Kunga nodded vigorously when he heard the name Milarespa, staring through me with that spacy look of his.
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “But I still think I’ll pass.”
“We’ll see what happens,” Freds said, looking thoughtful.
2
Many glasses of chang later we staggered out into the night. Freds and Kunga Norbu slipped on their down jackets, and with a “Good night” and a “Good morning” they wandered off to their tent. I made my way back to my group. It felt really late, and was maybe 8:30.
As I stood looking at our tent village, I saw a light bouncing down the trail from Lukla. The man carrying the flashlight approached—it was Laure, the sirdhar for my group. He was just getting back from escorting clients back to Lukla. “Laure!” I called softly.
“Hello George,” he said. “Why late now?”
“I’ve been drinking.”
“Ah.” With his flashlight pointed at the ground I could easily make out his big smile. “Good idea.”
“Yeah, you should go have some chang yourself. You’ve had a long day.”
“Not long.”
“Sure.” He had been escorting disgruntled clients back to Lukla all day, so he must have hiked five times as far as the rest of us. And here he was coming in by flashlight. Still, I suppose for Laure Tenzing Sherpa that did not represent a particularly tough day. As guide and yakboy he had been walking in these mountains all his life, and his calves were as big around as my thighs. Once, for a lark, he and three friends had set a record by hiking from Everest Base Camp to Kathmandu in four days; that’s about two hundred miles, across the grain of some seriously uneven countryside. Compared to that today’s work had been like a walk to the mailbox, I guess.
The worst part had no doubt been the clients. I asked him about them and he frowned. “People go co-op hotel, not happy. Very, very not happy. They fly back Kathmandu.”
“Good riddance,” I said. “Why don’t you go get some chang.”
He smiled and disappeared into the dark.
I looked over the tents holding my sleeping clients and sighed.
So far it had been a typical videotrek. We had flown in to Lukla from Kathmandu, and my clients, enticed to Nepal by glossy ads promising them video Ansel Adamshood, had gone wild in the plane, rushing about banging zoom lenses together in an attempt to film everything. They were irrepressible until they saw the Lukla strip, which from the air looks like a toy model of a ski jump. Pretty quickly they were strapped in and looking like they were reconsidering their wills—all except for one tubby little guy named Arnold, who continued to roll up and down the aisle like a bowling ball, finally inserting himself into the cockpit so he could shoot over the pilots’ shoulders. “We are landing at Lukla,” he announced to his camera’s mike in a deep fakey voice, like the narrator of a bad travelogue. “Looks impossible, but our pilots are calm.”
Despite him we landed safely. Unfortunately one of our group then tried to film his own descent from the plane, and fell heavily down the steps. As I ascertained the damage—a sprained ankle—there was Arnold again, leaning over to immortalize the victim’s every writhe and howl.
A second plane brought in the rest of our group, led by Laure and my assistant Heather. We started down the trail, and for a couple of hours everything went well—the trail serves as the Interstate Five of the region, and is as easy as they come. And the view is awesome—the Dudh Kosi valley is like a forested Grand Canyon, only bigger. Our group was impressed, and several of them filmed a real-time record of the day.
Then the trail descended to the banks of the Dudh Kosi river, and we got a surprise. Apparently in the last monsoon a glacial lake upstream had burst its ice dam, and rushed down in a devastating flood, tearing out the bridges, trail, trees, everything. Thus our fine interstate ended abruptly in a cliff overhanging the torn-to-shreds riverbed, and what came next was the seat-of-the-pants invention of the local porters, for whom the trail was a daily necessity. They had been clever indeed, but there really was no good alternative to the old route; so the new trail wound over strewn white boulders, traversed unstable new sand cliffs, and veered wildly up and down muddy slides that had been hacked out of dense forested walls. It was radical stuff, and even experienced trekkers were having trouble.
Our group was appalled. The ads had not mentioned this.
The porters ran ahead barefoot to reach the next tea break, and the clients began to bog down. People slipped and fell. People sat down and cried. Altitude sickness was mentioned more than once, though as a matter of fact we were not much higher than Denver. Heather and I ran around encouraging the weary. I found myself carrying three videocameras. Laure was carrying nine.
