by Jeff Long
off toward the mouth of the Shoot.
'Just the same,' Thomas said. 'I'm going down. We can go together.'
The declaration stunned them. Gus paused in her pouring. J.J. scowled. Even tired
Jorgens snapped his head up in surprise. Thomas descending wasn't part of the plan.
'You're sick?' said Daniel.
'You could say so.' But the way he said it, and his level stare at Daniel, told them
what it was Thomas was sick of. Daniel had rebelled against Jorgens, now Thomas was
rebelling against Daniel. The dominoes were falling.
Abe raced to calculate the implications. Thomas was slated to carry in the Shoot
tomorrow. By dropping out – even for a day – he would deprive them of supplies up
high and bottleneck them down below. It meant that he had eaten hill rats and used
fuel and occupied a space here at Three to do nothing more than fine-tune a couple of
tent platforms. It wasn't good.
Daniel made no attempt to stop him. 'Good idea,' he told Thomas over Jorgens and
Carlos's heads. There was no sarcasm or punishment in his voice.
'The hell...' Gus protested.
Daniel hushed her. 'If the man's sick, we can't use him anyway.'
After more Kool-Aid, Thomas ushered Jorgens and Carlos down the ropes toward
Two. Even moving slowly, it would take them only a couple of hours to descend. The
weather was perfect. As they sank from sight, J.J. said. 'Bummer for Jorgens. There's
no more big mountains in him.'
'Tough,' Gus said, but her voice was empty. With Kelly's no-show and Thomas's bail,
their six-man carry to Four tomorrow was cut to four people.
Daniel said nothing. He just watched the empty depths for a minute, maybe cobbling
together a new strategy, maybe just spacing out. Then he got on with things. They
worked on the camp for another hour, ratcheting nuts, twisting wires, tightening their
grip on the mountain. Daniel prepped a rack of climbing gear, adding some super-light
titanium ice screws he'd purchased on a climbing trip to the Caucasus in the Soviet
Union.
The sun still had an hour when Daniel and Gus crawled into one of the tents and Abe
and J.J. got into the other. The tents were spacious, the floors flat and comfortable.
But when the wind came, the platforms creaked and scratched at the rock. Abe was
afraid as he drifted into sleep. He could feel the abyss under his back.
It was still dark and windy when Abe heard a yakherder's blatting call. He wasn't
dreaming – there wasn't enough oxygen to dip that low into the REM levels – and yet
for a moment he was disoriented and thought their little herder, the monk, might
have returned somehow. The yawp sounded again, and this time Abe knew it was
Daniel in the other tent, waking them all.
By headlamp, Abe and J.J. readied themselves, dressing while the stove flame
roared blue under a pot of ice. It was three o'clock. The mountain would be locked
tight at this hour, frozen to its coldest point of the night. Rockfall would be at a
minimum. Also, Daniel wanted to land at Four today. They had to ascend some eight
hundred feet of rope already fixed in the Shoot before they could finish off the last
three hundred feet of climbing. In J.J.'s thick, slurring SoCal, the day promised to be a
hump and a half. An early start meant everything.
Abe gave his straps and buckles a final tug. The super-gaiters, his helmet, the pack
flap and side pockets, his harness – everything got cinched snug.
'I'm on my way,' J.J. promised, but he was at best only half ready. He had bad
stomach cramps in the morning, and it took him longer than most to gear up. J.J. had
cavalierly diagnosed his distress as a side effect of the anabolic steroids he used. Abe
thought the problem was more likely aspirin. At these elevations the red cells – the
oxygen carriers – multiplied so thickly the blood turned to syrup. The climbers who
chewed aspirin to counter the effect usually ended up with ulcers, bad teeth and epic
constipation.
'See you there,' Abe said, wherever there was. He braced for the cold air and
unzipped the tent door. The cold lashed him across the eyes and he flinched. Then he
got a good look and said, 'God.' Outside the blackness was perforated with a million
stars. There were stars behind the start, a solid carpet of lights. He looked up and
where the carpet ended in a raggedy line, the mountain pronounced its dark domain.
Abe saddled himself. He wanted to keep up with the gang today and had packed for
speed, a manageable but still respectable thirty pounds. Holding on to a handline, he
picked his way horizontally across forty feet of stone to the base of the Shoot. Gus was
already there, similarly burdened.
'Daniel's barfing,' she said to excuse her partner's absence.
'J.J.'s sour too,' Abe said.
Gus slugged Abe softly on one shoulder. 'Then it's you and me, Doc. We'll show these
wimps. They can straggle behind.' Abe felt warmed by her camaraderie. She had read
apprehension. For weeks people had been talking about the horrors of the Shoot. Now
he was about to be exposed to them for the first time. Gus swept her headlamp back
and forth across four ropes lying side by side in the back of the Shoot. There was one
rope for each of the expeditions that had entered this corridor.
With one gloved hand, Gus plucked at the orange rope – the Ultimate Summit stock
– but let it go and tried a second and a third rope. She seemed to be shopping, though
to Abe's mind there was no question, the newest was the best. Then he saw her
dilemma. Overnight the ropes had become coated with transparent ice. They were all
sheathed with verglas.
