But none more so than Mallory and Irvine. Back in the twenties and thirties, you see, the British had a lock on Everest, because Nepal was closed to foreigners, and Tibet was closed to all but the British, who had barged in on them with Younghusband’s campaign back in 1904. So the mountain was their private playground, and during those years they made four or five attempts, all of them failures, which is understandable: they were equipped like Boy Scouts, they had to learn high altitude technique on the spot, and they had terrible luck with weather.
The try that came closest was in 1924. Mallory was its lead climber, already famous from two previous attempts. As you may know, he was the guy who replied “Because it’s there” when asked why anyone would want to climb the thing. This is either a very deep or a very stupid answer, depending on what you think of Mallory. You can take your pick of interpretations; the guy has been psychoanalyzed into the ground. Anyway, he and his partner Irvine were last glimpsed, by another expedition member, just eight hundred feet and less than a quarter of a mile from the summit—and at one P.M., on a day that had good weather except for a brief storm, and mist that obscured the peak from the observers below. So they either made it or they didn’t; but something went wrong somewhere along the line, and they were never seen again.
A glorious defeat, a deep mystery: this is the kind of story that the English just love, as don’t we all. All the public school virtues wrapped into one heroic tale—you couldn’t write it better. To this day the story commands tremendous interest in England, and this is doubly true among people in the climbing community, who grew up on the story, and who still indulge in a lot of speculation about the two men’s fate, in journal articles and pub debates and the like. They love that story.
Thus to go up there, and find the bodies, and end the mystery, and cart the bodies off to England … You can see why it struck my drinking buddies that night as a kind of sacrilege. It was yet another modern PR stunt—a money-grubbing plan made by some publicity hound—a Profaning of the Mystery. It was, in fact, a bit like video-trekking. Only worse. So I could sympathize, in a way.
6
I tried to think of a change of subject, to distract the Brits. But Freds seemed determined to fire up their distress. He poked his finger onto the folded wreck of a photo. “You know what y’all oughta do,” he told them in a low voice. “You mentioned getting lost and climbing Pumori? Well shit, what you oughta do instead is get lost in the other direction, and beat that expedition to the spot, and hide old Mallory. I mean here you’ve got the actual eyewitness right here to lead you to him! Incredible! You could bury Mallory in rocks and snow and then sneak back down. If you did that, they’d never find him!”
All the Brits stared at Freds, eyes wide. Then they looked at each other, and their heads kind of lowered together over the table. Their voices got soft. “He’s a genius,” Trevor breathed.
“Uh, no,” I warned them. “He’s not a genius.” Laure was shaking his head. Even Kunga Norbu was looking doubtful.
Freds looked over the Brits at me and waggled his eyebrows vigorously, as if to say: this is a great idea! Don’t foul it up!
“What about the Lho La?” John asked. “Won’t we have to climb that?”
“Piece of cake,” Freds said promptly.
“No,” Laure protested. “Not piece cake! Pass! Very steep pass!”
“Piece of cake,” Freds insisted. “I climbed it with those West Ridge direct guys a couple years ago. And once you top it you just slog onto the West Shoulder and there you are with the whole North Face, sitting right off to your left.”
“Freds,” I said, trying to indicate that he shouldn’t incite his companions to such a dangerous, not to mention illegal, climb. “You’d need a lot more support for high camps than you’ve got. That circle there is pretty damn high on the mountain.”
“True,” Freds said immediately. “It’s pretty high. Pretty damn high. You can’t get much higher.”
Of course to climbers this was only another incitement, as I should have known.
“You’d have to do it like Woody Sayres did back in ’62,” Freds went on. “They got Sherpas to help them up the Nup La over by Cho Oyo, then bolted to Everest when they were supposed to be climbing Gyachung Kang. They moved a single camp with them all the way to Everest, and got back the same way. Just four of them, and they almost climbed it. And the Nup La is twenty miles further away from Everest than the Lho La. The Lho La’s right there under it.”
