Descent

by Roland Smith

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One: Descent

  Lama Roost

  Smoke

  And Then There Were Three

  Bāyī

  Chinese Takeout

  Choices

  Buildering

  Adrift

  Aspire

  The Intwinsible

  The Present Intense

  Part Two: Pemako

  Snickers

  Work Is Prayer

  The Library

  Bats in the Belfry

  By Other Means

  The Roost Run

  Monk Pack

  Chanda

  Sacred Numbers

  So Far So Good

  Part Three: Go Out and Do Good Things

  The Route

  Pursuit

  On Our Own

  Panic Bear

  The Good Thing

  High Noon

  Leaving

  Home

  Read More from the Peak Marcello Adventure series

  Find Your Story

  More Books from HMH Teen

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Copyright © 2020 by Roland Smith

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Cover illustration © 2020 JIMMY CHIN/National Geographic Creative

  Cover photographs: climbers © Galen Rowell/Corbis; mountains © Gordon Wiltsie/Getty Images/National Geographic

  Cover design by Cara Llewellyn and Francis Floro

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smith, Roland, 1951– author.

  Title: Descent / Roland Smith.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2020] | Series: A Peak Marcello adventure | Audience: Ages 12 and up. | Audience: Grades 7–9. | Summary: “Mountain-climbing prodigy Peak Marcello faces his toughest challenge yet as he descends into Tibet and goes head-to-head with an old enemy.”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019048786 (print) | LCCN 2019048787 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544859760 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358056027 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Mountaineering—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Fathers and sons—Fiction. | Tibet Autonomous Region (China)—Fiction. | China—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S65766 As 2018 (print) | LCC PZ7.S65766 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048786

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048787

  v1.0920

  As she has planted, so does she harvest; such is the field of karma.

  Sri Guru Granth Sahi

  If you’re really a mean person, you’re going to come back as a fly and eat poop.

  Kurt Cobain

  Part One

  Descent

  Lama Roost

  We are at the northern base of Hkakabo Razi.

  Tough descent.

  No one dead.

  Grateful.

  Relieved.

  Sore.

  Tired.

  Now all we have to do is get out of Tibet . . .

  I’m sitting on a narrow ledge outside a cave above a long, steep talus slope writing in this journal. The talus boulders are as big as basketballs here, and unstable. The sun is up. The pikas are chattering in the golden mist. I’ve watched these tiny creatures on every talus slope I’ve ever been on. They look like large mice, but they are actually in the rabbit family. They spend their summers gathering food into miniature haystacks, which they feed on during the winter when the talus is buried deep beneath the snow.

  chirp . . . chirp . . . chirp . . .

  They call back and forth across the slope, alerting each other to the presence of an intruder, which I guess is me, or maybe Zopa, who worked his way down the treacherous talus just before sunrise and disappeared into the jungle a couple of minutes before I opened this journal.

  I’d asked him where he was going. He shrugged (his reply to almost every question), then said, “You will find me. No worries, as your father is always saying.”

  Typical Zopa. The mystery monk. But he was right about my dad. “No worries” is Joshua Wood’s version of a shrug.

  Zopa led us to the cave late last night. It was pitch dark and snowing. Our headlamps were giving out. We barely had enough light to see where to place our boots on the slippery ledge. Zopa seemed to know where the cave was, as if he’d been to it a thousand times before, which was impossible. We descended Hkakabo Razi into Tibet along an unknown route, at least by our group, including Zopa. He told us that he had felt the cave hours before we reached it, another impossibility, or impossible for all but Zopa to understand.

  I was up before light, feeling a little claustrophobic with Zopa; our Sherpas, Yogi and Yash; our videographer, Jack; my dad; and me lying head to foot in the small cave like canned fish. I couldn’t breathe, and it wasn’t the altitude. We’re at ten thousand feet here. I think. I don’t have my GPS watch or any gizmos. We gave them all to Jack to carry until we could get them charged. With the batteries drained, they were dead weight, and Jack has padded cases to keep electronics from getting wrecked.

  I thought I had left the rainforest behind me in Myanmar. But looking down the slope now, all I see is rainforest. From where I’m sitting, the green tangle looks impenetrable. It’s going to be another sweaty trudge through a hideous jungle.

  When we reached the cave last night, despite the late hour and our exhaustion, none of us were ready to sleep. Yash and Yogi started a fire to heat the meager remains of our food supply. Zopa explained that the cave was used by Buddhists for meditation. He called it a lama roost.

  Jack was eager to review the footage of us climbing Hkakabo Razi. The cold had compromised his battery packs. He was afraid that if he didn’t use them they would be dead by morning and he’d have to wait until he got back to the States to see what he had gotten.

  Initially, I had been completely against filming our climb, but I had changed my mind because of Josh. He needed Jack’s documentary for his reputation and business, Peak Experience (not named after me).

  Zopa said that he didn’t want to watch the footage because he had already walked every foot of the climb. He found a ledge in the corner of the cave, folded himself into a lotus position, then closed his eyes in meditation, or maybe sleep. With Zopa, you never know.

