The Ascent

sickness, risk and death. He was just one more of them, a wanderer bearing his own

question mark.

They called him Doc for their own peace of mind and because they thought it would

flatter him, but Abe was embarrassed because he knew real physicians considered his

type wanabees and shake-and-bake messiahs. He was good at what he did, but a

paramedic is never a doctor, only at best the cowboy who first reaches the car wreck

or cardiac arrest or climbing victim and lays on the hands and manipulates the horror

and fear. Abe had saved people. He had been saving them most of his adult life,

sometimes even bringing them back from clinical death. But he no longer trusted his

motives, because at bottom what he did fed upon human beings at their most

vulnerable. He was needed by people who could not help but need him.

Abe had thought these thoughts too often to let them distract him. They came to

him as second nature, and he handled them with the same ease as he now handled the

boy's limp arms, palpating for fractures. He had a talent for treating his doubts as

background noise and getting done what needed doing.

He moved quickly, feeling for broken ribs, for deformities along the lower spine, for

pelvic fractures. The light shifted again, this time revealing yellowing bruises on the

boy's belly. But there were no distended areas, no unusual lumps or masses, not to

Abe's touch.

The rule was to assume spinal injuries with an unconscious patient. He hoped the

story of this boy collapsing on the trail was true, because anyone with cord injuries

might just as well die as be evacuated back across the Pang La and the corrugated

Tibetan roads.

Gently Abe pulled off the boy's shoes – he had no socks – and scratched his bare

soles with a pebble off the floor. To Abe's relief, each foot twitched. Abe got a distal

pulse behind each Achilles tendon and that meant there was circulation, more good

news.

Abe ran his hands down the bones of each leg, hip to toe: no gross fractures, no

dislocations. Then, with Nima's help, he slid off the Tibetan's quilted pants. His first

glance showed nothing out of the ordinary, but then the light – or shadows – revealed

more damage and once again he was scowling in puzzlement.

The flesh of both lower legs was ripped and torn and contused. Some of the wounds

appeared to have a pattern, some overlaid other wounds. His legs were like a canvas

of bad paints. Some of the marks were fresh and dark blue. Others showed green or

yellow, a month old. The overall effect was gruesome.

The yakherders against the wall muttered at the sight. Nima reacted, too. Abe could

feel the Sherpa withdrawing into himself. Nima still knelt beside him and held the

light. But his poise was gone, replaced by shock or fear or loathing. Something. For

whatever reason, his sense of command had drained off. Curiously, Abe felt himself

gaining strength from Nima's unnerving.

Abe took the light and bent close to the mysterious trauma on the boy's legs. He

pried open some of the lacerations for a cursory look and prodded at the terrible

bruises, investigating the clues. Abe had rescued – and when they were beyond

rescue, had bodybagged – climbers who had fallen from great heights and gotten torn

and shredded by their descent. Some of this boy's tissue injuries were consistent with

that, a bad tangle with old-fashioned gravity.

But some of these wounds were different.

'Damn,' Abe swore and pulled away, shocked.

His reaction alarmed Nima, who said, 'Sir? Sir?'

'These are animal bites.'

'No sir.' Nima categorically rejected the notion. 'Not possible.'

Abe didn't know what kind of animal, but he definitely recognized the puncture

wounds and lacerations.

'What's going on here?' Abe demanded. This was no ordinary camp accident. He

tried to piece together the injuries. Had the boy fallen off the trail and lain unconscious

while animals chewed at him? Or had animals attacked and driven him off some cliff?

Stranger things had happened.

'Very bad,' Nima murmured. 'Very bad.' Nima rocked back on his heels. He wouldn't

meet Abe's eyes.

Abe felt defeated, completely lost, like a traveler who wakes up in a dark forest. Abe

wanted a story to go with these wounds, as if that would somehow locate him in this

wilderness. But that was just laziness speaking. It was up to him to create the story

with a diagnosis. Wound by wound, he had to put in order this poor body.

Abe sighed. He was about to begin at the top again, with the boy's head, when

suddenly the body stiffened under his hands. The muscles seized and shuddered and

the boy gave an inhuman cry as if to answer all of Abe's questions.

Naked to the world, the body released its momentary tension, then spasmed again,

and the boy commenced to jerk and moan, gripped in the throes of a violent grand mal

seizure. Abe had seen epileptic fits before and knew what was happening. But the

yakherders were terrified by the monstrous sight, this human pinned and writhing

upon the cold dirt. Shouting, they scrambled backward against the wall and those by

the door darted out into the black wind.

Abe didn't hesitate. Still on his knees, he swept away the loose rocks and slid the

bunched sleeping bag under the boy's skull to prevent his braining himself. All the

while, the boy's hard fists and elbows flailed against Abe. Even though unconscious, he

seemed to be doing battle with some terrible enemy.

Abe hunched against the blows, but a sudden flurry caught him square in the face

and he shouted with pain and surprise. Blood flew from his nose and then another

blow caught him and knocked him flat. The safest thing seemed to be to lie close to the

epileptic and cover his head, so he huddled against the body and gritted his teeth and

felt the frozen earth against his cheek.

Finally someone thought to grab hold of Abe's ankles and pull him free of the

violence. It was Nima, and he propped him against the stone wall. There Abe panted

and pinched the blood from his nose and waited out the convulsions. The boy went on

twitching and fighting his demons in that ill-lit little hovel.

And then, abruptly, the boy went still. His possession simply ceased. His silence and

immobility were doubly blunt against the wild moments before. Abe stayed lying

against the wall in case there were any neural aftershocks. One pummeling was

enough.

All around him, Nima and the yakherders were staring at the still, heaped body,

mumbling and praying. They were horrified. But Abe was not.

He was relieved. He was cheered even. At least he knew now what was wrong. The

boy was an epileptic. Somewhere out there in the terra incognita called Tibet, this boy

had suffered a seizure and fallen and been set upon by animals. Nothing more. Now

Abe knew. Beyond sewing the torn flesh and treating the infection, there was little

Abe could do about that. The boy had his own mountain to climb. It was that simple,

after all.

With the same patient manner he unraveled knots, Abe worked on the boy's

wounds one by one. He started an IV to rehydrate the feverish boy and asked Nima

to recruit one of the herders to keep the bag of saline solution warm with his body, but

Nima chose to do it himself. While the bag was warming, Abe injected an ampule of

D-50, pure dextrose, through the IV needle. It was an old paramedic trick to revive

the unconscious. With diabetics it worked instantly. With this boy it didn't work at all.

Abe went ahead and connected the saline bag.

Finally Abe was able to seal the boy's bruised and torn and bandaged body back into

the warm sleeping bag. He knelt back on his heels and rested his hands on his thighs.

Abe had felt this helpless before, but never so hopeful at the same time. Still the

margins of chance were thin in this harsh borderland. Undiluted, destiny was more

likely to turn out here as it was meant to.

When Abe emerged from the hut, dawn was just seeping down the western slopes.

It had been hours since he'd disappeared into the hut's smoke and gloom and now the

sun was softly peeling away the frost.

The valley's blue air turned clear and a tiny flock of dawn quail gabbled and

tuttered. The yaks lay on their curled legs, crunching cud, drowsy.

In the distance, on the far side of the camp, the liaison officer had risen, as was

usual, to perform his morning t'ai chi. With slow, fluid sweeps of his hands, Li stalked

his invisible opponents and defeated them. His motions were more beautiful this

morning than Abe remembered.

And up the valley to the south stood Everest. Its jagged right-hand edge was lit

golden and the mountain was still, not a breath of wind stirring its snows.

4

Their calm was broken.

On the morning of April Fool's Day they cut loose from Base Camp. Abe woke early

and lay still, smiling. Watching his tent wall come alive with pure tangerine light, he

felt hope. The yak caravan had left yesterday, taking with them two tons of gear and a

whole circusful of noise. Only the young herder had remained behind, and though he

hadn't regained full consciousness, his delirium and fever were abating, and so was

Abe's pessimism. With bed rest and fluids and Western vitamins, the boy would

probably recover. Abe had spent an hour instructing Krishna, their cook, on how to

tend the patient. Krishna had solemnly promised to be devout in his care.

In this morning's hush it was easy to forget the shock of Daniel's fist on J.J.'s skull

and the mutiny against Jorgens's plodding ancien régime and the Tibetan boy's

horrible seizures. Abe thought to himself, Today has promise, today is new. It was the

kind of thing he used to tell Jamie every morning before they slipped from bed and

dressed. She had liked to hear it. He had liked to say it.

Abe hooked on his wire-rims and opened his sleeping bag and piece by piece dressed

with the clothing he kept warm every night for this very moment every morning. On

his way to the mess tent, he paid a visit to the expedition's water skull.

It was a sheep skull nestled into a rocky crevice by the glacier pond which provided

their water. It was still possessed of a good portion of its flesh, meaning it was in a

state of slow decay. The grisly head lay rotting within inches of their drinking water,

and Li had made several complaints, citing the People's Republic's campaign against

rats, flies and other germ carriers. But the skull served as a sort of Tibetan mousetrap

for bad spirits, and supposedly kept the water pure on a supernatural level. And since

Krishna Rai boiled all their potable water, hepatitis or cholera or any other plague

nesting in the head was rendered more unlikely than demon possession. Despite Li's

fussiness, the skull stayed in place.

Abe had come to enjoy waking early and sitting here in wait for the sunshine. It was

quiet and primeval and satisfied his streak of pantheism. But this morning he didn't

linger. The camp was alive. Krishna made farewell omelets with the last of their eggs

and talked about how he would miss them while they were on the mountain. Li

wagged his finger at the little cook and told him in English, 'Now you will be alone with

me and I will teach you how to play chess,' and Krishna laughed even though he didn't

like Li.

At the end of breakfast, Stump said, 'Let's do it to it,' with the enthusiasm of an

original thought. Outside the mess tent, Robby and Carlos started singing the

Rawhide theme, lashing the cold dirt with hanks of loose sling.

They loaded their packs and hefted them for weight, then added or subtracted

things and closed the packs and slung them on. In the coming week, some of the

yakherders were scheduled to make a second trip up with any mountain supplies still

remaining in the dump. By the middle of April it was projected that the next camp,

Advance Base Camp, would be self-sufficient. The climbers kept their loads light for

the trail and so Abe did too – a sleeping bag, some food, and his streamlined jump kit,

his trauma box for mishaps along the trail. On second thought he went ahead and

stuck a twelve-pound cylinder of oxygen in his pack just in case someone crashed.

It was going to take three days to trek up to their next camp, four days for the yaks.

It was only ten miles away, but the altitude was going to slow them. If all went well,

the climbers would arrive at Advance Base Camp – ABC – on the same day their gear

did. Some of them would immediately return to Base Camp to recover from the

altitude and to escort the final yak carry back up. Others would get ABC up and

running. Still others would begin climbing toward the next camp. The siege was now

begun.

In bunches, the climbers left camp and aimed for the throat of the Rongbuk Glacier,

a huge body of ice left behind by the last ice age. On maps, the glacier resembled a

white octopus with its tentacles flung out among all the surrounding valleys. Abe set

off with the last wave. Li stood by the trail and wished them good luck.

Five minutes out of Base Camp, Abe turned around to take a photo of their

comfortable little tent city, but it was already gone. When he looked back up at

Everest, it, too, had disappeared, blocked from view by the Changtse, the satellite

peak.

Single file on the trail, the climbers were swallowed whole by a maze of looming mud

walls and loose stone and deep, icy corridors. Once again Abe had no idea where they

were going or what to expect. Li was right, they truly had come to the edge of the

world.

It would have been hard to get lost on that twisting path, at least on the first part of

it, for dozens of expeditions had been here before them, and the trail was clearly

imprinted. Where the tracks disappeared on long, jumbled fields of scree, they simply

had to follow heaps of old frozen yak dung. But even with the sun out and the air

warm, it seemed to Abe that a careless soul could wander forever in this labyrinth,

and he was glad to have Daniel leading them.

At a prominent fork in the glacier, they found a huge, thirty-foot arrow made of

piled rocks. It pointed left.

'Mallory and his bunch went that way,' Daniel said. The Brit's body had never been

found, and the mountaineering community was still divided over whether he had

summited.

'It takes you to the North Col,' Daniel said. That was what climbers called the 'trade

route' up the north side. It was by far the easiest climb up Everest's north side, and

for that reason was the most often repeated. With huge sums of money and

oftentimes national prestige at stake, most expeditions to Everest opted for a sure

summit rather than a new or more difficult route. Part of Abe wished they were

heading for the North Col's well-known terrain and relative safety.

'That's also the trail you take to the Chengri La,' Daniel added. Chengri Pass, which

James Hilton had turned into the fictitious Shangri-La in his Lost Horizon, crossed

south into Nepal at a height of 18,000 feet. Over that la, Daniel and his Lepers'

Parade had escaped during the '84 debacle.

'We go this way,' Daniel pointed, and they turned right into the shadows, moving

quietly, as if giants had built this stone arrow and might still be lurking nearby.

The trail roller-coastered up and down, mostly up. For some reason a sense of

vertigo kept sneaking up on him. From minute to minute, he couldn't shake the sense

of being out of control. Usually he only felt this way on steep rock, and yet it was plain

to see that both his feet were planted on flat ground. Abe tried to reason with his

fears. Finally he just accepted that he was going to have to live with them.

The climbers gained elevation. A day passed, then two, then three. In between they

suffered two long, cramped nights of too many people sharing too few tents. Despite

the bitter cold, Abe ended up sleeping outside under the stars both nights.

Their pace slowed, and so did their thoughts, or at least Abe's did. He tried to

remember Jamie's face, but to his dull alarm it eluded him. The more he tried, the less

he remembered. Before it was too late and she was altogether erased from memory,

Abe decided to quit searching for her and instead concentrated on Carlos's heels in

front of him, plodding, mindless.

'Eventually we'll acclimatize,' Robby told Abe. 'This will seem just like sea level.' Abe

listened to Robby's words but watched his lips. They were bright blue, a symptom of

the hypoxia all of them were enduring. As their bodies cued to the altitude, some of

the blue would return to pink, but Abe doubted 20,000 feet could ever feel like sea

level.

Their third morning on the trail, the climbers penetrated a long bank of penitentes,

or seracs. These were tall pinnacles of ice that had been sharpened to a point by the

sun. Some had warped into grotesque shapes. Others had collapsed. One had toppled

and speared the earth.

Abe looked around, startled by the unnatural quiet in this place. He knew what

these penitentes were but had never seen them up close like this. Abe rubbernecked

until Gus came up behind and nudged him onward.

If ever nature had erected a sign to warn away man, the penitentes were it. It was

like an evil forest in there. The thirty-foot fingers of turquoise ice were utterly

beautiful and seductive, but they were also deadly and looked it.

Here and there, big boulders sat five and ten feet above the ground, balanced atop

thin sun-carved columns of ice like huge petrified mushrooms. 'I feel like Alice in

Wonderland,' Abe said to Gus.

Gus glanced up at him sharply and hushed him with a finger. 'This place is

booby-trapped,' she whispered, and pointed at the hair-trigger stones and penitentes.

'If one of those bastards collapses, it could bring the whole place down.' There was no

way to tiptoe with a fifty-pound pack on, but Abe did his best to walk more gingerly.

Soon they came upon a horribly twisted animal dangling from an ice wall. Half of it

lay outside the ice, the other half still frozen into the blue glass. Birds had pecked

away the eyes, and the elements had stripped much of the rest down to bone.

'Road kill,' Gus whispered, poking at the hide and bones with her ski pole.

It had long matted hair and thick joints, and the ice and wind and sunlight had

rendered it almost shapeless. Though it looked like the thawing remains of a

mastodon, Abe knew it was a yak.

'Is that one of ours?' he whispered. Gus shook her head no.

'Did a rock fall on it?'

'Nah,' whispered Gus. She opened her pocketknife and stepped closer to the thing.

'If a rock fell on it, the yakkies would have butchered it for the meat. This poor thing

probably fell down a crevasse, probably during some expedition. Now the glacier's just

getting around to belching it up. Everest does that a lot, turning out its dead.'

Gus reached forward and grabbed one of the horns and wrenched the animal's head

up. With her free hand, she snaked her knife under the neck and sawed away with the

blade. After a minute, a fist-sized cup of metal fell out of the filthy hair and hit the

ground with a clank.

Gus picked the bell up. She let the clapper strike the metal cup once, gently. The

solitary note trembled through the glass forest. 'For my collection,' she said, stuffing

one of her gloves inside to muffle the clapper.

Abe was glad when they finally reached the end of that hour-long bed of crystal

thorns and stone mushrooms. The rest of the group was waiting for them on a

clearing, lounging against their packs or stretching sore shoulder muscles. J.J. was

reading one of Robby's old Silver Surfer comics, and the Sherpas were sharing some

tsampa, or roasted barley, with Daniel. When Abe and Gus appeared, the climbers all

got to their feet and started loading up.

Only then did Abe realize that the group had divided itself into pairs and trios to

pass through the penitentes, one team at a time. Nobody had told them to do it, they'd

just split up and staggered their own ranks so that if there had been an accident

among the penitentes, there would have been a minimum of victims and a maximum

of rescuers. Abe's confidence in the group soared.

They headed higher up a series of glacial steppes, holding close to a wall of blue and

white ice. Another two hours' ground away and the natural terracing grew steeper.

Here and there they had to grab at outcrops to clamber higher. The party slowed to a

crawl, gasping and resting their hands on their knees.

'I must be getting old,' Kelly said. Abe remembered she was just thirty. Her hair

hung in long golden rags, partly braided.

'Twenty-one thou,' Stump consoled her, referring to the altitude.

'Twenty-one seven,' J.J. corrected him. He looked jolly and warm and primitive in a

big fur Khampa cap he'd bought from a nomad in Shekar. His black eye was buried

behind glacier glasses. 'We're getting up there.'

'No excuses,' Robby threw in, gasping along with the others. 'You are getting old,

Kelly. Especially for a woman.' Kelly delighted in having her beauty deflated, but no

one else was particularly amused. They were too tired.

'It's only a little more,' Daniel told them. As if to confirm him, some of the yak

caravan appeared, wending its way back down to Base Camp. Unburdened of their

loads and with gravity helping them along, the yaks and their herders were practically

running downhill. Their rapid descent made Abe feel that much slower.

Soon the afternoon winds began. The trail's corridor funneled blasts straight down

into their faces. Without breaking stride, Abe zipped his jacket closed to the throat

and fished some thin polypro gloves from a pocket. They wound through the

convolutions.

Abruptly, as if bobbing to the sea's surface after a deep dive, they emerged onto a

flat mesa, perhaps an acre wide.

And suddenly the whole earth just halted. And so did Abe.

With no warning, the gigantic gleaming body of Everest was rearing up in front of

them. They had lost sight of it for three days and now it jutted one and a half miles

above them, stabbing into the jetstream. Its curtains of afternoon light hung before

them like a dream.

At first the mountain distracted all attention from ABC, which lay in shadow at the

back of the mesa. The mesa was butted snugly against a soaring rock wall, and the

wall had shed copious piles of limestone down onto it. Including Daniel's pioneering

attempt six years ago, theirs was the fourth expedition to make camp on top of the

rubble.

