Travels

by Michael Crichton

  “How’re your feet?”

  “Blocks of ice.”

  A pause, and then she says, “Listen, let’s go back.”

  I am shocked. This woman who has so much energy, is so much in control of her body, now wants to quit. She’s had it. She wants to quit.

  “Listen,” she says, “I’m not embarrassed to say we got to seventeen thousand feet and then quit. We’re not in shape. Seventeen thousand is damned good.”

  I don’t know what to say. She’s right. I think it over.

  Loren continues quickly, “It’s insane to be doing this. There’s no reason to be doing this. It’s some kind of crazy proving of ourselves—for what? Who cares? Really. Let’s go back. We’ll tell everyone we climbed it. Who will know? It won’t matter. Nobody will ever know.”

  All I can think is: I’ll know.

  And I think a lot of other things, about not being a quitter, and how I think that quitting is contagious, that once you start to quit it spreads through your life—but that’s sports talk, coaching talk, I’m not sure I believe it.

  What I believe is, I’ll know. I feel trapped by an inner honesty I didn’t know I had.

  “I want to keep going,” I say.

  “Why?” she says. “Why is it so important to you to get to the top of some stupid mountain?”

  “I’m here now, I might as well do it,” I say. It sounds evasive. The fact is, I have no better answer. I have put up with a lot of pain and a lot of anxiety to get this far, and now I am in a cave in predawn darkness within a few hours of the summit, and there is no way I am going to quit now.

  “Michael, this is crazy,” she says.

  The others are filing out of the cave, resuming their ascent. I get to my feet.

  “Just go one more hour,” I say. “You can make it another hour. Then, if you still want to go back, we will.” I figure in another hour it will be dawn, and everything will seem better to her, and she will be encouraged to go on. I figure she’ll never quit if she knows that I am continuing.

  And I am continuing. I surprise myself with my own strength and conviction.

  Dawn is a beautiful prismatic band that throws the jagged peak of Mawenzi into relief. I tell myself I should pause for a moment to enjoy it. I can’t. I tell myself I should pause and take a picture of it, so I can enjoy the picture later. I can’t even take a picture. I have lost the ability to do anything that some animal part of my brain judges to be nonessential energetic movement. It is not necessary to take a picture. I don’t take one.

  A few thoughts enter my awareness anyway. I have never seen a sky so indigo-black. It looks like the sky from space pictures—and I realize that it should, that I am now more than three miles above the surface of the earth, and the normal blue sky, created by atmosphere and suspended dust, is gone.

  The other thing is that the horizon is curved. There is no doubt about it. Sunrise is an arc that bends down at the sides. I can see with my own eyes that I am standing on a spherical planet. But the actual sensation is uncomfortable, as if I am viewing the world through one of those curving wide-angle lenses. I look away.

  I put one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. I lean on my walking stick and breathe and keep my rhythm. I wait for the air to warm; eventually it does, a little. At least I can see where I am walking. But when I look up, the summit seems far away. Most of the other climbers are farther along, and their bright jackets contrast with the beige scree of the volcano.

  “Scree” is a geological term for small cinders of volcanic origin. We are walking up, ankle-deep in scree. It is like walking on a vertical beach. You take two steps up, and slide one step back. Two steps up, one back. The destination never comes any nearer.

  Two hours after sunrise is the worst time for me. I am utterly exhausted, and I am suddenly aware, looking at the climbers farther up the slopes, that they are walking like mountaineers in a National Geographic special. One of those movies where the intrepid climbers plod through the snow, head down, with a dogged, deliberate rhythm. Step, breathe, breathe. Step, breathe, breathe.

  The hikers above me are moving like that. And so am I. I have become a character in a television special. I am totally out of my element. Loren is right—I never expected it would be this hard. I’m not cut out for this. I’m not in shape for this. I’m not interested in doing this, now or ever again. Who cares about this climbing business anyway? A million people have already climbed Kilimanjaro, there’s nothing special to it. There’s no real accomplishment. It’s no big deal.

  My guide, Julius, sees that I am fatigued. He offers to push me. I tell him no. He offers to push Loren, and she agrees, and he stands behind her with his arms on her waist and pushes her up the slope. But it doesn’t seem to me that he helps Loren. It seems to me that you have to do this one alone.

