The Ascent

by Jeff Long

  again, the glacier, beneath his pillow of spare clothing.

  Hundreds of feet thick, the ice was alive and moving. He could hear it popping and

  groaning and cracking. And suddenly his vertigo returned and the very earth seemed

  to drop out from under him.

  Abe had once read that in the Dark Ages, peasants used to believe it meant certain

  death to sleep upon a glacier. Now, listening to the dragons stirring within the

  mountain, Abe came close to whispering a prayer. But for the life of him, he couldn't

  remember a single one.

  5

  Long before the morning sun could reach around Everest's north-facing architecture

  and unearth ABC, Abe left Kelly's warmth to go chop ice for breakfast. He was the

  first up, or thought so until he found Daniel alone, perched upon a boulder. The man

  was hunkered down upslope with a big expedition sleeping bag draped across his

  shoulders, and he was facing the mountain. He might have been a gargoyle frozen in

  place. His hair lay heavy with human grease, long and black upon the bag's cherry-red

  Gore-Tex.

  At Abe's approach, Daniel twisted. His eyes were glittering in a mask of sunbaked

  cheekbones and black whiskers and the pale skin of his goggles mark. He looked wild,

  but not because of the burnt flesh or unwashed hair or gleaming eyes which marked

  them all by this point. Rather it was his grin. The white teeth in that dark mask

  showed a joy so savage it made Abe cold.

  'Here it is,' Daniel said. He turned back to relish the wall, his horseshoe jawline

  thrusting out at the great North Face, and Abe stood beside him.

  The North Face was astounding. Where its lines had been washed out by shadow

  and light yesterday afternoon, this morning Abe could see the route's features in

  clean, blue detail. ABC sat so close to its base that the mountain was foreshortened

  and looked squashed. The upper reaches beetled out. Gullies and ridges seemed

  warped out of their actual shape. The summit was barely visible as an insignificant

  bump. All the parts of it stood assembled just so, and now Abe could see a logic to the

  route that made Daniel's climb a little more imaginable, almost accessible.

  'This beauty...' Daniel started to say with faraway remembrance, but he faded off.

  'I didn't know it would be so elegant,' Abe remarked, and he meant it. For all its

  brute, compacted massiveness, the line had a delicacy and straightness that would

  appeal to any climber, even a newcomer like Abe. Now, with the route stretched full

  above him, Abe could see that Daniel's direttisima was more direct, and ingenious,

  than any he'd ever seen. Abe stood quietly by the monster's author, marveling at

  Daniel's hubris.

  It was almost as if Daniel had laid down a giant ruler in the middle of all this

  geological anarchy and drawn a path of absolute simplicity. Not that simplicity meant

  ease or safety. To the contrary, the Kore Wall was going to demand extraordinary

  risk. From top to bottom, the 8,000-foot wall was exposed to weather and rockfall,

  and there was no exit onto easier ridges should they run into trouble.

  Daniel spoke again, his voice darker. 'This fucker...'

  He rustled under his crisp Gore-Tex shroud and looked around at Abe. For an

  instant – no longer – Abe saw a face from long ago, a look of utter blank panic or

  worse, a look of terrible surrender. Then Daniel drew a deep breath and brought

  himself back from the depths, and Abe drew a breath too.

  'I can't believe I'm here.'

  'Me either.' Abe meant himself.

  But Daniel was lost in his soliloquy. He snorted, shook his head. 'I'll tell you one

  thing,' he said. 'It's not for the love of it. No way. I hate this fucker.'

  Abe digested that. 'Bad attitude,' he finally joked, at a loss otherwise.

  It was just the right thing to say. Daniel was delighted. He grinned more fiercely.

  'Ain't it though.'

  They ate breakfast, then gathered by the jumbled heap of supplies, eager to climb.