Low-slung and mean, the camp had the lean, breathless look of a battlefield

headquarters. In effect, ABC robbed Base Camp of its function. From here on most of

the assault would be supplied and coordinated from ABC. Earlier expeditions had piled

rocks into semicircular walls to cut the wind, and the faster moving Sherpas had

erected tents in steps among the rubble, one above the other. Someone – probably

Nima, trying to make them feel comfortable – had attached one of their twelve-inch

American flags for the summit to a bamboo wand and wedged it among the rock.

Bright blue and yellow tarps covered a small stockpile of food and equipment, and

yaks and herders were wandering around.

The closer Abe got, the uglier the camp appeared. It seemed to squat in the

shadows beneath the rearing prow of white and black stone. Above ABC the mountain

didn't get just steep, it got vertical. This close, Abe couldn't see the top of the stone

wall and all of the mountain's other features vanished. He knew the wall was just one

more piece of the puzzle, though from here the Kore Wall seemed to stretch all the

way to the sky. Had he been the first to arrive here – had he been Daniel ten years

ago – he would have pronounced the route inconceivable and turned around.

Nima and Sonam were laboring among the rock, heaving chunks atop new walls,

building new spaces for more tents. Sonam nudged his sirdar, or boss, and pointed at

Abe, and Nima descended goatlike from the rubble to greet him.

'Oh, hello, sir.' Except for his bright Gore-Tex climbing uniform, Nima might have

been one of the yakherders. His cheekbones stood like fists, and his short city-cut had

grown wild and the black hair was below his ears.

'You are coming onto the mountain now,' Nima said. He was smiling.

'Yes, here I am,' Abe acknowledged. He was feeling nauseous and hitched his pack

higher on his shoulders, mostly for effect. He wanted to sit down. No, that wasn't true,

he wanted to lie down.

Nima wanted to talk. 'The mountain is very strong.'

'Yes, very impressive.'

Nima finally got around to his question. 'This yakherder in Base is all better now?'

Abe had forgotten all about the Tibetan boy. For a brief few days, he'd even

forgotten he was the team's archangel and had thought of himself as simply one of the

climbers. To an extent that Abe could not help but appreciate – for it let him be

something other than a doctor – they had begun replacing science with superstition.

Some had taken to refusing all medicine, relying instead on their crystals and vitamins

and herbs. Others had become alchemists, mixing cocktails of Halcion for sleep with

Diamox for respiration with codeine for coughing and aspirin for thinning their blood.

And J.J., of course, had his steroids. There was no thwarting them, so Abe didn't try.

There was no escaping duty, though.

'Nothing's changed, Nima. I checked him before I left Base Camp.' He didn't want to

raise any false hopes by explaining the subtle improvements. And besides, his nausea

was crawling up.

'But medicine, sir.'

Abe belched and swallowed. He wanted to be irritated, but that required too much

vigor. He had mounted to almost 22,000 feet on the mountain of his dreams, and his

only welcome was to be pestered about an epileptic yakkie in a coma? 'I did what I

could,' he said.

'Yes, sir,' Nima said.

Next to one of the empty tents, Abe backed against a rock and nestled down his

pack with a bovine groan. He unharnessed himself from the shoulder straps and

waistband and slumped forward, breathing deeply. One of the other Sherpas brought

over a cup of tea and just the fumes helped restore him. He drank and felt better. ABC

was a bleak place made all the bleaker because it lay in the very palm of the

mountain. Night was coming on and alpenglow had turned Everest into a vast crimson

spike. Its plume of red snow reached out for the plunging sun. Abe noticed that

everyone else seemed to be ignoring the mountain with a business-as-usual

nonchalance. He was alone in relishing the spectacle.

Everest didn't just overshadow ABC, it towered above. It utterly dominated the

land. Time and space had frozen tight here. The earth had stopped. As in Ptolemy's

scheme, the sun seemed to orbit this point. Here was the center.

From the outset Abe had imagined that this expedition was going to be a great

collective memory, one that he and his comrades would each harken back to in their

old age. Forever after, it would warm them on cold days, strengthen them, give them

an epic poetry to tell their grandchildren. Back in Boulder, Abe had lain awake beside

Jamie at night and stared up through the skylight, telling himself stories about how he

was going to climb a great mountain. But now, faced with actually ascending into this

pure light, his only thought was 'how absurd.'

'Doc?' Kelly was standing beside him, hunched beneath her big blue pack. For the

first time, Abe noticed a monarch butterfly she had embroidered onto the side pocket,

an iridescent creature that would have died within minutes up here. He wondered

what the yakherders thought of it, if they even associated it with reality.

'Is that your tent, Doc?'

Abe looked around at the other tents, already filling with people. 'Yeah, I guess,' he

said.

'You got a bunkie?'

Was this the beginning of what Thomas had warned him against? Abe hesitated, less

out of loyalty to Jamie than disappointment. Kelly obviously thought him safe to share

quarters with, and part of him didn't want to seem too safe to her. Even with her hair

greasy and eyes bloodshot from the sunscreen and sweat and her lips blistered, the

sight of Kelly took his breath away. It invaded what was left of his dwindling

memories of Jamie. It was difficult enough to remember what Jamie looked like

without waking to this other woman, this strange, harrowed beauty. But the truth

was, he did want to wake to her.

'It's just me,' he said.

'What would you think if we hooked up?' she asked. 'I think we're the last two not

paired off. And this is the last of the tents.' She seemed to think he might say no.

'I'd like that,' Abe said.

He reined it all in – the libido, the fantasies, the disbelief at his good fortune. In

itself, the prospect of a tentmate cheered him. He had grown tired of being alone at

Base, even with the traffic of visitors in and out of his tent. Kelly would be good

company, he sensed, and she could teach him things about the mountain. If things

worked out, they might even team up for some climbing and carrying. Abe had

noticed most of the climbers already matched up, and it was starting to look like he

and Kelly were the ugly ducklings. Thomas was looking at them from an uphill tent,

but when Abe stared back, he ducked away.

Quickly, because it was turning cold now, they set up house together. Kelly crawled

inside first. One at a time, Abe handed her the basics, staying outside while she laid

out their pads and sleeping bags, then hung a small propane cookstove by wires from

the ceiling. Elsewhere, other climbers were going through the same ritual, bracing for

night. One by one, they climbed into their tents and zipped up.

While Kelly worked in the tent, Abe watched Sonam, a Sherpa with gap teeth and

the slow gait of a sumo wrestler, chop pieces of ice from the bare glacier with his ice

axe. Like some burly Yankee peddler, he loaded the pieces into a burlap sack and

carried the ice around from tent to tent, leaving a pile of chips for each to use.

As Sonam approached, Abe could hear him mumbling prayers under his breath. He

dumped some chips by Abe and Kelly's door and looked up and said, 'Docta sob, docta

sob.'

'Thank you,' the doctor sahib said.

'Oh ho,' Sonam droned on, and returned to his prayers and ice delivery.

Abe was the last to get out of the wind. He took one last look at the mountain

overhead, then scooted into the doorway, feet last. He removed his shoes and clapped

off the limestone gravel and zipped the door shut. He was alone with one of the most

beautiful women on earth, but suddenly it didn't matter. There were more important

things than desire. Warmth and food and plain company easily outweighed other

inspirations.

Kelly had already fired up their little hanging cookstove and started a potful of ice

melting for hot chocolate. Until the team's second mess tent arrived with the next yak

train, the only communal meals the group was likely to share would be outside on

sunny days. For the time being, each pair of climbers cooked for itself. Over the next

two hours, Abe and Kelly took turns melting ice chips and cooking noodle soup or hot

drinks and melting more ice. It was vital that they drink two gallons or more per day.

Abe had quickly learned to read his urine, a literacy peculiar to high altitude

mountaineering. The darker the urine, the worse your dehydration, and at these

heights dehydration was a homicidal maniac. One's bodily fluids vanished into thin air,

expired and sweated away at dangerous rates.

It grew dark and cold, but they kept the flame at work under pot after pot of ice

melt. It gave them something to do while they talked. Abe learned a little about

Kelly's life in Spokane, that she was a biology teacher at a rural high school, that her

sisters all had babies, that she had been the youngest, and that her mother had long

ago despaired of her climbing adventures.

'It surprised me that you teach,' Abe said. 'They told me you were a model.' He was

thinking specifically of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in endorsement money

she'd brought in to the expedition.

'No way.' Kelly laughed self-consciously. 'It's one thing to hang clothes on a beat-up

blonde in the outdoors. As long as you keep the camera at a distance, I'm okay. But for

studio work, you have to be gorgeous. No wrinkles. No scars. No way. Not me.'

'But you must get a percentage of the endorsement money,' Abe said.

'Of course not,' Kelly said. 'I'm a climber, not a model.' She wasn't just shocked. She

was angry.

Abe saw he'd touched a nerve. 'I didn't mean to pry,' he said, and made himself busy

with the stove.

Kelly was frowning, figuring something out. 'It's okay,' she said. 'I just can't fight

everybody all of the time.'

'I don't know what that means.'

'This Barbie-doll crap. People act like I don't have any credentials. Like I'm here for

the photo ops but not for the climb.'

Abe didn't deny it. It was true. He'd heard the others talking. Until now it hadn't

occurred to him that Kelly might object to her role. 'Actually that sounds familiar,' he

said. 'They brought me along to doctor. But I came to climb, too. And I'm having my

doubts whether they'll ever let me.'

Kelly weighed his sincerity and was satisfied. 'That's what I mean,' she said. 'I know

I'm not the greatest climber in the world. I'm not a Daniel, say. But then no one else is

Daniel either. We all brought our weaknesses here.'

Now seemed the time for Abe to sketch some of his own past, and as an act of faith –

to whom he couldn't say – he mentioned Jamie.

'I didn't know her name,' Kelly said. 'But I knew you were married. Jorgens told me.'

Abe was quick to deny it. He had indeed said that to Jorgens, but only to gain some

sort of advantage that was lost to him just now. 'But I'm not,' he told Kelly. 'Not really.'

Kelly looked at him. 'Right,' she said. She'd heard that one before.

Abe started to elaborate. Kelly cut him off.

'I've been here before, you know. At the foot of the Hill with three months to go. A

woman in a tent with a man I've never met. And every time before I've thought, this

time it's going to happen. But every time it's been a bust.'

She was talking about Thomas, Abe realized. Thomas or others. Or perhaps she

meant only the summit.

Abe decided he was better off talking about her dreams of the summit than of

Thomas. 'How high have you gotten?' he asked.

'To the South Col,' she answered. Besides designating the easy route on Everest

Nepal-side, the South Col was also a feature, a broad dip in the ridge between Everest

and another of its satellite peaks, Lhotse. Situated at over 26,000 feet, the col

provided a virtual meadow for climbers to camp in before making their final leap

upward.

'So close,' Abe said. 'Was there a storm?' That was mountaineering diplomacy

talking. One put questions about failure delicately, and storms were a favorite

scapegoat.

'No,' Kelly said. 'I don't know what you've been told. But there was no storm.'

Abe didn't press.

'This might sound bizarre,' she said, 'but I once thought love might have something

to do with it.' And still she didn't say Thomas's name. 'I was wrong. Wrong up here

anyway. Up here it only breeds distraction. It gets in the way.' She glanced at Abe,

and he saw the plea in her eyes. 'That's not what love should be,' she finished softly.

Abe studied the callouses on his open palms. There was little left to add. As

unsettling as he found her candor, he was also grateful for it. Everything was in the

open now. At least they wouldn't be wasting their time or their dignity or their hearts

on a distraction.

'I didn't mean to go on,' she apologized. But of course she'd meant to. She was

hunting for a partner, not a sackmate. This was a test.

Abe tried to think of the right reply, trusting her confusion more than Thomas's

bitterness. And he wanted to climb with her.

'You're right,' he said. 'That does sound bizarre. Love. It's not a word I ever thought

to hear at twenty-one thousand feet on Everest. Not with so much mountain ahead of

us.'

He let it go at that, and so did she. In their silence, Abe could hear snatches of

conversation as climbers familiarized themselves with one another.

'You know, I've looked at the photo a hundred times,' Kelly said. On to a new topic.

'But now we're here and I still can't figure out the line.' No one else had admitted as

much, though Abe had suspected he wasn't alone in feeling intimidated by this great

unknown. It was good to hear that underneath the cocky self-assurance they all

affected, at least one other climber had some fears, too.

'I thought it was me,' Abe said. 'I thought I was getting stupid.' He said it by way of

trade, his anxiety for hers.

'Then we're all getting stupid together,' Kelly said. 'I mean, you tell me...' and she

suddenly flipped onto her stomach and rummaged through a stuff sack. She extracted

a stubby pencil, a spiral notebook, and one of their Ultimate Summit postcards with a

color picture of the North Face. 'Look at this,' she said, and stabbed her pencil at the

photo. 'What's up here? And how do you get past this?'

For the next two hours they lay side by side like newlyweds talking about the future

and making plans. Zipped chastely into their separate sleeping bags, they kept their

hips and shoulders pressed together, hungry for the extra warmth. They talked on

and on, Abe with his headlamp lit, Kelly pumping out pictures and maps with her

pencil. To an extent it worked. Even between the two of them, they couldn't decide

how Daniel had deciphered this route. But at least they managed to reduce the

monster towering above them to a paper cartoon, something both could manage in

their minds.

'What are our chances then?' Abe asked her.

'Are you kidding?' Kelly nudged him with her hip and her teeth flashed in their ball

of light. 'You don't have that one figured out yet, Doc?'

Abe snapped off the headlamp and closed his eyes. Kelly's bravado comforted him

more than he cared to admit. Maybe the Hill wasn't such an alien place after all. It had

been conquered before. It could be conquered again.

But around midnight, the moon burned a hole in Abe's sleep and his eyes came wide

open. He lay still and listened to the night.

He heard a woman breathing softly beside him, her warm back against his, and he

liked that it was Kelly there. In a nearby tent someone was hacking away with a dry

cough. A stiff breeze was beating their camp, but, oddly, he could even hear people

rustling in their sleeping bags fifty feet away. It still amazed Abe how acoustically

transparent tents could be, like tonight with every tent a bubble of sound connected

to all its neighbors. Even in a high wind, Abe had discovered he could hear his

neighbors whispering. They may as well have been a tribe of Neanderthals piled one

against another in a cave.

But what Abe was really listening for was not human at all. And now he heard it

again, the glacier, beneath his pillow of spare clothing.

Hundreds of feet thick, the ice was alive and moving. He could hear it popping and

groaning and cracking. And suddenly his vertigo returned and the very earth seemed

to drop out from under him.

Abe had once read that in the Dark Ages, peasants used to believe it meant certain

death to sleep upon a glacier. Now, listening to the dragons stirring within the

mountain, Abe came close to whispering a prayer. But for the life of him, he couldn't

remember a single one.

5

Long before the morning sun could reach around Everest's north-facing architecture

and unearth ABC, Abe left Kelly's warmth to go chop ice for breakfast. He was the

first up, or thought so until he found Daniel alone, perched upon a boulder. The man

was hunkered down upslope with a big expedition sleeping bag draped across his

shoulders, and he was facing the mountain. He might have been a gargoyle frozen in

place. His hair lay heavy with human grease, long and black upon the bag's cherry-red

Gore-Tex.

At Abe's approach, Daniel twisted. His eyes were glittering in a mask of sunbaked

cheekbones and black whiskers and the pale skin of his goggles mark. He looked wild,

but not because of the burnt flesh or unwashed hair or gleaming eyes which marked

them all by this point. Rather it was his grin. The white teeth in that dark mask

showed a joy so savage it made Abe cold.

'Here it is,' Daniel said. He turned back to relish the wall, his horseshoe jawline

thrusting out at the great North Face, and Abe stood beside him.

The North Face was astounding. Where its lines had been washed out by shadow

and light yesterday afternoon, this morning Abe could see the route's features in

clean, blue detail. ABC sat so close to its base that the mountain was foreshortened

and looked squashed. The upper reaches beetled out. Gullies and ridges seemed

warped out of their actual shape. The summit was barely visible as an insignificant

bump. All the parts of it stood assembled just so, and now Abe could see a logic to the

route that made Daniel's climb a little more imaginable, almost accessible.

'This beauty...' Daniel started to say with faraway remembrance, but he faded off.

'I didn't know it would be so elegant,' Abe remarked, and he meant it. For all its

brute, compacted massiveness, the line had a delicacy and straightness that would

appeal to any climber, even a newcomer like Abe. Now, with the route stretched full

above him, Abe could see that Daniel's direttisima was more direct, and ingenious,

than any he'd ever seen. Abe stood quietly by the monster's author, marveling at

Daniel's hubris.

It was almost as if Daniel had laid down a giant ruler in the middle of all this

geological anarchy and drawn a path of absolute simplicity. Not that simplicity meant

ease or safety. To the contrary, the Kore Wall was going to demand extraordinary

risk. From top to bottom, the 8,000-foot wall was exposed to weather and rockfall,

and there was no exit onto easier ridges should they run into trouble.

Daniel spoke again, his voice darker. 'This fucker...'

He rustled under his crisp Gore-Tex shroud and looked around at Abe. For an

instant – no longer – Abe saw a face from long ago, a look of utter blank panic or

worse, a look of terrible surrender. Then Daniel drew a deep breath and brought

himself back from the depths, and Abe drew a breath too.

'I can't believe I'm here.'

'Me either.' Abe meant himself.

But Daniel was lost in his soliloquy. He snorted, shook his head. 'I'll tell you one

thing,' he said. 'It's not for the love of it. No way. I hate this fucker.'

Abe digested that. 'Bad attitude,' he finally joked, at a loss otherwise.

It was just the right thing to say. Daniel was delighted. He grinned more fiercely.

'Ain't it though.'

They ate breakfast, then gathered by the jumbled heap of supplies, eager to climb.

Out came the ice screws and snow pickets and pitons of every shape, and 'Friends,'

the spring-loaded cams that looked so high-tech that James Bond had employed one

in a recent movie, and the deadmen, stacks of aluminum anchors. In one linked

silvery bunch lay their carabiners, or snap links, the all-purpose safety pins that

would channel ropes, complete belay anchors, connect harnesses, hold hardware,

brake rappels, and give a dumb extra hand with a 1,200-pound grip whenever an

extra hand was needed. Abe knew his way around most of this sharpened,

customized, taped, initialed, store-bought and homemade weaponry, even the two

battery-powered hand drills someone had brought for drilling bolts, a rock climber's

touch. What was unfamiliar to him he hefted and fiddled with and figured out on his

own.

Sporting his black eye still and a huge grin, J.J. got them in the mood when he

reached deep into the pile and extracted a 300-foot coil of orange rope and held it

over his head, whooping, 'Firepower.'

Three days passed before Abe got his turn to go up. In teams of two, the climbers

fanned upward. They took new territory, inflicting their calculations upon the

mountain, pinning their camps to the rock and snow and ice. Each team rotated to the

high point to push it higher, then retreated to ABC to rest and make room for fresh

troops. Forsaking the tactics which alpinists normally employed in almost every other

range on earth, the Ultimate Summit proceeded carefully and slowly. These were the

Greater Himalayas. Were Everest located at lower elevations, they could have made a

concerted push to the top in a single week.

They had entered the so-called deathzone, where big mountains tend to wreck the

delicate mechanisms of human physiology. Nothing lived up here for long except

lichen and a rare breed of spider with antifreeze glycerine for blood.

Up and down, up and down: When they weren't leading they were humping loads.

