“That’s really something special,” he said, fingering the tiny keypad. He put an arm around me. “I’ll for sure remember my crazy American girl. Always weeping about some sad thing. You can tell your friends back home about me.”
I wiped my face. “I’ll tell them, ‘He was not a king, but a maker of kings.’”
Nitzan laughed. “Yeah, that’s good.”
Then he helped me lock my bag under the bottom berth, and walked down the platform as the train picked up speed, waving through the window until he couldn’t keep up.
When I arrived in Kathmandu, I went straight to the GPO to check for mail. A crowd of travelers gathered outside the door, and when the office opened we were directed into a dusty side room. Kathmandu, the only sizable city in Nepal, got so much mail for foreigners that a whole room had been devoted to its distribution. A long table ran the length of this room, its surface covered with shoebox-sized troughs, one for each letter of the alphabet. A clerk unlocked a heavy cabinet and pulled out the bundles of mail, each tied with string and marked with a letter, and dropped them into the bins. I took a seat in front of the Ms and flipped through two feet of thin air-mail letters, searching for a familiar hand. All down the table there were crowds in front of the popular consonants, and several people leaned over my shoulders for a glimpse of the flashing envelopes. We were like a pack of starved animals. Now and then someone shouted with delight. “Morton! That’s me.” I passed postcards and fat packets back to Miles and Milford and Masterson, and began to lose hope. Only a few inches left and not a single letter. Then, at the very end of the pile, four months after I left home, I found a letter from Mau.
I went out to the stone steps and tore it open. He seemed to have forgotten how much I drove him crazy. He was staying in a shack in Venezuela surrounded by wild calla lilies and was thinking about settling there to raise bees. Did I want to join him? The letter went on in this vein, full of plans. Then it came to a breezy close. “Before I decide whether to stay in Merida, I want to tour around for a while. Don’t know where I’m going next. Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, maybe Chile and Peru?”
I wrote a ten-page reply on tissue-thin paper, not worrying until the end that I had no place to send it. Yes, I wanted to raise bees. Yes, I still loved him. On the back of my journal from those months is a list of South American countries. Far from an atlas, my sixth-grade geography strained, I resorted to querying strangers in cafés: “Pardon me, do you know the capital of Bolivia?”
When I had the names, I cycled through Kathmandu in search of a copy machine, finally coming across one in a dusty shop near the bus station. I made five copies of my letter and mailed one each to Buenos Aires, La Paz, Quito, Santiago, and Lima, hoping one might find its mark.
I had come to Nepal for the trekking, and when I met an Englishwoman who had a guide lined up and a trip planned, I decided to accompany her. Sarah was planning to hike up a small valley called Langtang, home to many Tibetans, then over a high pass and back down into the Kathmandu Valley.
We took an eight-hour bus ride to the point where the paved road ended, and spent the first few days hiking comfortably along wide forested trails, sleeping at night in small huts along the way. Sarah, a plucky Oxford graduate, who’d been teaching English in Kathmandu, wasn’t big on exertion, but she managed to haul herself from one hut to the next in a day’s time. Our guide, Shiva, a slim, fox-faced man from Kathmandu, coaxed us along by exhortation and example. “Good going, Sarah,” he’d say, pausing by the side of the trail. Then he’d sprint ahead, unable to check his natural stride, and wait for us at the next fork in the road.
By the tenth day, the trail had risen above the tree line and angled through massive granite terraces. At fourteen thousand feet Sarah and I were both beginning to drag a bit, and Shiva quickly climbed out of sight. We followed slowly, stopping to catch our breath and look down at the quilt of firs below, then starting again only to be winded within a few steps. We were both getting a bit delirious. Sarah turned pink and wheezy, and leaned back on a large slab to rest. “That’s it. We’ve been left for the jackals,” she said. The sight of her, collapsed under her canvas baggage, blotches of red in her cheeks, made me laugh, which was a bad idea. It felt like I was breathing through a straw, and soon I was hunched over, hands on my knees, gasping for air. Sarah started to snicker. “Bloody Shiva!” she said, wiping tears from her cheeks. “He knows we’re not fit.”
