“You have clippers in your kit, Doctor Father?” Devin says.
Reddy sifts through his supplies and produces a pair of tiny scissors.
“Let me trim those flappers for you,” says Devin. Sara opens her hands, and he bends over them to snip away the loose skin, his breath a warm steam on her palms.
“Don’t overdo it,” Reddy says. “Leave skin to protect.”
“Know what I’m doing,” Devin says. “Had my hands chewed up by gerbil teeth plenty a times.”
“Gerbil teeth?” Sara says.
“Those razory handholds we rock climbers sometimes need to cling to.” He shows her the fleshy part of his palms, thick as hide. “Your hands are too soft is the problem,” Devin says. “They’re not broken in.” He dabs the ointment onto the cuts.
Wilder tosses aside the tent flap and enters, announcing himself with a sharp cough. “Smells like something that’s not for breakfast in here.”
Sara smells her hands. “The ointment is odorless.”
Her father says, “I say the first order of the day should be, after all the doctoring and nursing and flirting and whiffing, day’s first order should be to get out and explore. We should start out sensibly, an unhurried pace until we get acclimated properly. A good week here at fifteen thousand feet should do it.”
“When acclimatized, we then ought to begin a search toward the north if we wish to establish a new passage,” Adams says. “Otherwise, we could retrace my steps and Hilman’s, this, of course, a longer course to take.”
“The old way will take us way west,” Devin says.
“And I’m here to claim a new route.”
“We know, Wilder,” Troy says, “so you’ve said from the beginning.”
“Come on,” Wilder says. “Make it new or don’t bother doing it.”
“I’m with Wilder,” says Devin. “We should exhaust all possibilities before doing what’s already been done.”
The monk strokes his head, as if contemplating the debate. He says, “The perfect journey, of course, is that of no need to go.”
“Too late for that,” Vida says.
“I don’t mind retracing Adams and Hilman’s steps,” Sara says.
Vida clucks her tongue, tired of Sara’s constant smile and her sweet replies, tired of the number of overtures she claims. No one could possibly be so sugary nice all the time. Vida reaches for the tub of honey, spoons a gob of it into her tea. “We’re all beginning to smell, in case no one has noticed,” she says, her spoon clanking against the tin cup as she stirs. She suggests the first order of the day, for those who want to stay and rest, she being one of them, is hot water enough for laundry and baths.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us establishing camp,” Adams says. “We might unpack and check equipment and make lists, sort the food and repack for higher camps. The Sherpas will be happy enough to put up a small shelter for privacy. Heat up some water for a bath. There should be time after the work is done for ambling the slopes. The proper way to accommodate to our beguiling new home, as the professor counsels, is to begin slowly.”
“Does everyone from Boston talk like you talk?” Wilder says.
“Why?” Adams says. “How is it you hear me speak?”
Sara reaches for her camera. “I’m going for fresh air and photographs.”
Devin bolts up from his chair, zips his coat closed. “Let’s do it,” he says, following her out of the tent.
“We might any of us have predicted this,” Troy says. “Predicted them.” He peers into his coffee, realizing he has not before seen his daughter on the brink of a relationship with another man, if she hasn’t already slipped off the cliff and fallen for Devin. “Hell,” he says. “Such things do happen.” He takes a sip of the hot java, feeling the warmth of the liquid cutting a path from throat to chest, the tension in his body subsiding, the stiffness in his back deliquesced.
“The most noteworthy task of a parent would be to bequeath his or her child to another,” Adams says. “So I have heard. For how could I really know personally of such matters?”
“We all have to give someone up sometime or another,” Reddy says.
Vida feels the remark as a nudge in the ribs. She sits up straight, lowers her face, unzips her parka. “It’s a mushroomy smell is what it is,” she says. She puts her nose inside the coat and sniffs.
“Yes, earthy, such as truffles,” Adams says.
“Kind of more like wet dog if you ask me,” Wilder says.
