The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  Jansz was awake and on deck in the pre-dawn light. (The draughtsman Gilsemans rose late that day—a pity, considering what was about to transpire: a sketch of the scene might have proved invaluable.) A swell was running still, but lessening, and the breeze, though light and shifting, seemed to be setting to the south-west, which would help the Zeehaen on its return to the north. For the moment, however, the ship and its crew were merely enjoying the respite from the storm.

  Jansz had just checked the ship’s chronometer to note the time, then, as his gaze roamed the grey horizon, something due south of the ship caught his eye: a sudden glow that was brightening, a sliver of dusky red on the edge of the world, vivid, but far, far away.

  ‘I bethought it the top of a cloud,’ writes Jansz, ‘which, ascending to a great height, was catching the unrisen sun.’

  But the more he looked, the less Jansz thought the glowing red sliver to be a cloud. For one, there were no other clouds at all in the south. Nor was it the shape of cloud form: neither the cauliflower cumulus of a storm, nor the diaphanous sheet of high-level cirrus. Instead, it looked for all the world like a crest of rocky land, the uppermost line of a great ridge flushing with the first light, except so far away that its edges were softened by distance almost to mist.

  Unearthly. In all his time at sea, Jansz had never seen anything quite like it. For many minutes he studied the distant sliver wonderingly as its colour changed from red to purple, and then near to blue, fading all the while as the light grew in the sky, till it was only the faintest of blurs. Was it land or not? Should he investigate? It lay in the wrong direction—south, not north—and he was already off course as it was. But if it was land, then surely it should be investigated? Jansz could not decide.

  But then a warm light broke across his face and he turned to see the sun lifting above the eastern horizon, the sails of his ship flushing orange. A thought struck him. He consulted the chronometer and saw that since he had first sighted the glowing sliver in the south, over twenty minutes had passed. That settled it then. The shape in the south—and it was all but invisible now in the haze of daylight—could only be a cloud.

  Jansz reasoned it out in his log. The object lay due south of the ship, on the same longitude, so it should have experienced sunrise at roughly the same time as the ship. And yet that pale sliver to the south had been sunlit a full twenty minutes earlier than had the Zeehaen.

  There was only one way to explain that: altitude. An object—a cloud, say, or a mountain—that reared to great heights above an observer would always see sunrise before that same observer. And as it happened, Jansz had made something of a study of this effect.

  His subject had been a particular mountain in Java, a mountain with white rock at its peak that glowed particularly brightly every sunrise. Local Dutch geographers had assured Jansz that the mountain was (translated into modern terms of measurement) some twelve hundred metres in height, and observing the mountain over several dawns, Jansz had noted that the sunlight reached its peak almost exactly one minute before it shone upon the world at sea level.

  So he had a figure of ready reckoning. For every thousand metres in height, the sun rose about fifty seconds earlier than at sea level. (There are adjustments needed, as Jansz knew, to compensate for the different rate of spin of the Earth’s surface between, say, a position on the equator and one nearer the poles, but that need not be explored here.) Jansz had used this reckoning while observing storms at dawn, and so had measured thunderheads that rose to a fantastic thirteen thousand metres, greeting the sun near to twelve minutes before the lower lands.

  Thirteen thousand metres was already far higher than any earthly mountain rose. But the red sliver that Jansz beheld that morning, for all that it looked like the top of a mountain, had been sunlit for close to twenty-one minutes before dawn reached the ship.

  That suggested a height of twenty-five thousand metres! Stupendous, even for a cloud, well beyond any precedent in Jansz’s experience. And for a mountain—well, it was impossible.

  The thing was a cloud, and only a cloud. To think—as Jansz wrote in his log—he’d almost dashed off to the south, chasing a useless mirage. Congratulating himself, Jansz turned his ship to the north, to make his rendezvous with Tasman four days later.

  So it was that the greatest discovery of the Southern Ocean would not be made for another century, and by another captain.