  Out came the ice screws and snow pickets and pitons of every shape, and 'Friends,'

  the spring-loaded cams that looked so high-tech that James Bond had employed one

  in a recent movie, and the deadmen, stacks of aluminum anchors. In one linked

  silvery bunch lay their carabiners, or snap links, the all-purpose safety pins that

  would channel ropes, complete belay anchors, connect harnesses, hold hardware,

  brake rappels, and give a dumb extra hand with a 1,200-pound grip whenever an

  extra hand was needed. Abe knew his way around most of this sharpened,

  customized, taped, initialed, store-bought and homemade weaponry, even the two

  battery-powered hand drills someone had brought for drilling bolts, a rock climber's

  touch. What was unfamiliar to him he hefted and fiddled with and figured out on his

  own.

  Sporting his black eye still and a huge grin, J.J. got them in the mood when he

  reached deep into the pile and extracted a 300-foot coil of orange rope and held it

  over his head, whooping, 'Firepower.'

  Three days passed before Abe got his turn to go up. In teams of two, the climbers

  fanned upward. They took new territory, inflicting their calculations upon the

  mountain, pinning their camps to the rock and snow and ice. Each team rotated to the

  high point to push it higher, then retreated to ABC to rest and make room for fresh

  troops. Forsaking the tactics which alpinists normally employed in almost every other

  range on earth, the Ultimate Summit proceeded carefully and slowly. These were the

  Greater Himalayas. Were Everest located at lower elevations, they could have made a

  concerted push to the top in a single week.

  They had entered the so-called deathzone, where big mountains tend to wreck the

  delicate mechanisms of human physiology. Nothing lived up here for long except

  lichen and a rare breed of spider with antifreeze glycerine for blood.

  Up and down, up and down: When they weren't leading they were humping loads.

  On any given day there were four to eight climbers occupying different levels of the

  mountain. With the yaks unable to go any higher, they became their own beasts of

  burden. Daniel's strategy called for five camps above ABC, each to be stocked with

  progressively smaller quantities of food and cooking fuel. The upper camps – those

  above 26,000 feet, if they got that far – would get bottled oxygen. Ounce by ounce,

  every thread, every crumb, had to be carried on their backs.

  At last Abe moved up. Because they were sharing a tent and wanted to try climbing

  together, he and Kelly got teamed. That meant they were supposed to keep track of

  one another, and to share 'hill rats,' or mountain food, which were broken into

  two-man-day packets, and to climb as a pair. Today the two of them were scheduled

  to reach Camp One, which one team had helped supply yesterday, and which another

  team was using to sleep in while pressing the ascent to what would become Camp

  Two. Tomorrow they would take the sharp end – the high point of the rope – to lead

  toward Two. Maybe they would reach it, though Abe had no idea where Two was

  supposed to be located or exactly what to do when they reached it. He was depending

  on Kelly to know how to configure and erect a Himalayan camp from scratch. A few

  yards beyond the borde
r of ABC, the rocky detritus gave way to pure glacier. The

  north bowl swept up toward the bergschrund – that fetal tear which separates a

  mountain from its glacier – and then steepened.

  Blowing wreaths of frost in the chill blue air, the two climbers clamped on their

  crampons. Somebody had landed a batch of twenty pairs of a brand called Foot Fangs,

  and Abe's were factory fresh, sharp enough to draw blood. He clapped shut the heel

  mount with his palm and tugged the ankle strap good and tight and stamped once

  against the snow. This was his first time in crampons on the mountain, and it felt a

  little like mounting a horse, this stout bonding of foot to steel to ice.

  They plied the glacial plain, navigating by instinct mostly. The wind had covered

  over yesterday's tracks with snow the texture of sand grains. It was obvious where

  they were going – to the fractured schrund a mile away – but between here and there

  lay an obstacle course of crevasses, false promises and wrong turns. Parts of the

  labyrinth were marked with bamboo wands brought up from Nepal and tipped with

  red duct tape. Most of the way lay unwritten, though. Kelly said 'no problem' and

  surged ahead.