Troy shrugs, sips his coffee, thinks his thoughts as the others talk on. He turns a spoon on the table, flipping it over again and again. He considers the idea of having to give a daughter away, as people like to put it. But in a sense, can’t it be more like a lending, or a sharing, while having someone else to porter the load? He fiddles with the spoon. Maybe it’s the sloth in me, he thinks, simple lack of effort, for as life goes on romantic love has become more a burden than a boon, he will confess, and he has relied instead on his daughter for constant company. As for erotic love, as to this he may as well admit a simple failure to act. He knows he’s now without plenitude or effort. He hasn’t any wish to be overcome again. When work replaces. Climbing replaces. He sees himself as one set on a proper course now, for the labor of concentration forces the mind in a direction that a person can believe in. It’s enough to feel the urgency of the task at hand, and for him, this has become enough. Even explaining himself to others is to deviate from what it is that most matters. So, yes, enough. He pushes the spoon aside and sips his coffee, looks to the one now speaking.
“I walked up deeper into the Sanctuary, got up onto the top of the moraine,” says Wilder. “There are some variegated cliffs at the base, schist and dolomite looks like. Different slates. I think there’d be a way for us to cut through the cliffs to get up and over and onto the northeast ridge.”
“Sooner we find out what is ahead of us the better,” Reddy says. “I have no patience for sleeping on it.”
“Wilder,” Troy says. “How about going out again and scouting around with us tomorrow? Show us what you’ve seen? See if we can find a breach?”
“I’m wiped, man.” He holds a hand up. “Will take your advice to acclimatize.”
* * *
THE MONK had told a story to the sahibs as they sat about the fire their last night in the Gorge. The story took place on the Crystal Mountain, a vessel of cosmic power known to millions as the center of the metaphysical world. Set high in the middle of the Himalaya between India and China, the mountain forms a spire at the top of the roof of the earth. A most holy site, it is forever protected by the gods from ignorance and illusion, and as if by a magnet, people are drawn to it from near and far.
Several years ago, the monk had said, an American woman of some means joined a small group of travelers to circumambulate the holy mountain. The party, which included two other women, four men, and a guide, set out by jet, and from there they were caravanned to the high plateau region of Tibet. They camped at night in the cold arid desert, each of them sleeping in their own small tent, sharing meals together in a common tent. It was on the second evening on the road, during a modest supper of vegetables and rice, that the American woman announced to the others that she had come on this journey to scatter her daughter’s ashes.
“An honor,” the guide said.
“What a beautiful gesture,” another woman in the party said.
The rest agreed, nodding their heads in assent.
Only one among them remained silent. He was a small good-looking man, of delicate but muscular build. He took a sip of his buttery tea, tasting the rancid taste of it. He gazed into the teacup, uncertain as to whether the woman was being overly forward or was simply self-centered, though she certainly could be either or both. The man did not take her to be a fool, not immediately, though this too he could not be certain of. Perhaps she was slightly deluded. But he was most convinced of the vanity of her act.
She spoke at length about her daughter, a
young woman who was certainly beautiful, for the mother had passed a photograph among them. She told of a daughter who had succeeded in the finest schools and was about to begin a fruitful career in family therapy, with a pursuit in circular causation, is what I believed the specialty was called, the monk said. The daughter had exceptional men asking for her hand in marriage, so the mother told her fellow travelers, and surrounding the girl was a bounty of friends everywhere she went. And just at this ripe time of her life, the daughter was riven of all these prizes: a sudden and tragic accident befell her, and she died. What a loss of a beautiful soul, who would say not? The mother lowered her head, and mourned as only a mother can mourn. The others turned her way, reaching a hand out or offering words, a handkerchief, finding perhaps in this grief-stricken woman a sense of what had led them toward this course of sacred pilgrimage they were on. For were they not heartfelt people, turning their attentions as they did to a woman who so deeply lamented?
