Kirinyaga

by Joe Gores

  “It’s numb now.”

  “Anything broken inside that you know about?”

  “My chest stabs when I breathe. I think it’s ribs. I did two of them at rugger once and it feels the same.” He closed his eyes, opened them. “I’ve had it, haven’t I?”

  Kendrick laid a momentary palm on his shoulder. “I’ll get you up to the ledge.”

  He went up his rope hand over hand. On the ridge Hamlin was hunched in the lee of the buttress. He was shivering. There was a blue line around his mouth and the rim of his nostrils.

  “He’s fifteen feet below the ridgeline,” said Kendrick. “I’m not sure I’m strong enough to get him up alone.”

  The wind moaned. Hamlin raised shock-dulled eyes. “He’s still alive?”

  “He won’t be if we keep fooling around. We’ll have to”

  He stopped there. Hamlin’s mouth was set.

  “I can’t.” His teeth had begun chattering. He was stripped of pretense. “Can’t face it. Can’t pull him up to the ledge, can’t make it down can’t … arm broken.”

  Kendrick had seen men do remarkable things hampered by a broken arm. But he had also seen men like Hamlin before stunned by the sudden terrible mortality that Kirinyaga could thrust upon you. Men who, faced with that realization, shriveled up inside. It was in search of that insight that others climbed.

  He left Hamlin there and returned to Perkins. He braced, took a turn around his left hand, and began hauling. He was aware of Hamlin, watching him like a ferret; the actor’s naked ego had begun peering once again from the rocks into which it had scuttled. The lift was the hardest thing Kendrick had ever done.

  When it was finished, he walked downwind from the crumpled youth and threw up.

  “Lie down next to him, Hamlin. I’ve dragged him back under the face of the buttress where there’s some shelter from the wind.”

  “Where are you going? You can’t leave me here! You can’t”

  “Grow up,” said Kendrick.

  The descent to Two-Tarn Hut wasn’t too bad; the whining press of wind cut visibility with swirling snow, but gave him a fixed direction on which to depend. He gathered up his bedroll and blankets and started back up. He didn’t like to contemplate the next hours. He was wearing down already; and besides the wind which in exposed places threatened to flick him off, his fatigue itself was dangerous. It made him treat tricky bits of rockwork with a numb, casual contempt.

  The light was muddy as he dragged himself up the final yards to the narrow ridge. Anger stirred him.

  “Dammit, Hamlin, I told you to lie down next to him.”

  “I couldn’t move.”

  “Move now or I’ll kick your arm!”

  Hamlin moved, crabwise, his back against the rock, his right arm hanging limply at his side. They got two of the blankets around Perkins and rolled him into the sleeping bag. A pulse of sorts, still breathing, but no outcry when they handled him. Just as well, Kendrick thought. At the very best he was going to lose his leg.

  Hamlin snatched at the two remaining blankets.

  “I’ll need more than this, Kendrick! I’ll freeze.”

  “You’ll be all right. Keep moving around, work your fingers and toes. And make sure Perkins stays covered.”

  Kendrick entered a curious limbo of exhaustion where he moved solely by his superb mountaineer’s sense. He had a flashlight, but here on the peaks it merely reflected back from swirling snow. During the rockwork he kept his mind awake with speculations of times and distances. Twenty-five miles to his VW down at the 9000-foot ,level, say. Easier going downhill, of course, but in the dark, in the snow and, below that, rain …

  He fell the first time going down the steep scree north of Shipton’s Peak, twisting instinctively and landing on a shoulder rather than on his face in the loose, sliding volcanic debris. By the time he reached the stream at the head of Teleki Valley he had fallen twice more. It was utterly black, pouring icy rain; he’d left his poncho at Two-Tarn Hut. At old ruined Klarwill’s Hut he jettisoned ice axe, crampons, piton hammer, and ropes. He went on down the long hollow of moorland dotted with giant lobelia and euphorbia.

  Below this was the vertical bog, several miles of coarse matted tussocks with water between. He lost track of his falls there. Only the vague starlight following the rain kept him floundering, splashing, cursing his way down.

  Ahead, the dark mass of the tree line. He fell on it as on a banquet. Stunted, gnarled nidorellas bearded with moss. The Naru Moru forest track plunged down into the rainforest’s impenetrable darkness. Sodden branches slapped at his face, clawed at his eyes.

  He used his flashlight here, made plenty of noise so he wouldn’t surprise an elephant or leopard on the trail. Once the light limned great streaming piles of fresh buffalo dung.