  They moved from one crevasse to the next, zigzagging back and forth in pursuit of

  marker wands. In between they methodically probed for crevasses, Kelly with her ice

  axe, Abe with a ski pole. Overnight some of the bamboo wands had tipped over or

  simply been ingested by the crevasses. Abe noticed that the bamboo – still green

  when they'd unloaded it from the trucks – had dried to a dead gray, every hint of

  water sucked out by the mountain.

  Most of the crevasses were easy to step across or hop over. Several were too wide

  for that and so snow bridges had been hunted out and tested for human weight,

  carefully, and then marked and roped for safety. These required long detours to

  reach.

  One crevasse gaped so wide it seemed impassable. But after a half-hour of walking

  along its lower flank, they came to a battered aluminum extension ladder with

  Japanese script along one side. Daniel had salvaged it from the garbage dump at ABC

  and with Gus and Nima's help had carefully laid it flat across the twenty-foot gap and

  staked it in place. Abe took an immediate dislike to the ladder. He was tempted to

  crawl across it, but with a pack on it would have been even more awkward. Besides

  that, Kelly had just walked it with robotic ease, clanking metallically. With each step,

  his crampon teeth threatened to slide or catch on the metal rungs. At the halfway

  point, the bottomless crevasse seemed to howl up at Abe. He scuttled across the rest

  of the span like a stick figure on fire.

  Kelly turned out to be better acclimated, but Abe managed to keep up. Their pace

  was relatively quick – one step, one breath. Higher, the ratio would widen radically,

  Abe knew, four or five lungfuls per step. Their crampon teeth squeaked on the ice

  bed.

  After two hours, Kelly paused and pointed up. Through his glacier glasses, Abe saw

  pink and green sunrays suddenly flare over the northeast shoulder of Everest. It

  turned into a wild jagged corona and he heard the mountain stretch itself. Its joints

  creaked underneath his boots as the glacier settled. Snowbeds rustled. A distant green

  avalanche sloughed loose, beautiful and deadly.

  'No problem,' said Kelly. 'We're still ahead of the warm.' Once the sun hit, the upper

  mountain would begin its daily thaw and send rocks and ice and maybe worse rattling

  down. Abe was not looking forward to that deadly rain.

  They moved off again. A gust of wind brushed across the glacier. Spindrift flowered

  up from underfoot and for thirty seconds or so a ground blizzard whistled at knee

  level. Because of its curvature, the immense northern bowl spawned dervishes.

  Slender ice tornadoes tap-danced here and there. One crawled partway up the wall

  before gravity pulled it back down. Then the wind stopped. The snow settled. The

  dervishes died. It was still again.

  More time passed. Overhead the wall of stone and ice grew enormous, but remained

  untouchable. Somewhere at its base lay Camp One. Since Abe had no idea where, time

  ceased to matter. They would get there when they got there.

  Finally they reached the bergschrund. Here was the start of the technical climbing

  and it was announced by the first rope. It was a thick snake of polypropylene, once

  white, now gray. Fixed ropes like this one would allow them to carry heavy loads in

  safety, giving them a handrail for guidance and support. As the angle grew more

  radical, they would be hanging from the ropes. In addition to aiding their ascent, the

  ropes were an insurance policy. If – when – the weather turned ugly, the ropes would

  allow them to bail out in a hurry, rappeling down the ropes at ten times the speed

  they'd gone up them.

  Abe didn't recognize the gray rope as any of their stock and he guessed it had been

  plundered from somewhere else on the mountain, maybe from the old pile Nima had

  uncovered in ABC. Abe wasn't in the habit of using a rope he didn't know. Wind and

  ultraviolet rays could age a rope in a matter of weeks, and there was no telling how

  long this one had been getting whipped and fried at the roof of the world. But since

  Kelly didn't hesitate to clip onto it, Abe didn't either. So much depended on sheer faith

  up here.