It was looking like the retreat from Moscow when we came to the first of the new bridges. These are pretty neat pieces of backwoods engineering; there aren’t any logs in the area long enough to span the river, so they take four logs and stick them out over the river, and weigh them down with a huge pile of round stones. Then four more logs are pushed out from the other side, until their ends rest on the ends of the first four. Instant bridge. They work, but they are not confidence builders.
Our group stared at the first one apprehensively. Arnold appeared behind us and chomped an unlit cigar as he filmed the scene. “The Death Bridge,” he announced into his camera’s mike.
“Arnold, please,” I said. “Mellow out.”
He walked down to the glacial gray rush of the river. “Hey, George, do you think I could take a step in to get a better shot of the crossing?”
“NO!” I stood up fast. “One step in and you’d drown, I mean look at it!”
“Well, okay.”
Now the rest of the group were staring at me in horror, as if it weren’t clear at first glance that to fall into the Dudh Kosi would be a very fatal error indeed. A good number of them ended up crawling across the bridge on hands and knees. Arnold got them all for posterity, and filmed his own crossing by walking in circles that made me cringe. Silently I cursed him; I was pretty sure he had known perfectly well how dangerous the river was, and only wanted to make sure everyone else did too. And very soon after that—at the next bridge, in fact—people began to demand to be taken back to Lukla. To Kathmandu. To San Francisco.
I sighed, remembering it. And remembering it was only the beginning. Just your typical Want to Take You Higher Ltd. videotrek. Plus Arnold.
3
I got another bit of Arnold in action early the next morning when I was in the rough outhouse behind the trekkers’ teahouses, very hung over, crouched over the unhealthily damp hole in the floor. I had just completed my business in there when I looked up to see the big glass eye of a zoom lens, staring over the top of the wooden door at me.
“No, Arnold!” I cried, struggling to put my hand over the lens while I pulled up my pants.
“Hey, just getting some local color,” Arnold said, backing away. “You know, people like to see what it’s really like, the details and all, and these outhouses are really something else. Exotic.”
I growled at him. “You should have trekked in from Jiri, then. The lowland villages don’t have outhouses at all.”
His eyes got round, and he shifted an unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth. “What do you do, then?”
“Well, you just go outside and have a look around. Pick a spot. They usually have a shitting field down by the river. Real exotic.”
He laughed. “You mean, turds everywhere?”
“Well, something like that.”
“That sounds great! Maybe I’d better walk back out instead of flying.”
I stared at him, wrinkling my nose. “Serious filmmaker, eh Arnold?”
“Oh, yeah. Haven’t you heard of me? Arnold McConnell? I make adventure films for PBS. And sometimes for the ski resort circuit, video rentals, that kind of thing. Skiing, hang gliding, kayaking, parachuting, climbing, skateboarding—I’ve done them all. Didn’t you ever see The Man Who Swam Down the Zambesi? No? Ah, tha
t’s a bit of a classic, now. One of my best.”
So he had known how dangerous the Dudh Kosi was. I stared at him reproachfully. It was hard to believe he made adventure films; he looked more like the kind of Hollywood producer you’d tell couch jokes about. “So you’re making a real film of this trip?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure. Always working, never stop working. Workaholic.”
“Don’t you need a bigger crew?”
“Well sure, usually, but this is a different kind of thing, one of my ‘personal diary’ films I call them. I’ve sold a couple to PBS. Do all the work myself. It’s kind of like my version of solo climbing.”
“Fine. But cut the part about me taking a crap, okay?”
“Sure, sure, don’t worry about it. Just got to get everything I can, you know, so I’ve got good tape to choose from later on. All grist for the mill. That’s why I got this lens. All the latest in equipment for me. I got stuff you wouldn’t believe.”
“I believe.”
He chomped his cigar. “Just call me Mr. Adventure.”
“I will.”