  At the Meteorological Clearing at 10,000 feet, he found Hamlin had left the keys in the Land Rover. That would cut 45 minutes and three miles afoot from his descent. He rested his forehead against the steering wheel as the four-wheel vehicle grumbled itself awake.

  Midnight. Another day beginning. Good Lord, he’d never been so tired. And he still had to get back up again.

  He sent the Land Rover careening down the narrow red murram track, almost sideswiped his VW, and as soon as he cleared the forest area swung off the route toward a distant farmhouse owned by a middle-aged Scots family originally from the Republic.

  His horn brought them awake so he could shamble through the welcome triangle of yellow lamplight, hollow-eyed and gaunt and caked with mud.

  “Accident up on Batian.”

  “Full mountain rescue drill?” The farmer was already at the phone; his wife was heating tea water and cutting bread.

  Kendrick nodded and drank scalding tea. All the farmers on Kirinyaga’s approaches knew about accidents on the mountain.

  The call would go through the Nairobi police, who would relay by shortwave. He set aside the mug regretfully. The farmer was full of objections.

  “Man, you’ll be in no condition to make it back up.”

  “And they’ll be in no condition to wait up there alone.”

  He remembered little of the climb after he had smashed and hulled the Land Rover two miles uphill beyond the Meteorological Clearing before bogging down entirely. Watery dawn slashed through renewed rain to greet him at the tree line. The bog should have finished him; then, fording the rapid rain-swollen Naru Moru by Teleki Hut, he knew he was all through.

  He kept on.

  At Klarwill’s he collapsed on what was left of the floor. He cried. He collected his climbing gear and went on.

  The sun appeared to taunt him while he was on a lateral moraine from the track to the stream below the Lewis Glacier. He made the stiff scramble to Two-Tarn Hut and passed it without pausing. The rest of the climb was made by instinct and will power only. His body merely continued to respond in familiar physical ways to familiar stimuli. Moving was as involuntary as breathing.

  He got there too late. Waiting for the rescue party, he knew he’d driven his body beyond the normal limits of endurance because he had feared from the beginning that he would be too late.

  The press conference was held two afternoons later in the lounge of Nyeri’s Outspan Hotel. Burke Hamlin had refused hospitalization beyond having his arm set and being treated for exposure. He lounged on one of the superbly comfortable old couches, hemmed in by reporters, tourists, onlookers, flacks, studio people.

  Cameras and mikes. His cast already scrawled with bawdy sentiments, a large whiskey at his elbow. As he’d said in an earlier context, damned good theater.

  “Does the broken arm hamper you much, Mr. Hamlin?”

  “I tend to spill more drinks.”

  “The mountain sequences were finished. What were you looking for up on Kirinyaga?”

  “Read The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

  “That isn’t really an answer, is it, Mr. Hamlin?”

  “It is for me.”

  “What can you tell us of the tragi
c death of Mr. Perkins?”

  Stern sorrow molded the craggy features. The drink was set aside unspilled. Kendrick, in a doorway well back from the crowd, thought it was an excellent performance.

  “What can one say when his best is not good enough? He died of cold and exposure and shock before the rescuers arrived.”

  It broke up. Kendrick wandered tree-shaded paths, his nostrils full of the rich accents of tropical blooms. Warm air caressed his skin. He had slept the clock around. The Outspan was an old Colonial hotel, airy, spacious, quiet, civilized.

  Cold and exposure and shock.

  He looked between the branches of a scarlet-flowered Nandi flame tree toward Kirinyaga, 40 miles away, with her head buried in clouds of her own making. Here, deep blue sky filled with stately gray-hulled clipper ships which would close ranks and fire salvos of rain at four o’clock.

  Cold and exposure and shock. Neat and cosmetic, antiseptic as a hospital bed.

  Reality was a bit more gross. Perkins was frozen solid. Lips pulled back from the canines in a perpetual trapped hyeng snarl.

  Fingers clawed into blunted parodies of a leopard’s talons.

  Eyeballs staring through their contact lenses of ice.

  And Kendrick couldn’t really condemn Hamlin for it. Blind panic. How many cracked in battle under similar stress, and while surrounded by companions and trained to it besides? Alone, on a mountain ridge with Kirinyaga slavering above you Couldn’t condemn, but couldn’t let it happen again so someone else would die. He knocked on the actor’s door just before four o’clock, under a clouded sky with pre-rain wind dancing dust devils in the parking lot.

  “It’s open.”

