Each ponders their thoughts, swells of clouds thinning out as they lean into the steep, bootsteps metered to galloping hearts and ballooning lungs. They climb into the meager air of higher country, shed ponchos, drink water, ease up, making guesses at weather and distance, surmising time. The porters and shepherds have stayed at least an hour ahead of the rest of the convoy, the Sherpas having paced themselves between the sahibs; Pasang and Mingma alternating the lead, Karma bringing the rear up, as Hillary Adams keeps post just ahead of him on the trail. She has sauntered along thinking about Thoreau and the word saunter, as in à la Sainte Terre. Then holy-landers we are, she thinks, Saint Terrers, saunterers all. They have sauntered off from the ordinary. They have walked away from the mundane. They have left engines and villages behind, have left life as they know it behind; lives of habit and duty, sales and debt, lives of the common, the hopeless, the mean. They step into form, one behind the other, like iron filings drawn into a single line, their aim being the same, that magnet which draws them upward, though their motives be various and distinct.
Midafternoon they arrive to an alpine meadow in a tapering rain. Here they find the porters have cast their loads off, the men now reposed among clumps of heather. The bhakrawallas have nudged their goats to a swale of rich grass on a higher shelf of tundra, where they are crouched on their haunches about a fire drinking their steaming brews, the goats tugging and snapping at the green. The sahibs find a place to settle on the perimeter of the meadow near a small glen of crooked trees. The Sherpas wander about collecting branches and twigs for a fire, pots of water for the tea. Sahibs shuck backpacks and out come binoculars and candy bars, cameras and hats, sheets of plastic to flop on. Big woolly rodents, stirred out of their middens, whistle their feral calls. The Sherpas serve the tea and sit among the sahibs and all take in the vast esplanade of steppe-land they are settled on. Slow-moving plates of the earth that have heaped and buckled. A spectacle of constant flux stirred by the globe’s inferno of core heat. Karma, the sirdar Sherpa, points to the hillside across the valley, to a great scar in the landscape left behind by a massive landslide.
“A tremendous display of the unceasing stirring of nature,” Professor Troy says. “The blind, the dumb, the immutable striving in all things.”
“Meaning?” Wilder says.
“Meaning what you see before you is the will of all phenomena. As in that which draws the stone to the earth or propels the river to the sea. The same striving that motivates night to overtake the day,” Troy says. “Or impels human beings to take risks, you might say.”
Sara rolls her neck to relieve the ache of the pack. Devin moves closer, puts his hands on her shoulders. He squeezes and kneads.
“Please,” Reddy says. “To show some restraint among company.”
Sara tips her head back against Devin’s chest. Hillary snaps their photograph. Adams and Karma scan the landscape with binoculars. Reddy sighs and closes his eyes to nap, making use of his backpack as headrest. Sherpa Pasang bellows the fire with his breath to yaw the flame along. Sherpa Mingma prepares the chapatis, patting balls of dough thin and flat between his hands, making the sounds of a happy child clapping. The porters pinch tobacco and roll their smokes, marks from the tumplines furrowed deep into their foreheads, their feet thick with callus and stubbed as clubs, laughing and joking among one another. Despite their hardships, the porters are the most cheerful bunch on the trip, though Sara seems the most pleased. “Alas, this is her party,” Adams says, watching her gad about picking starflowers with that smile and those rosy-pomed cheeks. Troy scribbles out another paragraph in his notebook. Wilder stifles a cough that has nagged him throughout the day. Again, Reddy suggests lozenges from the medical kit, but Wilder waves away the offer.
One of the fat marmots delivers another ear-piercing whistle, this followed by a loud shrieking that sends the animals diving back into their holes. People turn to see Vida scrambling from out of the stunted trees, belt dangling from the loops of her khakis, her face drained of color. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she says. “Leeches!” She holds out her blood-covered hands. There are looks of sympathy and disgust from the others. “Revolting beasts,” Adams says, shaking his head. Wilder reminds Vida that he warned her. Reddy assures her there can be no harm. He takes a kerchief out of his pocket and begins to swab her fingers clean. “Two I pulled off my legs. One on my backside,” she says. She shivers and does a little twitchy jig. Devin says, “Wonder what they feed on when people aren’t around?” “Excellent question,” says Hillary. The Sherpas, crouched about the cooksite, hold their caps in the smoke of the fire before quickly clapping them back onto their heads; who knows what kind of odd custom this might be? They watch as each of the sahibs quietly moves off into the trees to inspect himself or herself privately.
