Mysterium

by Susan Froderberg

  The monk puts the eyeglasses back on and takes the photograph from him. He brings it close to his face and studies it. He looks at it a long time. He cocks his head. “This picture from how many years old?”

  “It was,” Wilder says. “It…” His voice catches again. “Shit.”

  The monk gives the photograph back. He offers Wilder more tea.

  Wilder shakes his head. “My brother. He died is what.”

  The monk nods. “But why you need picture? Why you need pebble?”

  “Who said anything about needing anything?” Wilder decides not to tell of the ashes he has in his backpack. He feels his throat constricting. He blinks.

  “Tea,” the monk says. “Here, you drink.”

  * * *

  IT TAKES little convincing to get the monk to join the others at camp for a meal. The sahibs are astounded to see the man, the Sherpas less so. The porters and bhakrawallas, being Hindu, pretend to take little notice of the stranger who has joined their company; as low as they have been born in caste, the Buddhist’s rank is lower. When asked, the monk informs the sahibs he plans to take the path through the Gorge they have journeyed on to get here.

  “Then you must be told of the dangers you face if you continue on from the route we came,” says Adams. “You should also know there is a big cat slinking around back there. It last night killed one of our goats. Best not to go it alone. Better that you should walk with us.”

  “He’s going the opposite way,” Wilder says. “Dharamsala.”

  “There is an alternate route there,” Adams says. “I shall draw it out for you. The way is a bit longer, but much safer. You must climb up out of the Gorge with us, up into the hinterland of the Sanctuary. From there you may turn and go the other way toward your destination, with a bit of traversing.”

  The monk nods. He is nonchalant about having to retrace his steps. He thanks them for providing him with a safer route to his stopping place. He says he is happy to have their companionship. He sits with his new friends around the crackle and spit of the flames. He reaches into the folds of his robe, brings out a spoon and a bowl and holds the implements out, as beggars do, his bald head gleaming in the light of the fire. He waits patiently for his bowl to be filled.

  Sara leaves the campfire to collect the bouquet of valerian she has earlier gathered in the woods. The monk has given her a kata, taken from the folds of his robe, and she wears the gift now, draping the white scarf over her head like a veil. She walks upriver to where the porters are lodged, calling to them from a respectful distance. The cave they stay in is lit from within and glows crimson as the monk’s robe. One of the men comes out, wrapped in a fringed shawl. “Didi,” the man in the shawl says. He says, “Elder sister is here.” The other porters come out and all invite her inside to the heat of their fire, but she shakes her head. She stands at the threshold of their crimson domicile, as if by a hearth, and all the men draw closer to see her. She pulls the veil close to her face, speaks to them quietly in Hindi. They cling to her words, to the fire cast in her eyes, to the blaze that reddens her hair and ambers her flesh. This girl, the men will tell you: she is older than the earth itself. She holds a soul reborn and born and born again. In her they take comfort and believe.

  For each of the men Sara pinches a white cluster from its stem, handing a floret one by one to all of the porters as they open their hands to her. She speaks in a musical voice, tells them to place this gift of nature inside their caps before sleep tonight. She tells them their dreams will be dreams of enchantment and transport. Their visions will ease the way to a place of perfect rest for their friend. “The waters have taken him,” she says. “They are the waters that flow into the Ganges. The waters that flow back to Mother.” The porters know this to be true. But to hear Sarasvati speak the words deepens that truth. They take her counsel and her offering as a blessing she bestows upon each of them.

  * * *

  IN A dreary dawn rain they break camp, the river blathering on madly as the troopers turn their backs to take leave of the Gorge. They once again trudge hundreds of feet steeply up, navigating with little technical difficulty, though the labor is great. They climb a staircase of hackly quartz until the way levels out, descending from there to a shelf of lichened rock that brings them to another stretch of cliff ahead. The sahibs take a straight line up, grasping roots and branches along the way, collapsing onto a wide grassy ledge. They rest, wait for the others to come up, watching as the bhakrawallas work a traverse relative to their herd, the goats scrambling forward in wild gambols and bold leaps. The porters, bound to the sixty-plus-pound burdens carapaced to their backs, crawl up the cliff slowly and methodically, like an army of scarab beetles scuttling among the rubble and leaves.

