Mysterium

by Susan Froderberg

  But there is no time to call out.

  Wilder and Devin leap into the air, jumping for cover under an outcrop of rock, clinging to ice axes sunk deep, heads ducked, bodies clenched like fists. A flue of wind spews past. When the trembling earth settles they lift their heads to see a tranquil slope. They hear the perfect silence again.

  “Thought it for sure the big guy in the white suit coming for us.”

  “It was the next couloir over.”

  They shake the snow off, refit their packs, plant their axes, and start back up the scarp. They are hardly back into a rhythm when kaboom! the shock resounds like a launched bomb, and when they look up they see a roaring torrent charging at them. Wilder vaults back to the outcrop of rocks, but the thing already has Devin in its maw and he is flailing down the mountain, tumbling over and over like a piece of seaweed tossed onto a surf-beaten beach, the weight of the demon carrying him under and pounding down on him so hard he feels his neck about to snap. But now he is suddenly back on the surface, moving his arms as if swimming, his body bobbing along on a great tide of snow, a long sledless ride of snow, until finally the slide finds its point of repose as gravity gives way to friction and the steamrolling stops. Devin is buried, punched onto his side by the clobbering mass, like a small animal pinned into submission by an angry master. His hands are cupped over his head like a wrestler in defense. He takes in a breath, sucking in snow, coughing the snow out, only to suck it back in again, and coughing, choking, sucking, and now he knows he is drowning is what’s happening, he’s drowning. He struggles to move a hand to his face, and he fingers the snow away, carving a pocket of air out to breathe in. God, can this be? God, oh God, oh God can this be? The only response a deathly pocket of silence. His heart beating fast enough to kill him. His warm breath freezing the air pocket, icing a mask on his face. There is no air, no sound, no light, no weight, no cold, no breath. Then there is no fear. There is no thought at all.

  Like out of an anesthesia he wakes. Someone calling his name. Let me sleep. Wilder calling his name. Leave me be. Wilder’s face above his face, digging him out of the frozen concrete, screaming, “Say something, would you! Speak, man, would you speak!” Wilder gets a grip under an armpit and pulls Devin’s torso out and upright, then grabs both of his arms and drags his friend out of the frozen tomb. Devin is flopped on his back, face splintered with ice, the skin beneath a deathly blue. “Sit up, man. Try to sit up. Sit up would you goddamn you!” But Devin doesn’t move and now Wilder is pummeling him, yelling again and again to wake up goddamn you wake up.

  Devin opens his eyes.

  “Where’s my sunglasses at?” he says. “My friggin’ gloves?”

  * * *

  THE POWDERY tail of the avalanche scattered everyone about camp like an army of insects come out from under an upturned rock. Its buffeting wind flattened two of the tents, and sent the third one over the cliff along with several toppled cartons of supplies that had been the walls of the makeshift kitchen. Who knows where the tarp was lofted off to.

  When Devin and Wilder straggled in they found people stunned and completely encrusted with snow, all lurching about like mummies. Adams looked especially spooked, having just seen Sara arise from out of a mound of white powder, as though she were being hatched from an egg.

  The whirlwind and barrage of spindrift left snow in everything. Snow was wedged inside boots, caked into underwear, frozen into frozen layers within every layer of their clothing. Snow pelleted their hair, was clogged into ears and up nostrils, seeped beneath eyelids. They swiped at their veiled faces, slapped at themselves. They circled about as if lost. Then, as if abruptly finding a trail sign pointing the way, they snapped to and all started digging into the flattened tents, searching frantically for dry clothing before they iced up completely.

  After a change of clothes, Adams surveyed the shambles, collecting broken poles and stakes. Troy and Reddy uncovered a coil of rope and used it to downclimb the scarp in search of the lost tent. Karma ordered Pasang to take charge of the porters, directing them to gather and shuttle and resettle the camp beside the shelter of a rock wall several hundred yards away. The sirdar Sherpa pressed his temples, feeling only the cold flesh of his fingertips against the cold flesh of his face, the single yellow tab he had left to him now lost in the blast of snow.

  Down at Base Camp, Vida and Mingma and the few porters with them had burst out of their tents when they heard the explosion. They looked up to see a colossal white cloud balloon and volute down the mountain, a discharge ending in a fabulous display of cannonading ballistics, leaving a funnel of snow dust in the wake, like a great plume of cold breath.

