“All the various supplies are to be apportioned throughout: no particular bundle shall consist of all of any singular good for fear of losing every one of that necessary item,” says Adams. “This being a lesson learned on the ’56 expedition, in which a precious load holding all the crampons slipped off a narrow path and tumbled like a dumb animal off and over the cliff, then, to explode thousands of feet below. We were thus put into the position of having to cut steps the old-fashioned way.”
Taking heed, all go on with the repacking, sorting through piles of wool and mounds of down, struggling to imagine in the sticky heat of Delhi how they will soon be in need of any such wintry garb. Various headlamps and crampons are snugged into bins with water bottles and helmets and goggles, with booties and socks, with iodine pellets and toilet paper, with tampons and mittens. Hats, boots, axes and hammers, rain gear and snow gear are packed among the seam sealant, the batteries, the toothpaste, between layers of underwear and middlewear and outerwear: silk and woolen and fleece. Tent poles and rainflies, oxygen canisters and masks, sleeping bags, bivvy sacks, runners and webbing all get bundled together. They weigh and label and stack completed loads: hundreds of cartons and barrels and duffels the porters will tumpline to Base Camp for this newfangled alpine odyssey.
Devin and Wilder take on the job of untangling and recoiling the six-hundred-foot spools of rope that have split apart during shipment. They face unruly piles, and hours of tedium and slaving: tugging and unknotting, threading, cutting, re-coiling, all the while fighting off snarls of flies as they swab the pour of sweat from their heads. The alpinists among the group argue for less rope; the expedition types want extra for fixed lines. Reddy and Troy add more rope than apportioned to the sixty-six-pound loads; Devin and Wilder only to steal coils back out again: the outcome of this clandestine action to reveal itself seriously once they are up on the mountain. “We’ve got at least ten thousand feet here,” Devin says. “Way too much.” He watches Wilder skillfully handling another three-hundred-foot length of nylon stranding, looping it elbow to shoulder, bending the coiled rope into a horseshoe shape, wrapping both loose ends of it about the middle before he squares a knot and cinches it. He tosses the bulk into a duffel.
Devin tips his head in the direction of Reddy. “Some serious pinnacles my old man’s compiling,” he says.
Doctor Reddy sits cross-legged on the ground surrounded by bottles of analgesics, antibiotics, antidiarrheals, packets of lozenges, rolls of tape, wads of moleskin, bandages, steristrips, tubes of sunscreen and lip balm and superglue. To his right: a scatter of needles and syringes, stethoscope, scalpel, airway, staple kit, tweezers, scissors, safety pins, gloves. On his left: sprays of inhalers and repellents, vials of tinctures, jars of ointments and creams. There are drops for nose, drops for eyes, drops for ears, pills for altitude, pills for malaria, pills for nausea and sleep.
The Sarasvati Party goes on with the packing in the sweltering day. There are few complaints, this being more contest than virtue among the group. Dusty little children make their way around the dung wall and loiter within the courtyard, feet bare, scratching themselves or pulling at their ears, quietly staring at the strange pale people with their curious ways and wealth of belongings. Adams has made everyone in the group agree they will not hand out offerings to beggars of any kind, male or female, baby or elderly, normal or deformed. No candies, no pencils, no toothbrushes, no money. Many of the children flirt and plead. Wilder raises his voice and claps his hands, chasing them away like flies. One grimy little boy ignores him and instead comes closer to Sara. He calls her by name.
“How do you know me?” she says.
The boy takes a finger out of his nose, showing big white teeth when he smiles. He hides behind a taller boy. The taller one offers forth the newspaper rolled up in his hand. “You are the blessed goddess Sarasvati,” he says. “You have come to take the others with you up to your mountain.”
Devin takes the newspaper and reads from a page of The Times of India. “Headline,” he says.
A RARE VISIT FROM SARASVATI. An American expedition team has recently received government permission to climb the blessed mountain Sarasvati, called by some Mysterium. Leading the climb will be Mr. Virgil S. Adams, one of the first to reach the summit twenty-five years ago this year. Most interestingly, Miss Sarasvati Troy, a young lady named for the sacred mountain, will be part of the climbing team, as will her father, the legendary Stuart M. Troy.
Below the headline is a photograph of the group taken before they left the States, huddled together, the notches and peaks of shoulders and heads forming a serried ridge among them. There is Sara front row center, the sun a glory of light in her hair. “Check it out, Sara,” Devin says. “You’re a celebrity.”
She fingers her hair back over the crown of her head, smiles her smile.
Troy overhears the talk, shakes his head. “Celebrities,” he says.
* * *
VIDA LEAVES the lading area and disappears into the guesthouse, giving in to the stifling weather and a rush of light-headedness. She cannot dispatch or parcel, label or stack another carton or barrel. She has to put her feet up, close her eyes. She needs relief from the madness of slapping at mean biting flies, relief from the frenzy and noise and odors of the surrounding streets. She goes to her room and lies down on her back on the bed. The ceiling fan stirs above, creaking a worn-out sound. She is weighted, dispirited. She should be elated, she thinks, like Sara, the ever-beaming Sara, even after two days of work and in this miserable heat. Vida tells herself that this trip is a chance that happens only once in a lifetime. So pick yourself up, she thinks. Ponder the opposite. Remember why you said yes to this expedition. You are here to bring life back into your life. She looks at the dusty Shiva seated cross-legged in its dusty niche. Shiva with a look of all-knowing.
