The Ascent

valley safe. They were excited and grateful and eager to have him return to their

ranks. Even Jorgens and Thomas were pleased. The summit was within striking

distance now. Their long shot was suddenly much shorter. It would be difficult to fail.

'It will be different this time,' Stump said. 'I've found the bug in our radios. This time

we have communications.'

'This time we're rested,' Robby added.

'Then we're agreed,' said Jorgens. 'We go for it. Three days,' Jorgens said. 'Then we

go back up. We finish our business.'

They had been down for several days already, some for more than a week, and the

hiatus showed in their faces. Their concentration camp visage had fattened. The

faraway stares, the bony grimaces, even their raggedy, emaciated beards had filled

out. The mineral blueness of their flesh had softened and receded, leaving them with

the color of life.

'Three days,' Thomas seconded.

'And then,' someone pronounced, 'home.'

'Meanwhile,' another voice piped up. 'I have for you a surprise.' It was Li. Bundled to

the skull in expedition gear, he stood from his chair at the end of the wicker table. He

threw back the cherry-red parka hood and smiled at them, though the kerosene light

pulled out the struck hollows and bony edges of his face and it was hard to tell if he

was happy or in pain. His parka and Gore-Tex overpants had the crisp spotlessness of

a dress uniform and appeared to have suffered little exposure to the elements for

which they were intended.

'Good night,' he greeted them with a lecturer's formality. He had a starved man's

gleam in his eye, and his look of loneliness was almost obscene. Abe had forgotten him

completely.

'Tomorrow, for you, my friends and guests, is the viewing of Shangri-La,' he said.

Abe was shocked by how much Li's accent had thickened over the last nine weeks. His

syntax had slipped radically. It was the altitude and the forced hermitage, Abe knew.

They were lapsing, all of them.

Li continued with a showman's pitch. 'The real Shangri-La, you see.'

'The Rongbuk monastery,' Carlos blurted aloud.

'Yes, Mr. Crowell.' Li beamed. 'Sixty years ago, Mr. James Hilton wrote his book. He

based it on reports from early British expeditions to Qomolangma.' Qomolangma –

the Pinyin bastardization of the Tibetan Chomolungma. Mount Everest. 'He has a

pass, Shangri-La. We have a pass, Chengri La. He puts Utopia in a very high Chinese

monastery. We have this place. Rongbuk Monastery. Only now, not so Utopia.'

At the mention of a monastery, Abe remembered his epileptic monk and wondered

where the poor boy had disappeared to. He made a mental note to ask Nima. He

couldn't remember the boy's name, and that gave him a start. But then he couldn't

remember Jamie's face either, and for some reason that evened out his losses.

'We can actually go there?' Carlos asked. It was easy to see that one did not visit the

monastery with ease.

'It is my pleasure,' Li said, 'I am authorizing this for you.'

'Can we bring cameras?' Stump asked.

'Of course,' Li said. 'Cameras. Video cameras. Everything. You will see archaeology

of old Tibet. And something else. I have learned that tomorrow Tibetan nationals will

perform an archaic ceremony. Very special. Very dark. Very educational.'

P. T. Barnum could not have done a better job. The climbers were hooked. Down at

his end of the table, Carlos whispered the word puja. He was convinced they were

about to get another blessing. Li smiled broadly at their enthusiasm.

As Abe and Kelly returned to her tent, he looked up at the ghostly white massif of

Everest. Daniel and Gus were up there somewhere, probably holed up tonight in the

cave at 8,000 meters. There was something vaguely mythical about the notion – a

man and a woman in the mountain, their light mixing with the stars. 'I hope they're

okay up there,' Abe murmured to Kelly as they were falling to sleep. He had his good

arm around her shoulders and she was tucked close against him, each in their own

bag. Chastity had little to do with their separation tonight. Abe was going to be in a lot

of pain soon. The local anesthetic was wearing off and his arm was starting to throb.

'I wish they would come down with us,' Abe said.

'Sleep, Abe.' Kelly rolled her back to him. They slept.

Early next morning, in the spirit of a picnic, the climbers took off downvalley along the

road that led out to the Pang La and out to the world. Bounding through the rich

oxygen, they reached the monastery by ten and headed up a wide stone staircase that

snaked around the mountainside.

The sun was huge and white in a sky that verged on black outer space. Abe sweated,

but the sweat evaporated the instant it hit the dry air. They carried rocks to throw at

stray dogs, for there were Tibetan settlements nearby.

As they climbed the staircase, dust coated the sunblock on their faces. Some of them

had elected to paint their noses with a bright green sun cream, their lips with blue,

and that contributed to the festive spirit. Abe stuck with plain white. After an hour

their faces were mostly just brown with layered dirt.

The staircase turned around a ridge and quite suddenly the fortress – or dzong –

that had once protected the region, or what was left of it, unfolded before them. Acre

after steep acre, the dzong's remains lay in collapse, sprawled in terraces across the

mountainside. Like a miniature Great Wall, a serpentine wall climbed straight up the

incline. What buildings still stood were in pieces. Not one had a roof. The wind keened

through the gaps and across disintegrating walls as if this were a vast stone whistle.

The climbers were quick to unsheathe their cameras. Once before, on a trip to Inca

ruins in Peru, Abe had observed how gothic settings were irresistible to the Western

tourist. Decay and apocalypse made for excellent spice in home slide shows, and this

dzong was saturated with both.

Childlike, the climbers fanned out. They scrambled into deserted rooms, proving for

themselves that living people had once eaten and prayed and slept here. A narrow

labyrinth turned into a series of cells with entrance holes barely the size of a rib cage.

They decided these must be meditation chambers, where solitary monks had lived for

months and years at a time. Faded paintings of Buddhas and pop-eyed demons

decorated some of the leeward walls. Some of the listing walls showed traces of old

orange and white wash, brilliant against the darker earth. Here and there, they found

caves in the hillside filled with big heaps of clay tablets, each stamped with Buddhist

figures. Some caves held thousands of the little plaques. Abe knelt in front of one such

pile. The tablets were made of worthless clay, but they sparkled like Spanish

doubloons in the brilliant light.

'Souvenirs,' said Li. 'Yes, Doctor. Go ahead. Take some. These are not precious

antiquities. It is permitted under the law.'

'But they're religious, aren't they?' Abe was hesitant, even though his daypack was

wide open. He wanted to bring some of these tablets home. How else could he ever

prove that something so common could be so beautiful?

'Artifacts of a dead religion,' Li said. 'And anyway, they will turn to dust here.'

The monastery and its fortress had apparently been dead for centuries. Abe

contemplated aloud what sort of holocaust had been visited upon this civilization.

'I wonder what brought this all down,' he said. 'Drought? Or maybe famine? Or

plague?' Immediately he felt like a gringo touring overgrown pyramids in the Yucatán.

Li didn't answer right away. Finally he said, 'Earthquakes,' with a sobriety that was

almost mournful.

'Here?' Abe was surprised. The land had such an immovable quality, a look of

infinite gravity and stasis.

'Oh, yes,' Li expanded. 'The Himalaya is a very young mountain range. The Indian

subcontinent is all the time pushing against the Chinese land mass. There are many

earthquakes here.'

Abe ventured that they must have struck a long time ago.

Again Li looked at him curiously. 'Very long ago,' he said.

'That's what it looks like. Centuries ago.'

'Yes,' said Li.

Like clockwork, the afternoon winds began at high noon, three o'clock Beijing time.

Slapped by the wind, the climbers hastily regrouped and headed on higher.

As the group strung out along the trail, Abe walked with Carlos in the rear. Carlos's

sprained ankle had worsened and he was crutching along with two ski poles. The hike

was painful, but he was determined to keep up. Abe shared what he'd learned about

this place.

'Earthquakes?' Carlos barked. 'The L.O. said that?' He came to a halt and turned.

Abe faced his own reflection in Carlos's sunglasses.

'Look around,' Carlos said. He pointed at a building and then a section of the wall,

then more structures. 'See those holes? You ever heard of an earthquake that

punches round holes in a building?'

Abe hadn't.

'Artillery,' Carlos said. 'Chinese artillery practice.' Then he went on walking.

