by Roland Smith
Ha. Ha. Ha.
After a while I got the swing of it, literally, because it was all in the swing and the release. It finally stuck about twenty feet up the wall, which wasn’t far, but enough to get me started.
When I reached the grapple, I had a heck of a time unsticking it. I tried to throw it again and nearly got peeled off the wall. Enough grappling! I decided to free climb. I would use the rope and grapple on the way down with Duga’s mom.
The wall was pretty rotten. Huge rocks came loose on almost every reach. It was hard to believe that the guides had gotten her up here without killing her and themselves. But that was ten years ago. It could have been different guides. Maybe they’d had better climbing chops. Or maybe the wall had changed. A lot could happen to rock in ten years. That fissure at the hot springs had closed shut within a few hours.
It was nice to have the basket rope to follow, but I was getting a little concerned about how high this roost was. I had to be close to a hundred feet up, and there was no end to the rope above. Duga said his mom was in one of the highest roosts, but this was ridiculous. The green monk’s rope wasn’t nearly long enough to get her to the ground. It was going to take me four, or maybe five, separate pitches. After each one I would have to secure her, climb back up, free the grapple, and climb back down. It might be better to wait for more rope to show up and try to do it in one drop with Josh, or Yash, or me next to Chanda every inch of the way to make sure she didn’t bang her head on every rock and root and branch on the way down.
One rotten foot- and handhold at a time, I finally got above the mist. The sun was low in the sky, but there was enough radiant heat to dry the face, which made the climb a little easier. After another twenty minutes, I reached the rim of the cave entrance, out of breath and drenched in sweat.
There was a narrow shelf outside the entrance, maybe three feet wide and two feet deep, covered in bird guano. Probably some kind of raptor, maybe an eagle. I had been a little leery of eagles ever since a pair of them had tried to pluck me off a wall in the Pamirs. As I caught my breath on the ledge, I scanned the sky for large dark forms. There weren’t any. I had a good view of the accordion-like hills below. The cave was exposed. A chopper couldn’t miss an orange clad monk on the ledge if it happened by at the wrong moment, or a panting climber on his knees trying to catch his ragged breath. I needed to get inside, which looked impossible from where I was kneeling. It was more of a slit than an opening. I doubted an eagle could squeeze through. One good thing was that if a helicopter pilot saw it, he’d never believe there was a lama on the other side. If it hadn’t been for the basket rope disappearing inside, I wouldn’t have believed it either.
I unslung the grapple rope and took off my pack. I was going to have to slither through, which I was not looking forward to. After being buried alive on Hkakabo Razi not too long ago, I had a dread of closed, tight places. I put on my headlamp and took a closer look through the crack, hoping it wasn’t deep. There was no light coming from the cavern, or whatever lay beyond the opening. It looked like it was going to be a long crawl, or scoot, and I was going to have to wiggle through on my back.
Before I lost my nerve, I flipped over and started pulling myself through. It felt like the entry was a hundred yards long. Turns out it was only about twenty-five feet. It is weird how fear and imagination distorts distance and time. I felt I was pulling myself into an ancient tomb, getting ready to defile the dead, but here I was, and it wasn’t what I expected. It was a cone-shaped cavern with two small circular openings at the top with shafts of light shining through all the way to the stone floor like spotlights. In the center of the cavern were the remains of a campfire, the ashes cold to the touch. Next to the fire was a small pile of supplies. A bowl of cooked rice, a box of green tea, a jar of honey, and a pile of beeswax candles. All of it untouched as if it had been hastily dumped out of the basket so she could lower her note.
To the right of the fire at the base of the wall was a pool fed by a trickle of water seeping through a crack in the rock. On the opposite side of the pool was a thin bamboo mat covered with a pile of rumpled blankets. I walked over to the sleeping mat. Hidden among the blankets was a woman with a shaved head. She was no bigger than a young child. Her eyes were closed. Her skin was ashen. She didn’t appear to be breathing. I had arrived at the roost too late. It was a tomb.