  We sat around Jack’s tablet as we ate rice and drank tea, watching ourselves climb. Most of the footage had been taken with a drone. The elevated wide-angle shots made the climb look more difficult and dangerous than it actually was, but we’d had our moments.

  My moment was being buried alive by an avalanche, which Jack played back for us in slow motion. We had a bird’s-eye view of the snow and ice sweeping down the mountainside like a frozen tsunami and the frantic search for me beneath the debris. My teammates’ panic was nothing compared to mine as I tried to dig my way out of the icy grave with my friend Ethan’s spoon. I’m sure this horrible memory had something to do with my waking up in the cave with claustrophobia and a sense of smothering dread.

  The hardest part of the climb was getting to the mountain, long before Zopa, Josh, Jack, Yogi, and Yash joined me. It took Alessia, Ethan, and me weeks to get through the rainforest, none of which was going to appear in Josh and Jack’s documentary. But that’s the way it usually is with climbing documentaries. Suddenly, the intrepid, brave climbers appear on the mountai
n out of nowhere as if God dropped them from the sky. From my experience, getting to the mountain is more interesting than climbing it.

  On the way to Hkakabo Razi, Alessia came down with malaria. I thought she was going to die. We got lost. We hired a homicidal elephant handler, or mahout, and his temporarily insane elephant to haul our gear. We were rescued by an Australian botanist. We met a precious gemstone dealer named Chin, whom Zopa had saved from an avalanche decades earlier. We were arrested by the Burmese military. And then things really got bad . . . The mad mahout shot Ethan in the head with a slingshot. Our new friend Chin flew Ethan and Alessia to Yangon in his helicopter, where Ethan underwent emergency brain surgery (not that brain surgery isn’t always an emergency).

  I had tried to check in with Alessia several times during our descent into Tibet, without any luck. I tried to call again last night when we reached the cave, but I couldn’t get a signal and there was very little juice in the sat phone. I just hope Ethan isn’t dead. No climb is worth the death of a friend. I don’t know what I would do if Ethan has . . .

  Smoke

  “What’s happening?”

  I nearly fell off the ledge. Josh had come up behind me without a sound.

  “Sorry,” Josh said, laughing. “I should have cleared my throat or coughed or spit or something. It would be a shame to lose you after the climb is over.”

  He sat down next to me. I closed my journal.

  “Your mom tells me you’re a pretty good writer.”

  I shrugged.

  Josh smiled. “Don’t go all Zopa on me.”

  I laughed. “I’m not that good of a writer. Maybe someday. I couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d catch up on my journal.”

  Josh reached into his pocket and pulled out a small digital recorder. “This is how I keep my journal.”

  He handed it to me. The battery indicator was full. “This is the only gizmo we have that has juice.”

  “I haven’t had much chance to use it here, but there’s plenty of ramblings on it from my seven summits try.”

  It wasn’t a try. He had smashed the world record for topping the highest peaks on all seven continents before showing up to climb Hkakabo Razi with me. I think one of the reasons he had climbed with me after that exhausting task was to confess his biggest secret. My dad, Joshua Wood, arguably the greatest climber in the world, could not read or write. Which explained why he had never responded to my letters. Something that had bothered me for years.

  “So, what do you do with your ramblings?”

  “Sometimes I listen to them, but mostly I file them away. I have thousands of hours of me babbling on. I guess, like a lot of climbers, I want to leave something behind in case I fall off a mountain, not that anyone would be interested.”

  False modesty. He knew as well as I did that a lot of people would be interested. “I’m interested,” I said, playing along.

  “I figured you would be. The recordings are stored on my laptop in Chiang Mai. When I get back home, I’ll send them to you.”

  “I’d like that. And when you learn to read, I’ll send you my journals.”

  Josh grinned. “Deal.”

  I tried to give the digital recorder back, but he shook his head. “Nah, you keep it. We’ll call it a down payment on our sacred pact. And speaking of sacred things, where’s Zopa?”

  “He took off.” I pointed at the green tangle at the bottom of the talus.

  “Did you ask him where he was going?”

  “Yeah. What do you think his answer was?”

  “He shrugged.”

  “More or less. He said he’d find us.”

  “I’m sure he will,” Josh said. “I wonder why he brought us here.”

  I reminded him that we weren’t able to return the way we had ascended because of the avalanche and the weather.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Josh said. “Every step Zopa takes has a purpose. Something is up. I guarantee it.”

  “What might be up is yours and Zopa’s arrest by the Chinese government. We’re in Tibet.”

  Tibet was Tibet in name only. The Chinese had taken over the country in 1951 in what they called a “peaceful liberation.” The Tibetans have a different take on what happened, calling it “the Chinese invasion of Tibet.” The bottom line is that Tibet is now, for all intents and purposes, China, a country where both Josh and Zopa are wanted criminals for violating permit requirements on the northern side of Everest. They helped Zopa’s grandson, Sun-jo, summit Everest, making him the youngest person, and a “free” Tibetan, to top the mountain. The record has since been broken, but not before Sun-jo received several lucrative endorsement deals from climbing gear companies, making it possible for him and his two sisters to continue their education.