They reached the backside of the mountain and a whole system of hidden valleys

opened magically in the distance. Their flat spacious floors were outlined with

commune plots. Abe could just barely make out a line of tiny people working in

rhythmic unison, an almost indiscernible ripple of labor upon the earth. The wind

blew. The line of workers shifted like a slow tide.

Suddenly the smell of pines washed across them. The aroma was quite powerful,

then it was gone.

There was not a tree in sight. Indeed, Abe hadn't seen a single tree on the whole

Tibetan plateau. And yet, suddenly, for that brief moment, the air was thick and

sweet with cedar. It was like spying a rainbow in a desert. A few moments later, the

rich scent returned, then drifted away again.

'You smell it, too?' Carlos inhaled the breeze.

'Pine,' Abe said. 'Cedar pine.'

They followed the corkscrewing trail around to a second shoulder of the mountain.

Fifteen minutes higher, they reached a ridge where the others were drinking water,

waiting for them, taking pictures. They had stopped beside a pile of mani stones.

There were several hundred of them in the heap, each rounded by ancient rivers,

each carved with prayers in beautiful Tibetan calligraphy.

Atop the pile lay an animal skull, carved and painted with prayers. The rocks were

piled at random, but the skull was lodged in place with great care. The display sang of

a people embedded in the land. Robby fired off some more Kodachrome, angling for

the light.

'Folk art,' Li said. 'I am reminded of primitive cave paintings.' For all his gab, The

L.O. seemed to be getting nervous, as if they were straying into dangerous regions.

'You guys smell the pine smoke?' asked Carlos.

Stump pointed to the top of the mountain.

Now Abe saw white rags of smoke and smelled the smell again. The smoke was

whipping down from a crumbling building which crowned the very summit.

'We are on time,' Li said.

The trail led up to a breach in the crowning structure. The mountainside dropped

away beneath the breach. Loose rocks spilled down from this gap, the leftovers from

the old wall. Using their hands, the climbers cautiously pulled up through the breach.

Nothing could have prepared Abe for what lay within the walls.

'Oh lord,' breathed Jorgens.

It was a lost world in here.

A manmade forest of prayer flags surrounded them. It engulfed them, a dense

breathtaking grove of red and yellow and blue and white squares of cotton. Each flag

was blockprinted with Tibetan prayers. Each fluttered rapidly upon a thin willow

branch that was bunched with many dozens of others. More of these bunches were

planted in haphazard piles of mani stones. Some were new and bright, others bleached

and rotted by the sun.

The summit structure was barely eighty feet across and even less wide. But no

cathedral in the world could ever compete with this holy place, broken, bare to the

sky.

For a minute the climbers just stood where they'd surfaced through the breach,

listening to the cotton stroking infinity. Kelly's mouth was wide open. Robby doffed his

Dalton Hardware cap and a whole floodplain of dry wrinkles broke out across his

broad forehead. Their archaeology had come to life.

Then the wind shifted, and there was that smell of cedar again.

This time the white smoke engulfed them, turning the ruins into a cupful of flags and

wood fog.

Then Abe smelled something else, too. An unpleasant, saccharine odor. It took him a

minute to place the smell. And then it came to him. Something had died.

Voices drifted in with the smoke. They came muffled, from a distant part of the

ruins.

'This way,' Li said with waning confidence. 'But we must stay together. We must

take care. There are dangers. There are bad stories.'

Abe wended his way through the smoke. The summit structure was not very large,

but they had to pick their way through so many clusters of prayer flags and mani

stones that it seemed enormous and mazelike. Abe passed another horned animal

skull embellished with paint and carved lettering, then another. The voices grew

louder.

At the rear of the old structure, a collapsed doorway opened out onto a wide flat

ledge on the outside. On every side of the ledge, the mountain dropped away, a

thousand feet deep. Far in the distance, Everest was blowing her afternoon plume.

Abe stepped through the doorway. Then he stopped, frozen, for they had emerged

into the middle of a funeral. At first Abe wasn't even sure of that. He had no idea at all

what they were doing.

Three Tibetan men had stripped naked a dead woman.

One of the men was holding a knife.

The woman's clothing lay in a heap.

The scene struck directly at Abe's mind, unbuffered by language or thought. A big

hand grasped his shoulder from behind, someone trying to come through the

doorway, and Abe heard the person gasp sharply.

A cedar fire was smoking away on one end of the ledge. Back against the dzong wall,

to Abe's left, sat what he took to be the woman's family, maybe eight people of

different ages. For a moment, deceived by the thick white smoke, Abe thought he saw

his monk seated on skins, droning his monotone into the empty blue. The smoke

shifted. His monk disappeared.

For a moment, some of the family members didn't see the climbers and kept on

muttering prayers. Then all was silence. They froze, as if ambushed.

The climbers stood paralyzed, too. The Tibetans considered them for another

minute or so. They were not welcome, that was clear. But Abe and the others were

too stupefied to be moved by the hostile glares.

'What's the traffic jam,' Thomas groused, squeezing through the doorway. Then he

saw the body and went still, too.

'Trespass.' Carlos said it firmly. 'This is trespass. We don't belong here.'

But before they could retreat, Li squeezed through the bunched climbers.

'Trespass?' he scoffed, and the fear was gone from his voice. He seemed oddly

triumphant, pleased by the climber's shock at this raw, strange sight.

'We are within the law,' Li said with growing confidence. 'We are not trespassing.

You can take photographs. Yes, it is within the law.'

The Tibetans didn't speak to one another. Each of them scrutinized the climbers and

especially their Chinese guide. Then as suddenly as they had stopped, the Tibetans

started again. They began droning mantras without syncopation, almost without

breath. The cedar smoke changed direction and fell into the valley.

'Come.' With great firmness, almost as if he were disciplining them, Li ushered the

climbers to one side. 'Please, sit,' he said, indicating the ground by the wall.

Abe was dumbly obedient.

'What is this?' Kelly asked, hunkering by the wall.

Stump spoke in a whisper. 'I don't know.'

Abe felt their fear and helplessness, too. That bare knife, the corpse, the wind and

prayers: He wondered what they meant to do.

'I've heard of this,' Carlos said, keeping his voice low. 'Daniel told me about it. He has

pictures. They call it sky burial.'

Robby squirmed, horrified. 'They push her off the edge, or what, man? What is this?

What am I doing here?'

Before Carlos could answer, before Robby could leave, the man with the knife bent

down and made a long cut. From just right of her lightly haired pubis down to the

inside of the knee joint, the butcher drew his blade fast and hard.

Kelly groaned aloud.

Abe squinted in the cedar smoke. He tried not to flinch, though, telling himself this

was the stuff of gross anatomy, nothing more. And they were travelers and this was

culture. He took out his camera. Somehow, looking through the viewfinder made it

easier to watch.

Quickly now, because they had begun, the corpse was tilted up on one hip. From the

pelvic saddle down, the butcher sliced again and the quadriceps flopped loose onto the

cold stone.

The knives were sharp and these men had obviously done this with human beings

many times before. It took just minutes before the woman's leg bones were bare

white sticks. Losing his revulsion, Abe marveled at how quickly a body could be

undressed of its flesh.

'They throw their poor and their dead children into the rivers,' said Li. He spoke

aloud with a tour guide's voice. 'Their monks are cremated or else buried in big hollow

tree trunks. But for many, many centuries, this is how the common Tibetans have

been. Cutting up their loved ones like chickens. Feeding each other to the animals.'

Gigantic blue-and-white vultures that had been wheeling in the abyss came closer

now and roosted, first one, then others, landing with ungainly hops.

Like a pack of grotesque schoolchildren, the birds gathered into a semicircle at one

corner of the ledge. While they waited with eerie pique, they nipped and nudged each

other and flexed their six-foot wings.

The birds began to unsettle Abe in a way that the butchers had not. The vultures

looked like a parody of their little band lined against the dzong wall.

Yet even as Abe and the other climbers sorted through their guilt feelings, they kept

on snapping photos. Robby was firing away with a little black Samurai. Its

motor-driven telephoto lens pumped in and out with electronic frenzy. Abe's own

camera was bulky and old, which kept his picture taking slow. It made him seem

studied, even reluctant.

