by Jeff Long
It was too early to sleep, and the night was warm. Part of it was the sand, still releasing its day heat. They lounged by the haul bags for a while, sipping water and snacking. They turned off their headlamps and let the stars take over.
Hugh looked for Augustine’s lights, off to the southeast. “I wonder if they’re still climbing,” he said.
“He’s not stopping for anything,” Lewis said.
“Do you think she’s still alive?”
“What’s it matter? This isn’t a rescue. It’s penance, man. He’ll kill himself before he quits.” Lewis’s voice was tinged with admiration.
“Penance?”
“For her brother. Not that the man has any real choice. Augustine’s got to ride it through. Some things are, like, predestined.”
“She had a brother?”
“You’ve never heard about them? I had it figured out the minute Augustine told us his name.” Lewis relished a captive audience. “Down in Patagonia?” he said. “You’re sure? Augustine and Tim McPherson and Charlie Regis?”
Hugh waited. Lewis had a sip of water. He took his sweet time.
“They were trying a new route on Cerro Torre. It was a standard Patagonia gig, tons of wind, Shakespearean weather, nothing but base camp day after day. Then they got their clear window and went for it. They managed to push to the shoulder just under the ice cap. Of course the weather turned on them. Of course Augustine’s partners got sick. But instead of getting them down right away, Augustine decided to solo the ice cap and snag himself the summit.
“It took him three days, totally out there, you’ve seen the man. He’s got the strength of lions. By the time he returned to their ice cave, McPherson had died. Regis was too weak to move. By now, Augustine was in horrible shape, too. He couldn’t evacuate Regis by himself, so he went down for help. The weather got worse. End of story. Three went up, only one came home.”
It wasn’t completely extraordinary. Hugh could think of a half dozen similar incidents: Messner and his brother on Nanga Parbat, Stammberger on Tirich Mir, and others. And yet he’d never heard about this one. “How could I have missed it? When did it happen?”
Lewis went back in his head. “November or December. The fall of ’01.”
“That explains it,” Hugh said. “Nine-eleven.”
After 9/11, notions of risk had been transformed. People quit paying attention to thin air and perfect storms. After that, high adventuring had come to seem desperate at best, or just pathetic. In Saudi Arabia, Hugh had watched the world news shrink to a pinhead. The mood among expats had darkened overnight. His Saudi friends had quit speaking to him. They wouldn’t shake his hand. Right there in the ARAMCO offices, posters for Islamic charities had popped up like flowers. Contempt was everywhere, on all sides. A tale of Patagonia would have been swallowed up.
“Which one was her brother?” Hugh asked.
Lewis thought. “I don’t know. Regis, I’d say. The one he left alive.”
The pieces fell into place, the wedding postponed, this hell-bent rescue, and Augustine’s insistence that the woman was still alive. “Survivor guilt,” Hugh murmured. There was a deadly brew for the unwary.
“Tell me about it.” Lewis said it offhandedly, but Hugh recognized the subtext. Lewis wasn’t the first to believe Hugh needed to unburden himself of Annie’s death, only the most extreme. Some had offered him coffee or a beer. Lewis had offered him El Cap.
“Somebody needs to forgive the man,” Lewis said.
“He needs to forgive himself,” Hugh said.
“Penance doesn’t work that way, bro.”
“Survival is penance,” Hugh said.
“Sure,” said Lewis. He rattled his pill bottle. “Want some candy?”
“All yours,” Hugh said. “That’s wicked stuff.” He stood and looked out toward Trojan Women. Augustine was in motion over there somewhere tonight, racing after the one soul he could never hope to save, even if he saved her.
FOURTEEN
Far below, some animal’s scream ricocheted across the walls, waking him. At first, Hugh refused to open his eyes. Lying on his back with the safety rope snaking down into the throat of his sleeping bag, he just listened. A mountain lion, he decided. They shrieked like Arab widows.
The sand, so comfortable when he’d first nestled in, had packed hard against his hip and shoulder. His head throbbed. His nostrils and sinuses were clogged with dried blood. He wanted water. He would settle for sleep. He turned on his other side. Maybe he slept.
