Mysterium

by Susan Froderberg

  * * *

  THE SUN’S morning rays lamp and warm the men as they ready themselves for the day’s earthly endeavors. The three breakfast on instant coffee and smoky jerky, tabled on a promontory below the thrones of the gods, their minds trained on a single thing: Victory, a good of which they need not speak.

  After the meal, Adams prepares for Base Camp. He will head back down alone, keeping his mind occupied by composing a letter to Hillary, then to write and hand the missive off to one of the bhakrawallas sent back to the village where mail can be posted.

  Reddy and Troy pack up for the push ahead. They set out each with a spool of rope over a shoulder, armored with anchors and wands, slings and hammers, intending to place fixed lines on any menacing stretches of the ravine. They drop spools and hardware and packs at the top of the first disobliging pitch, and plant into the ground a tall fluorescent wand. Troy brings forth the metal spikes and the hammer. He drives the first piton into an outcrop of cross-bedded rock, his labor pealing out like a dull bell, the rock exhaling whiffs of sulfurous dust at its puncture. Reddy figure-eights a loop of tubular webbing to the anchor, as Troy picks up a piece of limestone come loose from the bed. He studies it, then hands the shard over to Reddy.

  “Crustacean?”

  “Or some arthropod that walked the ocean floor.” Troy zips the find into the inner pouch of his parka. “Further scrutiny at teatime.”

  They get back to the job, down-climbing to a natural resting place that makes for an intermediate site, securing and tying off this time with a carabiner clove-hitched to the kernmantle line. At the bottom of the steep pitch they place another anchor, and here at the start of the rope up they plant a second wand. Then they move on to the next difficult incline and repeat their routine, working together with a practiced efficiency.

  With efforts complete they lunch in full sun, squinting into the radiance, the dazzling light imbuing the rare atmosphere a cerulean blue. Deep-sky blue. A blue truer than blue. The surrounding peaks glitter like jewels, and small iridescent clouds roam the sky. Down below in the amphitheater of the Sanctuary, a thin spire of smoke twines up among their scarlet-colored S’ing of tents. They can see Adams nearly back to Base Camp now, a tiny black spider creeping across the moraine.

  Troy takes the fossil from his pocket, examines it more closely. “Might be a shell-less mollusk. Though these look like tentacles, don’t they?”

  Reddy takes the rock, slowly turns it over in his hand. He gives it back to Troy. “Appendages of some kind,” he says. “Imagine these things should crawl into your tent at night.”

  “Imagine the great plates of earth that once were.”

  “Imagine the drift,” Reddy says. “The collision.”

  “All the crumpling.”

  “All the warp and contort of it.”

  “Carrying these creatures from the sea.”

  “The Tethys, I believe.”

  “What magnitudinous drama,” Troy says.

  “And yet so many people will ask why we climb.”

  “What else but for all this,” Troy says. “For this heavenly spectacle.” He tosses the rock, arcing it out into the peerless blue. “And to triumph, of course.”

  Base Camp, 15,000 feet

  July 24, 1981

  My Dearest Hillary,

  I am now settled back down in the foothold of the Sanctuary with at last a few moments to write to you, having just returned from a night spent with Professor Troy and Doctor Reddy on a lofty ridge 2,000 feet higher upon the mountain’s shins. We three had the day prior set forth to explore the possibility of an alternative approach to Mysterium’s summit, the prod toward a new route brought about by Wilder Carson’s preliminary survey of the mountain’s upper reaches. The accomplished young man’s insistence that the party make it new, so to speak, put us more mature fellows in the position of feeling rather moth-eaten and dull. Well, ha! and pshaw to this, our trio agreed.

  As we elders were already betaken toward the snowy collets and furbelows of the bliss-giving goddess and were, by this time, properly acclimatized after a week at 15,000 feet, we thereby moved upward and on with little hesitation to inspect what we had yet to know of her. We hereby came to an unfamiliar place that bestowed to us a view of Sarasvati’s face never before seen. Yes, Carson was indeed correct in his reconnaissance report, and has since been given the credit that is due him.