“Grief,” the man said. “Tell me, what is it that grief can teach you?”
They all shook their heads, shunning the man for his callousness.
“It is scene-painting,” he said. “It is misleading.” He spoke softly.
The others called him a selfish man, a hard and selfish man.
“There is nothing to be gained from the favoring of suffering,” he said.
The others went to the woman, embraced her.
“You will find no wisdom in bereavement, only emptiness.”
The party turned away from him, and started back upon their journey.
The mother required numerous stop-offs. She would need to shop in the village markets for prayer flags, for a prayer wheel, for incense and beads, for a hat to reflect her sadness, for keepsakes to keep. They would make a visit to each temple along the way so the mother could tell the lamas her story in order that they might bless the ashes she carried.
In every monastery they passed the mother would need to break for tea. The party sat inside painted sanctuaries and caves, surrounded by colorful deities with fingers curved in meaning. The man stood outside waiting, alone, looking up to a vault of ever-changing sky.
There were days the mother’s anguish was so great it was impossible for the group to travel at all, and so the journey was often delayed. During these episodes her traveling companions would sit with her. They would bring her tea. They would listen to her speak of her daughter. The mother had many stories of the girl to tell. It would take a lifetime of telling, so many stories there were. They nodded. “It is important to try,” they said. “Court your suffering,” they said. “You have been cleaved.”
They climbed into the caravan and journeyed on, entering territory inhospitable and remote. The man sat in the back of the vehicle alone, packed between bundles of food and luggage, looking out the window to a dun-colored emptiness. Here and there they would pass a scatter of nomads, leathered and dust-covered men tending long-haired bovine, women wandering the desert in tattered and fanciful hats toting children on their backs.
At night, the party camped below star-washed skies, with more stars than the eye could take in. The moon changed from a great white spotlight to a golden floating disc. The man sat in his tent and took his meals alone, for if he were to enter the common tent the others would get up from their seats and leave in protest. He did not mind the solitude of his tent. But it disturbed him that he could not read his book or think his thoughts as the voice of the mother penetrated the canvas walls and spilled into his solitude. He heard tales of the daughter whether he wished to hear them or not. He heard in the mother’s voice a tone of great need. He heard around her a chorus of voices meant to comfort her. He thought of Greek tragedies. He thought of costumes and stages, of acts and orations.
After a long week of traveling the party arrived to the base of the Crystal Mountain. They left the caravan and set out through a deep cleft of rock following the way of the pilgrims, most of the pilgrims having traveled from very far away, riding inside the open beds of trucks or on rickety bicycles or swaybacked mules to get to this most holy place. Many of them tethered yaks loaded with provender and belongings, some of them bowed to the ground and moved on hands and knees, prostrating themselves full-length each step of the way. They would endure bitter cold and extreme altitude, though all knew to avoid the dangers of attempting to climb the highest slopes. To defile the sacred mountain by attempting to stand atop it was to violate a most sacred taboo, and for this the punishment was death. The quest was not an attempt to reach a zenith. It was about immersing oneself in an odyssey of eternal circling.
Now the party’s guide felt himself entirely necessary to the mother, the monk said. The guide stayed close, carrying her backpack, offering pious words of sympathy and praise, rarely leaving her side, for his duty to her was clear. The mother carried the ashes, her woes, her prayer flags, her hymns and her poems, as well as the succor given by her traveling companions. All gathered at the start of the path around the Crystal Mountain to help her anchor the stringed blocks of colorful cloth, all but the man who could see in the mother’s actions not grace but falsity. Knowing himself vanquished, he left the group to join the other pilgrims as they entered the gorge.
At sky burial sites along the way the mother stopped to scatter articles of the daughter’s clothing, tossing them among the mounds of discarded raiment that belonged to the dead. The others circled about her as she flung blouses and stockings and skirts to the wind. A few snapped pictures as the mother posed among the heaps of rotted cloth. She paused in many other places along the way, reaching into her hip pouch for handfuls of ashes. She blew the ashes into the thin cold air and watched as they settled into bins and wallows of snow. The others observed her as she crouched to her knees and wept. They squinted, and bowed their heads.
