The Ascent

Jeff Long, himself a veteran climber, based this story on his own experiences in the

Himalayas. Author of a previous novel, Angels of Light, he lives in Boulder, Colorado.

'The Ascent is an astonishing novel, a darkly brilliant tale haunted by the ominous yet

charged with hope and beauty' – David Roberts, author of Moment of Doubt

'An unbelievably powerful story... I would recommend this to anyone interested in the

Himalayas' – John Acklerly, Director, International Campaign for Tibet

The Ascent

Jeff Long

Copyright © 1992 Jeff Long

To Barbara

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One writes the way one solos upon a mountain, alone and yet not at all alone. I owe

The Ascent to many people, among them Cliff Watts, Charles Clark, Michael

Wiedman, and Kurt Papenfus, all physicians, all climbers. Over the years, David

Breashears, Brian Blessed, Fritz Stammberger, Arnold Larcher, Matija Malezic, and

Geof Childs have shared their ropes and wings with me in the Himalayas. I give

special thanks to John Paul Davidson and all the members of the BBC crew of Galahad

of Everest, and to Jim Whittaker of the 1990 International Peace Climb. Thanks also

to Craig Blockwick, James Landis, Gwen Edelman, Verne and Marion Read, Rodney

Korich, Jerry Cecil, and, as always, my parents for their support, and to Jeff Lowe,

Mary Kay Brewster, Annie Whitehouse, Karen Fellerhoff, and Brot Coburn for their

extraordinary tales. Elizabeth Crook, Steve Harrigan, Doe Coover, Pam Novotny, and

Rex Hauck helped raise me from the abysses of my own making.

I will remember forever Jeanne Bernkopf, who showed me that language is spirit,

and spirit, the rope with which we all inch higher. In the human rights arena, the

following people and organizations provided guidance and inspiration: Michelle

Bohanna, John Ackerly, Tenzin Tethong, Lisa Keary, Marcia Calkowski, Rinchen

Dharlo, Woody Leonhard, Spenser Havlick, Steve Pomerance, Matt Applebaum,

Leslie Durgin, Buzz Burrell, Chela Kunasz, the International Campaign for Tibet, the

Office of Tibet, the U.S.-Tibet Committee, and the Lawyers for Tibet. I am especially

grateful to Cindy Carlisle and Michael Weis for their vision and tenacity. Finally,

without my editor Elisa Petrini's magic these pages would be nothing but stone.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The Kore Wall route is an imaginary monster, drawn in bits from the south and west

faces of Makalu and glued to the north face of Everest. Himalayan veterans will also

note my fiddling with certain geographical features of the region, for example the 'loss'

of the second road exit from the Rongbuk Valley, the blending of Shekar Dzong with

the Rongbuk Monastery, and the movement of Chengri La from some twenty miles to

the east. I hope these liberties won't ruin the mountain's realities.

This story is fictional, but the tragedy of Tibet is not. China's illegal occupation of

Tibet constitutes one of the great crimes against humanity in this century. Having

killed off one sixth of the Tibetan population over the past forty years, the People's

Republic of China continues to systematically plunder and destroy the Tibetan

culture, religion and environment. What was once Shangri La, however imperfect, is

now a graveyard and gulag garrisoned by Chinese troops and overrun by 7.5 million

Chinese colonists. A century ago, Native-Americans of the Wild West were conquered

with similar violence fueled by similar ideals of racial supremacy. However, a century

ago, there was no such sanctuary as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The

twenty-first century may yet see Tibet restored to its sovereign status.

PROLOGUE – 1974

From far North, a breeze rushed and the forest creaked in a wave. The rescue men

waited in the frozen white of their car beams, acid from too much coffee, souring

among the pines. Abe had never felt cold like this. He tried warming himself with the

memory of their midnight breakfast in a truck stop – the fake maple syrup, the bacon,

the men's jokes to a waitress with yellow teeth – but then another breeze came

through.

It had been an all-night drive to reach this dead end in the heart of Wyoming.

Sometime around one the Jimi Hendrix on their airwave had surrendered to

honky-tonk and then near four the cowboy ballads had fallen into dark mountain

static. The road had quit at dawn and the forest had swallowed them whole and now

here they were, kicking about a wild goose chase. If the dead or wounded – the lost –

in fact existed, there was ho evidence, none, no car, certainly no tracks, not with this

fresh dusting of snow.

None of them were big men really. And yet they mustered like unshaven giants – at

least to Abe's eye – stomping the snow with lug-soled boots and snorting great

streams of white frost through their nostrils. They scared him, though for the most

part that was because he had finally, at the age of almost eighteen, succeeded in

scaring himself. For as long as he could remember, Abe had wanted to climb

mountains. The trouble was he was no mountain man, just an east Texas oil patch

brat, a college freshman who'd never climbed in his life except through the pages of

National Geographic and adventure books.

A ghost of white powder cast loose from the boughs to ride the air in ripples. Snow

splashed Abe in the face, then went on. Once more he was left facing the forest in a

cupful of men, a watchful boy with a long blade of a face and brass wire-rims and a

squared-off homecut. He was wearing immaculate white-on-white winter camouflage

purchased with hurried guesswork yesterday afternoon at Boulder's army surplus

store. The rest of the men were dressed in real clothes: wool and down mostly, most

of it patched up and greasy from use.

Abe could tell they weren't yet finished hanging their jokes on him. It was hard

saying what stung more, the justice of their mockery or the mockery itself. He didn't

blame them. He looked ridiculous. He didn't belong here, that was sure. But then

again, they were all outsiders. Dawn had broken an hour ago with a bright but steely

winter sun. And so their engines were kept running and their headlights were on and

they were pretending to get illumination and heat from the man-made beams. To

some extent, they were all making believe.

At long last their wait ended. 'Got him,' a voice among them shouted, and the pack of

men thronged the short-waves set. It was a Fish and Game pilot calling in. He'd been

scouring the peaks since first light and had, he announced, just sighted one of the

accident victims.

The rescue leader spoke up, a gruff, meticulous sort with a stained moustache and a

white helmet stenciled with ROCKY MOUNTAIN RESCUE. 'Ask him can he sweep for the

other victim,' he said to the radio man. 'Tell him there's got to be two. Nobody climbs

alone. Not in this kind of backcountry. Not in winter.'

But the leader was fishing. In fact, they had no facts. No names, no locations, no

missing person reports. Nothing but a drunk elk poacher's phone call about a climbing

accident on a mountain in Wyoming.

The pilot answered from far off. He refused. The weather had turned and he

couldn't stay. There was only the one victim. He'd looked. He approximated his

coordinates for their map finding.

'Ask him the man's condition,' said the leader.

'Oh, he's down there,' came the thinning voice. 'He's alive all right. Flopping around

on the high glacier.'

'Damn it,' snapped the leader. 'Is the man hanging on a face? Is he wandering? Is he

tore up? What's his condition?'

'Wait till you see this one,' the pilot said. 'In all my days...' Their reception tore to

rags.

'Repeat, over.'

The voice resurfaced, small and halt. '...like a gutshot angle,' they heard. That was it,

just enough to frown at and shrug away.

'Screw that,' someone said.

'Well, whoever he is, let's go save him,' said the leader, and they broke the huddle to

go saddle on their gear.

In all the mass of hardware and meds they off-loaded from the trucks and jeeps,

there was not one single item Abe knew how to use or even handle. Abe recalculated

his foolishness. He was a liability, not a savior, and his bluff was getting called. But he

couldn't bring himself to confess.

He had joined up, gambling the rescue team would teach him the ropes, literally, as

time passed. Afraid they would judge him too young, or his unchipped fingernails or

bayou accent would expose him as a flatlander, he had entered the rescue office shyly

and with his hands in his pockets. When they asked if he had experience, Abe had said

yes, though carefully, keeping the sir off his yes, and dropping the names of some

mountains in Patagonia which he figured to be safely obscure. Only two days later –

yesterday afternoon – they'd phoned him in urgent need of dumb backs and strong

legs. And now he could not share that this was the first snow he'd ever seen and the

coldest sun he'd ever woken to. This was his first mountain.

They set out through the trees, shortcutting along a frozen river. The water was

animal beneath its sturdy shell. Abe could hear it surging under the ice. Its serpentine

motion came up through his boots. Here and there the river ice had exploded from the

cold and its wounds showed turquoise and green.

Christmas was near and so they were undermanned, meaning everyone was

overloaded. Some carried hundred-meter coils of goldline rope and homemade brake

plates, others hauled the medicines and splints and the team's sole, precious Stokes

litter, a crude thing made of welded airplane tubing and chicken wire.

Abe stayed alive to the other men's cues, to how they breathed and how they set

their feet and leaned into their pack straps and to how they just plain managed. With

every step he was reminded all over again of his hubris, for he'd loaded his pack

himself, hastily and without any order, and now something was stabbing his kidneys

and the bags of saline solution kept rocking him off-balance. Each boot step chastised

him. He didn't belong, he didn't belong.

The sun died at noon in a gangrene sky. Shortly after, they broke the treeline, but

their first clear view of the coppery mountains was undermined by dark storm clouds

looming north and west. Even Abe could tell the advancing storm was going to be a

killer, the fabled sort that freezes range cattle to glass and detonates tree sap, leveling

whole forests.

The line of men struck north across a big plateau scoured bare to the dirt. The wind

sliced low, attacking them with a fury that Abe tried not to take personally. In a

matter of minutes his glasses were pitted by the highspeed sand. If not for the ballast

on his back, the wind would have sent him tumbling down the mountainside.

Midway across the plateau they startled a herd of skeletal deer grazing among the

stones. 'They oughtn't be up here,' one rescuer observed. 'It's strange.' The deer

clattered off with the wind.

The cold day drew on. The air thinned and people quit talking altogether. They

hunched like orphans beneath the overcast. Wind bleated against the rocks, a

maddened sound.

As it turned out, none of the team had ever visited this region. For budgetary

reasons, Wyoming was far beyond their normal range of operations. Abe was secretly

gratified that the group seemed as lost as he felt. When the leader unfolded their

USGS topo to match its lines with the geological chaos around them, the wind ripped

his map in two and then ripped the halves from his hands. After that the group

tightened ranks. The mountains took on a new sharpness against the ugly sky.

Nearing the coordinates given them by the pilot, the team reached a natural

doorway that suddenly opened onto a hidden cirque of higher peaks. Despite the

poisoned sunlight, it was a spectacular sight in there. To Abe it looked like a vast

granite chalice inlaid with ice and snow. On every side glacial panels swept up to

enormous stone towers girdling the heights. All around, men muttered their awe, and

Abe thought this must be how it was to discover a new land.

And then they saw the climber.

'He's alive,' someone said, glassing the distance with a pair of pocket binoculars.

'There's one alive.'

Abe couldn't see what they were talking about until a neighbor handed him a

camera with a telephoto lens and pointed.

Perhaps a half-mile distant and a thousand feet higher, a lone figure was kneeling

upon the glacial apron, unaware that rescue had arrived. His head was bare, black hair

whipping in the wind. He swept one arm up and out to the storm and Abe could see

him shouting soundlessly.

'That poor bastard,' the man with the binoculars declared to the group, 'he's talking

to the mountain.'

'Say again.'

'I swear it. Look yourself.'

Abe breathed out and steadied the telephoto lens. The mountain dwarfed the tiny

figure and Abe tried not to blink, afraid of losing this solitary human to all that alien

expanse.

The climber repeated his motion, the arm raised high, palm out, Abe realized that

he was seeing desperation or surrender or maybe outright madness.

After a minute, the climber bent forward and Abe noticed the hole in front of his

knees. It was a dark circle in the snow and the climber was speaking to it as if sharing

secrets with an open tomb.

'He's praying,' Abe murmured, though not so anyone could hear. But that's what he

was seeing, Abe knew it instinctively. Abe was shaken, and quickly handed the

camera and telephoto lens back to its owner.

'Well if he's got a buddy, I don't see him,' the man with the binoculars pronounced.

'One's better than none, folks. Let's go snatch him before this front hammers us in.'

They hurried. Another twenty minutes of hard march over loose stone brought

them to the base of the glacier. Abe edged over and stood on the ice, feeling through

his boot soles for the glacier's antiquity. He'd never seen a glacier before, but knew

from his readings that this plate of snow and ice had been squatting in the shadows

ever since the last ice age.

The rescuers opened the big coils of rope and strapped on their scratched

red-and-white helmets and their cold steel crampons. Abe watched them closely and

covertly. Between bursts of wind, they heard a distant howling. It didn't sound

human, but neither did it sound animal. A gutshot angel, Abe remembered.

With a hunger that startled him, Abe wanted to get up close to the blood. It was

imperative that nothing keep him from that fallen climber. Something profound was

awaiting them up there. He could tell by the way these hardened men had turned

somber and frightened. Whatever it was, Abe wanted to see the sight raw, not after

they had packaged it and brought it down in a litter. It was an old hunger, a simple

one. Abe wanted to lose his innocence.

They set off up the glacier, three to a rope, alert for crevasses. Abe was alive to the

new sensation. They stepped across a two-foot-wide crack in the field. It cut left and

right across the glacier. As he straddled the crevasse, Abe filled his lungs, trying to

taste the mountain's deep, ancient breath.

One of the rescuers pointed at skid tracks leading up the glacier. It reminded Abe of

an animal's blood trail. 'There's his fall line,' the man said. 'How'd he live through that?'

Abe stared at the rearing stone and ice, but it was a cipher to him. 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. He peered at the heights. A girdle of hanging snow ringed the upper

rim. It was an avalanche about to happen. The thought gave new urgency to his step.

As they drew near, Abe heard more distinctly the climber yelling and calling to

himself. Closer still, and the climber heard them and he turned his shaggy head. Abe

was surprised. The climber was a boy, no older than himself.

But even from twenty yards away, the young climber's eyes were too bright and his

clothes were rags, what was left of them, and on his knees in that limbo of gray light

Abe thought he looked more like the Lazarus of his grandmother's worn leather King

James than a mere teenager in the wilderness.

The rescuers slowed their mechanical pace, intimidated by the strange sight. His

jacket was gone and his sweater half off. Now Abe saw that the boy had pulled the

clothing away himself. He had started to bare himself to the wilderness.

'You're okay now,' someone offered to the climber. But there was no trust in the

climber's look, no welcome, certainly no relief. He didn't speak.

Abe saw that his white T-shirt was soaked in blood and that his left shoulder bulged

with a dislocation. His left hand clutched a short ice axe, and with the blood on its

silver pick, the axe looked like a medieval weapon.

The rescuers formed a wide circle around the young climber as if they had brought

something dangerous to bay. His black hair hung clotted with snow and he had wolf

eyes, blue and timid, and he'd been weeping.

'Hey there.' Someone's cold voice.'We got you now.'

'You want to lay down that axe there?' another rescuer tried. His voice was too loud,

and it struck Abe, they were afraid of this boy.

The way the climber stared through them, Abe felt like a ghost. The boy didn't lay

down his axe. Its handle lay loose in his gloved hand, a green wrist strap in place. Abe

guessed the axe was responsible for the long, seeping gash in his opposite arm.

While the climber knelt in their center – mute now, seeming deaf, too – they

discussed him, diagnosing his wounds and trying to understand what had made him so

empty and menacing. But to Abe's ear, they were simply diagnosing their own fear.

'What do you think?' one of the rescuers asked another. 'Hypothermia?'

'Maybe concussed. Probably. I don't see a helmet.'

'One way or the other, he's about as gone as they get.'

'Well what we need's his second,' the leader got on with it. 'Where's your second at,

boy?'

Getting no answer, the leader turned away. 'Joe,' he said, 'take some men and hunt

around. There's got to be a body somewhere. Maybe it hung up higher on a rock or

what have you.' The one named Joe patted three men on their helmets and they

started up.

The two men by Abe's side continued their evaluation. 'I don't see frostbite. A

puncture wound on the right thigh, though. And look at the inside of his hand. It's cut

to the bone.'

At last they noticed the rope tied to his waist harness. It was a beautiful blue rope

with red hatching and it led directly into the hole. Abe saw the pink blood marks in the

snow and recognized that the climber had stripped his hand raw pulling on the rope.

'Now we'll just take it from here, son,' said a man with brushy sideburns. He edged

close and gently reached for the blue rope. With a howl, the boy reacted, swinging his

axe in a wild arc. He missed goring the rescuer by an inch.

And then they heard a voice.

Dreamlike, it called from far away. It could have come from another valley or from

the top of the mountains. Or the bottom of a crevasse. 'Daniel?' it said.

'Oh dear God,' one of the rescuers breathed.

The leader whistled loud and sharp, and uphill Joe and the others came to a halt.

'Down here,' the leader shouted. 'We found the other one.'

'Daniel?' someone said. 'Is that your name, Daniel?'

The boy looked at them with a mask of pure horror.

'Daniel,' the rescuer pressed him. 'Is that your buddy down there?'

Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and tipped back his head. His lips curled back from his

teeth and he opened his throat to the sky. What came out was a terrible wrenching

groan, something from a nightmare. Then his rib cage spasmed with huge, hoarse

sobs.

Abe's mouth fell open at the climber's pain.

While the climber did his weeping, two of the rescuers rushed him from behind and

took away his axe. They were gentle, but he was strong and they ended up jostling his

disjointed shoulder and he screamed.

'Daniel,' the tiny voice called out from the crevasse.

This time they heard it more distinctly and it nearly caved in Abe's heart. Someone

among the rescuers whispered 'no.' Except for that there was silence for a minute.

Even the mourning climber fell mute.

'Are you all right?' asked the voice.

It was a woman down there.

'What the hell?' someone demanded. Now their pity hardened. Abe saw them grow

blunt. Astounded. Their gentleness was gone.

'You brought a girl up here?'

The climber turned his eyes away from them and stared blankly at the hole in the

snow.

'All right, boys.' The leader finally rallied them. 'That storm's not going away. Let's

do our job.'

It was one thing to disarm the boy, they discovered, something else to separate him

from his blue rope. He didn't want to relinquish that bond with the voice from below.

He held on to the rope with his good hand, the one with the mutilated palm. But once

they had tied it off to an ice screw and cut the blue knot, Daniel gave up and seemed

to go somewhere else in his mind.

He knelt there, unbudging, as if his legs were bound to the very mountain. In a

sense, they were. They learned this for themselves when they lifted Daniel and laid

him flat on the snow and ran their hands up and down his body. Both of his knees

were shattered, both femurs fractured. Daniel seemed not to care. He seemed dead

within his own body.

Abe stood back as the team frantically raced against the storm. Over where they'd

laid the boy, two men labored at piecing the halves of the litter together and several

arranged ropes for the carry out. Two more knelt over Daniel, fitting his legs with air

splints from the Vietnam War and taping his arm across his chest. They weren't

exactly rough, but they weren't gentle either. They didn't try to reduce the shoulder,

just stuck him with a hit of morphine.

Abe was staggered by the dire scene, by the blood and unhinged bones and the dark

clouds and the voice in the hole. Several men set to work with the blue rope.

