“Sight of what?” says Sara.
“A swan,” Adams says, “is what we thought it was. There was before us, of all things, a large white bird winging across the desolate space, an expanse that fell away like forgotten time over the rapturous depths of the frozen cliffs. I shall never forget the sight of it.”
“A bird that high up?” Devin says. “No way.”
Adams raises an arm and passes a gloved hand through the air. “As though it be the spirit of Sarasvati herself, this is what Hilman said. I remember his words exactly. I remember we stood watching the bird until it had glided completely from our vision. Then the sun disappeared suddenly behind a thick cloud, dimming the vista, filching our heat, making us altogether colder. We turned and quickly began the long and perilous descent.”
“Have some more tea,” Wilder says, engrossed by the story. He holds the thermos forth.
“Oddly enough,” Adams says, “we would later see the white bird everywhere. It went flying past us as we trudged down the mountain. Later, at camp, we opened the tent flap to see it dabbling on roots beside a tarn.”
“Imagine,” Sara says. “Just imagine.”
“The same bird was waiting for us in Darjeeling,” Adams says. “And then we would see it again in Paris. Yes, just imagine.” He peers into his cup of tea. “I even saw the white bird when I arrived in Boston. I still, to this day, see the flutter of its wings in my sleep.”
* * *
THE ENCAMPMENT at the Sanctuary had been stilled into an icy purity. The colony was nearly deserted now, with only a nylon four-man left standing for the porters, another tent for the Sherpas, both A-frames weathered into graupeled triangles. On the opposite side of the mess tent was left a single dome pitched for the sahibs, mammiform and flawless in the new-fallen snow. Snow-sculpted boulders cast shadows of plump cherubim, and juniper boughs were furled over into frosty embryos. The world was hushed to new. To Vida it seemed a starting over. A different time, a different place entirely.
Reddy arrived back down to Base Camp midday from up on the ridge, finding the outpost a ghost town with the horde of shepherds gone and their goats gone, and all but a tentful of porters departed. For those who were still here there would be a soaring fire tonight, curried goat meat and falafel for dinner, hot water for washup before bed for any who wished.
Within the flurry of camp work and evening routine there was too the occurrence of an odd phenomenon. It was when Vida was setting the table for mess, mingling a hand among the forks, when the words What are you doing? were abruptly spewed from among the tangle of metal tines. It was a message truly startling in its clarity. She dropped the utensils and peered at them. Glyphs of light played upon the walls of the tent in the flickering wick of the lantern. She turned to Reddy, who was seated at the table making lists of provisions, wondering if he had heard what she had heard. His head was kept bent to the task, his serious forehead illumined, his elongated earlobes and warrior nose cast in golden light. His face startled her, for he was suddenly evinced to her differently, strangely. The tent flaps riffled, the wind carrying in an incense smell of burning juniper. Reddy looked up, his eyes glassy nuggets of blackest sapphire. Vida saw him turbaned and necklaced with marigolds, the smoke of incense nimbused about his head, an aura of the mystical about him. He cleared his throat, making Vida suddenly aware of her staring and turning himself back to the familiar Reddy again. No more aura, no more marigolds. She returned to her task. She rustled the forks again, hearing only the ordinary, now just the sound of forks.
When dinner was finished the Sherpas retired for the night, leaving the two sahibs alone. Vida put a headlamp on, announced she was going out, “To do my toilette.” Reddy filled a flask with hot tea, and headed straight for the tent. He took his boots off, crawled inside, peeled off layers of wool and fleece, leaving his long johns on, his hat on, his headlamp on. He wormed into his sleeping bag, stuffed his parka in the stuff sack, pillowed his neck with it. When Vida entered he had his light beamed on pages of the American Alpine Journal. She scooted into the narrow space beside him. “That little book gets around,” she said.
“After this I’ll only have food labels to read.”
“You left your boots outside,” she said. “I put them in the vestibule.”
Reddy sat up. “Thank you. But I did remember the tea.”
She wiped the toothpaste off the rim of her tin cup, and Reddy poured steaming milky tea from the flask. She put her hand in a position of salute to cover her eyes. “You mind redirecting your light?” she said.
