by Jeff Long
For the fallen one, days were spent in the heap of his drugged, lacerated half-corpse. But soon enough he could drag himself about, and would lie gazing out into the mist, numb with his private thoughts. He slept, pampering his scabbed face even in his sleep, careful not to touch a large bald patch where his scalp had ripped. On a few fingers the nails were pulled off while on the rest, the cuticles had burst and bled, and his knuckles were flayed. A few times we had to kick him hard before he come awake from his delirium. But Aaron never really recovered from his fall, for though his wounds healed they were poisoned by the mist, and he was skittish and impacted with nightmares. One day the mist began to recede. Just like that, and we again became indistinguishable from the rock, and knew then we had risen slightly further.
We found a female mummy. She left no diary or notes. She was dried and desiccated after many years from hanging upon the wall. Tucked in her nylon hammock, she was well-covered with a thin silvery poncho that had at one time been painstakingly sewn as a lid to the hammock, but had long since been partly opened to reveal this precious corpse. Her hair was still long and beautiful, golden and soft. Short phrases of poetry were inscribed in the stone, and a multitude of names covered the rock above her head and chest; wreaths and bouquets of remembered loves that were immortalized here and dedicated to this one. How many had passed this way, brutal and hardened by the elements, and lifted the torn flap to witness her? Had there been even an intimation of company? But no, instead, each moving fragment of a body on this glossy wall, dissuaded by worn faith and weariness, persists deathlike to its own final isolation, there to be devoured by loneliness and gravity. For a moment, peering reverently at the body of this dusty and lofty female, I was gorged with her delicate process, her every grace. The fine woman. And the rock pushed at me with its slickness and with its fine-flaked, deep, deep sterility... but the woman, she never pushed toward death; instead to her own vanities, her clutching thighs, her fertility and population. I am her child, but what labors must I undergo to forget her? Some would challenge the contradiction on sheer principle and insist that consistency either is or is not valid. I never suffered as I poised between the rock and the female, but I can never eliminate that possession which was their harmony.
Another season of nailing and bouldering above our ledges transpired and we entered a weird, vertical plateau, still believing in the soloist and the escape he represented. Artistic exercises suddenly flooded the rock. There were carvings, bas-reliefs, etchings, poetic and philosophic engravings, statuettes, and figurines. Curiously, they all seemed confined to a particular zone, its area covering roughly three hundred square feet. It began and ended with no reason, its perimeter was not dictated by an encroachment of bad rock nor was it lined with cracks. It just ended, top, bottom, and side, by common aesthetic agreement. Climbers had religiously fixed pitons and bolts throughout the zone so that those hapless ones who followed would not accidentally chip or scar the art pieces while climbing through. All we had to do was snap our etriers onto the provided pins and we could easily ascend the vertical museum. We spent some two months in the region, rappelling and wandering about the abutments and fineries, returning to our hammocks each night to await the day when we could again resume our discoveries.
Everything was carved out of the wall rock. Pitons and drills had been skillfully wielded by the sculptors and masons, and the work had been beautifully polished by the wind. Some of the pieces were fragile, subject to destruction but at least temporarily surviving the elements.
All of the pieces, whether poetry or sculpture, reflected the medium of rock and the unavoidable reason for climbing forever. Everything was immediately apparent to us. But where had all the energy for this work arisen? Some of the pieces were overtly human creations and consisted of major rock workings, with heavy chiseling methods, while others were less forceful. These last works were milder compromises between natural design and human interpretation. Of these, some works were simple mineral patterns that were emphasized and highlighted by chip-out around the borders. The most gentle of the man-rock compromises were what we called the shadow creations. These offered grave difficulties to the understanding. Upon first glance they seemed just misshapen knobs, chicken heads, crystals jutting abnormally from the surface of the wall, but after some time we discerned that at certain moments the sun cast from these knobs particular and significant shadows which would stray sinuously across the granite entablatures surrounding them. The shadows were ephemeral, of course, and the work was only complete for a few minutes each day, but they were the most precious and abundant of works in all the zone. The more I became familiar with the shadow creations, the more I discovered in them. To my amazement I found that some of the knobs had been so carved as to give off a shadow pattern of one sort in the morning and an antithetical pattern in the afternoon. But then one day our hearts nearly burst when we recognized our own shadows. The rock, the immovable sun were devouring us in our introspection. Naively we had conceived of our immersion as a source of invention; it was our last intelligible clue.
