by Jeff Long
he waved heartily at the brown land. 'When we leave in June,' he said, 'these fields will
be green. The ewes will be dropping their lambs. This road will be cut by dozens of
irrigation ditches. You'll see. It'll be pretty as a picture.'
There were more ruins – old stone fortresses and monasteries and desolate villages.
The convoy crossed dry irrigation ditches, then a wide riverbed. In the summertime,
Jorgens promised, it would carry runoff 'as thick and white as sperm' from the
Rongbuk Glacier at the base of Everest. Now it held only a blue thread of water. More
hours passed and the sun stayed dangling on the southern rim. Having descended into
a valley, they now began to climb out again. The road turned menacing with deep
gullies and big gutting scree. Abe kept expecting their tires to blow out or the oil pan
to get disemboweled. Patches of ice waited in the shadows and on switchbacks. The
truck nearly high-centered on one rutted patch, then skidded on another. They crept
along at five kilometers per hour. For some reason, Abe had never imagined a truck
engine could still function at 17,000 feet. Theirs did.
The truck rounded a hillock of glacier debris. To the right and left, satellite peaks
couched a long, perfectly flush moraine. And then, from out of nowhere, Everest leapt
up before them. It seemed close, but that was the optics of high altitude and it was
still miles away. The trucks crept along toward where the valley floor quit and became
mountainside.
'There,' Jorgens pointed for their driver. At the same time Abe saw it too, a tiny
bubble of color. A moment later, the bubble became a green tent and Abe caught sight
of two miniature figures. One figure approached them. As they closed on him, the man
grew larger.
Though his head was bound with a red-checkered kaffiyeh and he looked more like
an Afghani rebel than a climber, and his eyes were covered with sunglasses, Abe
somehow recognized the man. It was Daniel, of course. He walked with wide, rolling
strides, but Abe could see the hitch in his one leg – that would be the spiral fracture;
and the exaggerated agility would be the amputated toes and scoped knees. He was
baked to copper by two weeks of Tibetan sun, and even with the daylight failing in
this deep valley his grin was an act of magnificent anarchy.
'Daniel,' Abe said aloud, greeting his own history.
Jorgens craned forward and squinted through his black horn-rims at the figure,
then at Abe. 'Good eyes,' he said.
Daniel waved the lead truck to a pause and pulled up to Abe's open window. 'Hey,
Jorgens,' he said, and reached through the window and across Abe to shake hands. It
struck Abe that he'd never heard Daniel actually speak, only howl. His voice rasped
slightly, the edge of bronchitis or a windpipe raw from the cold. 'I was starting to think
we'd have to climb without you.'
Abe looked at the paltry encampment in the distance and its other sticklike
inhabitant, then up at the huge mountain, and concluded Daniel was making a joke.
But Jorgens didn't snort his amusement and Daniel kept on grinning, and Abe wasn't
so sure after all.
Jorgens canted his head toward Abe. 'You two have met,' he said to Daniel.
Daniel backed off to get Abe in focus. He studied Abe's face for an intent minute,
then stuck his open right hand through the window to him. 'Once upon a time,' he said,
and it struck Abe that Daniel had never really seen him before. Abe's would have been
just one more face in a circle of pain.
'It was a long time ago.' Abe wasn't offended.
'Abraham Burns,' Daniel said, half to himself.
'I take it this is your pick for Base Camp,' Jorgens interrupted.
Daniel slung his face toward the distance. 'Looks like hell, doesn't it. But if we camp
over that way, the wind kills us. And over the other way, we get no sun. Gus and me,
we've spent the last week trying all the sites out. So here it is, as good as it gets.'
'Let's do it then. Show us where. We've got everything to do before night drops on
us.'
Daniel raced down off the running board, loped ahead of the truck, and then swept
his hands in a big half-acre half-moon on the ground.
The convoy circled on his geometry and came to a halt. The driver of Abe and
Jorgens's truck switched off the ignition. The cab fell silent.
'Home sweet home,' Jorgens pronounced.
Abe tried hard not to gawk. On the one hand, it looked the way it was supposed to
look, just as India had smelled the way India should smell when he'd first stepped off
the plane. But it was different, too.
Maybe he should have known better, but Abe had imagined their group would land
on Everest's soil like astronauts – or migrant workers – carrying with them
everything necessary for life where there was no life. Food, shelter, literature, even
oxygen: all of it imported. And like astronauts – or Okies – they would arrive bearing
hopes and dreams, most forcefully the dream of virgin territory, of a fresh start, of
frontier. But what Abe saw through the cracked windshield destroyed all such
sentiment and he was shocked.
At first glance, it looked like the aftermath of a gigantic New Year's Eve party with
confetti thrown across the whole landscape. Then Abe saw that it was trash, years and
years of trash. Like jackals, the wind had raided the garbage dumps of past
expeditions and cast debris across the entire moraine. Pieces of paper and plastic
clung stubbornly to rocks, hundreds of pink and blue and yellow entrails.
