by Jeff Long
broad forehead. Their archaeology had come to life.
Then the wind shifted, and there was that smell of cedar again.
This time the white smoke engulfed them, turning the ruins into a cupful of flags and
wood fog.
Then Abe smelled something else, too. An unpleasant, saccharine odor. It took him a
minute to place the smell. And then it came to him. Something had died.
Voices drifted in with the smoke. They came muffled, from a distant part of the
ruins.
'This way,' Li said with waning confidence. 'But we must stay together. We must
take care. There are dangers. There are bad stories.'
Abe wended his way through the smoke. The summit structure was not very large,
but they had to pick their way through so many clusters of prayer flags and mani
stones that it seemed enormous and mazelike. Abe passed another horned animal
skull embellished with paint and carved lettering, then another. The voices grew
louder.
At the rear of the old structure, a collapsed doorway opened out onto a wide flat
ledge on the outside. On every side of the ledge, the mountain dropped away, a
thousand feet deep. Far in the distance, Everest was blowing her afternoon plume.
Abe stepped through the doorway. Then he stopped, frozen, for they had emerged
into the middle of a funeral. At first Abe wasn't even sure of that. He had no idea at all
what they were doing.
Three Tibetan men had stripped naked a dead woman.
One of the men was holding a knife.
The woman's clothing lay in a heap.
The scene struck directly at Abe's mind, unbuffered by language or thought. A big
hand grasped his shoulder from behind, someone trying to come through the
doorway, and Abe heard the person gasp sharply.
A cedar fire was smoking away on one end of the ledge. Back against the dzong wall,
to Abe's left, sat what he took to be the woman's family, maybe eight people of
different ages. For a moment, deceived by the thick white smoke, Abe thought he saw
his monk seated on skins, droning his monotone into the empty blue. The smoke
shifted. His monk disappeared.
For a moment, some of the family members didn't see the climbers and kept on
muttering prayers. Then all was silence. They froze, as if ambushed.
The climbers stood paralyzed, too. The Tibetans considered them for another
minute or so. They were not welcome, that was clear. But Abe and the others were
too stupefied to be moved by the hostile glares.
'What's the traffic jam,' Thomas groused, squeezing through the doorway. Then he
saw the body and went still, too.
'Trespass.' Carlos said it firmly. 'This is trespass. We don't belong here.'
But before they could retreat, Li squeezed through the bunched climbers.
'Trespass?' he scoffed, and the fear was gone from his voice. He seemed oddly
triumphant, pleased by the climber's shock at this raw, strange sight.
'We are within the law,' Li said with growing confidence. 'We are not trespassing.
You can take photographs. Yes, it is within the law.'
The Tibetans didn't speak to one another. Each of them scrutinized the climbers and
especially their Chinese guide. Then as suddenly as they had stopped, the Tibetans
started again. They began droning mantras without syncopation, almost without
breath. The cedar smoke changed direction and fell into the valley.
'Come.' With great firmness, almost as if he were disciplining them, Li ushered the
climbers to one side. 'Please, sit,' he said, indicating the ground by the wall.
Abe was dumbly obedient.
'What is this?' Kelly asked, hunkering by the wall.
Stump spoke in a whisper. 'I don't know.'
Abe felt their fear and helplessness, too. That bare knife, the corpse, the wind and
prayers: He wondered what they meant to do.
'I've heard of this,' Carlos said, keeping his voice low. 'Daniel told me about it. He has
pictures. They call it sky burial.'
Robby squirmed, horrified. 'They push her off the edge, or what, man? What is this?
What am I doing here?'
Before Carlos could answer, before Robby could leave, the man with the knife bent
down and made a long cut. From just right of her lightly haired pubis down to the
inside of the knee joint, the butcher drew his blade fast and hard.
Kelly groaned aloud.
Abe squinted in the cedar smoke. He tried not to flinch, though, telling himself this
was the stuff of gross anatomy, nothing more. And they were travelers and this was
culture. He took out his camera. Somehow, looking through the viewfinder made it
easier to watch.
Quickly now, because they had begun, the corpse was tilted up on one hip. From the
pelvic saddle down, the butcher sliced again and the quadriceps flopped loose onto the
cold stone.
The knives were sharp and these men had obviously done this with human beings
many times before. It took just minutes before the woman's leg bones were bare
white sticks. Losing his revulsion, Abe marveled at how quickly a body could be
undressed of its flesh.
'They throw their poor and their dead children into the rivers,' said Li. He spoke
aloud with a tour guide's voice. 'Their monks are cremated or else buried in big hollow
tree trunks. But for many, many centuries, this is how the common Tibetans have
been. Cutting up their loved ones like chickens. Feeding each other to the animals.'
Gigantic blue-and-white vultures that had been wheeling in the abyss came closer
now and roosted, first one, then others, landing with ungainly hops.
Like a pack of grotesque schoolchildren, the birds gathered into a semicircle at one
corner of the ledge. While they waited with eerie pique, they nipped and nudged each
other and flexed their six-foot wings.