  Still, given the data in Jansz’s log, there can be no doubt about the truth. His own estimated position at the time translates to a spot three hundred kilometres to the south-southwest of Tasmania’s south-western-most point. Looking directly south from that position, he can have beheld only one thing, not a cloud, but the summit ridge of the Wheel, meeting the dawn. The first human ever to do so.

  And strangely enough, his rough estimate of twenty-five thousand metres, as little as he could credit such a figure himself, was accurate to within less than a tenth of a per cent, out by a mere seventeen metres. It would not be bettered in precision until the modern day of global positioning satellites.

  Not bad for a man history almost forgot.

  PROLOGUE 2

  Introduction from Reaching for the Hand of God,

  by John Soliola, 2007

  November 14 , 1 9 74 . The four men slept through their last night before the summit attempt—or pretended to sleep, for with the goal this close, it was a steady soul indeed who could manage to drift off. But in any case all four were at rest, unspeaking. Other than their breathing and the rustle of sleeping bags, the only sounds in the hut were the humming of the compressors and heaters, and the occasional venting of exhaust.

  From outside, nothing. No gales battered the aluminium alloy walls; no snow or hail pattered upon the aluminium alloy roof. Not this high up. Up here, the great silence held forever over all.

  By the inner airlock door, beneath a stencilled monogram that read H-122, there glowed a chunky digital readout. Embossed labels were glued alongside lines of orange electric numbers that occasionally flickered and changed.

  Time, AEST . . . . . . . 2.40

  Alt, M . . . . . . . . . 24,590

  Int Temp, C . . . . . . +15

  Ext Temp, C . . . . . . -63

  W Av Vel, km/h . . . . . 4.6

  W Max Gu, km/h . . . . . 7.9

  Int AP, ATM . . . . . . 0.75

  Ext AP, ATM . . . . . . 0.04

  Int Ox, % . . . . . . . 25.8

  Int CO2, % . . . . . . . 0.06

  Ma Integ, % . . . . . . 100

  AL Integ, % . . . . . . 100

  In other words, all was well. The hut—a stout, pressurised, prefabricated structure roughly the size and shape of a small caravan, and known formally as a HAEV, a High Altitude Environment—was doing its job, protecting the men from the stratospheric night. Outside was lethal, airless cold and a barrenness harsher than any desert, but within, the men slept, or did not sleep, upon a padded, electrically heated floor, breathing at ease in the oxygen-enriched air, surrounded by ample supplies of food and water.

  At three a.m., an alarm sounded. If any of the men had genuinely been asleep, they all stirred now. Two hours of preparations began. First, breakfast and ablutions. Then, the painstaking checking of equipment—inspecting first the hut itself, then each of the four men’s pressure suits, including all the associated tanks and batteries and seals, and back-ups for each, searching for even the smallest flaw or malfunction. Finally, and only when everything had been declared Condition Green, came the donning of the suits, each man taking at least fifteen minutes, even when assisted by the others.

  At five a.m. the four were ready to go outside. They looked, at a glance, like four astronauts about to step into space—which, after all, was not so far from the truth. But these men weren’t astronauts, they were mountain climbers, and they were still on Earth, if only just. Not that it made their task any easier. Indeed, getting to the Moon had been simpler in many ways than getting this close to the summit of the Wheel. Five years had pas
sed since Armstrong had taken his great step for mankind, with Mars presumably to follow one day soon, yet still there remained this one point on the home planet upon which no man had ever set foot.

  In any case, on closer study, the men’s pressure suits were rather different to those the Apollo astronauts had worn, although they had in fact been made by the same firm, the David Clark Company, which had been in the business ever since the US military began sending planes into the high atmosphere. Indeed, the climbers’ suits—HTF11 (High Terrain Function) suits—were the more advanced models.

  The Apollo pressure suits, for instance, the A7L series, were notoriously inflexible, barely adequate for the simple movements of walking on the Moon. True, all pressure suits face such limitations; stiffness is the trade-off for supplying full air pressure within a self-contained suit. But mountain climbing demands flexibility. So David Clark had gone back to their drawing boards and—after intensive experimentation—had come up with a range of original artificial fabrics for the HTF series, giving the climbers more freedom.