  Pretty soon Loren tells Julius to stop pushing her, and she continues by herself. She doesn’t seem to be aware of me any more, although we are only a few feet apart. She is lost in some private world of focused effort.

  I am trying to figure out what is going on inside my head. I have begun to understand that climbing at altitude is a mental process, an exercise in concentration and will. I notice that some thoughts sap my energy, but others allow me to continue for five or ten minutes without stopping. I am trying to figure out which thoughts work best.

  To my surprise, the mental pep talks (“You can do it, you’re doing great, keep up the good work”) don’t help. They just provoke the counter-thought that I am kidding myself and will ultimately fail.

  Nor does focusing on my rhythm, my pace, counting my steps or my breathing, going for a kind of mindlessness. That just puts everything into mental neutrality, which is not bad, but not particularly good, either.

  Equally surprising, to focus on my exhaustion is not deleterious. I can think, God, my legs ache, I don’t think I can lift them another step, and it doesn’t slow me down. It’s the truth, and my legs don’t feel worse just because I think the truth.

  In the end, what seems to work is to think of a nice warm swimming pool in California. Or the nice beer and curry dinner I will have when I get back to civilization. Hawaiian palm trees and surf. Scuba diving. Something far from my present surroundings. A pleasant fantasy or daydream.

  So I think about swimming pools and palm trees as I plod up the gritty scree. Around 8:00 a.m. Julius begins to show concern. Already people are coming down from the summit—I resent them deeply—and Julius wants to make sure we reach the top before any bad weather closes in. I ask him how far away the summit is. He says forty-five minutes.

  He has been saying forty-five minutes for the last two hours.

  In a way, it’s not his fault. The higher slopes of Kilimanjaro provide a bizarrely undramatic perspective. It’s like the view an ant would have on the outside of an overturned salad bowl—all you see is a curved surface that gets narrower as you approach the top, but otherwise looks pretty much the same all the time.

  It’s very dramatic to be there, because your body can feel the steepness of the ascent, and it is dizzying to look up to climbers above you. But it doesn’t look like much at all.

  Julius begins to urge us onward, bribing us with chocolate bars, threatening us with clouds. He needn’t bother. We are going as fast as we possibly can, and finally, around 9:00 a.m., we arrive at Gillman’s Point, marked by a small concrete plaque at 18,700 feet. Although the actual summit, Uhuru Point, is at 19,340 feet, most hikers stop at Gillman’s Point and consider honor satisfied. I certainly do.

  I stand on the summit, pose for pictures, read the plaque, and look at the flags and mementos left by previous climbing groups. I stare indifferently at the views. I’m not elated, I’m not self-satisfied, I’m not anything. I’m just here at the summit. I have gotten here after all, and now I’m here.

  Loren tells me I have gotten her to the top, and I tell her she did it herself. We take pictures of each other. And all the while I keep thinking one thing: I a
m here. I got here.

  I am at the summit of Kilimanjaro.

  Shrieking at the top of our lungs, we ski down the scree in our boots, sometimes falling, laughing, then sliding on the seat of our pants. It has taken us seven hours to make the ascent from Kibo Hut; we’re back down in an hour. From Kibo, we walk another ten miles across the saddle. The threatened bad weather finally arrives, with intermittent snow and sleet. Finally we reach Horombo Hut, where we spend the night. All together we have walked eighteen miles since 2:00 a.m. that morning.

  That night, at the huts, I inspect my feet. When I pull my boots off, my socks are stained red. I quickly pull the boots back on. My injuries don’t matter now anyway. Tomorrow night we will be back at the hotel. Loren comes up with a small mirror, laughs, asks if I want to see how I look; I say sure. I have not seen myself in four days. I stare at a dirty face with a scraggly beard, red skin, bloodshot eyes. In the tiny mirror, it is the face of a stranger.

  Some local entrepreneur at Horombo Hut is selling Tusker beer for five dollars a bottle, and he has plenty of takers. Paul and Jan have one, and so do I. I go almost immediately to sleep, around 5:00 p.m.

