by Don George
“Should we try it?”
“I’m willing if you are.”
“It would be incredible, to climb Kilimanjaro.”
“It takes five days to go up and come back,” Takis said. “A friend of Dad’s did it. You stay at huts along the way.”
“Well. . .”
“Yeah. Yeah, let’s do it. We may never come this way again.”
That night we radioed the Marangu Hotel, renowned to adventurers throughout the world (according to its brochure in the Amboseli Tourist Office) for the Kilimanjaro expeditions it has organized since 1948, and booked hut reservations and local assistants.
Three days later we arrived at the Marangu, where soft mattresses and continental meals stretched two nights into three. This morning, the fourth day, we stored our suitcases in a square room after brunch and drove to the park gates.
Godfriye, our guide, who had left earlier in the morning to gather the food and bedding for the climb, appears now in a red parka, patched pants and sandals, followed by his assistant guide and five porters. He is a short, sinewy man with darting eyes and a quick, high-pitched laugh.
We all shake hands. Godfriye is in his twentieth year of climbing Kilimanjaro, twice a month, eight months a year, and he looks at us and laughs. “It is good?” That seems to exhaust his English, but fortunately the brothers speak Swahili.
The other porters stamp out their cigarettes, walk toward Godfriye, and squat. He lifts the duffle bags, each weighed this morning on the veranda of the Marangu at precisely forty pounds, onto each head. They rise slowly, wobble a few steps balancing the bags, then start off with short, easy, choppy strides.
Day 1
For the first twenty minutes we walk up a tarred road, past a plaque commemorating Dr. Hans Meyer, the man who first reached Kilimanjaro’s summit in 1889. The tarmac gives way to a dirt road that could easily accommodate jeeps and trucks. We wind along this road for about an hour, surrounded by thick, lime-green bush and thorny vine and huge camphor and podo trees interspersed with pines.
Soon the path gets rougher and narrower, but still with room for two to walk side by side. The road ascends gently, the trees provide shade, and flowers, birds, and insects divert sense and thought: We might be taking a Sunday constitutional, not scaling the highest peak in Africa.
After two hours we enter a rain forest. The air is dank and gloomy, lightened infrequently by a flutter of sunlight on the leaves high overhead. It is a world of enchantment, completed by the burble of a stream that parallels the path, and recalls childhood fantasies of knights, castles, and dragons. Now the castle has become Kilimanjaro, the knight a writer, the dragons his own muscles and lungs.
I trail behind, busy with camera and notebook, and when I look ahead, the four climbers and the six porters, bags atop their heads, seem a late-night TV movie scene.
The rain forest ends in a burst of blue sky and blinding light. We come out into a field of waving wheat-colored grass. On the left, hills studded with cedar and pine roll toward the peak; on the right, Tanzania unfolds a patchwork of green and brown.
We arrive at Mandara Hut at 16:10 and sign the camp register. I feel fine except for a pulled muscle at the top of my left leg that has nagged me from the beginning, unaccountably intensifying then fading away. The climb has not been strenuous. . . has indeed been invigorating and unexpectedly beautiful.
The huts of Mandara are small, to retain heat, but still comfortable: three mattresses set like three sides of a six-foot square in wood frames on the floor, and another mattress above the middle on a shelf. We each choose a mattress and I stretch out in the musty smell.
When we had been arranging porters and provisions, the manager at the Marangu had offered a choice between their fully equipped climb and the “hard way.” Going the “hard way,” the climber is responsible for his own food and equipment, and obtains guides, porters, and hut bookings through the hotel.
For about twice the price, 820 shillings ($100) per person, the fully equipped climb provides everything. Traveling on a backpack budget, we had decided that our wants didn’t warrant the extra money, and over dinner that night, while the cold and hunger and hurt implicit in the name lingered in our minds, we had vowed to climb Kilimanjaro the “hard way.”
Now I sit back and revel while Godfriye and his assistant pour tea and spoon steaming plates of peas, beans, and corned beef.