The moon came lumbering over the summit, a vast, white, pockmarked globe. This time he looked. You could almost lay a ladder against it and climb up among the craters.
The smoke entered him like a dream. He couldn’t properly smell, but it had a taste in the back of his throat. It seemed to come up from his lungs.
Now fully awake, he looked across at the paddy tops of the silver-lit ledges, and Lewis was a motionless lump. He peered over the lip. Thirteen hundred feet below, the forest was catching fire.
Even as Hugh watched, a tiny orange flame danced among the trees like some Promethean spirit. He thought it must be a spark wafting on the breeze, though the air was still at this elevation.
The lion cried again. But its scream changed. It yipped and hooted, a whole menagerie of beasts lamenting the fire, perhaps. Or celebrating the moon.
It etched the floor in a slow, thin, ragged line. There was not one thing he could do to halt it, and so Hugh simply watched. As the spark skipped on and the fire grew longer, he sat up, legs dangling in his sleeping bag, back against the wall.
He sat there for a half hour, sure that firefighters would come streaming in any minute. And yet no one arrived. He began to wonder if they were setting the fire themselves. Maybe this was one of their controlled burns. And him with a ringside seat.
A puff of air ruffled his hair. He paid no attention to it. Breezes hit and ran on a whim. They were usually meaningless vagrants, detached from anything larger than themselves.
But what he felt as a breeze came pouring along the valley floor as a wind. It surged through the stone mouth of Yosemite, invisible but explicit. At ground level, the crooked vein of fire detonated.
The forest screamed again, and this time it seemed to him a human scream. It was promptly drowned in a roar. Trees blossomed with light and exploded. Hugh blinked at the sudden brightness. Flames scattered across the bone-dry fuel of summer. That quickly, the inferno took off.
“Lewis, you’ve got to see this.” Hugh scrambled to his feet and picked his way down to the main ledges. Lewis roused for a minute, long enough to say, “The camera, man, this is headlines.” Then he sagged and drifted off to sleep again. They had no camera.
For the next few hours, Hugh had the spectacle to himself. He paced back and forth on the islands as flames broke in waves against the base of El Cap. The fire rose like floodwater, moving from the flat floor and climbing up the talus slopes to the forest tucked behind the Nose. Backlit by flames, the enormous prow looked like a woman on her knees, in grief or submission.
He held out his hand, and the heat amazed him. He tried to recall how hot a forest fire burned, a thousand degrees or more, hot as oil fires he’d seen in the desert. At first, the wind shaped the fire, now the fire shaped the wind. It drew in fresh air and expelled it in thermal riptides. Flames coursed in the direction of Yosemite Village, and Hugh decided any firefighters were now protecting the village.
Here and there, tall trees resisted. Their high limbs stood clean of flame, and Hugh chose them to hold out. But the heat was too much. One after another, the giants burst like firecrackers. Centuries of growth went up with a snap, crackle, pop. The roar grew.
He tried again to wake Lewis, but his friend was deep in dream. He murmured the names of his daughters as if answering them. “Please,” he whispered. Hugh gave up on him.
Nothing was immune. The flames raged everywhere. They leaped the road in a rush, and finished off the meadow in a few white-hot seco
nds. After that, the meadow was just a blackened gash in the beautiful orange and red light. Hugh kept thinking he should be terrified. They were rats trapped on a stone raft. But he could not help falling in love with the fire, it was so beautiful.
Boxed between the valley walls, the heat had nowhere to go but up. Hugh didn’t have to hold out his hand to feel it anymore. He took off his parka, then his sweater and shirt. Sweat beaded the hairs on his arms.
The flood became an angry sea. Breakers of fire crashed against El Cap’s base, sending great masses of sparks up and curling back into the flames. Each time the sparks flew higher. Embers appeared in the space off the Archipelago, dancing like tiny demons. One landed on Hugh’s neck, and gave him a nip. He swept it away.
With a start, he remembered their coils of ropes, their naked ropes. The embers would melt right through them. He started to hide the ropes inside their haul bags, but the bags were nylon, too. Finally he buried each coil in sand. At the end of fifteen minutes, it looked like a small cemetery of mounds.