In the mornings, with the first rays of sun, we would begin climbing. While Gareth and Aaron started up the crack, I would pack the sleeping bags and hammocks, rig the sacks for easy hauling, then jumar to where the others were waiting or climbing. I’d haul up the gear, fix it to the pins, and wait. Or climb, then wait. Or wait, then climb. The three of us could cover ten or twelve pitches in a period. We made leisure into a doctrine, trying not to sweat because water was so precious, breathing as regularly as we could, following the rhythm of our bodies religiously, and surviving by being conscious of that process of survival. When we came to what looked to be a sure death pitch, we would clamor for the lead, anxious to contradict our lethargy. But even death pitches lost their possibility and we’d sometimes hang for days, becalmed at one point and lacking all desire to do anything. We’d hum to ourselves all day as we lay, tightly pressed against the rock, in our hammocks, noting our passive miseries, sucking on pebbles, staring blankly at our hands or the similar sky. But these spells would grow heavy with their own unique tedium and soon enough we’d begin climbing again just because it was something else to do. Seasons passed.
A winter was approaching. Still, we were nowhere. Still following the primary crack, many pitches beneath us and no top, only the dull sky overhead and beneath us; no deviation from the grievous music that would rattle our afternoons.
And then, the first instance in over a year, curled and dead, self-buried beneath a shelf of rock and loose stones, lay a naked, still shimmering climber. I mantled frantically up onto the miniature pedestal and caught sight of his body, and after fixing the rope for the others to follow, I unburied him. His flesh was cold, yet it was still pliable, and when I caught his hand it was limp and flexible. The fingers would bend or straighten when I worked them, as would all his joints, and with a start I noticed that there wasn’t the slightest sign of discoloration or rotting. A saint, canonized? Some monk of the mount who had overextended himself? The corpse was not only intact, it was also undead. It smelled sweetly, like pine, and though it was dry it seemed fresh, even unctuous. And yet it was a dead thing. It didn’t breathe nor could it move. It was affixed in a limbo midway between deadness and life. It was ready to move; it was flexible and unrigid, but it was unable to actually initiate the movement it seemed to contain. It was a wonderment, but at second thought it was a terrible thing, a boneless, cold mass. It had bones, and was in every way a human body, but because of its preservation it seemed empty. It showed no sign of escape. Most terrible of all, when Aaron and I dragged it from its recess and pulled one of its eyelids open we discovered it was lacking an iris and pupil. It looked as though the eyeball was pure, white marble, unveiled and with a dull sheen to it. I could, I swear, even see the tiny crystals in its surface. But neither Aaron nor I would touch the eye.
And Gareth was behind us, gasping and snarling, tossing and wrenching his ruined wild head. I looked to Aaron for help,
but he had pendulumed to an adjoining belay area, frightened immediately by what we both must have accented in our ancient suspicion, the finality of Gareth’s despair. All that night I was left on the ledge with Gareth and his madness. Aaron stood desperate, waiting somberly and shivering only some yards across and below. Gareth kept his head-shaking on and refused to answer to his name, keeping his clasped fists in primal hidden postures of innocence and disbelief. “Man,” I said, “What man?” But he only shook his head and wept on, snarling; so I tucked the unthinkable damp corpse back beneath its covering of rock and snapped myself into a piece of anchored sling lest my peril in Gareth’s presence be realized this night.
Then I walked to the limit of the sling and reached my hand out to Gareth and pulled him to me and hugged his tense head against my shoulder for our first contact in years. With this motion he groaned once and, weeping, gave over his fists to me quietly and at last. It was the journal, a mere few paragraphs of language, but it was the solo climber’s own journal and at that we all three were cast irrecoverably into infinity.