Mad Tom knocked his glasses up his nose, pulled out a pencil and began to do calculations on the table. Marion was nodding. Trevor was refilling all our glasses with chang. John was looking over Mad Tom’s shoulder and muttering to him; apparently they were in charge of supplies.
Trevor raised his glass. “Right then,” he said. “Are we for it?”
They all raised their glasses. “We’re for it.”
They were toasting the plan, and I was staring at them in dismay, when I heard the door creak and saw who was leaving the kitchen. “Hey!”
I reached out and dragged Arnold McConnell back into the room. “What’re you doing here?”
Arnold shifted something behind his back. “Nothing, really. Just my nightly glass of milktea, you know…”
“It’s him!” Marion exclaimed. She reached behind Arnold and snatched his camera from behind his back; he tried to hold onto it, but Marion was too strong for him. “Spying on me again, were you? Filming us from some dark corner?”
“No no,” Arnold said. “Can’t film in the dark, you know.”
“Film in tent,” Laure said promptly. “Night.”
Arnold glared at him.
“Listen, Arnold,” I said. “We were just shooting the bull here you know, a little private conversation over the chang. Nothing serious.”
“Oh I know,” Arnold assured me. “I know.”
Marion stood and stared down at Arnold. They made a funny pair—her so long and rangy, him so short and tubby. Marion pushed buttons on the camera until the video cassette popped out, never taking her eye from him. She could really glare. “I suppose this is the same film you used this morning, when you filmed me taking my shower, is that right?” She looked at us. “I was in the little shower box they’ve got across the way, and the tin with the hot water in it got plugged at the bottom somehow. I had the door open a bit so I could stretch up and fiddle with it, when suddenly I noticed this pervert filming me!” She laughed angrily.
“I bet you were quite pleased with that footage, weren’t you, you peeping Tom!”
“I was just leaving to shoot yaks,” Arnold explained rapidly, staring up at Marion with an admiring gaze. “Then there you were, and what was I supposed to do? I’m a filmmaker, I film beautiful things. I could make you a star in the States,” he told her earnestly. “You’re probably the most beautiful climber in the world.”
“And all that competition,” Mad Tom put in.
I was right about Marion’s reaction to a compliment of that sort—she blushed to the roots, and considered punching him too—she might have, if they’d been alone.
“—adventure films back in the States, for PBS and the ski resort circuit,” Arnold was going on, chewing his cigar and rolling his eyes as Marion took the cartridge over toward the stove.
The Sherpani waved her off. “Smell,” she said.
Marion nodded and took the video cassette in her hands. Her forearms tensed, and suddenly you could see every muscle. And there were a lot of them, too, looking like thin bunched wires under the skin. We all stared, and instinctively Arnold raised his camera to his shoulder before remembering it was empty. That fact made him whimper, and he was fumbling at his jacket pocket for a spare when the cassette snapped diagonally and the videotape spilled out. Marion handed it all to the Sherpani, who dumped it in a box of potato peels, grinning.
We all looked at Arnold. He chomped his cigar, shrugged. “Can’t make you a star that way,” he said, and gave Marion a soulful leer. “Really, you
oughta give me a chance, you’d be great. Such presence.”
“I would appreciate it if you would now leave,” Marion told him, and pointed at the door.
Arnold left.
“That guy could be trouble,” Freds said.
7
Freds was right about that.
But Arnold was not the only source of trouble. Freds himself was acting a bit peculiar, I judged. Still, when I thought of the various oddities in his recent behavior—his announcement that his friend Kunga Norbu was a tulku, and now this sudden advocacy of a Save Mallory’s Body campaign—I couldn’t put it all together. Why did he just happen to have a photo of the North Face of Everest in his wallet, for instance? It didn’t make sense.
So when Freds’s party and my trekking group took off upvalley from Pheriche on the same morning, I walked with Freds for a while. I wanted to ask him some questions. But there were a lot of people on the trail, and it was hard to get a moment to ourselves.
As an opener I said, “So, you’ve got a woman on your team.”