  There were other important differences besides, especially as regards the life-enabling equipment in the backpack sections, for survival in near space is a less complicated affair than in actual space. Thin air, for instance, even at only five per cent of the atmosphere at sea level, is better than no air at all. Thin air can be pumped by a battery-powered compressor into a small, pressurised tank to provide constant breathing air to the suit, whereas an Apollo suit, surrounded by vacuum, had to carry its entire air supply in a larger, heavier tank.

  But this is no place to go into all the technicalities. Suffice to say that in being more flexible and more lightweight and more easily powered than any pressure suit that had gone before, it was the HTF suits above any other advance that had enabled this expedition, and these four climbers, to approach victory where all else had failed.

  Final checks complete, the men turned to the door. One of them thumbed the airlock controls to release the catches, then opened the door, allowing the men to step into the airlock, an anteroom chamber that was nearly as large as the main room. Stacked here were all kinds of supplies in boxes, cans and flasks, wrapped tight against the room’s periodic depressurisations, while various tubes and cables ran through the walls to feed the compressors and heaters within both chambers.

  The men closed the inner door, and turned to the outer. It boasted a small, thick window. Through the glass a turquoise darkness sparkled, freezing even to the eye. One by one, the men lowered and latched their visors and switched on the environmental functions of their suits; air pockets inflated and pressed against skin in imitation of air pressure, other fabrics contracted to the same effect; heating and cooling systems kicked in, and breathing systems too. They were ready for the outside.

  The four checked all systems one last time, as per the drill. Finally one of them worked the controls by the outer door, and with a thumping sound, air began to drain from the chamber. It took only a few moments. Then the light by the outer door was blinking green. External and internal pressures were equalised.

  The men opened the outer door and stepped through into the near-space of altitude twenty-four-and-a-half thousand metres.

  At lower levels on the mountain, such an exit might entail beating one’s way against jet stream winds of incredible force, or digging one’s way up through an overnight ten-foot dump of snow, or feeling cautiously through fog so thick as to be night-dark.

  But here, there was none of that. Hut 122 was above all such weather of the world. Nothing more than a mild breeze ever blew here, or could blow, and the air was so thin that that breeze was undetectable anyway, especially through the suits. Nor did snow or rain ever fall here, or cloud ever gather. None of these things could happen. At nearly twenty-five kilometres altitude, the atmosphere was dead to weather. It was dry of all moisture, permanently frozen at temperatures far below zero, and utterly sterile.

  As was the landscape.

  Naked rock was all that greeted the four men, the stony surfaces without lustre or sheen. Nor was there any glint of ice, for even the trace moisture that had been contained in the rocks themselves, millennia ago, as they lifted inch by inch into the sky, had long since been sublimated away into the parched air. Far below—fifteen kilometres down the mountain—there was snow and ice aplenty, entire glaciers, but up here near the Wheel’s peak there was only desolation.

  It was a landscape closer to the surface of Mars than to Earth. Hence NASA’s eagerness to be involved in the expedition: climbing the Wheel was a perfect rehearsal for a future Mars landing.

  And yet the Wheel was no wide dusty Martian plain. The four mountain climbers were perched on a knife-edge of stone that climbed precariously into the pre-dawn sky, gulfs of infinity dropping away on either hand, only a misstep away.

  Such was the summit ridge of the Wheel, a hellish flesh-less backbone, narrow and rugged and cleft with many chasms. To the south, beyond the hut, it dropped away in jagged rises and falls, towards the far-below ocean, invisible for now in the darkness. To the west lay an abyss of empty air and a night untouched yet by any predawn light, but to the east the approaching sun outlined the very curve of the planet, the atmosphere, seen from almost beyond it, glowing as a golden mist.

