So neither Bourdillon nor Norgay earned much fame from their achievement. However, the skills of Sherpa climbers had forever been proven, and when Bourdillon and his British compatriots turned their attention to an attempt upon the Wheel, it seemed only obvious that they should enlist the aid of the Sherpas once again. In 1956, thus, the British Wheel Expedition was formed, and when, late in that year, over a hundred climbers and support staff were landed on Theodolite Isle, thirty of them were Sherpa climbers, led by Tenzing Norgay.
The expedition, the largest that had made an assault upon the Wheel up until that point, was not, of course, aiming for the mountain’s summit, which was far out of reach for the technology of the day. Their aim was instead the famous Black Band, a landmark on the West Face which stands at just over ten thousand metres. This was more than a kilometre higher than the summit of Everest, higher than anyone else had ever climbed, and would push the limits of the basic oxygen equipment available to the climbers to the utmost limit.
In the event, the expedition would meet with mixed success. One of its climbers, New Zealander Edmund Hillary, indeed reached the top of the Band to set a new record for altitude. (True, there is some debate as to that, but let’s let it stand for now.) Alas, he then died on the descent, his body never to be recovered. But whatever the expedition’s achievements, they were attained without the help of any of the Sherpa, for by that stage all thirty of them had gone home to Nepal.
What happened?
The Sherpa began the climb, sure enough. In the preparatory stages of landing at Bligh Cove and getting the expedition gear up to Base Camp on the Plateau at five thousand metres, the Sherpa climbers were as active as any other. However, once Base Camp was established and the expedition readied for the harder ascent towards the Black Band, the Sherpa, through their spokesman Tenzing Norgay, requested to be excused.
Expedition management was astounded. The Sherpa wanted to go home, just when the exciting climbing was about to start? What on earth was wrong? Was there a problem with their wages, their food, their camp accommodation?
None of that, answered Norgay, we just don’t want to climb here, thank you.
Pleaded management: But why not?
We don’t like this mountain, said Norgay. It is not a mountain as we know other mountains. It is something else.
Which only flabbergasted management all the more. What did he mean, not a mountain? Of course the Wheel was a mountain. Look at the damn thing, it was biggest bloody mountain in the world.
No, answered Norgay calmly. Chomolungma is the biggest mountain in the world. (Chomolungma is the Tibetan name for Mount Everest, translated as Mother of the World.) The biggest true mountain. It can be a cruel mother, as we know, who have suffered upon its slopes. But it is a mountain as other mountains are mountains. The Wheel is not.
Management: All right, what is it then, if not a mountain, for heaven’s sake?
Norgay: That I do not know. But I have climbed upon it enough now to know that I recognise nothing here, I do not feel at home here, I sense no kinship from the stone and snow and ice here, as I do at home in the Himalayas. The Wheel is alien to me, to all of us, and we do not wish to remain here.
Management: Is it that you’ve lost your nerve, is the Wheel just too big for you?
Norgay: To not fear a mountain is to be a fool. But it is not fear driving us now. The rest of you may succeed here or you may not, I don’t know. But I will not stay here. None of us will.
And from that position Norgay and the rest of the Sherpa would not be budged. After some weeks of argument and stalemate they were duly shipped home, and the expedition continued without them.
So, what did Norgay mean?
How can the Wheel not be a mountain, as other mountains are?
Was it a philosophical or religious position? The Sherpa are Buddhists, but that doesn’t necessarily explain it. Buddhism’s relationship with the natural landscape is a complex one, sometimes with moral overtones, but there’s little in Buddhism that would suggest that parts of the natural world can be declared not of the natural world.
So it seems that Norgay and the other Sherpa were talking only as climbers, as roamers in the high places of the world, as lovers of the thin air and the freezing cold. They rejected the Wheel as mountaineers, refusing it categorisation. Which brings us back to the same question. How is the highest mountain in the world not a mountain at all?