Chanda
Even in her emaciated state, Chanda was beautiful. She looked younger than I thought she would. I sat there for a long time staring at her, feeling horrible for Duga’s loss and my failure. I gently covered her face with a thin blanket.
I stood. Now what? Water. I was as thirsty as I’d ever been in my life. The sun was hitting the surface of the pool just right, and I saw my reflection. I looked a little haggard and grimy from the climb, but my hair had grown out to a respectable length, and most of my insect bites were gone.
Narcissus, I thought with disgust, and looked away from myself. There was a cup sitting next to the pool. I filled and drained it serval times before my thirst was quenched. The only thing to do now was to climb down or pull the basket up and lower a note to tell them what had happened and ask them what they wanted me to do, which seemed practical, but coldhearted. I wouldn’t want to find out that my mother had died from a scrap of paper in the bottom of a basket. But if I stayed in the roost, I could pull their line up with the basket rope and lower Chanda down, saving them a difficult ascent. I looked over at the sleeping mat. Somehow it didn’t seem right to leave her alone. It was hard to know what to do. Then I heard a moan. I hurried over to the sleeping pad and pulled the blanket back. Chanda looked the same. Eyes closed, skin the color of ash, completely still. She was as cold as the rock walls of her roost. The sound I’d heard must have been the wind. I put my index and middle fingers on her carotid artery, and I felt a slight bump. More like a flutter. I thought it was my imagination, then I felt it again. She had a pulse—weak, but it was there.
Her eyes opened and she smiled. She had beautiful brown eyes.
“Hello,” I said.
“You are English?”
“American. My name is Peak. I’m a friend of Duga’s.”
“I would like water.”
I took her empty glass over to the pool, filled it, and brought it back. I gently lifted her head, shocked at how light she was. It was like holding a bird in my hand. I put the rim of the cup to her pale lips. She took a sip.
“I’m going to give you a little more. You’re dehydrated.”
She took half a gulp. “Help is on the way,” I said. “I’m taking you down from the roost.”
“I will not be able to help you. I am very weak.”
“That’s okay. In fact, that’s good. Just try to relax on the way down. I’ll take care of everything,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt.
I gave her a final drink of water, then squeezed back out through the entrance. I started to retrieve the basket. I needed it and the rope for this crazy idea I had for getting her to the ground. It took a while to pull the basket up. When I finally got it reeled in, I cut the rope and coiled it. I emptied out my pack and stuffed the basket into the bottom. It fit perfectly. I pulled it back out and cut two holes in the bottom of my pack, and matching holes in the bottom of the basket, then put it back in the pack. Weirdly, I had gotten this idea on one of my flights from New York to Myanmar, which seemed like decades ago. I didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to use it, but here I was in Tibet trying it out.
I grabbed the rope and crawled back through the entrance. I was so focused on the task at hand, the earlier claustrophobia slipped my mind. Chanda was out again. I didn’t bother to feel for a pulse. Whether she was dead or alive, I was going to have to get her down with the least amount of damage. I dragged the mat over to the entrance with her on it and tied the rope to the corners. I crawled back through the entrance, then pulled the sleeping mat out onto the ledge. Now for the hard part . . . well, hard parts. I looked at my repurposed
backpack and made some adjustments.
I had seen a man and woman on a flight with children strapped to their bodies. The kids weren’t babies. They were five or six years old, each strapped to a parent’s chest as if they were ready for a tandem skydive. I thought it looked ridiculous, but not anymore, because I was about to do the same thing with an adult monk. I wouldn’t have even considered it if Chanda hadn’t been so tiny. She was bigger than the two kids, but I doubted she weighed more than they did.
I had no intention of carrying Chanda on my chest, though. I was going to haul her on my back so I could protect her from the rock face. I’d have to figure out how to tie her in so her arms and legs weren’t flopping around and so she didn’t fall out. It was probably a good thing that she wasn’t conscious. It was going to be a terrifying descent, and fast, because we were losing our light.