On any given day there were four to eight climbers occupying different levels of the

mountain. With the yaks unable to go any higher, they became their own beasts of

burden. Daniel's strategy called for five camps above ABC, each to be stocked with

progressively smaller quantities of food and cooking fuel. The upper camps – those

above 26,000 feet, if they got that far – would get bottled oxygen. Ounce by ounce,

every thread, every crumb, had to be carried on their backs.

At last Abe moved up. Because they were sharing a tent and wanted to try climbing

together, he and Kelly got teamed. That meant they were supposed to keep track of

one another, and to share 'hill rats,' or mountain food, which were broken into

two-man-day packets, and to climb as a pair. Today the two of them were scheduled

to reach Camp One, which one team had helped supply yesterday, and which another

team was using to sleep in while pressing the ascent to what would become Camp

Two. Tomorrow they would take the sharp end – the high point of the rope – to lead

toward Two. Maybe they would reach it, though Abe had no idea where Two was

supposed to be located or exactly what to do when they reached it. He was depending

on Kelly to know how to configure and erect a Himalayan camp from scratch. A few

yards beyond the border of ABC, the rocky detritus gave way to pure glacier. The

north bowl swept up toward the bergschrund – that fetal tear which separates a

mountain from its glacier – and then steepened.

Blowing wreaths of frost in the chill blue air, the two climbers clamped on their

crampons. Somebody had landed a batch of twenty pairs of a brand called Foot Fangs,

and Abe's were factory fresh, sharp enough to draw blood. He clapped shut the heel

mount with his palm and tugged the ankle strap good and tight and stamped once

against the snow. This was his first time in crampons on the mountain, and it felt a

little like mounting a horse, this stout bonding of foot to steel to ice.

They plied the glacial plain, navigating by instinct mostly. The wind had covered

over yesterday's tracks with snow the texture of sand grains. It was obvious where

they were going – to the fractured schrund a mile away – but between here and there

lay an obstacle course of crevasses, false promises and wrong turns. Parts of the

labyrinth were marked with bamboo wands brought up from Nepal and tipped with

red duct tape. Most of the way lay unwritten, though. Kelly said 'no problem' and

surged ahead.

They moved from one crevasse to the next, zigzagging back and forth in pursuit of

marker wands. In between they methodically probed for crevasses, Kelly with her ice

axe, Abe with a ski pole. Overnight some of the bamboo wands had tipped over or

simply been ingested by the crevasses. Abe noticed that the bamboo – still green

when they'd unloaded it from the trucks – had dried to a dead gray, every hint of

water sucked out by the mountain.

Most of the crevasses were easy to step across or hop over. Several were too wide

for that and so snow bridges had been hunted out and tested for human weight,

carefully, and then marked and roped for safety. These required long detours to

reach.

One crevasse gaped so wide it seemed impassable. But after a half-hour of walking

along its lower flank, they came to a battered aluminum extension ladder with

Japanese script along one side. Daniel had salvaged it from the garbage dump at ABC

and with Gus and Nima's help had carefully laid it flat across the twenty-foot gap and

staked it in place. Abe took an immediate dislike to the ladder. He was tempted to

crawl across it, but with a pack on it would have been even more awkward. Besides

that, Kelly had just walked it with robotic ease, clanking metallically. With each step,

his crampon teeth threatened to slide or catch on the metal rungs. At the halfway

point, the bottomless crevasse seemed to howl up at Abe. He scuttled across the rest

of the span like a stick figure on fire.

Kelly turned out to be better acclimated, but Abe managed to keep up. Their pace

was relatively quick – one step, one breath. Higher, the ratio would widen radically,

Abe knew, four or five lungfuls per step. Their crampon teeth squeaked on the ice

bed.

After two hours, Kelly paused and pointed up. Through his glacier glasses, Abe saw

pink and green sunrays suddenly flare over the northeast shoulder of Everest. It

turned into a wild jagged corona and he heard the mountain stretch itself. Its joints

creaked underneath his boots as the glacier settled. Snowbeds rustled. A distant green

avalanche sloughed loose, beautiful and deadly.

'No problem,' said Kelly. 'We're still ahead of the warm.' Once the sun hit, the upper

mountain would begin its daily thaw and send rocks and ice and maybe worse rattling

down. Abe was not looking forward to that deadly rain.

They moved off again. A gust of wind brushed across the glacier. Spindrift flowered

up from underfoot and for thirty seconds or so a ground blizzard whistled at knee

level. Because of its curvature, the immense northern bowl spawned dervishes.

Slender ice tornadoes tap-danced here and there. One crawled partway up the wall

before gravity pulled it back down. Then the wind stopped. The snow settled. The

dervishes died. It was still again.

More time passed. Overhead the wall of stone and ice grew enormous, but remained

untouchable. Somewhere at its base lay Camp One. Since Abe had no idea where, time

ceased to matter. They would get there when they got there.

Finally they reached the bergschrund. Here was the start of the technical climbing

and it was announced by the first rope. It was a thick snake of polypropylene, once

white, now gray. Fixed ropes like this one would allow them to carry heavy loads in

safety, giving them a handrail for guidance and support. As the angle grew more

radical, they would be hanging from the ropes. In addition to aiding their ascent, the

ropes were an insurance policy. If – when – the weather turned ugly, the ropes would

allow them to bail out in a hurry, rappeling down the ropes at ten times the speed

they'd gone up them.

Abe didn't recognize the gray rope as any of their stock and he guessed it had been

plundered from somewhere else on the mountain, maybe from the old pile Nima had

uncovered in ABC. Abe wasn't in the habit of using a rope he didn't know. Wind and

ultraviolet rays could age a rope in a matter of weeks, and there was no telling how

long this one had been getting whipped and fried at the roof of the world. But since

Kelly didn't hesitate to clip onto it, Abe didn't either. So much depended on sheer faith

up here.

They attached themselves to the rope with jumars, mechanical jaws that ratcheted

upward, but caught downward. Abe slid his jumar high on the rope, and when he came

to the four-foot-wide slash that was the bergschrund, he stopped beside Kelly. She

was peering into the deep chasm at her boot tips.

'You see it down there?' she said. 'That must be from Daniel's first go at the Hill.'

The huge block of ice they stood upon was calving from the slope, and deep in the

turquoise cleft Abe saw the taut green rope she was talking about. It stretched from

one wall to the other and looked like the final thread holding two naturally opposed

forces together.

'How'd it get so far down?' Abe asked. It had been six years since Daniel's last visit

here, yet the rope seemed centuries deep.

Kelly shrugged and turned her attention uphill. 'Yeti,' she said. The abominable

snowman. Things happened on mountains that couldn't be explained and humans

weren't very good at letting that be. They needed dragons or gremlins. Or yeti.

One at a time they took off their packs and leapt for the far side of the bergschrund.

Abe's Foot Fangs bit into the snow with a jolting halt. They were on the mountain

itself now, behind enemy lines.

The gray rope ended a hundred meters higher in a mass of knots that disappeared

into the snow and ice. Abe knew that somewhere under the surface an aluminum

plate called a deadman was locked in place, anchoring the rope. But to the naked eye,

it looked like the rope had been sucked into a devouring mouth. The mountain was

alive, no doubt about it.

They unclipped from the gray rope and clipped onto the next one, a section of

weathered blue nine-millimeter Perlon. This wasn't Ultimate Summit stock either,

and Abe realized the team was saving its new rope for more severe terrain. The line of

fixed old ropes went on and on like that to the top of the slope, jointed together with

bits and pieces of used nylon. Using the rope as an occasional handline, he slid his

jumar along just ahead of him. The slope steepened. More and more he had to haul

against the rope and kick his feet against snow that had been annealed by the sun and

wind. One short 65-degree required the front points of his crampons.

Kelly was kind, pacing their ascent to Abe's first time at these altitudes. She didn't

remark at his gasping, merely stopping each time he bent over his high knee to rest.

He felt ill and exhilarated at the same time. Part of him revelled in the height and

spectacle. Part of him just wanted to quit moving and lie down for a nap. Try as he

might, the ambivalence – the charged current between misery and magic – wouldn't

switch off. Twice he noticed colorful stains in the snow alongside the ropes, and

realized it was old vomit where others had found it tough going, too.

Camp One lay cupped at the tip of a knife ridge. Three bright yellow tents stood in a

lengthwise string, end to end, and it was the most precarious site Abe had ever seen.

At its widest point, the ridge was only five feet across, scarcely wide enough to hold a

tent. On either side, the ridge plummeted a thousand feet. The outermost tent had

part of its back wall hanging over the edge.

'Not too shabby,' Kelly said, checking her watch. It was only two o'clock – real time,

not Beijing time, they'd given that up upon reaching ABC – but their workday was

done. She was sitting in the doorway of one tent, dangling a foot over the edge.

Far below, the immense northern bowl with its crevasses and snowy expanses had

become a cup full of lines and white spaces. ABC was tiny, just a spray of colored

freckles. If anyone was moving among the tents, they were too small to see. The sun

was wheeling around the northwestern crest, cutting the bowl into dark and light

halves. Even as he watched, the sunlight gave up some of its territory, and the halves

were no longer halves.

Abe bit down on his vertigo and smiled weakly. He'd slept on ledges and in

hammocks on big walls in Yosemite, but never on a ridge jutting this thinly into space.

The placement looked insane, but Abe knew he should appreciate its logic. Very

simply, sitting on this ridge, the camp was out of reach of avalanches and rockfall. In

the long term, his dread of heights always simmered into a healthy fear. It was the

short term that was so rough. He tried reasoning it away.

They had lost the earth. They had thrown it down beneath their feet. Like monks

they were giving up their place in the world and becoming anonymous. Unlike monks,

they were striking pacts with their individual demons, honing a radical arrogance and

rising upon their whims.

Abe forced himself to stare into the abyss. See it, he told himself. Make it yours.

Sometimes that worked for him, incorporating the physical void into the center of his

soul. Today it didn't. He just felt sicker.

Since looking down was a wash, Abe looked up. A line of ropes led into a dark icy

gully and the gully led vertically into the unknown. Tomorrow and tomorrow and

tomorrow, Abe thought. The higher they rose, the deeper the abyss.

He'd always thought that a moment like this – a moment of crystalline reckoning –

would be glorious and Zen-like. His mouth would drop open and his eyes would see a

million miles and he would think, So this is what it is. Instead Abe carefully knelt by

the edge and gripped the rope tight. Positioned just so, he took the liberty of emptying

his stomach a thousand feet into the deep.

Another week passed. Each morning the climbers wrapped themselves in Gore-Tex

and polypropylene armor. They donned their helmets and goggles and glittering

crampons, took up their sharp ice axes, draped ropes like ammunition bandoliers

across their chests. They locked and loaded into their harnesses and onto their ropes

and humped their backpacks with the grim pluck of grunts on patrol, infiltrating the

mountain in tiny platoons, probing it for weak points, relentless.

Some days the mountain just sat there like a titan's still life, not a color moving on

the hot blinding canvas. Then again there were days of rage, everything torn to rags if

you could see the Hill at all, the mountain reassembling its arsenal, shifting its

defenses, readying for a kill. The mountain changed, but the climbers were just as

metamorphic. Abe could see it.

The fat was vanishing from their bodies, stripped out by the rigors of their journey.

They were turning to bone and gristle. Abe could see it on warm mornings when the

camp-bound stripped down to their T-shirts. Their muscles had thinned out and their

arms were ropy with veins. Their hands had taken on the horny, banged-up look of

roughnecks' hands. The pads were cut and fissures spread like drying mud and simple

scrapes ulcerated. Their fingernails had quit growing or were just continually chipped

and worn down. Every cuticle was split and bleeding as if their fingers were rejecting

the very nails, spitting them loose.

Abe tried in vain to remember what they'd looked like before. Like Himalayan

deities, their skin had turned blue, the higher they climbed the lusher the blue. And

their urine had turned the color of blood because the glacier melt was loaded with so

much raw iron and minerals. At supper, pieces of fried skin fell from their faces into

their food. Their eyes had grown huge and hungry behind their goggles and glacier

glasses. The mountain had spawned a pack of maniacs, it seemed, zealots. The

mountain will fall, Abe thought. To people like these it will fall. And he was one of

them.

Slowly, in bits and pieces, they were gaining on the beast. They prosecuted their

ascent by inches, cannibalizing the remains of earlier expeditions to feed their upward

journey. Their 'yak gap' had put them behind schedule, but through brute risk they

were beginning to make up for it. By the end of two weeks of brilliant route-finding,

most of it accomplished by Daniel and Gus, the climb was almost back on track.

Morale rose high, but so, curiously, did the group's anxiety. Every one of them was

feeling overextended, and no one could quite explain it, not for a climb that was going

so well.

'We're like casualties waiting to happen,' Robby said. 'You'll see. The machine will

start to break down. Then it all becomes a matter of forward momentum, how far can

we go before we stop.'

The breakdown started soon.

Carlos had arrived with chronic tendinitis in both ankles, and to compensate had

taped them tight like a Super Bowl halfback's. That stabilized the ankle but cut the

blood supply to his feet, causing some minor frost nip on his toes. Abe prescribed

warm socks and nixed the tape. Two days later Carlos stumbled and wrenched his left

ankle, and Jorgens sent him down to Base Camp to recuperate.

On April 14, Robby and J.J. got food poisoning at Camp Two. They'd been pinned in

their tents for two days as a cold front moved through, and neither man was known

for his fastidiousness. While the storm buffeted them, they did what everyone else

was doing on the mountain. They lay low, slept, BSed, and cooked. The water for

cooking came from melted snow. The snow came from outside the tent. Robby and

J.J. didn't bother reaching very far outside their tent, and ended up ingesting their

own feces. Their violent bout of vomiting and diarrhea had abated by the time the

storm lifted, but each man was left seriously dehydrated. Since the combination of

dehydration and altitude sickness could be deadly, Abe sent them down to Base Camp

to rest.

Abe had read about winter-long science expeditions to Antarctica which became

disease-free while in isolation. After sharing each other's flus and colds in the first

month, everyone's immune system adjusted and the incidence of viral infections

plummeted. Only with the introduction of a new arrival was the stasis violated. In

theory, Abe knew the Ultimate Summit Expedition could become disease-free also.

But the reality was that time was against them and they weren't a truly isolated

population anyway. The yakherders had exposed them to a host of Asian viruses that

were still waylaying the climbers a month later.

For a while everyone suffered sore throats and packed sinuses. Some went on to

develop the infamous high altitude cough, a persistent wracking hack. Stump got the

worst of it. A few days after chipping his front tooth on a frozen chocolate bar at Camp

Three, he descended to ABC doubled over with 'cough fracture.' It was not unheard of

for Himalayan climbers to break their own ribs in coughing fits. Abe examined

Stump's beer keg of a rib cage and said the 'fracture' was probably not a break, but

that he'd definitely separated some ribs. He put Stump on Cipro, an all-inclusive

antibiotic, and sent him down to Base Camp to recover.

About the time Carlos returned to ABC from his convalescence at Base, limping

gamely, Thomas keeled over with a high fever, chills and wet rales. Abe was carrying

up to Camp Two at the time. When Jorgens brought the news up at four in the

afternoon – they still had no radio contact – Abe immediately descended to ABC.

From Jorgen's description, Abe guessed Thomas had developed HAPE, or high

altitude pulmonary edema, a frequent killer at these heights. An indirect result of

dehydration, HAPE had a terrible irony: It drowned its victims in their own fluids.

Abe reached ABC at eight o'clock that night. Daniel was already there, sitting beside

the patient. He seemed much too relaxed under the circumstances. Thomas had

glazed eyes and cold perspiration, and Abe could hear the bubbly sound of wet rales

even without his stethoscope. Thomas coughed and colored sputum spattered the

front of his sleeping bag.

'HAPE,' Abe said. 'We better send one of the Sherpas down to Base for the bag.' The

Gamow 'bag' was a portable pressure chamber made of plastic. You put the patient

inside, pumped it full of air, and basically dropped him to 12,000 feet elevation in a

matter of minutes. It had saved many lives in the past few years.

'You're right and you're wrong,' Daniel said. 'We definitely ought to get the bag up

here. But there's no hurry. This isn't HAPE.'

'Of course it is. Look at him. He's got all the symptoms. Rales, the sputum.'

'Almost, not quite,' Daniel said. He was kind in his contradicting. 'I would have

thought the same if I hadn't seen it before. With HAPE there's no fever. And look at

the color of this stuff.' He tore a page from a magazine and scooped some of the

sputum up. 'See? It's rusty. Not pink. Pink's HAPE.'

'Pneumonia,' Abe said. And it was. The good news was that the pneumonia sounded

confined to the left lower lobe, and lobar pneumonia responded well to antibiotics.

Thomas would recover quickly, provided he went down to Base Camp.

'We're starting to look like a ghost town up here,' Abe said. 'And we're not even

halfway.'

'I don't hear the fat lady yet.' Daniel smiled.

On April 17, Pemba Sange fell down a crevasse above ABC during a routine carry.

Thirty feet down, the Sherpa landed on a false floor of snow. Happily the floor held

and he was safely extricated, but two days later two other Sherpas came down with

severe headaches, which Jorgens insisted was 'Himalayan AWOL.' After accidents or a

death, he said, hypochondria sometimes ran rampant among climbers or Sherpas or

both.

'Treat them like they're real patients,' Jorgens advised. 'Give them aspirin. Inject

them with vitamins, whatever it takes. Just get them on their feet. They'll get over it.

That or we pack them off to Base for the duration with no pay. We can't have slackers

up here. They'll kill our morale and eat us out of supplies.' He instructed Abe to stay

down for the day and play doctor with them.

In fact, the two Sherpas were really sick. Abe found them in their tent suffering

fevers and severe diarrhea and mildly disoriented. One of them had even started up

the glacier with a fifty-pound load before surrendering to his illness. No slacking here.

Winging it once again, Abe put the two on a five-day course of Cipro and told them to

go down to Base Camp when they felt strong enough.

The accidents and near misses left them all jumpy and fitful. They were stretching

their limits up here, and there was a growing sense that they were going to need

something more, some extra auspices. Otherwise the mountain was going to take a

victim.

When help arrived, it came from an unexpected quarter. It was the third week of

April and Abe was crossing the last of the crevasses in the north bowl, descending

from yet another tedious load hump, when he chanced to spy a kite floating in the

thermals above ABC. It was a box kite, the color of lemons and pomegranates, and

someone had nursed it a good two hundred feet into the air. There was no great

mystery who the someone had to be. Robby had brought three kites from the States,

hoping to stage a calendar photo of kites flying against the Himalayan backdrop. So far

he'd been too busy climbing or being sick to attempt more than one launch, and on

that occasion the winds had been too fierce. Today, apparently, he'd achieved takeoff.

With its tropical colors and alien weightlessness, the kite practically shouted its

presence, and judging by its height, it must have been up there for quite some time.

But it was only now that Abe happened to take notice. The rest of his way to camp, he

rode on its swoops and Promethean trembling, enchanted by its coltish delicacy.

Every moment the string seemed ready to snap, taxed by the wind, and the sky's

blueness alone looked enough to crush the toy.

At the edge of camp, Abe sat down on a rock to shuck his crampons, and Thomas

came up. He was swearing by a full recovery, but Abe could tell the man was still

weak. 'You got a visitor,' Thomas said.

'You're kidding,' Abe said.

'Nope,' Thomas said. 'Showed up this morning.'