  Hamlin was alone, sitting in a chair with his bare feet crossed on the foot of the bed. He had a drink in his left hand.

  “Pulling out at first light,” said Kendrick.

  “And you came to say goodbye? How touching.” The magnificent leonine head followed Kendrick across the room as if to camera cues. He set his bare feet on the rug. “Did I forget to thank you for saving my life?”

  “And for not saving Perkins’?”

  “Meaning what, precisely?” asked Hamlin carefully.

  Kendrick relaxed against the wall. The assurance he’d sought was in the raw edges of Hamlin’s voice, in the whiteness of his fingers around the glass. Kendrick shook his head chidingly.

  “It won’t do, Hamlin. The ends of the safety rope. The broken arm. The zipped-up sleeping bag.”

  Hamlin stood up. He swayed slightly, not from drink. His face was pale, something akin to terror was in his eyes.

  “I’m not going to listen to this, Kendrick. My arm”

  “was broken by yourself, deliberately, when you saw me coming up the mountain the next morning. You were clinging to that rock face with both hands the first time I saw you. Both hands.

  I’ll grant it takes courage of a sort to jam your forearm between a couple of rocks” He made a snapping motion with his hands.

  “It’s the image that’s all important, isn’t it? The image is everything.”

  “Don’t think I’ll admit”

  “And the safety rope. Brand-new Perlon, a thirty percent stretch factor to absorb shock you could have bounced Perkins up and down on it like a yoyo and it wouldn’t have broken.”

  “It broke.” Sweat stood on Hamlin’s face; his eyes were like knobs of bone in spoiled meat. They found the closed bathroom door, returned to Kendrick. “Broke. Broke. You weren’t there, you couldn’t know. It broke, I tell you.”

  “Two feet off your belt where it would have no chance to be rubbed through? It was cut. Perkins started sliding, screaming, you panicked and cut him loose.”

  “Who would believe”

  Kendrick laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh. Poor bloody Perkins. Poor bloody Hamlin, for all that.

  “Nobody has to. I just wanted you aware that I know. So if you ever get your nerve back and are ever tempted again”

  Hamlin sat down heavily. He stared straight ahead.

  “The cold,” he said in a strangled voice. “The altitude.” He shuddered abruptly. “Do you think I ever again”

  “Good.” Kendrick’s face hardened. “That leaves Perkins. Frozen solid in his sleeping bag and his blankets.”

  “You found him yourself.”

  “Only if he’d been out of the sleeping bag. Out of the blankets.

  Even in delirium he couldn’t have unzipped that bag. But you could. You still had both arms then, you could take away the blankets and bag for yourself, put them back when you saw me on my way. You were afraid of freezing.”

  “He was finished. Done for.” Hamlin was panting, sweating, hunched in his chair like a man who’d been fed arsenic. “Just a vegetable. Oh, it’s easy for you! You’re never tired. Never frightened. I was afraid to die. Afraid. Can you understand that?

  Can you?”

  The bathroom door opened and Morna came out. Must have gone in there when Kendrick had knocked and stayed there quietly, listening. No wonder Hamlin had tried to keep him from talking about it. Morna, who wanted a strong man, a self-sufficient man; Morna, who had dumped Kendrick because he hadn’t measured up. Now Hamlin had been stripped, exposed to her scorn. “

  “No, he can’t understand that, Burke,” she said in a low deadly voice. “He’s never needed anyone or anything in his life.” She met Kendrick’s gaze, a strange look on her lovely face. “Is it true? The things you’ve accused him of?”

  Kendrick shrugged. “I wasn’t accusing. Just telling him what I know. It doesn’t go any further.”

  “All right, you’ve told him. Now get out and leave us alone.”

  She was on her knees beside the sobbing actor, her arms around his massive shoulders, cooing soft words to him. She looked at Kendrick past the magnificent shaggy head, her eyes ablaze.

  “He needs me!” she cried triumphantly.

  Kendrick felt as if he had narrowly missed being struck by a train. He also felt nauseated. He said, “Yes. He needs you. God help him.”

  He left the room. The first broad drops of rain were making dime-sized splotches on the tarmac, making it smell of wet tar.

  Kendrick looked instinctively to the east. Just gray cloud massed there now, all the way to the horizon. But somewhere behind it He shuddered. Morna had been wrong, of course, when she’d said he had never needed anybody or anything. He stared at the clouds, as if able to see through them to Kirinyaga, waiting there with her fangs bared and gloaming.

  Waiting. For Kendrick.