It’s a riddle that remains unanswered, even twenty years later. Norgay and his compatriots have seldom spoken of it since, and all younger Sherpa, when they are offered, as Richman offered, the chance to go climbing on the Wheel, only shrug and answer much as did Norgay. We have no interest in that place.
But whatever the solution, it is most certainly not that the Sherpa were or are afraid of the Wheel. Fear does not rule the Sherpa climbers. To this day in their homeland they prove that by continuing to climb and die on the pitiless slopes of their Mother Everest.
Indeed, consider this. The Sherpa climbers risk all for a summit which to the rest of mankind is the lesser challenge, a second-prize peak. While climbers on the Wheel ascend to fame and fortune, the Sherpa labour in thankless obscurity. So who, really, is the braver?
15
THE LIGHTNING ROOM
Richman’s private quarters lay behind a secret door.
The door was accessed from the Library, which Rita had already explored with Clara. It was a welcoming, windowless cavern to the rear of the Saloon. Walls of tall bookshelves rose on every hand, laden with leather-bound volumes—antiques, Clara had explained to Rita, collected by Richman for their age and rarity. Moveable ladders set on rails gave access to the upper shelves, and here and there arched alcoves formed inviting reading rooms lit by dim lamps.
But Richman led Rita and the others through all this without a glance, and so came to a final alcove that was backed by a bookcase filled with especially fine-looking red-leather-bound tomes. The arched entry to the alcove was flanked by two life-size marble busts that were positioned atop solid wooden pedestals.
‘Do you recognise them?’ Richman asked Rita.
Rita looked for a moment at one bust and then the other, but aside from noting that both of the faces were male, she was at a loss. They might have been any historic figures from the ages.
Richman nodded. ‘They’re mountain climbers. This one is George Mallory, and this one Edmund Hillary. They were two of the great pioneers in the early days of climbing on the Wheel. Each climbed the highest that anyone had ever climbed in their own eras. Mallory made it to almost nine thousand metres in the nineteen thirties, and Hillary made it over ten thousand metres in the nineteen fifties. Both of them died on the mountain, sadly, but what they achieved was still incredible, given the primitive equipment available at the time.’
The names meant nothing to Rita. But then, she was no climber.
Richman grinned suddenly. ‘Now watch this. I got the idea from the old TV version of Batman. Couldn’t resist.’
He pushed on the forehead of the right-hand bust—Edmund Hillary. The entire likeness tilted back on a hinge to reveal a glass panel set flat atop the pedestal. Richman pressed his thumb to the glass, and in response, the rear bookshelf of the alcove slid smoothly and silently aside. Beyond waited what was evidently an elevator car.
‘Just a little joke,’ Richman said, as the others murmured laughter. ‘Still, it’s not bad as security either, having a secret door. Of course, even if someone knows the secret, they’d still need their prints on file to get in. Apart from this elevator, the only other way up to the Cottage is via the Terrace, and that door is print-activated too.’
They were all filing into the car, spacious even with the six of them. On the panelled wall, a brass plaque bore three buttons only. The bottom one was marked Staff and presumably descended to some lower domestic level. The middle said Library and the top, Cottage. Richman pressed the top button, and the door slid shut.
They rose in silence, the
lift mechanism barely a hum in the background. A sense of unreality possessed Rita. This quiet elevator car, the people she was with, the whole last three hours she had spent—it was impossible to believe that it was happening not in some luxury city hotel, but rather in a fantasy palace carved from a mountaintop far away in the wilds of the Southern Ocean. It was just too strange.
But when the car slowed and stopped, and the door opened, the mountain wilderness was all too apparent once more.
To one side a threshold led into the Cottage proper, but Rita’s gaze went to the opposite wall. This was made of glass and overlooked the Terrace, which was lit now only by a glow coming through the windows of the Atrium dome underneath. Beyond, windblown and unearthly, the night waited, a gulf of nothing around the mountaintop.