After lunch they kill the fire and pack up and caravan out of the meadow. The trail soon begins to zigzag up, making for a long grind to a high spur of earth that has everyone pouring sweat again and laboring for breath. Once to the top of the ridge they pause to take deep sucks of the paltry air, hearts booming in their ears. Already the herders and porters are moved far ahead and out of sight. It is windy and cold up here amid these rampages of glaciers, but they wait, wishing enough for a glimpse of Mysterium to withstand a bit of misery. They shed packs, retrieve water bottles. But for the gulping of water and the gurgling of guts, there is undivided silence.
A vision from out of the bands of evanescent light: an enormous bird of some kind, a dark thing riding a vector unseen, flapping its fantastic wings and now approaching so quickly and close they can see the bearded under-beak and the outspread barbs of its talons. The predator lets out a shrill cry and swoops down on its target, sending everyone ducking for cover. The thing tilts wildly, veers, and goes soaring skyward, its wingbeats a helicoptering whoop, whoop, whoop above their heads.
“God almighty,” Troy says.
“Lamb hawk,” says Karma.
“It looked me right in the eyes,” Sara says.
They watch the huge bird pilot the valley and disappear into cloud.
“Here this bird common,” Karma says. “It feed on marrow. Bird fly with catch of meat bone.” Karma grips his hands tightly, holds his fists out. “Then it let bone drop from sky to break on rock.” He splays his hands like bird digits. “Now come bird down to feed.”
A hard slap of cold air chases them off the ridge. The cadre heads down the declivity, out of the wind and into the valley, over a pellicle of loess and till. Here and there they pass an erratic, those lonely boulders left behind by glacier melt and retreat, weatherworn and alien, some big as houses, all carried great distances; stone foreigners sprung from another time and land. The party follows the path of the porters and herders, arriving to a tarn clear as a mirror where they stop to pause at water’s edge. Sara gazes into the pooled looking glass, rafts of clouds and rays of light surrounding her shimmering image. She draws closer to her reflection, tucks loose strands of hair back into her hat. Then the wind picks up to abolish the picture, erasing her eyes, her face, the sky, erasing everything.
They move on through the rugged splendor of the montane, cool wind and cool silence all about. At the end of the vale, at the end of a long day, they are forced to a halt at the verge of a precipice. Ahead of them is a sight wholly strange: a great split in the landscape, the earth appearing clawed apart by something monstrous. The rocky maw opens to tier upon tier of black slabs dropping vertically away, grotesque and exaggerated mineral shapes that can hardly be believed. A gray vapor seeps up among the crags.
“Altogether more frightening from a distance,” Adams says.
“As is death,” says Troy.
The sahibs step away from the brink. They look at Adams.
“I assure you,” he says.
“I heard the route is infested with devils,” Devin says.
“Don’t talk that talk around the porters,” says Reddy.
“Believe me,” Adams says, “they know thei
r demons better than we.”
The herders and porters have, without pause, moved on in an opposite direction with their flocks and their loads. The sahibs turn from the precipice and follow, heading out toward a flat stretch of alpine steppe. They come to a freshet of water, and here the entire party falls out, dropping backpacks and cargo to make camp for the night. The shadowy embrace of the Gorge they will face in the morning. Professor Troy reminds his companions, as he reminds himself, “To worry is to suffer twice.”
* * *
THE SAHIBS stake their tents within a shield of wind-bent trees, the Sherpas pitching theirs along the streambank, while the porters and herders shelter among themselves a fair distance away. There is category everywhere here, a bracketing of sorts. Even the goats have their place.