  But the men ignored the approaching sunrise. Their gazes were raised northwards, to the brightly coloured stars above, and the shadow that loomed stark against them. Here the ridge leapt up in a series of cliffs and precipices, until far above, still some four hundred vertical metres higher than their campsite, a twisted fist of blackness marked the crest of the ridge: the pinnacle of the mountain.

  There it was. The summit of the Wheel, the famed Hand of God, the focal point of immeasurable tonnes of stone, reared so painfully from the earth to pierce the stratosphere and to rear exactly—as far as anyone had so far measured—twenty-five thousand and seventeen metres. Far away in the Himalayas, the world’s second highest mountain, Everest, long ago defeated, was less than half that height.

  The four men stared for a time. Carbon monoxide–rich exhaust puffed periodically from their breathing units, crackling as the moisture within it froze instantly in tiny clouds of man-made snow before just as quickly sublimating. But otherwise the air was etched with a razor clarity, the peak above just beginning to glow in anticipation of dawn—not the pearly pink-white of a snow-capped peak, but rather a deep red upon black, as if veins of blood flowed through the rocky faces above.

  Three hundred and thirty-two years had passed since Gerrit Jansz had spied the growing fire on the horizon, and not realised what it was that he saw. Now the four men beheld the same sight, but from so close that as the light strengthened they could discern individual seams and clefts in the summit above, as if in arm’s reach. Before this day was out, if all went well, they would stand upon that strangely shaped pinnacle, so like a human hand, where no man had stood before.

  No man, nor any other creature neither. No bird had ever soared so high, no animal or insect had ever scaled the twenty-five kilometres from below. Only humanity had ventured even this close—and that at a terrible price. The slopes of the Wheel, far below, were littered with dozens, hundreds, of unrecovered corpses, the remains of climbers who had died in their assaults upon the mountain. The history of disasters and failed attempts stretched back over a hundred years and more.

  Non-climbers had also made attempts. Twice in the 1950s, high altitude balloonists had tried to soar to the summit, each time to meet with horror and death. And in the 1960s, both the USA and the USSR sent their highest-flying aircraft—spy planes—to pass over the summit at hypersonic speeds, the motors of their cameras whirring, to see what they might of the mysterious Hand of God up close.

  And yet despite all such efforts, the only knowledge that had been gained of the summit were a few dissatisfying photos, more enigmatic than revealing. The Wheel’s uttermost tip twisted upon itself in a way that hid and shadowed its own form: the Hand of God was not open to the wo
rld, but enclosed, keeping its secret. The spy jets could not pause in midair to get better shots, and no helicopter could fly even half as high as needed. A rocket, perhaps, at vast expense, might have risen aloft and detached a landing module to approach the Hand—but no module known could then thread the space between the fingers.

  The frustrating truth was this: the Wheel was too high for any aircraft to reach, and yet too low, too awkward, for a rocket to make a practical landing. If the great peak was to be defeated, it must be done the old-fashioned way, by human sweat and strain, labouring slowly up through the stone and ice and thinning air, camp by camp.

  As these four men indeed had done. These four—and many others. Some six hundred climbers had taken part in the two-year campaign, ferrying the many tonnes of supplies and equipment ever higher up the Wheel’s flanks. They had ascended by two separate paths, each redundant for the other to safeguard against destruction by landslide or avalanche, and each strung with pressurised huts every few hundred vertical metres. The huts were linked by power cables and heat-jacketed water lines that ran all the way back down to the mountain’s foot, to ships docked at the harbour, housing great generators and water pumps.

  As well as the six hundred climbers, the expedition employed at least as many support staff stationed at Base Camp or upon the ships that stood permanently offshore. And hundreds more had contributed to the assault from afar: the engineers who crafted the HTF suits and the HAEV huts, the staff in the supply depot in Hobart, the administration and publicity staff, a documentary film crew—the list went on, thousands of people in all, adding up to the greatest campaign ever mounted against the Wheel. All of it, so many man-hours and so much expense, just to place these chosen four at the foot of the summit.