“Yeah, Marion’s great. She’s probably the best climber of us all. And incredibly strong. You know those indoor walls they have in England, for practicing?”
“No.”
“Well, the weather is so bad there, and the climbers are such fanatics, that they’ve built these thirty and forty foot walls inside gyms, and covered them with concrete and made little handholds.” He laughed. “It looks dismal—scuzzy old gym with bad light and no heating, and all these guys stretched out on a concrete wall like some new kinda torture … Anyway I visited one of these, and they set me up in a race with Marion, up the two hardest pitches. Maybe 5.13 in places, impossible stuff. And there was a leak too. Everyone started betting on us, and the rule was someone had to top out for anyone to collect on the bets. I did my best, but I was hurrying and I came off about halfway up. So she won, but to collect the bets she had to top out. With the leak it really was impossible, but everyone who had bet on her was yelling at her to do it, so she just grit her teeth and started making these moves, man—” Freds illustrated in the air between us as we hiked—“And she was doing them in slow motion so she wouldn’t come off. Just hanging there by her fingertips and toes, and I swear to God she hung on that wall for must’ve been three hours. Everyone else stopped climbing to watch. Guys were going home—guys were begging her to come off—guys had tears in their eyes. Finally she topped out and crawled over to the ladder and came down, and they mobbed her. They were ready to make her queen. In fact she pretty much is queen, as far as English climbers are concerned—you could bring the real one in, and if Marion were there they wouldn’t even notice.”
Then Arnold slipped between us, looking conspiratorial. “I think this Save Mallory scheme is a great idea,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “I’m totally behind you, and it’ll make a great movie.”
“You miss the point,” I said to him.
“We ain’t doing nothing but climb Lingtren,” Freds said to him.
Arnold frowned, tucked his chin onto his chest, chewed his cigar. Frowning, Freds left to catch up with his group, and they soon disappeared ahead. So I lost my chance to talk to him.
We came to the upper end of Pheriche’s valley, turned right and climbed to get into an even higher one. This was the valley of the Khumbu glacier, a massive road of ice covered with a chaos of gray rubble and milky blue melt ponds. We skirted the glacier and followed a trail up its lateral moraine to Lobuche, which consists of three teahouses and a tenting ground. The next day we hiked on upvalley to Gorak Shep.
Now Gorak Shep (“Dead Crow”) is not the kind of place you see on posters in travel agencies. It’s just above 17,000 feet, and up there the plant life has about given up. It’s just two ragged little teahouses under a monstrous rubble hill, next to a gray glacial pond, and all in all it looks like the tailings of a very big gravel mine.
But what Gorak Shep does have is mountains. Big snowy mountains, on all sides. How big? Well, the wall of Nuptse, for instance, stands a full seven thousand feet over Gorak Shep. An avalanche we saw, sliding down a fraction of this wall and sounding like thunder, covered about two World Trade Centers’ worth of height, and still looked tiny. And Nuptse is not as big as some of the peaks around it. So you get the idea.
Cameras can never capture this kind of scale, but you can’t help trying, and my crowd tried for all they were worth in the days we were camped there. The ones handling the altitude well slogged up to the top of Kala Pattar (“Black Hill”), a local walker’s peak which has a fine view of the Southwest Face of Everest. The day after that, Heather and Laure led most of the same people up the glacier to Everest Base Camp, while the rest of us relaxed. Everest Base Camp, set by the Indian Army this season, was basically a tent village like ours, but there are some fine seracs and ice towers to be seen along the way, and when they returned the clients seemed satisfied.
So I was satisfied too. No one had gotten any bad altitude sickness, and we would be starting back the next morning. I was feeling fine, sitting up on the hill above our tents in the late afternoon, doing nothing.
But then Laure came zipping down the trail from Base Camp, and when he saw me he came right over. “George George,” he called out as he approached.
I stood as he reached me. “What’s up?”