We eat alone. As we are mopping up the beans with bread, the other climbers of the day troop in for dinner, rubbing their arms, blowing into their hands, and milling around. When they are all seated, a caterer’s army of porters and guides sweeps in with lanterns, tablecloths, dishes, silverware, and glasses, subsequently graced with soup, salad, bread with jam, meat and vegetables, and cake or fruit, with a choice of water, coffee, or tea.
“So that’s the luxury climb,” John says. “Glad we avoided that. Chrissake, we would have had to dress for dinner.”
Sunlight dims to lantern light. One of the guides starts a fire in the fireplace, everyone eats and talks and laughs, and finally cigars and cigarettes and pipes are brought out, and all prior sense of disjunction diffuses into smoke-filled air. The ascent assumes that strange logic, the appropriateness, of dream.
Day 2
Godfriye wakes us at 7:00, a rap and a yellow smile sliding past the door. “Jambo!”
The morning is cold and clear, as such mornings should be, and offers a spectacular view of the clouds shadowing Tanzania. We suck in the air, each breath a tingling reminder of nostrils and lungs, and survey trees and rocks and huts as they complete in the morning rays. I have forgotten this crisp demarcation of self and of thing that climbing confers.
We breakfast, then pack our bags, clothes, and equipment and set off at 8:00. At 10,500 feet the last pines give way to rock and scrub brush, dotted with purple lilies, miniature sunflowers, and snowflake anemones. At about 11,000 feet the bird sounds stop. Thereafter, the slopes are starkly silent except for a wind that sweeps like a scythe through the brush.
We sign in at Homboro at 13:30. The walk has made us hungry, and we gather immediately for lunch. Afterward, I lie on the hill above our hut, letting the sun massage my back and legs. To this point the ascent has seemed nothing more than a pleasant stroll.
The greatest challenge has been to establish a walking rhythm slow enough that I still advance steadily. I have never walked with such concentration before, and in so doing I have discovered three different rhythms, or “gears,” in which my body moves fluently. Accordingly, I proceed in a strangely exhilarating continuum of body control, restraining myself on the hills and shifting into a quicker coordination on the plains.
We’re at 12,335 feet. The air has cooled but the sun remains strong at this altitude, and we sit silently enjoying the combination of chill and warmth. Ahead, Uhuru turns from white to orange to crimson to a hyacinth blue.
Later that night, in the hut, I sit by the fireplace, writing and observing my fellow climbers. Germans, Austrians, French, Dutch, Belgians, and Italians . . . we could almost convene a mountainside meeting of NATO.
Most of us, about twenty-five in all, have been climbing together these two days, but a handful have descended from the top this afternoon, and it is to them we direct, whether consciously or unconsciously, our hopes and fears. How odd—and yet as always, how appropriate—to hear so many accents of English in this insular air:
“Und how vas it at tsee tope?”
“Ees eet zo vehry deefeecult az zay say?”
“Ant ze breating, eez it tso vehry hart?”
“Whaut is thear too see waunce you hauve reached the taup?”
It is 21:30. Everyone has gone to bed. I walk onto the terrace of the main hall. The air is icy, redolent with burnt wood and wet flower and fern. The stars cover the sky like a quilt laid over the mountain. No other noise. I try to imagine a car honking, a plane. Silence. Enjoy this silence, unlike any other, silence of rock and bush and star
deep in the sky.
Day 3
We leave Homboro at 8:00. Today it is clear and we can see the tin roof of Kibo Hut gleaming on the other side and far above the near rim of the summit crater.
As we begin the trek across the desolate, rock-strewn sands, I think we must look like the astronauts picking up their feet in slow motion over the surface of the moon. Despite frequent halts along the way, George and Nicos have developed headaches and stomach cramps. We have outdistanced the other climbers and we are absolutely alone: ahead the peak of Uhuru massed with clouds, behind the burnt-red sand.
George says he can’t go on, his stomach hurts so much he can’t move. John and I take him by the arms and hold him up until his legs strengthen and hold. Arm in arm we shuffle along, thoughts fixed on the reflection ahead.
We reach the camp at 14:30. Unfortunately, Kibo’s air-tight A-frames are still being constructed, and we huddle bodies and belongings in the most sturdy looking of three twenty-year-old tin shacks.