Abe (The Ascent)
“Standing here in the pit of this basin, it struck him that ascent was less an escape from the abyss than the creation of it.”
Author Note
In 1990 my friend David Breashears invited me to join him on a BBC expedition to the north side of Everest. The trip did not start auspiciously. A few of us arrived ahead of Brian Blessed, the British actor, and the rest of the BBC crew, only to find ourselves in the middle of a democracy revolution. We were the last foreigners to be allowed entry or exit, meaning we were present for a historic moment, one that would soon help inspire my novel, The Ascent.
Kathmandu was locked down with blackouts and martial law, giving us a taste of blunt force just before we were slated to enter Tibet, a nation crushed by the People’s Liberation Army. By day we sipped orange Fantas on the rooftop of our lodge, rode bikes to Nagarjung for training hikes, and photographed peaceful marchers. By night we wandered through roadblocks of burning tires and piled furniture. It was fun.
Then came the showdown. A huge crowd marched upon the King’s palace. I joined several other foreigners at the front with my camera, but around noon got thirsty and returned to my lodge. That’s when the popcorn started rattling in the distance. The army had positioned machine guns atop either side of the final block. Among the 100 to 200 killed were most of the foreigners at the front. The government promptly issued a report that there were no casualties. Through the night the bodies were trucked to mass graves.
Next morning a friend and I defied the military lockdown and walked to Bir Hospital, rumored to hold the wounded and remaining dead. Every intersection sported a machine gun nest. Broken glass littered the empty streets. Dogs limped. When the soldiers finally allowed us to enter the hospital, we found hundreds of casualties sitting packed together with no room to lie. Blood painted the walls. Most had head and bone injuries from beatings. The doctors took us behind a curtain to photograph the bodies of eight foreigners who had obviously been special targets. Filthy with gore and mud, and mostly naked from being dragged, they lay in a row on the cement floor. Later I timed my walk from the palace to my lodge: twelve minutes separated me from lying with them.
From Bir we made our way to the Yak and Yeti Hotel where the professional journalists were concentrated. Few had ventured from the hotel yesterday, none yet this morning. I handed off my film of the demonstration and the bodies to an eager American correspondent. I didn’t want money, just credit and a copy of the images. “Absolutely,” he said, “we’ll get it Stateside the instant mail service resumes.” I asked about immediate transport via diplomatic pouch. He frowned. I could feel any headlines about tiny Nepal already evaporating.
Returning to our lodge, we walked straight into a hornet nest of adventure travelers furious that our little human rights jaunt might have endangered their upcoming treks. For our information, revolutions were considered acts of war, and as such not covered by their insurance policies. So was I going to pay if their treks were cancelled due to my meddling? This democracy revolution thing was a local tug of war, didn’t I know, and none of our business. My astonishment would soon come in handy.
A day later the King abdicated, the curfew lifted, and the BBC crew arrived. We headed straight for the Tibetan border and Everest. Jim Whittaker’s long planned Peace Climb, intended as a literal “summit” of Soviet, Chinese and American superpowers, had survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and the slaughter at Tiananmen Square the previous year. Their climb was in progress.
By arrangement, our mini-expedition hitchhiked on their permit and ropes, and occupied our own little camp by the pond where the latrines now stand. That’s where I wrote The Ascent, disappearing into my tent whenever we weren’t on the mountain. An old and familiar fever had settled upon me. I had to get the whole book on paper, right here and now before I left Everest.
It was not convenient. There were ruins, photo sites, personalities, and Rongbuk Monastery to explore. But my latest taste of Kathmandu had triggered a sense of urgency. The martial law, the state sanctioned massacre, the Know Nothing adventure travelers, the journalists’ failure to investigate: on a miniature scale, all spoke to where we were and why I had come: Tibet.
