Sara would make the trip alone, not counting the faithful spirit of her mother’s company. She arrived to Delhi in the fall. From Delhi she journeyed north to Darjeeling and from there ventured northeast to the village of her chosen destination. She spent days moving by train in sweltering heat, the passenger cars packed full with people and chattel. Then, more hours of travel to follow by bus down hot dusty roads clotted with traffic of every type: autos, lorries, motorcycles, ordinary cycles, rickshaws and bullock carts, donkeys and camels and goats pulling loads, monkeys chattering hysterically in the trees. What a surprise to see all of life out on the street in full air: everywhere children begging, turbaned men lounging, women wound among the crowds all in brilliantly colored saris. Crippled limbs, dead eyes, a thrust of hands, the warning of horns, and everywhere cows, cows, cows. Tin collectors and ragpickers gathered trash, pigs and dogs nosed the ground for whatever filth might remain, while buzzards swooped into holy towers to peck offerings of human flesh. Ends converted to new means; whatever might be left aground or afloat had served its purpose to the uttermost.
The bus unloaded at the end of the paved road and Sara traveled the rest of the way by bicycle rickshaw, finally arriving to the guesthouse in the village at the base of the snowy range. She was tired and wilted and grimy, weighed down with an overstuffed backpack, her ears ringing, eyes stinging, throat parched. People everywhere stared at her as if she were a being from some other world entirely, with her turquoise eyes and milky skin and fine light hair. Some of the locals were bold and ventured near her to speak, a few asking if they might touch her hair. Little children, without asking, reached for the hem of her skirt or the tail end of her long braid and, laughing, ran shyly away. An elderly woman from the village approached her and bowed, and Sara allowed the stranger to thumb vermilion on her forehead just above and between her pale eyes. The bindi gave Sara a beatific appearance, and even more were the villagers drawn to her. She was wreathed with necklaces of marigolds, invited into homes for meals, offered cup after cup of spicy milk tea. Sara could feel Amanda encouraging her to volunteer at the village school once she was settled in. Sara, at first, resisted the voice, wanting more time for walks that brought her closer to Mysterium. She also wished for her mother to leave her to her own choices and purposes, as she was now herself a grown woman with a sensible enough head on her shoulders. But within weeks Sara had given in to her mother’s counsel and was teaching at the village school, a single room packed with barefoot children seated on a cement floor. Sara was pleased to be there, and the children could see this in her radiant face and in the grace of her gestures. They called her Sunahra-mata: Golden Mother. And in Sara’s mothering, she became more a mother to herself.
When her time at the village school came to an end, she could at last make a trip north to have a look at Mysterium, her plan being to get as close to the mountain as was allowed without a government permit and a proper expedition. She hired a guide and two porters to accompany her up to one of the smaller encircling peaks. Their way took them through tropical forest that brought them steeply out of a valley up to a long ridge, and then farther up to the high rim of a magnificent basin. From here they were able to look down into Sarasvati’s inner sanctuary, an esplanade of glacier and rock, with hanging valleys of grassy slopes and grazing herds of bharal and tahr, the landscape a fortress that lay between the foot of Sara’s namesake and a barrier ring of giant peaks. Anyone wanting to climb the great mountain would have to first pass through this citadel, a steep and forbidding descent from the edge where they stood. From the brink they looked directly ahead at Mysterium, Mount Sarasvati, Goddess of Joy, appearing to them to be rising out of nothing, afloat on a bolster of clouds, levitated, a picture of ascension. The double-peaked massif shimmered in the alpenglow, the lesser eastern summit descendant to the western, the one as guardian and part to the other. “Like mother and child,” said Sara, breathless and shivering. A lambent red glowed otherworldly along the curvature of the earth, where rock and snow and ice met sky, and above these palisades and ramparts was spread a rose-colored backscatter, a crepuscular light emitted in prisms and beams. What Sara saw was a picture of eternity, and she was enraptured by it. She had the world ahead of her entirely. To the east lay Nepal, to the north was the high plateau of Tibet, and all around were surrounding glaciers giving way into three main rivers in the valley below, two of the rivers flowing directly southerly into the Ganges. Mother Ganges: ever flowing, ever changing, ever the same; from the threshold they could see where her powers began.