“Sorry.” He tipped the headlamp and torched the ceiling.
“This is pretty weird,” she said. She warmed her hands on the tin cup.
“Everything is weird up here in the wilds of altitude.”
“Sleeping together is what I mean. Alone is what I mean.”
Vida’s boyish haircut had grown out, and long wisps of it escaped about her face from out of her wool hat. Reddy put a finger to one of the curls to move it away from her eye. “Have some more tea.”
She held her cup out. “Tower of Babel seems long ago.”
“I recall the feeling of being horribly responsible for you.”
“Horribly?” she said.
“We were not wearing helmets, if you recall.”
“There weren’t any climbers above us.”
“That, we did not really know.”
“It was late in the day.”
“It was my fault,” he said. “We had stayed far too long in bed.”
“We were not thinking loose rockfall, I guess.”
“We were thinking summits of another kind.”
Vida looked at him with her soft brown off-kilter eyes.
“I was thinking only about you falling, and me falling along with you,” Reddy said.
“Listen to us talking like this.”
“Well, our circumstances did carry a good deal of risk,” he said. “If you or I had been grimly injured what would the other of us have done? Mountain rescue would have been called. A report would have been filed. There would have been hospital documents to sign. Family to call. My wife. Your husband. There would have been explaining. Confessing. Apologies. Pleading. Remorse. Wounds that would not heal.”
“You told me the category was pretty-easy,” she said. “But of course why should I have trusted you on top of a mountain, just because I trusted you on top of me?”
Reddy reached a hand to her.
Vida flinched. “Is that thunder?” she said.
* * *
IT WAS mostly because she dreaded the many weeks of solitude, but also she knew she wanted to try to climb with Reddy again, just the two of them. This time, she would do it. She would erase her Tower of Babel defeat. She would revise the story; tell it new.
The snowfall had finally stopped. After five long days, Reddy had to go on ahead. He needed to get the porters started with the shuttling of loads, get them to the ridge before the others were completely out of food up there, deliver oxygen and medicine to them. He wanted to be back on the mountain, help Troy push to Advanced Camp. The mountain’s base of snow was packed and cold again, making the climb through the gully easier in many ways. Reddy would dig out the fixed lines. “The way is safe,” he told Vida. He told her she would get lonely if she stayed behind.
She is properly clothed and prepared to start out long before dawn. In the grim cold hour of three in the morning she moves through her dressing and washing routine. Then a quick breakfast of hot cocoa and stale fig bars. Now she fits her headlamp around her knit cap, switches the light on, starts out behind Reddy. They head up and over the moraine. It is not exactly the two of them. Behind Vida are the five porters who remain with the expedition, and trailing the porters, Sherpa Mingma. Here in the pitch-dark of a stark frozen world there are no human comforts, aside from what they give one another, no more and no less than being in the same place at the same time. She once again feels close to Reddy, alone with their secret together.
Mingma and the porters hadn’t any inkling of the couple’s love play during the night. There was no second stupa built for either portent or penance; no prayer flags, no altar, no offerings. No one would know that Reddy had reached into Vida’s sleeping bag for the hand she had tucked beneath her chin, kissing her fingers to wake her. And no one would know that it was Vida who earlier had first put a hand out to him, and when she did he unzipped his sleeping bag, and then he opened hers, and soon one was inside the other, entirely, completely, falling together in a paroxysm of sensation and snowballed emotion.
Avalanche rubble had been spewed out across the natural snow bridge covering the Sage’s river, a lathery white outpour that filled in and covered over the passageway. The former route is turned an imbroglio of heaping blocks of snow and toppled boulders, a frozen spill creating a colossal lingua they will have to detour a mile or more to get around. They trod along, the sluice and leak of subterranean meltwater from the glacier crooning melancholy harmonies beneath their feet. All about them the cold rings out in distance and in space. The going is trying, especially for the porters with their burdens tumped to foreheads and weighted onto backs. Reddy paces himself to ease the men’s labor, with Vida right behind him keeping space enough between them to allow herself her thoughts. And he, his. There is no talk, only walking and breathing. She keeps her eyes on the ground ahead of her, heeding her footing, stepping deliberately, paying attention, for there is nothing more important than paying attention. She considers it the single golden rule.
