by Jeff Long
blow caught him and knocked him flat. The safest thing seemed to be to lie close to the
epileptic and cover his head, so he huddled against the body and gritted his teeth and
felt the frozen earth against his cheek.
Finally someone thought to grab hold of Abe's ankles and pull him free of the
violence. It was Nima, and he propped him against the stone wall. There Abe panted
and pinched the blood from his nose and waited out the convulsions. The boy went on
twitching and fighting his demons in that ill-lit little hovel.
And then, abruptly, the boy went still. His possession simply ceased. His silence and
immobility were doubly blunt against the wild moments before. Abe stayed lying
against the wall in case there were any neural aftershocks. One pummeling was
enough.
All around him, Nima and the yakherders were staring at the still, heaped body,
mumbling and praying. They were horrified. But Abe was not.
He was relieved. He was cheered even. At least he knew now what was wrong. The
boy was an epileptic. Somewhere out there in the terra incognita called Tibet, this boy
had suffered a seizure and fallen and been set upon by animals. Nothing more. Now
Abe knew. Beyond sewing the torn flesh and treating the infection, there was little
Abe could do about that. The boy had his own mountain to climb. It was that simple,
after all.
With the same patient manner he unraveled knots, Abe worked on the boy's
wounds one by one. He started an IV to rehydrate the feverish boy and asked Nima
to recruit one of the herders to keep the bag of saline solution warm with his body, but
Nima chose to do it himself. While the bag was warming, Abe injected an ampule of
D-50, pure dextrose, through the IV needle. It was an old paramedic trick to revive
the unconscious. With diabetics it worked instantly. With this boy it didn't work at all.
Abe went ahead and connected the saline bag.
Finally Abe was able to seal the boy's bruised and torn and bandaged body back into
the warm sleeping bag. He knelt back on his heels and rested his hands on his thighs.
Abe had felt this helpless before, but never so hopeful at the same time. Still the
margins of chance were thin in this harsh borderland. Undiluted, destiny was more
likely to turn out here as it was meant to.
When Abe emerged from the hut, dawn was just seeping down the western slopes.
It had been hours since he'd disappeared into the hut's smoke and gloom and now the
sun was softly peeling away the frost.
The valley's blue air turned clear and a tiny flock of dawn quail gabbled and
tuttered. The yaks lay on their curled legs, crunching cud, drowsy.
In the distance, on the far side of the camp, the liaison officer had risen, as was
usual, to perform his morning t'ai chi. With slow, fluid sweeps of his hands, Li stalked
his invisible opponents and defeated them. His motions were more beautiful this
morning than Abe remembered.
And up the valley to the south stood Everest. Its jagged right-hand edge was lit
golden and the mountain was still, not a breath of wind stirring its snows.
4
Their calm was broken.
On the morning of April Fool's Day they cut loose from Base Camp. Abe woke early
and lay still, smiling. Watching his tent wall come alive with pure tangerine light, he
felt hope. The yak caravan had left yesterday, taking with them two tons of gear and a
whole circusful of noise. Only the young herder had remained behind, and though he
hadn't regained full consciousness, his delirium and fever were abating, and so was
Abe's pessimism. With bed rest and fluids and Western vitamins, the boy would
probably recover. Abe had spent an hour instructing Krishna, their cook, on how to
tend the patient. Krishna had solemnly promised to be devout in his care.
In this morning's hush it was easy to forget the shock of Daniel's fist on J.J.'s skull
and the mutiny against Jorgens's plodding ancien régime and the Tibetan boy's
horrible seizures. Abe thought to himself, Today has promise, today is new. It was the
kind of thing he used to tell Jamie every morning before they slipped from bed and
dressed. She had liked to hear it. He had liked to say it.
Abe hooked on his wire-rims and opened his sleeping bag and piece by piece dressed
with the clothing he kept warm every night for this very moment every morning. On
his way to the mess tent, he paid a visit to the expedition's water skull.
It was a sheep skull nestled into a rocky crevice by the glacier pond which provided
their water. It was still possessed of a good portion of its flesh, meaning it was in a
state of slow decay. The grisly head lay rotting within inches of their drinking water,
and Li had made several complaints, citing the People's Republic's campaign against
rats, flies and other germ carriers. But the skull served as a sort of Tibetan mousetrap
for bad spirits, and supposedly kept the water pure on a supernatural level. And since
Krishna Rai boiled all their potable water, hepatitis or cholera or any other plague
nesting in the head was rendered more unlikely than demon possession. Despite Li's
fussiness, the skull stayed in place.
Abe had come to enjoy waking early and sitting here in wait for the sunshine. It was
quiet and primeval and satisfied his streak of pantheism. But this morning he didn't
linger. The camp was alive. Krishna made farewell omelets with the last of their eggs
and talked about how he would miss them while they were on the mountain. Li
wagged his finger at the little cook and told him in English, 'Now you will be alone with
me and I will teach you how to play chess,' and Krishna laughed even though he didn't
like Li.
