by Jeff Long
backyard cliffs either. You know how car companies like to name their cars after
power animals? Mustang, Cougar, Stingray, right? Well it's Daniel's job to do power
climbs. He gets sent around the world to all the best faces on all the best mountains.
All expenses paid. Free air, free gear, free food. And everywhere he goes, Gus goes
too, and she is something. All in all, Doc, I'd trade a few toes to be in Daniel's shoes.'
For dinner they had gray, rubbery dumplings in the cavernous dining hall built to
feed a Western tourist trade that never happened, especially after martial law. The
hall was unheated and it leaked the cold wind. Everyone was feeling the altitude, so
dinner was brief. Jorgens spoke of their need to buy Chinese stamps for the
expedition's five hundred postcards, to be signed by all the members and sent from
base camp to contributors at ten dollars apiece, the standard scheme for raising
money. Stump, their wide-bodied co-leader, promised to score the stamps in the
morning. Then everyone scraped their chairs back from the table to go off to bed, but
Li intercepted them to offer a toast.
Li explained that he'd never climbed in his life nor been to Tibet before, but he
enjoyed Americans and he enjoyed the outdoors. 'The natural world is like an
unfinished poem,' he told them. 'It needs care and labor before it reaches
completeness. You Americans understand this because of your frontier days. Tibet is
our Old West, you see. And so, from one frontiers-man to another, I say let us write a
grand poem of friendship and adventure upon our mountain.'
'Give me a break,' Carlos rumbled at the end of the table. He started to stand and
leave, but Stump caught at his jacket.
'Shut it,' Stump commanded. Carlos paused and blinked, then sat back down.
'To friendship, to the mountain.' Jorgens seconded Li's toast, and everyone but
Carlos drank a few tablespoons of scotch from their dirty teacups.
Back in the room, just before hoisting the quilt up around his shoulders, Abe peered
out the window. The moon was up and the Himalayas were stretched long and white
in the moonlight like a vast, shearing coral reef.
Abe rode the last few hours to Everest on the front seat of the front truck in their
convoy, squeezed beside Jorgens, who couldn't seem to stop remembering old
mountain stories, all of them long and involved and about himself. They were
inoffensive tales, mostly designed to excuse his age, which was fifty-four, and Abe
didn't begrudge that.
Abruptly, with a suddenness that bounced Abe against the door, the truck turned
left off the road. This was the start of what became a long grinding crawl up the Pang
La, a 16,000-foot pass bridging the Tibetan plateau and the deeper range. They were
only forty miles from Everest now, but according to Jorgens, it was going to be a
tortuous forty miles of bad roads and wild scenery. 'The Pang La's our doorway to
Everest. All ye who enter, know your soul,' he joshed.
For the next two hours, the road switched back and forth past shields of gleaming
black granite. Here and there the road evaporated altogether under fresh slide scars
only to reappear again. Not a hint of vegetation graced the bleak stony land. It was
still winter here. Hour after hour, they saw no animals, no people, no houses. No
justification for this strange highway.
'The world's highest dead end,' Jorgens declared over the whine of downshifted
gears. 'The PLA hand-constructed it in 1960. They're very proud of it. They need to
get a three-hundred-man expedition in to Everest. So they cut this road in. And they
climbed their mountain.'
It was hard to tell which Jorgens respected more, the Chinese road or their climb.
Abe wondered if Jorgens had heard Carlos's theory, that the Chinese had merely
claimed the summit in 1960 in order to cement their occupation of Tibet. It was a
claim that remained dubious, since the Chinese had supposedly summited in the dark
when photography was impossible. Further Carlos held that this road had been built
with slave labor.
For the sake of argument, and because Jorgens was in such a garrulous mood, Abe
challenged him. 'I've heard the story told little different,' he said. 'That it was Tibetans
who built this road, and with a gun at their head.'
The deep dimples in Jorgens's beard vanished. He shot a look at their driver, who
spoke pidgin Mandarin and pidgin Hindi and even pidgin Japanese, but, judging by his
blank look, no English at all. Then he turned a stern look upon Abe.
'You had a chat with Mr. Crowell, I take it.'
'We rode together,' Abe said. 'It was an education.'
'Half an education,' Jorgens qualified it. 'There's always two sides to a story.'
Abe almost spread his hands as if to disown his own remark. He hadn't meant to
trigger a confrontation. At the same time, he didn't appreciate being lectured. Jorgens
went on.
'Take the story of this road, for instance. It took a long time to build this road,' he
said. 'You may not believe this, but the Tibetan workers would stop after every
shovelful to pick the earthworms out of the dirt. Can you imagine? Every shovelful,
stop to save an earthworm's life. Talk about benighted. It drove the Chinese nuts.'
Jorgens stared out at the blank countryside. 'What a country. What a sorry
ass-backward excuse for a country. People going around day and night mumbling
prayers, worshiping stones, prostrating themselves. Frankly I think the Chinese did
these Tibetans a favor. At least these people can see a hint of the twentieth century
now.'