For one crazy instant, Abe imagined that Jamie had somehow made her way to

Everest and trekked the long trail up to ABC. Just as quickly he dismissed the

thought. Even if Jamie had been the type, there were too many twists and turns in

this adventure, too many borders. He decided his visitor had to be Li Deng, in the role

of a patient or a bureaucrat or just in search of company. If so, he was definitely

unwelcome. The last person they needed up here was a liaison officer badgering them

about rules and deadlines and watching over them. They had a hundred days for this

climb, but counting them out bean by bean wasn't going to get them any higher.

'Hey,' said J.J., who had just come straggling down off the glacier. Others were

coming down behind him. 'Isn't that your idiot?' The story had gotten around about

Abe and his epileptic yakherder.

It was indeed the Tibetan boy. He was standing in mid-camp with the spool of kite

string in both hands, wearing a clean expedition T-shirt and quilted pants and dirty

animal skins.

Three of the Sherpas were sitting on rocks, offering jokes and helpful comments

while they watched him pilot the kite. Pemba's near brush in the crevasse had

sobered the Sherpas, but the kite, or its handler, seemed to have returned them to

their usual animation. Nima caught sight of Abe and immediately stood up and said

something to the Tibetan.

'Well look at who's here,' Stump said, kicking off his crampons. 'It's Abe's little stray.

I thought he'd disappeared.'

Abe saw the boy turn to view the growing knot of climbers and a wide, bucktoothed

smile splayed across his broad face. He had the look of a child with all the time in the

world. He bent and lodged the kite spool under some rocks, then made a slow beeline

toward the climbers. Nima trailed after him.

Abe's fatigue fell away. The last he'd seen him, the boy was a write-off. Now he'd

recovered enough to walk ten miles and fly a beautiful kite in the lap of the Mother

Goddess. There was something so simple and wonderful about it that Abe smiled right

back. After a dozen years of emergency work, he'd seen his fair share of so-called

miracles, but never so poetically rendered.

The boy walked haltingly, with a left-sided palsy, and it was plain to see that he'd

suffered neurological damage somewhere along the line. Once again Abe wondered

about a head injury that might have predated or even caused the epileptic seizures.

He wanted to take another look and ask some questions now that the patient could

answer for himself.

As the boy struggled across the gray and white debris, the climbers talked baldly

about him. 'What a gimp,' J.J. said, astonished. 'How'd he ever make it up here?'

Robby sauntered over in moonboots and a pair of purple polypro pants. He looked

like a rodeo clown with fuzzy chaps and two cameras slung around his neck. 'Can you

believe it?' He beamed. He turned to photo-frame the kite between his fingers.

'Will wonders never cease,' Stump cracked. 'You finally got it up.'

'Look at it,' Robby said. 'I'll tell you what, though. This Tibetan kid definitely missed

his calling. He's born to fly. He could have been an aviator the way he works the wind.

You should have seen the way he sent my kite up, just kind of opened his hand and it

took its place.'

'These Asians, man, they love their kites,' Carlos said. 'Down in Kathmandu, they get

so excited with their stringwork, they'll forget where they are and run right off of

five-story rooftops.'

'Maybe that's what happened to this guy,' J.J. suggested.

'Or a yak stampede,' Gus said.

They made a few more jokes. The boy continued laboring across the loose rocks

toward them. The afternoon's late rays cut him out from the shadows, making him

hard to look at for his radiance.

'You didn't tell us he was a tulku,' Daniel said to Abe. He had one hand shading his

eyes and was squinting at the boy.

Abe had never heard the word. He faked it. 'Yeah, one more yakherder.'

'A tulku?' Carlos said. He pulled his goggles off and looked more closely. 'Jeez, Daniel.

You're right.' He was excited and hushed in the same breath. 'He's no yakherder. Look

at that round face, and those pointy elf ears sticking out. And the eyes. And look at the

Sherpas, man, they're blown away. They look like disciples waiting for the body and

blood. Nah, nah, this guy's beaucoup holy, you can tell. Doc, you saved a tulku.'

'What the hell's a tulkoo?' J.J. asked.

Carlos sighed and tried again. J.J. thrived on reiteration, though even on the second

and third explanations there was no guarantee he'd get it. ' Tulkus are holy men.

They're like a monk and a prophet all rolled into one. And they can tell the future.'

'Yeah,' Daniel joshed, 'and tulkus can fly, too. And they fight demons.'

Carlos grew cautious. 'That's what they say.'

'All I know is I thought he was a dead man,' Abe said.

'Oh, they can do that, too,' Gus threw in. But whereas Daniel had been gently

teasing, she meant to sting. Gus had her virtues, but suffering credulous dharma

junkies was not one of them. She'd been through Asia too many times to get

snookered by the smoke and mirrors of local religions. Ascent was her dogma. 'These

tulkus can think their body temperature up or down. They can quit breathing and

fake death,' she lectured facetiously. 'They can even pick a precise moment to die and

then just check out, snuff themselves with a prayer, and catch the next cycle on the

merry-go-round.'

The Tibetan boy limped closer. His affliction became more graphic and they quit

talking about him. Chances were he couldn't understand a word of English, but he was

a thin frail reed among these sturdy climbers and he was their guest. Above all his

smile was the real McCoy. He looked positively overjoyed to have them down off the

mountain safe and sound. Despite themselves, the climbers seemed to warm to him.

To everyone's surprise, since it was presumably Abe he'd come to see, the boy

walked directly to Daniel.

Nima was embarrassed for the boy and stepped up beside him and laughed off the

mistake. 'This man is thinking you save him.'

'Me?' Daniel was startled. 'No. Him.' He clapped Abe's shoulder. 'Here's your

archangel. Not me.'

Switching to Tibetan, Nima corrected the record. The boy's smile didn't falter,

though a slight confusion clouded his brow. It was apparent he thought Nima was

wrong. He continued studying Daniel's blue eyes with some cryptic recognition, and

Daniel looked strangely off-balance. Then the boy twisted to face Abe. His smile

broadened, if that was possible, and Abe beamed back.

'Ask him how he feels,' Abe told Nima.

Nima didn't bother to ask. 'All better, sir. You see.'

'I don't think so, Nima. He looks very weak. He should be at Base Camp eating lots

of food and sleeping. This altitude is very bad for him. You should tell him that.'

But Nima was a Sherpa. High altitude was a fact of life and this Tibetan holy man

was here, so how could it be bad. 'This man is coming now to see you, Doctor. Coming

now eight days.'

From the back of the gathering, out of nowhere, Jorgen's voice crashed their little

party. 'The boy thinks he's going to stay here for another week? Not a chance.'

Nima didn't understand and his expression said so. But he seemed to realize Jorgens

wasn't addressing the issue of hospitality. This was gringo politics, Abe saw it clearly.

Still reeling from the shift in leadership, Jorgens was out to score some points. The

beauty of this issue was that he had logistics on his side.

'Tell him he can't stay, Nima,' Jorgens said. 'We don't have the food for an extra

mouth, and he doesn't have a permit to be up here. You know the rules. The yakkies

come up. The yakkies go down. One night here, that's it. More than that, he needs a

Chinese permit, understand?'

Somebody said, 'Chill out, man.'

Jorgen flushed. In the old days, before the mutiny, he would have cut the offender

down. Now he was reduced to trying to build a coalition. 'We can't afford trouble with

the liaison officer,' he clarified, straining for a civil tone. 'That's the bottom line.'

'That's not what Nima meant, though,' Abe said. He turned to the Sherpa. 'Eight

days. Are you saying it took this boy eight days to walk here from Base Camp?'

'Yes sir. Eight days maybe, maybe more. Many days, walking, saying the prayers,

slowly, slowly.'

One of the climbers whistled. 'Eights days from Base. He must have been crawling.'

'The dude must like you, Doc,' J.J. said.

'He had a debt,' Daniel stated. To him, anyway, it made perfect sense.

'Tell him I'm glad to see him,' Abe said to Nima.

Like a minister of the court, Nima didn't bother his prince with the small talk.

Speaking for the boy, Nima replied, 'He is very glad to see you, sir.'

'But Nima, ask him. Why did he come so far?'

'To give the puja, sir. We need the puja.' Nima's delivery was emphatic. Obviously

he thought they needed the puja, too. That was some kind of ritual. Abe had never

seen one.

'He's right,' Carlos said. 'We've been running on empty ever since we got here. We

should never have left Base without a puja.'

Immediately Jorgens went on the attack. His exasperation was tinged with the

weariness of a schoolmaster at the end of a very long semester. 'There are sensitive

issues here, people. I keep telling you, when in Rome we have to do as the...'

'This is Tibet,' Carlos overrode him. 'And this is Everest. And we need a puja. You go

climbing in these hills without a puja, you're asking for trouble. We're damn lucky to

have a monk who can do one.'

'A tulku,' J.J. added.

Jorgens weighed the vote with a quick scan. 'Fine, have your ritual,' he said. 'But

keep it up here at ABC. I don't want word one of this getting down to Li. It's one thing

for Li to think we're hosting a dumb, hurt yakherder. I don't want to test him on a

monk. Li's got his rules. Got it? Silence on the monk. Silence on the puja.'

Abe found it touching and a little childlike that hardcore mountaineers could be in

such a state over a good luck ceremony. He figured they couldn't really take this puja

business seriously. But when he looked around, there was satisfaction on people's

faces, a quiet relief that had been missing since their arrival. Even Gus seemed more

at ease.

The climbers disbanded and crunched off through the limestone rubble to their

tents, leaving Abe behind with Nima and the boy. Overhead the North Face burned

with a tea rose alpenglow.

'One more thing, Nima. Tell him I want to examine him before he leaves. Let's just

make sure he's good and healed.' In truth it was in the role of a skeptic that Abe

wanted to look the boy over. He couldn't fathom a recovery so complete, especially at

these heights. Maybe tulkus really did have magical powers.

'Okay,' Nima said. 'When, sir? Now?'

Abe hesitated. He was tired. 'Yes, okay,' he decided, 'now.'

On their way to an empty tent, they passed Daniel peeling off his super-gaiters. The

monk slowed his jerky pace for another look and came to a halt. Daniel glanced up,

startled by the boy's quizzical gawk.

'You sure you two haven't met?' Abe asked. 'Maybe on your last expedition.'

'Doubtful. He would have been ten or eleven years old.' Once again Daniel seemed

nonplussed.

'Maybe he saw you on your trek out.' Abe didn't say 'Lepers' Parade.' He'd never

mentioned it before, uncertain how Daniel preferred his history. But what a sight that

must have been to the Himalayan villagers, five monstrously ravaged human beings

straggling down from the outlands, feet and hands frozen black. A sight no young boy

would have easily forgotten.

'Doubtful.' Now, behind Daniel's bemusement, Abe saw the look of a hunted animal.

Daniel was afraid of this boy and his eerie recognition. He was afraid of the past. Abe

shifted the topic.

'I still can't believe he came just to say thanks.' The thought of a boy with nothing

more to do on this desolate plateau than set off into the deep wilds to randomly bless a

bunch of strangers made Abe feel lonely for him.

'I like him,' Daniel said. The boy had lifted Daniel's ice axe and was testing the

point's edge on his thumb. 'He's got real sand. We ought to make him a climber.' With

a sudden sweep of his arm, Daniel seated his black and orange Baltimore Orioles

baseball cap on the monk's head. It was sweat-stained and much too big, but the gift

could have been gold. The boy's eyes widened and he grunted, 'wah.'

'What's his name?'

Abe blinked. He'd never thought to ask. Unconscious, the boy hadn't needed one.

'His name is Wangdu,' Nima said.

Daniel tried it out. 'Wangdu.' Then he asked, 'Where are you guys off to?'

'Final exam,' Abe said. 'I want to give a last look over. You can tag along if you want.'

Daniel pushed against his knees and stood up. His joints crackled and Abe could see

the electric painkiller box bulging on his hip. What a bunch we are, Abe thought, lame

and halt. Mortals beneath our immortal grasping.

The four of them crowded into the empty dome tent. The smell of unwashed

humanity was a given, but another odor was harder to ignore. Abe hadn't noticed it in

the open air.

'Nima, ask him to take off that skin jacket and his shirt.'

When the boy shed his final layer, the tent filled with a terrible stench of rotting

flesh. Abe sat back, stunned.

'He's dead,' Daniel murmured. 'He looks dead.'

He was half right. Under the skins and T-shirt the monk was only half alive. His

various wounds had grown worse, much worse. In the light of day – what light was

left – his bruises had taken on the vile yellow and gangrenous hues of rotten fruit. The

animal bites were leaking a foul sap, and the strange erasertip markings around his

nipples had putrefied.

'It wasn't like this,' Abe said. He placed a bare palm against the boy's suppurating

chest and, through the callouses on his hand and fingers, he could feel the infection hot

and animate. The monk was being consumed alive.

Abe struck back at his own repulsion. He searched for another emotion and found

his anger and started to lash out at Nima. 'I thought Krishna was going to care for him.

I gave instructions, damn it. I told him...'

Nima wasn't even listening, too shocked by what they were all seeing and the foul

odor they were breathing. Abe bit the scolding off. He was the doctor, not Krishna,

and this wasn't Main Street, USA, where modern medicine was a God-given right and

a second language. It was Tibet, on the edge of time. The world was rough and

primordial out here. People died of things like wood splinters and chickenpox and

broken bones and insect bites.

'Tell him to lie down, Nima. Keep him here. I'll be back with some things. Pills and

salve and bandages. I have to clean him. I have to start all over again.'

He turned to exit, but Daniel was blocking the doorway, sullen with disgust and

curiosity. 'Abe, I don't understand this.'

'I don't either. But if we can't handle this infection, you're right, he's dead.'

Abe returned to find Daniel forcing a dialogue that Nima clearly did not want to be

part of. The Sherpa's face was dark and outraged, but so was Daniel's. Everyone

seemed angry but the monk, who had lain back in a nest of soft down bedding.

Daniel turned on Abe. 'You told me he got hurt in a camp accident.'

'I guessed,' Abe said. 'He was unconscious, and no one knew for sure.'

'Oh, they knew.' Daniel bitterly spat, but it wasn't a bitterness aimed at Nima. 'They

just weren't talking.'

'But why?'

'They were scared.'

Abe persisted. 'I don't see why.'

'See those holes on his chest?'

'Parasites? Maybe some kind of disease.' Abe shrugged. He knew Daniel was setting

him up to expose his naïveté or simpleness, and that didn't improve his mood. He had

done the best he could in that smoky hut at three in the morning.

'Tell him about those holes,' Daniel said to Nima.

Nima frowned at Abe. The mistrust stood heavy and black in his face. Finally Daniel

gave the answer. 'Red Pagoda Mountain,' he said.

'Pardon me?'

'It's a Chinese cigarette. The army officers like to smoke them.'

Abe gaped stupidly. What was being said here?

'These didn't happen on the trail. They're cigarette burns.'

'Come on.' Abe shut it out.

'And these bruises? And the dog bites?'

Dog bites, Abe thought. That's what the punctures and lacerations were. He kept it

simple and organized and manageable.

'Abe, listen to me. These aren't camp wounds. Think about it.'

He knew what Daniel was going to say. Daniel said it.

'These are torture wounds, Abe. He got these in a Chinese prison.'

'Impossible.'

'Why?'

Abe glared at him. 'Impossible.'

'You hear stories over here. What the Hans are doing to the Tibetans. But it always

sounds too much. Like, you know, a million dead? And the torture stories, what they

do to these people. Raping nuns with cattle prods, flogging monks to death with iron

bars...'

Abe had no idea what Daniel was telling him. He had no idea what to think. He had

come to climb a mountain. That was all he knew.

'Nima,' Daniel demanded. 'Tell what you know.'

The Sherpa spoke haltingly, with reluctance. 'This man, you know, they put him in

the prison. They making very bad things happen to him. He run from there. Now he is

going to Nepal side.'

'He's escaping?' Abe asked.

'He's trying to,' Daniel said. 'But the passes are high. He's trapped. He wouldn't stand

a chance in his condition. Look at him. No wonder he had to crawl to get this far.'

Through his paramedic work, Abe had seen terrible things, things worse than this,

bodies torn in two, skinned by windshields, ruptured like soft grapes, ripped and

shredded. But in all of that the suffering had never had a purpose, a reasoned cause,

never anything like this. What made this unthinkable was that another human being

had written the suffering into the boy's flesh, one wound at a time. It was beyond

belief. Abe's teeth were gritted and he felt tears of frustration forming in his eyes.

This wasn't supposed to be part of the deal. He'd come to see beauty and strength and

Utopia. He blinked his tears away.

'The yakkies got him as far as Base,' Daniel went on, and Abe could tell that Daniel

was extrapolating much of this even as he spoke. 'And the Sherpas, they don't know

what to do with the poor kid except keep it quiet. If the Chinese get wind of this...'

'What did he do to them?' Abe asked. He was fighting to accept what lay before him,

the proof of evil. He needed more time. Or a good reason. One or the other.

Nima asked the monk, and the monk crossed his wrists, made two fists, thrust them

down and lowered his head. Abe needed no help translating. Defiance. Resistance.

'He maked this at the Jokhang,' Nima explained.

'The big temple in Lhasa,' Daniel added for Abe's benefit.

'Now what?' Abe asked.

'Keep it quiet,' Daniel counselled, inventing by the moment. 'We've got to keep the

L.O. in the dark. As far as he knows, this is just one more yakherder. I think the rest

of the members should know what's going on. But Li can't find out.'

'Everyone?'

'Everyone. Informed consent. If they don't know, they might say something by

accident. And besides, we're all part of it now, and the others have a right to know.'

'Even Jorgens?' Abe asked. 'He'll kick if he knows we're part of some underground

railroad.'

'He doesn't have to like it,' Daniel decided. 'He's part of us, though. We owe him the

truth.'

'Okay then,' Abe said. 'Tell them.'

'And all you have to do is fix him. He's got to get his strength up or he'll never make

it over the pass. If he can't make it over the pass, things will go badly. In these parts,

Tibetan families have to buy the bodies back from the Chinese. Going rate is five

yuan, the price of a bullet. And I don't think this poor guy's got a family to bury him.'

'I'll do what I can.'

Daniel placed one hand on Abe's shoulder. 'Do your best, Abe. Save the ones you can

save. I learned that from you.'

But before Abe could add to it, Daniel had lurched out through the dome entrance to

go and instruct the others.

Abe suddenly found himself wishing that the boy were unconscious again.

Unconscious he had been mute, and mute he had been merely the canvas on which

these bruises and cuts and burns had been painted. But the boy was conscious now

and his story was no longer a fiction. Abe set himself to changing what dressings had

not fallen off and to cleaning the monk's sores and lacerations.

Next morning they had their puja.

The Sherpas made little towers of flour paste and put Oreo cookies and hard candy

on a platter and brought out a few precious bottles of Star beer packed in from

Kathmandu. They started a fire with cedar branches and pine needles that had come

from nowhere within a hundred miles. The sweet white smoke lay over ABC as a

center post was erected. From this post, four fifty-foot-long streamers of prayer flags

were stretched out and anchored in four different directions.

The flags were thin cotton, each dyed a different color and printed with prayers in

square Tibetan script. Despite her irreverence about tulkas yesterday, even Gus

looked pleased and comforted to see the prayer flags get unfurled. While Abe

watched, Kelly stood beside him and explained things. She held one of the cotton

squares still and showed him a crude horse block-printed among the fresh script.