  The permit violations were minor offenses. Josh and Zopa’s major offense, technically not illegal, was embarrassing the Chinese government. They were forbidden to set foot inside Chinese territory.

  “No worries,” Josh said. “We’ll be gone before they know we’re here. As far as anyone knows I’m in seclusion at my house in Chiang Mai recuperating after my seven summits climb.”

  Josh lived in northern Thailand in a big house with a private climbing gym in the backyard. I’d never been to his house, but I’d been hoping to go there on this trip. Looking down at the jungle, and the long trek before us, that didn’t look too likely now.

  Jack came out of the cave, squinting at the bright sunlight.

  “Morning,” he croaked.

  He didn’t look very good. “Are you sick?”

  “I don’t think so. Just tired. Didn’t sleep well. What’s the plan?”

  I pointed downhill. “We head into the jungle, find a road, and if we’re lucky, some kind of transportation to a city with an airport.”

  “Sounds good to me. Hopefully some food, too. Yash and Yogi are scraping together the last grains of rice for breakfast. Looks like we’ll get two spoonfuls each.”

  * * *

  It turned out to be three spoonfuls each, and we were picking our way down the loose talus within minutes of the pathetic meal. A cloud of insects engulfed us as we approached the jungle. We stripped out of our cold-weather clothes and stuffed them into our packs, where I found my machete. I couldn’t believe I’d hauled it to the top of Hkakabo Razi and down.

  Josh laughed when he saw it. “The guy with the machete leads the way.”

  “Fine with me. But which way?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Where did Zopa break through?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I should have paid closer attention to where he was when he disappeared into the tangle.”

  “No worries. Here’s just as good as anywhere else. But if we don’t find a trail or road in the next couple of days, we’ll probably starve to death.”

  With that happy thought, I took my first swing at the Tibetan rainforest, which wasn’t much different from the rainforest on the other side of the mountain. Hot, humid, and sharp, but after our long trek through Myanmar, I was used to it, and was actually enjoying myself. Kind of.

  An hour later Yash took over the machete, followed by Yogi, Josh, then me again. Jack was too busy gagging on insects to be much help with the slashing. It takes a while to get used to the jungle—in my case it took several weeks. There was no sign of Zopa. If he was close by, he couldn’t help but hear us. We sounded like a herd of stampeding elephants. How had he gotten through this mess without a machete? After several hours we stopped to rest, which is what the insects had been waiting for. They went into a feeding frenzy and we were the main course.

  “I say we go back to the cave and just die there,” Jack suggested, vainly trying to keep the bugs from biting him.

  It wasn’t a bad suggestion. There was no food in the cave, but there was water. We could live for a couple of weeks without food, but only a few days without water. And the cave was relatively insect-free. If we got desperate, we could always start eating pikas. In Myanmar, I had popped a mouthful of snake into my m
outh, which made me puke, but a roasted pika might go down easier.

  “It’s worth considering,” Josh said, spitting out several bugs.

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.” I wasn’t in charge, but I was probably the most acclimated to jungle misery. One thing that I had learned is that the tropical rainforest is always changing. You’ll be dragging yourself along, thinking your suffering will never end, then stumble into a clearing of staggering beauty with a pool of cool water and a refreshing breeze.

  “We’re no more than a mile from the talus,” I continued. “I think we should push on a little farther.”

  I’m not sure why I was so adamant about this, but I had a feeling that we shouldn’t give up quite yet, which made me smile. Maybe some of Zopa was rubbing off on me. He said he would find . . . no, he didn’t say that. He said: “You’ll find me.” A shiver went down the back of my neck like I had a big spider crawling there. I brushed at it. Nothing there but sweat and grime. Weird. I gulped some water, thinking that I must be getting a little dehydrated, then pulled my binoculars and compass out of my pack.

  “I don’t think those are going to do you a lot of good here,” Jack said. “We can’t see more than ten feet ahead.”

  “Yeah, I . . .” I looked up at the thick canopy. “I’m not using them down here. I’m using them up top. It’s time to climb a tree and figure out where we are.”

  I had climbed dozens of giant trees in Myanmar, collecting samples for Nick the botanist—payback for guiding us to the base of Hkakabo Razi.

  “You want company?” Josh asked.

  “You’re welcome to tag along, but I’m going to fast climb.”

  “I’m sure it will be difficult,” Josh said, sarcastically. “But I’ll give it my best.”

  I grinned. “It’s harder than you think.”

  We started up on opposite sides of the same tree. Josh was with me for the first hundred feet, but then I blew ahead of him. It’s easy to pick the wrong route. I’d lost a dozen tree races against Alessia and Ethan. And I was lucky in my tree pick. The top was a good forty feet above the canopy, which stretched to the north for as far as I could see without any visible gaps or signs of civilization. We still might have to return to the cave and eat pika snacks.