'Go closer,' Li encouraged him. But Abe didn't.

One man finished stripping the woman's arm bones clean. The other two began

working on the flesh already cut away. They sliced it into pieces and threw it to the

vultures. As the birds shoved about for bits of meat, their big dry feathers rattled.

Li was grimly jubilant.

'Now you see,' he said, 'we have come to the edge of the world. And they are

barbarians.'

8

It was nearly June and summer was loosening the countryside. The moraine thawed a

little more every morning, and their separate islands of tundra grass turned spongy.

Abe found mud on his shoes. It was a sign. The earth itself was compromising. The

separate elements – the mountain, the wind, the cold, the ice, the sunlight – were

reaching a sort of peace, mixing together, melding. It was a season for changes and for

the Ultimate Summit the changes came swiftly.

First, Gus brought the word down to Base, catching them at noon in the olive-green

mess tent. They were all there, a few hard at work rewiring the stubborn

walkie-talkie sets, most just swapping lies and snacking on popcorn and generally

taking it easy. From out of nowhere, Gus burst in upon them with her pack on, the

waistband still clipped.

They barely had time to recognize the windblown creature before she had delivered

her message. 'He's done it,' she rasped. Corroded with bronchitis and strep, her voice

cracked through them like distant thunder. The words came out more animal than

human and Abe wasn't sure he'd understood her.

A length of parachute cord bound her red hair and she had a filthy cap over that.

The smear of zinc oxide across her cheeks and nose was flecked with old food and

older scabs. What made Gus most alien, though, was not the filth but her wildness.

Something close to dementia burned in her green eyes – Abe recognized it as his own

– and she looked menacing, a berserker fresh from the glory fields.

Robby was the first to recover from her entrance. 'Sit down, Gus,' he said.

Kelly was next. 'Gus? Are you okay?'

Gus continued standing there with her craziness, weaving in place, drunk on the rich

oxygen. She stared at them.

'Where's Daniel at?' Stump asked with a most casual interest. He had a Phillips-head

in one hand and a welding gun in the other and amateur electronics on his mind.

Having found the glitch, he had sworn to get their walkie-talkies up and running by

tomorrow morning.

Gus stared at them, mute.

It suddenly hit Abe that Daniel might have fallen. Had he done it, then, sailed a day

too far? But Abe was just guessing, and no one else seemed concerned.

'How about some herbal spice tea?' Kelly asked her. 'It's great, sweet without sugar.

Real cinnamony.'

Abe goggled at Kelly's banality. Here was this ferocious woman with ropes of snot

splayed across her face like a horse whipped too far. Then he realized the banality was

Kelly's very point. Down here at Base, the status quo had its own rhythm and

coziness, and before things got too incendiary, they were banking Gus's fire, and their

own, too.

Gus would have none of their pacifism, though. She stood at the head of their table.

'Daniel broke through.'

'I knew it.' Heads turned. It was Thomas, the blood drained out from his cheeks.

'Are you saying Corder topped out?'

Gus heard his hostility, and chose to let him dangle. 'I'm saying he found a way out

of the Shoot. He placed Five. We're home free.'

'Gus, would you take a chair, please,' Robby said. 'Sit down before you fall down and

tell it in plain English.'

She sat. She told them. While she stayed in the cave, Daniel had soloed out of the

Shoot's lethal tube of rock-fall. He had discovered a sprawling snow plateau at the

base of the so-called Yellow Band – a thick sandwich of sulphur-colored limestone that

girdled the mountain at 27,500 feet. Blazing his path with nine-mil rope, he'd spent an

extra day humping a load of Kiwi gear up to the plateau and pitched their next camp.

Then he had descended to ABC. A dozen questions swarmed to Abe's mind. Before he

could ask even one, the others started interrogating Gus.

'So?' Thomas demanded. 'Did he solo to the top?'

Gus ignored him.

'Five's not much,' Gus said through the steam of her tea, 'but we don't need much.

There's wind up there, but no more rockfall. Daniel told me to tell you, from Five to

the top it's a cruise.'

'A cruise?' snorted Thomas. J.J. scowled at him. Thomas scowled back. On this

north side, the hard yellow rock lay in tiles canted downward at a 30-degree pitch,

with successive layers overlapping one another. The Yellow Band wasn't particularly

dangerous or technical, but neither was it going to be a cruise. Thomas was probably

right. The climb wasn't over yet.

Gus rolled right over Thomas's fatalism. For one thing he hadn't earned it; and for

another his cynical tone cloyed. 'Daniel says, Five's close enough, you can see the top.'

'Yeah? Well I can go outside and see the top from down here too,' Thomas said.

'That doesn't mean we're close.'

Gus had the punchline ready. 'Yeah, but you can't see the tripod. Not from down

here.'

It took them a minute to gather the significance of that. Then a light went on in

Robby's eyes. 'Daniel saw the tripod?' he breathed.

'Fantastic,' Stump said.

Thomas looked slapped silly. Speechless, he blinked rapidly.

The news galvanized them like a shot of crude voltage. In 1972 a Chinese expedition

had climbed via the easier North Col route and erected a five-foot-high metal survey

tripod on the very summit. Ever since, it had become a feature as natural as the

fossils and space shuttle vistas that awaited summiteers.

'I've never seen him so certain,' Gus added. And that in itself – Daniel's confidence –

spurred them even more than the other news, the camp, the Yellow Band, the tripod.

They were close all right.

'And Corder? Is he coming soon?' Jorgens guessed. His beard was more salt and

pepper now, his motions slower. He looked older and used up. But with this news, he

perked up. This was good news, very good, tantamount to victory.

'I parked his butt at ABC,' Gus said. 'He's in no shape for a bunch of round-trips to

Base.' They understood. Everyone had seen the way Daniel limped around on the

flats, and had heard the crepitation of bone on bone. It was harder on him to descend

an easy trail than to climb a sheer face. Climbing, he could at least compensate with

his arms for the kneecaps and cartilage of host of orthopods had cut out.

'One thing else,' Gus related. They fell silent. 'He made a promise. He said he'll wait

for us.'

She said it to remind them. Daniel could just as easily have continued on the last

thousand feet to the tripod alone. Instead he had roped down to join hands with his

teammates and take the Kore in a classic finish. Abe knew it was a gamble, Daniel

turning his back on a solo flash that must have seemed a sure thing. But apparently it

wasn't as much a gamble as lone wolfing through the rest of his life. Even now, several

days later, Gus looked relieved by his decision. She really thought she could save him,

Abe thought. Bravo, Gus.

The elated climbers bubbled out of the mess tent and into the sunshine, leaving Gus

in the dark with her mug of tea. Abe lagged behind. Unfinished business.

'How's he doing?' Abe asked her. She was changed. At least she would look him in

the eye now.

'He's whipped,' she said. 'He's in pain. His hands are like meat. His ribs are bad,

busted I think. And he stayed high too long. You know, the thousand-mile stare, all

that.' A sternness flickered across her face. 'But the nightmare's almost over. We're

going to nail this bastard. And then he's free.' She spoke it like a credo. She nodded to

herself and Abe nodded, too. To control the mountain was to control the entire

pyramid of obsessions that had led to it. None of them yearned for that power more

than Daniel.

'Is he taking care of his hands?' Doctors were supposed to ask questions like that.

'Of course.'

'How about you, how are the lungs holding up?' She had once developed double

pneumonia deep in the Karakoram range in Pakistan, and it was again a doctor's kind

of question. In truth, he was stalling. He wanted to know if there was any room to

negotiate on her dislike for him.

She was staring at him, deciding something. 'Daniel wanted me to tell you

something,' she said.

Abe braced himself.

'He wants to summit with you, Abe.'

Abe was dumbfounded. Then it occurred to him that Gus had gotten injured and

couldn't climb anymore. It would be like her to hide an injury. That would explain

Daniel's need for a new partner.

'Are you hurt?' Abe asked.

Gus reacted with scorn. 'Hurt?' she said. 'What the hell do you think?'

Now Abe saw his error. She was whole, but she was indeed hurt. 'No,' he said. 'I

meant injured.'