'They call that a lung ta. A wind horse. Every time the wind flaps a flag, the horse

carries a prayer to heaven,' she told Abe. 'They'll keep us safe and sound. All of us.'

The Tibetan boy sat on a small carpet by the center post with white smoke wafting

through the prayer flags overhead. One of the younger Sherpas, Ang Rita, was a lama

initiate back in his home in the Solu Khumbu. He'd either smuggled in the carpet and

the prayer flags for his own use, or else bought them from a yakherder. Kelly didn't

know which.

The tulku chanted and murmured while he turned the narrow pages of an old book.

The puja had the gravity of a mass but the air of a carnival. Through the entire two

hours, the Sherpas and climbers came and went, talking loudly and laughing and

taking pictures.

The ceremony had become more than a puja, Abe knew. It was a binding together.

When Daniel had laid out the monk's sorry tale last night, the climbers had reacted

with Abe's same disbelief, then personalized it. Kelly had teared up. Jorgens had

objected to jeopardizing 'his' climb by harboring a fugitive. Carlos had ranted about

the Chinese overlords. In the end they had agreed with Daniel, though. Silence gained

them everything. The little tulku would have time to heal and finish his escape. The

climbers could climb. And Li would be spared doing his duty.

Carlos originally explained to them that their puja would address Tara, a goddess

associated with compassion. As it developed, the tulku chose a different god for his

ritual, Mahakala. Carlos passed around a small book on Tibetan culture, and Abe saw

the picture of Mahakala. He was intrigued by the monk's selection.

Black and ferocious, the god was a demonic creature with six arms and a rosary of

human skulls. He held numerous weapons and his head was surrounded with a halo of

flames. He was drinking brains from a skull. Abe tried to square the image with his

frail patient. Carlos said it made perfect sense.

'Mahakala – Gompo, to lay Tibetans – he's the Great Black Lord of Enlightenment,'

Carlos said. 'He's a killer, but also a protector. He defends us against selfishness and

slaughters the demons of ignorance. On the Tibetan hit parade of deities, this guy

scores in the top three. He's the perfect symbol of killing the self to achieve

knowledge. Rebirth out of destruction, all that good stuff. With this dude watching

over us, we're double safe, man. It's a good choice. Excellent.'

Nima and Sonam distributed puja strings, blessed pieces of red twine that were tied

loosely around people's wrists or throats. 'You keep it on until it rots off,' Kelly

explained.

'What about Li?' Abe asked. 'What if he sees these strings?'

'We'll just say the truth, that these are our lucky charms. Maybe I'll give him one,

too.'

Abe didn't get a string until the very end.

Closing the long, wooden covers of an old prayer book, the tulku got up on unsteady

legs and came over and tied a red string around Abe's throat himself.

Abe didn't know the Tibetan word for thank you, and so he determined to give a

present in return. All he could think of was a second stethoscope from his medical kit.

But by the time Abe returned from his tent with the stethoscope, the monk was gone.

'Where did he go?' Abe asked Nima.

'I don't know, sir.'

They looked for the boy, but he had disappeared.

The prayer flags stayed up, flapping prayers into the blue sky. And the puja strings

turned dark red from their sweat. Abe figured that he would never see the monk

again. He had vanished outward into that idea called Tibet. He wanted for the monk to

be more than just a voice and this puja string. But that's all that was left.

6

The siege tightened through May.

Camps One and Two had fallen easily, as if the mountain didn't want them anyway.

They took Three in a snowstorm up a long gully filled with slag and junk ice; nothing

difficult, but it took some fight. Four was next, but first they had to pacify a wild mean

narrows dubbed the Shoot, short for the Shooting Gallery. Rocks and loose ice

bombed the Shoot at all hours. No one had gotten hurt yet, but people knew that even

puja strings and prayer flags couldn't hold down the odds for long.

Near the end of April – he'd lost all track of the actual date – Abe headed up the

line, this time humping forty pounds of rope, fuel, two sleeping bags, and five "hill

rats" or two-man-day packets of high altitude rations that were fast-cooking and easy

on the GI tract. The food, gas, and bags were for Three, the rope was for their

continuing drive on Four.

The camps were spaced a day apart from each other. Abe felt strong and could have

pushed from One to Three in a day, but that kind of leapfrogging was a fast track to

exhaustion and edema. He'd noticed how everyone else was saving their physical and

mental reserves for the summit bid, and he saw no reason to ruin himself hauling

heavy on a milk run. He wanted his crack at the top, too, though the closer D day

approached, the more nebulous it became. Some people said a month, most just shook

their heads and talked about something else.

Abe arrived in Three alone. Thomas and J.J. had already spent a day and night

there. It was midafternoon, maybe 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the two men were

putting the final touches on two rectangular box tents. Thomas's crewcut had gone to

seed, but not enough to shield his balding crown, and he had fresh red sunburn on top

of old sunburn scabs. He looked like a thermometer ready to explode. J.J. was

stripped to his muscle shirt: Gold's Gym. Neither man greeted him. They'd been

watching his torturous coming for the last two hours, and by the time of his arrival it

seemed like he'd been among them forever.

This was Abe's first visit to Three, and now he saw for himself the problems he'd

been hearing about. The camp was an aberration. There was no ice or snow to cut tent

platforms into, and the rock lay at a 60-degree angle with no ledges. It would have

been a hopeless site except for the multimillion-dollar Japanese expedition of '87.

With portable drills, anchor bolts and aircraft tubing, the Japanese had constructed a

metal ghetto here, or at least the skeleton of one. The result was four artificial

platforms with flat floors and roofs and perpendicular walls. In its heyday, the camp

would have accommodated up to twelve climbers.

The wind had shredded the nylon walls of each box tent and falling rock had sheared

some of the poles and smashed some of the infrastructure, but in three years Everest

hadn't yet managed to shed this evidence of earlier colonists. Now the Ultimate

Summit climbers had occupied the camp, cannibalizing platforms that were wrecked

to repair and buttress the ones that weren't. It was a vertical shantytown, a

sorry-looking place for such a magnificent abyss.

'Where's Kelly at?' J.J. asked. As a rule, the buddy system was inviolate. It was

peculiar for Abe to show alone.

'Sick,' Abe answered. More and more their language was getting truncated, cut

down to monosyllables their lungs could handle. Sometimes their dialogue sounded

like single-shot gunfire.

'At least she's not knocked up,' Thomas said. 'Let it flow.' His thin Yankee lips sealed

shut again, no sneer, just the sentiment. J.J. gave a small shake of his head, less

reconciled to the tiresome misogyny than Thomas seemed to think. In a flash, Abe

saw a whole lifetime of tiny mundane compromises in J.J., and realized the muscle

man wasn't so much stupid as judicious. For the first time since meeting him, Abe

didn't feel sorry for J.J.

But Thomas was correct, if impolite. Kelly was having her period and that's why she

hadn't made her carry today. By now Kelly's menstrual cycles were common

knowledge, and her cramps were notorious. Still it was none of Thomas's business, or

ought not be, and Abe almost said so. On the other hand, Abe was learning how every

sneeze and hangnail along the route moved up and down to affect the other climbers.

A missed carry could throw the logistics off for days.

Abe contained his annoyance. 'She'll come,' he said. 'Tomorrow.'

Thomas explored the hollow of one cheek with his tongue and looked off to the

north. Behind the bulging grasshopper goggles, his face said, We'll see.

'I'm hungry,' J.J. said. He was inhabiting his usual oblivion and Abe was grateful for

it. Surprisingly J.J.'s simpleminded cheer, so grating at lower altitudes, had become a

definite asset. One didn't want complications up here, and with J.J. you didn't get

them.

'How's it going up above?' Abe asked, indicating the Shoot's entrance.

'It's going,' Thomas grumbled.

'Daniel won't let go of the lead,' J.J. expounded. He seemed pleased J.J. had entered

into a fruitful bondage under Daniel, happy to harness his strength and courage to this

mountain, happier still to be serving under Daniel.

Thomas was just the opposite. A general contractor from northern California, he was

both older than Daniel and more serious about his chains of command. He seemed to

regard Daniel's brilliance in the mountains as an accident, and accidents could go

wrong just as easily as they went right.

'I've seen this before,' Thomas said. 'High altitude kamikazes. You try to keep up

with them. But nobody can. A guy like Corder can use up a whole team before people

say enough. Slow down. And by then it's too late.'

Abe didn't much care for Thomas's certainties and glumness, but the man had

climbed on a dozen expeditions and it would be foolish to discount his authority. 'So

we're going too fast?'

'Too fast?' barked J.J. 'Man, we're short. You can about smell the monsoon. We got

to go fast. We'll go bust without some pedal to the metal.'

'We'll go bust with it,' Thomas said. 'Another week at Daniel's pace, we'll hit empty.

You'll see. Kelly's just the first. He'll waste us all.'

Abe started to say that Kelly was having cramps, not bailing on the climb, but that

didn't change Thomas's basic point. Then he started to say it was all a matter of

degree – to most other people they were all kamikazes up here.

J.J. spoke first, though. 'We came to climb.' He shrugged heavily. 'We're climbing. I

want the Hill. Daniel wants the Hill. We're together.'

'Together?' Thomas squeezed a pair of pliers around a wire clip. 'Corder doesn't care

about together. He couldn't care less about you or me. Or even himself. He's a freak.

And he scares me.'

Just then a slight cloud passed across the sun, instantly reminding them of what was

what. The temperature plunged in a 70-degree gulp. Then the cloud passed and they

were panting and sweating once more. They quit talking. Soon voices came trickling

down from above and the limp orange rope looping across from the Shoot suddenly

came alive, jumping and jerking. People were descending. Daniel would be among

them.

'We've got to take it on our terms,' Thomas closed. 'That's all I'm saying.' Then he

clammed up, and Abe knew the man was more intimidated by Daniel than by the

mountain. Given the mountain's perils, that was a major league fear, and Abe

wondered how many others doubted or feared or maybe even loathed Daniel, too.

As the climbers rapped down, the orange rope twitched and curlicued like a dying

snake. The voices grew louder and Abe heard the tinkling of hardware on a sling. The

climbers sounded close because the Shoot funneled their sounds down, but their

descent took a while. Finally Gus appeared, running rope through the brake at her

belly.

'Hi guys,' she said, and blew a pink bubble of her private stock of Bazooka. She

snapped the bubble hard.

Thomas grunted at her and went back to fine-tuning the guy wires holding the

Japanese platforms together. J.J. greeted her with a lift of his chin, but then his chin

just stayed aloft and J.J.'s mind wandered off in some other direction. The altitude

had whittled their attention spans down to thin parentheses.

They had taken to using Swiss Army knives on their hair, at first snipping away

with the little folding scissors and finally, impatient, opening the long blade to saw

away whole hanks of hair. Under her scratched white helmet Gus's red locks looked

spikey and tattered and for some reason it brought to Abe's mind the scar along her

back. That in turn reminded him of her beautiful silvery front, her round, round

breasts. It seemed long ago, that night in his tent. He dug for some sort of context,

trying to remember if it had been warm beneath the moonlight, how her belly had

been muscled, if perhaps behind her warning there had not been the slightest of

invitations. But none of that mattered, not at these killing heights.

The memory closed itself off. The image of a mysterious moonlit nude vanished. In

its place Abe found himself staring dumbly at this wild, primitive female gnawing gum

and shaking ropes and now picking at a knot jamming her figure-eight brake. She

could have been his sister or his mate or his mother. There was nothing spiritual in

the recognition. She was part of his tribe, it was that simple.

Edging out of the Shoot, Gus undipped from the rope and peered up at activity Abe

couldn't see. She shouted up that the rope was free, then picked her way across to the

precarious campsite.

Close up, Gus looked cooked and shaggy and beat. Her energy and insouciance were

a mascara, Abe saw. They were aging fast up here, and no pretenses of youthful

vitality were going to change that.

Gus wasted no time resting. She poked her head through the door of the uppermost

box tent. Seeing it empty, she slung her pack in and claimed it for her and Daniel. She

got to work firing up a hanging stove to melt ice.

'Jorgens flamed out,' she remarked to anyone listening.

Thomas gave Abe the look: I told you so. Daniel's push was too extreme. 'Spell it

out,' he told Gus.

Gus goosed the butane flame hotter. It would take an hour to melt the ice into

water. Even boiling, the water would only be tepid, a function of the loosened air

pressure.

'No biggie,' Gus said. 'Jorgens needs some drink. Then down. All the way to Base.

The sooner, the better.'

'What happened?' Thomas pressed.

Gus made it short and sweet. 'It was a long day. He's an old man. He won't be back

up again. It's rough as hell up there.'

Abe knew more than the others did. Jorgens had come to him a fortnight ago,

complaining about having difficulty urinating. Though it could have been any number

of things, the problem sounded like an enlarged prostate to Abe. Jorgens had been

crushed by the possibility. 'Why don't you just de-nut me while you're at it,' he'd told

Abe. Then he'd made Abe promise not to tell anyone else, as if Abe wasn't already

keeping everyone's secrets.

'How about Carlos?' Carlos had gone up, too. Now Abe remembered.

Gus pointed down, down, down. Down the Hill, away from the front, out of service.

'He gave it a go. But you know Carlos. He never belonged high in the first place.' Her

glib obituary ignored the sprained ankle hobbling Carlos. Then again, they were all

impaired to some degree. What it came down to was that Carlos had finally

acknowledged his own mortality. And that scared Gus.

'So what I'm hearing is we just lost two guys in a single day?' Thomas said.

Now Gus caught his drift. She cocked her head over. 'No problem, Tom. We still got

you, right?' She went back to feeding ice chips into the pot.

It took another hour for Carlos and Jorgens to show up. The two were in sorry

shape, gray under their blue and sunburn. Jorgens looked dazed and Carlos had no

voice left, and each moved with loose, sloppy duck steps. Daniel was shepherding

them, keeping a sharp eye on the details: what they clipped and unclipped from the

ropes and anchor, how they managed themselves, where they placed their feet. That

was good.

Jorgens and Carlos sat where Daniel sat them, hunched and bleak like famine

victims. Gus brought them the lukewarm water with Kool-Aid and extra sugar in it.

Abe took his cue and checked their pulses and eyes and asked them to count his

fingers. Carlos's helmet was tipped to one side. Jorgens had been drooling into his

beard. Both were in disarray with zippers unzipped and clothing untucked. It was

easy to tell when a person was falling to pieces in the mountains; they came apart at

the seams.

'You guys ready?' Daniel asked the two. It was kindly but stern. There was no

question that they would continue down the mountain.

Carlos gave a game thumbs-up. Jorgens set his jaw, revived enough by the sugar to

realize that he was out for the count. There was bitterness in his eyes, but it wasn't

directed at Daniel. Jorgens was coming to terms with himself.

'You want me to go down with them?' Abe asked Daniel.

Jorgens rejected him instantly. 'The day I need a babysitter...' He winced and looked

off toward the mouth of the Shoot.

'Just the same,' Thomas said. 'I'm going down. We can go together.'

The declaration stunned them. Gus paused in her pouring. J.J. scowled. Even tired

Jorgens snapped his head up in surprise. Thomas descending wasn't part of the plan.

'You're sick?' said Daniel.

'You could say so.' But the way he said it, and his level stare at Daniel, told them

what it was Thomas was sick of. Daniel had rebelled against Jorgens, now Thomas was

rebelling against Daniel. The dominoes were falling.

Abe raced to calculate the implications. Thomas was slated to carry in the Shoot

tomorrow. By dropping out – even for a day – he would deprive them of supplies up

high and bottleneck them down below. It meant that he had eaten hill rats and used

fuel and occupied a space here at Three to do nothing more than fine-tune a couple of

tent platforms. It wasn't good.

Daniel made no attempt to stop him. 'Good idea,' he told Thomas over Jorgens and

Carlos's heads. There was no sarcasm or punishment in his voice.

'The hell...' Gus protested.

Daniel hushed her. 'If the man's sick, we can't use him anyway.'

After more Kool-Aid, Thomas ushered Jorgens and Carlos down the ropes toward

Two. Even moving slowly, it would take them only a couple of hours to descend. The

weather was perfect. As they sank from sight, J.J. said. 'Bummer for Jorgens. There's

no more big mountains in him.'

'Tough,' Gus said, but her voice was empty. With Kelly's no-show and Thomas's bail,

their six-man carry to Four tomorrow was cut to four people.

Daniel said nothing. He just watched the empty depths for a minute, maybe cobbling

together a new strategy, maybe just spacing out. Then he got on with things. They

worked on the camp for another hour, ratcheting nuts, twisting wires, tightening their

grip on the mountain. Daniel prepped a rack of climbing gear, adding some super-light

titanium ice screws he'd purchased on a climbing trip to the Caucasus in the Soviet

Union.

The sun still had an hour when Daniel and Gus crawled into one of the tents and Abe

and J.J. got into the other. The tents were spacious, the floors flat and comfortable.

But when the wind came, the platforms creaked and scratched at the rock. Abe was

afraid as he drifted into sleep. He could feel the abyss under his back.

It was still dark and windy when Abe heard a yakherder's blatting call. He wasn't

dreaming – there wasn't enough oxygen to dip that low into the REM levels – and yet

for a moment he was disoriented and thought their little herder, the monk, might

have returned somehow. The yawp sounded again, and this time Abe knew it was

Daniel in the other tent, waking them all.

By headlamp, Abe and J.J. readied themselves, dressing while the stove flame

roared blue under a pot of ice. It was three o'clock. The mountain would be locked

tight at this hour, frozen to its coldest point of the night. Rockfall would be at a

minimum. Also, Daniel wanted to land at Four today. They had to ascend some eight

hundred feet of rope already fixed in the Shoot before they could finish off the last

three hundred feet of climbing. In J.J.'s thick, slurring SoCal, the day promised to be a

hump and a half. An early start meant everything.

Abe gave his straps and buckles a final tug. The super-gaiters, his helmet, the pack

flap and side pockets, his harness – everything got cinched snug.

'I'm on my way,' J.J. promised, but he was at best only half ready. He had bad

stomach cramps in the morning, and it took him longer than most to gear up. J.J. had

cavalierly diagnosed his distress as a side effect of the anabolic steroids he used. Abe

thought the problem was more likely aspirin. At these elevations the red cells – the

oxygen carriers – multiplied so thickly the blood turned to syrup. The climbers who

chewed aspirin to counter the effect usually ended up with ulcers, bad teeth and epic

constipation.

'See you there,' Abe said, wherever there was. He braced for the cold air and

unzipped the tent door. The cold lashed him across the eyes and he flinched. Then he

got a good look and said, 'God.' Outside the blackness was perforated with a million

stars. There were stars behind the start, a solid carpet of lights. He looked up and

where the carpet ended in a raggedy line, the mountain pronounced its dark domain.

Abe saddled himself. He wanted to keep up with the gang today and had packed for

speed, a manageable but still respectable thirty pounds. Holding on to a handline, he

picked his way horizontally across forty feet of stone to the base of the Shoot. Gus was

already there, similarly burdened.

'Daniel's barfing,' she said to excuse her partner's absence.

'J.J.'s sour too,' Abe said.