'We're the rescue, miss,' one called down into the crevasse. If she said anything in

return, no one heard it, not with the wind mounting and the frenzied shouting and the

clank of gear. A man hauled out long hanks of blue rope until it came taut. They

tugged on the line experimentally.

'She's down there probably seventy, eighty feet,' guessed the man with the hanks of

blue rope in his hand.

'Get her the hell out,' the leader called over. 'And be quick.'

Abe went over to help. Bending to take up the blue rope, he noticed it was smeared

with gore, what had once been Daniel's flesh and blood. For the next five minutes he

and the other men yanked and hauled on the rope, but it was fixed in place.

'You budge, miss?' the man with sideburns shouted down the crevasse. Abe put his

head directly over the hole. A few feet below the surface, the ice showed dark green.

Below that was blackness and Abe turned his eyes away quickly, as if the darkness

were obscene.

'Nothing,' said the little voice in the hole.

Abe was surprised by how clear the voice rose to him once his head was right over

it. It slid up the glass walls, distinct and free of echoes, counterpointing the building

storm.

They pulled again, and this time Abe thought there was progress, but it was only the

rope's natural stretch. 'How about that?' shouted Sideburns.

'No,' said the voice.

They tried again, this time with a complicated winch system of slings and ropes and

customized equipment. When that produced no results they tried a different

configuration of parts and pulled again. Again it didn't work. She was jammed.

'How about it Ted?' Sideburns asked a small man.

'I'll try,' said Ted. While a third man cut away the snow fringing the hole, Ted

shucked his jacket, then his sweater and shirts. He tied another rope around his waist

and had them lower him down the crevasse. No matter how he shimmied, though, the

ice walls were too tight. He got only about five feet down into the darkness and finally

called for them to pull him out. He shook his head no and dressed again.

'What on earth possessed him?' Sideburns said, glaring over at Daniel. 'Now look at

what it is.'

'He should have known a whole lot better,' someone agreed. 'I wonder how old she

was.' Past tense. Abe cut him a side glance, but already he was trooping off, and

Sideburns and the others were walking after him. Abe dumbly followed them, then

realized that they were indeed abandoning the effort. He halted.

'You want me to keep trying?' he said.

The men kept walking. 'She's jammed,' one pronounced.

'I can start digging,' Abe offered hopefully.

No one bothered answering him.

Abe saw how useless he was to them, illiterate in their universe of glaciers and

mountain storms and green ice. Their very language – of brake plates and 'biners and

front pointing and all the rest of it – excluded him. He felt stupid and vulnerable and

put himself to work picking up whatever litter didn't blow away.

'You,' Abe heard. The team leader had spotted him off by himself. 'Come over here.'

Abe approached. The leader handed him a small notebook and a pencil.

'I want you to go over and talk to that girl in the crevasse. Get her name, hometown,

a phone number, you know, next-of-kin kind of stuff. Don't panic her. Keep her spirits

up until we get things figured out. Can you do that?'

Abe nodded his head. He walked over to the black hole and knelt down in the

imprints left from Daniel's knees. He peered into the darkness and licked his lips,

suddenly shy.

He couldn't see this woman trapped below the surface, and she couldn't see him. All

they had were words, and Abe wondered if words could be enough. He felt like a child

talking to a blind person. Before he could speak, however, the woman spoke to him.

'Hey,' the voice called up from the darkness. 'Is everybody gone?' She didn't ask, Is

anybody there? It struck Abe that she had no expectations. None. And yet she

sounded calm and with no begrudging.

'No.' Abe cleared his throat. 'I'm here.'

'Is Daniel going to be okay?'

Abe flinched at the question. Whose was this voice that put another person's welfare

before her own? But at the same time, Abe felt relief. He reckoned that whoever it

was down there had to be comfortable and secure, otherwise she would have sounded

hysterical. Such calmness had to have a reason. Maybe she'd landed on some soft

snow down inside, or simply bounced to a stop on the end of the rope. Abe's spirits

picked up. Everything was going to be okay.

'Yes. He's fine,' Abe answered. 'What's your name?'

'Diana.'

She didn't ask for his name, but Abe told her anyway. He couldn't think of anything

else to say, then remembered what the leader wanted. 'Where are you from?' he

asked.

She said, Rock Springs.

He asked for her phone number. She gave it, but warily. When he asked her

address, she suddenly seemed to lose interest in his interrogation.

'Is that the wind, Abe?' Her voice was weary and yet alive with instincts. She knew

there was a storm building. Abe lifted his face to the cold gale. They were racing both

the storm and nightfall now. Any minute now, the others would come over and figure

out how to pull this lonely woman out of the crevasse and they could all leave the

mountain and go home.

'We'll get you out,' Abe said. 'Don't worry.' His words sounded little as they fluttered

down the hole, mere feathers. The woman didn't waste breath returning the brave

assurance and Abe felt rebuked.

'Are you hurt?' Abe asked.

'I don't know.' Her voice got small. 'Are you going to get me out?'

'Of course. That's why we came.'

'Please,' she whispered.

Abe tried to understand what that might mean.

'Is there anything you want? Maybe I can lower something.' Abe was thinking of

food or water.

'A light, please.'

Abe goggled at the simplicity of it. He tried to summon an image of being trapped

down there, but nothing came. He couldn't visualize lying caught in the glassy bowels

of the earth. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'll try.'

Abe stood and approached one of the rescuers, who eyed the hole in the snow before

parting with his headlamp. He seemed reluctant or maybe just sad, and his attitude

irritated Abe. On his return to the crevasse, Abe borrowed one of their coils of goldline

rope.

'I have a light,' Abe yelled down the crevasse. He felt more useful now. He was this

woman's sole link to the surface. Once they rescued her, she would recognize Abe by

his voice and embrace him. She would hold him tight and weep her thanks into his

shoulder.

Lying on his belly, Abe flicked the headlamp on, stretched his arm and head into the

hole and shined it down. He had thought to find the climber sitting far below at the

bottom of a rounded well shaft. Instead the crevasse presented crystal lips no wider

than a man's rib cage.

To his right and left, the crevasse stretched off into dark, terrifying rifts. Except for

this accidental hole, the crevasse was covered over with snow, perfectly concealed

from above. Forty feet down, the icy walls curved underneath where Abe was lying.

The blue rope led down and under and disappeared from sight.

'Can you see the light?' Abe shouted.

'No,' she said. 'It's dark here.'

Abe was glad to extract his arm and head from that awful hole and return to the

surface. Even those few seconds had threatened to rob his self-possession.

While Abe talked and asked questions, he tried lowering the headlamp on the

goldline rope. But the braids were new and stiff and the curve of the walls blocked

passage at the forty-foot level. Abe pulled the headlamp back out.

'Can you catch it?'

'I can try.'

'I'll keep the light on so you can see it coming.'

Abe reached as deep as he could before letting the headlamp go. Its light ricocheted

from the deeper walls, then blinked out. Abe thought the headlamp had broken in the

drop. Then he heard the voice.

'Ah God,' she groaned.

'Did you get it?' Abe had expected joy. She had been delivered from darkness. But

as the silence accumulated, Abe realized that with the light had come the truth, and

now the woman could judge her awful predicament.

'What do you see?'

There was no reply. Abe hung his head into the hole and waited but all he heard was

the wind outside. The storm was ripe. He looked up at the darkening sky, then over at

the rescuers bustling around the litter. They had snugged Daniel into a sleeping bag

and strapped him into the litter. Some of the men were putting their packs on and

they looked close to leaving. Now the team could devote all of its energies to

extracting Diana.

The team leader walked over to Abe and sternly crooked his finger to draw him

away from the hole. Abe pushed up to kneeling. 'All right,' said the leader. 'We're going

down now. We'll need every hand. Go saddle up.'

Abe was sure he had misunderstood. 'Her name is Diana,' he explained. 'She has a

light now.'

The leader exhaled unhappily. 'You didn't do her any favor.'

Abe didn't know what to say. 'She'll be fine,' he finally blustered.

'I'm glad you think so. Anyway, we're shorthanded. If we can get the litter down

before this storm... hell, if we can get the litter down period, we'll be lucky.'

Abe persisted. 'We can dig her out.'

'Dig her out?' The leader's eyes glazed over. 'She's deep. Way too deep. That kid had

no right bringing her to this.'

'But if we all pull...'

'Look, Tex...' And suddenly Abe knew they knew him. He had fooled no one. 'Down

at the bottom, a crevasse thins into a V. You fall far enough, hard enough, and you get

wedged down there. After a while your body heat melts you down tighter. Every

minute that girl's alive, every breath, she's working down deeper.'

'But we're not leaving her down there.'

'We'll come back.'

'When?'

The leader paused. His crow's-feet pinched into a fan. 'When we can.'

'But we have to save her.' For the first time, Abe noticed how the rest of the team

was shunning the hole.

'We can't, not with things how they are. Maybe later, after she starves some more,

loses some of her tissue mass, maybe then. But I doubt it.'

Abe shook his head – against this directive, against his vision of a human being

pinned in an envelope of clear ice, broken and freezing and blind and yet still aware,

still full of her own history and future. She had probably eaten a breakfast yesterday

much like they had last night, had probably walked on the same river ice and spooked

the same herd of starving deer and crossed this same glacier. And now they were

condemning her to infinite darkness.

'Look,' said the leader. The icy tails of his gray moustache waggled. 'Sometimes this

is how it goes. You do a triage. You figure the odds. You save the ones you can save.

And you leave the ones you can't. Now it's going to be a long carry out of here. We're

leaving. I want you to go saddle up. I'll go tell that girl the news.'

'No,' said Abe. 'I'll tell her.' He had the right to the last word. He had touched this

blue rope. He had given this woman light and whatever terrible sights that attended.

The leader made a few thoughtful stabs at the hard snow with his ice axe, then he

walked off without saying more. The rescuers at the litter had turned their backs to

Abe and the hole.

Abe checked his watch, then shook it. Only twenty-five minutes had elapsed since

their arrival. Surely hours had passed. He couldn't fathom what was unfolding all

around him. They hoisted the litter like a coffin, three men to a side, one standing

back and feeding out a safety rope in case they slipped.

The wind sucked at Abe's face, then slapped him. The first snowflakes rattled

against the shell of his new white windjacket. The storm was cracking wide open.

Their little motions and hopes could do nothing to hold the sky together any longer.

The rescue was over, at least for the woman inside this mountain. Abe lay down by

the hole to tell her so.

'Hello?' Abe called down.

There was no reply. Abe could feel the blackness down there surrounding that

solitary light.

'We have to carry Daniel down,' he called into the hole. 'We're shorthanded, so all of

us have to go. But we'll come back.' He added, 'I promise.' Immediately Abe wished

the words away. They had already broken one promise. They had come to save the

survivors or carry bodies out, and they were only doing half the job. More promises

could only mean more betrayal to this trapped woman.

There was still no answer, and Abe started to push away from the crevasse. Then

Diana spoke.

'You're not leaving me?'

Abe shook his head no, but the word wouldn't come.

'You promised,' she screamed. Then, quickly, as if chiding herself, she said, 'no,' and

again, more firmly, 'no.'

'They're shorthanded...' Abe started again.

'It was my fault,' she said. Her words came to Abe low and awkward with the

cadence of a last testament. In her weariness or delirium, Abe heard something far

worse than acceptance. It was a tone of surrender similar to what her rescuers were

using. 'Tell Daniel that. Can you hear me, Abe?'

Abe lowered his head deeper into the hole. 'Yes.'

Now her voice gained strength. 'It was me that fell and pulled us down. It was me.

Tell him. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what happened to him. I'm sorry for what happened

to me. I know Daniel and he'll take this on. Tell him not to.'

Abe wanted to protest that the fall had been bad luck and was not a matter for

contrition. But maybe that was how Diana had decided to make her peace with it.

'Okay,' Abe said. 'I'll tell him that.'

'Now I want you to tell me something, Abe.'

'Yes.'

'How old are you?'

'Eighteen.' For some reason, Abe felt compelled to add the full truth of it. 'Almost.'

She took a long minute. 'I thought something like that,' she said. And now Abe saw

how they'd used him with this woman. They'd used him to buffer the horror to

interrogate her. And they'd used him for this death sentence.

'Well, Abe,' she started, then fell silent. After a moment, she finished. 'There's no

blame on you either. Remember that.'

Abe's throat clenched at that. She was forgiving him, too. He searched for something

to say. At last he thought to ask her age.

'Twenty,'she said.'Almost.'

'You know, I can wait some more,' Abe offered. 'I don't mind.' Until he spoke it out

loud, the thought hadn't occurred to him. He could spend an hour here, then race

down to catch the others who would be moving slow with the bulky litter. And if he

could spend an hour, why not two?

Diana didn't give him a chance. 'Is that wind bringing a storm?' she asked.

'The storm's here,' Abe said.

'Then get out of here.' There was courage in her voice, but hysteria, too. Then she

screamed his name. She invoked it. 'Abe,' she cried.

She needed him to stay. At least until they freed her, this woman wanted Abe with

her whole heart. That was more than he'd ever known with a woman.

'I'm here,' he replied. 'I'm not leaving.'

By staying Abe would make himself hostage to his own promise. By staying he

would force the rescue team to return and acknowledge the life in this pit of ice. Elated

by his decision, Abe clambered to his feet. He caught up with the leader as the litter

team trudged downslope.

'I'm staying with her,' Abe announced.

The leader wasted no words. His broad face darkened. He took one step closer and

shoved Abe hard in the chest, knocking him to the snow. 'You damn cowboy,' he said.

'I don't take threats.'

Abe wasn't hurt by the blow, only surprised.

'It's no threat,' Abe said. But it was, clearly. And now he saw that he threatened

their tranquility. They had already reconciled themselves to their forsaking the

woman. The rescuers were good and decent men, that went without saying. But by

staying, Abe seemed to expose them as something less or different or just more

complicated.

'Get your pack. Or leave it, I don't care. But get your ass down this mountain. I don't

want you on this mountain. I don't want you on this team,' the leader yelled over the

wind. 'You don't know anything.'

Without that last insult, Abe might have obeyed.

One of the rescuers, an older man with bad knees, came gimping up to see what the

disturbance was about. 'The cherry think he's staying,' the leader said to the older

man. 'He thinks he's going to save the day.'

Now Abe was angry. 'You didn't leave her food or water. You didn't even talk to her.'

'That's because she's already dead.'

'But she's not.'

The older man took a minute to study Abe's earnest face. There was no friendliness

in his look, but no hostility either. He was measuring Abe the way he would a

mountainside or an approaching storm or any other obstacle. 'Leave that poor girl

alone,' he counseled Abe. 'There's not a thing we can do now except let her go. Have

some mercy.'

Abe heard the logic there, but he had decided. 'No, sir,' he said.

'Listen to me. All you'll do is torment her. With food and water, she could drag on for

days. Don't do that to her.'

'That's not the point,' Abe said. 'If it was me...'

'If it was you, you'd pray to God I had a gun to finish you quick.'

Abe shrugged. He was afraid to argue because he knew they were probably right.

But he was staying.

'I admire your chivalry,' the older man said, and Abe blushed because the man was

talking about naïveté'. 'Just the same, you'll put everybody at risk all over again, and

all to rescue you. Not her. She's gone. Now come on with us.'

'No sir.'

'Damn it,' the leader blew. 'You see?'

'I don't want to leave her either,' the older man said. 'If you ask me, it ought to be

that one over there' – he jerked a thumb at the litter – 'who's stuck in the hole. As far

as I'm concerned, he as good as killed that girl. All the same, it's her who stays and

him that gets saved.'

'There's no right or wrong in the mountains,' the leader added. 'There's just

whatever happens.'

'What's your name?' the older man asked.

'Abe Burns.'

'Well, Abe, if we were down in the World, I'd have you tied up. But we don't have the

manpower to carry you out. So that's no good. All we can do is rely on you to do what's

right.'

'Yes sir,' Abe said. 'I'm trying.'

'Quit your jacking off,' the leader shouted. 'We got an avalanche overhead and a

storm and a hurt man. And no time for you to get a hard-on for a dead woman.'

Abe didn't hesitate. He knocked the leader backward onto his pack and would have

kicked him, too, except he had on crampons and the teeth would have cut the man.

'Jesus,' the older man hissed at the leader, 'Jesus.' Then he turned to Abe. 'You

know, you can't save her.'

'I don't care,' Abe admitted.

'Then why?'

Abe didn't answer. He couldn't.

The older man looked around at the peaks. 'Have it your way,' he said. 'I just wish

you wouldn't do this to yourself.'

'It's your funeral,' the leader cursed Abe, struggling to his feet. He pointed at the

hole. 'She's already had hers.'

The older man shouted the litter crew to a halt two hundred yards down the glacier

and Abe trailed him down. The team set down the wounded man, who was delirious

with the morphine and warmth. The rescuers all went through their packs, donating

food and an extra sleeping bag and a bivouac tent and a little kerosene stove for

melting water. They did it quickly, with little respect for Abe but no discourtesy. They

thought him a fool, that was plain, but no one said it out loud. They simply left him

their surplus. To a man, the rescuers were sullen. Clearly they did not relish carrying

Daniel down at the expense of the woman in the crevasse. But the decision had been

made. One went so far as to wish Abe well. Then they were gone.

Abe trudged back up the slope with the supplies. In all, their charity weighed about

twenty pounds, and suddenly that seemed very little against the dark mass of storm

and twilight.

Abe lay the things beside the crevasse and assembled the bivouac tent as best he

could before the wind blew everything away or the snow buried it or he got too cold.

He set the tent door inches from the mouth of the crevasse, which made for an

awkward entrance. But it would facilitate communication, and that was the whole

point. Once inside the tiny tent and burrowed into the sleeping bag, Abe felt like he

was the one trapped. Only then did he call down into the hole and tell Diana what he'd

done.

The woman didn't answer. Not a whisper issued up from the crevasse.

'Diana?' he called. Abe had prepared himself for resistance, which was why he'd

waited to set camp before announcing his presence. Her silence confused him.

'Well, I'm here,' Abe said.

Hours passed. The storm swallowed them alive. What light remained was scooped

away by the wind.

Abe fell asleep and began dreaming he'd fallen into the crevasse. He couldn't move

his arms or legs and it was hard to breathe except in shallow birdlike bursts. He woke

from the dream to find himself smothering in complete darkness. The tent had

collapsed beneath a heavy mantle of snow and his limbs were lodged tight inside the

cocoon of the sleeping bag.

It took all Abe's strength to jackknife his body up and down and punch the tent and

himself free of the snow. Frenzied with claustrophobia, he managed to claw open the

door. There he lay with his bare head extending into the blizzard, gulping huge,

searing lungfuls of air and snowflakes, overjoyed to find himself free of the dream

even if not the mountain.

It was only then that he heard singing. The song was eerie and distant and sounded

like nothing human, and Abe guessed the wind was playing through the high towers.

That or some animal had been driven up from the forest. Or spirits were on the loose.

Abe listened harder. Between the howl of wind and the hiss of corn snow guttering

off his tent wall, he found a rhythm and a tune and a sunniness to it. It was a Beach

Boys song.