Sherpas Pasang and Mingma—whom the sahibs still have trouble telling apart, so similar in face and manner and dress are they—peel root vegetables, pat chapatis, tend to a pot of boiling rice. The sahibs recline about a crackling fire, watching the day fade away. There is a faint radiant glow in the air, a hint of the blazing light of the universe on the horizon, the hot, dense remnant of energy that has sparked existence.
Wilder stares into the fire, sizzling djinns of red-hot cinders crazing up into the night. He thinks of his brother, their last climb. The Valley of the Pitchforks, Lucas had called their campsite on the Stone Sentinel climb. “The place looks like a basin of devil’s tools,” he had said. Wilder watches tongues of flames flaring out every which way, his brother’s words returning. Night was coming on fast. There was a deep blue atmospheric light in the sky, as there is tonight, and Wilder knew it to be the same blue fire that flamed within him, flamed within him and his twin brother. The earth had smelled of raw and pure elements, of stone and ash, of a cooling luminescence. Wilder smells the smell now in his remembering. Of course he remembers. He remembers all of it.
Lucas, why’d you goddammit take off your boots?
Karma, the sirdar Sherpa, plonks more wood onto the glowing coals. The fire crackles and blazes. Wilder stares into the outburst of flames. Sees the two-man dome he and his brother had pitched. That old thing, set on a bed of ancient craton, faced to open to sunrise. After they had put their tent up, they had to sit and catch their breath, so easily out of breath that first night they were. They panted like old smokers and watched an inferno of clouds dimming out in the twilighting sky. What a sight it was. Who could forget? Their hearts bounded at twice their usual paces. They complained about headaches, drank from their water jugs, praised the alpenglow. Lucas started a fire with one of the army-issue heat tabs he had brought back from training camp in Alaska. Wilder fixed what they liked to call horse ovaries, their jocular take on the word hors d’oeuvres. They laughed their breathless laughs. Wilder smiles. He lets out breath. Hears the hum of voices of the others around the fire. He checks his wristwatch, takes a swallow of tea, regards Karma prodding the fire to life.
Wilder and his brother had sat cross-legged, warmed by the fire, watching the simmer of water in the pot, just as Wilder watches the fire before him now. They talked easily, agreed on the why for being all the way out here, though in clumsy phrases that would make no sense to anyone but each other. Above all, they agreed on the pleasure of being far from anything reminding them of everyday chore or obligation. They were alone together, just the two of them, as in a long day of boyhood romp and sport where they could lose track of place and any time given by watch or by clock. He and Lucas understood life in these wild beyonds as something akin to metaphysical parents—so they had tried their best to explain—in that the span of days, with its living creatures and ecosystems, its flora and fauna, its order and flux and its lots and fates—knowing it was all this they were sheltered by, havened by the innate goodness of all these things. Out in the middle of nowhere they could be kids again, feeling cared for without effort, is what they had been trying to say—with some greater thing altogether to father and mother them, and the weeks ahead like another long day of play. The brothers had felt alone together and safe.
Wilder sits with arms rested on raised knees, within the background noise of small talk, the knock of tin spoons against pots. Pyretic sparks arc up and burn out into darkness. He sees Vida looking at him now through the hot glints of the fire. She had been jealous of Lucas, of the closeness between them, the intimacy of twins. She could never, will never, understand it.
* * *
“A GOOD sign,” Karma says. He raises a thumb skyward. “Tomorrow we have fine day.” He is wearing little yellow squares of adhesive cloth outside the corner of each eye. He will adorn his temples in this peculiar way the remainder of the trip, and no one will ask him why, whether out of politeness or superstition.
Sherpas Pasang and Mingma pass around plates of steaming food and pancaked bread to the group, and all sit about staring into the blaze as they supper, their eyes glowing like coals, the night bending in the heat. How wondrously simple and primitive their lives have become. After the meal is finished they drink more tea and contemplate the sky, putting planets into order and story. There is a hint of Mysterium rising and scrimmed in the darkness. Or maybe this vision is just a wish in each seeker.