That wasn't the worst of it, either. Abe opened the door and hopped nimbly to the
ground and landed, literally, in shit, in the dried feces of their mountaineering
ancestors. And now Abe saw that in every direction, human and yak dung lay coiled
and dropped in random piles, each one mummified by the sun.
Wasteland, Abe thought, and immediately filed the pun for his slide shows. But the
filth and desolation kept on hitting at his mind. It was so unexpected.
Daniel breezed past, hustling to get the trucks unloaded and camp set up. 'Welcome
to paradise,' he said without a trace of irony.
None of the other climbers seemed fazed. If anything, the trash lent a festive spirit
to the place and people seemed energized by the emptiness of this Himalayan
clearing. Abe looked around, groping to get his bearings. When he finally did move, he
moved slowly. He wasn't the only one. In contrast to the Sherpas, most of the
climbers looked clumsy and crippled by the altitude.
Everest was actually ten miles distant, but from here on they were on foot. Though
the valley floor was as flat as a billiard table, the climb began here.
In between them and Everest stood a satellite mountain called Changtse which
blocked the lower five thousand feet of their route from view. But above Changtse's
dark, blunt massif, Everest was projecting brilliant white light. The sight only
exaggerated the squalor of Base Camp, for the valley had fallen into shadow. It would
be daytime up there for hours to come, while down in the valley, the climbers were
already layering on sweaters and parkas for the night.
Eager to depart before the sun was altogether gone, the truck drivers pitched in.
They hastily
unroped the tarps and clambered on top of the gear and started tossing
it from the trucks into a mountain of jumbled boxes, packs, and utensils.
Standing atop one of the truck cabs, Jorgens was shouting, 'System it, people,
system it,' for he'd painstakingly tapped together a computerized blueprint for the
supply dump and spent extra money for color-coded boxes.
But as the sun sank lower and the wind blew harder, Jorgens's dream of a system
completely disintegrated. The drivers were rough and indifferent to their loads. They
kicked and pitched and shoved at the gear and the climbers simply tried to keep up
with them. The pile of gear grew taller and more hectic. Everyone worked with a
gasping determination. No one relished spending their first night at Everest in the
open.
As Abe labored, he felt oddly desperate. He had thought they would arrive on this
island and carefully inhabit it, and instead they had crashed upon its rocky shores and
were now frantically salvaging their gear before the ship sank altogether.
'Goddamn it, get the system, people,' Jorgens bellowed helplessly. He spotted one of
the Sherpas. 'Norbu, tell these damn drivers, system it.'
'Yes sir,' Norbu said, and turned away, having no idea what Jorgens meant, or if he
did, no intention of doing it.
Alpenglow radiated orange and pink off the highest tips of the surrounding peaks.
But down in the valley it was dark. The darker it got, the harder people drove
themselves, frantic to make a shelter against the night and make this refuge
habitable.
First one truck, then all of them disgorged their contents and bolted for the Pang La.
Abe watched the truck's headlights cast crazy patterns in the dusk. Finally, like
spiders retracting their white silk, the trucks and their cobweb of lights were gone and
the climbers had Everest to themselves. They were alone. To Abe's surprise, his heart
felt heavy. Not since his father's death a few years ago had Abe felt so profoundly
abandoned. It wasn't logical, but there it was.
They secured the gear as best they could, but soon it got too dark for them to be
useful. The climbers and Sherpas gathered at Krishna Rai's food box and stood around
in the wind and stars and shared a twenty-pound block of cheddar cheese and three
cans of tuna mixed with ice crystals. No one could coax the Indian kerosene stoves
into firing, and so there was no boiled water for tea or for brushing their teeth. Daniel
and his companions shared what little water they had, but it wasn't much more than a
swallow apiece.
Everyone economised on the dialogue. But when they did speak Abe could hear
their low mood. This was their first night at the grand destination and the entire team
was now together for the first time. The evening should have been filled with joy and
excitement and camaraderie. Instead the climbers were about to drag off to bed
thirsty and exhausted and hungover from the thin air. Abe could tell he wasn't alone
in already feeling flatass defeated. He figured the only thing to do was go sleep it off.
But then something happened that strangely lifted their spirits. A meteor shower
suddenly emerged in the sky above Everest.
'Look,' someone said, and they all turned to see the extraordinary thing, this
bunched strafing surge of lights.
The meteors appeared like wild parrots, a whole flock of colors slashing through the
night. They sprang through the blackness in silence.
'Is it real?' someone marveled. There were dozens of flashing meteors, then a
hundred and maybe more. Abe had seen comets and falling stars before, but never in
such abundance as this, and never so incisive and brilliant and obtainable. He felt sure
they would slug straight into the mountain.