  They attached themselves to the rope with jumars, mechanical jaws that ratcheted

  upward, but caught downward. Abe slid his jumar high on the rope, and when he came

  to the four-foot-wide slash that was the bergschrund, he stopped beside Kelly. She

  was peering into the deep chasm at her boot tips.

  'You see it down there?' she said. 'That must be from Daniel's first go at the Hill.'

  The huge block of ice they stood upon was calving from the slope, and deep in the

  turquoise cleft Abe saw the taut green rope she was talking about. It stretched from

  one wall to the other and looked like the final thread holding two naturally opposed

  forces together.

  'How'd it get so far down?' Abe asked. It had been six years since Daniel's last visit

  here, yet the rope seemed centuries deep.

  Kelly shrugged and turned her attention uphill. 'Yeti,' she said. The abominable

  snowman. Things happened on mountains that couldn't be explained and humans

  weren't very good at letting that be. They needed dragons or gremlins. Or yeti.

  One at a time they took off their packs and leapt for the far side of the bergschrund.

  Abe's Foot Fangs bit into the snow with a jolting halt. They were on the mountain

  itself now, behind enemy lines.

  The gray rope ended a hundred meters higher in a mass of knots that disappeared

  into the snow and ice. Abe knew that somewhere under the surface an aluminum

  plate called a deadman was locked in place, anchoring the rope. But to the naked eye,

  it looked like the rope had been sucked into a devouring mouth. The mountain was

  alive, no doubt about it.

  They unclipped from the gray rope and clipped onto the next one, a section of

  weathered blue nine-millimeter Perlon. This wasn't Ultimate Summit stock either,

  and Abe realized the team was saving its new rope for more severe terrain. The line of

  fixed old
ropes went on and on like that to the top of the slope, jointed together with

  bits and pieces of used nylon. Using the rope as an occasional handline, he slid his

  jumar along just ahead of him. The slope steepened. More and more he had to haul

  against the rope and kick his feet against snow that had been annealed by the sun and

  wind. One short 65-degree required the front points of his crampons.

  Kelly was kind, pacing their ascent to Abe's first time at these altitudes. She didn't

  remark at his gasping, merely stopping each time he bent over his high knee to rest.

  He felt ill and exhilarated at the same time. Part of him revelled in the height and

  spectacle. Part of him just wanted to quit moving and lie down for a nap. Try as he

  might, the ambivalence – the charged current between misery and magic – wouldn't

  switch off. Twice he noticed colorful stains in the snow alongside the ropes, and

  realized it was old vomit where others had found it tough going, too.

  Camp One lay cupped at the tip of a knife ridge. Three bright yellow tents stood in a

  lengthwise string, end to end, and it was the most precarious site Abe had ever seen.

  At its widest point, the ridge was only five feet across, scarcely wide enough to hold a

  tent. On either side, the ridge plummeted a thousand feet. The outermost tent had

  part of its back wall hanging over the edge.

  'Not too shabby,' Kelly said, checking her watch. It was only two o'clock – real time,

  not Beijing time, they'd given that up upon reaching ABC – but their workday was

  done. She was sitting in the doorway of one tent, dangling a foot over the edge.

  Far below, the immense northern bowl with its crevasses and snowy expanses had

  become a cup full of lines and white spaces. ABC was tiny, just a spray of colored

  freckles. If anyone was moving among the tents, they were too small to see. The sun

  was wheeling around the northwestern crest, cutting the bowl into dark and light

  halves. Even as he watched, the sunlight gave up some of its territory, and the halves

  were no longer halves.

  Abe bit down on his vertigo and smiled weakly. He'd slept on ledges and in

  hammocks on big walls in Yosemite, but never on a ridge jutting this thinly into space.

  The placement looked insane, but Abe knew he should appreciate its logic. Very

  simply, sitting on this ridge, the camp was out of reach of avalanches and rockfall. In