Gus waved aside his clarification.

'Then what is this?' He knew better than to feel sorry for this woman, and yet Daniel

had betrayed her. Alone and weary, she'd had to carry the news of it down ten miles

and then deliver it to the man chosen to replace her.

'He wants you with him when he hits top,' she said. 'Same day. Same rope.'

Abe was flattered. He hadn't expected anything like this, to reach the summit, to lay

the past to rest once and for all. But could they? Forgiveness was something granted,

not attained. It was not the same as reaching a mere mountaintop. Like that, Abe

made his mind up.

'I'll tell him my answer when I see him,' Abe said.

'Tell me,' Gus demanded. She had a right.

'I already have a partner.'

Now was Gus's turn to be surprised. She stared at him as if he'd stayed too high for

too long as well. 'Kelly?' she said. But her real contempt was for Abe. 'You're not telling

me you'd hang yourself up with her. Daniel's your one sure shot.'

Abe shrugged. 'It's me and Kelly.'

Gus frowned, trying to turn with this latest about-face. Odd, Abe thought. He hadn't

noticed until now that her red hair had turned nearly gold. The great stone crucible

was changing them. To see her from behind, you might almost mistake Gus for Kelly.

'You're making a mistake,' Gus said. But she wasn't really arguing. For all her

muscular gruffness, she had a wonderful transparency, Abe realized. There was no

hiding the ray of hope lighting her face. Nor, a moment later, hiding the suspicion that

darkened it.

'I get it,' she said to herself.

'Gus?'

Her green eyes glittered in the afternoon sunlight. She was angry now, once again

with Abe. 'See here,' she said. 'I don't know what's with you two. But if this is how

Daniel wants to break his damn curse, great. It's worth the summit to have him done

with Diana. So don't play noble with me.'

'Nobility has nothing to do with it.'

'Daniel needs this, Abe. Go bury your ghost. Together. Whatever it takes.'

'Gus, you don't understand. I didn't come for an exorcism. I'm not ditching Kelly.

And I can tell you, Daniel's not ditching you. He was being dramatic, that's all.'

'Fuck off,' she said. 'If you want to patronize Kelly, be my guest. But not me, guy. I

don't need your help. I don't need your permission. Got it?'

Suddenly Abe was tired of trying to soothe this woman. He had no desire to be her

foil, but it was hard to turn his back on her. She was heartbroken. Something Kelly

had said came back to him.

'Love has nothing to do with it, Gus.' He kept it simple. Gus was speechless, just as

he'd hoped. Now they could both pretend ascent was built on colder realities. He

started to walk off.

'By the way.' Her voice caught him.

Abe heard the change in her tone. She had an ailment.

'Yes, Gus.' He took a breath and made himself the healer once again.

'While I'm here, did you bring any of those home pregnancy tests?' The way she said

it, the timing she used, even the fact that she said it at all, was meant to sandbag him.

Of course they hadn't brought such a thing.

Abe groped for a reply. 'You're late?' he finally asked.

'Three, four weeks.' She was right to shrug. Everyone's rhythms were out of sync up

here.

'What about other symptoms?'

'Besides nausea and loss of appetite and exhaustion? Last time I looked, everyone

had those.' Right again.

And yet there was the possibility. Abe pursued it. 'Gus, if it's true, and if you want

this baby...'

She held up a hand. 'One, if it's true, I don't know if I want it. And two, either way, I

don't need a lecture. You've already said your mouthful.'

'But, Gus.' He had a duty to warn her about the solar radiation, the bad food, the

raised blood pressures, and all the myriad dangers of high altitude. He stopped

himself. She'd had weeks to think it all through.

'Does Daniel know?'

'Nope. And it's not yours to say.'

'Of course not.' Another secret to hold. 'But don't you think...'

'Tell him? Tell him what, Abe? There's a chance I might be carrying his child? You

know what he'd do? He'd sack the climb, just on the very chance. And then what if it

weren't true?'

'But what if it is?'

Now she handed it back to him. 'I thought you said love has nothing to do with it.'

'I didn't mean that.'

She quit bantering. 'We'll never be this close again,' she said. 'We can make it.'

But on the eve of launching their final assault – on the very afternoon before they

were going to trek back to ABC and inhabit the mountain all over again – a Land

Cruiser arrived to kill the Ultimate Summit. It came roaring toward them like a small

dinosaur, smoking out plumes of white dust, and at first Abe had trouble integrating

the return of the twentieth century.

For nearly a hundred days now they had lived like the native denizens of this

strange, lost nation called Tibet. They had lapsed into a pack of trolls, mountain beings

who were ugly and twisted and hunchbacked beneath the sun. All their great works of

music and literature had been shucked as incomprehensible. These days, instead of

Proust and Milton, they applied themselves to Conan the Barbarian comic books,

scrupulously reading and rereading key balloons. It could take a full evening to

complete one issue.

The climbers gathered as if the white Land Cruiser were a spaceship landing and

watched three PLA soldiers dismount. The soldiers were marvelously clean, their hair

cut, cheeks shaved, their pea-green uniforms unscathed by the weather or rockfall.

None of them limped. The flesh on their faces was unblemished by the sun. Their

rifles glinted in the light.

The oldest of the three, an officer, was perhaps Abe's age. The other two appeared

to be in their late teens, and they couldn't pry their eyes away from the climbers. Abe

wanted to believe their shock held some measure of homage or at least mutual

respect, but all he saw in their look was a curious disdain.

Li came crisply dressed from his tent as if this visit were no surprise and their

timing was precise. The homesickness was gone from his face. He had spring in his

step. Still he was not prepared for what the officer told him in Mandarin, even less so

for what he next read in a dispatch that was handed to him. He was visibly shaken

and took another minute to read the dispatch again and ask the officer many

questions.

The climbers kept their distance, even after Li spoke to them. 'Mister Jorgens,' he

called.

'Hey, Lee,' J.J. bellowed. 'Those guys bring any mail for us?'

'Not bloody likely,' Carlos muttered.

'Mister Jorgens,' Li somberly repeated.

Jorgens detached himself from the climbers and walked over to Li and the soldiers.

The conversation was one-sided, with Li doing all the talking. The climbers couldn't

hear a word, but instinct told them something was off and wrong.

Jorgens leaned in to glean the softly spoken words. Li repeated himself. Jorgens

swayed back.

'Not good, not good,' Stump muttered.

Li turned his back on Jorgens then and led off toward the mess tent with the

soldiers in tow. Jorgens didn't move. As a group, the climbers surrounded him by the

Land Cruiser.

'Five days,' Jorgens said. He looked pasty and ill. 'We have five days.'

The climbers glanced at each other, mystified. Finally Robby spoke. ' No comprendo,

Captain.'

'They pulled the plug on us. In five days a convoy of trucks will arrive. We have to

leave.'

'Five days?' J.J. wailed. 'We can't finish in five days. We can't even occupy our high

camps in five days.'

Jorgens was squinting. 'No more climbing,' he breathed. 'We have to pack up and be

ready to go. We're done.'

The news stupefied them.

'But we have permission. We paid. It's ours.' Carlos tripped out his argument.

'They pulled the plug on us,' Jorgens said.

'I've never heard of such a thing...' Stump started. But they were too stunned to be

angry. They were scrambling just to understand the implications.

'Five days?' Thomas said. 'Even with yaks here right now, we couldn't start to strip

the mountain. We'll lose everything. From ABC to Five, we'll lose it all.'

Jorgens nodded slowly. 'Yes.'

'But they can't do that.'

'We have five days,' Jorgens said. 'They want us to load the trucks and leave the

same day. These soldiers will escort us to the Nepal border.'

'What the fuck happened?' It was Gus, quiet, furious. Now they started finding their

anger, too.

'What did I say,' J.J. railed. 'You can't trust gooks.'

'There's been trouble in Lhasa,' Jorgens said. 'A Tibetan riot. A Chinese police

station was burned. Several Chinese stores were destroyed. The army opened fire.

That means bloodshed. They've declared martial law.'

'These fucking Tibetans, man,' J.J. shouted. 'Now we're fucked.'