Even as he listened, Abe felt the storm layering him with snow all over again. He

shook the tent hard but carefully, for after all his shaking around there was no telling

where the crevasse lay now. Rooting through the folds of the tent, Abe found a

flashlight and shined it outside. He was horrified and at the same time enchanted by

how the falling snow actually devoured his light. The beam reached a few feet beyond

his little nylon cave, then vanished.

It took him several minutes to locate the crevasse. The hole had closed to a small

circle, as if stealing its catch away from the world for good. Still lying inside his

sleeping bag and tent, Abe edged closer. The singing became more distinct, but that

only made it more alien because Diana wasn't singing real words, only jibberish.

Now Abe found the ice axe they had left him. In thrashing around, he'd landed on

top of the axe. The pick had slashed his sleeping bag and down feathers had spilled

everywhere. There was blood on the metal head, and for a bad moment Abe thought

he'd cut himself and was too cold to feel the wound. Then he realized this was Daniel's

axe and Daniel's blood.

Reaching his arm outside, Abe poked at the edges of the hole to widen it. He began

chopping, methodically cutting away at the snow even though the debris poured down

the crevasse, adding to Diana's misery. 'I'm sorry,' he shouted to her, 'I'm sorry.' It

was for himself that Abe cut at the snow. He needed to keep open this doorway to the

underworld. He was afraid to lose contact, quite certain that without Diana's company,

he would never make it through this ordeal.

When Abe had finally cut down to the blue rope and gained proof of his companion,

he rested. He slept. When his eyes opened again, it was day, but it might as well have

been night still. The storm was raging more fiercely than before. Abe couldn't see

anything outside the tent and he couldn't see anything inside it, either, without the

flashlight.

Abe turned to rebuilding his tent. Section by section, he propped the walls up with

the broken poles and taught himself to rustle the fabric every few minutes to shed the

snow. And all the while, he listened to Diana's mindless singing.

'You're going to make it,' Abe shouted down the crevasse. He found some cheese and

a chunk of wet bread and a plastic bottle of mostly frozen water. 'You want some

food?' he yelled.

Diana made no answer. She just sang on and on.

While Abe ate and drank, he listened. It was essentially the same tune over and

over. The words weren't real words. They were sounds to mark a path. Locked in

place, Diana was circling around and around. Soon the vortex would suck her into its

deepest part. Abe knew he was listening to the sound of death.

Finally Abe joined in the singing. He'd heard this song many times before, but he

couldn't remember what the words were either. With the woman's same abandon,

Abe threw his voice out into the void all around them.

After a while Diana seemed to notice the extra voice. Somewhere in her benighted

skull, Abe's singing freed Diana to depart from the song and actually talk. She began to

emit bursts of story. Abe labored to hear what she had to say. It was a freewheeling

autobiography, woven together from memories and fictions and pleas for her mother's

comfort. It made Abe weep sometimes, and other times just bored him.

The stormy day passed. Night moved in again.

As the darkness stretched out and Abe drifted into delirious catnaps, it was hard to

tell what was real anymore. He grew colder and a little crazy himself, and it was hard

to know what was even spoken. Much of what Abe heard he may have imagined.

Diana may or may not have been a college student with a bad job and a drafty

trailer-home and allegiance to some crazy woman. She seemed to have three brothers

named John and Wes and Blake, which Abe began to suspect because those were his

own uncles' names. Her talk about mountains was probably real, because she

described spring wildflowers Abe had never heard of. She wanted to climb Everest

someday, though that might as easily have been Abe's overlay. Abe gave up trying to

keep the woman – or himself – lucid with questions or dialogue.

Abe finally concluded that the name of her dogged savior was completely lost to her,

for she'd quit saying his name altogether. He accepted that she had ceased to

understand he was lying on the surface above or even that she was caged inside the

mountain. Abe's presence had not loaned one ounce of dignity to her long and ugly

dying, and he resigned himself to anonymity. It was then, during a lull in the gale, that

she cried out.

'I love you,' she yelled.

Abe knew she meant someone else, yet all he could think to reply was the same. 'I

love you,' he shouted into the crevasse, and so she wouldn't think it was just her own

echo, he added, 'Diana.' Her name sank down the hole, a pebble dropped into the

ocean.

But something happened. A single word came drifting back up the hole. 'Abe,' she

spoke.

The storm and the waiting went on for a very long time. Abe's watch had come off in

his struggles, so he had no idea how much time passed, only that he and his invisible

lover were both losing their faculties and blurring their memories and mixing in the

same dream.

At one point Abe turned his palms up and noticed that he'd rope-burned the pads

down to the white gristle. He didn't remember doing that, but the snow was pink with

blood around the blue rope, and the pink was fresh.

In the end, there was silence.

Dawn never broke, but an exhausted light did finally seep into the sky. Overnight,

Abe had taken ill from the water or maybe from the storm itself and the cold and the

sounds, and his tent had collapsed again. He was very cold and thirsty and tired. But

the storm had passed. The wind had quit. He flapped open the tent door. The

crevasse had pinched nearly shut. Nothing more could be done.

'Hello,' he called into the crevasse. The word emerged as blue frost.

There was no answer. No more song, no more jibberish. Maybe she was still alive,

just mute now, eyes wide, a zombie pinned in its crypt for the rest of time.

Abe shook loose from the snow and wormed out of the tent. The night and day and

night had bled him of his strength. It took his full concentration just to stand up. His

parka was soaked and frozen. His feet were dead blocks.

He faced the crevasse, which had puckered shut again. The hole was only a few

inches across now. The blue rope was buried deep again. The earth was sealing over.

'Good-bye,' Abe croaked. He said it to a memory, to the place itself. He said it to deep

part of himself.

Without another thought, Abe abandoned the tent and the torn sleeping bag and his

pack, which had blown away anyway. The water bottle was frozen solid and useless.

The thought of food turned his stomach. He simply backed away from the hole and

faced downhill and let gravity herd him off the glacier.

Abe stumbled and kicked and plowed his way out of the high cirque and across the

plateau, which was now scalloped with drifts like a hard, white sea.

He descended into the forest.

The path they had taken up the frozen river was buried under two and three feet of

snow, but he was patient. Every time he seemed lost, Abe stopped and listened for the

water running through its deep veins. He followed that song, humming to himself.

It took all day. Not once did Abe sit down, because then he would have lain back and

disappeared into the dream. He reached the trailhead at dusk and started down the

road into night.

Abe kept moving simply because he could. There was no other reason. Survival was

the furthest thing from his mind. Night came on.

The path turned black. The forest walked him in, squeezing him tight. After some

time Abe couldn't be sure his legs were still moving. He felt motionless and suspended.

Just before dawn on the next morning a single bright light appeared like a hole in

the darkness. It was a big truck with one broken headlight and it was filled with

rescuers. While the engine idled, Abe stood transfixed by the hard white light. One by

one the rescuers emerged to touch him.

When they laid him down, it was tentatively, not quite certain of his reality. They

had been on their way to retrieve Abe or Abe's body from the cirque. They dressed

the wounds in his hands and started on IV and zipped him into a sleeping bag in the

back of the truck and started the long road back to Boulder. The roof rocked back and

forth.

Two rescuers sat beside Abe to monitor his vital signs and pour him full of soup and

coffee and herbal tea, whatever hot liquids the group could muster. Abe's voice was

nearly gone from dehydration and the raw cold and his singing, so they filled his

silence answering questions they thought he might have asked.

Daniel was in intensive care, they said. He had gotten very agitated at the hospital

and kept repeating the woman's name until a nurse explained that someone had

stayed at the crevasse. After that he'd dropped into a deep sleep. He had multiple

fractures, but the doctors said Daniel would recover.

'That's the good news,' said the man pumping up a blood pressure cuff on Abe's arm.

'The bad news is the girl. She was a dropout from the university at Laramie. She

moved back to Rock Springs to take care of her sick mom, Alzheimer's or something.

Anyway, that's where she hooked up with this fella and he got her into the climbing.'

'She was getting good. But nowhere close to good enough for that wall,' the second

rescuer said. 'I guess the boyfriend's some local legend. First ascents all around here.

That's what this was supposed to be. A new route. New wall. New mountain.'

'Some wedding present,' the first man said.

'Yeah, that, too. They were supposed to get married. In the spring.'

Abe could tell they found their information poignant and moving. But he was

confused.

The two rescuers exchanged a glance.

'She's not still alive up there?' one asked in a low voice.

Abe looked from one to the other with blank eyes, wondering if he'd done something

wrong.

'Who?' he whispered timidly.

1

CHRISTMAS EVE – 1991

Abe reached home bloodstained and bone weary, with the song of sirens still

screaming in his ear. Two back-to-back twenty-four-hour shifts had left him so

empty it took a full minute just to recognize the living room as his own. He needed

some serious downtime, a bed, even just a flat spot on the floor so long as it was out of

the way and dry and warm and quiet. But he knew there was no way.

This was the afternoon of Christmas Eve and Jamie had charged him with making

his special sour cream enchiladas for the dinner party that night and there were still

gifts to wrap and the faucet to fix. Abe found some orange juice in the refrigerator and

the aspirin in the cupboard. He wondered why. Why fix it. He'd promised her a long

time ago, but the faucet was really the least of their worries anymore. Besides, drop

by drop, the slow leak had come to provide a clockwork to their discontent. Like an

old man, he had grown used to hearing it in the middle of their cold nights.

Abe pulled out his toolbox from under the stairs and rummaged for a pair of vise

grips. He rattled the eighteen-cent washer inside its little white bag, then went up to

the bathroom. By the time Jamie returned from work, the faucet would be silent. She

probably wouldn't even notice.

Abe's pager started beeping.

Abe sighed. He laid down the wrench. It had been too much to hope for that the

street would be done with him. Even without this snow in the air and glare ice on the

highways, there was something about the holiday season that always invited extra

chaos. More car accidents, more cardiac arrests, more domestic violence and suicide

attempts. More loneliness. More need. More overtime. So much for Christmas Eve.

Jamie would say nothing when he told her. She would simply turn away and busy

herself with the salad or eggnog or something else. Anymore that's how they managed

together.

Abe straightened and stretched and there in the mirror, move for move, the

cannibal rose up into the electric light. Long ago, twelve years next May, back when

he'd first become a paramedic, Abe had seen the cannibal inhabiting his universe of

ambulance crews and emergency room staff and cops and firemen. Since calling it

burnout only half described the living deadness, the off-time wags had cooked up the

cannibal, this voracious eater of the heart. Abe had sworn to leave the pain business

before it got to him, but here he was, thirty-five years old and still riding shotgun for

Boulder Ambulance and packaging disasters for Rocky Mountain Rescue. And the

cannibal had caught him.

He knew, because of late his work had turned into a sort of cheap pornography, less

for its voyeurism than for its repetition and the predictability of his responses. When

his pager went off, when the siren turned on, when he smelled the blood, Abe could

almost stand back and watch his body react – patching and splinting and injecting the

afflicted. Jamie saw it in him, too, though on another level. 'You don't love me,' she

pitied him. 'You don't know how to love anymore.'

Abe turned off the pager and called in.

'You ever hear of some guy named Peter Jorgens?' asked the dispatcher.

Abe hadn't.

'He's called about you twice today. A pretty pushy guy. He's in some kind of major

sweat. Says there's no time for reference letters. Some kind of emergency. He makes

me hook whoever's closest to the phone and he pumps them for your rep, your

experience, all that.'

'Med school,' Abe said. Like the faucet, that was something else he was finally

getting around to. Of the four schools he'd applied to, two still seemed interested. He

wondered which school Peter Jorgens would be with and what kind of war stories the

other medics had probably fed the man, not that Abe was worried. He had a good

reputation. Better than good. He'd seen some of the references people gave him and

they were good. They called him their best, with over a dozen years of experience in

both the city and the mountains. Rock, snow or ice, day or night, he was an

all-weather, all-terrain, one-man scoop. Someone had stenciled ST. BERNARD on Abe's

locker at work. Underneath someone else had taped a piece of movie poster:

Terminator. A lot of death, as well as life, had passed through Abe's hands in the last

dozen years.

'He just called again,' said the dispatcher. 'Says he needs you to contact him. And not

tomorrow. Tonight. Right now.'

All Abe could guess was that one of the schools had accepted him and wanted to give

him the word before Christmas closed their offices. What would Jamie say? he

wondered. Probably not much, they were so wounded by each other. Once upon a

time, he'd thought they would celebrate just such a moment. But those days were

gone.

Abe placed the call to an area code he didn't recognize.

A game-show voice answered, female. 'U.S.U.S. Expeditions,' she singsonged. 'Merry

Christmas.'

Abe's anticipation fell to pieces. U.S.U.S. Expeditions? This was no med school. They

were peddling something, American flags or adventure-travel tours or what? Worse,

they were peddling on his one night off and after snooping on him at work.

'May I help you?' the woman said.

Tired, his temper short, Abe nearly hung up. On second thought he decided to

confront their trespass.

'Yes.' He made his voice flat and statutory, a lawyer's trick. He wanted their full

attention, their fear of litigation or at least a promise to stay out of his life. 'I want you

to tell Peter Jorgens...'

'Oh, wait,' she interrupted. 'Pete just walked in the door. You can talk to him

directly. May I ask who's calling?'

Abe gave his name. He checked his clock. Thirty seconds. That's all this got.

'Burns?' a hearty man boomed. 'Abraham Burns? Do I have an offer for you.'

'Yeah, well I started to tell your secretary...'

'Wife,' Jorgens said, 'that was my wife. She didn't tell you yet, did she? I want to be

the one.'

The clock showed forty seconds gone. Abe meant to register at least one profanity

before hanging up on the man. 'Listen,' Abe tried again.

'Are you sitting down? It's the kind of thing that makes strong men weak,' Jorgens

barreled on. 'Even a bull like you.'

Abe said 'piss off' and hung up. He got as far as the hallway before the phone rang. It

was Jorgens.

'At least hear me out,' the man said.

'Whatever you're selling...'

'No, no.' Desperation came over the phone line. 'This isn't for contributions. Our war

chest is full. We're totally solvent. We're going. And we want you to go with us. We

need you.'

Abe was more mystified than annoyed by the man's persistence. This had to be the

worst sales pitch in history. 'Hurry up,' Abe growled.

'You're the one,' Jorgens said. 'Your buddy Corder said so.'

The name Corder tickled his memory, but not enough. Abe decided to finish this.

'Look, mister,' he told Jorgens. 'It's Christmas Eve, and you're not making any

sense.' Sometimes that worked on the Gomers, the get-out-of-my-emergency-room

riffraff destined for detox. A single moment of definition sometimes provided them a

floor to stand on. The screamers would shut up. The wild men would calm down. But

it only seemed to inspire Jorgens.

'You've heard of us,' he declared. 'The U.S. Ultimate Summit Expedition? The

Nordwand '92 team? That's us. We're in the latest Rolex commercial.'

'Rolex commercial?'

'The one with the ice climber, the backdrop...'

Abe's amusement expired. 'Time's up,' he said. 'Don't call here again.'

'Wait,' Jorgens shouted. He sounded shocked. 'Everest. I'm talking about Everest.'

It worked, that single word.

'Everest?' Abe breathed.

Now they started over again.

'My God.' Jorgens sounded chastened. 'I thought we'd lost you before we even had

you.' Abe could tell Jorgens was the nasty sort who believed in jumping out at people

to test their reflexes. Maybe next time he'd remember this backfire.

'I better start from square one,' Jorgens said. 'You've really never heard of us?'

They were a team of Americans going to the Tibetan side of Mount Everest. Three

days ago, their physician had fallen on a training climb and rebroken an old rugby

ankle. Almost on the eve of its departure for Asia, the U.S. Ultimate Summit

Expedition, a.k.a. Everest Nordwand 1992, was suddenly without medical backup. No

major expedition could afford to go without a doctor, not to a country as remote as

Tibet. But time was short. Their departure date was early February. A burst of phone

calls had failed to produce a single physician in all of North America willing to climb to

five miles high, commit to a hundred-day absence, and leave in five weeks.

'I've hunted hard these last three days. Days and nights,' Jorgens said. 'I've been

calling hospitals all across the country. I even hired a computer search of med

students and physician assistants and paramedics. And it all comes down to you.'

'You need a doctor,' Abe observed. 'An M.D. Not a paramedic.' He was too realistic

about mountain medicine to be modest. Whoever they took along would have to be a

walking hospital, capable of tackling everything from tropical parasites to compound

fractures.

'We've got you,' Jorgens said.

'I've never been to the Himalayas.' As much as he wanted to shout Yes, I'm your

man, these things had to be said. If they were going to disqualify him, he wanted it to

be now, not halfway up a mountainside. Not even next week. If there was any chance

they would extinguish this dream, he wanted it over with. 'And you're weak on ice

experience,' Jorgens said. 'Don't worry, I've asked. But you can lead 5.11 on rock,

which is solid, not hot. Then again, I'm not looking for any more ninja, Mr. Burns. All

we need is a good bones man who can make house calls to eight thousand meters.

That's you.'

'What about the mountain?'

Jorgens filled him in. Over the last ten years, three different teams had attempted

the route, a vertical chimera of rock and ice known as the Kore Wall. It was known

among mountaineers as a severe creation – 9,000 vertical feet from top to bottom –

that approached the summit straight on, a direct or direttisima up the right centre of

the vast North Face. The first try back in 1984 had been all British, with the exception

of one American climber. After pioneering to 27,000 feet and surmounting most of the

geological barriers, they'd gotten mauled and surrendered. In '89, half of a New

Zealand expedition had vanished on the upper reaches in a storm. And last spring,

two Japanese and a Sherpa had been killed by an avalanche.

'So it's the Kore Wall three, climbers zip,' Jorgens finished. 'She's had a lot of suitors.

But we own her cherry.'

Abe didn't trust the overstatement.

'What about other lines?' Abe asked. He was already trying to visualize alternate

retreat routes for injured climbers, because that would be his job. But Jorgens took his

question to imply second-choice lines for ascent.

'Not interested,' Jorgens said. 'There's three other routes on the north side, but

they've all been done, especially the North Col. Frankly our team's too damn good to

be pulling a repeat. It's the Kore Wall or bust.'

Like most climbers, Abe had dreamed of Everest, tired and exaggerated as it was.

The mountain had handled too many people to deserve coveting, yet no one could

erase the memory of her glorious virginity. He'd wanted to go to the big mountain for

so long that the very idea had come to defeat him. But the Kore Wall?

'Four of our team's already in Kathmandu,' Jorgens said. 'The rest of us leave in

thirty-four days. That's five weeks minus a day,' Jorgens said. 'Can you handle that?'

'I could try,' Abe said.

'Is that the broader affirmative then? You can appreciate my need to know. Are you

with us, son?'

Abe knew ex-military when he heard it. Emergency work abounded with it: cops,

medicos, firemen. He had nothing against hierarchies and their jargon, but life was too

short to spend three or four months at high altitude fighting cabin fever with a

commander in chief. Jorgens was handing him Everest on a silver platter, and Abe

wanted it. But some inner radar told Abe that if he didn't back this man off right now,

even just a little, then he might as well not go. And so, though he meant yes, Abe said

maybe.