I lined the basket with one of her blankets so she didn’t get torn up by the rough bamboo, then I put her thin legs through the holes in the bottom of my pack, which was a little embarrassing. It was like putting shorts on a complete stranger. I cinched her in the rig as best I could. Now all I had to do was get her on my back. I’d hauled much heavier loads, but I couldn’t swing the pack onto my back without giving her whiplash. I sat down with my back to her and gently lay down, trying not to crush her. I put my arms through the straps, tightened them, then sat back up very slowly. I made a couple more strap adjustments and got to my feet. Now I had a monk on my back. There was nothing I could do about her dangling legs, but I had to do something about her limp arms flopping around. They were so thin that I was afraid they might snap on the way down. I cut a piece of rope, draped her arms over my shoulders, and tied her wrists in front of me.
The green monk’s rope wasn’t nearly long enough to get to the ground. It would take several pitches to get down. The problem was going to be retrieving the rope between pitches. The monk’s rope was a climbing rope (obviously a monastery import), and the grapple was made from tempered steel (another import). My plan was to use the basket rope to unstick the grapple in between pitches. I wasn’t sure this would work, but it was my only choice. My sequence would be rappel, stop, anchor, retrieve, anchor, rappel, stop . . . and so on until I reached the ground, making sure the grapple didn’t impale us as it hurtled down from above.
I set the grapple, tested it, threw the rope over, made a final adjustment to the monk pack, leaned out over the void, and dropped.
My favorite cartoon of all time is the one with the guy falling off a skyscraper past an office window. An office worker shouts through the window at the guy, “How’s it going?” The hurdling man smiles and shouts back, “So far so good.”
The first pitch took about forty seconds. I stopped before I ran out of rope because I saw a good anchor point. I wasn’t confident that my secondary line would free the grapple. If it failed I would have to climb back up to the roost and rethink the whole descent. The grapple popped loose with a couple of hard tugs.
So far so good.
The second pitch was also easy. The third pitch? Not so much. I freed the grapple, but it got snagged on the way down, and no matter how hard I whipped and yanked on the basket rope it didn’t give. I had to climb back up about fifty feet to untangle it, which was a little sketchy with a monk on my back. It happened again on the fourth pitch. The fifth pitch was okay. I had to yank on the grapple for several minutes, but it finally gave way. The sixth and final pitch was perfect, except that I had to descend in the dark.
I got Chanda out of the monk pack and wrapped her in the blanket before I felt for a pulse. In the light of my headlamp she looked the same as she had when I first saw her in the roost. Horrible. Eyes closed, pale, completely still. You cannot feel someone’s pulse if your own pulse is racing, and mine was sprinting with adrenaline and the relief of reaching the ground after a difficult descent. I took some deep breaths, stretched, drank a sip of water, and tried her pulse again. I felt nothing. I put my ear close to her face, hoping to feel or hear a breath.
The only sound was the wind in the trees and the night animals calling through the moonless forest. I held Chanda’s small, cold hand in mine, thinking that I had lost her.
Sacred Numbers
A familiar but out of place buzzing sound woke me. I had fallen asleep curled protectively around Chanda. It was dark, and I must have been zonked, because I couldn’t quite remember where I was. The buzzing persisted. I looked at my watch, thinking it was an alarm, or more likely a low battery warning. It was just after midnight. I’d slept for several hours. The buzzing was not coming from my watch—it was coming from my pack. The sat phone. I lunged for it. I’d forgotten it was in a side pocket. I must have left it on the last time I tried to get a signal.
“I’m here! Alessia?”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Ethan!”
“What’s left of him.”
“How are you?”
“Still a little scrambled. Sorry for the late call. I had to wait for my prison guard to nod off. He sleeps on a cot outside my door, if you can believe it. He checks in on me every hour, so I don’t have much time. I sneaked over to Alessia’s room to use her phone.”
