by Jeff Long
Texas up at Four. The summit team didn't call in, and that was more good news. It
meant they were too busy climbing. No one mentioned the monk.
Abe and Kelly geared up inside the tent, a clumsy process. Between the cramped
space and the lines running from their oxygen bottles and headlamps and the dangling
cookstove, their movements were knotted and cumbrous. They could have opened
the tent door for more room, but that would have disheartened them. Though the
mountain had gone silent, it was bitterly cold. The tent walls let them enjoy the
appearance of cozy warmth for their final minutes at Four. At last they were ready to
ascend to the high camp. And tomorrow, Abe thought with a pleasure too distant to be
called joy, tomorrow the summit.
Kelly unzipped the tent door and the cold poured in. Like deep sea divers, they
clambered to their feet and stood upright by the cave mouth. Abe was unsettled by
the darkness outside the cave. By this hour there should have been more light, even
with the sun buried in clouds. If conditions didn't improve, Daniel and his team would
have to use a flash to take photos of their summit triumph projected for noon.
'It's so peaceful,' Kelly marveled.
'The storm has passed,' Abe said.
But he should have suspected otherwise when he placed one hand on the
green-and-white checkered rope that led out of the cave and up the face. It was
vibrating like a plucked guitar string and he realized that here was the source of the
odd humming noise. Abe made nothing more of it and went ahead with his
preparations. He clipped his jumars onto the rope and adjusted his goggles. Even in
this darkness one could go snowblind. He stepped from the cave onto the face.
The world turned upside down.
Abe flew. He was swallowed into the air.
It was instantaneous. The thought flashed past that he was falling, but he wasn't. It
was utterly impossible.
Far from disappearing, the wind had grown into a hurricane gale and with his very
first step onto the face Abe was ripped from his front points and actually lifted ten or
twelve feet up the mountain. If not for the rope, he would have sailed right off the
face, a bit of dust swept into the jet stream.
Abe lay plastered against the wall, too astounded to move, not certain he even could.
He wasn't hurt, but his confusion was almost painful. He had to fight back his shock
just to register bits and pieces of what was happening.
The darkness was in fact a snowy whiteness so flat and dense his eyes could hardly
see. Thunder had usurped the silence, indeed the silence was thunder, and the goggles
were torn from his face. If not for the oxygen mask strapped across his mouth, the
wind would have stripped the breath from his lungs. Loose pack straps lashed him
where the skin of his face was exposed.
Sucking hard at the oxygen mask, Abe hoicked his body around. Hand over hand, he
hauled himself down the rope and back to the cave entrance. There Kelly helped to
pull him inside. 'God, Abe. Are you all right?' She knelt beside him in the cave mouth,
aghast.
'Not good,' Abe said, crouching on one knee. The oxygen mask was dangling at his
throat. 'And it's got to be worse up high. Daniel and the others, they've got to be
pinned down.'
'I don't think so,' Kelly said. 'If they were pinned in Five they would have told us.
They would have made the radio call this morning. I think they're climbing. They're
on their way.'
There were other explanations for Five's radio silence, of course. Their radio
batteries might have gotten used up in last evening's arguing or frozen overnight.
Someone might have dropped the radio handset or they might just have slept in or
forgotten to call. The other possibility, the worst one, was that Daniel and the others
had set out in the early hours according to plan and the wind had exterminated them.
Abe left it all unspoken.
He couldn't get over the preternatural power of the wind and stared fearfully at the
mountainside. There were no bench-marks – no tree branches or tumbleweeds or
flags or wind socks – to help him gauge the force, nothing to even suggest the wind
was blowing. Any loose snow had been scoured away. But for all its peaceful
appearance, the North Face was now a gigantic maelstrom.
'Do we stay here or go up?' Abe asked.
Kelly didn't pause. 'We have to go up,' she answered. 'They'll need us up there.'
Abe slipped an extra bottle of oxygen into his pack for ballast, then braced himself
and stepped from the cave once again. This time, turning one of his jumars upside
down on the rope and slipping both tight, he managed to keep his footing. Kelly did the
same, and after the initial blast, they adapted.
He looked up and saw a ball of purplish Saint Elmo's fire fifty feet higher along the
rope. He'd seen such a thing on a friend's sailboat once, but never in the mountains.
The ball of glowing electric flame had been drawn to the metal of their next anchor,
and despite the wind it didn't move. Beyond that an immense dark white halo was
crowning the summit. Abe forced himself to breathe deeply. It was imperative that he
ignore this world of beautiful images. He had to concentrate on the climbing. He felt
very afraid.
The air was murderously cold and it shook and rattled their clothing. Even standing
side by side at the rest stances, neither could hear the other over the din without
shouting. But it gave them one advantage. It graced them with wings. Abe was
carrying three bottles of oxygen plus his jump kit for medical emergencies, and even
so his load felt lighter than empty. It was almost as if the mountain were sucking him
higher and higher. He couldn't shake the feeling that he and Kelly were being drawn
into an ambush.