'It's not the Perseids,' Carlos pronounced for their benefit. Abe had already been
treated to his theories on the universe. 'They come in August. But I don't know what
else it could be, not this bright and not this many and at this season, I don't know.'
The shower went on and on. Abe forgot his thirstiness and fatigue and the cold wind.
Everyone did. They all just stared at the extraordinary fireworks.
People remarked aloud as the green and red and white lines materialized from deep
space and stung downward toward their Hill. The general tone was awe. Stump was so
entranced that he forgot to instruct Robby and Tom to catch the stars on film. After a
few minutes, Abe could hear the Sherpas muttering darkly in their own language, and
he felt them shifting around and realized they were afraid.
'So beautiful,' Kelly was murmuring.
Then Nima spoke. 'This thing, very, very bad,' he pronounced to the group.
'I don't think so, Nima,' someone consoled him. 'It's just meteors.'
'It is scientific,' the Chinese liaison officer Li explained, and by his tone Abe could
make out his impatience with the Sherpa's fear.
But by Nima's silence, Abe could tell science had little place in this outland.
3
Ten days straight the climbers looked north toward the Pang La, praying for their yak
caravan to materialize, marking their calendars, waiting. Every day the skies were
swept so bare that Abe imagined he could see the stars at high noon. It was so still in
the mornings he could actually hear tiny icicles melting, their droplets chiming like
bells. The weather was perfect. But the yaks didn't come.
'Our valley is a gigantic prison cell,' Abe wrote in his growing letter to Jamie.
'Barren. Tedious. There is no life here. Time has stopped. Everything occurs in
enormous proportions – the blue sky, the mountainsides, the Rongbuk Glacier. I've
never known such vastness. It humbles me. The closest things to human scale in this
outsized land are the tiny fluorescent red and blue and green lichen that freckle the
rocks. The lichens and us – we share this dead place. I can almost hear my hair
growing.'
Base Camp was up and running. Tents were pitched, walls taut, latrines dug. The
heap of gear had been sorted and resorted. The climbers were ready to climb.
There were two ways to attack a mountain of this size and height. The simplest, by
far the most dangerous, was the so-called alpine ascent, which pitted two to four
climbers against the clock as they made a single-minded dash for the summit. Using
this strategy, the climbers would continue progressively higher, taking their camp and
supplies with them. When someone pulled off an alpine ascent in the Himalayas, it was
treated as a brilliant theft, a jewel stolen from under the dragon's nose. The problem
was risk. Stripped for speed and isolated high on their mountain, an alpine team
depended on perfect conditions, perfect teamwork and perfect health. One mistake,
one stormy day, and it was all over, you froze to glass where you lay. Everyone agreed
that an alpine attempt on a route as complicated and vast as the Kore Wall would
have been insane.
The more tried and true strategy, the one the Ultimate Summit Expedition had
been built around, was the old-fashioned siege. This called for methodically setting
permanent camps at successive heights and linking each to its neighbors with
thousands of feet of 'fixed' safety rope. In contrast to the blitzkrieg motion of an alpine
ascent, siege climbers shuttled up and down repeatedly, stocking the highest, newest
camps – what climbers called 'building the logistics pyramid' – and acclimatizing
slowly. The rule of thumb for siege ascents was 'climb high, sleep low,' the idea being
that you climbed high and slept low at progressively higher elevations.
From his childhood reading through the mountaineering classics about the first
ascents of Annapurna and Nanga Parbat, the early British assaults on the north side of
Everest and their first conquest of Everest on its southern side, Abe knew the
concepts behind laying siege to a mountain. What he lacked was the mindset. Robby
clued him in one afternoon.
With every word, the garrulous man made it clear they were at war. He described
the upper camps as firebases, with all the rough-and-ready charm of temporary
defenses injected deep into enemy territory. Every camp would depend on its lower
neighbor for support and reinforcement. None was designed for long-term occupation
on the Hill. The very highest camp would be placed and stocked for one-day guerrilla
strikes on the summit.
'On summit day, you go for quick penetration,' Robby preached. 'Quick up, quick
down.'
Abe listened, rapt. Climbing in the Himalayas was like climbing nowhere else in the
world. It had a language all its own, a risk and a mindset, and Robby – and all the
others – brimmed with it. The very language of ascent abounded with war terms:
siege tactics, assault, base camp, supply lines, logistics, planting camps, pushing the
line, retreat, victory, conquest, and planting the flag. Abe was getting a clear sense
that one brought to Everest a lifetime of battle plans, of occupied landscapes – high
ground, always the high ground – and of risks, blood, and wet socks on cold nights.
Taken altogether, it was a kind of high-speed imperialism, the rise and fall of a
dynasty within a few months. The idea behind their occupation was less to inhabit a
land than to enter into history.
But without the yaks, they couldn't even begin to climb.
Through the Chinese Mountaineering Association, a caravan of sixty yaks – each
able to carry seventy pounds – had been contracted to ferry gear up to Advance Base