“The fortress below is home of the seven rishis,” the guide said. “Hindu sages. The mountain’s unrelenting guardians.” The porters had bowed their heads and were uttering words to their deities.
Sara looked up, not at the amphitheater of glacier and river beneath her, but at the incite of her christening. “There,” she said, pointing to the topmost peak, knowing her mother was listening. “I will stand there someday.”
September 7, 1980
Dear Mr. Virgil Adams,
I am Sarasvati Troy, the daughter of Professor Stuart M. Troy and Amanda Laurel Troy, and I introduce myself to you here in the hope of someday making your acquaintance. You’re familiar with my parents since many of my father’s essays have been published in the American Alpine Journal while you’ve been the editor there, and you also wrote a profile about my mother that was printed in A.A.J. only a year before she died. I don’t take it as coincidence that the mountain you climbed and made history on just so happens to be my very namesake, but instead feel this as a most important link between us.
I’m sure you don’t need reminding that your success was almost a quarter century ago, the very day coming up next summer. Call it providence (a favorite word of my mother’s) that the anniversary of the mountain’s crowning also happens to be my twenty-fifth birthday. I was born the day you stood at the top, and I celebrate birthdays by blowing out candles and wishing such an accomplishment true for myself in this lifetime. What memories you must have, and what stories! I hope someday to have a chance to sit and listen to these stories, without sounding too much like just another one of your many admirers. Forgive my clumsiness here, but let me anyway get to the point and say I would absolutely be honored to shake your hand if you might be good enough to give me the opportunity. I’d be happy to fly to Boston for a visit and will promise to keep my stop-by short—maybe just for a few hours of a morning or afternoon? Unless you might happen to be in the Pacific Northwest anytime soon, allowing my father and me to be your welcoming hosts in our home.
Yours most truly, Sara Troy
P.S. Enclosed is a picture I drew of the mountain for you.
* * *
“HOW ABOUT I clean up?” Sara said. She was wearing her mother’s emerald-colored sweater, and had put the clarinet quintet back on the stereo.
Her father stirred the few remaining embering coals and went to the room he called Base Camp and sat at his desk. Out the window, ominous wavelike shapes with cumulous towers obscured the mountain south. Dashes of rain appeared on the windowpane. A black-tailed deer feeding on the salmonberries and the Himalaya blackberries in the purlieus of the yard bolted off in a leap, leaving behind in the mud its tracks of split hearts.
Professor Troy turned his head to the page and began to write:
Utilitarianism as opposed to the Categorical Imperative: greatest good for the greatest number, or do unto others as you would have them do unto you? As to decision-making in the mountains: argue each and which.
He had left the door open and could hear Sara in the kitchen quietly talking to herself, carrying on the way she used to when conversing with her mother. She had always a natural proclivity for chatter, since she first began to speak. He could not make her words out, and he did not care to eavesdrop, but since her return from India he could hear in her voice a difference, there now being a slightly more musical lilt to it. At his approach, she would stop talking, and always Troy was careful to give a w
ord or a cough, a scuff of a heel, a toss of a key, anything to announce his coming.
He looked up from the page and out to the darkening tent of weather. Tendrils bled like ink from a threatening mass of nimbus. In the distance, a ferryboat sounded a mournful bellow from out on the Sound. What now made him think of his old friend Reddy? Arun Reddy, how was he?
Sara had her hands in soapy water and was sponging the back of a dinner plate when the phenomenon took place; some strange atmospheric shift it was, maybe a warp or a fade or a dilate in the jet stream. A burst of wind flushed sparrows from the trees, jolting the little birds upward and outward erratically in every direction. She raised her head and saw in her reflection in the window a chine of light cleave through the clouds and widen in the sky, a mirrored fiery beam that spread out over her completely.
3.