'Say we stay. We climb,' Gus said. 'We make our way across the border when we're

done. Li can go home right now.' It was farfetched.

'The country's under martial law,' Jorgens said. 'They want all tourists out.'

'But we're climbers.' J.J. beat at his chest. 'We're climbers.'

Robby took care of that one. 'We're tourists, J.J. That's exactly what we are. And

keep your voice down.'

'Li said he'll recommend us for a permit. For the very next season, whenever

martial law gets lifted, whenever the mountain opens up again,' Jorgens said. 'He said

this is unfortunate.'

'So, carrot and stick.' Gus spat. Her disgust washed over them, more than enough

for them all. 'Go along, get along. Shit.'

But Stump considered the proposition. 'It just could work, though. Next season, if it

really was next season? The minute we leave the yakkies will plunder our stores here

and at ABC. But they won't go onto the mountain itself. And at least some of our

camps will survive the monsoon. We'd have a leg up, stock in place. It might just

work.'

'Yeah,' said Robby. 'A definite advantage.'

'Two, three months,' Carlos thought out aloud. 'Not so bad.'

'Like a sequel climb,' Robby added. 'I like it.'

It was Abe who popped their bubble. 'Count me out,' he said. 'I can't come back next

season. Med school starts in September.' He wasn't sure why he shared this nugget of

information. It presumed that he'd even be invited to return, and he'd barely been

invited along on this one.

Nevertheless, it reminded the rest of them of the realities. They had girlfriends and

wives, children and jobs. There were mortgages to pay, commitments that couldn't be

broken. From many dinners and small moments and shared days and nights together,

they remembered that Thomas was getting married in October and J.J.'s little girl

was starting first grade, Gus was lined up for an all-woman's expedition to the

Caucasus and Kelly was moving to Boise for a new teaching job.

The fantasy of a return to this climb – with these climbers in this perfect weather

upon this route – fell to pieces. The instant they left Everest they were going to

disperse into tales that would have nothing to do with their comrades'. Their joined

dream, such as it was, could never be recaptured.

They spent another half hour trying out other solutions to this sudden collapse of

their expedition, but the facts only weighed heavier. The Hill had won.

Then Kelly raised one final bittersweet thought. 'If only Daniel had gone the little bit

further,' she said. It was true. When even one climber reached the top, the entire

expedition did. But none had and time was out. In the end, Daniel's noble gesture of

waiting for them had disserved them all.

'So close,' Thomas said.

'And the radios,' Stump said. 'Just when I finally fixed the bastards.'

Abe had his back turned to Everest. When he turned to look at their lost prize, the

mountain attacked with a wave of raw white light. Unprepared, Abe gasped and

bowed his head, clawing for the sunglasses in his pocket. Ordinarily the sight would

have provoked a nod of admiration, but not this morning.

Even with the glasses covering his eyes, the mountain was too bright to look at for

more than a few seconds. All definition was gone, washed away by the pure

illumination. No lines or shadows, no stone or ice, no ridges or cols. Even the summit

pyramid was illegible in the midst of all that radiance. The mountain simply fused into

sunlight and sky, hiding itself in infinity. It made their ambitions seem fruitless and

tiny.

Gus asked Jorgens to talk with Li again. It was hard for her to ask, because she

didn't like or trust Jorgens. But the mountain was a higher priority worth more than

her pride and she spoke the words. 'One more try, Jorgens, please.'

Jorgens didn't make her grovel. 'It won't work,' he said, 'but if that's what you want,

okay. I'll try.'

He was back from the mess tent within ten minutes. 'It's written in stone. Li said his

orders come directly from the Public Security Bureau in Lhasa. The army is out of its

cage. He wishes to ensure our safety.'

'You can't get any safer than our dead end,' Carlos pointed out, but of course that

wasn't Li's consideration anyway.

'One other thing, people,' Jorgens said. 'I want you to steer clear of our military

guests. No contact whatsoever. Is that understood?'

'Screw,' said J.J.

'I'm not asking, J.J. I'm ordering. Things are already bad enough without hard

words or more tension. Got it?'

J.J. didn't answer.

Jorgens put it bluntly. 'They've got guns.'

They spent the rest of the day cursing the Chinese and Tibet and the mountain,

finally dropping into an exhausted silence as alpenglow lit Everest orange. As

everywhere else in the world, bad news traveled quickly through the Rongbuk Valley.

Before nightfall, a tiny contingent of herders showed up driving seven yaks. They

were eager for work, and also eager to get a preview of the booty getting left behind.

At dinner that night, Carlos got the climbers drunk. He had stocked the expedition

pantry with enough Star beer for one big blow, and this was it. 'With victory in clear

sight,' he raised his toast, 'here's to blind defeat.'

It was not a happy drunk, but neither was it an ugly one. Someone pointed out that

at least they hadn't lost anyone on the climb. They hadn't lost so much as a toe or

finger. They were quitting the mountain in one piece, and that was always something

to be grateful for.

Finally Jorgens spoke. 'Somebody needs to go tell Daniel and bring him down.'

'I'll go,' J.J. volunteered. He had pulled out pictures of his daughter and had tears in

his eyes.

'Damned if I'm staying down here,' Stump said. 'I don't think I could put in five days

without hitting one of Li's soldier boys.'

'I've got cameras and film up there,' Robby remembered. 'And all my ice gear and

double boots. I can make two, three round-trips down with full loads in the time we've

got.'

In that way, the whole group decided to go up to ABC. Their spirits lifted by ounces.

En masse they would break the bad news to Daniel and strip the camp of their most

valuable gear. Above all they would get to pay their respects to the enemy. Stump

wanted to finish a water-color of the North Face. Thomas declared a great urge to piss

on the mountain once and for all. Carlos said he'd be happy just to sleep with the

Mother Goddess one final night. Few if any of them were ever going to return to the

Kore Wall. Abe could hear it in their voices.

Abe slept poorly that night. At daybreak he walked down to the water skull and sat

there to clear his mind. Overhead, Everest was floating in a scoop of soft dawn light.

With her manelike summit massif and outstretched ridges, the Hill had the aspect of a

sphinx splashed with rainbows this morning.

They had come close to cracking her riddle, Daniel closest of all. Abe felt the

closeness of it as a weight in his skull. He felt the frustration of having a perfect

summarizing word on the tip of his tongue and knowing it was forever beyond his

articulation. For the rest of his life he would have to carry around this freighted

silence.

He was thinking these thoughts and generally feeling sorry for himself when the

sound of a dislodged pebble interrupted him. An image – half man, half animal – took

shape in the glacier pond. Abe glanced up at the rim. Standing there, if a sideways

stoop upon ancient ski poles could be called standing, was the monk in old yak skins

and Daniel's black and orange baseball cap.

Abe's mouth came open. The two of them observed each other until Abe began to

wonder if this wasn't another one of his hallucinations. Then the monk teetered

between the ski poles as if he were fixed atop stilts and more pebbles pattered down

off the rim.

Abe didn't need Nima's translation to know he'd come to say good-bye. It was going

to be a two-way adios, Abe realized. Good-bye to the expedition. Good-bye to the

monk. The boy needed full-scale hospitalization. Yet four days from now he wouldn't

have even Abe's quackery for a stopgap. Abe let his breath out slowly. That was the

cold fact. This holy man was going to die.

The boy was in such bad condition that Abe wondered if he might have been hiding

near Base Camp the whole time. That or one of the yakherders had brought him in

overnight. One thing was certain, even if tulkus could fly, this one was anchored to the

few inches of soil he currently occupied. As if to confirm Abe's pessimism, the boy

sank his rump down upon a stone and stiffly lowered himself backward to rest. He

was too weak to take his hands from the ski pole straps, so the poles lay attached to

him, pitched askew.

'Tashi-dili,' Abe said, approaching. Nima had taught him that much. The monk

didn't return his greeting except to smile crookedly. He was wan and his eyes had a

dull luster. Closer up, Abe saw saliva stringing loose from his mouth. Abe didn't need

to open the boy's clothing to know the infection was back. He could smell the yellow

and orange fluid staining what had once been a clean white expedition T-shirt.

