by Dave Eggers
“Jambo,” the porter repeats, and smiles at her.
He is young, probably the youngest porter she’s seen, maybe eighteen. He has a scar bisecting his mouth, from just below his nose to just above the dimple on his chin. The containers are the size and shape of those used to carry gasoline. He lowers one under a small waterfall and it begins to fill, making precisely the same sound she heard from her bed, in her Moshi hut. She and the porter are crouching a few feet apart, his sweatshirt lashed with a zebra pattern in pink and black.
“You like zebras?” she asks. She rolls her eyes at her own inability to sound like anything but a moron.
He smiles and nods. She touches his sweatshirt and gives him a thumbs up. He smiles nervously.
She dips her hands into the water. Exactly the temperature she expected—cold but not bracing. She uses her fingernails to scrape the dirt from her palms, and with each trowel-like movement, she seems to free soil from her hand’s lines. She then lets the water run over her palm, and her sense of accomplishment is great. Without soap she will clean these filthy hands! But when she is finished, when she has dried her hands on her shorts, they look exactly the same, filthy.
The sun has come through while she was staring at them, and she turns to face the sun, which is low but strong. The sun convinces her that she belongs here more than the other hikers, more than the porters. She is still not wearing socks! And now the sun is warming her, telling her not to worry that she cannot get her hands clean.
“Sun,” she says to the porter, and smiles.
He nods while twisting the cap on the second container.
“What is your name?” she asks.
“Kassim,” he says.
She asks him to spell it. He does. She tries to say it and he smiles.
“You think we’re crazy to pay to hike up this hill?” she asks. She is nodding, hoping he will agree with her. He smiles and shakes his head, not understanding.
“Crazy?” Rita says, pointing to her chest. “To pay to hike up this hill?” She is walking her index and middle fingers up an imaginary mountain in the air. She points to the peak of Kilimanjaro, ringed by clouds, curved blades guarding the final thousand feet.
He doesn’t understand, or pretends not to. Rita decides that Kassim is her favorite porter and that she’ll give him her lunch. When they reach the bottom, she’ll give him her boots. She glances at his feet, inside ancient faux-leather basketball shoes, and knows that his feet are much too big. Maybe he has kids. He can give the shoes to the kids. It occurs to Rita then that he’s at work. That his family is at home while he is on the mountain. This is what she misses so much, coming home to those kids. The noise! They would just start in, a million things they had to talk about. She was interrupted all night until they fell asleep. They had no respect for her privacy and she loved them for their insouciance. She wants to sign more field trip permission slips. She wants to quietly curse their gym teacher for upsetting them. She wants to clean the gum out of J.J.’s backpack or wash Frederick’s urine-soaked sheets.
Kassim finishes, his vessels full, and so he stands, waves goodbye, and jogs back to the camp.
In the sun the hikers and porters lay their wet clothes out on the rocks, hang them from the bare limbs of the trees. The temperature rises from freezing to sixty in an hour and everyone is delirious with warmth, with the idea of being dry, of everything being dry. The campsite, now visible for hundreds of yards, is wretched with people—maybe four hundred of them—and the things they’re bringing up the mountain. There are colors ragged everywhere, dripping from the trees, bleeding into the earth. In every direction hikers are walking, toilet paper in hand, to find a private spot to deposit their waste.
Rita devours her porridge and she knows that she is feeling strong just as a few of the others are fading. They are cramped around the card table, in the tent, and the flaps are open for the first time during a meal, and it is now too warm, too sunny. Those facing the sun are wearing sunglasses.
“Lordy that feels good,” Grant says.
“Thank God,” Jerry says.
“You sure, dear Lord, we deserve this? Sure we haven’t suffered enough?” Shelly says, and they laugh.
“I don’t want to spoil the mood,” Frank says, “but I have an announcement. I wanted to make clear that you’re not allowed to give porters stuff. This morning, Mike thought it was a good idea to give a porter his sunglasses, and what happened, Mike?”
“Some other guy was wearing them.”