“I stay talk friends porter Indian Army base camp, Freds find me Freds say his base camp come please you. Climb Lho La find man camera come hire Sherpas finish with Freds, very bad follow Freds.”
Now Laure’s English is not very good, as you may have noticed. But after all we were in his country speaking my language—and for him English came after Sherpa, Nepali, and some Japanese and German, and how many languages do you speak?
Besides, I find I always get the gist of what Laure says, which is not something you can always say of all our fellow native speakers. So I cried out, “No! Arnold is following them?”
“Yes,” Laure said. “Very bad. Freds say come please get.”
“Arnold hired their Sherpas?”
Laure nodded. “Sherpas finish porter, Arnold hire.”
“Damn him! We’ll have to climb up there and get him!”
“Yes. Very bad.”
“Will you come with me?”
“Whatever you like.”
I hustled to our tents to get together my climbing gear and tell Heather what had happened. “How did he get up there?” she asked. “I thought he was with you all day!”
“He told me he was going with you! He probably followed you guys all the way up, and kept on going. Don’t worry about it, it’s not your fault. Take the group back to Namche starting tomorrow, and we’ll catch up with you.” She nodded, looking worried.
Laure and I took off. Even going at Laure’s pace we didn’t reach Freds’s base camp until the moon had risen.
Their camp was now only a single tent in a bunch of trampled snow, just under the steep headwall of the Khumbu Valley—the ridge that divides Nepal from Tibet. We zipped open the tent and woke Freds and Kunga Norbu.
“All right!” Freds said. “I’m glad you’re here! Real glad!”
“Give me the story,” I said.
“Well, that Arnold snuck up here, apparently.”
“That’s right.”
“And our Sherpas were done and we had paid them, and I guess he hired them on the spot. They have a bunch of climbing gear, and we left fixed ropes up to the Lho La, so up they came. I tell you I was pretty blown away when they showed up in the pass! The Brits got furious and told Arnold to go back down, but he refused and, well, how do you make someone do something they don’t want to up there? If you punch him out he’s likely to have trouble getting down! So Kunga and I came back to get you and found Laure at Base Camp, and he said he’d get you while we held the fort.”
“Arnold climbed the Lho La?” I said, amazed.
“Well, he’s a pretty tough guy, I reckon. Didn’t you ever see that movie he made of the kayak run down the
Baltoro? Radical film, man, really it’s up there with The Man Who Skied Down Everest for radicalness. And he’s done some other crazy things too, like flying a hang glider off the Grand Teton, filming all the way. He’s tougher than he looks. I think he just does the Hollywood sleaze routine so he can get away with things. Anyway those are some excellent climbing Sherpas he’s got, and with them and the fixed ropes he just had to gut it out. And I guess he acclimatizes well, because he was walking around up there like he was at the beach.”
I sighed. “That is one determined filmmaker.”
Freds shook his head. “The guy is a leech. He’s gonna drive the Brits bats if we don’t haul his ass back down here.”
8
So the next day the four of us started the ascent of the Lho La, and were quickly engaged in some of the most dangerous climbing I’ve ever done. Not the most technically difficult—the Brits had left fixed rope in the toughest sections, so our progress was considerably aided. But it was still dangerous, because we were climbing an icefall, which is to say a glacier on a serious tilt.
Now a glacier as you know is a river of ice, and like its liquid counterparts it is always flowing downstream. Its rate of flow is much slower than a river’s, but it isn’t negligible, especially when you’re standing on it. Then you often hear creaks, groans, sudden cracks and booms, and you feel like you’re on the back of a living creature.
Put that glacier on a hillside and everything is accelerated; the living creature becomes a dragon. The ice of the glacier breaks up into immense blocks and shards, and these shift regularly, then balance on a point or edge, then fall and smash to fragments, or crack open to reveal deep fissures. As we threaded our way up through the maze of the Lho La’s icefall, we were constantly moving underneath blocks of ice that looked eternal but were actually precarious—they were certain to fall sometime in the next month or two. I’m not expert at probability theory, but I still didn’t like it.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection Page 85