We are at 15,520 feet, and the wind howls and whistles through the hut, clanging a stray strip along the roof and shoving tea bags and socks to the floor. The temperature outside is about 10°F. The sun blazes almost directly overhead.
We wad arms and legs and spare clothing into our sleeping bags and pass the hours trying to extract warmth. Throughout the afternoon, climbers straggle into camp, numb with cold and pain, a babble of groans and complaints.
George and Nicos are miserable, Takis and John woozy, and I feel giddily strong and decide to inspect the surroundings. The wind almost pushes me over.
Clouds charge across the saddle, engulfing Uhuru and Mawenzi and Kibo Hut in the same wet, blind gray that seems to stick to clothes and walls. It is 16:30, but it could be dusk. Through the window of their shack I watch Godfriye and the porters scrunch in a corner around a fire of cardboard, can labels, wood scraps, and grass.
Could money alone make a man do this twice a month, eight months a year? Maybe him. Not me, that’s for sure. And yet he hasn’t shown any love of mountains or climbing. He has been courteously attentive and prompt, and has organized the porters flawlessly. But love? It’s probably money, I think, and go back to my sleeping bag.
Eventually John and I manage a meager dinner of bread and jam while the others sip biscuits dissolved in tea. Nearly all the climbers have complained of stomach pain or headaches, and dinner time passes in self-pitying silence. I feel all too well, however, and containing myself no longer, begin to sing.
Before long the others pluck up their spirits and join in, and we serenade the slopes of Kilimanjaro for a half hour as guides and porters appear, retreat, and appear again in ever-greater numbers at hut windows and doors.
Before I fall asleep that night my head begins to pound like the old Anacin commercial that showed a diagrammed head with a sledgehammer inside, and cold steals up from benumbed toes to ankles and calves. All of us toss and turn, none wanting to disrupt the silence, although each seeks the reassurance of shared distress.
Day 4
At 1:15 Godfriye pounds on the door. I have been living with that sound inside my head for fifteen minutes, tired and sick, focusing all my energy on getting out of bed and ready to begin walking before I can feel or reflect.
I react instantaneously, jump out of bed, and tie one boot before my fingers freeze. I sit on my hands for five minutes and tie the other boot, sloppily. The cold clings to clothes and skin.
All of us are up except George, who rolls over, groans. “Go on. I’m not going anywhere but to sleep.”
I put on another sweater, a windbreaker, gloves, and goggles. We stumble into blackness that burns our faces and freezes in our lungs.
The scree, romanticized by the half-moon, rises at a slope of about fifty-five degrees . . . loose gravel that swallows eleven inches of every twelve taken. We zigzag after Godfriye’s lantern. It is 2:05 when I look at my watch.
I slump on my walking stick, nauseated, gasping to get air into constricted lungs. Suddenly heat surges from my feet to my head, followed by a blast of cold, then nothing but my heart thumping; my arms collapse, my knees bend, and for the first time in my life I “see stars.”
Nicos decides to turn back and descends with the assistant guide. We— Takis, John, and I—continue.
Gradually I find a new rhythm, slow, heavy, careful. “Everything we’ve done has been for this,” I think, and “for this” rings in my head as seconds pass and minutes pass and foot slides past foot. 2:35. We stop. I sit on the pricking broken rocks and the sweat in my gloves and socks freezes. Thin clouds sail by like dreams, like sleep, like waking at the Marangu Hotel past the moon.
4:15. We lie inside a boulder hollowed by the wind into a cave, halfway to the top. I am too tired to talk, too tired to move, too tired to do anything but close my eyes.
Takis, who vomited before we started, has climbed with the least difficulty so far. John has already been sick twice and has just crawled back into the cave.
Walking slowly and breathing deeply has become instinctive, for when I walk too rapidly or fail to breathe deeply enough my stomach bubbles, my throat tightens, and I have to stop.
At 4:25 Godfriye leaps up. Takis has been standing for five minutes; now he walks over to us and says, “Come on! We’ve got to go now or we won’t get to the top for the sunrise.”
Oh jeezus . . . I don’t want to move. I just want to stay here and my feet and my legs and my arms and my head just lie here and sleep. . . .
We plod on, feet skidding forward, trapped in an interminable idea: climbing Kilimanjaro. Always there are lights in front, always lights behind; more to do, more we have done.