“How long did it take before the sunglasses were on this other guy?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Why’s that, Mike?”
“Because you’re supposed to give stuff to Patrick first.”
“Right. Listen, people. There’s a pecking order here, and Patrick knows the score. If you have a wave of generosity come over you and wanna give someone your lunch or your shoelaces or something, you give it to Patrick. He’ll distribute whatever it is. That’s the only way it’s fair. That understood? You’re here to walk and they’re here to work.”
Everyone nods.
“Why you giving your sunglasses away anyway, Mike? You’re sure as hell gonna need ’em these next couple days. You get to the top and you’re—”
“I’m going down,” Mike says.
“What?”
“I have to go down,” Mike says, staring at Frank, the sun lightening his blue eyes until they’re sweater-gray, almost colorless. “I don’t have the desire any more.”
“The desire, eh?”
Frank pauses for a second, and seems to move, silently, from wanting to joke with Mike to wanting to talk him out of it to accepting the decision. It’s clear he wants Jerry to say something, but Jerry is silent. Jerry will speak to Mike in private.
“Well,” Frank says, “you know it when you know it, I guess. Patrick’ll get a porter to walk you down.”
Mike and Frank talk about how it will work. All the way down in one day? That’s best, Frank says. That way you won’t need provisions. Who brings my stuff? You carry your pack, a porter will carry the duffel. Get in by nightfall, probably, and Godwill will be there to meet you. Who’s Godwill? The driver. Oh, the older man. Yes. Godwill. He’ll come up to get you. If the park rangers think it’s an emergency, they’ll let him drive about half the way up. So how much of a hike will we make down? Six hours. I think I can do that. You can, Mike, you can. You’ll have to. No problem. Thanks for playing. Better luck next time.
Jerry still hasn’t said anything. He is eating his porridge quickly, listening. He is now chewing his porridge, his face pinched, his eyes planning.
After breakfast Rita is walking to the toilet tent and passes the cooking tent. There are six porters inside, and a small tight group outside—younger porters, mostly, each holding a small cup, standing around a large plastic tub, like those used to bus dishes and silverware. Kassim is there; she recognizes him immediately because he, like all of the porters, wears the same clothes each day. There is another sweatshirt she knows, with a white torso and orange sleeves, a florid Hello Kitty logo on the chest. Rita tries to catch Kassim’s eye but he’s concentrating on the cooking tent. Steven steps through the flaps with a silver bowl and overturns it into the tub. The young porters descend upon it, stabbing their cups into the small mound of porridge until it’s gone in seconds.
The trail makes its way gradually upward and winds around the mountain, and Mike, groaning with every leaden step, is still with them. Rita doesn’t know why he is still with the group. He is lagging behind, with Patrick, and looks stripped of all blood and hope. He is pale, and he is listing to one side, and is using hiking poles as an elderly man would use a cane, unsure and relying too heavily on that point at the end of a stick.
The clouds are following the group up the mountain. They should stay ahead of the clouds, Frank told them, if they want to keep warm today. There has been talk of more rain, but Frank and Patrick believe that it won’t rain at the next camp—
it’s too high. They are hiking in a high desert area called the Saddle, between the peaks of Mawenzi, a mile away and jagged, and Kibo, above. The vegetation is now sparse, the trees long gone. Directly above the trail stands the mountain, though the peak is still obscured by cloud cover. She and Grant are still the only ones who have seen it, at midnight under the bright small moon.
Two hours into the day, Rita’s head begins to throb. They are at 11,200 feet and the pain comes suddenly. It is at the back of her skull, where she was told the pain would begin and grow. She begins to breathe with more effort, trying to bring more oxygen into her blood, her brain. Her breathing works for small periods of time, the pain receding, though it comes back with ferocity. She breathes quickly, and loudly, and the pain moves away when she is walking faster, and climbing steeper, so she knows she must keep going up.