  On this untried part of the peak, the professor and the doctor and I found a broad ridge on which to make camp for the night, and from the crest we could see above us a most excellent site where an Advanced Base Camp might be established. Such a position will put us at a greater advantage in our aim to instill our party at yet higher camps among the icy flounces and sky-woven pleats of Sarasvati, as we make our way up to the mount’s precious crown.

  Which brings me only to the thought of you my darling, and with it a wish to run my fingers through your silken hair. Ah, the thought of pressing my lips to your tender lips! How might I even begin to tell you how much I miss you, sweet Hillary? Take my promise to strive toward more precise and ardent wording, so that I might be a wiser lover to you in our days ahead.

  Yours and always,

  Ad

  * * *

  DOWN IN the Sanctuary, Wilder leaves the confines of his sleeping bag and exits the tent. He zips the flap closed, and now Vida begins to dress in the cold. It has to be Mingma who sets the morning’s basin of warm water outside the tent; she hears him muttering, as he often does, maybe as a way of announcing himself, though could be he prays. She pulls her down parka out of the stuff sack it is pillowcased in and puts the coat on, then stuffs her sleeping bag into the casing. Finds her boots, shoves them on. Locates her gloves and tin cup, toothpaste and toothbrush. She crawls out of the tent and looks up to a sky thronged with snow-boding clouds.

  She fills her tin cup with water from the water jug, puts a plug of paste onto her toothbrush, and begins to scrub her teeth. Wilder is over on the other side of the mess tent, waving his arms about as he wrangles with the porters, the unruly beard on his face making him appear a burlier man than he really is. Vida doesn’t like the feel of her husband’s thick whiskers, and because he knows this he is considerate enough to keep his face away from hers. She sees him pointing up to the summit, and she gets that sinking feeling in her gut; sinking, there is no better word for it. She knows they have traveled far and hard to climb the mountain, not just camp and play at its feet in the thrilling scenery, like children. But how will it be to be alone for weeks with only a Sherpa and a few porters as companions in the Sanctuary? She takes the toothbrush out of her mouth. Will Adams stay at Base Camp? Probably not. She takes a mouthful of water and rinses, the swishing noise a crazed jangling inside her brain. She spits, and now she hears another sound, realizing it comes from inside the other tent. The sound of Devin and Sara lingering in their sleeping bags. Her stomach grumbles. She takes a swallow of water, hearing the happiness and intimacy between them. She tosses the water out of her cup. Looks up to see Mysterium shimmering in a pour of morning light, dominating everything, the way a goddess does.

  * * *

  AS PARTY leader it is up to Adams to determine the hardiest porters willing to transport provisions to higher settlements on the mountain. The other porters he will pay and discharge, as too will the bhakrawallas be relieved, the goats saddling back only the food needed to get the herders to hearth and kin again.

  “The men want to go home,” Wilder says. “Every last one.”

  “Leave it to me,” Adams says. “I am practiced at such matters.” He looks into the mess tent. “Where is our translator?” he says.

  “Over there she is,” Vida says, pointing toward the stream where Sara and Devin stand holding each other, looking out across the grassy downs at the wild bharal sheep that are feeding. “And to think Reddy was worried about married couples on this trip,” she says.

  Adams marches out toward the stream, stomping carelessly over the heads of wi
ld lilies and hairy vetch. Dalliance in the heights, he thinks. Altitudinous lusts and seductions. Perhaps the mountains themselves inspire it, as a person is caught up and carried away in the rapture of landscape and circumstance. His mind goes this way and that. Adams understands why Sara would be drawn to Devin’s pluck and skill, his splendidly youthful body and obliging mind. He sees too how Sara’s joyful smile easily captured the boy, her serene being carrying him away into some blissful delirium. The first time he and his wife had met the girl, they saw her fruitful as the earth with her golden hair and flushed cheeks, agreeing between them the name Heidi would have been perfectly fitting. In the startling blue of her eyes they saw that she was too good to be true, and both were at once smitten with her. Yet now Adams sees less a Heidi, and more a Beatrice. Yes, a Beatrice, she is. Incarnation of beatific love, an inspiration and guide. A means of transference, inscrutable, unknowable, anything we wish her to be. He sighs deeply, working for breath in the covetous air. He works to focus his mind. “Lovely Sara,” he calls out, “I need your assistance.”

