Besides the vegetables, they held a piece of bread, a pocketknife, sometimes the AlpineClub guidebook, and always a spool of wire for emergency repairs.
Beck snapped pictures of the crude stone shelters that AlpineClub members had begun building high in the mountains the precursors to the helicopter-serviced "huts" you find these days.
They had shaken hands and he had saluted and gone out to the staff car where the old man was waiting asleep and in that car they had ridden over the road past Guadarrama, the old man still asleep, and up the Navacerrada road to the AlpineClub hut where he, Robert Jordan, slept for three hours before they started.