'I'll have to call you back,' Abe said. For extra weight, and just to prick Jorgens's

chauvinism, he added, 'My wife gets final say.' Then he hung up.

Jamie wasn't his wife, but Abe figured 'girlfriend' would never carry enough weight

with a man like Jorgens. He'd once asked Jamie to marry him, but the institution

hadn't worn too well with her. She'd already been married once, too young and to the

wrong man. She had borne a baby boy. Her husband had disappeared with the child.

Jamie had fallen into emptiness.

Abe had met her a few years after that tragedy. It seemed like a long time ago. The

first time she told him her story, Abe had determined never to speak to her again. He

had enough doubts about why he did what he did for a living without taking on a

victim for a lover. But she had eyes like black magnets. And Abe found himself in love.

It was one of those hospital hookups, the ambulance cowboy and the angel of mercy.

She was an R.N. up in maternity, slender and quiet as a flower. Between his reserve

and hers, it was a marvel they'd ever gotten beyond hello. On the day they started

living together in his Victorian townhouse with the skylight over the bed, they'd made

a house rule: No shoptalk. She wouldn't talk about birth. He wouldn't talk about death.

As it turned out, all their problems lay in between.

Over the years, Abe had watched other professional Samaritans grow to distrust

their own charity. With Jamie he tried to be careful to keep the kindness of rescue out

of the kindness of love, only to discover she was beyond rescue anyway.

Every night he helped her bury the lost child all over again. Every morning he

helped dig up her hopes for the new day. She had a habit of sleeping curled in a fetal

ball and sometimes crying in her sleep. It was not the best life.

They had grown apart. Abe blamed her losses. She blamed him. 'You never let me

smile,' she accused him. He wondered if that could be true. He wanted her happiness

and had said so. But that left him uncertain about what it was he wanted for himself.

Life with the drama stripped out and the siren turned down, that much for sure. Life

without the noise, without the losses. Part of him believed she had worn him out.

Jamie got home from the hospital at 5:30, out of sorts over a new boss and rumors

of a pay cut. Abe gave her a few minutes to sit on the couch and unwind. Then he

broke the news about the Ultimate Summit invitation. She took it well.

'I'd be gone a hundred days, maybe more,' Abe said.

'You really want this, don't you?' She was decent about subduing her relief. This was

probably the good-bye they'd been waiting for. There were no tears and she didn't

say leave. She said go. 'You need this.'

Abe was grateful for her dispassion. On a sudden impulse, he wanted to convey to

her just how important the mountain was to him.

'I can still remember, I was seven years old when the first Americans to climb

Everest came to the White House. JFK was there in the Rose Garden and he

welcomed them like they were astronauts. I saw it in the papers and my mother cut

the photo of it out and taped it to the refrigerator door.'

Abe paused and looked at Jamie to see if she cared about any of this. She was

wiggling her toes and winnowing her black hair with long fingers. Her interest seemed

more than polite.

'That photo stayed up on the refrigerator all week long, eye-level, and for a whole

week I imagined what it must be like up there. And then my father came home. You

know, rig work, one week on, one off.'

Now Jamie spoke, perhaps to abbreviate his tale. 'And your dad took you on his

knee and said, "Someday, Abe, someday."'

'No,' Abe said. It was his father who had first traced constellations for Abe, flat on

their backs pointing between the fireflies, and taught him how to build a fire, how to

whittle and read a compass. But all of that had stopped when his father lost part of

one hand to a wellhead accident. After that he'd quit sharing the stars. 'No. He took

the photo off the refrigerator door.'

When he was done, she said. 'I feel sad, Abe.'

Abe swallowed. 'I haven't said yes, yet,' he said.

'No,' she said. 'That's not what I mean. It's just, I can remember when you used to

talk like this. Excited. Alive.'

Thinking she wanted to hear more, Abe went on. 'I would bring you a fossil,' he said.

He told her about how climbers would fill their pockets with the sea fossils that riddled

the summit rock band. They had jewelers make the fossils into earrings and pendants

for gifts.

'You need to go,' she said. 'Now I've said it twice. You should go and climb your

mountain. Is there something else you want me to say?'

'I'm afraid of losing you,' Abe said. He didn't mean to be that blunt. They had so

many reasons to separate, but had never had the hate or anger to do it with. How

strange that a cold faraway chunk of stone was going to give logic to their parting. He

felt close to tears and at the same time freed.

Jamie didn't reply that she was afraid of losing him. Instead she said, 'I'm afraid of

you losing me, too, Abe. But your staying won't change that. As for your going? I don't

know. Or maybe I do know.' She stopped. 'Do we have to do this tonight?'

That was the closest she'd ever come to telling him her truth, that through their

three years together it was she who had protected him. Abe heard what Jamie meant

and it startled him because he'd never seen himself as someone needing protection.

'Call the man back,' Jamie urged. She leaned forward and kissed him. 'And smile. I'm

happy for you.'

'I have to go get an onion at the store,' Abe remembered. 'A red onion.' He was

stalling. He wanted more time to think.

'I'll go to the store,' Jamie said. She seemed to have thought about things enough.

'You make your call.'

Abe gave it another half-hour before calling Seattle. By then Jorgens had recovered

his gruff poise. He sounded disgruntled that the team's new medic didn't gush thanks,

but Abe didn't see this as a favor. It was a job, and if it was an opportunity, too, then it

was going to be an earned one. Jorgens said, 'Welcome on board.'

'Tell me what needs doing,' Abe said.

'Do you have a fax machine?'

Abe didn't.

'First thing, day after tomorrow, go rent one. You've got some catching up to do.'

Abe didn't waste time being thrilled. He marked five weeks on his calendar and got

on with it. He had to get immunized against eight different diseases, obtain a passport,

read and memorize thirty-seven monographs and books on high altitude medicine,

buy a small fortune of personal gear, and train for the most extreme route on the

highest mountain on earth.

Abe had developed a habit of tidiness in approaching new terrain, and that included

the names of things. He'd always assumed Kore was Japanese or Chinese or Tibetan

for north. It sounded Oriental, and the Japanese had spent a number of lives trying to

climb the route in '90. Finally, most big mountain routes were named prosaically for

their geographic features: the North Face, the West Ridge, and so on. But he was

wrong. In an article about the New Zealand attempt three years ago, he found the

briefest of etymologies. Kore was another name for Persephone. Kidnapped by Pluto

and taken into cold darkness to become the queen of Hades, the goddess was

permitted to surface into the sunshine six months of the year. It was an apt name for

a north-facing wall that saw the light of day only with the approach of spring.

According to the article, a climber on the initial British expedition had baptized the

route.

Near the end of his thirty-four-day whirlwind, Abe received a two-pound package.

Compiled by the expedition's former physician, it contained detailed medical histories

of all the members. Abe was just leaving to grab a quick few miles of trail running on

Mount Sanitas, but when the package came he bagged the run, kicked off his shoes,

and put on a pot of coffee. This would be his first look at the people whose health and

lives were his mission.

Inside the package were ten manila file folders with a passport photo paperclipped

to the inner flap of each. Abe cleared a corner of his kitchen table and stacked the files

where they wouldn't fall. One by one, Abe drew these people to him, matching their

pictures with their names and telephone voices – the few he'd spoken to – and trying

to read from their eyes and dimples and haircuts what kind of spirits moved their

cages of bone and flesh. He stared at their photos and tried to guess how they would

laugh and cry, or if they would. Then he lifted their skin aside and peered at the

machinery, translating their medical histories into makeshift biographies, finding here

and there broken bones, a missing thyroid gland, three abortions, a heart with

murmurs, a case of diabetes, and the secretly mentioned venereal diseases.

You are my flock, Abe thought in his kitchen. Their mortality was abundant.

Beneath their muscles and tanned squints and high-flying grins and their dreams like

wings, these eagles were human, and they would need him.

There was only one surprise in that stack of folders, really. It came in the

next-to-last file. Abe opened it as he'd opened the others, casually, and he looked at

the photo, not even the name.

It was Daniel.

Abe had not seen Daniel since that once upon a time on the glacier seventeen long

years ago. He lifted the photo closer, disbelieving. Here was that same black Irish

brow, those same Lazarus eyes and the cheekbones and unsmiling laughlines. The boy

had grown into a man. His features had gravity now, though the wildness was still

evident. The blood was washed from his hair, of course, and life had etched his

forehead.

'Corder D. W.,' Abe read aloud from the file, forcing the conviction. He laid the folder

open on the stack of others.

For a few minutes, Abe sat stunned by the coincidence, then it caught up with him.

He had a connection to this man, so of course they would meet. Now or later, standing

in line at a grocery store or walking down a sidewalk or climbing a mountain. The only

real surprise was that they had not met before.

Then it caught up with him, what Jorgens had said in their first conversation: Your

buddy Corder said so. This was Corder then. You're the one.

For a time, Abe had liked to believe that he and Daniel had been orphaned by the

same event and that they had been bound by the same disappearance. But that had

just been his way of not making the event answer for itself, a chore that he'd

conveniently heaped onto his other, this twin, Daniel.

After a while, Abe had dismantled that imagined fraternity. For one thing, it was

bizarre. And for another, Abe had held the hands of too many patients who in their

fear and pain had raved with his own confusion about the falling rock or the car or the

bullet or the cancer, whatever it was, to believe death had any value.

They had talked to a ghost, he and Daniel, but that didn't mean they had to be

haunted for the rest of time. For his part, Abe had finally made himself be done with it

all. After recovering from his own ordeal, Abe had avoided revisiting that fateful range

in Wyoming, never even learning the name of Daniel's mountain. Abe had closed the

whole thing off. He had sealed the voice in the crevasse beneath seventeen years of

daily happenstance.

Yet here was Daniel again. He wondered why the man should remember him now,

so many years later. Was this expedition some sort of payback? Or was Daniel

perhaps still haunted, still needing rescue? Or just curious about that girl's long

ending?

Almost as if he were invading his own privacy, Abe picked up the folder.

Daniel's medical read like a masochist's ode to the wilderness. Their former

physician had listed Daniel's injuries in careful reverse chronology, like a résumé,

which made it easy for Abe to construct Daniel's story. Abe skipped through the list at

random.

Eight years ago Daniel had elected to have arthroscopic surgery on both knees, one

at a time, for cartilage torn by years of humping big loads down big mountains. And

the year before, he'd spent three weeks hospitalized for malaria contracted in New

Guinea.

Around that same time, surgeons had fused part of his spinal column after he'd

fallen and collapsed several vertebrae. There was a note that Daniel would be bringing

along a TENS unit, a portable battery-powered device that electrically over-rode

chronic, localized pain. Killing two birds with one stone, the surgeons had taken the

same occasion to cut the nerves in Daniel's toes to address the pain of his Morton's

neuroma. Climbers liked their rock shoes so tight that they sometimes developed

hammer toes, similar to the effects of Chinese foot binding. That was back when

Daniel still had toes.

In 1984, the records showed, Daniel had spent several months in the hospital

getting most of every toe amputated because of frostbite. Abe checked a secondary

page in the folder, and there it was, a photocopied report chronicling the long,

agonizing fight to save the damaged toes. Abe flipped back to the first page and found

what he was looking for. The frostbite had occurred on Everest, in Tibet, on the north

side, in 1983.

'You,' Abe whispered to the page.

Now he recollected the tale of five Brits and an American who had been the first to

attack the Kore Wall. Just before reaching the summit slopes, they had been struck

by a winter storm. No one had died, but the group's horrible retreat had come to be

dubbed the Lepers' Parade. The American media had ignored it altogether – they

rarely took notice of mountaineering triumphs, much less failures. But among

climbers the story had spread. In fighting their way down the valley to a Tibetan

village each had suffered major frostbite. Each had lost toes, three had lost fingers,

and one had lost portions of his lower legs. Afterward, so the story went, all of the

climbers had given up climbing, all except one. Now Abe knew. Daniel was that one.

Sobered – a little sickened, even – Abe stored the nugget of history away and

finished studying Daniel's long list of injuries and disease. The severity of pain and

debilitation ebbed and flowed on the page, and Abe had to remind himself that this

was the profile of one man, not an entire ward.

The previous year Daniel had undergone surgery for another problem common to

high standard rock climbers, tendinitis in the elbow. The doctors had split the tendons

in both arms, cleared out the scar tissue, and transferred the ulna nerve from its

normal groove to across the elbow. Abe could picture the half-moon scars Daniel

would be carrying on his inner arms.

There had been double pneumonia in '84, tropical parasites in '82 and '79, the

anterior reconstruction of his left shoulder in '83, rabies shots for a dog bite in

Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in '80, and a spiral fracture of the right tibia in '77.

The list went on. It was grotesque. In the context of a normal sport, Daniel's

relentless suffering and compulsion would have depressed Abe. But his fascinated

him. Here was the sort of obsession he'd always associated with Himalayan ascent,

and it was written in flesh and blood. The other members might have the same

passion, but only here did Abe see proof of a heart and mind whipped by demons.

Now he knew who it was on that British expedition who had named their route for a

woman locked away in the underworld.

2

THE BEGINNING – 1992

Abe woke at dawn on the border of Tibet, flat on his back beneath a truck axle. After

a late start from Kathmandu, they had reached the border too late for crossing, so the

climbers had slept where they could, on one of the big Indian Tata trucks or under

them. Hauling himself out by one of the worn black tires, Abe squinted up and around

at this borderland in the light of day.

He had come prepared for a landscape of collision, a place where two continental

plates were warring for dominance. What he hadn't prepared for was this: a single

bridge wedged at the base of an emerald green gorge, half a mile deep. On either side,

monkeys barked in the trees and thousand-foot waterfalls threaded walls thick with

rhododendron and pine.

They had spent six days in Kathmandu, speedy with jet lag, racing to finish stocking

the expedition with food from the local bazaar and with secondhand mountain gear

from the trek shops and from other expeditions. With his partner Gus, Daniel had

already headed north into Tibet to weed through the red tape and choose a site for

their base camp at Everest. Abe was glad for that. For the time being it was enough to

get acquainted with these strangers and this new land.

From their moment of landing, Abe had been enchanted. Kathmandu was a vortex

of centuries swirling upon themselves. Electric lines threaded among thirteen-tiered

temples. Honda motorcycles wove between ambling sacred cows. Ancient stone gods

peeked out of brick walls or peered up from holes in the asphalt. There was a layering

of time here that sucked at Abe's spirit, and at every turn he felt himself pulled

deeper and harder into Asia.

Yesterday they had mounted a jitney bus and the Tata trucks and the city had

given way to countryside and the countryside to mountains. The green and red hills

with their sleepy cattle and terraced fields had slipped by. The Kathmandu highway

had turned into this mean dirt strip hugging a white river.

High in the distance, in a scoop of morning sunlight, a Tibetan village lay carved into

the stone and clouds. Down here the air was warm and sticky and crowded with nasal

childlike songs from a shopkeeper's radio. Every breath tasted like truck fuel and last

night's rice and lentils. But up there, high overhead in Tibet, it looked chilly and

remote and peaceful.

Someone came up behind Abe and pointed at the distant floating village. It was

Jorgens, Abe could tell by the hand – square and veined like a miner's, with latticed,

weather-beaten skin – and because only Jorgens had the ease to go around slapping

backs or propping his arm on shoulders. Most of the climbers were still stalking wary

circles around one another, snuffling for aggression or dominance like pack wolves. In

a fit of bonhomie at the Kathmandu airport, Jorgens had even called them 'kids,'

exposing his wish that they be one big family. Abe canted his head enough to catch the

cropped monastic tonsure and the clunky horn-rims that ex-Marines seemed to

favor. 'Breakfast,' Jorgens grunted, and then he was gone, rousting climbers from

their nooks and crannies by the roadside.

Abe looked around him as the group rose up from the ground. There were leaves in

their hair and bags beneath their eyes. The ones who had slept under the trucks

sported oil stains, and now Abe found a greasy stripe on his own jacket. Half of them

limped from old sports injuries or tendinitis sustained in training for this expedition.

They did not inspire confidence as a collection of world-class athletes coiled to strike

the highest mountain.

Their Chinese permit listed them as members of the U.S. Ultimate Summit

Expedition to the North Face of Qomolangma – or Everest. But one of the climbers –

probably Robby with his mouth or Thomas, in another fit of forlorn criticism – had

dubbed them the Yeti, and it stuck. Composed of fifteen testicles, four breasts, and

'nine too many brains,' they were indeed a creature fit for the mountains. Including

airfare, gear, food, permit fees and bribes, it was costing over a half million dollars to

stitch together this monster. Its life expectancy was a hundred days, though just now,

after a single night in the open, the team looked mostly dead.

They limped and shrugged across the Friendship Bridge that spanned the border.

All their gear had to be off-loaded here and then loaded onto Chinese government

trucks hired at exorbitant rates. And because a section of road to town was in poor

repair, the bus chartered to bring up the climbers had been canceled. They would

have to walk for their breakfast.

On the far side of the bridge, four People's Liberation Army soldiers awaited the

expedition, their pea-green uniform jackets unbuttoned and their cheeks chapped the

color of radishes. They stared without amusement as several climbers capered back

and forth across the international line for each other's cameras.

At the end of an hour of hiking, the string of hungry climbers reached the village,

walking past shacks made of radiant blond pinewood saturated with dew. A waterfall

sluiced beneath the roadway and rocketed out into free space, springing hundreds of

feet into the depths. They came to a concrete arch marking the customs entry point

and overhead a huge fire-red Chinese flag billowed in the mountain air. Abe took a

deep lungful of the dream.

Big Tibetan half-breeds with gold teeth and white cotton gloves drove them up out of

the gorge and onto the high plateau where they connected with a new Old Silk Road, a

two-lane bulldozed road that extended from China all the way to Pakistan. To Abe,

the ancient trade route promised riches and forgotten cities. But around every bend it

delivered only more mountains and more emptiness.

'A war road,' Carlos Crowell called it. He and Abe were riding side by side atop a

canvas tarp in the bed of one truck. Along this road, Carlos said, the People's Republic

kept Tibet garrisoned with occupation troops and stocked with everything from rice

to nuclear weapons. Along this road, back to China, flowed commune crops and

minerals and what was left of Tibet's forests.

'They've stripped her clean,' Carlos said. Even stating the facts depressed Carlos,

who felt he had a special connection to Tibet, and indeed most of the Third World.

This was his fourth time here.

Whippet-thin, Carlos was an ex-Peace Corps hand who had served in Rwanda a

decade ago, then drifted on to become a part-time dharma bum and entrepreneur. He

knew just enough Asian slang to keep everyone wondering how much he really did

know. Part of his uniform was the fresh set of red puja threads on his wrist from a

blessing he'd arranged for himself back in Kathmandu. At his throat hung a turquoise

cylinder from his New Age import-export shop in Eugene, and his wispy ponytail was

pulled back to show two tiny gold earrings.