  The couple let go their embrace, turn to their distinguished leader, the man the Sherpas have come to call Bhalu Sahib, with great affection. Virgil Adams, their Lord Bear, is still very broad in shoulders and chest, but he has become hollow-cheeked and leaner during the passing weeks of their odyssey, though his step and gait are still quick and deliberate, the look in his eyes sharp as a metal spike.

  “See you back at mess tent,” Devin says. He gives a tug to the plaited ties of Sara’s ski cap hanging beneath her chin.

  The porters get up from about their cookfire, welcoming sahib and little sister, please, to take hot tea and chapatis and to sit with them. Adams politely declines. The men are still attired in every item of clothing each of them owns. They are wearing rubber shoes, perhaps more likely plastic, or some sort of polymer of dubious quality; in any case, shoes they have carried all this way to be worn now as if a reward for having arrived at their intended destination. The men gather around Sara and Adams, and the head porter says in a few words of peculiar English that tomorrow they plan all to return home. Sara speaks to him in Hindi, asking that some of the men be invited to stay and help carry to higher camps. The head porter looks up to the darkening sky, snugging the pink-fringed shawl around him. He points to the mountain, looming like a massive sepulchre in the thickening mist. He gives a shake of the head. “No, Didi,” he says. “We cannot do, dear sister.”

  “Tell them we will double their pay,” Adams says.

  There is a curmurring among the porters, who seem to have understood Adams’s words clearly enough. Sara speaks for Adams again, telling the head porter they will leave him with his crew to decide.

  “But not to dither.” Adams raises a finger in emphasis.

  They are turned and headed back to the mess tent when the head porter calls out. “Sahib,” he says, nodding to Adams. He turns to Sara, explains in Hindi that he believes some of the porters will agree to stay if they are paid twice what they are owed, but they must be paid right away.

  “On that, we shall have to get back to you,” Adams says. Once back inside the mess tent he grumbles about not trusting them. “They could take double the money and leave as they might,” he says. “There would be no stopping them.”

  Karma suggests paying the porters all that is owed them up until today, as well as paying them now half of the total they have asked to carry to Advanced Camp, the remaining half to be paid at arrival to Advanced. “I believe we will have much help,” Karma says. He presses the sticky yellow patches firmly against his temples.

  But now it is Vida who resists. “This is a perfect campsite,” she says. “Why go higher?”

  “There is too much distance between here and the summit,” Adams says. “It is better for all of us to have a base set farther up.”

  “I don’t have a good feeling about going up there.”

  Wilder looks at her. “You don’t go and you’ll hold us all back.”

  “Troy and Reddy will have set fixed lines,” Adams says. “The route will be safe. Certainly, if porters with heavy bundles can manage it…”

  “It looks steep,” she says. “It looks cold and barren up there.”

  “What’re you doing here, Vida?” Wilder says. “Why did you come?”

  She turns away, feeling lost, as if her compass is off, the needle wagging unreliably. “I don’t know,” she says, her words coming out hard as stones.

  * * *

  EXPLORING. RISK-TAKING. What is it but a matter of character, appetite, heart or might or eye, that which leads one on toward any such endeavor? Call it a calling. Call it a summoning, bound as we are by a law of universal striving, this dictate being the only truth that governs: a truth simply writ in a seed.

  * * *

  REDDY AND Troy pack up food, the stove, and the tent, and start for the base of the northern glacier, intending to traverse the far side of this river of snow and ice; from there to gain the farther ridge and determine Advanced Camp. They march beneath a vault of gray sky, across tiers of gravel and spall, coming to a milky stream that dribbles out of the glacier’s ducts, stopping to fill their plastic bottles. They take long drinks, and fill the bottles again. They climb on through loose talus up onto a rampart of protalus, a slope of detrital accrual angled in repose, the tension between friction and gravity a point of delicacy where holding on meets letting go. From the top of the rampart they can see the icy snout of the glacier scarred by past avalanche, its base a littoral of grit and rocky flotsam. They will cross at the point where the throat narrows, aware of the perils here of icefall and snowslide.