Gus slugged Abe softly on one shoulder. 'Then it's you and me, Doc. We'll show these

wimps. They can straggle behind.' Abe felt warmed by her camaraderie. She had read

apprehension. For weeks people had been talking about the horrors of the Shoot. Now

he was about to be exposed to them for the first time. Gus swept her headlamp back

and forth across four ropes lying side by side in the back of the Shoot. There was one

rope for each of the expeditions that had entered this corridor.

With one gloved hand, Gus plucked at the orange rope – the Ultimate Summit stock

– but let it go and tried a second and a third rope. She seemed to be shopping, though

to Abe's mind there was no question, the newest was the best. Then he saw her

dilemma. Overnight the ropes had become coated with transparent ice. They were all

sheathed with verglas.

'Heads up,' Gus said. She took the end of the new orange rope again and swung it

from the wall. Then she cracked it against the stone like a gigantic, ponderous whip.

The ice fractured off and maybe twenty pounds of chandelier glass came tinkling

down, pattering on Abe's helmet and hunched shoulders.

'Dibs,' Gus said, grabbing the first place on the rope. She thumbed open the metal

jaws of her two jumars and clipped them onto the cleared rope. She slid the

uppermost jumar high, then tugged to see if it caught on the downstroke and it did. As

the rope iced up, the jumars would slip now and then, but that was a nuisance, not a

hazard.

Abe didn't mind going second, even though it meant more work. With Abe beneath

Gus, the rope would be weighted and that always made jumaring the ropes – jugging

the line – much easier. But going first was a mixed blessing, because if one of these

ropes was abraded, it would break under her weight first.

Abe felt a twinge of something, shame perhaps, or guilt. The truth was he

appreciated Gus's making herself the guinea pig. He was scared. He knew his nerves

would smooth out eventually. Maybe in an hour or two he could take over jugging the

lead and spare Gus some of the risk.

Gus finished rigging her stirrups to the jumars, then headed up the line. The rope

creaked under her weight. Abe gave her a few bodylengths, then started up behind

her, walking his stirrups up a foot at a time.

The going was slow. Repeatedly the teeth in their jumars caked with rime and the

jaws missed their bite and slipped. Each time one of Abe's jumars fouled, he had to

unclip it and thaw the teeth with his warm breath and clip it back on the rope.

At the top of the first ropelength – or pitch – they rested, standing in their stirrups

since there were no ledges here. Abe leaned his shoulder against the cold rock. The

corridor was only five feet across at this level, and its boxlike sides channeled the wind

straight up between their boots.

'One down, six to go,' Gus said. Shoulder to shoulder, Abe could smell the coffee on

her breath. He checked his watch. It was going on four-thirty. At the rate of a half

hour per rope, they could possibly reach the top of their line by eight or nine.

Abe looked between his knees at the ground. Far below, almost a mile beneath his

boots, the glacier was giving off a phosphorescent glow. Closer in, a tiny headlamp was

bouncing white beams against the corridor's walls and Abe could feel the climber's

movement vibrating in the orange rope. Gus whipped the next rope to clear its ice.

They continued up.

The Shoot's slick stone turned to panels of ice, green beneath Abe's light. They put

on crampons and kicked at the ice, biting it with their front points. The ice squeaked, a

comforting noise that told them the ice was plastic this morning, not brittle. Here and

there the wall lay bare and their crampon teeth scuttered against the exposed rock

and sent out electric sparks, red and blue.

At the top of the second pitch, Abe realized that either his calculations were off or

his watch was. It was nearly six. Already an hour and a half had passed. At this rate, it

would be late morning before they got to the high point. And by then the sun would

have renewed its conspiracy with the mountain. Abe tried not to think of what that

was going to mean.

They went on and on. Dawn broke.

Near eleven the sun painted them with hot light. Abe was already sweating under

the pack straps, deep in his own animalism. Even if he could have thought in full

thoughts, he wouldn't have dared. Ascent hurt too much at these heights. Abe had

never had to fight his own body this way. The aches and pains were bad enough. The

lassitude was worse. He wanted to obey his instincts. He wanted to go down. But that

was unthinkable. He concentrated on brute primary motion. He kept his mind

slave-empty.

Abe lost count of the time, of the ropes, of his pain.

The Shoot opened to thirty feet across, and the ice took on the white marbling of

snow. The angle eased slightly. Tiny balls of snow – sunballs – loosened in the heat

and tumbled in minuscule avalanches that evaporated before they could grow bigger

than a fingernail.

'Look,' said Daniel.

'Huh?' said Abe. He lifted his head to see, but his helmet hit the high crown of his

pack. He shifted the load and cocked his head sideways and indeed, Gus had become

Daniel. Somehow, in the hours since dawn, Daniel had moved from last to first on the

line of ropes. Abe was startled to the extent his apathy allowed. He hadn't noticed the

changing. He couldn't remember passing Gus on the ropes nor Daniel passing him.

One thing was certain, Daniel no longer looked sick. His pack full and his power was

obvious in the way he dominated the ice.

Abe looked off to the right where Daniel was pointing. He blinked. He blinked again.

There was paradise out there. They had climbed so high they could look right

around the mountain and into Nepal.

Off in that far distance lay a land of kaleidoscopic peaks. They poked their summits

up among a white lather of clouds like a chain of bony, carved islands. Even as Abe

watched, wind vacuumed the clouds out from the distant valleys, exposing a

topography of light and dark hollows. The sunlight twisted in strange patterns. A

razor-sharp feather of snow, at least three thousand feet in length, appeared as a

streak of glycerine quick-silver, a divine flourish.

Abe lowered his head to break the spell. He looked at the glacier between his

crampon teeth. It was gleaming like a slick reptile down there, vast, coiled dragon's

vertebrae. He looked back to the south, enchanted, drawn by the promise.

For months now, he had spent his gaze – his belief – upon Everest alone. But here,

this morning with half the Himalayan range unfolded before him, Abe faltered. It

hadn't occurred to him that they might see Nepal before reaching the very summit,

and he hadn't really expected to reach the summit. This unexpected view brought to

mind all that the south represented to him: a diminution of the mountains, a

relinquishing of all that was sharp and vertical and lifeless, a backing away from the

Hill. Out there, he knew, the mountains gave way to foothills and the foothills of Nepal

gave way to India, and India was his doorway. Through her riot of colors and smells

and tangled human energy, he had come here. Through Nepal, then India, he would

return.

As Abe stood sweating in his black windsuit and glittering crampons with taped

jumar handles in each fist and his mouth wide – dumb as an ape and sucking at what

little was left of the atmosphere – he could almost see home. For an instant even, he

could almost see Jamie, and it was almost enough to remember that she was

completely forgotten. Under his helmet, Abe's forehead wrinkled with the nearness of

a memory. Behind his goggles, his eyes gained a glimmer, and he blinked.

It was then, when he was most vulnerable, that the mountain commenced fire.

Abe took the day's first hit.

He wasn't listening, so he wasn't ready. There wasn't even time to flinch. One

moment he was still, feet splayed on the side points of his crampons, swimming

against his riptide of amnesia. The next moment he was hanging limp upon the rope,

harness tight, staring straight into the Egypt eye of the sun. His goggles were askew

on his face. His ears were ringing. His pack straps were creaking, and it came to him

that he was nearly upside down and the pack was dragging the very breath from him.

Just as suddenly, he felt a pair of strong hands hoisting him away from suffocation.

The hands would be Daniel, Abe registered. He felt himself hauled upright and shoved

face first against the slope. Abe was at a loss. First gravity had him, then Daniel did.

He was caught between forces. He tried to fathom what was going on.

'Rock!' Daniel bellowed down the ropes. Far below, someone passed the word, a tiny

voice peeping into the depths. 'Rock. Rock.'

'A rock?' Abe mumbled. He kicked weakly at the ice, finally getting the front points

of his crampons into the ice. Standing up gave him at least a measure of self-control,

more so than just lying helpless and suspended on the rope. He pressed his fingers

under the left edge of his helmet and held them in front of his eyes. It was a

paramedic's habit, not to trust your touch alone. He looked at the wetness on his

fingertip, but the sun had seared his vision and he couldn't see if it was sweat or blood.

Quite certain he was thinking clearly, Abe tasted for blood, but all he got was the filth

off his gloves.

'Rock, ice,' Daniel muttered, fussing with Abe's pack, straightening his goggles, 'at

terminal velocity, it's all the same.' Daniel stank the way they all stank. It verged on

the smell of oiled leather, and Abe breathed it in with relief. He was alive. Whatever

had happened, he was still part of the dream.

The ringing subsided. Abe's vision flooded back in. Daniel was crouched against the

wall beside him, one hand holding Abe firmly by the scruff of his pack. He was peering

upward for more debris. Abe shook the messiness from his head but it was impossible

to tell if he was dazed by the hit against his helmet or by the altitude or just the

adrenaline surge. He drew a string of quick breaths and kicked his crampon points in

and put his weight back onto his feet.

'I'm okay,' he said.

The upper mountain unleashed a second barrage. This time Abe heard the warning

sound, a hybrid whistling and buzzing. Abe gasped, horrified to be caught in the open

like this.

The rocks – or ice or both – skipped hard against a blunt gray spur overhead, and

Abe could hear rocks ricocheting all around with a desolate, predatory humming like

hornets make.

'Jeezis.' Abe squeezed the oath between gritted teeth. He shut his eyes and dug his

head fast against the ice and the plastic clacked on the ice wall. 'Jeez,' he said again.

The rockfall snicked and screamed on every side. Each flashing bit of debris was

hunting along its fall line to gouge them, to break and skin them. Abe knew what

contact looked like. He'd seen people opened up by rocks. He'd seen skulls emptied.

Once his rescue team had found a climber with a fist of quartz inside his abdominal

cavity, no viscera, just that transparent crystal lodged between the pelvic wings.

Something exploded beside him. Abe was showered with slivers of glass. The glass

became ice. It melted on his burning face.

Harm's way, Abe thought. There were so many prayers to dodge it, so many words

to dread it. And here he was courting his own mutilation, a hero with fouled pants.

Yes, he realized. That warm mud in his crotch was his own shit.

Then it was past, at least for the moment. Abe blew air through his nostrils and

unwrapped his grip from the rope. But he still lay flat against the wall, afraid to move,

afraid to look down but more afraid to look up. He'd seen that, too, a climber with

shards of his crushed glacier glasses jutting from one socket.

Daniel was moving, though, blithe to the dangers, craning backward to scan the

upper mountain and survey their people down the Shoot. Abe peeked. A hundred feet

down the ropes, Gus was spidering upward once again, and beneath her another

hundred feet J.J. was on one knee.

Daniel exposed his Kmart wristwatch. 'Clockwork,' he grinned. 'Eleven oh-five. The

daily wake-up call.'

Abe grinned back. He grinned wide. 'Good clean fun,' he said. He wiped the ice melt

off his goggles and rapped a knuckle against his helmet. But for all his bluff pluck, he

still lay fast against the wall. Behind his hell-bent grin Abe could feel his sphincter

seized up and his pants damp. He was gripped.

He'd known fear before, even been nailed by stray rockfall. But this was different.

There was the suddenness of it for one thing, and for another there was Daniel's

nonchalance. It informed Abe that rockfall was a commonplace up here, no more

extraordinary than the dandruff in their tea and Top Ramen, or the blood on their

ragged lips or their fits of delirium.

'You took a hit,' Daniel said. He was offering Abe an exit. There was no dishonor in

retreat, not for the wounded.

Abe rejected the offer. 'I'm good,' he said. It hadn't been so bad. No damage down,

and they needed him to hump the load. He would go on.

Daniel was pleased. Abe could tell by the way he nodded and the set of his jaw. They

were together now. They were brothers. 'We're there.' Daniel pointed. 'Our high

point.'

Abe saw an outcrop of gray stone fifty feet higher. A mass of coiled rope and parked

gear hung from pitons driven into a crack.

'From here it's only another couple hours,' Daniel estimated. 'I can lead it fast. We'll

be okay at Four. It's a cave.'

'Yeah,' said Abe. Daniel was double-checking his morale. All for one, one for all. The

fear had seemed huge and catalyzing and significant, but now Abe buried it deep.

They moved up the rope and nestled beneath the outcrop. It wasn't much of an

abutment, but it was enough. They would be protected from rockfall here.

Abe peeked around the corner at the remainder of the Shoot without learning much.

The corridor took a bend and there was no sight of Camp Four. There was no more

orange rope up there. The Ultimate Summit had not yet made its mark above this

stone.

While Abe shook out a coil of new rope and Daniel tightened the wrist loop on his ice

axe, another hail of stone and rotten ice came slashing down.

'Rock!' he shouted down the line.

This time Abe had nothing to fear. He hid behind the outcrop and the rockfall

whined and hummed past harmlessly. With a curious detachment, he watched first

Gus then J.J. react. Gus balled tight with her armadillo technique. J.J. cumbrously

turned his pack upslope to let it take any beating. Everyone had theories on how to

survive a rockfall.

The debris skipped left, mostly strafing empty air. Here and there puffs of ice

smoke showed where rocks barked the wall. After a minute Gus and J.J. started

jumaring again. Abe was impressed with how slow and tiny they appeared, even

though they weren't so far below. The mountain had miniaturized them. They looked

trivial and expendable.

Daniel started up the Shoot, trailing a rope. Hanging from the rack crossing his

chest, his Soviet ice screws tinkled dully. He wasn't carrying much in the way of

protection. He didn't need to, he was that good.

The sun continued to plasticize the ice, softening it for Daniel's toe plants – quick,

powerful kicks to seat his front points. He flicked the tip of his ice axe into the

mountain with the finesse of a switchblade fighter, every motion surgical and

understated. Abe had never seen an ice climber operate so economically. Where most

climbers hammered at the ice for deep purchase, flailing and overdriving their tools,

Daniel seemed content to stroke it, scarcely entering the ice at all.

As Daniel advanced, Abe fed him rope through a brake mechanism. If the leader fell,

the second was supposed to catch him. Daniel wasn't the type to fall, however, which

freed Abe to gaze at Nepal and stare into the abyss. Time bent around him. From his

little perch, ABC was much too small to see and all the other camps were out of sight.

He tried guessing where Base might lie along the glacial tendrils, but the Tibetan

plateau swallowed his estimations whole. He had the sense of having climbed right out

of the world.

After another half hour, Gus reached the outcrop, groping for air like some chemical

warrior. While she was bent over, gasping and coughing, Abe clipped her pack off to a

runner sling attached to the anchor and helped her from the straps. Gus recovered

enough to straighten up.

Down below, J.J. was approaching with amazing torpor. He had the dense,

coagulated motions of a deep sea diver. He would slug his way up a few steps, then

hang on the rope for minutes at a time, paralyzed by the thin air. Then he would move

again. His progress was pained, but Abe felt no pity. He just watched. It was like

watching a bug move.

Daniel's rope slid through the brake with little pause. Abe snuck a glance around the

outcrop, but Daniel was already out of sight up the corridor.

Another rockfall shelled them. Gus huddled against Abe under the outcrop. J.J. was

still two hundred feet down, still exposed. He turned with all the speed of a tortoise.

He completed his turn just in time to take a rock square against his pack. It made a

pillowy thud and J.J. was promptly plucked from his stance. He swung out from the

wall and bounced across the slope. J.J. didn't shout out or scramble for cover. There

was no cover. He simply turned his pack upslope and took a second hit and swung

again. Then the rockfall was down. He twisted around and resumed his reptilian

progress.

'Piece of gum?' Gus asked. Abe nodded yes. He was parched. The sun was

unmerciful. What little water he had left in his bottle had to last until they reached

Four and could melt more. That could be many hours. Water, water, everywhere, he

thought, and leaned against the blazing ice.

Gus gave him a pink chunk of her Bazooka with the exaggerated care wall climbers

use to hand things back and forth. It was soft from her body heat. 'You owe me,' she

said.

Abe chewed carefully because his teeth had begun to loosen. Mostly he sucked at

the sugar. It revived him from his stupor, then dropped him back into it all over again.

He wondered if the chunk of rock or ice had given him a concussion. He felt all the

more tired and debilitated seeing Gus's animation. A nap would have been nice.

'You're on,' Gus said. Daniel's voice was chirping down at them from the Shoot.

Neither could hear what he said but both knew what he meant. It was showtime.

Abe kept his dread mute and worked into the pack straps. He wanted to stay under

this outcrop for the rest of his life. He loved this stasis, this bombproof sanctuary, and

this piece of wet gum on his sunburned tongue.

'Want me to go?' Gus prodded him. She didn't want to go either.

'Photosynthesis,' Abe said, trying to make a joke of his inertia. Gus gaped without

comprehending. He clipped his jumars onto Daniel's rope and left the outcrop,

ascending with all the speed he could muster. Daniel couldn't safely advance until Abe

arrived to belay him and tend his climbing rope. Every minute wasted was another

minute Daniel could be investing in their reach for Four. More to the point, every

wasted minute exposed Abe to more rockfall. The wall's angle eased slightly. Abe let

his quadriceps take the brunt of the toil.

The Shoot curved left. Daniel came in view. Above him the corridor seemed to

extend without end. Abe despaired at that. He'd hoped the Shoot was nearly played

out. He reached a little ledge and Daniel helped him out of his pack.

'Damn, Abe. You're running heavy.'

For the first time all day, Abe was glad he hadn't lightened his load. It was a good

respectable carry and it was plain that Daniel appreciated that. For all its brute

danger and hard labor, today was going to turn out well after all. No climber can know

in advance how well he will perform at high altitude. Abe was performing. He

belonged.

Abe had meant to ask how far it was to Four. After Daniel's praise, he didn't. They

would get there when they got there. At any rate, Daniel answered without being

asked. 'See it?' he grunted.

Abe looked. Less than eighty feet overhead stood the mouth of a cave. It opened in

the rock like a desert miracle. Only one rope led up to the cave. It looked very old and

most of it lay buried within the ice wall. Daniel had already opened a coil of new rope

to climb with and fix at the cave entrance. One end was tied to his harness.

'How about that,' Abe marvelled. His words rasped out, no saliva left. He couldn't

remember spitting out the gum, then found it lodged inside his leathery cheek. It

might be okay to drink the last of his water now. They were almost there.

The rope Abe had just ascended began jerking. That would be Gus coming up.

'I'll just run this pup out, fast like,' Daniel said. He was cranking one of his precious

Soviet ice screws into the ice to bolster their belay anchor. The screws were only six

inches long, stubby with threads coiling around the exterior of the tube. Inside his

beard, he had weariness cut in deep lines besides his mouth. 'Ten more minutes and

we're home.' He started off.

Abe could see the cobalt sky between Daniel's outstretched legs. He was moving

quickly, especially for a man nearing 26,400 feet. Among climbers, 8,000 meters

marked the border between what was mortal and ordinary and what was something

more. Back in Boulder, Abe had been awed at the very prospect of grappling his way

into that fabled region. Now that he was here, over twice as high as Mount Olympus,

8,000 meters seemed impoverished, hardly Olympian. Far from anointing them, the

mountain had reduced them to virtual idiots, with spit on their faces and shit in their

pants and scarcely enough wind in their lungs to complete a full sentence. He tried to

remember what treasure he'd come to find. Everest was supposed to have bestowed

on him all the sacraments in one, baptizing and confirming and confessing him all at

once. But the only blessing he was likely to return home with was a piece of red string

tied around his throat by an epileptic in yak skins. So much for glory, he thought, and

paid out more rope to Daniel.

Daniel scooted up fifty, then seventy feet. He didn't bother placing any protection.