'Heads up,' Gus said. She took the end of the new orange rope again and swung it
from the wall. Then she cracked it against the stone like a gigantic, ponderous whip.
The ice fractured off and maybe twenty pounds of chandelier glass came tinkling
down, pattering on Abe's helmet and hunched shoulders.
'Dibs,' Gus said, grabbing the first place on the rope. She thumbed open the metal
jaws of her two jumars and clipped them onto the cleared rope. She slid the
uppermost jumar high, then tugged to see if it caught on the downstroke and it did. As
the rope iced up, the jumars would slip now and then, but that was a nuisance, not a
hazard.
Abe didn't mind going second, even though it meant more work. With Abe beneath
Gus, the rope would be weighted and that always made jumaring the ropes – jugging
the line – much easier. But going first was a mixed blessing, because if one of these
ropes was abraded, it would break under her weight first.
Abe felt a twinge of something, shame perhaps, or guilt. The truth was he
appreciated Gus's making herself the guinea pig. He was scared. He knew his nerves
would smooth out eventually. Maybe in an hour or two he could take over jugging the
lead and spare Gus some of the risk.
Gus finished rigging her stirrups to the jumars, then headed up the line. The rope
creaked under her weight. Abe gave her a few bodylengths, then started up behind
her, walking his stirrups up a foot at a time.
The going was slow. Repeatedly the teeth in their jumars caked with rime and the
jaws missed their bite and slipped. Each time one of Abe's jumars foul
ed, he had to
unclip it and thaw the teeth with his warm breath and clip it back on the rope.
At the top of the first ropelength – or pitch – they rested, standing in their stirrups
since there were no ledges here. Abe leaned his shoulder against the cold rock. The
corridor was only five feet across at this level, and its boxlike sides channeled the wind
straight up between their boots.
'One down, six to go,' Gus said. Shoulder to shoulder, Abe could smell the coffee on
her breath. He checked his watch. It was going on four-thirty. At the rate of a half
hour per rope, they could possibly reach the top of their line by eight or nine.
Abe looked between his knees at the ground. Far below, almost a mile beneath his
boots, the glacier was giving off a phosphorescent glow. Closer in, a tiny headlamp was
bouncing white beams against the corridor's walls and Abe could feel the climber's
movement vibrating in the orange rope. Gus whipped the next rope to clear its ice.
They continued up.
The Shoot's slick stone turned to panels of ice, green beneath Abe's light. They put
on crampons and kicked at the ice, biting it with their front points. The ice squeaked, a
comforting noise that told them the ice was plastic this morning, not brittle. Here and
there the wall lay bare and their crampon teeth scuttered against the exposed rock
and sent out electric sparks, red and blue.
At the top of the second pitch, Abe realized that either his calculations were off or
his watch was. It was nearly six. Already an hour and a half had passed. At this rate, it
would be late morning before they got to the high point. And by then the sun would
have renewed its conspiracy with the mountain. Abe tried not to think of what that
was going to mean.
They went on and on. Dawn broke.
Near eleven the sun painted them with hot light. Abe was already sweating under
the pack straps, deep in his own animalism. Even if he could have thought in full
thoughts, he wouldn't have dared. Ascent hurt too much at these heights. Abe had
never had to fight his own body this way. The aches and pains were bad enough. The
lassitude was worse. He wanted to obey his instincts. He wanted to go down. But that
was unthinkable. He concentrated on brute primary motion. He kept his mind
slave-empty.
Abe lost count of the time, of the ropes, of his pain.
The Shoot opened to thirty feet across, and the ice took on the white marbling of
snow. The angle eased slightly. Tiny balls of snow – sunballs – loosened in the heat
and tumbled in minuscule avalanches that evaporated before they could grow bigger
than a fingernail.
'Look,' said Daniel.
'Huh?' said Abe. He lifted his head to see, but his helmet hit the high crown of his
pack. He shifted the load and cocked his head sideways and indeed, Gus had become
Daniel. Somehow, in the hours since dawn, Daniel had moved from last to first on the
line of ropes. Abe was startled to the extent his apathy allowed. He hadn't noticed the
changing. He couldn't remember passing Gus on the ropes nor Daniel passing him.
One thing was certain, Daniel no longer looked sick. His pack full and his power was
obvious in the way he dominated the ice.
Abe looked off to the right where Daniel was pointing. He blinked. He blinked again.
There was paradise out there. They had climbed so high they could look right
around the mountain and into Nepal.
Off in that far distance lay a land of kaleidoscopic peaks. They poked their summits
up among a white lather of clouds like a chain of bony, carved islands. Even as Abe
watched, wind vacuumed the clouds out from the distant valleys, exposing a
topography of light and dark hollows. The sunlight twisted in strange patterns. A
razor-sharp feather of snow, at least three thousand feet in length, appeared as a
streak of glycerine quick-silver, a divine flourish.