Most of the other climbers tended to treat Carlos's colorful spiels about the

holocaust that China had unleashed upon Tibet as ghost stories rather than real

history. The stories were fabulous and gruesome and no one paid much attention

except for Jorgens, who had instructed Carlos to zip his yap once they crossed the

border. 'A million-plus Tibetans snuffed since 1959,' Carlos regaled Abe as they

motored along. 'That's one out of every six people here starved, shot, bayoneted,

burned, crucified or beaten to death with iron bars. Manifest Destiny, Han-style.' His

claims were horrific, but the land seemed too barren and empty to support such

bloodshed. Certainly there were no bodies heaped along the roadside. For the sake of

keeping up his end of the conversation, Abe said so.

'Oh, there's killing fields here. They stretch for acres. Miles. I haven't found them

yet, but I'm looking, man. Mountains of skulls with a single bullet hole through the

buttside of each.'

They managed to ride in silence for a while, then Carlos leaned close. 'I shouldn't

ever have come back here,' he said.

Abe had no idea what he meant, but it sounded circular and self-absorbed the way

Carlos liked to be. 'Back to Tibet?' Abe asked.

'Everest,' Carlos said. 'Here we go again. Renting the mountain from a regime that

doesn't even own it. Paying lip service to butchers.'

'But all we're doing is climbing,' Abe said.

'Yeah, yeah. I've heard that one. All the world's a playground for us climbers. The

thing is, every time one of us comes and climbs here, we kiss the Chinese ass.'

'Well, I guess I don't know about that.'

'That's okay. You're ignorant,' Carlos said, but it wasn't meant as an insult. 'You

don't know what it's like here. I do.'

'Ignorance is bliss,' Abe lamely offered.

Carlos shook his head bitterly. 'Maybe so. But one thing's sure. Knowledge is

complicity.'

For the rest of the day, their convoy of three army surplus trucks spewed huge

roostertails of dust across the land. The plateau was barren. The land lay as flat as a

Wyoming oil range – except to the south. All along the right-hand horizon lay the

Himalayas, abrupt and enormous. Unlike the Nepalese side of the chain with its

foothills and forests and paddies, there was no preface to these eruptions. Abe couldn't

get over that. There was nothing intermediate between the extremes.

Human beings – even animals or vegetation – were practically an event. At one

point, Carlos thrust his arm out. 'Would you look at that,' he said.

Three horsemen were riding past, dour and fierce-looking. Two wore Aussie-style

cowboy hats, the third a fur cap. One carried a rifle with a twin-pronged stand made

of long animal horns.

'Khambas,' Carlos said. 'Once upon a time the CIA trained a bunch of those dudes as

guerrillas.'

Abe waited. Even when he was serious, Carlos seemed to be pulling your leg.

'No, no, it's true, man. They used to fly guys like them to the Rocky Mountains, an

old army camp in Colorado. Taught them, armed them, had them running ops across

the Nepal border. They'd blow up roads, attack convoys or outposts. But you know

how that goes. After a while the Agency pulled the plug. The spooks call these kind of

guys Dixie cups. Use once, throw away.'

The horsemen had long braids bound with chile-red twine. None of the three wasted

so much as a look at the truck convoy. Abe reached for his camera, but already they

were gone.

They reached a cold little village called Shekar at five and drove straight to a

concrete hostel provided by the Chinese Mountaineering Association. The village

stood at 11,000 feet. Their Chinese liaison officer – their keeper while they were

in-country – met them with a smile. 'There's one of the butchers,' Carlos muttered.

'We belong to him now.'

Wearing a crisp yellow windbreaker with ULTIMATE SUMMIT on the back and along

one arm, the L.O. was easy to recognize. 'Welcome to my country,' he greeted them.

His name was Li Deng and he was tall and well educated, a Han apparatchik from

Beijing, maybe thirty-five years old. He spoke superb British English and occupied

some high rank in the Chinese Mountaineering Association, a government bureau.

With his brand-new clean pump-up basketball shoes and hundred-dollar Revo

sunglasses – all expedition issue – he didn't look very Marxist or genocidal.

There was no heat in the rooms and what illumination there was came from a bulb

dangling by exposed wires. An industrial-strength quilt covered Abe's bed. All the

rooms lacked to be jail cells were metal bars. The CMA was charging over a hundred

dollars per climber for the lodging, but no one complained because that was the price

of climbing in Tibet.

Abe stood at the window. The truckyard was losing its daylight and Abe shivered,

unprepared for the teeth of this highland cold. Tonight's roommate was Robby, a

spidery carpenter with an old two-tone crewcut gone to seed. He was flopped out atop

his quilt, prattling on about about how he'd stayed in this same miserable hostel in '87

on his way to another mountain, Shisha Pangma. He ranked staying here alongside

giving blood – he had a needle phobia – and swimming in the ocean – sharks.

In the window's reflection, Abe could see Robby sitting on his bed. The lightbulb cast

his eyes into shadowy sockets and there was no mirth on his lips. His Great Plains

inflection blunted any intended humor, another misfire. He seemed trapped in his own

monologue.

Abe had a headache and didn't feel like conversation, and it was too early in the

expedition to be telling Robby to pipe down, so he stood there and tuned out, watching

the truckyard. A scarred black mongrel was creeping beyond stone's throw of a pack

of ragged children. Further out, the notorious Tibetan wind skirled dust clouds that

blotted out the middle distance, but not the distant Himalayas.

Abe pressed his fingertips against the dusty Chinese glass and pondered the ghostly

scenery. There was mystery out there and he welcomed it. Absentmindedly he

started tracing a silhouette of the mountains on the cold glass. A moment later Abe

noticed the idle sketch under his finger and stopped immediately. It looked, for all the

world, like the lifeline on an EEG readout. He lifted away his finger before the line

went flat on the far horizon, then chided himself for being superstitious.

It was a forgivable primitivism. They were already beginning to starve for oxygen.

Abe could sense it. From the medical literature he'd steeped himself in, Abe felt well

versed in the effects of high altitude. Even so he was surprised to see the faint blue

coloration underneath his fingernails already.

From here on out, they would be living in a constant state of hypoxia, or oxygen

starvation. In fact there was just as much oxygen in the air – 21 percent – here and

on the top of Everest as at sea level. What varied was the ambient pressure needed to

force the oxygen from the lungs into the bloodstream. So they would have to breath

more air. Their bodies would produce more red blood cells to carry the oxygen. Their

blood would thicken almost to syrup, forcing their hearts to labor harder. Even the

youngest and fittest climbers would soon run an increased risk of heart failure. The

margins of normal health would wither away. And above 22,000 feet or so, their

bodies would slowly begin dying.

Out of his crash course in high-altitude physiology, Abe had derived one bit of

poetry. It turned out that even among people with a genetic tolerance for high

altitude, people like the Sherpas or Peruvian miners, life inside the womb was, in

effect, close to a sea-level existence. Newborns had to acclimatize like mountaineers.

Mountaineers had to adapt like newborns. For all its jagged contours, the world at

high altitude presented a level playing field.

Abe tried to identify some of the far peaks, but without luck. Over the years, he had

memorized the contours of Everest and Lhotse and Makalu and Cho Oyu and others

without stopping to think that all the pictures showed the range from the Nepal side.

Here in Tibet, the profiles were not only reversed, but distorted.

When Abe asked which were which, Robby said, 'Forget it. We're on the backside of

the moon now. Our labels don't count here.' But then he joined Abe at the window and

pointed out different mountains and gave their names. Even with Robby's help,

though, the range didn't become any more familiar to Abe, and that just made it seem

more alien.

'And that there's the Big E,' Robby said, pointing at a small, triangular bump to the

south.

'Sorry?' He wasn't paying attention.

'You know, like E Sharp, Big White,' Robby jived.

'Chomolungma, Mother Goddess. The Hill.'

Abe nodded: Everest. It looked very small from here.

'I wish we were there already,' Robby said. 'Daniel's been out there a week now,

nothing to do but smell the roses and do the hang with old Gus. But then luck's his

middle name.'

'Daniel?' Abe said. 'I never thought of him as lucky. Just the opposite.' Abe had

made a pact with himself not to preface his meeting with Daniel with expedition

gossip. But here it was getting handed to him and it was hard to turn away.

'Not lucky? Come on.'

Abe kept it general. 'Don't get me wrong,' he said. 'I don't know Daniel. But the

man's lost his toes. He's broken bones. Taken bad falls. And he's tried Everest how

many times now, and never made the top.' And seen his young fiancée eaten alive by

a mountain, Abe almost added. So far as he could tell, no one on the expedition knew

about the nightmare that bound Daniel and Abe.

'Yeah,' Robby agreed, 'but he's alive.' His eyebrows jumped electrically.

'That's something,' Abe conceded.

'I'd trade him any day. You know what he does for a living?'

Abe didn't.

'He's a crash dummy. A technical adviser to manufacturers of climbing equipment.

He has to try out all the new toys. He has to climb full-time. And not on scruffy little

backyard cliffs either. You know how car companies like to name their cars after

power animals? Mustang, Cougar, Stingray, right? Well it's Daniel's job to do power

climbs. He gets sent around the world to all the best faces on all the best mountains.

All expenses paid. Free air, free gear, free food. And everywhere he goes, Gus goes

too, and she is something. All in all, Doc, I'd trade a few toes to be in Daniel's shoes.'

For dinner they had gray, rubbery dumplings in the cavernous dining hall built to

feed a Western tourist trade that never happened, especially after martial law. The

hall was unheated and it leaked the cold wind. Everyone was feeling the altitude, so

dinner was brief. Jorgens spoke of their need to buy Chinese stamps for the

expedition's five hundred postcards, to be signed by all the members and sent from

base camp to contributors at ten dollars apiece, the standard scheme for raising

money. Stump, their wide-bodied co-leader, promised to score the stamps in the

morning. Then everyone scraped their chairs back from the table to go off to bed, but

Li intercepted them to offer a toast.

Li explained that he'd never climbed in his life nor been to Tibet before, but he

enjoyed Americans and he enjoyed the outdoors. 'The natural world is like an

unfinished poem,' he told them. 'It needs care and labor before it reaches

completeness. You Americans understand this because of your frontier days. Tibet is

our Old West, you see. And so, from one frontiers-man to another, I say let us write a

grand poem of friendship and adventure upon our mountain.'

'Give me a break,' Carlos rumbled at the end of the table. He started to stand and

leave, but Stump caught at his jacket.

'Shut it,' Stump commanded. Carlos paused and blinked, then sat back down.

'To friendship, to the mountain.' Jorgens seconded Li's toast, and everyone but

Carlos drank a few tablespoons of scotch from their dirty teacups.

Back in the room, just before hoisting the quilt up around his shoulders, Abe peered

out the window. The moon was up and the Himalayas were stretched long and white

in the moonlight like a vast, shearing coral reef.

Abe rode the last few hours to Everest on the front seat of the front truck in their

convoy, squeezed beside Jorgens, who couldn't seem to stop remembering old

mountain stories, all of them long and involved and about himself. They were

inoffensive tales, mostly designed to excuse his age, which was fifty-four, and Abe

didn't begrudge that.

Abruptly, with a suddenness that bounced Abe against the door, the truck turned

left off the road. This was the start of what became a long grinding crawl up the Pang

La, a 16,000-foot pass bridging the Tibetan plateau and the deeper range. They were

only forty miles from Everest now, but according to Jorgens, it was going to be a

tortuous forty miles of bad roads and wild scenery. 'The Pang La's our doorway to

Everest. All ye who enter, know your soul,' he joshed.

For the next two hours, the road switched back and forth past shields of gleaming

black granite. Here and there the road evaporated altogether under fresh slide scars

only to reappear again. Not a hint of vegetation graced the bleak stony land. It was

still winter here. Hour after hour, they saw no animals, no people, no houses. No

justification for this strange highway.

'The world's highest dead end,' Jorgens declared over the whine of downshifted

gears. 'The PLA hand-constructed it in 1960. They're very proud of it. They need to

get a three-hundred-man expedition in to Everest. So they cut this road in. And they

climbed their mountain.'

It was hard to tell which Jorgens respected more, the Chinese road or their climb.

Abe wondered if Jorgens had heard Carlos's theory, that the Chinese had merely

claimed the summit in 1960 in order to cement their occupation of Tibet. It was a

claim that remained dubious, since the Chinese had supposedly summited in the dark

when photography was impossible. Further Carlos held that this road had been built

with slave labor.

For the sake of argument, and because Jorgens was in such a garrulous mood, Abe

challenged him. 'I've heard the story told little different,' he said. 'That it was Tibetans

who built this road, and with a gun at their head.'

The deep dimples in Jorgens's beard vanished. He shot a look at their driver, who

spoke pidgin Mandarin and pidgin Hindi and even pidgin Japanese, but, judging by his

blank look, no English at all. Then he turned a stern look upon Abe.

'You had a chat with Mr. Crowell, I take it.'

'We rode together,' Abe said. 'It was an education.'

'Half an education,' Jorgens qualified it. 'There's always two sides to a story.'

Abe almost spread his hands as if to disown his own remark. He hadn't meant to

trigger a confrontation. At the same time, he didn't appreciate being lectured. Jorgens

went on.

'Take the story of this road, for instance. It took a long time to build this road,' he

said. 'You may not believe this, but the Tibetan workers would stop after every

shovelful to pick the earthworms out of the dirt. Can you imagine? Every shovelful,

stop to save an earthworm's life. Talk about benighted. It drove the Chinese nuts.'

Jorgens stared out at the blank countryside. 'What a country. What a sorry

ass-backward excuse for a country. People going around day and night mumbling

prayers, worshiping stones, prostrating themselves. Frankly I think the Chinese did

these Tibetans a favor. At least these people can see a hint of the twentieth century

now.'

Abe noticed that Jorgens hadn't disputed the charge of slave labor. At best he'd put

a happy face on it. 'Sounds to me like Tibet didn't really need the twentieth century,'

Abe said.

'Tibet.' Jorgens spit the word. 'You have to understand something about this place,

then you'll understand Mr. Crowell's fixation on it. Tibet was called the forbidden

kingdom for a reason. People like us were kept out. But even when we're let in, we're

still out. We're all strangers here. And that's why people like Mr. Crowell feel so at

home here – because nobody knows Tibet, and so we can all imagine it is whatever we

want.'

After that, they rode in silence.

At the top of the Pang La, Jorgens breathed a long whistle. 'My God,' he said. 'Would

you look at this.'

It was indeed a sight. The Himalayan range lay spread before them, a tonnage of

angles and sunlight. Jorgens signaled their driver to stop. The driver scowled and

tapped his wristwatch. Jorgens waved him to a halt anyway.

A second truck pulled up and Li disembarked. Bundled in cherry-colored expedition

parkas, Thomas and Robby and J.J. Packard rose up from their nest atop the boxes

stacked in back. They moved slowly, cold and stiff. But their teeth gleamed in huge

grins and they were excited to be getting so close to the mountain.

A third truck arrived, and more people joined them. Cameras snapped and whirred.

Not a cloud adulterated the blue sky. The air was still. They were twenty miles or

more from Everest, but with the humidity content near zero, there was no haze and it

looked close enough to touch.

Even though Daniel and Gus were missing, Jorgens decided it was time for 'the

Picture' – the official 'before' shot which, months later, would go with the 'after' shot in

their slide shows to prove how Everest was about to ravage them. He called one of

their Sherpas over to round out the group. They put on their best face, eight

mountaineers radiant in their shorts or jeans or Lycra tights, bellies taut, teeth white.

But while Abe steadied his bulky old Pentax on a tripod, they flexed anyway.

The most obvious as usual was J.J. Packard, who whipped off his sweatshirt to

display thick lats like a peacock in rut. He came advertised as a magnificent summit

animal, capable of squatting a quarter-ton of iron draped across his neck, but Abe

wondered. His exhibitionism and dirty blond dreadlocks aside, J.J.'s sheer bulk

seemed more likely to gobble up his oxygen capacity and leave him far behind, and

Abe was curious to see how it would go.

Next to the giant, like spidery twins, Robby Powell 'sucked cheek' in Revo

sunglasses and his buddy Thomas Case postured with a dour, foreboding frown. Both

were wearing the expedition T-shirts that Robby had compared, unkindly – it was

Jorgens's design – to a cheap supermarket tabloid. The logo showed an ice climber

peering into the neon orange cosmic reaches. The title ULTIMATE SUMMIT: EVEREST

NORDWAND galloped across the chest. Under that, in hot purple ink, the shirt bragged,

'Getting High the Hard Way!'

Kelly, their beauty queen, just cocked her head and the sun poured gold on her

Viking locks. Though she was embarrassed by her flat chest and regularly joked that

her butt looked like hams waiting to happen, Kelly was the ultimate tits-and-ass show

to ever play Everest. A schoolteacher in real life, she had consented to model on the

expedition. On her crystal blue eyes alone, magazines and cosmetic companies had

paid the Ultimate Summit $150,000. A pantyhose company had kicked in $80,000

for rights to her legs, providing darker shades to hide the scars. Her hair had gone for

another $35,000 to a shampoo maker, and her skin had fetched still more from a

tanning lotion manufacturer. The rest of their money had come through more

conventional expedition schemes such as T-shirt sales, a book contract – null and void

if they failed the summit, unless there was a death – ten-dollar 'Postcards from the

Edge,' a wristwatch endorsement, and some last-minute corporate check-kiting that

involved the venture's nonprofit status and the future profits from Jorgen's Chinese

permit for Everest the following year. Abe didn't understand it all, nor did he waste

much time inquiring.

Nima Tenzing, the top kick of their climbing Sherpas, looked as grave as a

nineteenth-century chieftain facing the lens of history. Centuries ago, the Sherpas had

migrated from their native Tibet into the high valleys south of Everest in Nepal.

They'd been 'discovered' in the 1930s by Western mountaineers in need of cheap

labor on Everest, becoming famous as 'tigers of the snow' who functioned as high

altitude Gunga Dins, capable of carrying enormous loads by day and cheerfully

delivering cups of tea each morning at dawn to their sunburned sahibs.

Back in Kathmandu, Abe had met a worn-out old Sherpa missing most of the fingers

on one hand. What it had brought to mind was not tales of Himalayan heroism but the

memory of his own father, maimed in service to an oil company that soon after fired

and forgot him. In Nepal, tourism was the number one industry, and with their good

humor and charming English and their appetite for Western fashion, these Sherpas

were less tigers than safari porters who were usually the first to get eaten by the

mountain. Just prior to the first successful ascent of Everest in 1953, Tenzing Norgay

and the team's other Sherpas had been stuck in a converted stable without a toilet

while Hillary and his comrades enjoyed the British embassy building. From then on,

the Sherpas had known their place in the scheme of things.

Glen 'Stump' Wilson, the co-leader, anchored their center. An arbitrator and

construction litigation attorney, Stump was built from the waist down like a pro

fullback. His enormous thighs were offset by what he termed 'the littlest man,' a

genuinely small penis and a lone descended gonad which Abe had seen for himself

while probing for a hernia in Kathmandu. He had climbed on Everest twice before, and

both times seen expeditions flame out because of personality disputes. 'That's not

going to happen this time,' he'd warned them, and left it at that.