Wilder’s gully is filled with crusty deep snow. Reddy hinges at the knees, swinging his legs to cut bootsteps in the deep. Still it is strenuous uphill work for those following behind. Vida falls into a silent intoning, letting the mantra repeat as she sets her respiring and her ice axe and her boot stride into a definite rhythm: step, step, plant, breath, step, step, plant, breath, and on and on repeating, her heart adding its own metered variation to the theme. The sun edges up behind Mysterium’s darkened profile. Flesh-colored clouds open like hands in the paling sky.
Vida struggles on, breathlessly, gravity pulling at her bones. In the vast and barren landscape she is small and insignificant and alone. How little even lovemaking does to erase the aloneness that confronts you up here. You look loneliness in the eye. It looks you in the eye. No, it’s more that you are the eye, you are the loneliness itself. Ironic, she thinks, that she climbs primarily for the romance of it, so she has always said. And just what is romance anyway but an ideal, a mystery, a transcendence, a lifting? A glance exchanged, an affinity, a coming together, a longing for harmony, is what she believes. This man or that man has been her reply to why climb, whenever she might be asked to explain. Who knows why she always felt she had to have an answer.
There is more searching and more work still when they get up to the middle of the gully and finally find the fluorescent wand that signals the start of the buried rope. Reddy and Mingma dig on hands and knees trying to locate the fixed line while Vida stomps her feet and claps her hands to keep her heat inside. After more than an hour the first rope is exposed and freed, and they all harness up and clip in, lining up behind Reddy one by one as he again kicks out big steps, making a staircase of snow for the others to follow him in. But now the slope is rinded in ice, and even with the aid of the rope Vida begins to question the soundness of the ground beneath her feet. She knows the porters are only getting colder as she hesitates. Reddy shouts out from above, “Do not look down!” And then he has a hand out and is reaching for her, and she is pulled up with determined force, dragged up and plopped down in the snow, backpack and all, attaching herself to as much of the earth as possible. She sits up, tries to slow her breathing. She sees Base Camp diminished to small puddles of color far below, the spiral of river beside it, the great ocean of sky circumscribing everything.
Reddy reaches a hand out and pulls her up to standing. “You are fine,” he says. “And very beautiful.” He brushes the snow off her chest.
“Let me ask you,” she says, her voice thin and quivery in the cold. “Why do you climb?”
He studies the look on her face, realizing the question is no joke. “I suppose,” he says, “for the boyish feeling that nothing can stop me.”
She nods. “I like that about you.”
It’s true what Reddy says about the rest of the ascent being easier. Though steep, there are good handholds and footholds. She goes back to paying attention, does not look down until she gets to the top of the ridge.
People put their tasks and their cups of tea down, turn heads, stand up, say their heys and their namastes and their what-do-you-knows when they see Vida coming up over the crest behind Reddy. Wilder sits, regarding her as if she were someone unfamiliar to him. Then he goes into a fit of coughing that has him up and lurching about.
Out of admiration or obligation or an unusual bout of rivalry, her husband says he will stay with his wife at Ridge Camp. Tomorrow he will let Doctor Reddy go in his place with Karma and Troy up to Advanced Camp. As if Reddy would have it be otherwise. As if Wilder had seen something new in the wandering vulnerability of Vida’s eyes.
* * *
IN HIS brother’s face, Wilder had seen a horrifying emptiness, a look that would not be forgotten.
No, don’t you ever forget.
They had left the tent behind, planning a rapid alpine-style ascent to the top of Stone Sentinel, expecting better weather. But the wind slowed them, and then conditions turned worse. He and Lucas had plodded on. They knew they should stop and light the stove, melt snow, drink tea, feed themselves, but their fingers were numb and both were too exhausted to bother; a failing they recognized as they trudged on. It was hours before they finally found a rocky outcrop to protect them from the icy wind for the night. Their feet were stone cold and painfully distended, and they realized they would never get their boots back on if they were to take them off. Wilder’s feet ache just to remember it.