We were both relieved when we saw the peaked roof of a lodge up ahead. We dropped our packs at the door and stood on the hillside, looking down at the way we’d come. A level bank of clouds had rolled in while we climbed, covering the valley and the lower wooded slopes. Punching up through the clouds were the snowcapped peaks of Annapurna and Everest. We appeared to stand at the edge of a vast empty dance floor, plumped white by a fog machine, and I was tempted to step onto that white expanse for a waltz. A last waltz, it would have been, ending several thousand feet in the valley below.
That night, I slept in every stitch of clothing I had, including gloves and a hat, and still woke in the night from cold. The couple who ran the lodge pulled down heavy batted blankets and slept near the dying fire. Still, I heard them rustling in the blackness at 4 A.M., when the cold took over the rooms.
The next morning, the clouds had disappeared. The deep green cleft of the valley opened below us, wet with mist. Shiva had gone off on a prebreakfast hike, and Sarah was late in rising. I ducked into the hut to check on her. She was sleeping soundly, but her breathing was rough.
I asked the lodge owner if I could have some lemon tea. She stirred the coals under a dented kettle and pointed to a seat by the fire. At times like this, I cursed my poor Nepali. I could ask how far a certain town was, count to five, say thank you and please, and order food in butchered phrases. But this morning, I longed to ask this woman if she was cold at night, if she had ever been to Kathmandu, if she was happy.
Sarah finally rose and stumbled out of the sleeping room. “Tell me, do I have a pickax between my eyes?” she asked, leaning against the door frame and looking wan. She seemed to have all the signs of altitude sickness: headache, listlessness, disorientation. We both decided that she should rest for a day. Shiva would wait with her, in case she needed to descend in a hurry, and I would go on to the next lodge with a young Australian couple, Ron and Juliet, who had arrived late the night before. When Sarah got acclimatized, we could cross over the Gosaikund saddle together.
The day’s walk was easy, a traverse across a bald hillside dusted with snow. When we reached the crest, we looked down on a pair of glacial lakes. Robin’s-egg blue and ringed with ice, the upper lake fed into the lower, which then ran off into a wide, rushing stream headed downslope toward the valley. We skirted the lakes, and in the shelter of some small hills on the south shore came to a lodge—rock walls, a sheet-metal roof, a prayer flag braced in a pile of boulders near the door.
We were the only guests at the hut. The lodge owner, a twenty-four-year-old who spoke some skeletal English, seemed lonely, and so we sat inside drinking tea and listening to Radio Nepal’s English news broadcast. China and the USSR had es tablished diplomatic relations after thirty years. I wondered what my father would have thought of that.
The lodge owner, we learned, lived most of the year alone by the lake, waiting for tourists to pass through. In the monsoon months, when the rains were too heavy for trekkers, he lived with his family in the lower valley. I sat next to him on a low bench near the fire, taking sidelong looks at his face, trying to imagine how he weathered the cold and the solitude. When he caught me staring, he turned, a little shy and surprised, and busied himself with the coals.
Ron and Juliet and I tucked into our sleeping bags early—the sun left the lake basin long before dark, and we were too cold to sit still without blankets—and ordered food in rotating order to keep the low fire warming the room. I asked the lodge owner if I could borrow an extra blanket, and he pulled a heavy straw-filled tick from a pile of ba
tting in the corner and laid it over my sleeping bag.
That night I dreamt I was in a cathedral of ice, where a choir, set deep in the apse, sang mournful chants. The pews were cold, but I stayed, transfixed by the voices. Sometime before morning, I woke in the dark and heard the young lodge owner singing from his pallet near the fire. It was a lonely song, with no verse or refrain, and it warbled on like whalesong until the sun rose.
Over breakfast I asked him about it.
He shrugged and set bread to toast on the coals. “I sing keeping warm,” he said, taking a quick glance at my borrowed blanket.