Eventually the pain stabilizes and the mind stops inspecting and only records.
At one point we pass the Germans, the first to get off this morning, slumped in silence on the side of the trail.
We arrive at Gillman’s Point—18,635 feet—as the first light of day scales the rim of the Earth. While we watch, the light leads others: Yellow, green, orange, red, blue, purple climb the sky, and the tip of the sun flares into sight. For a moment Earth and sun hang suspended in a web of light.
Alone, we lie back exhausted and content. This sunrise is ours, I think, as arms and legs go limp, something no one else has ever experienced or ever will experience.
People watch it around the world every day, and yet nothing like this—these colors, this feeling, like watching it from another world, our own world, where somewhere underneath the clouds people are doing what they do every day—I’ll never have that again.
I roll over. My God, I hurt everywhere.
“Godfriye wants to go back now,” Takis reports, shaking my shoulder. John and I have been asleep for an hour.
“Back? Back where?” John sits up. “We’ve got to go to Uhuru.”
I wince to my knees, jab my walking stick into a cleft in the rocks, and push up.
Godfriye is arguing with Takis.
“He says it’s impossible, there’s not enough time.” He wants to get back to Homboro before sunset.
“What the—? We didn’t bust our butts passing everybody on the slope for nothing. We’re going on to Uhuru, whether he wants to lead us or not.”
Godfriye listens immobile to Takis’s translation, then spurts off without a word at a pace double that of before. We follow him along the rim of the crater past three-story ice blocks and ice caves gleaming with stalagmites and stalactites twice my height. I stop every ten minutes.
I reach the summit with John after an hour and a half. We collapse by the plaque that marks the highest point on the continent.
I have never felt so terrible in my life. My head, my lungs, my stomach; thudding, straining, tightening. Everything hurts.
Sky, ice cap, and crater surround us. Unearthly clarity: the taut blue sky striped with white clouds, the black crater crags edged, distinct, demarcating the peak, the brilliant ice white, chiseled into the air, tumbling
and rolling and flowing away beyond my own sense of space and time.
Forget pain, forget worry, forget food and sleep; forget question, forget blood, forget breath.
After twenty minutes, Godfriye will say we have to leave to reach the middle hut by sundown. The next afternoon, when we reach the park gates, Godfriye will lead the three of us to the park warden, who will present us with certificates featuring sketches of Kilimanjaro and a baobab in green, black, and white, and signed by Godfriye, the park warden, and the director of Tanzania’s National Parks: “This is to certify that Mr. Donald W. George has successfully climbed Kilimanjaro 7th July 1976.”
A Night with the Ghosts of Greece
This article was written for Signature magazine in 1981. I’d visited Delos at the beginning of my fellowship year in Athens, and that trip had been one of my most moving experiences in Greece. Happily, I’d written about it at length in my journal and in letters home, so when an editor at Signature expressed interest in the piece four years later, I had freshly recorded details from the trip still at hand. Signature was a hospitable place for this piece; the editors liked articles that told a story, and gave their authors considerable literary freedom. Of all the pieces I wrote for the magazine—about Tokyo neighborhoods and Kyoto temples and little-visited islands in the Caribbean—this was my favorite, partly because spending the night on a forbidden island was such an unexpected and tantalizing subject, and partly because the circular nature of the piece, which arose organically from my experience there, really appealed to me. Beginning with this story, the notion of creating this kind of circle became a goal in my writing. When the end circles back to the beginning, I discovered, the reader sees the end/beginning in two ways: On the surface the scene looks exactly the same, and yet it is layered with all that has been lived and learned along the way.
THERE ARE NO TAVERNAS, NO DISCOTHEQUES, no pleasure boats at anchor; nor are there churches, windmills, or goatherds. Delos, three miles long and less than one mile wide, is a parched, rocky island of ruins, only fourteen miles from Mykonos, Aegean playground of the international vagabonderie. Once the center of the Panhellenic world, Delos has been uninhabited since the 1st century a.d., fulfilling a proclamation of the Delphic oracle that “no man or woman shall give birth, fall sick, or meet death on the sacred island.”