4
I didn’t run into Freds and Kunga Norbu in Namche Bazaar, the Sherpas’ dramatically placed little capital town, and I figured they had left already with Freds’s British friends. Then I kept my group there a couple of days to acclimatize, and enjoy the town, and I figured that if I caught up with them at all, it’d be up at their base camp.
So I was quite surprised to run across the whole group in Pheriche, one of the Sherpas’ high mountain villages.
Most of these villages are occupied only in the summer, to grow potatoes and pasture yaks. Pheriche, however, lies on the trekking route to Everest, so it’s occupied almost year-round, and a couple of lodges have been built, along with the Himalayan Rescue Association’s only aid station. It still looks like a summer pasturage: low rock walls separate potato fields, and a few slate-roofed stone huts, plus the lodges and the tin-roofed aid station. All of it is clustered at the end of a flat-bottomed glacial valley, against the side of a lateral moraine five hundred feet high. A stream meanders by and the ground is carpeted with grasses and the bright autumn red of berberi bushes. On all sides tower the fantastic white spikes of some of the world’s most dramatic peaks—Ama Dablam, Taboche, Tramserku, Kang Taiga—and all in all, it’s quite a place. My clients were making themselves dizzy trying to film it.
We set up our tent village in an unused potato field, and after dinner Laure and I slipped off to the Himalaya Hotel to have some chang. I entered the lodge’s little kitchen and heard Freds cry, “Hey George!” He was sitting with Kunga Norbu and four Westerners; we joined them, crowding in around a little table. “These are the friends we’re climbing with.”
He introduced them, and we all shook hands. Trevor was a tall slender guy, with round glasses and a somewhat crazed grin. “Mad Tom,” as Freds called him, was short and curly-headed, and didn’t look mad at all, although something in his mild manner made me believe that he could be. John was short and compact, with a salt-and-pepper beard, and a crusher handshake. And Marion was a tall and rather attractive woman—though I suspected she might have blushed or punched you if you said so—she was attractive in a tough, wild way, with a stark strong face, and thick brown hair pulled back and braided. They were British, with the accents to prove it: Marion and Trevor quite posh and public school, and John and Mad Tom very thick and North country.
We started drinking chang, and they told me about their climb. Lingtren, a sharp peak between Pumori and Everest’s West Shoulder, is serious work from any approach, and they were clearly excited about it, in their own way: “Bit of a slog, to tell the truth,” Trevor said cheerfully.
When British climbers talk about climbing, you have to learn to translate it into English. “Bit of a slog” means don’t go there.
“I think we ought to get lost and climb Pumori instead,” said Marion. “Lingtren is a perfect hill.”
“Marion, really.”
“Can’t beat Lingtren’s price, anyway,” said John.
He was referring to the fee that the Nepali government makes climbers pay for the right to climb its peaks. These fees are determined by the height of the peak to be climbed—the really big peaks are super expensive. They charge you over five thousand dollars to climb Everest, for instance, and still competition to get on its long waiting list is fierce. But some of the toughest climbs in Nepal aren’t very high, relative to the biggies, and they come pretty cheap. Apparently Lingtren was one of these.
We watched the Sherpani who runs the lodge cook dinner for fifty, under the fixed gazes of the diners, who sat staring hungrily at her every move. To accomplish this she had at her command a small woodburning stove (with chimney, thank God), a pile of potatoes, noodles, rice, some eggs and cabbage, and several chang-happy porter assistants, who alternated washing dishes with breaking up chunks of yak dung for the fire. A difficult situation on the face of it, but the Sherpani was cool: she cooked the whole list of orders by memory, slicing and tossing potatoes into one pan, stuffing wood in the fire, flipping twenty pounds of noodles in mid-air like they were a single hotcake—all with the sureness and panache of an expert juggler. It was a kind of genius.
Two hours later those who had ordered the meals that came last in her strict sequence got their cabbage omelets on French fries, and the kitchen emptied out as many people went to bed. The rest of us settled down to more chang and chatter.
Then a trekker came back into the kitchen, so he could listen to his shortwave radio without bothering sleepers in the lodge’s single dorm room. He said he wanted to catch the news. We all stared at him in disbelief. “I need to find out how the dollar’s doing,” he explained. “Did you know it dropped eight percent last week?”