For thirteen years, ever since my release from the jails of Kathmandu in 1977 and well before the Free Tibet movement, I had been writing articles, editorials, and letters about the destruction of Tibet’s extraordinary culture. I wrote a feature piece for Rocky Mountain Magazine about the CIA training Tibetan guerrillas in Colorado. Most of the guerrilla command and the Dalai Lama’s special envoy had lived in the cell next to mine, leading me to weave in a secondary story with myself as a bit character. I was learning: story is everything.
Interest in Tibet picked up in the late 1980s, due in part to Galen Rowell’s writing and photographs. Once again a climber was one of the first to witness events unseen by professional journalists and the public. He espoused a different kind of photojournalism in which the photographer participates in the image, a creative approach that mixed visual and narrative storytelling.
As attention grew, it seemed Tibet might actually get a shot at autocracy. In the mid-1990s hopes soared when Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon. Richard Gere and Harrison Ford had been supporters for a long time. 1997 marked the release of two feature films about Tibet. One was Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, about the young Dalai Lama. The other was Seven Years in Tibet starring Brad Pitt, who played Heinrich Harrer, the alpinist (first ascent of the Eiger), and author. Most of Seven Years in Tibet was filmed in South America. Few people know that David Breashears secretly shot some of the most powerful scenes inside Tibet, assisted by the explorer and Everest powerhouse Pete Athans and acclaimed writer and Himalayan authority Brot Coburn, who translated and doubled as Brad Pitt, a climber portraying an actor portraying a climber. Yet again climbers were in the vanguard, witnessing and sharing worlds beyond ordinary imagination.
At the time of the BBC Everest shoot (1990), the Hollywood movies were still years away. But something was in the air. It had less to do with street level activism, lobbying in Congress, or marches on the UN, and more to do with the kinetic energy of storytelling. I sensed it: people didn’t want editorials, condensed histories, Buddhist teachings, or fact sheets. They wanted to be told a story, and I wanted to tell at least one.
I have a glass ceiling. At 25,000-feet I crash. Pulmonary edema, retinal hemorrhages, and mini-strokes send me back to earth. This time I flamed out at Camp IV on the North Col route. Overnight my left side went numb and weak, and the hemorrhages wrecked my vision. I descended straight into the hands of a Harvard ophthalmologist who had been waiting for weeks for someone to develop retinal hemorrhages. Wearing oxygen, I returned to Base Camp with a snow-blind climber, and was evacuated by Land Cruisers to Kathmandu. I wanted to stay, but was ready to leave. The first draft of my novel was complete. Rough as tree bark, it would need five more drafts. But my li
ttle stack of legal pads contained the general shape, characters, and tension I wanted to express Tibet’s plight.
Even as I plunged into my next book, The Ascent took on a life of its own and commenced to pull me after it. My mention of The Cowboy Junkies led to a road trip to Everest with lead singer Margo Timmons and her husband Graham Henderson. It was late November and iron cold. Our group suffered the washboard roads cocooned in sleeping bags. We reached Rongbuk Monastery, and the monks rented us rooms in the ruins by the prayer hall. Upon learning Margo was a singer, they suspended their evening prayers and requested a song.
Three days earlier we had left Kathmandu, elevation 4,500 feet. Rongbuk stands at 16,000 feet. Still jetlagged, we had headaches and just wanted to crawl into our bags. Margo is an artist, though, and tough as a boot. No different from a writer, her voice is her gift, and now she shared it. The literal translation of a cappella is “in the manner of the church.” So it was. I don’t know where she got the air to sustain the opening phrases. And then blood began trickling from her nose.
Margo did not pause to wipe it away, just kept singing to the end. The monks stared at each other, amazed by the beauty. One spoke. They wanted an encore. In the lap of Everest, Margo gave them one.
As with all my climbing novels, The Ascent failed to get a foothold in the mainstream, and did not earn out its small advance. In the old days, editors held a long view about a writer’s body of work. Then corporate publishing invaded, slicing advances, firing editors, and fixating on writers’ sales numbers. The Ascent’s numbers cost me when it came time for my next advance. That’s why the term “labor of love” exists.