  “Now will become difficult,” Karma says.

  They are gathered at the base of a slab of rock that wings up without shrub or tree for aid in the ascending. The sirdar Sherpa shows the others a narrow chimney holed into a portion of the rock. He opens one of the porter’s loads, takes a rope out, carabiners and bolts.

  Adams pokes his head inside the rock. “A tight fit.”

  “I can manage this,” Wilder says.

  “I am better size,” Karma says. He reties the laces of his sneakers and doubles the knots. He pockets the hardware, holsters the hammer, hitches the rope over his shoulder, and then he disappears into the rock cleft. Wedged inside, he begins to shimmy his body up. He presses a foot and a knee on opposite sides of the chimney, reaches for spalls and fins in the mineraled wall and pulls himself higher. He pauses, his hot breath huffing back into his face from off the wall. He is now lodged so deeply into the cranny he is barely able to move at all, his body like an arrowhead that cannot be worked back out again. What now to do? He relies on his father’s teachings. He stacks his feet, pushing his way farther up into the body of the rock until he is moved up out of the choke point and the way begins to open up. His hammer has worked its way out of the holster, and is loose on the catch of his thigh. He crimps his fingers into a fissure and with his free hand reaches for the tool, but it is doffed off his leg and goes tumbling into the darkness below. He holds himself to the wall, hearing the clang of metal against stone as the hammer hits bottom. Loud toll of a gong. He settles his breath and looks up into a piercing light, a shining blade that draws him on. With counterforce, with hands and knees and buttocks and feet he moves up, pulled toward the radiant beam. His quickened breath echoes loud all around, a breath larger than he is. The brightness above him bores open as he pushes and pulls his way up, until the light is suddenly on him and flooding down in bestowal and he is reaching up to the lip of the opening, heaving himself up and out of the coal-black hole. He stands breathing hard, sweating, looking down into the narrow chops he was spewed from, seeing himself nearly cocooned in there, perhaps forever, his body fossiled into the chasm of rock for millennia to come.

  He shouts out names, waves down to the others. Then he searches for something deeply rooted to the earth. There, a boulder. He secures the rope, tosses the coiled end over the cliff. The anchored assistance Karma places is priceless, especially for the men who are laden. One by one, all come up the face of the cliff with the help of the rope; sahibs, porters, herders, Sherpas, the monk, all toppling over onto the ledge in a splay of poses and shapes and exclamations, the Gorge having spat all of them out at last. Who knows how the goats have managed the way, but the animals appear before them snapping hungrily at the grass.

  And now what a sight they behold! At the far end of the hanging valley they are landed upon is a V’d notch, and to this sight all eyes are drawn. For beyond the cleft to dominate the skyline is the glorious mountain herself, Mount Mysterium. A thin veil of cloud at the top of the pinnacle’s head spills off into the thin cold air. A diamond choker of ice drapes her throat, and sunglow cloaks her glaciered shoulders. Her flanks are white and soft as ermine. Her base is gowned in cloud. The porters release their loads, fall to their knees, bow their heads. The shepherds r
aise their arms and chant in praise. The sahibs whoop and holler and take their cameras out. The monk smiles at the spectacle about him.

  They gather themselves and shoulder their loads. Renewed and full of rejoice, singing, chanting, laughing, they parade toward the notch. Even the goats bleat and bay as they step through the cleaved rock, moving out of the jaws of the gully and on into the promised land of the Sanctuary. Ahead of them, the blessed goddess, the divine rays of light projected from her heights like arms held out, drawing the holy-landers forward.

  5.

  THE SANCTUARY

  How sweet the blood flows after the body is freed from strain, all senses having been sharpened by danger, awareness honed by abolishing from the mind any triviality otherwise. Do we court circumstances that put us in a state of mortal seriousness, with no room for mistake, purely for the prize of the exhilarating release that follows?