  “Come in, Advanced Camp,” Vida said.

  Reddy’s voice sputtered through the scratch and the static.

  “Oscar Kilo,” he said. “All okay.”

  * * *

  AS WE are, so is Mysterium. For that which fires all is no more and no less than restiveness and insatiety. Gravity, petrology, orogeny, performance, attainment, acquirement: none of it flamed by content. Mountains will court and pursue; men will let themselves be wooed and tempted afresh. For the stars, for the mountains, for the seas, for humankind, there is only will, only drive.

  Nature cares not for the being, only for the species.

  The world is a sublimely callous place.

  6.

  THE SUMMIT

  No one wanted to talk about it. For if they were to talk about it they would need to call upon logic and reason. They would have to tally the risk, reckon the drawbacks, rethink the reward. And all would necessarily conclude that there was only one intelligent choice and only one thing to do: Leave. Call it quits. Get off the mountain. Go down now.

  But no one would speak of retreat.

  A threshold crossed, they cast their gazes to the zenith.

  * * *

  THE MORNING is without cloud-form or wind-blow or portent of any kind as the crusaders ready themselves for the climb up the couloir and on to Camp I. Adams and Karma, Wilder and Devin and Sara gather their equipage. They clip on, buckle in, gird up, declare their goodbyes, leaving the porters and embers of the morning cookfire behind. The first steep stretch of the hump they now call the Bobsled, a moniker in honor of Devin Reddy’s calamitous ride down the masticating declivity. They laugh as they cant up the alabaster bank, entitled now to wisecrack about it.

  Troy and Reddy had the day prior set out ahead to establish the higher camp, aiming for the crest of one of the mountain’s prominent white bones so as to settle them at a roost of twenty-one-thousand-plus feet in altitude, a site they would name in tribute to their leader: Camp I now christened Adams’ Rib. The two had passed through the snow-shed funnel of the Bobsled and from there had made their way up and over the bergschrund, walking with fanatical care and prayerful delicacy across the frozen ocean of broken waves and gaping ice that had severed from the head of the glacier. They sidetracked cataracts of seracs and skirted fathomless crevasses in a world without code or plumb or plane. They punched through a pasture of snow rollers and finger drifts in crust knee-deep that brought them to the base of the thousand-foot slope. They tiptoed up the precipitous rib on the front points of crampons, hammering the picks of their ice axes into deep turquoise ice, Reddy leading the first seventy-degree pitch, anchoring pickets and flukes along the way, belaying Troy up to lead the next section of vertical. Blood surged through their arteries and veins in hard-won joy. They were doing some real climbing now.

  Adams had over the past week talked about the options for the various summit teams. It was agreed that Reddy and Troy should try for the top in tandem, Adams then joining forces with them to make it a trio. Wilder and Devin and Sara would triplet up and form the other team. This would have left Karma to choose between which of the two groups he would accompany, going with the vigor of youth or with the wisdom of the elders, if the sirdar Sherpa hadn’t decided to say nay to the summit either way. Without the squares of yellow to affix to his face, he would assist the
others only to the highest camp. The single question remaining was which team would have the first chance to make it to the top of Mysterium, a thought lingering in the minds of Reddy and Troy as they rested on the crest of Adams’ Rib, taking hungry sucks of the miserly air.

  The pair stood high upon a glimmering white scimitar two thousand feet below the northeast shoulder. Not far ahead was a tranche of snowy ground wide enough to erect two small high-altitude tents, the platform safe from any kind of snowy barrage, so high were they perched and away from possible avalanche. Past what would be the campsite, the crest thinned out to a long precarious knife-edge, this stretch a test they would face in order to get onto the farmost glacier and up onto the cold bald slopes of the mountain’s formidable collarbones.

  They laid the ground sheet out and spread the sack of tent over it, assembled the poles and slipped the skeleton through the nylon sleeving, then raised the whole of the body and pulled out the guy ropes and planted the stakes to taut it all in place. They worked together in their usual mode of practiced efficiency, knowing without speaking the next step of the routine, knowing too, without speaking, the progress made toward their vainglorious aim. What speaks to them is ahead of them. And once they have reached the zenith there will be a new search for the next wreath of laurels, another crown yet to be taken, the men’s linear goals turned a circling. The way of absurd heroes, you may say, rolling a mythical stone.