‘Christ,’ Rita had to say, going to the glass and staring down. Beside her, an airlock door opened to the top of the stairway that ran down to the Terrace. The weather display, she noted, was glowing orange for caution, no doubt because of the gale blowing, though out across the bare court below the only evidence of the wind was the swift ripples that were sheeting across the darkened surface of the pool.
‘It’s something, isn’t it,’ said Richman at her side. ‘It’s one of my favourite views, even though you can’t see the Wheel from here. Makes you feel you’re flying above the Mount.’
It did, and for an instant Rita’s gaze lifted from the Terrace to the night all around, and like a flash she was staring through the transparent walls of the plane on the LA flight, and seeing all over again the monstrous presences that called the middle skies their home.
‘Anyway, come on through,’ her host was saying. Suppressing a shiver and a passing weakness in her knees, Rita turned away and followed the others through the inner threshold.
What lay beyond was … well, if not exactly the open plan living area of a typical family house, done in a kind of neo-American Ranch style, then it was something not wildly distant from that.
The space was unevenly ovoid, mirroring the shape of the tooth of stone from which the Cottage had been dug. There was a sunken lounge area with couches set before a brightly burning fire; a dining area, railed off, containing a table and a timber bar; and backing it all was a spacious and gorgeously appointed kitchen.
‘My home,’ the billionaire said simply to Rita.
It did indeed look homely, certainly as compared to the vast splendour of the great halls below; a retreat that spoke of privacy and casual ease. Not an average home, sure enough, not with its unique shape and the raw stone of the walls; not with furniture that was of the very finest leather; not with a kitchen that glowed with state-of-the-art appliances; and not with the tall windows that opened all around, dark now, but which would no doubt offer staggering views by day—but even so.
Richman didn’t linger. ‘This way,’ he said, leading Rita and the others across the living area. ‘Still three floors to go yet.’
In the centre of the room rose an ornate ironwork scaffold with a narrow elevator car held within. It was in the style of the old-fashioned elevators found in Victorian-era hotels or apartment blocks, perhaps a genuine antique rescued from some grand building of the past. Around the elevator ran a staircase of matching wrought-iron, likewise ascending. They took the stairs. One level up they came to a landing from which two hallways extended. ‘This is the family floor,’ Richman expounded to Rita. ‘It has three bedroom suites, one each for the kids.’ They kept climbing. ‘And this floor,’ he added as they reached the next level, ‘houses my own suite and my private office.’
The stairs and elevator both terminated here. Doors opened from either side of a broad landing, but both were shut. At one end of the landing a picture window occupied the entire wall, the glass dark now, but if Rita had her reckoning right it faced to the Wheel and by day it would offer yet another amazing vista. And at the landing’s other end a final narrow set of stairs spiralled up to—
To what?
‘This way,’ said Richman, going to the stairs. He wore an anticipatory smile, matched, Rita noticed, by some of the others.
‘The Lightning Room?’ she asked.
The billionaire only beckoned her upwards. The stairs curved into the solid rock of the ceiling, and then into blackness. It was like climbing the turret of a medieval castle. Dim lights in the walls grew dimmer as they rose, and after several turns they came to a heavy curtain hanging across the way. Beyond was near darkness, aside from a barely discernible fluorescence that outlined the steps to prevent tripping. ‘Just a little further now,’ came the voice of Richman, sepulchral.
They circled one more time about the shaft, and then—
Then they stepped into the open night, into midair, into a sky flung with stars, onto a platform that had no roof and no walls or rails on any side, only the gulf and the fall to ruin. Rita’s legs almost buckled as the realisation and terror reared in her. There’d been no warning! No one had told her that they were venturing out onto such an exposed aerie, naked to the night and the wind and the freezing air—
Except, it was still warm. There was no wind—that is, she could hear it moaning and thrumming close by, but she could not feel it on her face—and around her the others were chuckling.
Glass, she realised, it was all glass. Now that she looked for it, outlined against the stars was a gossamer framework in which the panes must reside, reaching up and overheard in a vault.