Vida closes her eyes, reminds herself that she came here to find her way with Wilder again. Being with him, doing what he most loves to do. To begin again, the two of them. To make it new, as he likes to say. Yes, to make it new. If it might be possible. She rolls onto her side, face toward the cracks and the stains of the rough stucco wall. Why would it not be possible?
She drifts off into the start of a dream, is jerked back fast with a feeling of falling.
She opens her eyes, hearing Reddy outside calling for help with a carry. She stares at the cracks in the wall. Reddy, a decision in her life that had been reckless. She had put herself in jeopardy. She had risked her marriage for a summer of pleasure and a confusing happiness. She had seen herself at the threshold of her life about to change when she said yes to Reddy that day. Her life, with all the predictability and safety built into it, with days thoughtfully and carefully put into place: yes, she had been reckless with it. Impulsive. Unreasonable. But what affair of passion is reasonable? And how does one ever truly explain?
She turns to the deity in the shadowed alcove of the wall.
Shiva with eyes of knowing.
Reddy was a story that had never had a proper ending.
Was it a story still in the telling?
Vida not knowing.
* * *
THEY ARE a bedraggled-looking brigade by the end of the third day; sunburned, dirt-caked, sticky with sweat, welted with fly bites, backs and arms and shoulders aching. They line up for tepid showers, soaping grime and dust off with lips tightly sealed to the spray, rinsing mouths with swigs of bottled water, brushing soot and dead insects from their hair. They meet in the common room for dinner, freshly dressed and instantly perspiring, queuing up buffet-style to pile food onto plates. There are platters of curried vegetables and meats, a heap of wilted bread, bowls of soupy dal, spicy rice, unknown pickled things, swarms of flies alighting over all of it and them. The procession moves half-heartedly along.
“Your head?” Vida says, her one eye endearingly awry.
“I forget to stoop when passing through the doorway of my room,” Reddy says, “and like an idiot I hit the beam of the lintel.”
For the first time since they were lovers, they offer each other a smile.
They all find places at the table. Troy and Adams take seats at each end. Everyone is quiet in the heat, tired and quiet, sweating quietly. They pick at their food, scoot plates away, ask for more bottled drinks.
Adams clears his throat and pushes his plate aside. “Here,” he says, “the photographs I’ve promised of the mountain.” He places the leather-bound album out in front of him and people get up from their chairs and move around to his end of the table as he opens the pages and begins to explain. “Beginning with the Sage’s Gorge,” Adams says, “one of the finest specimens of powerful water erosion I’ve ever encountered. This is the abominable moat protecting Mysterium from penetration.” He taps a finger to a photograph that shows sheer perpendicular walls ravined thousands of feet high. He turns the page, tilts the album forward to display a picture of steep precipices, dark notches, toothlike ridges, lips of thick ice. “This section here, Hilman and I called Hades,” Adams says. He leafs to the next photograph, directing attention to the midsection of the mountain. “And here at this site we were under constant artillery fire as we attempted to pass, with great masses of the glacier breaking free from the icy terrace and thundering down to the valley and any poor soul, such as one of us, below.”
“Makes one cringe a bit, doesn’t it?” Mrs. Adams says.
“The mountain is angel as well as demon, I assure you,” Adams says. “Look here,” he says. He flips to the last pages of the album that holds old newspaper clippings; a yellowed photo showing dogs and pigs and cows sprawled dead across the claggy ground, vultures parked on the carcass of a water buffalo, fowl toppled into heaps in the mud. The picture next to it revealing bodies of people shrouded under rugs, their bloated feet exposed. Sara bends closer to read of the havoc: houses swept away, crops washed out, mothers and babies and old people drowned, some people not found at all.
“So much death on my birthday,” she says.
“Yes, it was a most severe monsoon that hit the surrounding villages on the very day we reached Mysterium’s summit,” Adams says. “I’m sure most of you have by now been told or read of the deadly calamity. Heavy rainfall caused the river to overflow, whereby the waters destroyed everything that lay in the surrounding area. We had angered the goddess, so the Indian newspapers said. Look here. It is written right here.” He puts a finger to a place on the page. “‘Her sanctuary violated, the goddess had thus been provoked to avenge.’” Adams looks up to the others, their heads bowed toward the page. “And this be in modern times,” he says.
“Time to make amends,” Sara says. “And balance the Karma.”
“If I were to believe in things of that sort. I am, however, not a superstitious man,” Adams says. At this he claps the book shut.
People return to their seats. Hillary Adams calls for more tea, and then she passes around added travel permits along with ballpoint pens and a tin of biscuits. After the paperwork is completed, Virgil Adams stands and calls the group to order. All look up to him. He is a solid man, thick shouldered and broad of chest, dense, sturdy, durable. He has a mass of snowy white hair, a nose that is sharp and buttress-like. His flesh is coarsened by weather, lichen dry, speckled over with rust-colored orbicules deposited by sun and time.
