除了砾石、融水和偶尔一块面包车大小的巨石，什么也没有了。冰川终于出现在他眼前时，离他很远，又在很高的地方，像一条淡色的舌头，楔在两座山峰之间的缺口里。在他和它之间，没有任何地方留着照片里那堵墙的痕迹。小路旁边，在他头顶三十米处，延伸着一道被刮擦过的岩石线，他过了片刻才明白，那标出的是祖父站在这里那天冰川的高度。
The rock was easy to find. What made it unmistakable was the lichen: a thumb-shaped smear of orange on its north face, exactly as it appeared in the print, only a little wider now. He climbed on to it with some care, because it was wet, and stood where the small figure had stood. Having imagined this moment for months, he noticed that he felt less than he had planned to, and was paying very close attention to his boots instead.
那块岩石很容易找。让它一眼就能认出来的，是地衣：北面上一块拇指形状的橙色斑痕，和照片里一模一样，只是现在宽了一点。他小心翼翼地爬了上去，因为岩石是湿的，然后站在了照片中那个小小身影站过的地方。这一刻，他已经想象了好几个月，却发现自己的感受比原先预想的要少，反而在非常专注地盯着自己的靴子。
He held the print at arm's length against the valley and let the two scenes settle over one another. The ridges lined up. The dark band of rock halfway up the left-hand peak lined up. The wall of ice that had once filled the lower half of the frame was simply not there. What stood in its place was a quantity of air and distance that the paper could not account for. It was the sound, not the sight, that took him by surprise: a steady ticking of meltwater falling somewhere out of view, in a place that used to be solid.
他把照片举到手臂远处，对着山谷，让两个场景叠在一起。山脊对上了。左边那座山峰半腰的黑色岩带对上了。曾经填满画面下半部分的那堵冰墙，就是不在了。取而代之的，是一大片空气和距离，那是纸张无法说明的。让他意外的是声音，而不是景象：一阵稳定的滴答声，是融水落在某个看不见的地方，落在一个过去曾是固体的地方。
Malcolm took the photograph with his phone, then another, in case. Had his grandfather known, he thought, he would probably have said something dry about the weather; the man had never in his life commented directly on anything he cared about. A small wind came down the valley and lifted the corner of the print, and he put his thumb on it until it settled.
马尔科姆用手机拍了一张照片，又拍了一张，以防万一。要是祖父知道了，他想，大概会就天气说上一句淡淡的话；这个人一辈子从来没有直接评论过任何他在乎的事。一阵小风顺着山谷吹下来，掀起了照片的一角，他用拇指按住，直到它平静下来。
Before climbing down he turned the print over, took the pencil from his breast pocket, and wrote the date beneath the old one, in his own handwriting, which was worse. Under it he added four words of his own, then stopped, erased two of them, and left the rest. He slid the print back into its bag and the bag into the book, and started down the valley the long way, beside a river that was, for the moment, still the colour of milk.
下山之前，他把照片翻过来，从胸前口袋里取出铅笔，在旧日期下面写上了今天的日期，用的是他自己的笔迹，比祖父的更糟。在日期下面，他又加了他自己的四个字，然后停下来，擦掉了其中两个，把剩下的留着。他把照片滑回袋子里，把袋子放进书里，然后沿着山谷走上了下山的长路，身边的那条河，此刻仍然是牛奶的颜色。