THE SARASVATI PARTY
They meet at Professor Stuart Troy’s house on an early spring afternoon. A drizzle outside mounts to downpour, while flames rear to life in the living room fireplace. On the mantel above the fire is the framed photograph of Troy’s wife, Amanda, standing on a rocky outcrop at the top of a mountain, eyes focused right at the camera so it appears she scrutinizes those now convened in the room. The eyes take in her husband as he lays copies of an essay out on the coffee table. The gaze includes Wilder and Vida Carson too, seated together on a sofa at one side of the table, and across from them, on the opposing sofa, Doctor Arun Reddy and his son, Devin.
Vida moves restlessly in her seat, shifting from one position to another in an uneasy attempt to settle in. Doctor Reddy, cause of her uneasiness, studies the photograph above the fireplace, conscious of the penetrating look of the flame-lit eyes. He thinks of his own wife. One day, the next day, and like that the world is changed.
The doctor’s son, Devin, agreeable mix of father and mother with wavy brown hair and tan-colored skin, picks the pile of papers up and passes a copy to his friend Wilder’s wife before handing one to Wilder, keeping an essay for himself, then holding a copy out to his father. The fire crackles and huffs and tongues flames. They lower their heads and read.
Mount Sarasvati, familiar to most as Mysterium, known to the local populace as the bliss-giving goddess, looms 25,845 feet above the surface of the earth. A superbly contoured spectacle rising steeply skyward in the midst of a land recognized as the birthplace of the Hindu religion, she is thereby rich in myth and tradition, inspiring many a holy man, philosopher, and scribe. There is no landscape in the world that incites loftier thoughts than do mountains. Indeed, did God not command Moses to climb Mount Nebo in order to view the Promised Land? The divine career of Jesus was sparked in the once-splendorous hills of Galilee, and his ideas drawn from the altitudinous air. The Tibetan yogi Milarepa wrote his most exquisite poetry on Mount Kailash, where he had made his home in a cave there, and Shelley composed “Mont Blanc” in the Chamonix, overcome with what he described as an overflowing of his soul. Yet even the common man, with little respect for things sacred, has found in the aloofness and majesty of the snowy ranges a reverence beyond compare.
The blessed goddess we call Mysterium is a twin-peaked massif, with a sharp mile-long ridge parting each summit, the eastern summit lower by 745 feet, and recognized as the little goddess, or Mysterium East. A splendid diamond of unearthly proportion, she is set amid a barrier ring of a dozen smaller, but no less precious, gems, none of them under 21,000 feet. These unrelenting guardians, and the impregnability of the mountain’s other surroundings, have kept many explorers out of her reach for years. Thus, she remained a supreme temptress, inviolable and eternal, until last year’s expedition and our conquest thereof, when, alas, the goddess was overtaken by us. For on August 17, 1956, William W. Hilman and I became the first humans to set foot upon the summit of Mysterium.
The goddess’s basin, often referred to as the Sanctuary, is that space amid the foot of the mountain and its ringed fortress. The Sanctuary is itself protected by the Sage’s Gorge, a deep, narrow canyon that is known to some as the Valley of the Brahmins, or Valley of the Holy Men; called the Abyss Infested by Devils by yet others. This gorge is a narrow throat of violent river and slick towering walls, making it by far the biggest hindrance to entering the Sanctuary. Nevertheless, it is the single route in.
From Mysterium spring three great rivers, like the many beautiful flowing arms of the goddess Sarasvati herself, two of these rivers emptying directly into the Ganges, the mother river below. Shouldered among the waterways, the Sarasvati range spurs off in outwardly directions to form the letter M. Between the two outermost parallel spurs of the M is carved a shorter stroke, that of the shining pinnacle Mysterium; the longer top and bottom strokes being those of two subsidiary Indo-Tibetan massifs that serve as part of the ring fence of rising sentinels, with secondary ridges branching again from each of these, so in essence forming a fortress to the Sanctuary, within which the great Mysterium soars dramatically heavenward.