To the far left stood Peter Jorgens, beaming in his salt-and-pepper beard. With his

crisp widow's peak and sunbaked crow's-feet, Jorgens looked every inch the

Hollywood alpinist. In fact he was an accountant who had somehow ascended to the

presidency of the American Alpine Club. Abe had heard that Jorgens dreamed of

becoming secretary of the interior someday, and that this expedition was meant to be

a stepping-stone to Washington. Some of the other climbers considered it funny, and

sad, too, that Jorgens had already ordered a set of vanity plates reading '29,028' – the

height of Everest – for his family Jeep.

While Abe got his tripod legs screwed tight and attached his camera, the team stood

around wisecracking and catcalling at Everest, so many apes hooting at the moon.

They were in high spirits and Abe thought it fine and promising for them to be

thumbing their noses at the monster. It meant they were ready or thought they were,

and sometimes that was the same thing.

He panned his viewfinder across the bunch, smiling to himself. Each and every one

of them was dedicated to his reputation, though in reality they all were essentially

anonymous figments of their own imaginations. They hadn't come here to buy a name

by dying on the mountain; rather they'd come to emulate those who had, miming the

hard-core giants with their brilliant teeth and their posturing in the wind.

Abe was finally ready and called to the climbers to take their places again. Kelly

moved panther-soft, her black Lycra rippling like midnight, and J.J. squeezed some

more veins to the surface, and the truck drivers gaped. Abe focused and was about to

trigger the self-timer and jump in line, when suddenly, without warning, a puff of air –

the softest of breezes – brushed their faces.

Someone groaned. It was a bad news groan and everyone turned to look at the

jagged horizon behind them.

A tiny comma of a white cloud had appeared in the sky. The cloud was nothing more

than a mare's tail – altocirrus at 35,000 feet – and it drifted silkily. It hung up there

like white ink on a cobalt canvas, a beautiful Zen master stroke.

But the little cloud was a warning and every climber there understood, all except

Abe, who didn't know this mountain's traits.

'Damn,' J.J. whispered, as if he were just now realizing a mistake.

A moment or two passed. And then the mountain sprang into life. Everest's curt left

edge released a ghostly plume.

'Snow?' Abe asked quietly.

Carlos shook his head. 'Water vapor,' he said. 'The Indian air mass is hot. And when

it hits the cold mountain, zap. Smoke.' He checked his watch, synchronizing with the

pattern. Abe did the same. It was not quite two, Beijing time.

'That's not the monsoon, is it?' Abe asked.

'That?' Carlos said. 'That's just Everest. She likes to send up a flag in the afternoons.

Don't worry, Doc. The monsoon's still three months off. You'll know when it comes.

That's when we close the works and get the hell out of Dodge.'

Before their eyes, the white plume turned into a long ragged flag reaching east.

'It's probably one-ten, maybe one-twenty miles per hour up top there,' J.J. said.

'That's major air, man. Hurricane force.'

The white flag might as well have been black. It signified no quarter, nullifying the

climbers' coltish good humor. Abe took his cue from their spoiled bravado. He stowed

his grin like everyone else. Weather was everything on an Everest climb. But Abe was

handicapped, because they were half the planet removed from any skies he could

reliably read. All the same he meant to learn the patterns fast.

'That's that,' Stump called out with the enthusiasm of a man heading off for his own

execution. 'Let's knock off then and get on with the show.'

They turned their backs on the Hill. Everyone returned to the trucks.

The convoy moved down off the pass toward the floor of the Rongbuk Valley,

heading due south for Everest. As they wove back and forth down the steep,

miles-long pass, or la, Everest disappeared from view. After a half-hour, the Pang La

flattened out and the road jogged left and right through canyon walls. Soon the pass

vanished behind them, and their entrance and exit to the outside world was just a

memory.

There was a whole other world in here. If Shekar was poor, then the settlements in

the Rongbuk Valley were desperate. Poverty lay everywhere – in the soil, in the

adobe dwellings, in the children's astonishing nudity beneath the cold wind. Here and

there, little clusters of stone and adobe dwellings popped up like southwestern

pueblos. Some of the buildings were white-washed, some were banded white and

orange. The flat rooftops were ringed with sticks of firewood that must have been

brought from far away, for there was not a tree in sight. The people didn't smile from

their rock-strewn fields at the passing truckloads of climbers. They glared, then went

on with their tilling. Jorgens seemed not to register their bleak circumstances. Instead

he waved heartily at the brown land. 'When we leave in June,' he said, 'these fields will

be green. The ewes will be dropping their lambs. This road will be cut by dozens of

irrigation ditches. You'll see. It'll be pretty as a picture.'

There were more ruins – old stone fortresses and monasteries and desolate villages.

The convoy crossed dry irrigation ditches, then a wide riverbed. In the summertime,

Jorgens promised, it would carry runoff 'as thick and white as sperm' from the

Rongbuk Glacier at the base of Everest. Now it held only a blue thread of water. More

hours passed and the sun stayed dangling on the southern rim. Having descended into

a valley, they now began to climb out again. The road turned menacing with deep

gullies and big gutting scree. Abe kept expecting their tires to blow out or the oil pan

to get disemboweled. Patches of ice waited in the shadows and on switchbacks. The

truck nearly high-centered on one rutted patch, then skidded on another. They crept

along at five kilometers per hour. For some reason, Abe had never imagined a truck

engine could still function at 17,000 feet. Theirs did.

The truck rounded a hillock of glacier debris. To the right and left, satellite peaks

couched a long, perfectly flush moraine. And then, from out of nowhere, Everest leapt

up before them. It seemed close, but that was the optics of high altitude and it was

still miles away. The trucks crept along toward where the valley floor quit and became

mountainside.

'There,' Jorgens pointed for their driver. At the same time Abe saw it too, a tiny

bubble of color. A moment later, the bubble became a green tent and Abe caught sight

of two miniature figures. One figure approached them. As they closed on him, the man

grew larger.

Though his head was bound with a red-checkered kaffiyeh and he looked more like

an Afghani rebel than a climber, and his eyes were covered with sunglasses, Abe

somehow recognized the man. It was Daniel, of course. He walked with wide, rolling

strides, but Abe could see the hitch in his one leg – that would be the spiral fracture;

and the exaggerated agility would be the amputated toes and scoped knees. He was

baked to copper by two weeks of Tibetan sun, and even with the daylight failing in

this deep valley his grin was an act of magnificent anarchy.

'Daniel,' Abe said aloud, greeting his own history.

Jorgens craned forward and squinted through his black horn-rims at the figure,

then at Abe. 'Good eyes,' he said.

Daniel waved the lead truck to a pause and pulled up to Abe's open window. 'Hey,

Jorgens,' he said, and reached through the window and across Abe to shake hands. It

struck Abe that he'd never heard Daniel actually speak, only howl. His voice rasped

slightly, the edge of bronchitis or a windpipe raw from the cold. 'I was starting to think

we'd have to climb without you.'

Abe looked at the paltry encampment in the distance and its other sticklike

inhabitant, then up at the huge mountain, and concluded Daniel was making a joke.

But Jorgens didn't snort his amusement and Daniel kept on grinning, and Abe wasn't

so sure after all.

Jorgens canted his head toward Abe. 'You two have met,' he said to Daniel.

Daniel backed off to get Abe in focus. He studied Abe's face for an intent minute,

then stuck his open right hand through the window to him. 'Once upon a time,' he said,

and it struck Abe that Daniel had never really seen him before. Abe's would have been

just one more face in a circle of pain.

'It was a long time ago.' Abe wasn't offended.

'Abraham Burns,' Daniel said, half to himself.

'I take it this is your pick for Base Camp,' Jorgens interrupted.

Daniel slung his face toward the distance. 'Looks like hell, doesn't it. But if we camp

over that way, the wind kills us. And over the other way, we get no sun. Gus and me,

we've spent the last week trying all the sites out. So here it is, as good as it gets.'

'Let's do it then. Show us where. We've got everything to do before night drops on

us.'

Daniel raced down off the running board, loped ahead of the truck, and then swept

his hands in a big half-acre half-moon on the ground.

The convoy circled on his geometry and came to a halt. The driver of Abe and

Jorgens's truck switched off the ignition. The cab fell silent.

'Home sweet home,' Jorgens pronounced.

Abe tried hard not to gawk. On the one hand, it looked the way it was supposed to

look, just as India had smelled the way India should smell when he'd first stepped off

the plane. But it was different, too.

Maybe he should have known better, but Abe had imagined their group would land

on Everest's soil like astronauts – or migrant workers – carrying with them

everything necessary for life where there was no life. Food, shelter, literature, even

oxygen: all of it imported. And like astronauts – or Okies – they would arrive bearing

hopes and dreams, most forcefully the dream of virgin territory, of a fresh start, of

frontier. But what Abe saw through the cracked windshield destroyed all such

sentiment and he was shocked.

At first glance, it looked like the aftermath of a gigantic New Year's Eve party with

confetti thrown across the whole landscape. Then Abe saw that it was trash, years and

years of trash. Like jackals, the wind had raided the garbage dumps of past

expeditions and cast debris across the entire moraine. Pieces of paper and plastic

clung stubbornly to rocks, hundreds of pink and blue and yellow entrails.

That wasn't the worst of it, either. Abe opened the door and hopped nimbly to the

ground and landed, literally, in shit, in the dried feces of their mountaineering

ancestors. And now Abe saw that in every direction, human and yak dung lay coiled

and dropped in random piles, each one mummified by the sun.

Wasteland, Abe thought, and immediately filed the pun for his slide shows. But the

filth and desolation kept on hitting at his mind. It was so unexpected.

Daniel breezed past, hustling to get the trucks unloaded and camp set up. 'Welcome

to paradise,' he said without a trace of irony.

None of the other climbers seemed fazed. If anything, the trash lent a festive spirit

to the place and people seemed energized by the emptiness of this Himalayan

clearing. Abe looked around, groping to get his bearings. When he finally did move, he

moved slowly. He wasn't the only one. In contrast to the Sherpas, most of the

climbers looked clumsy and crippled by the altitude.

Everest was actually ten miles distant, but from here on they were on foot. Though

the valley floor was as flat as a billiard table, the climb began here.

In between them and Everest stood a satellite mountain called Changtse which

blocked the lower five thousand feet of their route from view. But above Changtse's

dark, blunt massif, Everest was projecting brilliant white light. The sight only

exaggerated the squalor of Base Camp, for the valley had fallen into shadow. It would

be daytime up there for hours to come, while down in the valley, the climbers were

already layering on sweaters and parkas for the night.

Eager to depart before the sun was altogether gone, the truck drivers pitched in.

They hastily unroped the tarps and clambered on top of the gear and started tossing

it from the trucks into a mountain of jumbled boxes, packs, and utensils.

Standing atop one of the truck cabs, Jorgens was shouting, 'System it, people,

system it,' for he'd painstakingly tapped together a computerized blueprint for the

supply dump and spent extra money for color-coded boxes.

But as the sun sank lower and the wind blew harder, Jorgens's dream of a system

completely disintegrated. The drivers were rough and indifferent to their loads. They

kicked and pitched and shoved at the gear and the climbers simply tried to keep up

with them. The pile of gear grew taller and more hectic. Everyone worked with a

gasping determination. No one relished spending their first night at Everest in the

open.

As Abe labored, he felt oddly desperate. He had thought they would arrive on this

island and carefully inhabit it, and instead they had crashed upon its rocky shores and

were now frantically salvaging their gear before the ship sank altogether.

'Goddamn it, get the system, people,' Jorgens bellowed helplessly. He spotted one of

the Sherpas. 'Norbu, tell these damn drivers, system it.'

'Yes sir,' Norbu said, and turned away, having no idea what Jorgens meant, or if he

did, no intention of doing it.

Alpenglow radiated orange and pink off the highest tips of the surrounding peaks.

But down in the valley it was dark. The darker it got, the harder people drove

themselves, frantic to make a shelter against the night and make this refuge

habitable.

First one truck, then all of them disgorged their contents and bolted for the Pang La.

Abe watched the truck's headlights cast crazy patterns in the dusk. Finally, like

spiders retracting their white silk, the trucks and their cobweb of lights were gone and

the climbers had Everest to themselves. They were alone. To Abe's surprise, his heart

felt heavy. Not since his father's death a few years ago had Abe felt so profoundly

abandoned. It wasn't logical, but there it was.

They secured the gear as best they could, but soon it got too dark for them to be

useful. The climbers and Sherpas gathered at Krishna Rai's food box and stood around

in the wind and stars and shared a twenty-pound block of cheddar cheese and three

cans of tuna mixed with ice crystals. No one could coax the Indian kerosene stoves

into firing, and so there was no boiled water for tea or for brushing their teeth. Daniel

and his companions shared what little water they had, but it wasn't much more than a

swallow apiece.

Everyone economised on the dialogue. But when they did speak Abe could hear

their low mood. This was their first night at the grand destination and the entire team

was now together for the first time. The evening should have been filled with joy and

excitement and camaraderie. Instead the climbers were about to drag off to bed

thirsty and exhausted and hungover from the thin air. Abe could tell he wasn't alone

in already feeling flatass defeated. He figured the only thing to do was go sleep it off.

But then something happened that strangely lifted their spirits. A meteor shower

suddenly emerged in the sky above Everest.

'Look,' someone said, and they all turned to see the extraordinary thing, this

bunched strafing surge of lights.

The meteors appeared like wild parrots, a whole flock of colors slashing through the

night. They sprang through the blackness in silence.

'Is it real?' someone marveled. There were dozens of flashing meteors, then a

hundred and maybe more. Abe had seen comets and falling stars before, but never in

such abundance as this, and never so incisive and brilliant and obtainable. He felt sure

they would slug straight into the mountain.

'It's not the Perseids,' Carlos pronounced for their benefit. Abe had already been

treated to his theories on the universe. 'They come in August. But I don't know what

else it could be, not this bright and not this many and at this season, I don't know.'

The shower went on and on. Abe forgot his thirstiness and fatigue and the cold wind.

Everyone did. They all just stared at the extraordinary fireworks.

People remarked aloud as the green and red and white lines materialized from deep

space and stung downward toward their Hill. The general tone was awe. Stump was so

entranced that he forgot to instruct Robby and Tom to catch the stars on film. After a

few minutes, Abe could hear the Sherpas muttering darkly in their own language, and

he felt them shifting around and realized they were afraid.

'So beautiful,' Kelly was murmuring.

Then Nima spoke. 'This thing, very, very bad,' he pronounced to the group.

'I don't think so, Nima,' someone consoled him. 'It's just meteors.'

'It is scientific,' the Chinese liaison officer Li explained, and by his tone Abe could

make out his impatience with the Sherpa's fear.

But by Nima's silence, Abe could tell science had little place in this outland.

3

Ten days straight the climbers looked north toward the Pang La, praying for their yak

caravan to materialize, marking their calendars, waiting. Every day the skies were

swept so bare that Abe imagined he could see the stars at high noon. It was so still in

the mornings he could actually hear tiny icicles melting, their droplets chiming like

bells. The weather was perfect. But the yaks didn't come.

'Our valley is a gigantic prison cell,' Abe wrote in his growing letter to Jamie.

'Barren. Tedious. There is no life here. Time has stopped. Everything occurs in

enormous proportions – the blue sky, the mountainsides, the Rongbuk Glacier. I've

never known such vastness. It humbles me. The closest things to human scale in this

outsized land are the tiny fluorescent red and blue and green lichen that freckle the

rocks. The lichens and us – we share this dead place. I can almost hear my hair

growing.'

Base Camp was up and running. Tents were pitched, walls taut, latrines dug. The

heap of gear had been sorted and resorted. The climbers were ready to climb.

There were two ways to attack a mountain of this size and height. The simplest, by

far the most dangerous, was the so-called alpine ascent, which pitted two to four

climbers against the clock as they made a single-minded dash for the summit. Using

this strategy, the climbers would continue progressively higher, taking their camp and

supplies with them. When someone pulled off an alpine ascent in the Himalayas, it was

treated as a brilliant theft, a jewel stolen from under the dragon's nose. The problem

was risk. Stripped for speed and isolated high on their mountain, an alpine team

depended on perfect conditions, perfect teamwork and perfect health. One mistake,

one stormy day, and it was all over, you froze to glass where you lay. Everyone agreed

that an alpine attempt on a route as complicated and vast as the Kore Wall would

have been insane.

The more tried and true strategy, the one the Ultimate Summit Expedition had

been built around, was the old-fashioned siege. This called for methodically setting

permanent camps at successive heights and linking each to its neighbors with

thousands of feet of 'fixed' safety rope. In contrast to the blitzkrieg motion of an alpine

ascent, siege climbers shuttled up and down repeatedly, stocking the highest, newest

camps – what climbers called 'building the logistics pyramid' – and acclimatizing

slowly. The rule of thumb for siege ascents was 'climb high, sleep low,' the idea being

that you climbed high and slept low at progressively higher elevations.

From his childhood reading through the mountaineering classics about the first

ascents of Annapurna and Nanga Parbat, the early British assaults on the north side of

Everest and their first conquest of Everest on its southern side, Abe knew the

concepts behind laying siege to a mountain. What he lacked was the mindset. Robby

clued him in one afternoon.

With every word, the garrulous man made it clear they were at war. He described

the upper camps as firebases, with all the rough-and-ready charm of temporary

defenses injected deep into enemy territory. Every camp would depend on its lower

neighbor for support and reinforcement. None was designed for long-term occupation

on the Hill. The very highest camp would be placed and stocked for one-day guerrilla

strikes on the summit.

'On summit day, you go for quick penetration,' Robby preached. 'Quick up, quick

down.'

Abe listened, rapt. Climbing in the Himalayas was like climbing nowhere else in the

world. It had a language all its own, a risk and a mindset, and Robby – and all the

others – brimmed with it. The very language of ascent abounded with war terms:

siege tactics, assault, base camp, supply lines, logistics, planting camps, pushing the

line, retreat, victory, conquest, and planting the flag. Abe was getting a clear sense

that one brought to Everest a lifetime of battle plans, of occupied landscapes – high

ground, always the high ground – and of risks, blood, and wet socks on cold nights.

Taken altogether, it was a kind of high-speed imperialism, the rise and fall of a

dynasty within a few months. The idea behind their occupation was less to inhabit a

land than to enter into history.

But without the yaks, they couldn't even begin to climb.

Through the Chinese Mountaineering Association, a caravan of sixty yaks – each

able to carry seventy pounds – had been contracted to ferry gear up to Advance Base

Camp. With them the expedition would move two solid tons of rope, shelter, food,

oxygen and film equipment up to 21,700 feet in the span of two days. Without them,

the climbers would simply waste their strength humping loads. Worse, they would

waste their time. Using a laptop computer, Jorgens estimated it would take

sixty-three good-weather days for the climbers to pack the gear in and begin

climbing... and by then the monsoon would be looming and they would fail.

And so they waited. They sat and tinkered with gear. They read novels and snacked

on popcorn and grumbled. 'It's like being an animal in a zoo,' J.J. complained. 'Every

time I look up there, it's watching us.' It was true. All morning long the mountain

taunted them with its silence and light. At sunset it smothered them in shadows.

Whenever they turned around, Everest was there.