Abe noticed that Jorgens hadn't disputed the charge of slave labor. At best he'd put
a happy face on it. 'Sounds to me like Tibet didn't really need the twentieth century,'
Abe said.
'Tibet.' Jorgens spit the word. 'You have to understand something about this place,
then you'll understand Mr. Crowell's fixation on it. Tibet was called the forbidden
kingdom for a reason. People like us were kept out. But even when we're let in, we're
still out. We're all strangers here. And that's why people like Mr. Crowell feel so at
home here – because nobody knows Tibet, and so we can all imagine it is whatever we
want.'
After that, they rode in silence.
At the top of the Pang La, Jorgens breathed a long whistle. 'My God,' he said. 'Would
you look at this.'
It was indeed a sight. The Himalayan range lay spread before them, a tonnage of
angles and sunlight. Jorgens signaled their driver to stop. The driver scowled and
tapped his wristwatch. Jorgens waved him to a halt anyway.
A second truck pulled up and Li disembarked. Bundled in cherry-colored expedition
parkas, Thomas and Robby and J.J. Packard rose up from their nest atop the boxes
stacked in back. They moved slowly, cold and stiff. But their teeth gleamed in huge
grins and they were excited to be getting so close to the mountain.
A third truck arrived, and more people joined them. Cameras snapped and whirred.
Not a cloud adulterated the blue sky. The air was still. They were twenty miles or
more from Everest, but with the humidity content near zero, there was no haze and it
looked close enough to touch.
Even though Daniel and Gus wer
e missing, Jorgens decided it was time for 'the
Picture' – the official 'before' shot which, months later, would go with the 'after' shot in
their slide shows to prove how Everest was about to ravage them. He called one of
their Sherpas over to round out the group. They put on their best face, eight
mountaineers radiant in their shorts or jeans or Lycra tights, bellies taut, teeth white.
But while Abe steadied his bulky old Pentax on a tripod, they flexed anyway.
The most obvious as usual was J.J. Packard, who whipped off his sweatshirt to
display thick lats like a peacock in rut. He came advertised as a magnificent summit
animal, capable of squatting a quarter-ton of iron draped across his neck, but Abe
wondered. His exhibitionism and dirty blond dreadlocks aside, J.J.'s sheer bulk
seemed more likely to gobble up his oxygen capacity and leave him far behind, and
Abe was curious to see how it would go.
Next to the giant, like spidery twins, Robby Powell 'sucked cheek' in Revo
sunglasses and his buddy Thomas Case postured with a dour, foreboding frown. Both
were wearing the expedition T-shirts that Robby had compared, unkindly – it was
Jorgens's design – to a cheap supermarket tabloid. The logo showed an ice climber
peering into the neon orange cosmic reaches. The title ULTIMATE SUMMIT: EVEREST
NORDWAND galloped across the chest. Under that, in hot purple ink, the shirt bragged,
'Getting High the Hard Way!'
Kelly, their beauty queen, just cocked her head and the sun poured gold on her
Viking locks. Though she was embarrassed by her flat chest and regularly joked that
her butt looked like hams waiting to happen, Kelly was the ultimate tits-and-ass show
to ever play Everest. A schoolteacher in real life, she had consented to model on the
expedition. On her crystal blue eyes alone, magazines and cosmetic companies had
paid the Ultimate Summit $150,000. A pantyhose company had kicked in $80,000
for rights to her legs, providing darker shades to hide the scars. Her hair had gone for
another $35,000 to a shampoo maker, and her skin had fetched still more from a
tanning lotion manufacturer. The rest of their money had come through more
conventional expedition schemes such as T-shirt sales, a book contract – null and void
if they failed the summit, unless there was a death – ten-dollar 'Postcards from the
Edge,' a wristwatch endorsement, and some last-minute corporate check-kiting that
involved the venture's nonprofit status and the future profits from Jorgen's Chinese
permit for Everest the following year. Abe didn't understand it all, nor did he waste
much time inquiring.
Nima Tenzing, the top kick of their climbing Sherpas, looked as grave as a
nineteenth-century chieftain facing the lens of history. Centuries ago, the Sherpas had
migrated from their native Tibet into the high valleys south of Everest in Nepal.
They'd been 'discovered' in the 1930s by Western mountaineers in need of cheap
labor on Everest, becoming famous as 'tigers of the snow' who functioned as high
altitude Gunga Dins, capable of carrying enormous loads by day and cheerfully
delivering cups of tea each morning at dawn to their sunburned sahibs.
Back in Kathmandu, Abe had met a worn-out old Sherpa missing most of the fingers
on one hand. What it had brought to mind was not tales of Himalayan heroism but the
memory of his own father, maimed in service to an oil company that soon after fired
and forgot him. In Nepal, tourism was the number one industry, and with their good
humor and charming English and their appetite for Western fashion, these Sherpas
were less tigers than safari porters who were usually the first to get eaten by the
mountain. Just prior to the first successful ascent of Everest in 1953, Tenzing Norgay
and the team's other Sherpas had been stuck in a converted stable without a toilet
while Hillary and his comrades enjoyed the British embassy building. From then on,
the Sherpas had known their place in the scheme of things.