  * * *

  A CRYSTAL cold morning turns into the scorching bake of midday. The sun’s incinerating beams reflected off snow hinder them all, but especially trouble their leader. Karma urges him to make use of the oxygen, despite Adams’s resistance to expending precious supplies of it. “A few might need this crutch only as we near the apogee,” he said. “Or for spells of serious illness. However, most of us should likely not require it at all.”

  Eschew bottled oxygen as aid to the top; all in the party had agreed.

  But now it is otherwise.

  “We need you sharp as you can be,” says Troy.

  Adams, admitting responsibility to the expedition, fits the canister onto his back, snugs the mask over his face. Karma adjusts the regulator, and Adams starts out once again, his crampons sounding like grinding teeth as he proceeds across the icy derm. Breathing in the gas does bring relief from the dizzying altitude and insufferable fatigue, but still the furnace of sun slows his progress. He remains at the tail of the cordée the entire day.

  As Adams trudges up the toilsome field of hip-deep snow he realizes the measure of his fervor has diminished over the years, as he supposes is the case for his general lack of inclination toward many other things. He is not certain, or perhaps he simply cannot too well recollect, what lure has led him thus far today, other than having been charmed by Miss Sarasvati Troy, though he has a vague notion it may have to do with wanting something back he once had. Ardor, could be, or simply gaiety. Or perhaps, and more seriously, a deep wish to achieve some lasting state of grace.

  He misses his wife terribly. Of this, there is no doubt.

  Adams raises his head and looks up to the line of climbers crawling along the steep ridge in the clear and deathly air. They are, if you will, but mites on a lioness, fleas on a grizzly, lice on a great white whale. He sees them toiling upward. Before them is a white cross, a pillared patch of light beside the sun that meets the curvature of pure earth. What is this phenomenon called? He no longer summons nouns without effort.

  Deep breaths of the bottled oxygen.

  Step, breath, step, breath, plant, step, breath. Rest.

  He knows he is slow. He senses he is no longer needed.

  Parhelion.

  Hooray! Rest. He would laugh if there were air enough.

  He looks in wonder at the vastness of his environs, at the delirious emptiness that encompasses him: a frigid and limitless sky, barren pastures of slick white. Is it the place, or something within himself that besets him with a sense of utter loneliness? Some nameless anxiety has tempered the future. In the scale of his surroundings, he is reduced. Or is it time that has demoted him? His heart rattles like a cheap prize inside the skeletal coffers of his chest. He cannot remember the gulf of such moods when he stepped upon these ridges and cols a quarter century ago.

  Not so.

  There was a palpable sadness or, perhaps, more a remorse that dampened some of the grandeur he and Hilman had captured when standing at the top of Mysterium. Once home, he had tried to describe the regret to his wife. Hillary was in the kitchen pouring kibble into a dog bowl; he remembers this like yesterday. He explained to her that what he had come up against at the summit might be akin to the contrition experienced by elephant hunters. Despite the thrill, the arduous chase, the necessary strength and endurance, the marksmanship needed, the bounty of the ivory that awaits, there is a feeling of sacrilege as one watches the great bulk shudder and collapse in a huff of dust. Hillary stood hugging the dog bowl, the dog prancing about her feet as she studied her husband’s eyes.

  He and Hilman had started down the slippery ridge, frostbitten, exhausted, oxygen depleted, and despite some odd letdown, ravenous for more adventure. It was the heyday of climbing, no doubt about it, and both were caught in the thrill of further record-breaking undertakings. Men had time again after another big war and were once more out eagerly claiming virgin summits, poking their flags into the icy skins of the world’s most onerous prominences, for want of other things to master. Some would be heroes again for their countries. A few, better loved.