The terror slipped away, replaced by wonderment. She was standing on the pinnacle of the Mount, like a climber who had just achieved the summit, two thousand eight hundred metres above the sea, and there was nothing, north, south, east or west, to hold back the sky.
And what a sky! She turned in place, staring up. The wind still roared and sang, but there were no clouds anymore, no shred of fog to obscure the heavens, and stars were everywhere, undimmed by any rival light, for there was no moon, and a shoulder of the Mount’s peak blocked any light from the Observatory below. Such was the clarity in the heavens that it seemed to Rita that even faint nebulas were visible, cobwebs against the bright scatter. But most spectacular, nearing the zenith, was the sash of the Milky Way, somehow three-dimensional in its proximity and shot through with pinpoints of red and green and blue.
And matching the Milky Way for vastness and glory, rising from the east to meet it almost overhead, was the Wheel. The great mountain was illuminated only by the starlight, but even so an ethereal green glow seemed to infuse its appalling faces of stone and ice. Perhaps it was an actual glow, some pale but gargantuan version of St Elmo’s fire, or perhaps it was some type of aurora effect, here so near to the Antarctic. But either way, there the Wheel stood, a titan with its snout tilted to the sky, the shrouds of earlier all blown away.
Gazing up, still not sure if she felt only wonder or maybe also dread, Rita became aware of the others moving around in the darkness. Some were even sinking down; why, they were sitting. Yes, with her eyes slowly adjusting to the night, she could see now, there were armchairs scattered about the glassed-in chamber. There was even a large low shadow that must be a bed. Richman could sleep up here if he chose, with the infinite stars for a roof, like camping in a tent of glass.
‘Well,’ Richman asked, a tall shape at her shoulder. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s incredible,’ she answered, quite honestly. ‘But … why the Lightning Room?’
A dark arm rose, pointed. ‘You see that?’ He was indicating the peak of the spider’s web of framework that supported the glass. The structure, and indeed the room beneath it, must have been near to ten metres across, rising to a point high above them. There the lines converged, and a solid spike arrowed up stiffly.
‘That’s a lightning rod,’ Richman said.
‘You mean, lightning hits right there?’
The shadow at her side was nodding. ‘This whole room is a Faraday cage—and believe me, it’s necessary. Storms hit the Mount all the time, the Wheel seems to breed them, and the Mount is a li
ghtning magnet. You realise that you are on the peak. Apart from the tunnel to give access, and the erection of the glasshouse, very little was done up here, aside from smoothing a few lumps out to level the floor.’
The sense of nakedness assailed Rita again. To be exposed on such a high loft, with no more protection than glass …
Richman laughed quietly. ‘But don’t worry, that’s not just any old glass. It’s quadruple-glazed to keep out the cold, and proof against wind and rain and even hail. And that frame might look like it’s made of nothing, but in fact it’s constructed from a special metal superalloy, one of the toughest substances in the world, which is why it can be so thin.’
She swallowed. ‘And you’ve really seen lightning hit?’
It was another shadow, from one of the chairs, who answered: Eugene. ‘Hell, yes. I set up a surge detector to monitor how often exactly. In the four months I’ve had it running, we’ve had two hundred direct strikes up here. For any given storm, it averages five or six hits.’
‘I’ve been up here at the time,’ Richman confirmed. ‘It’s something you’ve got to see, to hear, to feel, if you hope to believe it. The clouds, the updrafts, the electrical imbalances building, you’re right in it, and then, boom, the world ignites … but you’re completely safe every second. The rod links to a metal cable which grounds directly to rock.’ A queasy sensation flipped Rita’s stomach. Completely safe? With storm clouds forming around you? With lighting striking a few feet above your head? Oh, she remembered enough of science lessons to know that it was true, that the strike would be safely grounded by the rod into the bedrock of the mountain, harmless to anyone inside.
The Rich Man’s House Page 16