You meet all kinds in Nepal.
Actually it’s interesting to hear what you get on shortwave in the Himal, because depending on how the ionosphere is acting, almost anything will bounce in. That night we listened to the People’s Voice of Syria, for instance, and some female pop singer from Bombay, which perked up the porters. Then the operator ran across the BBC world news, which was not unusual—it could have been coming from Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo, even London itself.
Through the hissing of the static the public-school voice of the reporter could barely be made out “… British Everest Expedition of 1987 is now on the Rongbuk Glacier in Tibet, and over the next two months they expect to repeat the historic route of the attempts made in the twenties and thirties. Our correspondent to the expedition reports—” and then the voice changed to one even more staccato and drowned in static: “—the expedition’s principal goal of recovering the bodies of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who were last seen near the summit in 1924, crackle, buzz.… chances considerably improved by conversations with a partner of the Chinese climber who reported seeing a body on the North Face in 1980 bzzzzkrkrk!—description of the site of the finding sssssssss … snow levels very low this year, and all concerned feel chances for success are sssskrkssss.” The voice faded away in a roar of static.
Trevor looked around at us, eyebrows lifted. “Did I understand them to say that they are going to search for Mallory and Irvine’s bodies?”
A look of deep horror creased Mad Tom’s face. Marion wrinkled her nose as if her chang had turned to Tibetan tea. “I can’t believe it.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was an unexpected opportunity for Freds to put his plan into action ahead of schedule. He said, “Haven’t you heard about that? Why Kunga Norbu here is precisely the climber they’re talking about, the one who spotted a body on the North Face in 1980.”
“He is?” we all said.
“Yeah, you bet. Kunga was part of the Chinese expedition to the North Ridge in 1980, and he was up there doing reconnaissance for a direct route on the North Face when he saw a body.” Freds spoke to Kinga Norbu in Tibetan, and Kunga nodded and replied at some length. Freds translated for him: “He says it was a Wester
ner, wearing old-fashioned clothing, and it had clearly been there a long time. Here, he says he can mark it on a photo—” Freds got out his wallet and pulled a wad of paper from it. Unfolded, it revealed itself as a battered black-and-white photo of Everest as seen from the Tibetan side. Kunga Norbu studied it for long time, talked it over with Freds, and then took a pencil from Freds and carefully made a circle on the photo.
“Why he’s circled half the North Face,” John pointed out. “It’s fooking useless.”
“Nah,” Freds said. “Look, it’s a little circle.”
“It’s a little photo, innit.”
“Well, he can describe the spot exactly—it’s up there on top of the Black Band. Anyway, someone has managed to get together an expedition to go looking for the bodies, or the body, whatever. Now Kunga slipped over to Nepal last year, so this expedition is going on second-hand information from his climbing buds. But that might be enough.”
“And if they find the bodies?”
“Well, I think they’re planning to take them down and ship them to London and bury them in Winchester Cathedral.”
The Brits stared at him. “You mean Westminster Abbey?” Trevor ventured.
“Oh that’s right, I always get those two mixed up. Anyway that’s what they’re going to do, and they’re going to make a movie out of it.”
I groaned at the thought. More video.
The four Brits groaned louder than I did. “That is rilly dis-gusting,” Marion said.
“Sickening,” John and Mad Tom agreed.
“It is a travesty, isn’t it?” Trevor said. “I mean those chaps belong up there if anybody does. It’s nothing less than grave robbing!”
And his three companions nodded. On one level they were joking, making a pretense of their outrage; but underneath that, they were dead serious. They meant it.
5
To understand why they would care so much, you have to understand what the story of Mallory and Irvine means to the British soul. Climbing has always been more important there than in America—you could say that the British invented the sport in Victorian times, and they’ve continued to excel in it since then, even after World War Two when much else there fell apart. You could say that climbing is the Rolls Royce of British sport. Whymper, Hillary, the brilliant crowd that climbed with Bonnington in the Seventies: they’re all national heroes.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection Page 84