Abe squatted and palmed the boy's forehead. There was fever, though not so bad as

to account for this delirium and weakness. No, with this drooling, Abe's suspicion grew

that the boy had suffered a closed head injury. Between that and his wounds and

whatever damage lay beneath the abdominal bruises, the monk was in deep waters.

'What am I going to do with you?' Abe asked him in English.

The boy's eyes rounded onto him and he smiled at Abe.

'What are you going to do with him,' another voice asked. It was Gus over by the

water skull. She had materialized as softly as the monk.

'Start over again,' Abe said. 'Patch him. Drug him. Pray.'

Gus seemed frightened by the monk's presence in camp. 'Why did he have to come

back,' she demanded.

'I don't know. But he did. Now we have to get him squirreled away. It's going to take

me a few hours to clean him up and he can't be out in the open like this.'

'He shouldn't have come back,' Gus grumbled.

'It's okay,' Abe reassured her. 'The Chinese will never know about him. And in four

days we'll all be gone, us and the Chinese, and he can have the whole valley to himself.'

Once again they occupied the hut made of memorial stones, the Tomb with its

ceiling of cannibalized tentage. The boy lapsed deeper into inertia and finally a twilight

delirium that was close to the coma in which Abe had first found him. The word

passed among the climbers that the monk had returned, and they conspired to keep

his presence a secret. Lest the soldiers see people going in and out of the Tomb,

everyone stayed away except for Krishna, who brought Abe and his patient food and

drink. Abe slept in the hut that night, lying on the bare ground. The monk slept on

Abe's air pad.

And then something strange happened. With three days to go before their forced

departure from the mountain, Li came into the mess tent while the climbers were at

breakfast to make an announcement.

'Now what?' Robby grumbled.

'I have decided,' Li said. 'You may have ten more days to climb the mountain. After

that, I must obey my orders.'

When no one replied, Li expanded. 'There are things in life that require finishing.

You have taken many courageous risks. Now it is my turn to take a risk also.'

And still no one spoke, although Abe could see agitation blazing on every face. If Li

was waiting for them to thank him, he was out of luck. So far as the climbers were

concerned, the mountain had never been his to withhold. And this bizarre reversal

only reminded them of a power they could not ignore. It didn't seem possible, but Li's

generosity had made him even more unpopular.

'But why?' J.J. demanded.

'J.J.,' Thomas warned him off. They had just been granted a stay of execution, and

as rankling as the principle was, the fact of it gave them a second life.

'Even in difficult times, it is wrong to punish the innocent,' Li told them.

After Li had left, the climbers tried to fathom his sudden altruism. When Robby

tried to credit Jorgens's last-ditch request, Jorgens rebuffed him. 'It wasn't anything I

said. Li didn't look at me once the whole time I was talking.'

'What then?' Stump wondered.

'Does it matter?' Thomas asked. 'Now we got no one else to blame. That's as clean as

it gets in life.'

They left within the hour. With his sprained ankle taped and iced with a bag of

glacier chips, Carlos stayed down to man the Base Camp walkie-talkie. If necessary,

he could try to talk Li into an eleventh-day extension. The rest of the climbers surged

up the trail to finish off the Kore Wall.

9

Everest was a weather factory, so they said, but for a hundred days Abe had seen no

weather, no change. Day in, day out, the sky had seduced their eyes with its

blue-black constancy. What few clouds came had stayed in the distance, white

feathers that scattered in the wind. Abe had begun to believe it never snowed in

Tibet.

But on the afternoon they reentered ABC, the sky turned greasy silver. Daniel was

there, looming on the boulders, gaunt, irresistible, arms wide to them, and he

promised victory. But in the space of half an hour, the mountain wove a grimy cobweb

of storm clouds into the sky. By sunset, the cloud cover stretched from east to north

to west. The climbers took their meal early and scurried back to their tents just as the

first of the corn snow rattled down.

Bolts of lightning began igniting among the snowflakes, something Abe had never

witnessed before. He and Kelly zipped their door tight and crawled into their bags.

'What does this mean?' Abe asked. Kelly was lying beside him in the twilight,

propped on her elbow. It was too light to turn on their headlamps, but too dark for

much except talk. The wind loped through camp and their tent walls rhythmically

popped in and pulled out.

'It's the monsoon,' Kelly said. 'It's late.' She might have been talking about her

period, she was so morose. Her eyebrows were dark dashes in the failing light and her

golden hair black ink. Her nose was burned the cancerous red that only comes from

repeated delaminations.

'So we're finished,' Abe said.

'Not necessarily. It comes on in waves like this. There's usually breaks in between,

especially on this north side. We're in a rain shadow here. Chances are, we'll see a

window. The summit will open.' But she didn't sound pleased.

Above the rattling of snow pellets on their dome, thunder blossomed in the distance.

Without the lightning. Abe would have thought it was avalanches.

'I hope I can sleep tonight,' Kelly said.

Abe said, 'That thunder's loud.'

But Kelly shook her head no, it wasn't that. She was agitated, and her worry was

more complicated than thunder or a mere threat to her summit bid.

'Is something wrong, Kelly?'

Her white eyes flickered at him, then darted away, and she dropped her head. A

moment later she looked at him again, weighing some enormous risk, judging him.

'Yes,' she started. 'But I don't know how to tell you.'

'Don't tell me.'

'Just don't laugh.'

Abe nodded his assent.

'To tell the truth...' She faltered, then found the words. 'The other night I had this

dream.'

'Tell me,' he said.

'It's not like me,' Kelly quickly had him know. 'I don't believe in dreams. I don't talk

about them.'

'But this one...' He opened the way for her.

She looked him straight in the eyes. 'Something's going to happen up there.'

Abe let her finish.

Her voice turned timid. 'Abe. I think I'm going to die.'

For a minute, the snow clattered against the drum-tight walls and the poles creaked

under the wind's weight.

'There was a woman in a storm. She was trapped on the Hill, tangled in a rope,

upside down. Her hair was long. It was blowing in the wind. Her eyes were wide open.'

She whispered the woman's identity as if telling a ghost story. 'It was me, Abe.'

Abe didn't know what to do, argue or agree or touch her or otherwise make it all

right to have premonitions of death on the eve of danger. He suddenly seemed very

young to himself and Kelly very much older.

'I know what that sounds like.' Kelly grinned mournfully, and Abe sensed she was

about to detour into a joke at her own expense. She didn't, though. She just quit

talking.

In another setting, Abe might have tried snuffing Kelly's anxiety with some sort of

label – cyanotic hysteria or rapture of the heights, something poetic or at least

polysyllabic. But an unusual somberness had been afflicting the other climbers in the

last two days, and now he realized that it was apprehension. Except for Daniel, who

had been spared Li's vacillations, they had been plunged into their own futility and

had resigned themselves to leaving the mountain. They returned to the mountain

with all the joy of a chain gang off to hard labor.

'I want a child.' Kelly spoke it with a certain grief. 'I wasn't sure before. Now I am.'

'It was just a dream,' Abe tried to reassure her.

'I saw it.' She was clear.

Then Abe had a bright idea. 'Maybe you shouldn't go up,' he ventured hopefully.

'Don't think I haven't thought about it.'

Abe had no other solutions, so he pursued this one, even though it would not satisfy

her. 'It's okay to stay down, Kelly. You've pushed it. Nobody will say different.'

'You know that's not true.'

'It doesn't matter. Nobody has to know why. Just stay down.'

'I can't. You know that.'

Abe did. Maybe a man could have stayed down. Not Kelly. She was healthy and

strong and proud. And blond. Eventually it would get out that she'd had a bad dream.

The word would spread. The men would expect nothing less than for her to bail. She

would hear the worst from Gus. Kelly swallowed hard.

'Damn it, Abe.'

Abe heard the need. He laid aside his hesitation and slipped his arm under her

shoulder and wormed closer to hold her tight. Kelly came into his embrace with the

familiarity of a longtime lover. She settled into the crook of his arm and placed one

bare hand against his chest. It was one of the few times on this mountain when two

people could comfort each other. Usually the bad times and fear came when you were

critically alone, at the far end of a rope. This embrace was a luxury.