Setting an ice screw took time, and besides the Shoot was laid back now at a relatively

comfortable 70-degree angle. For a climber of Daniel's abilities it was next to

impossible to fall from such a plane.

Just the same, Daniel fell. In truth he was shoved. Shot. Ambushed by the Yeti.

It was a lone piece – rock or ice, all the same thing. Abe never heard it. He was

watching, but all he saw was Daniel suddenly kicked backward into space. He didn't

touch the slope for a full ten feet, the shock was that powerful, and when he did it was

to glance off and fly another five feet.

Abe was sure he had no more adrenaline left after their long, hot gauntlet of rockfall.

But he did and it jolted him with a chemical voltage that bulged his vision and sped his

mind and turned his hands into vise grips. He locked down on the rope. He stared

hard at the sure death of an alpinist.

Daniel skipped twice more on the ice and by that time he was halfway down to Abe.

There was no time to react really. Abe made a try at pulling in some of the slack rope,

but it piled in wild serpentine loops over his arms and shoulders.

Minus the ten or fifteen pounds they had all lost on this expedition, Daniel still

weighed a good one-eighty. With the instantaneous wisdom a catastrophe inspires,

Abe knew the man would strike him with a gross force approaching a ton or more.

Abe's sole hope was to be missed. And to hold on to what was in his hands. And to

pray that the anchor would hold, that the world would not let him go.

Daniel neared. Abe could hear his Gore-Tex windsuit hissing on the ice. Then he

heard the metal chattering of Daniel's ice axe beating loose against the wall, and a

loose ice tool was like a chainsaw amok.

Abe's lips peeled back from his teeth. Now it was clear what he had come so far to

face, not the summit but the abyss. It wasn't Daniel's death he was witnessing, but his

own.

And then Daniel was past. He sliced within inches, close enough so that one crampon

tooth ripped a neat gash down Abe's right arm. He heard the fabric unzip. When the

opening burned – when it sluiced a line of blood against the ice – he knew the fabric

had been his flesh parting.

But his wound and his pain were beside the point. The anchor could not hold. Not

against this kind of momentum. Here was chaos. Here was the world unpiecing itself

at a speed beyond all reckoning. All the same at terminal velocity.

Abe wondered if it would seem this fast all the way down. He wondered how deep

into the pit he would stay alive. Sometimes people went all the way without losing

consciousness. Sometimes they lived for a while, tucked down a crevasse, say. He

remembered that Gus was on a rope that was anchored to him. And J.J. was on a rope

attached to her. They would all go, tangling into a ball of bloody yarn. The glacier

would eat them. In a hundred years someone would find what was left. Abe was sorry

for the others. He was sorry for himself.

The loops of rope draped across his arms began vanishing, one by one. He didn't

follow Daniel's descent with his eyes. He just stared at the anchor. He counted four ice

screws. They had been so close. A drink of water, that's all he'd really wanted. The

rope whipped away from his arms. For a moment there was peace.

The peace shattered. Abruptly Abe heard a howling.

It was himself. He was filling the void with a cushion of sound. Here was his precious

sacrament then, all he was going to get, last rites.

In that millisecond of acceptance, the rope came taut. Abe's hands flew from their

grip. The ice wall sprang into his face, smashing against his helmet. One – then two –

then three – ice screws blew free like rivets in a submarine bottoming out.

But the last screw held. For no good reason but the faith that had placed it – Daniel's

faith, not his – the titanium ice screw stayed firm.

Abe was saved.

He returned to himself tenuously. He took his time. He trusted nothing. Until he

touched it all with his fingertips, piece by piece, he could not take for granted even

that single bent ice screw with the mass of ropes and loose screws dangling from it.

Even then he hardly dared to trust that he'd survived.

For a space of time, Abe simply drew in perceptions and let his senses sort through

them. His goggles were still intact and the light filtered through with the color of new

lettuce. The still air was moving now, bringing with it a whiff of the solar winds just

beyond their tissue of stratosphere. In the ice dust from the blown anchor holes, Abe

could smell time itself, geological afterbirth. He felt the breeze cooling his face, listened

to it whistling through the stem of Daniel's good ice screw. His right forearm hurt, but

the pain was ritual, bearable. He held the hurt with his left hand. From a great

distance, he watched the blood running through the sleeve and between fingers that

were his.

In that dazed state, Abe sat on his ledge. Head back against the ice, he stared into

the blankness of Tibet. He might have dozed.

At some point Daniel appeared. The black-haired ghost rose up along the newest of

the ropes, seeming no worse for the wear. Abe knew that couldn't be so, not after such

a fall. On second glance, he saw that this figure was moving slower than the old Daniel.

But that was to be expected from a dead man.

'Abe?'

Abe didn't answer. He knew the mountain was playing a trick on him. Starved for

oxygen, the human brain freely invented its own fictions, populating the world with

angels and demons and other imaginary beings. High altitude climbers often reported

a third man on a rope for two. They would talk aloud to their guest. They would cook

food for him.

'Are you okay? Look at your arm.'

Abe ignored the hallucination.

'It hit you too?'

'No,' Abe said. 'That was you.'

The apparition sat down beside Abe on the little ledge.

'Man. What a ride.'

'Now what,' Abe said aloud. He didn't mind the company, but he wasn't speaking to

it. He was talking to himself, company enough.

'How about one more go?' Daniel asked. 'We were so close. And I saw something. Up

in the cave. It might be good.'

'Sure,' said Abe.

'Or we can go down.'

'No,' Abe decided. 'Up. It might be good.'

'Can you belay?'

'Of course.'

For the next space of time, Abe belayed the ghost. He fed rope out with his good

arm.

Gus appeared. She was quite ugly now, but beautiful too.

'Hi, Gus,' Abe said.

'What's this shit?' Gus gasped. Abe followed her gaze. She was staring dismayed at

the anchor. It was in near ruins – a lone, bent screw – and she had just trusted her life

to it. Abe tried to see it from her perspective. He could have repaired the anchor. At

least he could have warned her. He felt a little bad about that. On the other hand he

couldn't say if she was any more real than Daniel. How odd, he thought. Even in death,

Daniel was somehow their higher standard.

Then Gus noticed the blood heating in a small pool on the glassy ledge. She knelt

beside Abe and peered inside his ripped sleeve.

'We have to get you down.'

'No. Up,' said Abe.

'Where's Daniel at?' she said. 'Does he know you're like this?'

'He fell.'

'No,' Gus determined. 'He's okay. Up there. He's in the cave.'

From above, Abe heard Daniel's voice. 'Abe. You can come on now.' Showtime again.

'What happened here?' Gus said.

'It doesn't matter,' Abe said.

Daniel's voice moved between them. 'Gus. Can he climb?'

'Are you kidding?' Abe could tell she was mystified and angry. He wondered idly

how it would be to kiss those torn lips smeared white with zinc oxide. She was his

angel. 'He has to go down,' Gus reiterated.

'It's a thousand feet down,' Daniel argued. 'Only one pitch up.'

'But he's hurt. He's in shock.'

Not so bad, Abe thought. In most respects, it was pleasant sitting here at Gus's

knees with the planet curving on the north horizon.

'There's a camp here,' Daniel said. 'It will be dark soon. We're best here.'

'I thought I belonged,' Abe confided to Gus. 'I'm sorry.'

'That's all right,' Gus said. 'Can you stand?' Abe stood.

'Let me check your jumars. And your harness. And fix this helmet.' She was trying

to take charge here. Abe could tell she was thinking of many things. 'Daniel,' she

shouted up the wall. 'Abe's pack. Can you pull it up on a rope?'

'I don't think so,' Daniel answered.

'No problem,' Abe said. He reached for his pack, his pack of wonderful heaviness. He

had hauled so much so high and there was only this eighty feet more to go.

'Leave that,' Gus said. 'I'll bring it up. Can you climb?'

Abe made his way up. It was much, much easier without the weight on his back. His

wings were freed. He could fly.

Daniel met him at the mouth of the cave. The cave was almost supernaturally

perfect for human occupation. The floor was flat, the ceiling was seven feet high, and

the walls were spaced wide enough to admit the two tents that were standing side by

side. One was a faded peach color, the other was still orange. The cave wasn't very

deep, maybe fifteen feet, and it looked like some equipment had been parked in the

very rear.

'Maybe you should lie down,' Daniel said.

'I'm fine.' Abe was enchanted. He had entered another dimension in here. Outside

there had been no respite. But here there was an inside to the mountain. There was a

sanctuary not only from the rockfall and the crucifying sunlight, but also from the

relentless verticality. He took a few prickly steps forward atop his two-inch crampon

teeth. The floor was flat. He couldn't get over that. He had forgotten what it was like

to stand on a horizontal surface.

'We lucked out,' Daniel said. 'Look at all this stuff. The Kiwis just left it all.'

Both tents were zipped shut, both were intact. Neither had so much as a tear in the

fabric or a split in the seams. In contrast to the Ultimate Summit's fancy dome tents,

these were old-style triangular structures with guy lines and center poles, the kind

that required daily attention or else they collapsed. But years had passed and these

tents were standing whole. Their spines were tight, not an inch of sagging, and their

walls drummed to Abe's finger tap. They could have been pitched yesterday.

Yellow urine stains to the side of each tent looked fresh. Empty food cans and paper

wrappers lay loose in nooks and crannies of the cave, unperturbed by so much as a

breeze. Ropes lay piled in limp butterfly coils, ready for use. Behind the tents, in the

deepest recesses, heavy oxygen bottles were stacked like firewood, and red stuff

sacks contained windpants and sweaters and personal gear – a Led Zeppelin tape, a

can of sweet condensed milk, a photo of a woman.

Tucked in this squared-off pocket of stone, the camp was free of the hazards that

normally plague Everesters. No falling rock or ice in here, no avalanches, no wind,

apparently not even the passage of time. In here the sanctuary was complete.

'Let's sit down,' Daniel said.

Abe sat in the open doorway of the faded peach tent. The air pads were still

buoyant. Tears of happiness welled up at this luxury of sitting on a thing that was soft

in a place that was safe. They were out of danger. Nothing could hurt him anymore.

'Pretty wild out there,' Daniel said. He turned from the cave mouth and carefully

eased himself to sitting beside Abe in the tent. He grimaced. Abe knew he would.

Abe's muscles and joints were stiffening. His arm wound was starting to burn. It was

logical that this hallucination would reflect his hurt.

Side by side, Abe sat with his other. They didn't talk. Eventually Gus appeared at

the cave entrance, wheezing for air. The outside had gone dark gold. The sun was

setting.

Gus pulled down her goggles and cast her fresh green eyes across them. Abe saw

that she had carried a double load, tying his pack on top of hers. Without ceremony,

she dumped the gear against one cave wall.

'Now what the hell's going on, Daniel,' she demanded. She was angry. She didn't like

mysteries.

'The mountain whacked me,' Daniel said. 'I whacked Abe.'

Close enough Abe thought, though his own telling of it would have elaborated on the

ferocity of sunbeams upon a rock in ice, the gentle unlocking of noisy fate.

'So fix him,' Gus said. 'Don't just sit there.'

'Gus...' Daniel held out his hands with a gesture of helplessness. That was the first

Abe saw of the flayed palms. Daniel's hands were laid open and bleeding. They needed

help, he and Abe.

Gus didn't hesitate. 'AH right then,' she breathed. There was work to do and no one

but her to do it. She set aside her own weariness. Abe saw the tired resolve in her

eyes.

Gus started three stoves and cut ice for water with the adze of her axe. She worked

on Abe first, stripping off his torn black wind shell and rolling up his sweater sleeve to

expose the incision. It was deep. Abe looked in when Gus opened its lips.

'You're the doctor,' she told him with a question mark on her face. She had his jump

kit spread out on the ground, all his trauma equipment and meds.

Abe was tempted to remark on the brightness of her eyes. That was all that came to

mind. She was a masterpiece.

Gus frowned at his staring and said, 'You're fucking useless, Abe.' But she wasn't

angry. Abe was glad for that because he loved her, she was his sister, too, just as

Daniel was his brother. She customized a crude, bulky patch job on his arm. It turned

red through the white cotton. Abe knew he ought to be concerned, but couldn't figure

out why. He had begun to shiver in great spasms.

'Daniel?' Gus pleaded.

Daniel was watching from the side, his back slumped, palms bleeding. He was fading.

'There's oxygen,' he told Gus.

'No, Daniel. There's not. We didn't bring any.' Oxygen usually came up in later loads

after more fundamental needs were met, such as food, fuel to make water, and

shelter. And today they'd been stripped for speed, carrying mostly ropes and a single

night's needs, and that didn't mean toothbrushes. Or air.

'The Kiwis,' Daniel said. He was hurting more now. His voice was getting smaller.

'Back of the cave. Hook him up.'

Gus crawled over Abe to the back and unzipped the rear flap of the tent. A wealth of

goods lay stacked in neat piles. The oxygen was in two gleaming upright tanks. Gus

manhandled one of the bottles and found a regulator and mask, then zipped the door

shut and returned to Abe's side.

When she fitted it to his face, the mask smelled like old food, and then Gus started

the flow. Immediately Abe heard the oxygen flooding through the mask. Warmth

crept through his limbs, and with it came a blossoming awareness. The afternoon's

surreality drifted away like a rare gas. He was bleeding and would have to be sewed.

He'd possibly suffered a concussion and should descend. Daniel was hurt and needed

examining. And they were all near collapse from the long day. Clearly he had to help.

But he was so tired.

Abe lifted the mask away. 'What about J.J.?' In all his sorting out the dead, he'd

forgotten the living.

'J.J. bailed.' Gus's voice had sunk to a slur. 'Stashed his load. Rapped away.'

So it was just the three of them. Abe wiggled the mask against his face, the slip loops

tight, the air bladder snapping rhythmically. His head dipped down toward its pillow,

Gus's lap. The wind had ignited outside. But here, inside, there was not a breeze. Just

the three of them. Safe.

'I wish we had the radios,' Gus murmured, slumping against Abe and Daniel. 'They

should know. We need them.'

Together, heaped against one another, they did the worst thing possible. They let

down their guard and fell asleep.

Abe woke with a start, struck by the image of Daniel falling toward him. He threw

up his arm and there it was again, the slashing pain. Abe cried out, but his cry was

muffled.

He found the face mask wet with his own exhaled breath. Someone had turned on a

headlamp, then dropped it to the floor. Its batteries were freezing up and the light

was jaundiced. Abe lifted his head. In another setting, under different light, the scene

might have been fraternal, even erotic, the three of them lovingly entangled. Beneath

this sick yellowish beam, however, they looked like three corpses dumped into a

common grave. Daniel lay flopped on one side, arms outstretched to keep the pain in

his hands at bay. Gus was slumped against him. The gauntness in their faces carried

surrender.

'No,' Abe groaned. He forced himself upright. For a full five minutes he just sat, dully

pulling at the oxygen in his mask. Then he clawed the mask from his face and leaned

toward Daniel.

'Here.' He pressed the mask to Daniel's mouth, closing away the bared teeth, the

black beard. The mountain had begun to mineralize the climbers, coloring them like

stone. Now, before Abe's eyes, Daniel's cheeks took on a flush and the beds of his

fingernails washed pink.

'Gus,' Abe said. Her eyes barely opened and Abe drew back, unnerved by the oxen

dumbness in her gaze. He shook her. 'Gus, wake up. We have to wake up.' Her eyes

glazed over and closed.

Abe's watch said 12:35. Past midnight. He winced at the impossibility of that. The

mountain was voracious and they were in its very belly. But where Jonah could afford

to wait it out, they could not. By dawn they might never wake again.

Abe unlocked his stiff joints and crawled to the rear of the tent. By the dimming

light, he unzipped the door and found two more regulators for oxygen sets. He

screwed the pieces together with his good hand and bayonet-mounted the masks and

dragged the assembled sets back in. He strapped a mask to Gus's face and one to his

own and cranked the flow to its full six liters per minute, not much by paramedic

standards but the maximum for these mountaineering regulators. With his portable

Gamow bag, Abe could have dropped them to a pressure relative to 12,000 feet

elevation in a matter of ten minutes. But that was down below. On oxygen alone, the

climbers all descended several thousand feet anyway, a temporary relief.

With everyone 'sucking O's,' Abe scooted forward to address the water situation.

The stoves had burned out while they slept, so he fished out three full cartridges and

started new fires. He worked with the slow deliberation of a drunk. The oxygen was

sobering, but with the pain in his arm wound and the stiffness in his limbs and his

diarrhea and the bronchitis and all his other woes, the high altitude hangover was

wracking.

Gus revived before Daniel did. Finally all three of them were sitting upright,

hunched close among their piles of sleeping bags and parkas and boots and overpants

like sadsack figures in a Beckett play. The wind was roaring past the cave's entrance,

but in here the tent walls didn't even ripple. It was as if the mountain had wanted

them to slumber undisturbed, on and on.

'We have to get down,' Abe said. First it had been Daniel in charge, then Gus. Now it

was his turn. He had to manage this emergency. Gus had said it: He was the doctor.

He loosened the slip loop around his head and pulled the mask down so that his words

were unobstructed.

'We have to go down,' he repeated. The altitude had eviscerated them. They had to

descend and regroup. They had reached their limit this round.

'We're close.' Daniel's words were muffled by his mask, but his eyes were glittering

with summit fever. He was happy. They had pushed far and even if descent was in

order, there was still time to come back and break through Everest's glass ceiling. The

route's most serious obstacle, the Shoot, was now tamed. They had captured it with

their ropes and it was open to passage. From here to the summit was only another

2,500 vertical feet, a matter of one more camp, maybe two, a week or a fortnight, no

more, and suddenly it seemed they were very close indeed.

'Close,' Abe agreed. 'But we have to go down.' Descent was imperative. They had

wounds to lick. And with Jorgens and Carlos out of the picture, and Thomas on his

mutiny, the entire effort had to be reassessed. Even if the team could pull together

the numbers for a summit bid, it didn't have the strength just now. Plainly they had to

get down to Base Camp, all of them. Only then could they hope to launch the final

assault. To continue on in their condition was simply to hand the mountain three

victims.

'Yes,' Gus said. 'Down.'

'We'll come back,' said Abe.

'Yes,' Daniel said.

'Let me see your hands.'

Daniel held out his palms. Abe hissed inside his mask. On each hand, the flesh lay

peeled open in long flaps. He cleaned the flaps and laid them in place and wrapped

each hand with white tape. He used a special pattern favored by boxers and jam crack

climbers, thick across the palm, strung between the fingers. Daniel would need all the

extra padding possible for the long rappel back to ABC tomorrow.

'Anything else?' Abe asked. He knew there was. Daniel had been favouring his left

side ever since arriving at Four.

Daniel removed his jacket and pulled up his sweater and shirts. Wrapped partway

round his rib cage stood a livid bruise the size of a watermelon. The rock had bounded

between his arms, just missing the abdominal cavity. A little more to the center, the

rock might have punched in a whole section of the chest wall: flail chest sternum. At

this height a flail chest would have killed him hours ago.

Abe prodded at Daniel's huge rib cage. 'Is this tender? Here? Here?' As he probed

and interrogated, Abe took stock. A gruesome furrow tracked along Daniel's spine and

there were purplish surgery scars on his shoulder and the half-moons where they'd

gone after the tendinitis in his elbows. There were other old marks on his arms and

hands, and compared to these gouges and furrows and purpled seams, Abe's own

climbing scars looked like the hesitation marks of a fake suicide.