After tea and bread with honey, Ron and Juliet set out for Ghopte, a small village on the far side of the pass. God, how I hated to be left behind. I watched them move up the snow-packed peak until they looked like ants crawling across a white wall. I barely knew these people, and yet the sight of their tiny retreating figures made my throat catch. It was a relief when they broke the horizon and sank out of sight. I walked over the smooth hillside beside the lake and sat on a rock, trying to warm myself in the thin sun. I felt ashamed of having deprived our host of his extra blanket the night before, and decided that I would use up no more firewood before I left. Squirrels popped up from their burrows and skittered across the grass, dodging this way and that, not a shrub or tree to hide them from the hawks. It was a gorgeous, godforsaken place. I didn’t see how that young man could stand it. I hoped that Sarah would come along quickly, so we could cross the pass in time to reach Ghopte before sundown.
By midmorning, Shiva came running over the crest of the hill. When he reached me, barely winded, he said that Sarah was no better and had decided to walk back down to our starting point and take the bus to Kathmandu. I could gather my things and make the return trip with them, or continue on, trying to catch Ron and Juliet. I worried over this for a few minutes, but it wasn’t hard to make up my mind. Sarah would be safe with Shiva, and it seemed a pity to retrace my steps. I could see Ron’s and Juliet’s tracks leading away from the lodge in the hard-packed snow. I decided to follow them. Shiva assured me that I could make my way alone, and he wrote down the names of the villages I should pass through on my way down to Kathmandu: Ghopte, Tarepati, Kutomsom, Chisapani, Sundarijal. The trail was wide and well marked, he said, and I would run into Nepalese who would point the way if I gestured and looked sufficiently lost. I said goodbye to Shiva, wrote a note to Sarah explaining my plans, and set out.
It was a perfect day, the sky a flat, cobalt blue, the trail rising gently up the peak north of the lake. I walked quickly, breathless from my unexpected bravado, heart thumping under my ribs. Up ahead, the trail rose to the low point in a saddle, then disappeared over the other side. I had heard tales of people who became delirious and wandered off into the snow just yards from the crest, or those caught in sudden blizzards who were forced to turn back on their hands and knees, using the slope to guide them back to the lake. I had imagined that the pass would be a chink between peaks, a narrow windswept slot. But in daylight, following the tracks of Ron’s and Juliet’s boots, the crossing looked wide and benign.
Only my breath, shallow and ragged, gave a hint of how high I had climbed. I moved slowly, holding on to the straps of my backpack, surprised at my fortitude and foolhardiness. When I reached the crest, a vast bowl opened below me—snow and dark outcroppings, mist gathering lower down, a white amphitheater of cold. Through this basin threaded the faint depression of a trail. From my vantage, I could see where my friends had veered off, then found their way to the tamped rut again. I ran down the hill, glad to be on their heels.
After walking for half an hour or so at a fast clip, the snow turned patchy. I felt sure that my choice to go on was a good one. The trail was clearly visible, the good weather was holding. I even felt a little pride—pride I would later regret—that I hadn’t suffered much from the altitude. I came over a rise and there, in a broad hollow of snow and dead grass, was a hut. It looked out of place, perched in the center of that stark space. When I came closer, I saw that the builder had been short of supplies; a grown person couldn’t stand up inside. I bent over and ducked my head in the door, which faced downwind. A man sat inside mending a garment, his head nearly brushing the ceiling. He gave me one brief, indifferent look and turned back to his work.
“Ghopte, how far?” I asked in my pidgin Nepali.
“Far,” he replied.
I pointed to the trail I was following. “Ghopte?” The man nodded and said nothing more.
Back on the trail, I swung my mittened hands and whistled to fill the silence. I knew it was childish, but that man took some of the wind out of my sails, preferring, as he did, solitude to the scarcest company. It didn’t help that the landscape was desolate. In places where the snow thinned I could see the trail, but though I gained a sure sense of heading in those sections, I lost Ron’s and Juliet’s tracks, their comforting precedent. At one point I could see where it seemed they had stopped and turned around a bit, then stepped over a line of large rocks crossing the trail. I paused for a swig of water, then followed them.
The path contoured along a hillside for a while, curving around small ridges, then tucking into drainages between them, keeping a level course. It was easy going, but after an hour or so, I turned a corner and found the trail buried under a snowslide.
I walked to the edge to take a look. It was old snow, packed by wind to the stiffness of Styrofoam. It rose sharply above me—I couldn’t hike upward to cross it at a flatter expanse—and below me the sheet angled down for a few hundred feet before ending in a pile of boulders.