  * * *

  DAY ONE in the Sanctuary, and the morning star is ablaze when the sojourners wake, a few bright planets and stars shimmering at the pole opposing. Beneath these stellar orbs Mysterium lets go her sable robe, rising forth into a glory of light. The party is settled at her feet in a deep hollow at the end of a valley, their bright red tents set single file in the alpine grass following the line of a meandering stream, shaping Base Camp into the spread of a letter S. The mess tent is pitched within the upper stroke of the colorful S, separating sahib and Sherpa abodes from those of the herders and porters. Inside the mess, eight folding portable chairs surround a folding rectangular table, where here the sahibs will convene and take meals. Far back from the stream a latrine is dug out, with a canvas curtained around tent poles for privacy. A metal washbasin and a bar of soap are settled on a stone; a juniper bough offers prop to a towel. The sahibs wash and dress in daybreak’s aubade, the Sherpas collect scrub brush for the fire and put the water to boiling, the bhakrawallas roll their smokes and tend to the goats, while a corps of porters head out to prowl in the dawn on the moraine.

  The agony of the Gorge is behind them, the travelers having abandoned all testament to struggle and gladly forgotten the work that brought them to this place. Already sinew and tendon and flesh are mended, the mind without haste erasing past distress. “Not unlike a mother after the labor of birth,” is the way Doctor Reddy had put it. Now for the weeks ahead all bodies will do what they must to comply with the altitude: a metabolic recalibrating for each. There will be more breaths taken per minute to draw needed oxygen, triggering blood gases and pressures to shift, with serum diluting and cells amassing, nutrients and minerals and salts all in flux. Hearts pump more stubbornly as rates of respiring climb, while blood acidity and hemoglobin plummet. Sleep and appetite and reason slacken, muscles shrink, body weight falls. Wounds simply fail to heal.

  The porters had the night prior celebrated arrival to the Sanctuary in a ritual of chorus and dance. They erected a rock monument modeled in semblance of the avatar Sarasvati; at the foot of it was placed a stone altar and a prasada of chapatis and date sweets. They built an enormous fire in front of the sculpture, luring the others over to gather around in the heat and festivity. The porters sang out loudly to the goddess a melodious air of both joy and lament that was repeated over and again, so that even the sahibs, perched on rocks encircling the fire, could croon along in broken words and waning phrases. The porters chanted. They frapped their feet and waved their arms in harmony, gyrating like red devils in the hot light of the inferno. The bhakrawallas stood about the dancers, enraptured, clapping their hands, intoning in the frenzy and the ecstasy. The sahibs watched the primitive ballet in awe, moving lips or heads or feet to the delirious caroling in their various cadences and ways, each face beaming in the blazing light. Sara looked on with eyes that glowed like coals, her windblown hair turned wild tails of flame, the fire snapping and leaping about her, knowing herself to be the cause of the rapture. The stars above scintillated in the frosty night air, the encircling peaks beneath silent as dutiful sentinels. Mysterium, aloof, loomed huge at the bounds, a somber Buddha pondering in the dim.

  * * *

  FIRST MORNING at Base Camp, and Vida sits on a rock in summer’s wintry air warming her hands on a cup of hot cocoa. She looks around in wonderment, her breath literally taken away within the heights and pageantry of the oncoming day. Mysterium is illuminated in dawn, her snowy flanks slowly absorbing the light. A flock of bar-headed geese sail before a wall of snow shouldered high on the glacier: what a rare sight to see them fly in the thin air. Down below, blue sheep forage in the sedges across the stream, as morning light melts night’s sprinkling of icy geometry. Vida sips the sweet cocoa, knowing this place will be home for the next month or two to come.