At the end of breakfast, Stump said, 'Let's do it to it,' with the enthusiasm of an
original thought. Outside the mess tent, Robby and Carlos started singing the
Rawhide theme, lashing the cold dirt with hanks of loose sling.
They loaded their packs and hefted them for weight, then added or subtracted
things and closed the packs and slung them on. In the coming week, some of the
yakherders were scheduled to make a second trip up with any mountain supplies still
remaining in the dump. By the middle of April it was projected that the next camp,
Advance Base Camp, would be self-sufficient. The climbers kept their loads light for
the trail and so Abe did too – a sleeping bag, some food, and his streamlined jump kit,
his trauma box for mishaps along the trail. On second thought he went ahead and
stuck a twelve-pound cylinder of oxygen in his pack just in case someone crashed.
It was going to take three days to trek up to their next camp, four days for the yaks.
It was only ten miles away, but the altitude was going to slow them. If all went well,
the climbers would arrive at Advance Base Camp – ABC – on the same day their gear
did. Some of them would immediately return to Base Camp to recover from the
altitude and to escort the final yak carry back up. Others would get ABC up and
running. Still others would begin climbing toward the next camp. The siege was now
begun.
In bunches, the climbers left camp and aimed for the throat of the Rongbuk Glacier,
a huge body of ice left behind by the last ice age. On maps, the glacier resembled
a
white octopus with its tentacles flung out among all the surrounding valleys. Abe set
off with the last wave. Li stood by the trail and wished them good luck.
Five minutes out of Base Camp, Abe turned around to take a photo of their
comfortable little tent city, but it was already gone. When he looked back up at
Everest, it, too, had disappeared, blocked from view by the Changtse, the satellite
peak.
Single file on the trail, the climbers were swallowed whole by a maze of looming mud
walls and loose stone and deep, icy corridors. Once again Abe had no idea where they
were going or what to expect. Li was right, they truly had come to the edge of the
world.
It would have been hard to get lost on that twisting path, at least on the first part of
it, for dozens of expeditions had been here before them, and the trail was clearly
imprinted. Where the tracks disappeared on long, jumbled fields of scree, they simply
had to follow heaps of old frozen yak dung. But even with the sun out and the air
warm, it seemed to Abe that a careless soul could wander forever in this labyrinth,
and he was glad to have Daniel leading them.
At a prominent fork in the glacier, they found a huge, thirty-foot arrow made of
piled rocks. It pointed left.
'Mallory and his bunch went that way,' Daniel said. The Brit's body had never been
found, and the mountaineering community was still divided over whether he had
summited.
'It takes you to the North Col,' Daniel said. That was what climbers called the 'trade
route' up the north side. It was by far the easiest climb up Everest's north side, and
for that reason was the most often repeated. With huge sums of money and
oftentimes national prestige at stake, most expeditions to Everest opted for a sure
summit rather than a new or more difficult route. Part of Abe wished they were
heading for the North Col's well-known terrain and relative safety.
'That's also the trail you take to the Chengri La,' Daniel added. Chengri Pass, which
James Hilton had turned into the fictitious Shangri-La in his Lost Horizon, crossed
south into Nepal at a height of 18,000 feet. Over that la, Daniel and his Lepers'
Parade had escaped during the '84 debacle.
'We go this way,' Daniel pointed, and they turned right into the shadows, moving
quietly, as if giants had built this stone arrow and might still be lurking nearby.
The trail roller-coastered up and down, mostly up. For some reason a sense of
vertigo kept sneaking up on him. From minute to minute, he couldn't shake the sense
of being out of control. Usually he only felt this way on steep rock, and yet it was plain
to see that both his feet were planted on flat ground. Abe tried to reason with his
fears. Finally he just accepted that he was going to have to live with them.
The climbers gained elevation. A day passed, then two, then three. In between they
suffered two long, cramped nights of too many people sharing too few tents. Despite
the bitter cold, Abe ended up sleeping outside under the stars both nights.
Their pace slowed, and so did their thoughts, or at least Abe's did. He tried to
remember Jamie's face, but to his dull alarm it eluded him. The more he tried, the less
he remembered. Before it was too late and she was altogether erased from memory,
Abe decided to quit searching for her and instead concentrated on Carlos's heels in
front of him, plodding, mindless.
'Eventually we'll acclimatize,' Robby told Abe. 'This will seem just like sea level.' Abe
listened to Robby's words but watched his lips. They were bright blue, a symptom of
the hypoxia all of them were enduring. As their bodies cued to the altitude, some of
the blue would return to pink, but Abe doubted 20,000 feet could ever feel like sea
level.
Their third morning on the trail, the climbers penetrated a long bank of penitentes,
or seracs. These were tall pinnacles of ice that had been sharpened to a point by the
sun. Some had warped into grotesque shapes. Others had collapsed. One had toppled
and speared the earth.