  Troy is the first to span the danger zone, and he does so as quickly as heart and lungs will allow, feeling himself tethered and weighted into slow motion and arriving to the other side too many minutes later, heaving breathlessly. Reddy pushes himself to follow in Troy’s tracks, the quarter mile of uncertainty seeming to go on endlessly, knowing this undertaking a gambling game of spinning beads and numbers they play. Once to the other side of the couloir they pause to gulp oxygen, letting their hearts settle before heading up a stratum of crumbling black schist. Straight up the two move, topping a rock staircase that brings them onto a lofty perch of earth, the plateau a skyscraper world of glacial block and fold, a world bare of insect or animal or plant of any kind. They stake the tent and, here, within the vastness of radiant silence, they spend the night.

  * * *

  SARA WAKES and exits the tent at nature’s calling, stumbling out into a campsite mantled in white, last night’s pregnant air having turned to snow. She avoids the latrine to pee behind it instead, preferring the freshness of the air to the stench inside. She squats and admires the dawn flushing her namesake in color, the purity of the snow adding even more grace and substance to the mountain’s corpus. To imagine that she will soon enough stand tall at the pinnacle seems impossible. Her throat aches at the thought of it. She thinks about her mother, her silence now, her persistent distance. But with only a slight shift of cognition, Sara senses her mother everywhere about her, audible and palpable, really so very close. She shivers in the cold, hurries back to the tent, seeing fresh tracks that have since crossed her path. There is the broad slippery imprint of her down bootie, and over this the snow leopard’s print embossed onto her own.

  * * *

  KARMA AND Adams round the porters up as the others begin to reorganize Base Camp. Half of the porters agree to carry to a higher camp for the extra pay. Of these, only seven are asked to stay; the men selected, Adams and Karma have decided, the least indolent and the most fit. The remaining porters, disgruntled at having been rebuffed, are discharged home to their villages, as too are all the bhakrawallas told to go home. Adams assures the men a safe passage back through the Gorge with the aid of fixed ropes left in place. He offers the herders tender for the butchering of two goats before they depart. After plenty of bargaining, it is agreed.

  Adams too decides it best for Vida to remai
n in the Sanctuary at Base Camp. “In the old days I might have told you to buck up,” he says. “But I have learned that to push someone higher when it is against that person’s will is only to invite distress. Besides, the weather has changed,” he says, “with wet snow inviting difficulty.” Adams says Mingma Sherpa will remain with Vida here and assist in the dispatch of porters up to Advanced Camp. Pasang Sherpa will manage Advanced, forwarding the cache of supplies as needed to higher sights on the mountain. Karma, the sirdar Sherpa, will accompany the sahibs as far as he can, intending to stand with them at the summit.

  Adams and the Sherpas begin the mammoth task of recoiling rope and reorganizing gear. Chaotic piles of equipment and provisions are scattered everywhere about camp. Sara and Devin and Vida are assigned to the mess tent to tackle the job of repackaging the rations, measuring out of large containers various foodstuffs that need to be packed into day-unit piles intended to feed parties of four. The job is colossal. They must think through noodles and lentils, quinoa and couscous, oatmeal and cornmeal, instant potatoes and puddings and soups, sorting out the precooked, the freeze-dried, the dehydrated. They need to tube the tubs of peanut butter, slab the wheels of cheese, rebag bags of almonds and corn nuts, raisins and figs. They quota the drink mixes, the coffee and tea and dry milk, then allocate the jello, the jerkied meats, the smoked fish, the pickled greens.

  All the while, Sara and Devin work side by side, both of them besotted. It is impossible to ignore. Others try politely not to see, averting their eyes, pretending they have not seen, but see they do, and with it comes an avalanche of feelings for at least a few.

  “That’s it,” Vida says when Sara and Devin come lip-to-lip with a twist of licorice between them. Vida tosses a package of sour lemon drops onto the table, announces she’s going out for some breaths of thin air. She is light-headed, unsettled. To have new love around her reminds her of what she no longer has. She feels sadness, envy, anger, self-pity—why not admit it, it’s true. The days of wanting, not planning, days of having, not thinking, seem altogether past her now. All of it gone, as if the person she remembers being never was. She is thinner, harder, colder, and suddenly thirty feels old. She sits on the canvas seat of a folding aluminum stool outside the mess tent watching the snow coming down. Big soft flakes land on her lips, thatch in her eyelashes. She pulls the hood of her anorak up over her hat, zips herself in up to the chin.