“What happened to the vanquished man?” Reddy said.
“By now the man was far ahead of the rest,” said the monk, “as he intended to travel around the entire mountain in a single day. Many of the devout attempt it in this manner.”
“So the mother walks around with her entourage in tow,” Vida said.
“In the glorification of her ego,” Adams said.
“But the mother couldn’t have managed the task alone,” said Sara.
“She could have managed it differently,” Wilder said. “Privately.”
“Yes,” Troy said. “Less narcissistically.”
“It was a way to keep her daughter alive,” Sara said. But at this she hung her head to hide the shame on her face, struck by the sudden keen awareness of her own vanity. For she knew she would have acted just as the mother had, presenting her daughter as the heart of the matter: nothing or no one could be more important. Needing to keep the daughter the primary concern, someone born of her and so part of her, was to put herself above the others and their concerns. The daughter required nothing any longer. Only the mother did, demanding the focus of her travel mates, needing to remain in the limelight. Simply put, she was a woman in great want of an audience. Sara wondered if the monk had told this story as a lesson to her.
“A way to keep the daughter alive?” Vida said. “Or herself alive?”
“To lose her motherhood was to lose the person she was,” Sara said.
Adams said, “Did the banished man circle the mountain in a day?”
“Could be the man found the famous yogi poet’s cave,” Troy said. “Maybe he’s still there, sitting quietly, spanning time, no longer bothering to abut himself up against the masses, abut himself up against the rest of the world.”
“Maybe the man decided to climb to the summit,” said Reddy.
“Right,” Wilder said. “To hell with the rules.”
“And on the way up met his death,” Devin said.
The monk sat with his hands open and settled on his knees.
“And so what of the moral?” Reddy said. “Tell us.”
The monk laughed. “Moral? Why a moral? It is only a story,” he said.
* * *
REDDY AND Troy return to Base Camp with the news. “There appears to be no way to the top from the northeast,” Troy says. He pulls his wool cap off, tosses it onto the table, and takes a seat next to his daughter.
“Can’t be,” Wilder says. He drops his task as repackaging assistant. Devin and Sara carry on, the two pouring large containers of orange-drink mix into quart-size plastic bags.
“We’ll have to go back around and take the west route, I’m afraid,” Troy says. “It’s just not possible to get up the escarpment and onto the face any other way. The cliffs are simply impassable. There are no means of traversing. There is no plateau at all. The arête we could see was sharp as a blade of knife in places, and it was bristling with frozen pinnacles.”
“The mountain’s just showing its teeth is all,” Wilder says.
“Below her incisors are walls of icy vertical,” Reddy says.
“That’s not what I saw, Doc.”
“We took the only clear course there was to take,” Troy says.
“Sara and I took Wilder’s bearings,” Devin says. He holds open a container bag as Sara handles the job of ladle and fill. “Climbed up a bluff and onto a saddle. Didn’t find a way to get up through the cliffs, but we—”
Sara touches Devin from under the table with her knee as reminder. She has made him promise not to mention the snow leopard, for to tell of it would be to take away the power of what she has seen.
“You two didn’t get high enough to really see anything,” Wilder says. He coughs, clears his throat, puts his head out of the tent, spits.
“Please,” Reddy says. “Hygiene, if you don’t mind.”
“You don’t find ledges and holds until you’re up there,” Wilder says.
“Let’s take the original route,” Sara says. “Mr. Adams’s line.”
“Agree,” says Devin. “Going for on-sight at first sight isn’t as safe.”
Wilder picks up a plastic bag and tosses it back down on the table. Dust powders out in an orange cloud. “What’re you saying, man?” he says. “You’re doing a one-eighty on me.”
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