'Could be some hairline cracks,' he said.

'Probably just bruised,' Daniel said.

'You're lucky,' Abe said. He closed Daniel's jacket and started to lay an oxygen mask

over his mouth, but Daniel took hold of his wrist.

'I wondered about you,' he said.

Abe felt his heart sink. At long last, this was it. But why was Daniel choosing to

resurrect the past in this midnight storm so far above the earth? Their shared past

could easily wait. For that matter, it could go unspoken altogether. Half a lifetime had

passed without Abe feeling this need to dredge up the memory. What did it matter.

Because it's there? he wryly thought.

Above her mask, Gus was frowning. There was an alarm in her eyes, though Abe

allowed that could have been a trick of the light. She started to shake her head.

'I wondered what you'd be like,' Daniel said.

'Then you remembered me,' Abe said. The words billowed from his mouth, cold

layers of frost. He lifted the mask and took a deep draw.

'No. But later they told me. There was a wild kid who stayed through the end.'

'That was me.'

For a minute neither of them spoke, then Daniel did. 'It must have been spooky up

there all alone.'

There had been a time when Abe had meant to say something like that to Daniel.

But Daniel stole the march and now Abe was obliged to answer.

'I wasn't alone,' he reminded Daniel.

'They told me you went crazy,' Daniel continued. 'You quit school. You disappeared.'

This wasn't going the way Abe had thought it would. 'It wasn't that dramatic,' he

said. 'I had to think, that's all.'

'Yeah,' Daniel said.

There was no thanks. No explanation. Abe felt outmaneuvered. He had meant to

ask Daniel what he'd done with the girl's haunting voice, and maybe this was his

answer, that for him there had been no voice or at least no haunting, just a day and a

night of prayer and broken knees and then the peace of morphone and a ride out in

the litter. But Abe didn't believe it was that simple.

'And I heard about your visit,' Daniel said.

Abe looked away.

'You went to her mother's. It took a while to get it all figured out. But we figured it

out. Some kid with wire-rims and a swamp drawl. You.' Daniel paused. 'In the middle

of the night? You terrified her.'

'I know.' Abe barely heard himself.

'She was already out of her head.'

'Yes.'

Behind the mask, Abe bit at his torn lips. This was the part that shamed him. All

over again he remembered the windblown trailer park outside Rock Springs and near

the back of a lone trailer with a burned-out lightbulb over a makeshift porch. It had

been late spring, a cold Wyoming night with no stars, and right through the aluminum

paneling he had heard a dog barking inside and footsteps as she came to the door.

Abe felt old vertigo now, just the way it had been when the old woman's voice had

asked who it was through the door. And then the handle had turned and the door had

opened. Abe felt himself spinning desperately with no solid footing. He could feel Gus's

eyes on him. She had not heard this story yet. Her confusion was becoming wonder,

though. She had pulled off her face mask, too. The oxygen has suffused her features

with color, highlighting their ravages.

'But why?' Daniel said. He seemed genuinely perplexed. Probably he had been angry

about it once, maybe he still was. But right now what Abe heard was pure curiosity.

Indeed, thought Abe. All he'd gotten were more tears and more heartbreak. What

more had he thought there was to get? 'I wondered, that's all. I was seventeen. I could

hear her voice. But I'd never seen her face.'

'But why?'

Abe shrugged helplessly.

'We didn't tell her about how long Diana lived,' Daniel said. 'We didn't tell her for a

reason. She didn't know, not until you came along.'

'I know.' Abe remembered how her eyes had grown wider, but by then it had been

too late to stop and he'd told everything. He had put her through the whole tale. She

hadn't said stop so he'd made her die all over again with her dead daughter.

'It was bad enough,' Daniel murmured.

'I know.'

The three of them huddled there for another few minutes while the hanging

cookstoves roared with blue flames and the wind thundered past like a waterfall and

their words settled as cold vapor onto their worn-out hands.

At last Abe spoke. 'I'm sorry,' he whispered. Was this why he'd come then? Yet it

didn't feel like reason enough.

'Now I know,' Daniel whispered back.

Sitting stock-still in the tent crammed with gear and injured humanity, Abe could

feel the chaos gathering all around him. Captured by a voice from long ago, he had

caused suffering that came from the suffering Daniel had caused, merely by taking a

risk. Neither he nor Daniel had ever meant to bring hurt into the world. And yet

neither of them could seem to exist without the pain. How strange, thought Abe. How

sad.

Then Gus spoke up. 'That's all there was to it?' She looked shocked.

'It was enough,' Daniel said.

'Enough?' she spat. 'But that's nothing.'

Daniel was unprepared for her outburst. 'What is it you want, Gus?' He glanced at

Abe, who was equally baffled.

'You guys,' she snorted, indignant. 'All this time it's been like, Jesus, one killed the

girl, the other ate her heart. I thought, these two guys, they must have shared a great

sin. Or sacrament. Something. Something bigger than this.'

She didn't understand, Abe realized. Or maybe she did. She had expected whatever

it was that bound Daniel to Abe – and through Abe, to the darker obsession – to be

profound. Yet all he and Daniel had revealed was a memory of the aftermath. To Gus,

it must have sounded like two old men trading tired gossip.

'It was between Abe and me,' Daniel tried to explain. 'It had nothing to do with you.'

'No?' She was angry now, a feat in this cold tent. 'Years now. Years, I've been

fighting her ghost for you.'

She turned on Abe. 'Remember? In the beginning I was afraid of you.'

Abe remembered the night in his Base Camp tent, but he wouldn't have termed her

warning shot 'afraid.' Before he could reply, she returned her attention to Daniel.

'I told him to stay away from you. I thought he'd dig her up and bring her back to

life. But I was wrong. Abe couldn't have brought her back. Because you never buried

her.'

Daniel fell silent.

'I live with her. In our house. In our bed. Yes, you talk to her in your sleep, Daniel.'

She drew at the air for breath. 'And now I come onto the mountain and she's here, too.

Her name, her ghost. And it has nothing to do with me?'

Gus glared at them both. Then her eyes started to glaze and her flesh darkened

with cyanotic blue. Her anger thinned out.

'Look, Gus,' Daniel murmured, 'I'm sorry.'

'Not as sorry as I am.'

Peeled back, her anger was pity and love, Abe marveled.

She lifted the mask back to her face. The wind's thunder took over.

Abe twisted away. One of the pots of water was ready. They shared, speechless, and

started more ice over the flame. It would go on like that until dawn, Abe knew. They

would eat and drink until it was safe to descend. No more sleep. No more words. Not

tonight, not in this dangerous place.

7

At dawn, standing at the cave mouth in streamers of cold light, Daniel changed his

mind. Abe was goosing his harness good and snug around his loins, and Gus was

resting on her knees, pacing herself for the long descent back to ABC and from there

down to Base for some rest.

'I don't get it,' she murmured. 'So tired.' No mystery there, Abe thought. Even

willpower could run out of steam.

Just behind Daniel, their orange line plunged off into the black depths. No rope led

upward into the sun, not even old Kiwi or Japanese stock buried under the green ice,

because Four was the highest anyone had ever climbed on the Kore Wall. Above this

point the route was a blank tablet, just as the entire face had been when Daniel first

approached it seven years earlier. Maybe it was that resonance – the tug of terra

incognita – which caused Daniel's about-face.

'I'm not going down,' he announced to them quietly. 'Not quite yet.'

After a moment, just as quietly, Gus said, 'Say again?'

'Believe me,' he said. 'I've been here before. And stopped. That was our mistake.

One camp more, then we'll be in position. We can rest. And when we come back up,

we can take this beast down. One stab. All the way.'

'We're tired,' Abe said. From here to Five would require fresh cannon fodder to

explore the way and build and stock the next camp. One thing Abe could say with

absolute certainty. He was scarcely fit to descend, much less climb to 28,000 feet.

'You're not invited,' Daniel said. 'It's my deal.'

'Negative,' Gus said. She tried to put some razor in her inflection, but it came out

slurred and dull. She couldn't even lift the orange rope to rig her descent and kept

fumbling stupidly with simple carabiners. Only yesterday this woman had carried two

heavy packs upon her back. Now she seemed feeble. If anything, her debilitation

spurred Daniel's resolve.

'Two more days, maybe three,' Daniel insisted. 'I'll use the gear the Kiwis left us.'

There was at least 1,800 feet of rope stacked in coils, he explained. He would climb as

high as possible each day, extending their reach. Each night he would return to the

cave. He could sleep on the Kiwi's bottled oxygen and eat from their cache of

freeze-dried food and nuts and even listen to their music. He was adamant.

Abe tried to gauge his recklessness. Daniel wasn't exactly restored to yesterday's

strength, but he no longer looked stripped and bloodless either. A night on oxygen

appeared to have layered flesh and muscle over his near transparency. His eyes were

clear, his strategy complete.

'It makes sense,' Abe argued. 'But not good sense. Gus is right. You can't push it

alone.'

Suddenly Abe heard himself. He'd heard words little different from these in the

thick of a Wyoming blizzard many years ago. Words hadn't swayed him from his

mission then, and words weren't going to convert Daniel now. Abe blinked. He quit

arguing. There was nothing to argue.

'At least let me tape your hands again,' he said.

Instantly Gus heard Abe's surrender. 'Screw you, both of you,' she said. She

undipped her rappel device from the rope and sat back against the cave wall and shut

her eyes. She was pulling herself together. She was Daniel's archangel and would

never leave him, Abe knew. If Daniel went up, she would not go down. There was no

point arguing that either.

Daniel had taken the bandages off and the ugly flaps of skin were still weeping. Abe

could see meat through one slice.

'I should sew these first,' Abe said. He'd hoped to wait until they got down to ABC or

Base, where the wounds could be properly cleaned and the thread wouldn't tear out in

manual labor and his fingers wouldn't be half-frozen while he pressed the needle

through.

Daniel had his own considerations. 'There's not time for that,' he said.

'But they can't stay open like this.'

'Plastics, Abe, plastics.' Daniel grinned his cockeyed grin. It was the first time in

many days Abe had seen anyone smile. Instinctively he smiled back.

Mystified, Abe watched Daniel open the top pocket of his pack and fish out a tube of

Super Glue. It struck him what was about to happen. 'That stuff's toxic,' Abe objected.

'Yeah? So's the Hill.' Daniel's grin widened. The splits in his lips beaded with blood.

With deft robotic efficiency, Daniel squeezed long strings of glue into the gashes on

each palm and pulled the flaps shut with careful fingertips. He let the glue set up,

holding his hands over the blue stove flame like a welder closing a seam, then flexed

his hands in fists to assess the patch job. It was a rock-climber's trick, though Abe had

never heard of people gluing more than a finger pad back in place.

For a moment, Abe considered tearing the bloody bandage off his own arm, pouring

Super Glue into the slit and continuing up with Daniel. But even at the thought, a chill

went through him and he realized that it was this from which Thomas had fled down

the mountain. It wasn't Daniel's natural authority up here that had driven Thomas

away, nor that this black-haired kamikaze was berserk for ascent. No, what had

scared Thomas off was the sudden recognition that he would become willing to die up

here, not for this mountain with its pure diamond light and not for his own glory and

benediction, but rather for Daniel, for the sake of freeing one soul from its cage. Daniel

had led them so high they were nearly out of air and yet he was still aimed at the sun

and they were still following. Abe wanted – desperately wanted – to stay with Daniel

and climb on. But it was time for him to flee.

'Good luck,' Abe said.

'See you down at Base,' Daniel said.

'Good-bye,' Abe said to Gus. She didn't even open her eyes to glare at him.

Shortly after Abe started down, Daniel sallied up, trailing a rainbow of three colorful

nine-millimeter ropes and bearing four more still coiled in his pack. Gus was belaying

him from inside the cave, paying out rope as Daniel climbed up. He was bearing

almost a thousand feet of rope, upward of eighty pounds. If there had been anyone

else to watch, it would have seemed a boast. Alone, the load was nothing more than

one man's calculation of himself.

Just before Abe lost sight of him, he saw that the Shoot opened wider and angled

back above the cave and that Daniel had quit front-pointing and was walking almost

upright on the icy slope. At the rate he was going, Daniel might just do what he'd said:

fix all the way to Five and still have time left over to build the camp and descend

before he ran out of steam. As usual in matters of this mountain, Daniel was proving

himself correct.

The expedition would have a definite advantage with Five set in place. It would give

them a high point from which to launch their all-out assault. Providing there were still

enough healthy, willing players down at ABC or Base, they could repopulate the

mountain all the way to 28,000 feet in a little less than a week of climbing. That would

leave just a thousand feet more to go. They still had a chance. The last Abe saw of

him, Daniel had come to a halt to pin one of his ropes to the wall with ice screws.

It had taken Abe four hard days to get from ABC to Four. Now, in less than nine

hours, he dropped a vertical mile and reached ABC in time for supper. Along the way,

every camp was deserted, not a climber in sight. Except for Daniel and Gus high

above, the mountain appeared to have been abandoned.

ABC was deserted, too, except for Nima and Chuldum, who had been instructed to

guard the camp. Abe couldn't comprehend what there was to guard against – the

wind, perhaps, or the beat of sunlight – but that was Jorgens for you. He ran a tight

ship when it was in drydock.

First thing next morning, Abe set off in his trail sneakers alone. The ten miles of trail

seemed to fly underfoot. That was his imagination at play. In fact what felt like an

effortless tumble into the lower valley was a struggle. His watch told him he was going

slower and slower. But the farther he descended, the richer the air became so he

didn't mind. After weeks on end of following the scant vertical tracery of their ascent,

this flat trail seemed blatant, a virtual highway. Abe found it hard to believe the trail

had once struck him as vague and confounding. The way was so clear down here, so

inevitable. His pack was empty, his spirits light, and he wanted to race pell-mell down

the rocky lane. It was frustrating to feel so invigorated and yet have such an unsteady

step. He lurched on. All around him, the world assembled itself with details that grew

sharper and more lustrous. A chorus of grouse gabbled on the perimeter of sunshine

and frost. Big sticks of glacier mud hung beside the trail like temple columns.

Insignificant rocks took on an almost sacramental distinctness beneath his Nikes. Part

of his awe was plain hunger and fatigue and the richer air, Abe knew. But there was

more than that to it. He had heard that monks wake in darkness so as to welcome the

order of day. Now, descending from the Kore's dark, slaughtering radiance, he

understood. These rocks, this birdsong, the blue sky: They were simple things, but

they were everything.

Base Camp sprang out at Abe with its candy-coloured domes and bustling industry.

He came to a surprised halt and stood still, weaving slightly, taking it all in. He had

forgotten how many tents were down here and how level the moraine was and what it

was like to hear water flowing loose in a stream.

There was laughter in the air, and an aroma of fresh-baked bread – that would be

from Carlos's solar oven – and even the background silence had a lush melody to it.

Roddy and Stump were rearranging what was left of the supply dump, and J.J. was

clowning for the Sherpas, walking around on his hands. From the boom box by the

mess tent, Pink Floyd – a high altitude mainstay – was weaving electric notes into the

carnival of sights and sounds and smells, and Abe moved stiffly, drawn by the music.

Suddenly he wanted to be among these people. He felt starved for their voices and

their touch and their company.

Kelly emerged from a tent swinging her waist-length mane – freshly washed, heavy

as white gold – and she was the first to catch sight of Abe. Her face lit with a smile and

she came toward him.

'Abe,' she greeted, and opened her arms to hug him. 'I am so glad to see you.' She

smelled like coconut shampoo and Ivory soap like the woman he had gotten used to

smelling in their shared tents on the mountains. They had been apart for less than a

week, but it felt like a season since he had seen her. She had missed him. He had

missed her. He had missed them all. It was good to be down. He was dizzied by how

good it felt.

'Kelly?' he rasped.

Her embrace had flesh to it, warmth and substance. She didn't pat him quickly on

the back and release him. She held him against her for a long, long minute.

In the span of that embrace, Abe was flooded with so many thoughts that they came

to him only as a babble. He wanted to sing his joy and cry at the same time.

'You look so good,' Kelly said.

Abe knew that wasn't so. He could feel his lips splitting, literally, in a smile. He

tasted blood and knew his face was blistered and skinned and hairy and smeared with

old glacier cream. Worse than the ugliness, he stank. There had been no chance to

wash in the weeks at ABC and higher, and now he smelled the feces caking his

underwear. He was ashamed and yet strangely exhilarated. He had become a child of

the Kore Wall, a foul yeti himself. Even so, this golden woman held him.

It struck him. He had survived the mountain. And not just in the minute-to-minute

sense of dodging its missiles or making it through another night. He had turned his

back on the Hill, and however temporary this respite, it was now only an image

against the sky. He was alive.

Abe wanted to tell Kelly some of this, but when he opened his mouth all that came

out was his bronchial croak. 'Kelly,' he said again.

Kelly held him out from her and looked into his eyes. She seemed to have some

notion what his wild gleam was all about. Maybe she had suffered this same ecstasy.

'Come on, Abe,' she said, and led him by the arm. They went directly to her tent, not

to his cold, empty hospital dome. She stripped the pack off his back and made him sit.

He felt drunk and couldn't quit grinning. After the mountain's murderous violence,

this peace seemed surreal. He could actually sit here without ducking or listening for

the crack of avalanches or shivering or sucking at the air for breath. He could just sit.

Kelly disappeared, then returned with a steaming mug of tea and bright boxes of

crackers and a slab of cheese, and the crackers weren't a ball of mangled wet crumbs

and the cheese wasn't frozen to stone. 'I told the others you're down,' she said.

'Jorgens wants to debrief you right away. But I told everyone to stay away.'

The sun was warm and not a breeze was stirring. She helped him from his sweater,

which was stiff with old blood. 'Christ, Abe,' she said when the gash in his arm came in

view. 'Was there some kind of massacre up there?'

'It was...' Abe stopped, trying to recall the ordeal.

'I asked Krishna to heat some water,' Kelly said. 'I'll wash you. Then we'll clean that

arm. And there's time to sleep before dinner. Here. I want you to sleep in my tent.'

Abe felt tears running down his face.

'Thank you,' he creaked.

She reached for his hand and squeezed it. 'You're down,' Kelly assured him, knowing

his disbelief. 'It's time to rest.'

At dinner that night, Abe related the latest news on their progress to Four. He

described Daniel's fall and the bad night at the cave and Daniel and Gus's continuing

effort to establish Camp Five. Freshly washed and shaven, wearing a clean white

T-shirt with a tequila advertisement on the chest, he sat at the table and felt profound

contentment. His arm was throbbing under a bandage that stood brilliant against his

bronzed flesh. Kelly had cleaned and stitched it for him, and Abe was getting drowsy

from a Percodan he'd taken for the pain. He would sleep well tonight.

With grave courtesy, Krishna served the climbers plates piled high with steaming

rice and lentils and Tibetan dumplings. Krishna surveyed the general vicinity to make

sure people had the necessary amenities – a spoon, a bottle of ketchup, some Tabasco

sauce – then hustled back to stir his pots and start supper for the Sherpas who sat in

the corner by Krishna's stoves, warming themselves, waiting politely for the members

to finish. Their happy chattering blended into the background noise of the stove roar

and the wind whipping a loose cord against the tent.

People reacted to Abe's news as if Daniel had just subdued a dragon and made their