Virgil S. Adams
American Alpine Journal, Spring 1957
“Adams is a Harvard man,” Professor Troy says. “With years at Oxford mixed in. Hence, his style.” He comes back into the room carrying two pots of something hot that he’s brought in from the kitchen. He is dressed in a pair of fresh denims, flannel shirt buttoned at the cuffs. “Old Bostonian,” he says, “what they call a Brahmin. A Boston Brahmin. His family came to this country with the first load of bricks.” Troy sets the containers on the table among a spread of teacups and mugs, his movements fine and relaxed, precise. “Coffee and/or tea,” he says. “Help yourselves.” He takes a seat in one of the armchairs across from the fire. Watches as Mrs. Carson and his old friend Reddy continue to read. Watches as they both finish reading.
“Reddy,” Troy says. “You’re a Brahmin too. Real thing, aren’t you?”
“And I cannot be cast out of my caste, no matter my sins,” Reddy says. His smile is sharp and quick, his teeth are large and even and very white. “For all the good it may do me.”
“You’ve all made the how-do-you-dos?”
“Just you left, Professor,” Devin says. He gestures to his friend across the table. “This here’s Wilder Carson, buddy I told you about.”
“Brother of Lucas,” Troy says. “I see the resemblance.”
“You knew my brother?” Wilder says, slumped in his seat, fists balled in his pockets.
“Lucas was a student in my political philosophy class.”
“Yeah, well, we’re twins.”
“Glad to have you,” Troy says, standing to extend a hand, puzzled by his use of present tense. Wilder’s handshake is warm enough, but the lack of eye contact lets on a social awkwardness, a peculiarity Troy has seen among other talented climbers, especially those whose style is alpine, even solo at times. Personality types not often of the common persuasion.
“Heard about some of your triumphs even before I’d read your impressive climbing résumé,” Troy says. “You’ve sure nailed a few.”
“Make myself into a hammer and go at it. All’s there is to it.”
“This is Wilder’s wife,” Devin says.
“Vida. My name’s Vida.”
“Don’t get up.” Troy reaches across Wilder and gives Vida’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Skip the professor,” he says. “Call me Troy.”
“Troy.” She flushes, smiles nervously. Reddy notices this. Of course he notices. He knows this woman intimately.
“And Wilder, you’ve met Doctor Reddy?”
“Yeah, me and him just met.”
“Yes, he and I have just met,” Reddy says. Reddy who has had a long married habit of other women in his life. Reddy who has had Vida.
“Doctor Reddy,” she says, “we’ve actually, he and I already, we were—what was it, last year ago where I was teaching that workshop, wasn’t it?”
“Last summer, July it would’ve been,” Wilder says.
“Yes,” Reddy says. “July. The lodge out on the peninsula.”
“A career
boost,” Wilder says. “Soon after she got busier teaching.”
“What do you teach?” Troy says.
Wilder answers for his wife. “Hindu exercise discipline,” he says. “Vida’s a master of all sorts of tortuous poses. She has people looking like pieces of laundry in a washing machine moving through cycles of tumble and spin.”
Reddy and Troy share a quiet laugh.
“How crazy, I mean, how we all ended up here today.” Vida hears her voice wavering and thin. But she knew Reddy would be here. Just as he knew she would be. She takes a sip of tea. “Oh,” she says, “this is coffee.”
“Climbing world is a small world,” Troy says.
Reddy says, “You were teaching a yoga retreat that weekend, Mrs. Carson?” As if he has to remind himself of this. As if he has forgotten the long walk they had taken, the loud pound of his heart threatening to give him away every mile of the trail. He had told her to call him Reddy, as everyone did. He had told her he was a doctor, a cancer doctor. He said he had a wife. “And I have a husband,” is what Vida said. “And being a yoga teacher, well, you could say healthy people are my ideal too.” She had been gathering wild raspberries as they walked along, and she stopped to hold one out to him, the light of late afternoon webbed in her hair. Reddy remembers that light. He remembers opening his mouth to let her drop the berry onto the tip of his tongue. Her fingers, stained from the blood of the fruit, grazed his lips, causing something deeply male from deep within to rush right through him. It was not the first time such a feeling had caused him to move in the direction of another woman. But it had been the last.
“Yoga?” Troy says. “You, Reddy? Tell me you’re kidding.”
“It was my wife’s idea. Maggie’s idea. We were taking a weekend. Though somehow we never managed to do any yoga when we were there.”
Mysterium Page 3