by Rick Chesler
Zack half-smiled. “Everything I told you and Francesca was true. We didn’t talk so much about the mountain, at least not in so many words. What he did say was very cryptic.”
For the first time Zack realized that his headache had subsided. That his nausea wasn’t nearly as bad.
“Didn’t you ask him specifically about the expedition?” Dustin said.
Zack zipped up his sleeping bag. “Of course I did.”
“And?”
“And he said–”
Suddenly Dustin shouted, “Damn,” and began fumbling his way out of the sleeping bag.
Zack sat up. “What’s wrong?”
Holding his gut with his left hand, Dustin scrambled out of the tent without another word.
After a moment, Zack lay back down and hummed. The Abbot had been rather enigmatic, and yet Zack had left the monastery feeling fulfilled.
His thoughts drifted back to the afternoon. It had taken Zack quite some time to see the Abbot. By the time Tengboche Rimpoche finished his prayer and meditation, a line of Sherpas and tourists had already formed at his door. While Zack waited, Tashi explained that in addition to performing divinations and dispensing advice, the Abbot named children, conducted funerals, blessed marriages, houses, and land.
“Tengboche Rimpoche is very busy, much sought-after man,” Tashi said.
Barefooted, Zack stood silently in the main assembly hall under the watchful eye of an imposing fifteen-foot statue of Buddha. When Tashi pressed his hands together in prayer, Zack followed suit. When Tashi prostrated three times, Zack tried not to appear uncomfortable. He lowered himself alongside the Sherpa and mirrored his movements, extending his body, touching his forehead to the floor, rising and repeating the action twice more.
Together they lit a few butter lamps and spun a number of prayer wheels. Then Tashi disappeared into the Abbot’s quarters, to seek the lama’s blessings on behalf of the expedition.
Soon after it was Zack’s turn. As he entered the Abbot’s quarters, he removed a handful of U.S. bills from his pocket, distressed again that he’d neglected to exchange the dollars for rupees. He offered them to the Abbot, who set them down on his prayer table without looking at them. The Abbot smiled warmly then motioned for Zack to sit.
“You are an adventurer,” the Abbot said.
Zack looked up at him. The lama was seated cross-legged on a daybed. His face was weathered, his dark skin as wrinkled as Zack’s shirt. The Abbot’s bare arms were pencil thin. What little hair he had was shaved down and strikingly white.
“No,” Zack said, inhaling deeply. The lama’s words had caught him off-guard. “My wife, she was the adventurer. I’m a school teacher.”
The Abbot laughed. “Sounds like adventure to me.”
The sound of the lama’s laughter immediately put Zack at ease. He had been told he’d have twenty minutes with the Abbot, a half hour at most. But Zack sat with Tengboche Rimpoche for nearly an hour and a half.
Lying now in his sleeping bag, he felt the silk kata the Abbot had placed around his neck. These white scarves, Tashi told him, were given to high lamas, family and friends and guests. They were offered both as a welcoming and a farewell gift. At weddings, they were provided to the bride and groom. But the one the Abbot had given Zack was special, Tashi said. Unlike most, Zack’s kata was plain and unembroidered. Plain and unembroidered katas were only given to those who’d recently lost a loved one.
“Plain kata symbolizes sadness and mourning,” Tashi said.
A high-pitched whistling suddenly emanated from the nearby forest. Zack shot up in his sleeping bag again.
There was silence. Silence as sudden and absolute as the pitch blackness that enveloped Tengboche earlier that evening. Evidently, even Patty and Ian had eventually packed it in.
Zack listened carefully. He thought he heard footsteps padding across the temple grounds. First they sounded far off. Then they seemed to get closer. Closer. Closer still.
Swallowing hard, Zack moved to unzip his sleeping bag.
Suddenly the tent flap flew open, and a wave of icy air blew in.
Zack released his breath. “Damnit, Dustin. You scared the hell out of me.”
“Sorry.”
Zack slowly settled back down. “What was that whistle?”
Dustin shrugged. “Beats me.” He seemed to be breathing as hard as Zack. “Probably just
a gorak - you know, a raven. There are thousands of them around here.”