Glen 'Stump' Wilson, the co-leader, anchored their center. An arbitrator and
construction litigation attorney, Stump was built from the waist down like a pro
fullback. His enormous thighs were offset by what he termed 'the littlest man,' a
genuinely small penis and a lone descended gonad which Abe had seen for himself
while probing for a hernia in Kathmandu. He had climbed on Everest twice before, and
both times seen expeditions flame out because of personality disputes. 'That's not
going to happen this time,' he'd warned them, and left it at that.
To the far left stood Peter Jorgens, beaming in his salt-and-pepper beard. With his
crisp widow's peak and sunbaked crow's-feet, Jorgens looked every inch the
Hollywood alpinist. In fact he was an accountant who had somehow ascended to the
presidency of the American Alpine Club. Abe had heard that Jorgens dreamed of
becoming secretary of the interior someday, and that this expedition was meant to be
a stepping-stone to Washington. Some of the other climbers considered it funny, and
sad, too, that Jorgens had already ordered a set of vanity plates reading '29,028' – the
height of Everest – for his family Jeep.
While Abe got his tripod legs screwed tight and attached his camera, the team stood
around wisecracking and catcalling at Everest, so many apes hooting at the moon.
They were in high spirits and Abe thought it fine and promising for them to be
thumbing their noses at the monster. It meant they were ready or thought they were,
and sometimes that was the same thing.
He panned his viewfinder across the bunch, smiling to himself. Each and every one
of them was dedicated to his reputation, though in reality they all were essentially
anonymous figments of their own imaginations. They hadn't come here to buy a name
by dying on the mountain; rather they'd come to emulate those who had, miming the
hard-core giants with their brilliant teeth and their posturing in the wind.
Abe was finally ready and called to the climbers to take their places again. Kelly
moved panther-soft, her black Lycra rippling like midnight, and J.J. squeezed some
more veins to the surface, and the truck drivers gaped. Abe focused and was about to
trigger the self-timer and jump in line, when suddenly, without warning, a puff of air –
the softest of breezes – brushed their faces.
Someone groaned. It was a bad news groan and everyone turned to look at the
jagged horizon behind them.
A tiny comma of a white cloud had appeared in the sky. The cloud was nothing more
than a mare's tail – altocirrus at 35,000 feet – and it drifted silkily. It hung up there
like white ink on a cobalt canvas, a beautiful Zen master stroke.
But the little cloud was a warning and every climber there understood, all except
Abe, who didn't know this mountain's traits.
'Damn,' J.J. whispered, as if he were just now realizing a mistake.
A moment or two passed. And then the mountain sprang into life. Everest's curt left
edge released a ghostly plume.
'Snow?' Abe asked quietly.
Carlos shook his head. 'Water vapor,' he said. 'The Indian air mass is hot. And when
it hits the cold mountain, zap. Smoke.' He checked his watch, synchronizing with the
pattern. Abe did the same. It was n
ot quite two, Beijing time.
'That's not the monsoon, is it?' Abe asked.
'That?' Carlos said. 'That's just Everest. She likes to send up a flag in the afternoons.
Don't worry, Doc. The monsoon's still three months off. You'll know when it comes.
That's when we close the works and get the hell out of Dodge.'
Before their eyes, the white plume turned into a long ragged flag reaching east.
'It's probably one-ten, maybe one-twenty miles per hour up top there,' J.J. said.
'That's major air, man. Hurricane force.'
The white flag might as well have been black. It signified no quarter, nullifying the
climbers' coltish good humor. Abe took his cue from their spoiled bravado. He stowed
his grin like everyone else. Weather was everything on an Everest climb. But Abe was
handicapped, because they were half the planet removed from any skies he could
reliably read. All the same he meant to learn the patterns fast.
'That's that,' Stump called out with the enthusiasm of a man heading off for his own
execution. 'Let's knock off then and get on with the show.'
They turned their backs on the Hill. Everyone returned to the trucks.
The convoy moved down off the pass toward the floor of the Rongbuk Valley,
heading due south for Everest. As they wove back and forth down the steep,
miles-long pass, or la, Everest disappeared from view. After a half-hour, the Pang La
flattened out and the road jogged left and right through canyon walls. Soon the pass
vanished behind them, and their entrance and exit to the outside world was just a
memory.
There was a whole other world in here. If Shekar was poor, then the settlements in
the Rongbuk Valley were desperate. Poverty lay everywhere – in the soil, in the
adobe dwellings, in the children's astonishing nudity beneath the cold wind. Here and
there, little clusters of stone and adobe dwellings popped up like southwestern
pueblos. Some of the buildings were white-washed, some were banded white and
orange. The flat rooftops were ringed with sticks of firewood that must have been
brought from far away, for there was not a tree in sight. The people didn't smile from
their rock-strewn fields at the passing truckloads of climbers. They glared, then went
on with their tilling. Jorgens seemed not to register their bleak circumstances. Instead