“We have a few matters yet to discuss before the truck arrives this evening and the lading and stacking begin,” he says. “First, Doctor Reddy will speak a bit on the topic of physical ailments about which we must all be quite conscious. I shall afterwards go over a few logistics of the road trip we have ahead of us for the next, well, who knows how many days it may take, time depending, of course, on travel conditions.” Adams takes his seat, folds his speckled hands together in front of him on the table and nods at Reddy.
“Let me begin with infection and prevention,” Reddy says. The doctor moves into a mode of practiced lecturing, doing his best to ignore the grunts and the yawns, venturing immediately upon a variety of maladies and complaints, after which he pauses, clears his throat, asks for any questions before going on. His audience swats at flies and remains silent, their attention directed to the open doorway, where a derelict in rags has stopped to peer at them. The raggedy bystander points at Doctor Reddy, says something in garbled Hindi, and begins laughing maniacally. Reddy looks about the room as if for an answer, until a woman enters and slaps the lunatic with a dirty cloth to shoo him away. The man’s crazed laughter fades out to the street, out into the din and the throng.
“Going on,” Reddy says. He talks of the symptoms of altitude sickness, cerebral and pulmonary edema. He speaks of frostbite, dysentery, hypothermia, snow blindness, bites and stings, trauma of organ and bone, tendon and flesh. He puts forth statistics, risks, emergencies, illness that might turn critical, sickness that may become grave. He talks impending death. He tells of treatment, ways to improvise, means of carrying on. He offers advice. Once again he presses for questions. A woman comes in from the kitchen and goes to Doctor Reddy, asking something in Hindi. “Why keep coming to me?” Reddy says. “I speak no Hindi.”
“They think you’re still one of them, Father Doctor,” Devin says.
Sara says something in the woman’s tongue. She speaks softly to her, in clear and simple phrases, aware of the warm light shining down on her head from the naked bulb above.
“Whatever few personal things you want to leave here, please pack them into a duffel with your name and a lock on it, as I intend to do with this heavy leather album, among other things. We shall all collect our belongings here on our return,” Adams says, “and thereby have clean clothes and be presentable on our travels home.”
People sip their tea, watch women in saris and nose rings clearing dishes away. Bent old men and mangy dogs slink by outside. Across the street, a tamed monkey begs coins and picks lice from the head of a man squat on the ground beside him. A child cries from a back room within the guesthouse somewhere. Hillary collects the paperwork and ballpoint pens. Wilder fumbles with the stone in his pocket. Devin yawns. Sara feels the encouragement of her mother to get people moving, and so breaks the silence and gets up from the table, smiling, always smiling. This is, after all, her party.
* * *
THE TRANSPORT truck is a lime-colored military jalopy, an old haulage vehicle painted bright with tropical flowers and a bold sign to HONK PLEASE! blazoned on the tailgate. The driver climbs out of the cab front to greet the expedition team; palms pressed together, he gives a modest tip of the head. He is a big man with a soft paunch, nutmeg-colored skin, hair glossy and stiff as crow wings, appearing to be somewhere around either the far or near side of middle age. He wears a polo shirt imprinted with the name of an Ivy League university, drawstring pajama trousers, plastic sandals, a ring on his pinkie set with a large ruby-colored stone. His lips and teeth are darkened vermilion from the stain of the betel leaf.
A woman thumbs a tilak on each of the passengers’ foreheads, and offers words of favor before the journey begins. After her blessing they pile into the haulage vehicle, an assembly of readied troops moving faithfully to duty and call. Virgil and Hillary Adams sit up front with the driver, while the others move into the back of the truck, Devin Reddy climbing up onto a stack of crates, Doctor Reddy, Professor Troy and Sara, Wilder and Vida fitting themselves in with the rest of the tonnage of equipage, tucked and folded among containers and duffels that will serve as seating for the next several nights and days.
The truck carooms loudly at the start-up, pouring a thick choke of black smoke into the night. It lumbers out of the lot and onto the potholed road, tottering the riders through the littered streets of the amber-lit city, a hazy shard of moon in the wane above. The travelers pass crumbling hovels, a shantytown of shacks and tents and gutters heaped with sewage and decay. They pass raggedy people spread onto pieces of cardboard or sheets of newspapers, some curled onto plain hard clay or harder pavement; people asleep among the rags and the muck, among the shards of bones and
rotted marigolds, the garbage and stench. Rats scamper past innocent dreamers, pigs nibble at the dung, as the riders, guileless too of their visions, list and are jostled along. A pale band of light smokes up from a ragged horizon.
Sara Troy, cross-legged and composed upon a carton marked FRAGILE, closes her eyes and tips her head back against a basket, a bandanna loosely draped about her throat. Her fellow travelers are here because of her, this drowsy towheaded girl; she now the guardian of their destinies, just as mother and father are their daughter’s christeners and keepers and will decree destiny to her, and so fate to all: a version and conversion of each into other. How might their story be told?
Mysterium Page 6