“Feeling any better?” Zack asked.
“No.” Dustin slid back into his sleeping bag. “Not at all. Looks like a bad case of travelers’ diarrhea. On my way back, I stopped in to see Dr. Kapoor. He gave me some antibiotics and told me to stay hydrated. We’ll see how it goes.” He sighed heavily as he turned down his lantern. “Just what I needed,” he mumbled, “a case of dysentery a few days into the trek.”
Zack closed his eyes, relieved he was no longer feeling the effects of altitude sickness.
In the darkness, Dustin said, “So, before I got the runs, you were saying...”
Zack said, “I was telling you how the Abbot was acting mysteriously. Especially toward the end.”
“Oh yeah?” Dustin sounded intrigued. “How so?”
Zack’s mind drifted back to the Abbot’s colorful quarters, to the moment Zack was about to leave.
The lama had clapped his hands together and called him back. Zack sat across from the Abbot as he had before. But the Abbot this time shook his head and motioned him forward. Zack stood and stepped around the prayer table, glancing down in disgust at his dollar bills as he did.
When Zack was near, the Abbot cupped his hands around his mouth and directed Zack to lower his head.
When Zack did, the Abbot whispered in his ear.
“What did he tell you?” Dustin said.
Zack arched an eyebrow in the darkness of the tent. “He asked me if I could keep a secret.”
“And?”
“And I told him, yes, I could.”
“Then what did he say?” Dustin asked.
Zack thought back. “He said, ‘Good.’”
Chapter 10
Gorak Shep
Eight days after their acclimatization day in Tengboche, the expedition finally arrived in Gorak Shep, which, at seventeen thousand vertical feet, would serve as their last lodging spot before Base Camp.
Zack hastily shed his pack and dropped to the ground like a fallen tree. His lungs were hungry; his calves burned. He felt as though his entire body might melt into the frozen lakebed covered with sand. And at this point, he couldn’t really care less if it did.
One after another Zack’s teammates fell in beside him. Except, that is, for Tashi, who hovered over Zack, still rambling, his breathing as regular as it was in Lukla at the start of last week when they commenced the forever trek.
“...and once, when my father was a young boy,” Tashi said gravely, “he saw yeti drinking from a creek in Machhermo.” The Sherpa paused, his chin sinking into his chest. “Three days later, his grandmother die.”
Tashi had been sharing stories like this ever since Pangboche, where the team was greeted by a pair of Sherpas who were curious about what had happened to the expedition’s yaks back in Namche.
Their names were Pemba and Lobsang, and they claimed to be the Sherpas who discovered the ravaged body of the Tibetan farmer in the woods abutting their village not three months ago.
“How do you know he was a farmer?” Dustin had asked.
Over Lobsang’s apparent protests, Pemba pulled a small piece of paper from his pocket and smoothed it out on a large flat stone. Beneath a dark rust-colored smear, Zack could see that there was writing on it, but not Roman letters.
“They are Tibetan characters,” Francesca said, examining the page.
Pemba nodded, then spoke to Tashi in Sherpa.
Tashi translated. “He say, yes, but they were written by a foreigner.”
Zack moved in for a closer look, flatteni
ng the scrap across the stone. His heart was still racing, thumping like approaching footsteps in his chest. He tried to block out what had just transpired on the suspension bridge eighty feet above the Imja Khola river, and focus instead on the note.
“What does it say?” he asked.
Pemba pulled Tashi aside and spoke in a hushed tone. Once he finished, Tashi turned to the group and said, “He say, it reads, ‘Nga tsay-wa sem-chen-chig go,’ which he believes to mean: ‘I need find an animal.’ This is how he knows the dead man was a farmer.”
Zack lifted the paper off the rock and considered Pemba’s logic. The poorly written characters were clearly the mark of a foreigner. A foreigner who felt more comfortable writing rather than speaking the local language. The sentence, though inartfully drafted, was taken by Pemba to mean that the foreigner was in the market for an animal, and who else in Tibet would he approach with such a request but a native farmer.
“Why is he speaking so quietly?” Francesca asked, referring to Pemba.