  The world, of course, had changed, what with aluminum ladders and fixed lines de rigueur, and with all the highly paid guides for those clients eager to climb just about anything that might add to image and name. Alas, the earth has long since been ravaged and befouled. Clients! Are we not all of us doomed by such terms? Base Camp at Everest, so it’s been said, is now a motley city of nylon-domed abodes surrounded by piles of empty oxygen cylinders and heaps of frozen excrement. What was the word for the latter? Wait. It will come. Adams plants his axe, as if to loosen the peculiar curlicues of his worn brain. He checks the gauge of his oxygen tank, refits the mask. Frozen fecaloma? Close, but not it. At least Mysterium has kept a measure of purity, barely touched as she is. Yet what heroism will there be for anyone on this expedition? Doing what has already been done.

  Coprolith? Or something near it.

  How the mind wanders for the wanderer.

  Adams looks up to see the line of roped climbers tilted into the wind, twines of white dust ghosting about them. If Sara is roped in the middle with Wilder in the lead, surely Reddy’s son will be tied in right behind her. She and Devin are obviously ready to take the plunge. “Be bold and free,” Adams heard Sara say to her beau, words that would surely turn a young man’s doubts and fears to a promontory of certainty and desire, given a loveful girl like herself. Is such sweetness and light in a human to be believed? Why not? And as to her words, yes, and absolutely: be bold and free. For those who work to forge and form know the longing to push into worlds unexplored, and so discover something new, if only about themselves. In that lies the detonating spark.

  Meltwater inside the body of the glacier travels subterranean paths beneath his feet, emitting an eerie harmonic sound. There is a word for this melancholic resonance, he is sure of it. He refits his goggles.

  Skirl!

  Yes. He is getting quicker.

  Snow particles sparkle and waft about him like angelic dust, stellars of icy crystals becoming tiny mirrors of the miracle of existence. Sun spokes fan out from the core of hot star in which they are born, piercing the figures up on the ridge with a singular radiant shaft, burning the entire line of climbers away in a flaming light. Adams foreheads his goggles, wipes his eyes. The group reappears, yet he sees they are hardly moving. Perhaps they have stopped to drink, or stopped for breath. Then he sees one of them rising balloon-like above the others, hovering there in the air, as if with wings. How is such a trick accomplished? He pulls the binoculars out of his jac
ket pocket to sharpen and zoom what he sees. Sara is in the lead, she the bright patch in the snow at the start of the line, Devin roped directly behind her as expected, and then, lastly, Wilder. They are clearly together with feet solidly planted upon the frozen ground. But Karma? Where is Karma? Adams scans the slope. He must radio Vida back at Base Camp this evening; inquire as to whether the Sherpa has made the higher camp. He shall tell her too of the image of one of the party levitating, so to amuse her. There have been crazier tricks of the retina reported at these heights. He feels the delicate wobble of the earth on its axis, his boot soles giving beneath his feet. He digs a heel in. Plants the axe. Squints in the prismed light. He breathes. There are, he knows, many ways for the story to go, possibilities spiraling out this way and that in a burst of dumb chance. There will be a birthday this trip, an anniversary, guaranteed. With any luck, no serious injury or further fatality. He is here to see the story through. Fate shuffles, we play. Who can say? Buy gold and flee?

  Be bold and free!

  “Hilman, my friend, I have got it!”

  * * *

  SARA LEADS the way across the frozen plateau, Devin roped behind her, Wilder at the tail of the line, the mountain a marmoreal palace rising beside them. Wending their way up the outer edge of a glacial corrie, the climbers are decelerated and diminished within the immensity of the landscape, their long-humped shadows clinging ancient and reptilian to their clawed feet, the icy firma beneath making a brittle sound like the crackling of branches, or a snapping of frangible bones. They move through a numbing wonderland of tottering blocks and shattered slab, seracs erratic and titanic as buildings, any of them boding to any moment topple their icy tonnage and come crashing down as the glacier courses seaward in actual measure each day. Fangs of icicles threaten to bite a rope or sever a limb in two, and funnels of frozen holes, moulins unforgiving of any slip, alert a simple willingness to swallow any or all of the careless. A bristling maze of crevasses appears through a swirl of ice dust, some of the vertical fissures narrow enough to step across, others gaping like gangrenous wounds, black and hellishly deep, a few insidious, like cancerous ulcers hidden beneath a thin gauzing. All about are the ghastly and the ravishing, the horrible and the beautiful, the fascinens, the tremendum, all of that which appalls and is sublime, and none of any of it lost to them as they move through the tors of this purgatorial world.