Ten miles shy of their grail, the climbers stewed. Li Deng quit showing the glum

Americans his dog-eared, rubber-stamped CMA contract with the yakherders. He

quit making promises or inventing excuses or cursing the 'minority nationals,' as he

called the Tibetans. He even quit playing chess games with the climbers, and that had

been his one pleasure.

April approached. Jorgens soured. Everything seemed to rankle him. From what

wags were calling their 'yak gap' to the manner in which they pitched their tents,

nothing pleased him. He had visualized setting camp in something like an iron cross,

with straight lines and right angles that would speak to their souls and declare that

here in this netherland, under the hand of man, lay order. But the only tent sites

available were on patches of soft tundra which projected above the rocky floor like

small islands. This archipelago of tundra patches rambled here and there, and as a

result Base Camp resembled less a cross than a mutilated starfish with arms cast out

in every direction.

Every morning Jorgens was freshly assaulted by the camp's chaos. Every morning

he scowled and cursed and his displeasure would orbit his head in a puff of frost. It got

so that every morning Robby or Carlos or J.J., each to needle or fawn or just find out,

would ask, 'What's wrong, Captain?' or 'Problem, Boss?', and Jorgens would glare at

them, then wheel around and walk off into the distance to take his morning relief, a

tiny figure squatting on the immense valley floor with his bare ass turned impudently

to the sun.

Along one of these starfish arms, on a yellowed tundra patch, Abe set up his big

'hospital' tent, a peach-coloured dome with an eight-foot ceiling. His site was remote

enough from the mess tent for him to suppose there wouldn't be any neighbors, which

suited him fine. But he got neighbors anyway, and that suited him fine, too, because

who he got were the women and Daniel.

Daniel and Gus set up their dome to one side. Farther out, in a direct line between

Abe's front door and the morning sun, Kelly pitched her own tent. Abe knew he was

lucky. But he didn't appreciate the other climbers' envy until one drowsy afternoon

when Thomas paid a visit.

He came into Abe's tent the way everyone did, without announcing himself or

asking. The hospital – and Abe's services, for that matter – were considered public

property, like the mess tent and Krishna's cooking. It wasn't unusual for people to

enter Abe's tent at strange hours in search of drugs or surgical tape or just some

company. For all his love of privacy, Abe was actually enjoying his lack of it. He'd

heard how some expedition doctors could be completely ignored for months at a time

by fanatical climbers who considered their diagnoses bad omens. So far, this bunch

was having no trouble assimilating their shaman, and Abe had found the impromptu

visits a chance to try to figure out what – if anything – made these Himalayan

climbers different from ordinary humanity.

Abe was lying on a ground pad flipping through his big Principles of Internal

Medicine when Thomas entered. 'Hey, Doc,' he said, 'you got any good stuff for a

headache?' Even before Abe could answer, Thomas was on his knees in front of a box

that had been pawed through by others. Judging from the looks of it, the climbers

seemed to know Abe's medicine cabinet better than he did. Abe went back to his book.

'Talk about a room with a view,' Thomas said. He was looking out the door at Kelly's

tent. 'Your neighborhood's a lot cozier than mine.'

'Lady luck,' Abe joked.

'Lady luck,' Thomas muttered to himself. 'You know,' he said more loudly, 'you

better watch out for that one.' It was a warning, Abe could hear its tone, and it took

him off-guard. 'What's that?' he said.

Thomas rummaged idly through the supplies. 'I'm talking about her.'

'Kelly?'

'Call it the fruit of a bad harvest,' Thomas said. 'I'm just suggesting you want to

watch your headset with her around, Doc.' Thomas tapped his skull. 'She'll dial the

tune on you. Before you know it, you're on her program.'

Abe didn't know how to respond. He was still sorting out the group's braided

strands. Some of these people had climbed together before. All seemed to have heard

of one another. They shared a powerful, interwoven history, all except Abe, who was

new to it.

'You two were on the South Col, weren't you?' Abe seemed to recall that connection,

a failed attempt a year ago on the classic route up Everest's sunny side. 'You climbed

with Kelly?'

'Carried Kelly is more like it,' Thomas snapped. His reaction made Abe suddenly

cautious. There was something raw here, and he wasn't sure he wanted to be an

audience to it.

'She cost me my summit,' Thomas added darkly. He had lean-cut pilgrim jowls, good

for deep dimples when he was smiling, which was seldom.

He looked over at Abe. 'Don't get me wrong, Doc. I'm a consenting adult. I should

have known better. But she has a way, you know. Like a witch.'

Abe decided to make light of it and snorted. 'A witch?' The man was obviously

talking about love, or maybe just fornication. It didn't escape him that Kelly had

placed her tent far from Thomas's. Abe didn't even try to guess at the meanings.

'Yeah,' Thomas said. 'You'll see. A woman like that can wreck an expedition. She

needs a man. That's how she works it, on the backs and heads of men.'

'Well, it won't be me,' Abe said. 'I'm already carrying around a broken heart.' That

wasn't exactly true. It was just something to say. In spite of himself, Abe felt a touch

of championship toward his solitary blond neighbor. She was pleasant, a welcome

contrast any day to Thomas's sour moods.

'Tell me,' he asked. 'I thought you were a taken man.' They had all been treated to

Thomas's photos of the woman he was going to marry upon his return to the States.

'I am,' Thomas replied.

'So what's the beef?'

'We're not in the World anymore, Doc. We're on expedition now. And that's my

advice.'

This could only get worse, Abe decided. 'Find your medicine?' he asked. End of

conversation.

'Screw it,' Thomas said. 'Don't listen.' He stood up and left.

As a matter of principle, some climbers had a fierce aversion to women on big

mountains, reasoning that Fay Wray never belonged in the jungle in the first place

and had only accomplished getting a natural-born climber killed off in the end. Women

couldn't hack it, lacked mountain sense, and threw an expedition's clockwork off. Abe

had seen the same logic work among firemen and Colorado miners, and he passed

Thomas off as one more dinosaur.

But while the man was wrong, he was also right, for the very sight of Kelly was

starting to do something to Abe's heart. At night, Kelly's lithe silhouette trembled

against her tent fabric as she readied for sleep, and in the morning she emerged to

unfold her beauty like an angel in the clear dawn light.

She was a fraction of an inch shy of six feet tall, half of it blond hair, the other half

Hollywood legs laced with childlike scars and bruises. Abe had heard how Kelly

treated her masterpiece body with dreamy recklessness, and each time he saw the

scars, it struck him as a sort of vandalism. But that was just how Kelly proceeded

through life, bumping and tearing and scraping her way up climbs, through brush, and

across the lava fields and coral reefs and hot asphalt of countless triathlons.

Abe had seen the advertising shots of Kelly and heard the stories about how she

sometimes played to her appearance, donning slit skirts and painting her nails with

fuck-me glitter. But, like a snake shedding its skin, she would plunge into the

wilderness all over again where her nails would be broken, her hair tangled with pine

needles, her arms and legs bruised and torn.

Their other women, Gabriella Gustafson – Gus, as she preferred it in her clipped

British Columbian manner – lived with Daniel on the opposite side of the hospital, and

she was a different concoction. Abe thought of her as night, in part for the color of her

cropped hair, but more because Kelly so completely inhabited what he thought of as

day.

Gus was all business, Kelly all play. Gus had the green eyes and carved cheekbones

of a Highlander princess, but a stern homely slash for lips, and she was notorious for

her hair-trigger readiness to compete at the top levels, what was known as 'punching

out the guys.' Her résumé as a hard-core mountaineer included some of the wildest

routes in North America. She and Daniel had once pioneered a new line in the

Karakoram range of Pakistan, and two separate parties had suffered casualties trying

to repeat it. Abe had heard of Gus, though always in terms of her machinelike

strength and endurance. No one gossiped about her being a girl climber or a husband

hunter or a black widow. She was a climber – a climber's climber, and she belonged to

Daniel, or Daniel belonged to her, Abe couldn't quite tell how it was, not until their first

night of the full moon.

It was after dinner. The afternoon winds had died early, giving them a respite from

the cold. Their garden thermometer, tied to a ski pole beside the mess tent, was

registering a relatively balmy 10 degrees Fahrenheit. In the distance, Everest

hovered like the ghost of an Egyptian pyramid, triangular and alabaster and remote.

No need for his headlamp. When he entered his tent it was in darkness. It took a

moment to see that someone was already there.

Stripped to the waist and bent over in the semidarkness, the climber was busily

scrubbing his face with one of the hundreds of surgical wipes Abe had made available.

The moon was cutting the tent's interior into black and silver tatters, and that made it

impossible to tell who the person was. He studied the bare glittering back, sorting

through the possibilities, and decided it was probably Robby.

Zebra-striped with moonlight, he had one of those precision-built climber's bodies,

95 per cent fat-free. Flaring latissimus dorsi joined at the spine in tightly knit

striations. An ugly lightning-shaped scar scuttered off one trapezoid and across the big

rib cage. And a tattoo of some kind peeked insolently above the elastic waistband of

his surfer pants. His physicality was branded sharply. He belonged to the wilderness.

'It's a warm night,' Abe greeted the climber.

'Doc?' the climber answered, straightening up and turning around.

It wasn't Robby. It wasn't even a man. It was Gus.

Abe didn't know what startled him more, her quicksilver nipples or the corrugation

on her stomach or her indifference to his shock. Indeed her attitude seemed to dare

him.

Gus made no attempt to hide her nakedness. She just stood there, her white eyes

locked on Abe's. He felt paralyzed by Gus's metamorphosis from man to woman. Her

red hair was bunched up beneath a baseball cap. Abe saw that now. And her skin was

gleaming.

'I was just washing up,' she said. Warshing hoop.

'I didn't know you were here,' Abe said. 'I'll step out.'

'Why? It's your tent,' Gus dryly observed.

So it was. She was telling him to stay.

Abe passed his eyes down her body. He did it quickly, trying to disguise it as an

afterthought. She had a bodybuilder's pectoral ridgeline, and to the sides stood her

breasts, almost supernaturally round.

Gus was watching his eyes. She was letting him look. For a moment, a vain instant,

Abe thought she was trying to seduce him. In a way she was.

'I know about you,' she said, then started to towel herself off. 'Daniel told me.' Still

facing him, she took her sweet time with the towel, but the eroticism was gone. If it

was his attention – or confusion – Gus had wanted, she had it.

'What did Daniel say?'

'No big secrets. I've known about his dead Diana ever since I met him. And I've

known as much about you as Daniel has, which is next to nothing. You did the

death-watch with his girlfriend. Your name is Abe. That's all we knew.'

All? Abe wondered. He wanted that to be all they knew. He wanted the past to be

done.

'So you buried her,' Gus said. She reached for an undershirt and pulled it over her

head. For all her seriousness, she could not help but luxuriate in her cleanness. The

shirt slid across her bare skin.

'You could say that.'

'Yeah,' she said. 'Anyway, I have a favor to ask.'

Abe felt oddly exposed. This stranger had just washed her body in front of him as if

his desire were irrelevant. Something close to contempt laced her attitude, and that

threw Abe because he'd done nothing to deserve it. Not if she knew nothing.

'What do you want?' Abe asked.

'Between you and me, okay?'

'Fine.' Was that her reason for presenting her nakedness then, to create a precedent

of secrecy between the two of them?

'Good,' she said. 'I know this is the very beginning of the climb. But I want you to

stay away from Daniel. And I'll keep him away from you.'

Abe gawked at her with a mute farmboy look. First Thomas had warned him away

from Kelly. Now Gus was taking her turn. Maybe they were freezing him out.

'Nothing personal, Abe. But you have no right to him, no more right than you had to

her. Okay? So I'm asking you, just stay away.'

Abe took half a step backward, speechless. 'Gus...' he finally said, but nothing more

came to mind. It was she who had no right here, not he. She had to be kidding.

'I know Daniel,' Gus explained. 'He's not like the rest of us. He can't afford

memories, not that one anyway.'

Abe recovered enough to be stung and then angry. 'But that's between him and me,'

he said. Gus had nothing to do with that long past matter. It was he who had lived all

these years with the voice in the crevasse, and it was Daniel whose girlfriend had

furnished the voice. Together they had sealed the dead girl in ice. Then it occurred to

him that Gus might be jealous. She could be jealous of Abe's connection across time

with Daniel, he considered. Or jealous of a dead girl. But he didn't say so. It was too

juvenile.

'I don't understand,' he said.

'You could kill him with all that shit.' Gus's white eyes flared in the darkness. 'I mean

it. There's something about this wall. And you. Of all people, he gets you invited. I

don't know what he's thinking. But I do know this. If he can just make it past the Kore

Wall, everything's going to smooth out for him.'

Abe saw the sense she'd made out of the same coincidences he'd already noticed.

But he didn't agree with her. 'Once the monkey finds your back,' he said, 'things don't

ever smooth out.'

'He wants peace, Abe. Is that so bad?'

'So do I. So do you. Who doesn't.'

As quickly as she'd flared, Gus grew soft again. 'I want to get old,' she said very

simply. 'And I want Daniel with me.'

'Gus,' he started to say.

Abruptly she was gone out into the blinding full moon. Abe was left standing in the

big dome tent by himself, smelling her smell. She had seen his desire and turned it

back into itself, forming a circle for him. In the middle lay his emptiness, a surprise.

The memory of Gus's silver flesh stayed with him for hours. Her demand stayed with

him for longer. But the more he thought about it, the less he agreed. They had come

to climb, not act out old history. And besides, as Thomas had put it, they were all

consenting adults.

And still the yaks did not come.

Day after day, Abe preoccupied himself. He arranged his library of medical texts in a

line on one side of his tent. His medicines and equipment were assigned boxes neatly

labeled with a Magic Marker. One morning, he moved everything out of his tent and

took it down, then spent an hour smoothing out the ground and put the tent back up

again and returned his possessions to their previous order. He stacked rocks on the

south side as a windbreak. Next day he took the break apart and stacked it

differently. His chin was shaved to a smooth polish. He washed his white socks three

times in as many days. He even recorded the laundry dates in his journal.

On March 25, someone killed Kelly's potted geranium. Back in her fall quarter at the

high school she taught in, Kelly's students had cooked up a theory that plant life would

add oxygen to their beloved teacher's Base Camp tent. Kelly didn't believe it herself,

but nevertheless she'd gone ahead and bought the stoutest green geranium

Kathmandu had to offer. She had carried it past glaring Chinese border guards who

suspected the plant for no other reason than because a Western woman with yellow

hair happened to be carrying it. She had guarded it from hungry goats and curious

Tibetans and – ultimately – from Jorgens, who one night groused that the plant was a

childish affectation and that they had come to Everest to climb, not garden.

Like a canary in a coal mine, the wilting plant clearly evidenced the effects of their

environment, losing color and leaves by the day. It was dying anyway. But someone

helped it along one morning by reaching into Kelly's tent and setting it out beneath the

sun. By noon it had shrivelled to a crisp. Gus caught Kelly weeping over the small

vandalism and tongue-lashed her for showing weakness in this camp full of men.

Stump heard Gus and told her to ease up, and that led to more hard words.

'This is no good,' Robby said to Abe later on. 'You can't park combat troops in a box

like this or they turn mean. You watch what I say, there's going to be blood soon.'

Abe filed the prediction with all of Robby's other predictions. The carpenter was

best at forecasting dumplings and blue sky, things that were inevitable. Mostly he just

registered hot air.

The yaks still didn't come.

Camp turned into a pressure cooker. The climbers fretted and muttered and

sometimes bellowed, but always in the privacy of their tents or on short day hikes

around the valley. People grew afraid of their own frustration and meals became

largely silent with a sprinkling of small talk. The group's morale spiraled downward.

Abe could see it in his dwindling supply of Percodan, amphetamines and morphine,

the recreational drugs, to which some climbers freely helped themselves in the

hospital. Abe didn't stop them – they were getting his surplus – but he did note their

despair.

And then the sky came tumbling down, or almost did. It was the middle of the day

on March 28, though Abe was starting to slip on which day of the week it was

anymore. They were gathered at what was called the Tomb, a squat stone hut some

hundred yards out from camp on top of a small hill.

When George Mallory disappeared near the summit in 1924, his comrades had

stacked a primitive monument atop the hill. Over the years, expeditions had

borrowed flat stones from the monument for windbreaks and to make this

ten-by-ten-foot hut with its doorway aimed at Everest. Now the only thing left of the

monument was the hut, and there was little left of that. The tops of the walls were

falling in and there was no roof.

Jorgens had talked about making the Tomb their latrine, declaring that the women

should have privacy, a building with walls, not just a hole in the ground. But it was

Gus, a woman, who got mad and told him no. 'It wouldn't be proper,' she said. Jorgens

scoffed and said everything and nothing was proper up here on Everest. And Gus

replied how that was the point, it was up to them to decide what was right and what

wasn't, and shitting in a hut made of monument stones wasn't right. It would be like

shitting into a grave. The climbers liked to gather here and lounge about, some

reading bad horror and techno-military novels and comic books, others snoozing with

their feet jutting out the hut door or fiddling with climbing gear or sipping Sherpa tea.

Behind a rock, Thomas was puffing short, breathless blues riffs on one of his

harmonicas. Jorgens and Robby were taking their crack at trying to fix their seven

Korean-made walkie-talkies. Without the handsets there would be no communication

between camps on the mountain. But that was providing they ever got on the

mountain.

Stump was dabbing at his latest watercolor of the Hill, continually thwarted by the

cold and dryness. Every time he had it right, the paint would freeze and when it

thawed his image became something completely different.

Krishna Rai, their lilliputian cook, had propped the expedition boom box outside the

mess tent and Cowboy Junkies music was drifting between sunbeams. Today was

Abe's day with the stack of Ultimate Summit postcards, and he still had two or three

hundred cards left to sign.

It was about then J.J. erupted.

'Hey,' he suddenly shouted, and Abe's pen halted. The harmonica died in the

background. Stump lowered his paint-brush. A dozen heads swiveled to see what

J.J.'s hormones had jumped at this time.

It was Li. The liaison officer was striding by on his way back from the mess tent

with a refill of Swiss chocolate coffee, a luxury fast becoming a personal addiction. Li

had no inkling he was J.J.'s target, and so, concentrating on his full mug and the

bumpy terrain, he just kept on walking.

'Hey you,' J.J. shouted again. He was standing in shorts and thongs and the noon sun

filleted his physique into gleaming lines and plates. 'Where's those yaks, man.'

Li slowed. He looked up, surprised. 'Mr. Packard?' He blinked.

'We had promises,' J.J. said more softly. Now was his turn to be surprised, for he

hadn't meant to make a complicated declaration, only to bark once or twice and shake

some rust off. But he had begun.

'We paid for those yaks. We paid the Chinese government. In American dollars. In

full.'

'J.J.,' Jorgens growled up from his spot on the ground. But he didn't move and J.J.

ignored him.

'You owe us yaks, man. I didn't quit my job and leave my kid and come six thousand

miles around the world to get had by the People's Republic.'

'Had?' wondered Li, who was just starting to get the gist of this harangue.

'Hell yes, had. Like, ripped off.'