I was ready to turn back, and then I saw a line of boot prints crossing the snow. It seemed my friends had continued. It must have been a small slide brought on by the warming temperatures. I cinched my pack tightly and stepped out on the angled crust, using their prints as footholds, laying my body flat to the slope and digging in with my gloved fingertips. I crossed without a mishap, hit the solid trail, and set out again.
About a mile farther on, I came to another iced-over section. Again the boot prints crossed and so did I. But there was another after that, and then two more. At each crossing I came close to slipping into the ravines below; when I reached the opposite side I ran down the trail, sure I had passed the last obstacle, only to turn a corner and find another.
On one sheet, about halfway across, one of the boot prints broke under my weight and I began sliding. I dug my fingers into the snow, listening to the scrape of my pack and shoes over the frozen crust, helpless to brake myself. The slope must have leveled off, because I came to a shuddering stop, crawled to the opposite edge, and sat on the trail, panting, till I recovered my breath.
I was convinced then that something was wrong. Shiva had never mentioned such difficult terrain. In my mind I retraced my route up to that point. Unless the man in the hut had lied, I must have gone astray after I stopped for directions. Then I remembered the line of rocks. They were no doubt the Nepali equivalent of a highway sign: road closed.
I tried to stay calm and consider my options. I didn’t have a watch. As I walked, the mist had settled around me, muffling the light, but it seemed to be past midday. There was a chance I could make it back to the lone hut before nightfall, but I couldn’t be sure. Then again, given the occupant’s sour disposition, I couldn’t be sure he would invite me in. And between me and that cold comfort were the ice slopes, one after another, a white gauntlet.
It might have been a wise decision to retreat, but something made me go on, and I wonder sometimes what steeled me. When I was in high school, I didn’t keep a diary, but I used to record each day’s events on my wall calendar: “Stayed home. Cleaned house. Burned my face with sun lamp.” “Got a great watch from Grandpa … broke it.” The notes were full of code, which my mother could have deciphered had she been nosy and a bit suspicious (she was neither). Tiny scissors marked the days I cut class, a torpedo shape with dots issuing from the end signaled the days I smoked dope. I crammed those squares with
a record of my days, as if it might keep them from unraveling behind me. It never worked. At the end of the year, I took the calendar down and paged through the months, feeling an inexplicable loneliness, even as I remembered days when I knew myself to have been happy. The past collapsed behind me like an old sock. I couldn’t recover its fullness.
So perhaps this had something to do with it. I couldn’t stand the thought of heading back over the trail I had covered. Knowing exactly what I faced left me dry in the mouth. I could just see it: my body in a heap at the bottom of a gully—cheery, useless yellow slicker, limbs twisted this way and that. I wouldn’t rot—it was too cold for that—but the snow and ice would cover over my body, and far away, on the back side of the globe, a handful of people would sicken with worry. So I might say that fear of the past made me go forward. A random thing, a character quirk. Someone else might have liked the idea of return. I opted for the future. Perhaps I had passed the last patch of ice, and just around the corner the trail tended downward. It seemed more of a heartbreak to imagine myself coming within a half mile of safety and turning back, than to plod deeper into the snow.
I made a quick check of my provisions. I had on light cotton pants and long underwear, a cotton shirt and wool sweater, tennis shoes and cotton gloves. Except for the wool sweater, all foolish. What was that phrase that Mau once used? “Cotton kills.” In my pack I had a down sleeping bag (useless once wet), one quart of water, and a bag of dried chickpeas. If I didn’t find shelter before nightfall, I’d most likely freeze.
I forced myself to chew some of the peas—sour, chalky little pellets. (They’re a fad now in health-food stores, and I’ve tried to eat them once or twice, but it’s no use: they taste of desperation.) I tried to think of good things: how I would catch up with Juliet and Ron, how they would turn around on the trail when I shouted, shocked to see me. How we would laugh at our stupidity and help each other out of this place. The two of them seemed more capable than I was, calmer, less prone to dread. It was toward their imaginary companionship that I set out.
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