She walks with a trio of South Africans who have driven to Tanzania from Johannesburg. She asks them how long it took, the drive, and guesses at sixteen, eighteen hours. They laugh, no, no—three weeks, friend, they say. There are no superhighways in East Africa! they say. They walk along an easy path, a C-shape around the mountain, through a field of shale. The rocks are the color of rust and whales, shards that tinkle and clink, loudly, under their feet.
The path cuts through the most desolate side of Kilimanjaro, an area that looks like the volcano had spewed not lava but rusted steel. There is a windswept look about it, the slices of shale angled away from the mountaintop as if still trying to get away from the center, from the fire.
They descend into a valley, through a sparse forest of lobelia trees, all of them ridiculous-looking, each with the gray trunk of a coconut tree topped by an exuberant burst of green, a wild head of spiky verdant hair. A stream runs along the path, in a narrow and shallow crack in the valley wall, and they stop to fill their water bottles. The four of them squat like gargoyles and share a small vial of purification pills. They drop two of the pills, tiny and the color of steel, into the bottles and shake. They wait, still squatting, until the pills have dissolved, then they drop in small white tablets, meant to improve the water’s taste. They stand.
She decides she will jog ahead of the South Africans, down the path. Weighing the appeal of learning more about the economic situation in sub-Saharan Africa against the prospect of running down this trail and making it to camp sooner, she chooses to run. She tells them she’ll see them at the bottom and when she begins jogging, she immediately feels better. Her breathing is denser and her head clears within minutes. Exertion, she realizes, must be intense and constant.
There is a man lying in the path just ahead, as it bends under a thicket of lobelias. She runs faster, toward him. The body is crumpled as if it had been dropped. It’s Mike. She is upon him and his skin is almost blue. He is asleep. He is lying on the path, his pack still strapped to his back. She dumps her pack and kneels beside him. He is breathing. His pulse seems slow but not desperate.
“Rita.”
“You okay? What’s wrong?”
“Tired. Sick. Ashley is killing me. Want to go home.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll get your wish now. You’re a mess.”
He smiles.
Rita helps him stand and they walk slowly down the valley to the camp. It is spread out in a wide valley, the tents on the edge of a cliff—the camp this third day is stunning. It’s late afternoon when they arrive and the sun is out and everywhere. This is the Great Barranco Valley, sitting high above the clouds, which lie like an ocean beyond the valley’s mouth, as if being kept at bay behind glass.
The tents are assembled and she helps him inside one, his head on a pillow of clothes, the sun making the interior pink and alarming. When Jerry, already at camp and washing his socks in the stream, notices that his son is present, he enters the tent, asks Rita to leave, and when she does, zips the tent closed.
In her own tent Rita is wrecked. Now that she’s not moving the pain in her head is a living thing. It is a rat-sized and prickly animal living, with great soaring breaths and a restless tail, in her frontal lobe. But there is no room for this animal in her frontal lobe, and thus there is great strain in her skull. The pain reaches to the corners of her eyes. At the corners of her brow someone is slowly pushing a pen or pencil, just behind her eyes and through, into the center of her head. When she places her first and second fingers on the base of her skull, she can feel a pulsing.
The tent is yellow. The sun makes the tent seem alive; she’s inside a lemon. The air seems to be yellow, and everything that she knows about yellow is here—its glory and its anemia. It gets hotter, the sun reigning throughout the day, giving and giving, though with the heaviest heart.
The night goes cold. They are at 14,500 feet and the air is thin and when the sun disappears the wind is cruel, profane. The rain comes again. Frank and Patrick are amazed by the rain, because they say it is rare in this valley, but it begins just when the sun descends, a drizzle, and by dinner is steady. The temperature is plunging.
At dinner, tomorrow’s hike—the final ascent—is mapped out. They will rise at 6 a.m., walk for eight hours, and stop at the high camp, where they’ll eat and then sleep until 11 p.m. At 11, the group will get up, get packed, and make the final six-hour leg in the dark. They will reach the peak of Kibo at sunrise, take pictures, and dawdle for an hour before making the descent, eight hours to the final camp, halfway down the mountain, the path shooting through a different side this time, less scenic, quicker, straighter.