Abe approached the first anchor cautiously. The blue ball of flame was seeping up
and down the rope around one of Daniel's titanium ice screws. Abe couldn't remember
if the phenomenon carried a dangerous electrical charge. There was no way around it,
however, and so he finally dipped his hand into the strange shimmering light to clip his
jumar onto the next rope. His hand tingled, no more. He could smell ozone, but on
second thought decided smell was impossible in such wind and through an oxygen
mask to boot. One more illusion. He kept on climbing.
They seemed to be moving much faster than human beings physically can at such
altitudes. They had no choice in the matter. Kelly had the worst of it. Despite a
hundred days of lost bodyweight. Abe still outweighed her by fifty pounds, and it told
now in their footing. A dozen times Kelly was rocked and buffeted off her feet. Each
time she patiently righted herself and dug her crampon points into the snow and ice
and started again. She didn't complain.
Abe positioned himself a few steps behind in an effort to cut the wind. He couldn't
afford to lose Kelly. Things were getting stranger by the minute, and his sole comfort
was in being able to watch over her. Love had nothing to do with it. This was altruism
stripped bare. The only way he could identify his own welfare anymore was by looking
after hers.
Kelly's pace began to falter. She took more rests and h
er rhythm was off, afflicted by
missteps and occasional wobbling. Abe was slow to fault her performance, blaming the
wind. Finally he realized Kelly was in trouble. Her coordination was melting away
before his eyes. She kept lumbering off to her right, plainly disoriented.
Abe called her name, but she continued up. He called again, then plodded fast
enough to catch her by one arm. 'Kelly,' he shouted. 'Are you okay?'
'Cold,' she mumbled through her mask.
The easy explanation was that she'd run out of oxygen. Abe hoped it was that. He
stepped above her and fumbled for the cylinder tucked in her pack. The regulator
showed three-quarters full. Next he checked her mask. It was a standard military
issue for aviators, a diluter-demand system. It drew pure oxygen through a demand
valve and mixed it with air drawn from outside the mask. It was a simple enough tool,
but the exhaust valve and ports tended to freeze up. Abe had practiced dismantling
the assembly and putting it together down at Base Camp, and prayed it wasn't the
demand valve that had iced up. Fortunately it was the exhaust ports. He squeezed the
rubber mask in his mitten and freed the ice. Then he fitted the mask back over Kelly's
helmet and cranked her regulator up to two liters per minute.
'Try that,' he yelled.
She gave him a weary thumbs-up. After a while her pace improved.
At the head of two more pitches, the Shooting Gallery's steep narrow cleavage
opened wide and the angle of the slope grew more and more manageable. They found
themselves breaking trail upon a snowy tilted plateau. Compared to the vertical
gantlet of the last few days, the plateau felt almost level. They left the abyss behind
them, out of sight, almost out of mind.
The rope ended. Daniel had decided it was safe enough up here.
They continued on for another hour or so in the deafening howl, then Kelly stopped
and pointed. Not far in the distance, perhaps two hundred yards away, stood a
solitary orange tent. Daniel had taken it from the cache of gear the New Zealanders
had left in the cave. For the time being anyway, it represented the highest human
habitation on earth. The camp was built on snow, at the intersection of the plateau
and what Abe knew could only be the Yellow Band. Through his goggles the rock was
lime green and plated like lizard scales.
Kelly was pointing above the tent, though, and Abe moved his attention higher. He
saw a thick wide shelf of snow that had accumulated three or four hundred feet above
the camp. It probably held a thousand tons of snow, a perfectly formed avalanche
ready to cut loose. Then Abe saw similar pockets coiled all along on the downsloping
tiles. The whole region was primed for a catastrophe. The sight was almost enough to
make Abe turn tail and descend as fast as possible. But one further sight held him
steady, a rather sorry sight. There, almost within reach, stood the summit.
Abe was disappointed. For all its majesty and fury, Everest didn't finish with a
dramatic sculptured prow or a sharp pinnacle. Instead the mountain just rounded into
a sorry little hump-back, a gray lump shrugging at the gray sky.
The top was perhaps a half-mile away and a thousand feet overhead, but it looked
much closer and very easy, an afternoon romp. Just as Daniel had said, you could see
the summit tripod from here, a tiny, sticklike protuberance. The tripod reminded Abe
of an altarpiece for ants, ridiculous and not at all triumphant.
Kelly pulled at Abe's arm and shouted something. She had taken her glacier glasses
off. Abe bent his head closer. Their helmets knocked. 'I can't see anyone,' she shouted
above the wind, and Abe thought she'd gone snowblind.
'Your glasses,' Abe shouted back. He gestured to her to put them on.
Kelly didn't hear or else didn't care to. Either way she let the glasses dangle and
whip about on the string at her throat. She pointed at the summit again.
Abe realized she was hunting for some evidence of climbers on the summit slopes.