Before Tashi could translate the question, Dustin supplied the answer. “Because Sherpas believe that seeing a yeti is a bad omen, and to talk about one is taboo.”
Lobsang gasped at the mere mention of the beast. He tugged on Pemba’s arm and tried to lead him away.
Pemba shook him off. After some argument, Lobsang finally stalked away on his own.
Now as he lay on the ground trying to rest, Zack grew weary of the stories Tashi had been telling him throughout the second week of their trek, from Dingboche to Pheriche, from Pheriche to Lobuche, from Lobuche to Gorak Shep. Enough was enough.
Zack sat up. “Tell me, Tashi,” he said, a bit irritably. “How is it then that the yeti has managed to stay hidden for so long?”
Tashi lowered himself on his haunches. His voice took on a cold, serious tone. “The beasts live in the Snow Mountains. They sleep in caves. Only come out at night.”
“They’re nocturnal?”
Tashi ignored him. “Their feet point backwards, so they cannot be tracked.” He stood again, pointed to his eyes. “And when one is seen, it can right away disappear. Become invisible. Vanish like it was never, never there.”
Zack smiled and shook his head. “So it can dematerialize, too?” He glanced toward the mountains. “Tell me, Tashi,” he said. “If it’s nearly impossible to see a yeti, how will I know when one is nearby?”
Tashi touched his nose. “It is said you can smell the reeking beast very clear.” He pointed to his ear. “And if you listen close, sometimes you will even to hear it.”
“Hear it, huh?” And tell me, what does a yeti sound like?”
Tashi put two fingers between his lips and whistled as loud as he could. The shrill blast chased a flock of ravens from the nearby juniper bushes. Zack watched as they shot like errant arrows across the silver-blue sky.
When he finished his whistle, Tashi took a deep breath. Then he opened his mouth and shrieked: “Aiyeeeeeeeeee! Aiyeeeeeeeeee!”
Zack lay back down. He covered his face with his new bright red North Face hood and closed his eyes. After a moment, he peeked out at the team. Dustin was busy erecting their tent. Good. All Zack wanted right now was to sleep.
* * *
When Zack awoke in his sleeping bag, light already filtered through the top of the nylon tent. He stretched. His neck was stiff, his back sore. His left arm remained asleep. He glanced across the tent at Dustin’s empty sleeping bag. Atop it sat his tentmate’s gear. In precisely the same position it was in late last night, when Zack finally fell asleep.
Zack crawled out of the tent and into the early morning mist. His bladder felt full, his mouth dry. First things first, he thought. He trudged through the fog, looking for a place to piss.
The ground was rocky and he stumbled a number of times. Then he barely missed walking into a neck-high pile of stones. He looked around. Through the fog, he saw rows and rows of similar stones, carefully piled high one atop another like a child’s building blocks.
Monuments, he realized. Crudely constructed shrines to the Everest dead.
“Merda!”
Zack looked up. He could have sworn he heard Francesca’s voice.
“Merda!” she shouted again, only louder this time.
He started toward the sound. As he grew closer, he heard Dustin and immediately experienced a mix of emotions--envy and relief.
“Did you hurt yourself?” Dustin asked.
“No,” she snapped. “Merda. I stepped in it.”
Zack was suddenly struck with a pang of guilt; he felt as though he were eavesdropping. Instantly, he raised his arm, waved it as though clearing away the fog. As he did he called Dustin’s name.
“Over here, Zack,” Dustin called back.
Zack followed Dustin’s voice. Through the mist, he could finally make out Francesca’s form as she leaned against a boulder, attempting to remove her boot.
“I swear,” she said. “I will never understand it. Why would anyone on our team defecate so close to our camp? And why here, so near the monuments?” She shook her head. “Savages they are.”
“Primitive,” Dustin agreed. “Still, I wouldn’t put it past that Austrian guy. Or maybe that spoiled young Greek.”
Zack buried his nose in his North Face coat and stared down at the mess. “That’s not human feces.”
Dustin furrowed his brow. “No? Sure looks like it.”
Zack knelt down. It certainly wasn’t yak dung. He’d seen enough of that over the past two weeks. He gagged-- the smell was overwhelming. But he held his breath and drew as close as he could without getting sick.