Shelly asks if all the porters go up with the group.
“What, up to the top? No, no,” Frank says. About five do, just as guides, basically, he says. They come with the group, in case someone needs help with a pack or needs to go down. The rest of the porters stay at camp, then break it down and head out to meet the group at the final camp, on the long hike down.
After she’s eaten, very little, Rita exits the tent and quickly bumps her head against the ear of a porter. It’s the man with the water by the stream.
“Jambo,” she says.
“Hello,” he says. He is holding a small backpack. There are about twenty porters around the dining tent, though only three are carrying dishes away. With the tent empty, two more are breaking down the card table and chairs. The tent is soon empty and the porters begin filing in, intending, Rita assumes, to clean it before disassembling it.
Rita lies down. She lies down with great care and deliberation, resting her head so slowly onto the pillow Shelly has created for her from a garbage bag full of soft clothes. But even the small crinkling sound of the garbage bag is as loud as the collision of planets. Rita is scared. She sees the gravestone of the young man who died here six months before—they had a picture of it, and him—a beautiful young man grinning from below a blue bandanna—at the hotel, laminated on the front desk, to warn guests about pushing themselves too far. She sees her body being taken down by porters. Would they be careful with her corpse? She doesn’t trust that they would be careful. They would want to get down quickly. They would carry her until they got to the rickshaw gurney and then they would run.
She listens as the paying hikers get ready for bed. She is in her sleeping bag and is still cold—she is wearing three layers but still she feels flayed. She shivers but the shivering hurts her head so she forces her body to rest; she pours her own calm over her skin, coating it as if with warm oil, and she breathes slower. Soon something is eating her legs. A panther is gnawing on her legs. She is watching the panther gnawing and can feel it, can feel it as if she were having her toes licked by a puppy, only there is blood, and bone, and marrow visible; the puppy is sucking the marrow from her bones, while looking up at her, smiling, asking What’s your name? Do you like zebras?
She wakes up when she hears the rain growing louder. She shakes free of the dream and succeeds in forgetting it almost immediately. The rain overwhelms her mind. The rain is strong and hard, like the knocking of a door, the knocking getting louder, and it won’t end, the knocking—swe
et Jesus will someone please answer that knocking? She is freezing all night. She awakens every hour and puts on another article of clothing, until she can barely move. She briefly considers staying at this camp with the porters, not making the final climb. There are photographs. There is an IMAX movie. Maybe she will survive without summitting.
But she does not want to be grouped with Mike. She is better than Mike. There is a reason to finish this hike. She must finish it because Shelly is finishing it, and Grant is finishing it. She is as good as these people. She is tired of admitting that she cannot continue. For so many years she has been doing everything within her power to finish but again and again she has pulled up short, and has been content for having tried. She found comfort in the nuances between success and failure, between a goal finished, accomplished, and a goal adjusted.
She puts on another T-shirt and another pair of socks. She falls back to sleep. She wakes up in the dark, not long before dawn, and Shelly is holding her, spooning.
The light through the vent is like a crack into a world uninterrupted by shape or definition. There is only white. White against white. She squints and reaches for her sunglasses, reaches around to no avail, feels only the rocks beneath the tent. She is breathing as deeply as she can but it has no effect. She knows her head is not getting enough blood. Her faculties are slipping away. She tries to do simple mental tasks, testing herself—the alphabet, states of the union, Latin conjugations—and finds her thoughts scattered. She inhales so deeply the air feels coarse, and exhales with such force her chest goes concave. Shelly is still asleep.
It’s the first light of morning. If there is sun the rain must have passed. It will not be so cold today—there is sun. Already she is warmer, the tent heating quickly, but the wind is still strong and the tent ripples loudly.
What is that? There is a commotion outside the tent. The porters are yelling. She hears Frank, so close, unzip and rezip his tent’s door, and then can hear his steps move toward the voices. The voices rise and fall on the wind, fractured by the flapping of the tent.