  She watches her husband as he laces his boots and snaps his anorak closed. He lifts a chin to her in abbreviated goodbye, then turns to follow a line of porters making their way across the grassy downs. Wilder climbs over a hill of livid-colored boulders, then up through rocky piles of glacial debris, keeping his distance from the men so they won’t look back and encourage him to join them. He’s had it with all the camaraderie lately, though as he looks to the upper buttress towering a mile overhead he imagines describing what he sees to his brother, telling him what a piece of excellent quartzite that rock is going to be in the climbing, the feeling of Lucas here walking beside him. And hearing his twin agreeing, now both of them noting that the quartzite is sloping downward, you see? And we know down-sloping holds make for hard work and riskier going. He puts the binoculars back into the pouch of his anorak. Best now to take another course up the moraine, a line the porters seem not to have spotted, then to get up quick and over the crest of it to get a look at what might be on the other side. Find the new route to the summit and report it before anyone else does. He picks his pace up, working for breath, lungs hungering in their want for oxygen. A voice skips across the rocks, and he turns his head to see a few of the porters following in his path, one who wears a pink-fringed shawl signaling his way. Wilder speeds up and veers off in another direction, no word or gesture in return. The men turn and push on behind him, and now Wilder pushes all the harder, thankful not to have the weight of a pack on his back today. He won’t let the porters get ahead, won’t let anyone get ahead; no, not even his brother should beat him. Just as in their days of boyhood together: Who could run or ski the fastest, dive the deepest, jump the farthest, climb the highest? Who might display the greater bravery? The appetites of their youth satisfied most by undertakings strenuous and threatening.

  He drives himself on, moving faster, propelled by the challenge. His head throbs, his thighs burn, his calves spasm. He pants like an animal. He knows his own craziness. Maybe more like stupidity, he hears his brother say. No breath to laugh with. He draws everything in, willing his body into a machine, torsional and elastic, legs cranked into rotary motion, muscles of his heart like pistons driven through cylinders, lungs to the point of combusting. He’s far in the lead, pouring sweat, soaking in it, with sweat in his eyes, sweat in his ears, his heart in his ears, his legs to the point of crumple and give. Keep on, man, keep on. Do not quit.

  Wilder’s legs buckle at the top of the moraine. He drops to hands and knees, barking out a spasm of coughing that grabs at his ribs. He hacks. He spits. He sleeves his mouth clean. When finally the coughing settles he stands, legs trembling. “Man alive,” he says. He wipes the sweat from his eyes. Straight out ahead of him are massive walls of schist and dolomite wrapped about the mountain’s pedestal. He sees the river punching through the snout of the Sage’s glacier, the water cut into the depths of the Gorge in a raging impetus to merge with the Ganges as it heads to the sea. He pulls the binoculars out of his anorak, scans the rock strata for any walk-ups. A porter comes stumbling in behind him.

  “Sahib,” the porter says. “You strong, Sahib,” he says. The man is leaned over, hands on his thighs, the fringe of his shawl dusting the earth as he works to breathe. The porter raises himself up tall and cries a wild animal cry of d
elight. Wilder grins, pouches the binoculars, and reaches forward, forcing any remaining shaking out of himself with a hard shake of the man’s hand.

  * * *

  THE MONK sits cross-legged next to the morning fire running a battery-powered razor over the dome of his head, the dome of the mountain behind him, the bending dome of the day above everything. Virgil Adams, curious, approaches the mendicant in the midst of his morning ablutions.

  “Hah! I wondered what the noise was,” Adams says. “I thought perhaps we had aggrieved some type of rodent creature in the vicinity.” The monk turns the razor off and tucks it back into the folds of his robe. He nods, smoothing a palm over his smooth dome.

  “You shall come in and join the plenum for breakfast,” Adams says.

  The monk follows Adams into the tent where the sahibs are seated around the metal table in wool knit caps, corpulent in their downy parkas. The table is spread with cups of steaming drinks and bowls of cold cereal, and now Pasang carries in a plate of hot chapatis while Mingma replenishes the flask of coffee and hot milk. The monk holds an empty cup out, and nods at the flask of milk. Doctor Reddy puts a bottle of aspirin tablets onto the table between tubs of butter and honey, analgesic for the many suffering from headaches brought on by the heights. Sara reaches in and fingers the depths of her father’s coat pocket and retrieves a pen. She picks the aspirin bottle up and adds to the label a g.

  “Now we have aspiring tablets,” she says, setting the bottle back onto the table. Her palms are raw from gripping the hackly rocks during their trek through the Gorge. The pomes of her cheeks are red as the cuts and scrapes of her hands, her nose drippy and roseate in the cold. “For those whose zeal may be fading,” she says, shaking the bottle.

  Reddy takes a tube out of his kit and puts it in front of Sara. “Apply this ointment to those wounds before you put your gloves back on,” he says.