'Unzip your bag, Abe.' They had learned, through someone's joke about them one

night, that the expedition-style sleeping bags could be zipped together. Now they

made a common bed. It was the first time they had lain together, unhampered by

separate cocoons.

They didn't make love, that wasn't the point, and besides it would have been

ridiculous in this tent at this altitude, a cold, short-winded fuck, hardly the way Abe

wanted it. Maybe they would make love someday, he thought. Maybe not. Tonight, at

any rate, they didn't even kiss because their lips were so shredded by the sun.

What they did do was more precious still. They just lay there, Abe with Kelly in his

arms. On the verge of sleep he was full of wonder at what this virtual stranger was to

him and what he might be to her. She could have been practically any woman – Jamie

or Gus or some other – a softness against his hard rib cage, a warm weight where her

thigh dangled across his. But she was Kelly, and he held the thought of her as he held

her long back and big shoulders. He tried to imagine what he was to her just now

beyond a heartbeat and whiskers like sandpaper against the tip of her forehead. She

could be thinking of anyone else. But Abe hoped it was him she thought of as she

drifted off to sleep.

'There's something I've wanted to say to you,' he started to confess.

But she stopped him. She knew. 'Not now,' she said. 'Another time. Please. Another

time.'

There was only a trace of her coconut shampoo left.

Her hair smelled almost entirely of smoke and sweat and human grease and Abe

inhaled it. She smelled like an animal. Before this, he'd never thought about how much

mountain air smells like a mountain, like snow and still rocks and ice sweating under

the stars. Nor had he ever craved human company so fundamentally. Up here it was

the sight of blood or the smell of raw humanity or a simple embrace that married you

to what you had become, an animal on a mountain.

Love reduced to this quiet possession, then, this touch and shared warmth.

By dawn, the squall had passed, leaving behind six inches of snow. The sky hung

gray, but nothing was coming down out of it, and that was worth a day more of hope.

Daniel was the first to strap into his crampons, of course. He alone seemed unaware

that the mountain had entered a new configuration. Six inches of snow wasn't much in

the way of armor, but another storm or two could sheathe the mountain with lethal

defenses. Between Li's deadline and the invading monsoon, they were definitely

running out of time.

Kelly's head appeared from the tent door and she smiled at Abe. Not once through

the night had they disentangled from each other's arms. There had been no more

mention of Kelly's bad dream and Abe had let it drop. It came to mind that maybe his

embrace had exorcised her premonition, and he snorted at the notion. What a journey

that would be, from ambulance cowboy to full-fledged physician to shaman and

exorcist. At this rate he would end his days droning prayers in a Tibetan monastery

cell. It was time to quit believing in his own magic.

Even as he watched her, Kelly gave Abe a surprise. Unfolding her long limbs from

the tent door, she stretched to her full height wearing a skintight, powder blue Nordic

ski racing uniform. It had bold white stripes up each leg to the armpit and down from

her neck to her wrists. Lithe and streamlined, she was spectacular, which Abe already

knew. What really puzzled him was where this outfit could have come from.

But then he looked around and saw that most of the other climbers were emerging

dressed in the same powder blue uniforms. He remembered. It was product

endorsement time and all through camp brand-name costumes were surfacing clean

and new, saved especially for the camera and their summit bid. The uniform looked

Olympian on some, silly on others. Bird legs and chicken breasts stood pronounced,

and Abe was glad no one had remembered to issue him one of the suits. The uniform

had its merit, however. For the first time since Li had undercut their morale, the

climbers had the look of a team bent on tagging the earth's highest point. Shaking the

snow off their equipment, they got to work peopling the Hill once again.

Over the next five days, the climbers took up their positions in the forward camps

and prepared to rush the summit. It was a slow and orderly rush. Spaced a day apart,

they moved up. The weather got no better, but at least it got no worse.

By the end of the fifth day, Abe found himself once more at the cave camp

designated Four. To his delight, the foul weather seemed to have locked the mountain

tight. Not so much as a single rock had bombed the Shooting Gallery all day long. He

took that as a sign of good luck, and told Kelly so at each of their rest stances along the

fixed ropes.

Abe was now as fully acclimatized as he was going to get, with the result that he

actually felt strong as they entered the cave near three o'clock. His last time here with

Daniel and Gus, he had been gasping and hurt, but his rest at lower elevations had

restored him. He was hardly a superman – at 26,500 feet, there was no way not to

gasp for air and his entire being hurt – but he was functioning quite well this time

around, and the idea of going higher was not at all mind-boggling.

Two teams of two – Daniel and Gus, and Stump and J.J. – had stayed here the night

before, then gone on to occupy Five. Someone, probably J.J. judging by the

elementary school scrawl, had left them a note: 'Big E or Bust.'

The plan was for Abe and Kelly's team to spend the night here, then move up to

Five in the morning. They would occupy Five while Daniel and his bunch made its

push to the top and then descended as far as possible. On the day after tomorrow, if

all went well, Abe and Kelly would repeat Daniel's success. Behind them by a day, the

final team of Robby and Thomas waited at Three, poised for their turn to rotate up

and have a crack at the summit. The two men were realistic. If the weather didn't

scotch their summit bid, their sagging health probably would. Thomas had never fully

recovered from his pneumonia, and Robby was suffering through his latest rampage

of diarrhea. Thomas had dubbed Robby and himself the Lost Patrol, astounding them

all. It seemed impossible that Thomas might have a sense of humor.

Jorgens was far below at One. He had 'Four-F'd' himself, bowing out on medical

grounds. In theory he was a support climber in case someone got in trouble above.

But it was no secret that Jorgens was incapable of going much higher and his presence

was strictly as a cheerleader to the rest of them.

And all the way down, with Li for a chess partner, Carlos was manning Base Camp.

The expedition was spread thin over the huge mountain, but this time around they

had the advantage of radio contact. Just being able to hear other voices had given the

various teams more confidence.

The sky stayed dense and leaden. It was so uniformly overcast that no one could

predict the next storm. They hadn't seen the sun in nearly a week, and that was a

mixed blessing. They didn't have to fight the noonday heat, but for the last five days,

everyone had been complaining of a chronic lassitude that made them feel heavy. Abe

was starting to wonder if the change in barometric pressure might be responsible.

Others in the team decided on a different scapegoat.

It was Li's fault, they said. The L.O. had shackled them. He had derailed their

freight-train momentum. They muttered about him and there seemed no doubt in

their minds that he had deliberately sabotaged their morale. Some went so far as to

accuse him of setting them up for failure and humiliation, conjecturing that he must

have hoped the team would just throw in the towel without this last effort. But they

were wrong. Li wanted them up here. On the very eve of their summit assault, they

learned why.

The six o'clock radio call opened routinely. Abe was sitting hunched in the tent with

the cold walkie-talkie in his hands. Kelly was lying behind him in a sleeping bag, most

of her face obscured by an oxygen mask. From here on they would be sleeping on

oxygen, and anyone who wanted to could climb on it, too. His last time here in the

cave with Daniel and Gus, Abe had been so weak and hurt that no amount of oxygen

would have gotten him higher. This time, the oxygen was like a kiss.

In preparation for the radio call, Abe had taken his mask off and poked the antennae

through an unzipped triangle at the top of the door. The cave's position was such that

he could be relatively warm and comfortable inside the tent and receive transmissions

from anywhere on the mountain.

'Five to all camps. It's time for the six o'clock news,' Abe heard. It was Stump's

voice. 'Let's get a head count. Over.'

Each of the teams checked in. Everyone was doing fine. Everyone sounded tired and

excited, especially Stump. 'It's going to be a long night,' he said. 'We got a crowd. Four

people, one tent, over.' His words came slowly, blurring on the edges from the

extreme altitude.

'At least you're snug and warm. Over.' Robby was handling the radio at Three.

Count on him to find the silver lining.

'How's your wind up there, Five? Over.' To his credit, Jorgens had set aside his

wounded pride. He earnestly wanted Daniel and anyone else to reach the top. Abe was

starting to like the man.

'The wind's stiff,' Stump answered. 'I hope something's not blowing in tonight. Over.'