The birds began to unsettle Abe in a way that the butchers had not. The vultures
looked like a parody of their little band lined against the dzong wall.
Yet even as Abe and the other climbers sorted through their guilt feelings, they kept
on snapping photos. Robby was firing away with a little black Samurai. Its
motor-driven telephoto lens pumped in and out with electronic frenzy. Abe's own
camera was bulky and old, which kept his picture taking slow. It made him seem
studied, even reluctant.
'Go closer,' Li encouraged him. But Abe didn't.
One man finished stripping the woman's arm bones clean. The other two began
working on the flesh already cut away. They sliced it into pieces and threw it to the
vultures. As the birds shoved about for bits of meat, their big dry feathers rattled.
Li was grimly jubilant.
'Now you see,' he said, 'we have come to the edge of the world. And they are
barbarians.'
8
It was nearly June and summer was loosening the countryside. The moraine thawed a
little more every morning, and their separate islands of tundra grass turned spongy.
Abe found mud on his shoes. It was a sign. The earth itself was compromising. The
separate elements – the mountain, the wind, the cold, the ice, the sunlight – were
reaching a sort of peace, mixing together, melding. It was a season for changes and for
the Ultimate Summit the changes came swiftly.
First, Gus brought the word down to Base, catchin
g them at noon in the olive-green
mess tent. They were all there, a few hard at work rewiring the stubborn
walkie-talkie sets, most just swapping lies and snacking on popcorn and generally
taking it easy. From out of nowhere, Gus burst in upon them with her pack on, the
waistband still clipped.
They barely had time to recognize the windblown creature before she had delivered
her message. 'He's done it,' she rasped. Corroded with bronchitis and strep, her voice
cracked through them like distant thunder. The words came out more animal than
human and Abe wasn't sure he'd understood her.
A length of parachute cord bound her red hair and she had a filthy cap over that.
The smear of zinc oxide across her cheeks and nose was flecked with old food and
older scabs. What made Gus most alien, though, was not the filth but her wildness.
Something close to dementia burned in her green eyes – Abe recognized it as his own
– and she looked menacing, a berserker fresh from the glory fields.
Robby was the first to recover from her entrance. 'Sit down, Gus,' he said.
Kelly was next. 'Gus? Are you okay?'
Gus continued standing there with her craziness, weaving in place, drunk on the rich
oxygen. She stared at them.
'Where's Daniel at?' Stump asked with a most casual interest. He had a Phillips-head
in one hand and a welding gun in the other and amateur electronics on his mind.
Having found the glitch, he had sworn to get their walkie-talkies up and running by
tomorrow morning.
Gus stared at them, mute.
It suddenly hit Abe that Daniel might have fallen. Had he done it, then, sailed a day
too far? But Abe was just guessing, and no one else seemed concerned.
'How about some herbal spice tea?' Kelly asked her. 'It's great, sweet without sugar.
Real cinnamony.'
Abe goggled at Kelly's banality. Here was this ferocious woman with ropes of snot
splayed across her face like a horse whipped too far. Then he realized the banality was
Kelly's very point. Down here at Base, the status quo had its own rhythm and
coziness, and before things got too incendiary, they were banking Gus's fire, and their
own, too.
Gus would have none of their pacifism, though. She stood at the head of their table.
'Daniel broke through.'
'I knew it.' Heads turned. It was Thomas, the blood drained out from his cheeks.
'Are you saying Corder topped out?'
Gus heard his hostility, and chose to let him dangle. 'I'm saying he found a way out
of the Shoot. He placed Five. We're home free.'
'Gus, would you take a chair, please,' Robby said. 'Sit down before you fall down and
tell it in plain English.'
She sat. She told them. While she stayed in the cave, Daniel had soloed out of the
Shoot's lethal tube of rock-fall. He had discovered a sprawling snow plateau at the
base of the so-called Yellow Band – a thick sandwich of sulphur-colored limestone that
girdled the mountain at 27,500 feet. Blazing his path with nine-mil rope, he'd spent an
extra day humping a load of Kiwi gear up to the plateau and pitched their next camp.
Then he had descended to ABC. A dozen questions swarmed to Abe's mind. Before he
could ask even one, the others started interrogating Gus.
'So?' Thomas demanded. 'Did he solo to the top?'
Gus ignored him.
'Five's not much,' Gus said through the steam of her tea, 'but we don't need much.
There's wind up there, but no more rockfall. Daniel told me to tell you, from Five to
the top it's a cruise.'
'A cruise?' snorted Thomas. J.J. scowled at him. Thomas scowled back. On this
north side, the hard yellow rock lay in tiles canted downward at a 30-degree pitch,
with successive layers overlapping one another. The Yellow Band wasn't particularly
dangerous or technical, but neither was it going to be a cruise. Thomas was probably
right. The climb wasn't over yet.
Gus rolled right over Thomas's fatalism. For one thing he hadn't earned it; and for
another his cynical tone cloyed. 'Daniel says, Five's close enough, you can see the top.'