He will remember it.
The last leg to the summit was no more than a hike ahead of them the next day. They could make it, but now they absolutely had to drink. “We need to force it,” Wilder had said, and as he lighted the stove he saw Lucas doing what he never should have done. He cried his brother’s name out, but Lucas had already gotten his boots off. His feet were mottled and grossly swollen, the toes a dark purplish color, like those of sick old folks or people you see homeless on the street. Wilder wrapped his brother’s bloated feet in layers of fleece and wool, told him not to worry, said they’d be to safety soon enough. He’d carry him to the top and all the way down if he had to. They were sure to find trekkers on the other side of the summit, find help by noon the next day.
Wilder prepared the last meal they would share on the mountain. He was afraid for his brother; afraid Lucas might lose his feet. But Wilder had to think. He had to think sharp for the both of them. He felt the lonely pauses of the skipped beats of his heart. He melted snow and they drank tea and then they bundled themselves into their mummy bags and waited for dawn to come. The wind shrieked in loud she-devil pronouncements. The brothers shivered through the long night. By morning the wind had died, but Lucas’s feet were worse, the raw flesh starting to eviscerate in places. Wilder broke down and sobbed. He tried to get his brother to stand, but Lucas could not, and when Wilder helped him to sit, he collapsed to his back. Wilder propped him up once more to stay. “Leave me alone,” Lucas said. “Just leave me alone.” And at this Wilder gave his brother a hard punch on the shoulder, slumping Lucas back onto the ground. “Don’t say that to me,” Wilder said, blood searing through his veins with each unruly systole. “Don’t you ever say that to me ever.” He got Lucas deeper into his sleeping bag and zipped him in. “Stay here. I need to go on ahead. You have all the food and all the water I am melting for you for tomorrow, you see, do you see? Melting water, here, look, for you to drink. You need to drink. Promise me you’ll drink. Say it, you sonofabitch! Say it! Don’t laugh at me.” But now Wilder was l
aughing too. Suddenly nothing seemed more hilarious, more ridiculous, more perfectly stupid than the situation they had put themselves in. They laughed and laughed. They laughed until their jaws ached, laughed until they could laugh no more.
To forget is to suffer the loss twice.
He will remember it all.
Wilder sees himself the following morning zipping Lucas into the sleeping bag up to his chin. He wrapped the other mummy sack tightly around his brother’s head and his shoulders. He coiled the rope about this chrysalis that was his brother, and anchored him to a rock. Then Wilder was off. He would be at the top in roughly six hours. He would find help in the hut just off the other side of the summit, and he would be back to Lucas only a few hours later.
Two hours after Wilder left his brother the notorious white wind began its assault again, this time with a staggering ferocity. Over and over the gale force knocked Wilder off his feet. He clung to boulders to keep from being blown off the ridge. He struggled on, lurching forward with outstretched arms. He tottered and fell, tottered and fell again. He crawled on hands and knees. Like this, and more than a day later, Wilder reached the top of Stone Sentinel. Without his brother.
He hates to remember it.
He will always remember it.
* * *
IN THE gloom of another predawn dark the upper camp begins to stir. There are muffled voices, the hiss and poof of a stove lit, a clattering of tin cups and cutlery. Professor Troy, Doctor Reddy, and Sherpa Karma down a quick breakfast of tinned fish and yesterday’s chapatis, and then the men’s accoutrement commences. First the wool shirts and wool pants over the wool long johns, and over all of this wool sweaters and jackets of fleece. Over the fleece the down parkas, and over the parkas the anoraks. Hats on. Next, the struggle of cold boots and cold fingers and frozen lacings, followed by pairings and lacings of gaiters. Headlamps over hats. Harnesses buckled up. Crampons fitted onto rubber-lugged soles and strapped and clasped. Glacier glasses in pocket. Ice axes in hand. Outer mittens on, gloves and liners beneath. They shoulder their loads, their regalia governing their movement and mien, their apparatus prescribing a way of looking at things.
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