A long day. Stars to watch, but no stories to tell. No one brings up the task of the Gorge they will have to confront in the morning. No one wishes to worry twice. The decision has been made; the choice is forward and up. In ones and twos they get to their feet, a few to help the Sherpas pick up plates and utensils, the others sooner seeking the warmth of downy beds and the arms of Morpheus.
Occupying one of the tents are Virgil and Hillary Adams, Vida and Wilder Carson, the couples to sleep head to head, feet to feet, accordingly. “The married-people tent,” Karma says, pressing the yellow stickers into place at the sides of his eyes. Assigned to the second tent are Doctor Reddy and son Devin, Professor Troy and daughter Sara. “The begetters and the begotten tent,” Adams says.
“I never realized the party’s beautiful symmetry until now,” his wife says. “And I bet Devin and Sara are pleased to be sleeping side by side.” She yawns, says, “Anyway, it’s time.” Hillary watches as Pasang fills a plastic drinking bottle with hot water, and she takes it and thanks him and bids her goodnight. She feels the gnaw of the day in her body, in the pockets and joints of hip bones and knees from the up and down of the steep, an ache in the folds of her shoulders from the weight of the knapsack. She climbs into the tent and shucks her down booties and slides into the warm keep of her sleeping bag. She settles the hot water bottle in the hollow of her low back for a while, and then she maneuvers it into the depths of the bag and welcomes it about her feet. As the others enter the tent she is already fallen into the depths of sleep. Soon enough, all follow her into slumber. The night pulses on.
Wilder’s eyes snap open in the dark. He wakes up twisted about in his sleeping bag, choked in windings of clothing, drenched with sweat, his heart pounding like a running animal’s. He unzips the mummy bag, works to steady his breath. His eyes adjust to the dark and he searches the tent, looking for remains of the evil callers somewhere near that just were. Images that struck in the night race through his mind, like apparitions creeping in, and now he sees the stranger coming out of the moonscape, the thing gesturing to him and his brother, a demon of stone smiling eerily. They had to run, move quick. Hurry, man! Go! Move your legs, Lucas. Move! But Lucas is slow. Wilder calling and calling in warning, and his panicked cries coming out nothing but a pitiful moaning, like in every horrible dream. He shakes violently in his remembering. And now he sees Lucas running—finally his brother is running—but he is running on bloody stumps.
Wilder jolts upright. He sleeves the sweat from his face. His mouth waters with a sickening taste. He puts his head outside the tent, spits. The fire is dampened to embers, its smolder a quiet rustling in the night. He lies back and zips himself into his mummy bag, works to slow his breath and the wild gallop of his heart. He says his brother’s name. He says it again.
>
* * *
MRS. ADAMS peels herself out of the sleeping sack, doing her best not to disturb the others enfolded about her in their feathery confines. She finds the down booties nearby within the pleats of the tent, shoves them onto her socked feet, unzips the flap, and crawls out into the night on hands and knees. Her husband groans. Vida sleeps. Wilder pretends to sleep. Hillary wanders out far away enough from the tent to avoid making noise, pulls her long johns down, and squats against a rock. What pleasure simple relief can bring. And to see now how clear the night is; the sky like a chalkboard filled with geometry problems and eraser swipes. The bright sky replicates the earthly tableau, lighting up the scatter of tents with its pyramids and domes, the camp spread out like a constellation, like a Leo or Cassiopeia or Orion. She breathes in the magnificence that surrounds her: every bit of work to get here worth it for this celestial spectacle alone. It will be etched in her synapses, engrammed in her mind like a sky map drawn by the ancients. She feels as expansive as the universe. She feels safe and very close to her companions, emotionally so. Her scalp and her fingers tingle. Her eyes water up. Her breath feathers vapory afterglows in the cold. She stands and wiggles back into her pants and hurries back to the tent, taking one last look at the display of heroes that rest in the heavens above. And then she is down—fast—like that—flat on her face in the grass. Oh! that stone. Even with eyes on the ground she may not have seen it coming.
Mysterium Page 8