'Yeah? Well I can go outside and see the top from down here too,' Thomas said.
'That doesn't mean we're close.'
Gus had the punchline ready. 'Yeah, but you can't see the tripod. Not from down
here.'
It took them a minute to gather the significance of that. Then a light went on in
Robby's eyes. 'Daniel saw the tripod?' he breathed.
'Fantastic,' Stump said.
Thomas looked slapped silly. Speechless, he blinked rapidly.
The news galvanized them like a shot of crude voltage. In 1972 a Chinese expedition
had climbed via the easier North Col route and erected a five-foot-high metal survey
tripod on the very summit. Ever since, it had become a feature as natural as the
fossils and space shuttle vistas that awaited summiteers.
'I've never seen him so certain,' Gus added. And that in itself – Daniel's confidence –
spurred them even more than the other news, the camp, the Yellow Band, the tripod.
They were close all right.
'And Corder? Is he coming soon?' Jorgens guessed. His beard was more salt and
pepper now, his motions slower. He looked older and used up. But with this news, he
perked up. This was good news, very good, tantamount to victory.
'I parked his butt at ABC,' Gus said. 'He's in no shape for a bunch of round-trips to
Base.' They understood. Everyone had seen the way Daniel limped around on the
flats, and had heard the crepitation of bone on bone. It was harder on him to descend
an easy trail than to climb a sheer face. Climbing, he could at least compensate with
his arms for the kneecaps and cartilage of host of orthopods had cut out.
'One thing else,' Gus related. They fell silent. 'He made a promise. He said he'll wait
for us.'
She said it to remind them. Daniel could just as easily have continued on the last
thousand feet to the tripod alone. Instead he had roped down to join hands with his
teammates and take the Kore in a classic finish. Abe knew it was a gamble, Daniel
turning his back on a solo flash that must have seemed a sure thing. But apparently it
wasn't as much a gamble as lone wolfing through the rest of his life. Even now, several
days later, Gus looked relieved by his decision. She really thought she could save him,
Abe thought. Bravo, Gus.
The elated climbers bubbled out of the mess tent and into the sunshine, leaving Gus
in the dark with her mug of tea. Abe lagged behind. Unfinished business.
'How's he doing?' Abe asked her. She was changed. At least she would look him in
the eye now.
'He's whipped,' she said. 'He's in pain. His hands are like meat. His ribs are bad,
busted I think. And he stayed high too long. You know, the thousand-mile stare, all
that.' A sternness flickered across her face. 'But the nightmare's almost over. We're
going to nail this bastard. And then he's free.' She spoke it like a credo. She nodded to
herself and Abe nodded, too. To control the mountain was to control the entire
pyramid of obsessions that had led to it. None of them yearned for that power more
than Daniel.
'Is he taking care of his hands?' Doctors were supposed to ask questions like that.
'Of course.'
'Ho
w about you, how are the lungs holding up?' She had once developed double
pneumonia deep in the Karakoram range in Pakistan, and it was again a doctor's kind
of question. In truth, he was stalling. He wanted to know if there was any room to
negotiate on her dislike for him.
She was staring at him, deciding something. 'Daniel wanted me to tell you
something,' she said.
Abe braced himself.
'He wants to summit with you, Abe.'
Abe was dumbfounded. Then it occurred to him that Gus had gotten injured and
couldn't climb anymore. It would be like her to hide an injury. That would explain
Daniel's need for a new partner.
'Are you hurt?' Abe asked.
Gus reacted with scorn. 'Hurt?' she said. 'What the hell do you think?'
Now Abe saw his error. She was whole, but she was indeed hurt. 'No,' he said. 'I
meant injured.'
Gus waved aside his clarification.
'Then what is this?' He knew better than to feel sorry for this woman, and yet Daniel
had betrayed her. Alone and weary, she'd had to carry the news of it down ten miles
and then deliver it to the man chosen to replace her.
'He wants you with him when he hits top,' she said. 'Same day. Same rope.'
Abe was flattered. He hadn't expected anything like this, to reach the summit, to lay
the past to rest once and for all. But could they? Forgiveness was something granted,
not attained. It was not the same as reaching a mere mountaintop. Like that, Abe
made his mind up.
'I'll tell him my answer when I see him,' Abe said.
'Tell me,' Gus demanded. She had a right.
'I already have a partner.'
Now was Gus's turn to be surprised. She stared at him as if he'd stayed too high for
too long as well. 'Kelly?' she said. But her real contempt was for Abe. 'You're not telling
me you'd hang yourself up with her. Daniel's your one sure shot.'
Abe shrugged. 'It's me and Kelly.'
Gus frowned, trying to turn with this latest about-face. Odd, Abe thought. He hadn't
noticed until now that her red hair had turned nearly gold. The great stone crucible
was changing them. To see her from behind, you might almost mistake Gus for Kelly.
'You're making a mistake,' Gus said. But she wasn't really arguing. For all her
muscular gruffness, she had a wonderful transparency, Abe realized. There was no