“Put her on speaker.”
“Yeah, well, that’s why I’m calling. She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“No one knows. Or else they aren’t telling me because of my brain problem. I’m supposed to keep completely calm. That’s not exactly a natural state for me, so everyone whispers when they talk to me and smiles and never says anything interesting. They have no idea how badly that stresses me out. Anyway, a couple of days ago, there was a big dust-up here between Alessia and her mom over your current situation. We heard that the PLA was in hot pursuit of you, your dad, and Zopa.”
“It’s not the entire PLA. It’s just Shek and a few of his men.”
“You mean Captain Shek from Everest?”
“It’s Sergeant Shek from Bāyī now, but yeah, the same guy. I had the bad luck to run into him in a restaurant. They grabbed Josh, but we managed to free him. Now we’re on the run. Shek wants his captaincy back and is no doubt pretty homicidal about us springing Josh.”
“I bet. But back to the big mom-daughter fight. Alessia wanted her mom to do something about your problem, but she refused. Something about it not being a French issue and how her interfering could cause World War Three with China. And you know Alessia. She’s not the kind of person to sit around wringing her hands and worrying. She wanted to do something. I didn’t see her at all today, which has never happened. Chuck, a.k.a. Prison Guard, Wrestler, Big Nurse, and I mean huge like the Hulk, told me she went upcountry for a couple of days to visit friends. Big fat lie. I’m her bodyguard—well, I was until I got beaned, and I know that she doesn’t have friends upcountry. I was just downstairs and one of my security pals told me on the QT that Alessia ran away, presumably to help you. They haven’t had any luck finding her. Where are you, by the way?”
I thought, I’m sitting in the forest next to a monk who is about to die from malaria. Or has already died.
“Tibet,” I said.
“Still?”
“We’re having a little trouble getting over the border.”
“You better resolve that quickly. I have a doctor’s appointment at the hospital later this morning. I’ll try to make a break for it when I’m there. I have some ideas about where Alessia might have gone. I think she’s trying to find Chin and ask him for help. If I find out, I’ll call you back and give you an update. But the last time Chuck caught me with a phone he wrestled it out of my hand and half carried me back into my bedroom. The guy is a menace.”
“The signal is unreliable here.”
“I’ll leave you a voicemail if you don’t pick up. Don’t worry about me if I slur my words. If I violate the rules, and there are a lot of rules, I think my so-called nurse ups my meds. You wouldn’t believe all the pills they make me take. I’m a zombie most of the ti
me. He said if he catches me out of my room unescorted again, he will send me back to the hospital or put me in bed restraints. I’d better head back down before he checks to make sure that I’m in bed like an obedient patient. Oh, one more thing. Your mom is here. Got in last night. She’s as upset as Alessia is. Get your ass out of Tibet. It’s good to hear your voice.”
Ethan disconnected.
“My hand.” It was a whisper.
I looked down at Chanda. Her eyes were open, and I realized that I was crushing her hand. I released my iron grip.
“I’m so sorry. I just got some bad news on the phone. I didn’t realize I was—”
“Water.”
“Of course.” I held the bottle for her.
“We are down from the roost?”
I was delighted she was alive, speaking, and obviously cognizant, but it didn’t make me feel any better about all the trouble I was causing Mom and Alessia.
“Yes. We are on the ground. We’ve been here for several hours. You’re going to be taken back to the monastery.”
“More water, please.”
I gave her a few more sips.
“Is there food?”
“I’m sorry. I left the food up in the roost.”
“Was it difficult bringing me down?”
“It was easy. You don’t weigh very much.”
“I am thin and weak.”
“Maybe you should rest some more. Save your energy for the trip back to the monastery.”
“Perhaps I should, but it is so long since I have talked to someone.”
“Ten years.”
“That long? It seems so much shorter than that. Was Duga with you?”
“Yes. He went to the monastery to get help.”