Now he looked, too. Their vantage point was ideal for spotting any movement up
there. If they could see the summit tripod, there was no reason they couldn't see a
moving figure wrapped in expedition colors.
In vain Abe tried tracing a route upward from the orange tent to the top. Then he
tried working down from the top along five or six different paths. Kelly took out her
camera and screwed on the telephoto, and they took turns scanning the top. They saw
no one. The climbers had disappeared.
Kelly's eyes were streaming tears from the wind. She shouted something, but Abe
shook his head, deaf in this hurricane. He tried replacing the glasses on her face, but
his fingers had gone wooden with the cold. Besides that, he could see Kelly's tiredness
and disorientation. He suspected her mask had packed in again with ice, and that
would need more work still.
'The tent,' he yelled.
Abe led off, plowing his knees through the snow crust. He left it to the wind to blow
Kelly in his wake. As they slogged up toward the orange tent, Abe tried to arrange his
thoughts for an orderly discussion. Matters of search and rescue or simple retreat had
to be weighed quickly and clearly and ruthlessly. But with each step he only got more
confused and tired.
It took them an hour to ascend the two hundred yards to camp. By the time they
reached the orange tent, Abe's fingers wouldn't work and all Kelly could do was kneel
and stare at the closed door. Finally he pried a flap open with his ice axe and slowly
peeled it open. He was careful not to break the zipper, because if they couldn't close
the door again the wind would surely kill them.
Abe pawed Kelly's pack off, then his own, and dumped them in the snow. Then he
pushed her inside and crawled in behind. It took five minutes to worry the door zipper
shut again.
'There's no one here,' Kelly yelled over the wind. She, too, had been hoping the
climbers would be inside.
Four sleeping bags lay heaped in the back of the tent. Daniel's team had broken the
rule and entered the tent with their crampons on. Abe could tell by the ripped,
punctured floor. Then he noticed that he had neglected to take off his own crampons.
Kelly's were still on, too. He took them off.
The tent walls shook so fast they buzzed. Abe was thankful the tent hadn't blown
away. Kelly sat in the corner, staring, mask off, mouth open. Her lips were bright blue.
They stared at each other, exhausted. Abe felt asleep. Or dead.
Another thought came to him. 'Oxygen,' he said to Kelly. Her eyes had closed
though. Abe set the mask back across her mouth. He checked the regulator on her
oxygen bottle. It was a quarter full. He checked his own. It was empty. He'd been
sucking on ambient air at 27,500 feet. For how long, he couldn't say.
Abe pulled the mask off Kelly's face and strapped it to his own face. It was like
robbing a child of candy. She didn't protest or even notice. He cranked the flow rate
up to four liters per minute and breathed as deep as one could up here, a modified
pant. After five or ten minutes, he felt warmer and less stupefied. His few priorities
marched into view. They had to breathe, drink and eat.
He unzipped the door. The
wind blasted him and the tent bellied in the rear. As
quickly as possible, Abe opened his pack and pulled in two more bottles of oxygen,
then closed the door. It took awhile, but he finally got a second oxygen set assembled
with a regulator showing full. He nestled the second mask over Kelly's mouth and
turned it on. It would be good for four to six hours.
Kelly slept. Abe cooked. Rather than open and close the door each time the pot
needed more snow, he simply ripped the floor apart and took snow from underneath.
Since Kelly was out of the loop, Abe talked to himself. 'We're in trouble now,' he said.
He wondered if the regulator had lied. It seemed likely he was out of oxygen again,
but it was too much effort to check. He wasn't scared. To the contrary, a host of old
friends and half-familiar faces had come from nowhere to offer encouragement. They
were friendly and anxious for him, mumbling kind, if incoherent, advice. The tent
seemed much larger than it was. It filled with dozens of visitors. Abe kept at his stove.
There was suddenly so many to give water to.
At one point, the tent shook harder than ever. More voices cried out, adding to the
disembodied conversations Abe was enjoying. The tent door opened. More ghosts
joined Abe's gathering of souls. He looked for Jamie among the new faces, but she was
nowhere to be seen. Abe's father drifted through with his old oil-rig scars, and the
Tibetan monk rested against one wall, smiling, bundled in yak skins, looking more
boyish than ever. Daniel was there and Gus and all the others. The babble of voices
sounded like the roar of the wind and the roar of the wind reminded Abe of one vast,
unending prayer, a sort of high mass. And he was the priest. 'Water,' he offered one
and all.
Abe sat jammed against Kelly, who curled fetuslike. He handed out cups of melted
water and went on with his cooking, scooping new snow through the hole in the floor.
There was no room to work really – too many bodies in one tent – and he had to
protect his hanging stove from their elbows and commotion. Finally someone
volunteered to take over. It was Daniel. Pressed tight against Kelly and with someone
sitting on one of his legs, Abe fell asleep.
He woke slowly, still sitting upright. He was breathing oxygen through his mask.
The tent was full of people, but everything seemed different. The people had changed.