  The following day I discover that climbing down a mountain calls upon a whole other set of muscles; my legs are trembling before lunch. I also discover that, while my heel blisters are rested by the descent, my toe blisters now hurt fiercely. So coming down is not easier on my feet.

  Although we retrace our route exactly, I am surprised by how different the views appear on the way back. In part, this is a standard trekker’s discovery: any route looks different going and coming. But in part it is my own sense of having succeeded in climbing the mountain. I feel different.

  In the hotel, the bathwater turns opaque black. We each take two baths, trying to get clean. Sitting on the hotel bed, I peel off my socks and moleskin and finally take a good look at my feet. The blisters are open, exposing great patches of bleeding, raw, dirty skin around the heels up to the anklebone. My feet are so bad I make Loren take pictures of them, but they turn out like pictures in medical textbooks and I later throw them away.

  For a couple of years afterward, the skin of my feet remained discolored, and if I was at the beach, or had my shoes off, people would say, “What’s the matter with your heels? They’re funny-colored,” and I then would start to explain about climbing the mountain, and they would get an odd look in their eyes, and I would stop talking. Eventually I never talked about climbing the mountain.

  What I learned was this: that I had defined myself as a person who didn’t like heights or cold, a person who didn’t like to be dirty, a person who didn’t like physical exertion or discomfort. And here I had spent five days cold, dirty, and exhausted; I had lost twenty pounds; and I had had a wonderful experience.

  I realized then that I had defined myself too narrowly.

  The experience of climbing Kilimanjaro affected me so powerfully that, for a long time afterward, if I caught myself saying, “I’m not a person who likes to do that activity, eat that food, listen to that music,” I would automatically go out and do what I imagined I didn’t like. Generally I found I was wrong about myself—I liked what I thought I wouldn’t like. And even if I didn’t like the particular experience, I learned I liked having new experiences.

  Second, although I am tall, I had always secretly defined myself as a physically weak and somewhat sickly person. After climbing Kilimanjaro, I had to acknowledge that I was mentally and physically tough. I was forced to redefine myself. Climbing the mountain was the hardest thing I had ever done, physically, in my life, but I had done it.

  Of course, part of the reason it was hard was that I had approached it like a damned fool. I was not in shape and not prepared, and I refused to listen to anybody.

  Now it seems inconceivable to me that I had no inkling what was in store for me, no idea what exertion was implied by an eighteen-thousand-foot summit, no idea about proper conditioning and equipment. So much of my behavior looks to be deliberately unconscious, designed to give me a shocking, hard experience. It certainly was that. And it was an experience that I didn’t fully appreciate for years afterward.

  But at the time it just left me flat. After we had taken our baths, and Loren had photographed my heels for posterity, we got dressed and walked to the polished dining room. Paul and Jan were eating silently at one table; other climbers at others. We felt a camaraderie as we sat down to eat. We were very tired, far more tired than hungry, but we were also away in some special world reserved for exhausted athletes, a world in which triumph is muted, the gains countered by the costs.

  At another table, a family stared at us curiously. I knew they were going to climb tomorrow morning, and they wanted to know what it was like.

  I thought, What can I tell them? I can’t tell them what it’s really like. What would be the point of that? I found myself looking away, hoping they wouldn’t ask.

  The father: “Did you climb the mountain?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “You make it to the top, both of you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A silence. “How is it up there?”

  It’s good, I said to them. It’s hard but it’s good. Some days are very hard, but it’s good. Just do a day at a time. It’s good.

  They stared at me. I knew that stare. They were trying to figure out why I was so flat. I didn’t care. Tomorrow they would find out for themselves, and the climb would mean whatever it meant to them.

  When we walked back to our room after dinner, the sun was just fading. Kilimanjaro hung above the garden like a pale, reddish, disembodied ghost. Unearthly. Unreal. Already unreal.

  The next day we flew to Nairobi.

  Pyramid of the Magician

  Dawn appears as a yellow band over the Yucatán jungle horizon, as I climb the steep Pyramid of the Magician and look out over the extensive Mayan ruins of Uxmal.