“For one,” he said, “there’s far too much of it. Looks like it’s just one long fecal mass.”
Dustin grinned. “You didn’t tell us you were an expert in scatology, Zack.”
“I’m not.” Zack squinted at the fresh excrement until his eyes began to tear. “It’s just that this specimen is pretty unusual.”
Dustin took a tentative step forward. “How do you mean?”
Zack said, “Whatever left this has been eating small animals.”
“So?” Francesca scrunched up her face. “What is so unusual about that?”
“Nothing.” Zack pointed to the center of the pile, to the leavings that suggested the creature’s diet. “Except whatever left this mess didn’t restrict itself to the meat.” He looked up at her. “It ingested everything,” he said pensively. “Even the fur and the bones.”
* * *
The Himalayan Skies expedition departed Gorak Shep the next day. For the first time since Lukla, Zack felt excited to hit the trail. His head was as clear as when he was a kid, his breathing as easy as in Newport in spring. It certainly wasn’t the air. The air was thinner here than anywhere Zack had ever been. Because now, without question, Zack was higher than he’d ever been before. Higher even than he and Nadia were on Denali when the blizzard turned them around.
No, it wasn’t the air, Zack realized. And, as pleasant as it was, it wasn’t the weather. In fact, it wasn’t any external factor at all. Truth was, he’d been experiencing a tinge of this exhilaration for days. Ever since that incident on the way to Pangboche.
It had happened so fast. Well, maybe not; but that’s how Zack remembered it now. Fast, like the first and only hit he’d taken as quarterback of the junior varsity football team. Fast. Fast like that.
He’d been crossing a bridge, an ancient wooden structure fashioned out of the most rudimentary parts, each plank, it seemed to Zack, more warped than the last. He tread lightly, holding tightly to frayed ropes. He took a deep breath as the bridge swayed from the high winds, glanced down ever so briefly at the Imja Khola river some eighty feet below. His stomach felt suddenly empty and sick.
As he crossed, Zack stared longingly at the more modern bridge suspended a bit higher to his right. It, at least, was constructed of steel, upgraded and obviously sturdier, more stable. But alas, closed and under repair.
He looked ahead. Wished the yaks would
make their way across faster. Zack didn’t like being idle on this bridge. Didn’t care to remain stationary so high.
But Tashi didn’t seem to mind. “A fine place for prayer flags,” he said to Zack, as he unraveled a roll of multi-colored cotton cloths. “The strong winds in this gorge very good for carry prayers aloft.”
As Tashi wove the prayer flags along the worn ropes, the wind picked up even more. The yaks in front of Zack instantly froze in their tracks. Each of the animals then lifted its nose.
Zack drew a breath and for a second he smelled it, too. A revolting, almost intolerable stench.
“What is that odor?” Francesca cried from behind him. “It is downright vile.”
Then all at once the line of yaks began backing up, knocking into drivers and porters. Zack instinctively crouched down as the grunting yaks tried helplessly to turn around on the narrow, unforgiving bridge.
Zack glanced up just in time to see one of the porters spill over the side, just a few feet away, snatching a length of Tashi’s prayer flags as he fell.
Francesca screamed.
Zack leapt up. Tashi’s prayer flags began unwinding along the rope rail. Zack reached out, snatched up the tail end just before it fell. He lurched forward from the force but held on with all his strength.
The prayer flags went taut. His grip on the line burned Zack’s hands.
“Hold on!” His yell echoed off the walls of the valley.
Too much weight. Zack began to slide forward. He tried digging the heels of his boots between two loose planks to no avail. He continued to slide. Soon his torso was through the ropes and it seemed as though he would fall face first eighty-some feet onto the rocks in the rushing river below.
Ian’s voice began barking commands.
Then Tashi grabbed Zack’s legs. “I got him, boss!”
Zack released the line of prayer flags with his left hand, and stretched that arm as far as he could toward the porter. He couldn’t reach.
Zack again gripped the line of prayer flags with both hands, and with all his might pulled it higher. Upside down, the blood rushed to his head. He felt faint, drool pooling at the corners of his mouth. Then the white began clouding over his eyes.