The L.O. looked around at the crop of uplifted faces. Some of the Sherpas had come

over and curious climbers were appearing from their tents. Abe watched, fascinated

by the brewing ugliness. There was a sense of mob excitement here. Abe felt it

himself, the allure of an August lynching. Li's face hardened by degrees, in direct

proportion to the crowd's growing interest.

'The yaks will come,' Li said. 'I have told you this.'

'There are no yaks,' J.J. shot back. 'It's all make-believe.'

Li blushed. 'The yaks will come.'

That was when Daniel stepped from out of nowhere and faced J.J. He was wearing

baggy blue jeans and a baggy gray shirt, and though he had Abe's same height and his

forearms looked like feeder cables in some sort of power tool, Daniel looked thin

against the giant. 'Enough,' Daniel said.

'Stay out,' J.J. snarled.

'You're out of line,' Daniel said. 'I'm telling you – politely – just stand down.'

J.J. looked up at the sky for an instant. Something like anguish flashed across his

face and Abe could tell that J.J. wished he'd never started this, not with Daniel in on it

now. But the event had taken on its own momentum and J.J. had to play it out.

'Out of line?' he said, twisting to address the circle of onlookers. The veins were

standing in his neck and biceps. 'We got no yaks. Our good weather's wasting. We're

getting fat. And all the L.O. does is drink fancy coffee and make up lies. And I'm out of

line?'

Abe felt himself nodding his head in agreement. They had come to climb, not feed

and sleep and listen to the boom box. J.J.'s anger was his anger, too. It was all of

theirs, and it was genuine.

But then J.J. made a mistake. He ran out of things to say, you could tell. His face

went blank for a full minute. Then he slapped his bare thighs and shrugged his big

shoulders, and ad-libbed his idea of a finale. 'Well anyway,' he sighed to the gathering,

'what do you expect from a gook?'

Later Abe would allow that Li probably never heard the slur, because Abe wasn't

sure he'd heard it himself. As it was, the word was barely a syllable before Daniel's fist

was plowing a tight furrow across J.J.'s face.

J.J. dropped hard. His legs crumpled like a killed steer's. He hit the ground so fast

that gouts of blood were still flying when his head slapped the earth. A moment later

Abe felt a warm raindrop on his face and when he touched it, his fingertip showed red.

Instantly the fight was over. Without a single word, the climbers and Sherpas

turned away from the nasty spectacle, each returning to their distractions, everyone

but Abe and Daniel, who shook his hand as if he'd just barked it on a tree. Li moved on

with his mugful of chocolate coffee, stepping very carefully around the giant's body.

Stump went back to his painting. J.J. lay in the dirt.

It took a minute for J.J. to even moan, and by then Abe was kneeling over him,

doing his damage control. There was blood on the rocks, on J.J.'s face, on Abe's new

Nikes. His chief concern was J.J.'s teeth, because any dentistry would have to be

derived from a book. To his relief, Daniel's fist had opened a simple gash over the right

eye, and that was only a matter of thread and a tube of Neosporin.

Jorgens stood up and came over. He nested his fists on his hips and blew air through

his sharp beard.

'I didn't mean it that hard,' Daniel spoke down at J.J.'s stunned form.

'Well I'm glad you didn't mean it any harder, then,' Jorgens approved. Abe had seen

Jorgen's scared look while J.J. was hectoring the L.O., but the look was different now.

Jorgens was excited and relieved both, charged by Daniel's power and relieved that

the mutiny was over. Abe could tell it in the man's eyes and by the rural fatalism in

his voice.

'I can't have him fouling this climb, that's all,' Daniel explained.

'Hell, no,' Jorgens agreed.

Abe kept his head down. He couldn't believe the violence, first the shout, then the

raving, then the fist. And the indifference, he saw it from the corner of his eye,

indifference all around the Tomb.

But more, Abe couldn't believe that Daniel had decided so quickly, though that

wasn't it either. No, it wasn't so much the quickness of Daniel's act that overwhelmed

Abe but the completeness of it. Daniel's fist had completed the thing so fully that in

itself it didn't admit right or wrong. The fist was just something that had happened,

like the yaks not showing up or like the sun going down.

'Hell yes, you were right,' Jorgens said. 'That was close. One more word, and we

would have been packing for home. But you stopped it. Hell yes, you were right. And

J.J. was wrong.'

'No,' said Daniel, 'he was right too. Li owes us the damn yaks.'

Jorgens's head snapped back, not much different from taking a blow to the jaw. In a

panic, he cast around for Li, but Li had left, toting off his Swiss chocolate coffee.

J.J. was beginning to recover his senses. He was shaking his head, tossing blood

drops right and left and lifting his eyebrows and declaring, 'Gaw, man. Gaw.'

Daniel looked down at J.J. and said, 'Damn it.' Slowly, with a pained hitch, Daniel

knelt down and rested one hand on J.J.'s shoulder.

J.J. focused on Daniel's face. His eyes cleared. He smiled. 'Daniel,' he said. 'Are we

okay, Daniel?'

And suddenly Abe knew this had been a mutiny and everything would be different

from now on. The outfit had a new leader.

As if the demons ruling this Himalayan niche had decided the blood offering was

enough, the mountain finally opened to them. That very same afternoon, the climbers'

destiny broke free of the valley.

Abe was facing north and he was the first to see them in the far distance, huge dark

birds swinging back and forth through the empty sky like albatrosses following a fleet

of galleons. One minute the northward view was nothing but rocks and flat valley floor

and the next there were these birds, and then, even as he looked, a mass of dark,

lumbering figures appeared at the far mouth of the valley.

'Look,' he said.

'The yaks,' someone shouted, 'they're here.'

Everyone came out from their tents to watch the yaks arrive. It took almost two

hours. The herd came slowly, and from the distance Abe heard a guttural blat and

sharp cracking. The blat was easy to place, it was a shout, a grotesque human shout.

As for the sharp cracking noise, Abe decided it was the snapping of whips. Closer still,

he saw it was the sound of stone on bone. The yakherders steered their animals by

throwing rocks at one or the other side of their horns.

All through camp, the climbers were whooping like cowboys on Saturday night. Abe

grabbed his old Pentax camera and a telephoto lens and hustled through camp for a

closer vantage. He saw Li near the mess tent doorway and paused, a friendly gesture.

The Chinese official was wearing a look of vindicated authority and Abe allowed that

he deserved it. He hoped Li wouldn't carry it too far, however, because it would only

make him enemies among these climbers.

The braying shouts and cracking of rocks against horn grew more distinct, and now

Abe heard the big black ravens calling from above the herd. 'Now you will see,' Li said,

'the Tibetans are barbarians.'

Abe had to agree. Through his telephoto lens, the herders and their animals

resembled nothing short of a Gothic invasion. They moved stolidly, like a storm cloud.

The yakkies' faces were black from the sun and their thick layers of clothing were so

filthy they had the color of the earth. Some of the men had removed one arm from

their jackets, nomad-style, baring a white shoulder. Some wore long black braids,

others Mao caps and ancient mountaineering goggles.

They loomed closer in the lens and Abe heard the primitive ringing of yak bells, all

pitched differently, and he saw that some of the men wore pants made of thick

leather, others of Chinese quilting. Some were barefoot, others walked in ragged

tennis shoes or hide wrappings.

'The edge of the world is here,' Li commented.

Abe didn't answer. It was easy to see these yakherders the way Li saw them, as

children of the wilderness, the real wilderness, even a brood of the darkness. If there

was a Chinese Rome, it was Li's Beijing, and here he was, a functionary faced with the

hairy underbelly of his empire. From within the safe walls of his bureau, order must

have seemed automatic. But out here, the blue sky and these gutting mountains and

strange, dark natives wrecked the order.

'We must be careful,' Li said, 'we must guard against the...' he searched, 'the danger.'

Abe had never seen a yak before, and he was a little disappointed by how small they

were. What few wild yaks remained in Tibet were said to be prehistorically enormous.

These domestic versions were a comedown, standing midway between a St. Bernard

and an American dairy cow. They had the wild aspect of Texas longhorns, but none of

the menace. They were shy animals that spooked easily, and so the climbers quit their

joyous cheering. There were fifty or sixty of them, some blond or tawny, some black.

Their hair hung shaggy.

The herders and their herd entered Base Camp and immediately it became their

camp, too. Now Abe saw why the yak and human dung had been so intermixed on the

ground. The Tibetans pitched their open-sided tents among the climbers' tents and

their beasts milled everywhere, bells chiming, grazing on straw.

From the midst of the yak mass, someone hallowed Abe. He searched the throng for

the voice. It took him a minute to spot Daniel, who was taller than the Tibetans and

white with a pronounced limp and dressed in Western gear. But something about him

tricked Abe's eye and he was hard to distinguish from the nomads.

'Heads up,' Daniel called over the backs of milling yaks. 'Tie down everything you've

got. These yakkies are pirates.' He was wearing what Abe termed the Nordwand grin.

Something about the North Face – just this promise of it, these yaks that would bring

them to its base – had unleashed an epidemic of toothy hellbent smile. Every climber

had it. Abe could feel it stretching his own face.

'I wasn't sure they'd come,' Abe said.

'These guys? They'd come even if they weren't invited. We're like the circus, the

mall and the bank all wrapped up in one. We provide the entertainment and put on a

feed and pay them to watch all at the same time.' In the distance, Gus was watching

them talk. When Abe nodded to her, she turned away.

'You knew they'd show up?'

'That's the easy part. The question with these guys is always when. The trick is

understanding that Tibet's on the Mexican time plan. Around here you have to be

ready for lots and lots of mañana.'

'So now the climb begins,' Abe said.

'Abe,' said Daniel, and he suddenly sounded cold sober, 'the climb began a long time

before we ever got here. But you know that.'

Abe glanced at him quickly. The words were cryptic, the smile was not. But Daniel

had no intention of explaining himself. Already he was looking away, reveling in the

chaos with his cocked white grin.

A sharp light, a dark voice, someone's hand – Abe's sleep blew to pieces.

'Doctor, sir.' It was a Sherpa crouching at the far bright end of a headlamp. His voice

was solemn, not so different from the wind.

'Nima,' Abe registered. Something was wrong. Someone was ill. He knew this ugly

rousing and blinding light and voices soft and solemn. They needed him.

'One man,' the Sherpa said. 'Very sick.'

'Now?' Abe pleaded. He was so warm in his cocoon of goose down and the night was

so cold. He resented it a little that Nima had just woken him from a shoreline of white

sand and bare flesh and lime green tequila. Abe squinted and shielded his eyes. He

had a headache and craved glacier water.

'This man very sick,' Nima repeated. 'Please you coming now.' There was demand

behind his calm. The calm was Sherpa, the demand was not, not to a white employer.

Abe paid more attention.

'Bring him here then.'

'Not possible, sir.'

'I'll look at him. But I want to do it here. All my equipment is here.' There was some

truth to that. Mostly he didn't want to go out into the wind.

Nima was adamant. 'Not possible.'

'What's wrong with him?'

'Very, very sick.' Berry, berry sick. 'Maybe dying now. This way, sir.' He was

pointing away from camp, but at this hour there was nothing that way except night

and more night. Still Nima was not the sort to cry wolf.

'Yes, okay.' Abe heaved himself to sitting. There was never a dignified way to rise

from sleeping on the ground, and he felt doubly awkward under the beam of Nima's

light. He dressed quickly, then thought to check the time. It was three-thirty.

Abe rooted through the open boxes lining his tent wall and located some of the

basics. He stuffed a stethoscope, a BP cuff, and a penlight into his parka pocket, then

laid out some medicines on the sleeping bag. A bottle of injectible lidocaine and a 3-cc

syringe for local anesthesia, plus a few packs of silk and needles. A number 15 scalpel.

Scissors. A Betadine scrub brush. Gloves. Bandages. Cipro for general infection,

though that was expensive and not so plentiful. Percodan for pain. Benadryl for

inflammation. He glanced through the mechanisms and chemicals and, satisfied,

tossed it all into his little day-pack. He trailed Nima out into the cold blackness.

Abe splashed white light through the silent camp, then swung it outward in Nima's

direction. There was only darkness. Almost until they reached Mallory's Tomb, Abe

could not figure out where he was being led.

Now he saw that someone – the Sherpas or the herders – had lashed old tent fabric

on top of the listing walls for a roof. Yesterday the hut had been an empty shell. The

raggedy improvement actually made the building appear less habitable and more

inconspicuous. By the light of Abe's headlamp, the hut had achieved a look of eerie

corruption befitting its nickname.

At the hut door, Abe paused and silently wished for a mug of hot tea and hoped this

was blood or bones, not some disease. He was good with trauma. With trauma, the

problem was often obvious, and better yet, it usually responded to touch. It healed

and you could see it heal. But with disease, the body hid its problems. It impeached

whatever you thought you knew and made you suffer for the suffering.

Abe took a deep breath and slipped through the ripped tentage posing as a front

door. He was unprepared for the primitive scene. The hut was lit with two headlamps

hung from pegs in the wall. Thick incense choked the air and it was impossible to see

how many people were crowded inside. Their eyes glowed white in the gloom.

The patient was lying in an expedition sleeping bag on top of three or four

brand-new air pads, a luxury even Jorgens would not have allowed himself. The

Sherpas had obviously donated their own gear to this man's comfort, which was

extraordinary because Abe had seen no love lost between the Sherpas and the

yakkies. Nima roughly ordered the herders to make room, and they scuttled

backward.

The patient was a young man, probably still in his teens, and his hair was cropped

close. Underneath a layer of grime and blue wood smoke, the boy's face was

handsome, more round than long, and yet slighter than most of the Tibetan faces Abe

had seen. Under his dark sepia pigmentation, the boy's big Mongolian cheeks were

flushed and rosy. He was unconscious and his respiration was labored, yet he looked

healthy enough, even robust. Abe hadn't noticed the boy among the yakkies and

concluded he'd arrived in the night, maybe herding strays.

'Hold my light,' Abe told Nima.

He knelt in the cold dirt. Overhead, the nylon ceiling rustled in the wind. The

incense drifted like fog, gray and aquatic. Everything in the room had an aspect of

slippery illusion. Abe peeled back the edge of the sleeping bag.

Then Nima moved the light or the fog shifted and suddenly the left side of the man's

face leapt into view. It was completely different from the healthy face of a moment

before. From his lips to left ear, the jaw was contused, purplish and swollen, a fighter's

mask. Very obviously the boy had been beaten. Abe had heard how violent these

Tibetans got when they drank, but if this was the result of a brawl, then it was an old

one. The bruises were too mature, days old, maybe older.

Abe made a mental note to check for facial fractures and loose teeth, then moved on.

Vitals first, he told himself. Then head to toe. Keep in order.

The boy's throat was hot under Abe's fingertips, the pulse fast and thready. His

blood pressure was high, but then everyone was running high BPs because of the

altitude. Abe pressed back the eyelids. The pupils looked unequal, one blown, one

pinpoint. That could mean an epidural hematoma: arterial bleeding within the

cranium. This far from a hospital that would spell certain death. Abe leaned in closer

to the boy, determined to prove himself wrong.

He ran his fingers around the back of the boy's skull, searching for lumps or blood.

The boy's hair was stubbly in Abe's palms. He handled the skull carefully, almost

sacramentally. No matter how many times he held a victim's head, it never ceased to

astonish him that a lifetime of memories and thoughts could weigh so little, and yet at

the same time that a mere two handfuls of bone and water could weigh so much.

With an epidural hematoma, most patients died within eight hours. And yet the

discoloration on this man's jaw – which might coincide with any possible skull fracture

– looked a week or more old. There were no goose eggs. No blood or fluid in his ears.

What then, Abe silently demanded. Head injury or not? And then Nima moved the

light again and suddenly the pupils evened out. Now they looked equal in size. Abe

was baffled but relieved. He moved south from the troublesome head.

'Let's see what else,' he said to Nima. Together they unzipped the sleeping bag and

exposed the boy to view. He was dressed in yak skins and a pair of quilted pants. Abe

smelled old vomit and there were bloodstains on his shirt. Whoever had laid him here

hadn't gotten around to removing the Chinese sneakers from his wide feet. Abe

opened the hide jacket and lifted up the bloody shirt. And halted.

In the first instance Abe thought it was measles. A dozen or more circular wounds

splashed across the boy's barrel chest, each the size of a pencil eraser. But they were

grouped – oddly – around his nipples. Abe revised his guess. The pustules might be

the infected bites of some large parasite. Then he reverted to disease theory and

conjectured it might be some sort of Asian plague. That could explain the fever and

coma. But it might not.

Mystified, Abe looked up at Nima. 'What happened to this boy?' he asked.

Nima shrugged helplessly.

'He was beaten,' Abe said, and clenched his fist for illustration.

'Yes sir.'

'Who did this?' Abe asked. Then he amended his question. 'When?'

'This man, very good man,' the Sherpa said.

All right, Abe thought. Let's talk about the man. 'Who is he? Where's he come from?'

Nima shook his open palm in the air to show uncertainty. 'I don't know, sir. Some

guy.'

'Is he a yakherder?' Abe tried.

'Yes.' Nima's eyes shifted away. 'Yok hoda.' Nima knew more than he was saying.

Abe didn't know why, nor did he ask. That was a different pursuit.

'Did this happen on the trail?'

'Yes.'

'What happened, Nima?'

'I don't know, sir.'

'Nima, please...'

Nima thought about it. 'Not possible.'

'You can't tell me? Or you don't know?'

'Yes sir.'

Abe sighed. 'Ask his friends, Nima.'

Nima barked a question at the yakkies, then turned back to Abe. 'They say, this

man falling down. Shaking, shaking. I don't know.'

There was the suggestion of malaria again, but Abe discounted it. He would have to

look it up later in the big Physician's Desk Reference in his tent, but this just didn't

seem like malaria.

'Anything else?'

'No sir.'

Abe glanced up and around at the stark white eyes glowing in the smoke and gloom.

The shadows were too thick to show the stone walls and their dark faces were

invisible. But their eyes leapt out of the murkiness, peering and cryptic. Their

curiosity went beyond the ordinary voyeurism that attends any accident. These

yakkies had awe and fear written on them – it showed in their multitude at this early

hour and it sounded in their hushed murmurs and repetitious mumbles. Prayers, Abe

decided. Some of them were praying, and praying hard, non-stop. But why? He looked

down at his patient, and all he saw was 'some guy,' a creature like himself except for

the strange markings and hot delirium.

'Nima,' he started again, then gave it up. Abe admonished himself. It wasn't up to

Nima to provide answers. It was up to him, Abraham, their pretend-physician, to

solve the greater mystery of why this man lay unconscious and stretched out on the

ground. Always before, Abe had known his patients would move into the care of men

and women who knew more than he did and had technology he didn't. Once he

packaged and delivered them to the emergency room, his patients disappeared, and

he could quit thinking about them. But there was no other place for this Tibetan boy

to go, and no higher authority than Abe himself.

At the same time it touched him, Abe was also annoyed that these yakkies – indeed,

all of the men and women now gathered in the lap of this mountain – needed him, or

might need him, which was the same thing. He was not their answer to pain and