  It is an extraordinary sight to watch the rising sun illuminate the pale buildings of that ancient city. Guidebook in hand, I pick out the sights. Directly before me stands the white courtyard structure known as the Nunnery. To the west, the great tiered House of the Governor, which has been called the single most magnificent building ever erected in the Americas. Near it, the House of the Turtles and the House of the Pigeons. And beyond, the humped green shapes of more ruins still to be uncovered in the surrounding jungle.

  At dawn, Uxmal is deserted. The tourists still sleep; an occasional parrot cries, but for the most part the jungle landscape is silent. The city before me is serene, yet I feel anxious.

  Looking straight down the Pyramid of the Magician, with its nearly vertical incline of steps, is dizzying. But even more disorienting is the recognition of where you really are, for Uxmal is a great mystery.

  The pyramid on which I stand is an oval structure, 125 feet high. It is called either the Pyramid of the Magician or sometimes the Pyramid of the Dwarf, for reasons that are unclear. The Nunnery and the House of the Governor are names applied by convention; the ruins already bore those names when archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens stayed in them, in 1841.

  The House of the Turtles is named for a row of turtles on its façade. The House of the Pigeons is so named because its roof suggests a dovecote. But no one knows what those buildings were really called, or what went on in them. No one has any idea at all.

  It is easy to become anxious atop the pyramid, for I am looking at extensive ruins that no one understands. Uxmal is a city fifty miles from the ocean and a hundred miles from Chichén Itzá. Why was it built here? How does it relate to other Mayan cities? How many people lived in this great complex, which records date to A.D. 987? What was this city for?

  The night before, I had watched the sound-and-light show at Uxmal, similar to sound-and-light productions elsewhere in the world, only here the narration artfully concealed from the audience exactly how little was known. Uxmal was not a French château or an Egyptian pyramid. There was no clear chronology, no well-understood purpos
e. Rulers could not be named, their edicts could not be quoted, histories of construction could not be cited. Uxmal was an utterly mysterious ruin. Sitting there watching the colorful play of lights on the buildings, I felt a sort of conspiracy among the audience, a conspiracy not to acknowledge the depth of the ignorance. It was almost intolerable to look at this vast complex and to admit that we didn’t know about it. We had to know. It was too large for us not to know. Uxmal is not a detail, not a footnote to history. It’s a big, impressive city.

  How can we not know all about it?

  I watched the sun rise over the buildings. The jungle grew warm. An hour later the first tourists begin to arrive, walking through the ruins, guidebooks in hand. They read confidently about the rules of the ball games that were played in the ball courts, and the meaning of various ceremonies and human sacrifices. They read the date of founding of Uxmal and they read that its Late Classic architectural style is termed decadent. Sources of information are never cited. Visitors are not reminded that scholars cannot easily read the hieroglyphs the guidebooks so glibly summarize. Nor are they reminded that scholars do not know how this ancient temple-building civilization of the Mayas arose, why it flourished, or why it died. Such reminders would be unnerving. Nobody on vacation wants to walk through a great ruined city and be told, “We know nothing about this place.”

  But the truth is, we don’t know.

  * * *

  The closer one looks at history, the less coherent it becomes. From a distance, from the chapter headings of a textbook, history looks very tidy indeed. But on closer inspection it all breaks down. The Dark Ages weren’t dark; it is hard to be sure what the Middle Ages stood in the middle of; the Renaissance is as much a birth as a rebirth. Anyway, these headings only apply to European history, a small fragment of world history. Things were different in other parts of the globe, and in other cultural traditions.

  For the most part, the constructions we make of our own past are invisible to us. The interpretations themselves become real. Nowhere is this clearer than in the interpretations we place on the artifacts of prehistory and early history. When we look at ancient ruins, our beliefs are manufactured whole. At Knossos, on Crete, Arthur Evans found a ruin he called the Palace of King Minos. Tourists have dutifully tramped through it ever since. Yet there is no clear evidence that Knossos was a palace, or that King Minos—if he was a historical figure—had anything to do with its construction or its habitation. Similarly, the story of Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Troy is endlessly retold. But Schliemann merely found a previously unknown city in Asia Minor. There is no evidence that Schliemann found Troy. There is no compelling evidence that Troy ever existed, except in the imagination of a poet.