After the first two hours or so, the first of the animals began arriving. He mistook the early ones for dark ash. But they were winged bugs, grasshoppers and beetles, boosted toward the stars on hot updrafts.
They landed on the ledges, on Hugh, and on Lewis’s sleeping form. They crawled in the sand. They rested on mica crystals glittering in the firelight. The wall pulsed with their motion.
Others were carried higher into the night, and somewhere up there, where the hot air hit the cold night, they died and their bodies rained down like confetti. Hugh swept them from his hair and shoulders. He turned Lewis on his side so they wouldn’t fall in his mouth and choke him. Soon he draped shirts over his and Lewis’s heads.
A whole food chain unfolded before him. The insects brought predators. Bats swept back and forth, gorging in midair. Agitated by the heat and light, swallows, swifts, jays, and nutcrackers flocked upward. Some flew with wings on fire until they suddenly tumbled back into the awful basement. The lucky ones lit on Hugh’s islands, their feathers singed, and found a feast. Their avian brains adjusted immediately, turning hell into heaven, and they began walking around like barnyard chickens gorging on the insects.
The birds had their predators, too. He wished for a camera. Falcons struck. A giant gray owl sank from the night and plucked a raven, still cawing and flapping its wings, from the ledge.
The birds, bugs, and fire degenerated into a vision out of Hieronymous Bosch. The mad mix of birdcalls, buzzing wings, and trees rupturing with light wore Hugh down. The Ten Commandments drama of plague and apocalypse grew tiresome, and finally ugly.
The flames muddied. The crystal light silted up with smoke and ash, which packed higher in layers, filling in the lower forest, then burying the treetops, and piling over that. Strangely, as the smoke crawled higher, Hugh felt as if he was leaving the earth. The valley floor seemed to sink into oblivion. The carpet of fire lit the smoke pink as salmon meat.
The wind died as suddenly as it had begun. In the sudden dead calm, the smoke crept up the wall and enveloped the ledges. Hugh’s eyes stung. He wrapped one sleeve of the shirt on his head around his mouth to filter out the stink and taste. Above and behind them, the stone appeared to disintegrate. They were stranded.
Dawn seeped into Hugh’s awareness.
The sun came up as little more than a dim gray musket ball. The smoke lost color, relinquishing its lovely nocturnal pink and orange glow to the smog of sepia tones. What had been so beautiful now reminded him of a dirty stray dog.
At last Lewis’s sleeping pill wore off. With a shout, he sat up and yanked the shirt from his head and looked around. He shouted again, as if he were still dreaming, and batted at the insects and birds. “Hugh?” he said.
Hugh handed him some water. “There’s been a fire. The forest is gone.”
Groggy and dubious, Lewis crawled to the edge. There was not one thing to see for the smoke. He rubbed at his eyes. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I tried. Rome burned, you fiddled,” Hugh said. “Remember all your talk about the fellaheen? It came true. Now we really do get to live among the ruins.”
“Was it lightning?”
“There wasn’t a cloud in sight, nothing but stars.”
Lewis held up his arms, covered with stunned insects. “It’s an act of God, Hugh.”
“I’m pretty sure it was set on purpose,” said Hugh.
“A managed fire? But the rangers would have told us.”
“I guess not.” Hugh shrugged. “They were busy with other things.”
“Maybe they were trying to smoke Joshua out. Give him a fright, flush him into the open. And then it got away from them.”
“This isn’t a western, Lewis.” The smoke had congealed. Hugh couldn’t quit coughing. His eyes ached.
“Never mind,” Lewis said. “It doesn’t matter. Don’t you see, we were chosen. First the fallen girl. Then Joshua. Now this. It’s some kind of purification.”
Hugh was in no mood for his gonzo routine. “Don’t start.”
“Marooned.” A light went on in Lewis’s eyes. “Rachel,” he said. “The girls.”
“Rachel’s not watching.”
“They’ll think we’ve gone up in flames.”
“That makes you happy?”
The insects clung to Lewis. He had grasshoppers on his head. Cinders had lit in his hair and singed patches. He sat there smiling.