Abe looked around, startled by the unnatural quiet in this place. He knew what
these penitentes were but had never seen them up close like this. Abe rubbernecked
until Gus came up behind and nudged him onward.
If ever nature had erected a sign to warn away man, the penitentes were it. It was
like an evil forest in there. The thirty-foot fingers of turquoise ice were utterly
beautiful and seductive, but they were also deadly and looked it.
Here and there, big boulders sat five and ten feet above the ground, balanced atop
thin sun-carved columns of ice like huge petrified mushrooms. 'I feel like Alice in
Wonderland,' Abe said to Gus.
Gus glanced up at him sharply and hushed him with a finger. 'This place is
booby-trapped,' she whispered, and pointed at the hair-trigger stones and penitentes.
'If one of those bastards collapses, it could bring the whole place down.' There was no
way to tiptoe with a fifty-pound pack on, but Abe did his best to walk more gingerly.
Soon they came upon a horribly twisted animal dangling from an ice wall. Half of it
lay outside the ice, the other half still frozen into the blue glass. Birds had pecked
away the eyes, and the elements had stripped much of the rest down to bone.
'Road kill,' Gus whispered, poking at the hide and bones with her ski pole.
It had long matted hair and thick joints, and the ice and wind and sunlight had
rendered it almost shapeless. Though it looked like the thawing remains of a
mastodon, Abe knew it was a yak.
'Is that one of ours?' he whispered. Gus shook her head no.
'Did a rock fall on it?'
'Nah,' whispered Gus. She opened her pocketknife and stepped closer to the thing.
'If a rock fell on it, the yakkies would have butchered it for the meat. This poor thing
probably fell down a crevasse, probably during some expedition. Now the glacier's just
getting around to belching it up. Everest does that a lot, turning out its dead.'
Gus reached forward and grabbed one of the horns and wrenched the animal's head
up. With her free hand, she snaked her knife under the neck and sawed away with the
blade. After a minute, a fist-sized cup of metal fell out of the filthy hair and hit the
ground with a clank.
Gus picked the bell up. She let the clapper strike the metal cup once, gently. The
solitary note trembled through the glass forest. 'For my collection,' she said, stuffing
one of her gloves inside to muffle the clapper.
Abe was glad when they finally reached the end of that hour-long bed of crystal
thorns and stone mushrooms. The rest of the group was waiting for them on a
clearing, lounging against their packs or stretching sore shoulder muscles. J.J. was
reading one of Robby's old Silver Surfer comics, and the Sherpas were sharing some
tsampa, or roasted barley, with Daniel. When Abe and Gus appeared, the climbers all
got to their feet and started loading up.
Only then did Abe realize that the group had divided itself into pairs and trios to
pass through the penitentes, one team at a time. Nobody had told them to do it, they'd
just split up and staggered their own ranks so that if there had been an accident
among the penitentes,
there would have been a minimum of victims and a maximum
of rescuers. Abe's confidence in the group soared.
They headed higher up a series of glacial steppes, holding close to a wall of blue and
white ice. Another two hours' ground away and the natural terracing grew steeper.
Here and there they had to grab at outcrops to clamber higher. The party slowed to a
crawl, gasping and resting their hands on their knees.
'I must be getting old,' Kelly said. Abe remembered she was just thirty. Her hair
hung in long golden rags, partly braided.
'Twenty-one thou,' Stump consoled her, referring to the altitude.
'Twenty-one seven,' J.J. corrected him. He looked jolly and warm and primitive in a
big fur Khampa cap he'd bought from a nomad in Shekar. His black eye was buried
behind glacier glasses. 'We're getting up there.'
'No excuses,' Robby threw in, gasping along with the others. 'You are getting old,
Kelly. Especially for a woman.' Kelly delighted in having her beauty deflated, but no
one else was particularly amused. They were too tired.
'It's only a little more,' Daniel told them. As if to confirm him, some of the yak
caravan appeared, wending its way back down to Base Camp. Unburdened of their
loads and with gravity helping them along, the yaks and their herders were practically
running downhill. Their rapid descent made Abe feel that much slower.
Soon the afternoon winds began. The trail's corridor funneled blasts straight down
into their faces. Without breaking stride, Abe zipped his jacket closed to the throat
and fished some thin polypro gloves from a pocket. They wound through the
convolutions.
Abruptly, as if bobbing to the sea's surface after a deep dive, they emerged onto a
flat mesa, perhaps an acre wide.
And suddenly the whole earth just halted. And so did Abe.
With no warning, the gigantic gleaming body of Everest was rearing up in front of
them. They had lost sight of it for three days and now it jutted one and a half miles
above them, stabbing into the jetstream. Its curtains of afternoon light hung before
them like a dream.
At first the mountain distracted all attention from ABC, which lay in shadow at the
back of the mesa. The mesa was butted snugly against a soaring rock wall, and the
wall had shed copious piles of limestone down onto it. Including Daniel's pioneering