Abe lowered his head to break the spell. He looked at the glacier between his
crampon teeth. It was gleaming like a slick reptile down there, vast, coiled dragon's
vertebrae. He looked back to the south, enchanted, drawn by the promise.
For months now, he had spent his gaze – his belief – upon Everest alone. But here,
this morning with half the Himalayan range unfolded before him, Abe faltered. It
hadn't occurred to him that they might see Nepal before reaching the very summit,
and he hadn't really expected to reach the summit. This unexpected view brought to
mind all that the south represented to him: a diminution of the mountains, a
relinquishing of all that was sharp and vertical and lifeless, a backing away from the
Hill. Out there, he knew, the mountains gave way to foothills and the foothills of Nepal
gave way to India, and India was his doorway. Through her riot of colors and smells
and tangled human energy, he had come here. Through Nepal, then India, he would
return.
As Abe stood sweating in his black windsuit and glittering crampons with taped
jumar handles in each fist and his mouth wide – dumb as an ape and sucking at what
little was left of the atmosphere – he could almost see home. For an instant even, he
could almost see Jamie, and it was almost enough to remember that she was
completely forgotten. Under his helmet, Abe's forehead wrinkled with the nearness of
a memory. Behind his goggles, his eyes gained a glimmer, and he blinked.
It was then, when he was most vulnerable, that the mountain commenced fire.
Abe took the day's first hit.
He wasn't listening, so he wasn't ready. There wasn't even time to flinch. One
moment he was still, feet splayed on the side points of his crampons, swimming
against his riptide of amnesia. The next moment he was hanging limp upon the rope,
harness tight, staring straight into the Egypt eye of the sun. His goggles were askew
on his face. His ears were ringing. His pack straps were creaking, and it came to him
that he was nearly upside down and the pack was dragging the very breath from him.
Just as suddenly, he felt a pair of strong hands hoisting him away from suffocation.
The hands would be Daniel, Abe registered. He felt himself hauled upright and shoved
face first against the slope. Abe was at a loss. First gravity had him, then Daniel did.
He was caught between forces. He tried to fathom what was going on.
'Rock!' Daniel bellowed down the ropes. Far below, someone passed the word, a tiny
voice peeping into the depths. 'Rock. Rock.'
'A rock?' Abe mumbled. He kicked weakly at the ice, finally getting the front points
of his crampons into the ice. Standing up gave him at least a measure of self-control,
more so than just lying helpless and suspended on the rope. He pressed his fingers
under the left edge of his helmet and held them in front of his eyes. It was a
paramedic's habit, not to trust your touch alone. He looked at the wetness on his
fingertip, but the sun had seared his vision and he couldn't see if it was sweat or blood.
Quite certain he was thinking clearly, Abe tasted for blood, but all he got was the filth
off his gloves.
'Rock, ice,' Daniel muttered, fussing with Abe's pack, straightening his goggles, 'at
terminal velocity, it's all the same.' Daniel stank the way they all stank. It verged on
&nbs
p; the smell of oiled leather, and Abe breathed it in with relief. He was alive. Whatever
had happened, he was still part of the dream.
The ringing subsided. Abe's vision flooded back in. Daniel was crouched against the
wall beside him, one hand holding Abe firmly by the scruff of his pack. He was peering
upward for more debris. Abe shook the messiness from his head but it was impossible
to tell if he was dazed by the hit against his helmet or by the altitude or just the
adrenaline surge. He drew a string of quick breaths and kicked his crampon points in
and put his weight back onto his feet.
'I'm okay,' he said.
The upper mountain unleashed a second barrage. This time Abe heard the warning
sound, a hybrid whistling and buzzing. Abe gasped, horrified to be caught in the open
like this.
The rocks – or ice or both – skipped hard against a blunt gray spur overhead, and
Abe could hear rocks ricocheting all around with a desolate, predatory humming like
hornets make.
'Jeezis.' Abe squeezed the oath between gritted teeth. He shut his eyes and dug his
head fast against the ice and the plastic clacked on the ice wall. 'Jeez,' he said again.
The rockfall snicked and screamed on every side. Each flashing bit of debris was
hunting along its fall line to gouge them, to break and skin them. Abe knew what
contact looked like. He'd seen people opened up by rocks. He'd seen skulls emptied.
Once his rescue team had found a climber with a fist of quartz inside his abdominal
cavity, no viscera, just that transparent crystal lodged between the pelvic wings.
Something exploded beside him. Abe was showered with slivers of glass. The glass
became ice. It melted on his burning face.
Harm's way, Abe thought. There were so many prayers to dodge it, so many words
to dread it. And here he was courting his own mutilation, a hero with fouled pants.
Yes, he realized. That warm mud in his crotch was his own shit.
Then it was past, at least for the moment. Abe blew air through his nostrils and
unwrapped his grip from the rope. But he still lay flat against the wall, afraid to move,
afraid to look down but more afraid to look up. He'd seen that, too, a climber with
shards of his crushed glacier glasses jutting from one socket.
Daniel was moving, though, blithe to the dangers, craning backward to scan the