Then Hugh understood. Lewis was imagining Rachel imagining him dead, and falling back in love with the idea of him. And then Lewis would materialize from the ashes and smoke, and their fairy tale could resume.
“I guess we stay put for now,” said Lewis.
“For now.” Descending was out of the question. And climbing on seemed too audacious with a holocaust nipping at their heels.
Live embers sparkled in the air. The gray-brown smoke had poison in it, real poison, the dust of poison ivy and oak. Hugh and Lewis took turns flushing each other’s eyes, and finally decided it was wiser to conserve their water.
They settled in, slapping at the embers as if they were mosquitoes. They taped gauze from the first-aid kit over their mouths and noses to filter the smoke, and draped shirts over their heads as little tents.
It was a miserable day. The brown pall obscured the sun. More animals climbed onto the ledge. The species now included lizards, mice, and a scorched squirrel. They tried to give the squirrel some water, but the thing acted rabid. The fire had driven it insane. When it tried to bite them, Lewis kicked it over the edge, and then anguished about killing a fellow survivor. Birds took refuge on the islands, and tucked their heads down or under their wings.
There was nothing to do. The smoke made reading too painful. The gauze kept them muzzled for the most part. At one point, Lewis did try to start a conversation about what limbo must be like, meaning a day like today. Hugh merely grunted at him.
He looked out at their Ark of dying creatures. “It won’t last forever,” he said. “The fire will run out of fuel.”
“What a sad, ugly way to finish,” said Lewis. “It’s going to be like walking through the last days of Pompeii on our way out.”
Hugh had been waiting for this. “Then why go out through it, Lewis?”
“How else are we going to get down?”
“Why go down, Louie?”
Lewis was appalled. “You mean keep climbing?”
“Leave the ugliness and sadness behind you.” Hugh was talking about the fire and destruction. He was talking about Rachel. He was talking about life. “Why walk through ashes when we can go into the light? The forest is green up there. Turn your back on the ruins. There’s nothing left for us down there.”
Lewis peered at him from under his rag of a head covering. He seemed to be straining, as if Hugh was dissolving in the smoke, that or just now assembling from it. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that, Hugh,” he said.
Hugh put away his expectation. He quit watching for a flicker o
f pluck to twinkle in his friend’s runny eyes. He could have appealed to Lewis with one of their old battle cries, oh you few, you lucky few, dare we roll our trousers. Or bullied him with disappointment or camaraderie. Possibly he could have forced the climb.
But the Great Ape had lost heart. Even if they made it, even if they struck the summit and all went well, the spirit of the thing had changed. It would be like reaching a place with his own shadow, and Hugh didn’t need El Cap for that. He could have stayed home for that. “That’s okay,” Hugh told him.
FIFTEEN
The fire dragged on. The world tightened around them. Hugh couldn’t hear the flames anymore. The gloom thickened and the sun shrank to the size of a piece of buckshot. The insects quit moving, smoked to death. Birds toppled over with their little stick claws balled.
Hugh lay on his side, flipping idly through his book of maps and approach notes. Then he began sculpting the sand into little dunes. With his eyes right next to the ground, the Rub’ could take him away from this place.
People thought deserts were all the same, just big wide-open sandboxes. In fact, they came in all shapes and sizes and substances. There were ice deserts in the Antarctic, and relic deserts in Nebraska, where the grass had locked the shifting sands in place. While hunting for hydrocarbon reservoirs near Yemen, Hugh had come across so-called radar rivers, the remnants of river systems that dated back twenty million years before the Nile and other great rivers were born, buried so deep only radar could find them. Deserts beneath deserts.
The Rub’ al-Khali—the Empty Quarter—held the greatest sand sea on earth. The only one larger that anyone knew existed was on Mars, near the northern polar cap. Besides their immense size, the two planets’ sand seas shared the same kind of dune formation, and even the same shade of red.
“Is she in there?”
Hugh lifted his head. Lewis had crept up on him. He was guessing at Hugh’s tracings in the sand. Annie, he meant. Hugh didn’t answer. The smoke was making him vaguely sick.