Protected by the cave, Four was unaffected. But Abe could hear the wind blasting

the face. It sounded like Niagara Falls out there.

'How about the tripod?' Robby asked. 'Did you see the top? Over.'

'It's there,' Stump answered. 'We'll hang a flag from it. That's tomorrow, folks.

ASAP. Over.'

'Go team. Over.'

Abe waited for a break in the chatter. 'Any medical problems up or down? Over.'

The climbers knew better than to complain about hangnails. No one was healthy,

but no one was dying either.

Jorgens returned to the air. He wanted to clarify the assault plan and work out any

bugs before the high team committed itself. 'You guys are all synchronized? Over,' he

asked Stump.

Stump didn't mind the repetition. It was good to have some oversight, especially

from someone at a lower altitude. 'We're synced up,' he said. 'We'll wake at

oh-one-hundred. I doubt anyone sleeps anyway. Over.'

'And you'll be out the door by oh-three-hundred. Over.' Jorgens was going to walk

them through the whole thing.

'Roger that. Over.' Radio time was one of the few occasions for the two ex-soldiers to

trot out the patois without getting teased by the other climbers. Abe listened.

'Two ropes? Over.' It was like an aviator's checklist.

'Two ropes. Two bottles per man. Over.' There would be two teams of two, each

linked by a fifty-meter rope of nine-mil. Each climber would start off with two bottles

of oxygen. They would discard the twelve-pound cylinders, once emptied. According

to their best calculations, two bottles would last a climber all the way to the top and

partway down again.

'And if you haven't topped out by sixteen-hundred, you will turn around. Over.' This

one wasn't a question. By mutual agreement, they had decided that if the summiteers

couldn't finish by four o'clock in the afternoon, then they had failed. By that time they

would have been climbing for thirteen hours. To push any longer would only increase

their risk of not getting back to the tent at Five. And a night outdoors above 28,000

feet – especially in a wind like this one – meant certain death. The wind-chill factor

combined with their oxygen deficit would terminate their ambitions for good.

'Sixteen-hundred, turn around,' Stump verified. 'Over.' Like bankers' clockwork,

Abe thought. They were going to beat this extreme chaos with their extreme order.

Just then Base Camp broke in on the conversation. It was Carlos. He sounded very

frightened, which was odd since he was on flat ground and the safest of any of them.

'Base to the mountain. To anybody. Can anybody hear me? Over.'

'Five to Base, we read you, over.'

'Something's going on here. Something bad.'

Stump answered. 'Clarify yourself, Base. Over.' He was annoyed that Carlos had

forgotten to say 'over,' and it was clear he didn't appreciate the note of urgency. In

just a few hours the summit team was going to head off into the night. They needed

support, not last-minute problems from the abyss.

'It's the monk.'

Abe's breath went out of him.

'They've got him.'

'One to Five. What's going on up there, Stump? Over.' Down at One, Jorgens was

not in line of sight with Base Camp. Between him and Carlos lay the satellite peak

Changtse, which cast a sonic shadow. The rest of the camps sat higher than Changtse's

blunt summit and so their communications with Base were unrestricted. He couldn't

hear Carlos. At best he could only deduce that Stump was talking to someone at Base.

Stump took a moment to respond. 'Please hold, One. And Base, tell me more. Over.'

'It happened this afternoon. Li comes up to me. He says we've been harboring a

fugitive. But now they know and they've taken the prisoner into custody. And they

have. I saw him.'

'Damn it, Carlos. Say over. Over.' Stump was upset, but Abe knew it wasn't by the

breach in radio etiquette.

'They took him out to the Tomb. The soldiers and him. He's hog-tied, hand and foot.'

Carlos added, 'Over.'

'What do they plan on doing with him? Over.'

'The soldiers are going to return him to Lhasa. Li said the monk is a state criminal.

He said this is an internal affair of the People's Republic of China. Our interference is a

serious breach of international law. Over.'

Abe couldn't contain himself any longer. 'Internal affair?' he barked into the radio.

This was his patient, a boy, a holy man. And the last time the Chinese had him in their

possession they'd tortured him half to death.

'Is that you, Doc?' Carlos asked.

'When are they taking him off to Lhasa?' Abe asked. He remembered to say, 'Over.'

'Li said maybe tomorrow, probably the day after tomorrow. He wants to finish

making out his report.'

'One, here,' Jorgens interrupted. 'What are you people jabbering about? It doesn't

sound like mission talk. Over.'

'Bad luck,' Stump told him. 'Li sniffed the kid out. Things are unwinding down at

Base. Over.'

Jorgens didn't sound surprised. His irritation was immediately replaced by a tone of

calm succor. 'I was afraid of something like this,' he said quietly. 'The way I saw it,

nothing would happen until after we were finished and gone. But I missed my guess.

Over.'

The one person who didn't hear him was Carlos, who now asked the question

Jorgens had just answered. 'It's worse than bad luck,' Carlos said to Stump. 'Li said we

got the green light to summit because somebody cooperated with him. The summit is

our reward for turning the kid in.'

The ugly charge hung in the air like the smell of sulphur after a lightning strike.

Robby came on. 'I don't believe that.'

'None of us would have done that,' Stump declared.

'That's what Li told me,' said Carlos. 'But he wouldn't tell me who.'

Abe looked over the shoulder of his blood red parka. Kelly's eyes were huge in the

lamplight.

'Look,' Jorgens exhorted the climbers in their precarious camps upon the mountain.

He turned on his basso profundo, smooth and polished, the one he used to address the

American Alpine Club. 'These Chinese will say it's none of our business, they always

do. And they're right. It's none of our business. The boy took his chances. He should

never have come waltzing into camp when their soldiers were there. The important

thing is for us to keep our eye on the ball. Over.'

Everything about Jorgens repelled Abe. He was working them like some Texas

politician, and he'd just betrayed them all.

'They'll kill the boy,' Abe declared as flatly as he could. It was a fact, like the stone in

this cave's walls. His anger would only make it seem negotiable, and it wasn't. 'I've

seen what they do.'

'We can't stop that,' Jorgens replied. 'We're up here. They're down there. It was a

matter of time before they found out. And besides, we're tourists. You people said so

yourselves. Tourists and climbers. Not saviors. Over.'

'Maybe not saviors,' Robby said. 'But not traitors, either.'

'Pete,' Stump said to Jorgens. If grimness had a voice, his was it. 'Carlos tells us that

Li didn't just find out. He was informed. Someone traded the kid for our summit.' He

didn't ask for a confession. He didn't have to. Jorgens knew what he meant.

Abe strained to hear Jorgens's answer. He couldn't distinguish between the blood

roaring through his head and the wind outside.

'Damn you, Stump,' Jorgens murmured. The two men had climbed many mountains

together, never with trouble like this. Bitterly, Jorgens surrendered the transmission

to their static.

'This is a serious matter, Pete. And you were the last to talk to Li. Over.'

Jorgens let it dangle.

Robby broke in again. He was dependably their good-time man, the one who, with a

word, could breach their deadly mood and finesse this disaster. 'Motherfucker,' was all

he had to say, and there was no mistaking who it was aimed at.

Down at Base, Carlos pieced together their judgement. 'You're not saying it was the

captain, are you?'

The damnation of Jorgens could take all night, Abe thought. They were losing sight

of the victim. Someone had to get this back on track and quickly.

'Carlos, can you talk to Li?' Abe asked. 'Tonight. Before he sends the boy off. Over.'

'Negative. I tried,' said Carlos. He sounded more weary than they were, and he was

two miles lower. 'Li's got his hackles up. He's acting real funny, like we're in deep shit.

He'll mention our cooperation in his report, but we're no longer being escorted to the

border. We're getting deported, folks.'

'But he can't do that,' Robby said, shocked. 'We didn't do anything.'

'Who can't do what?' Jorgens demanded.

'Li's declared us persona non grata,' Stump relayed. 'The Chinese are deporting us.

Over.'

'For God's sake,' Jorgens said. 'What's going on down there at Base? Handle this

thing, Stump. Over.'

Stump thought it over. 'Base, can you stall Li?' he asked. 'Two or three more days.

We can finish our business up here and come down and finish our business with him.

Over.'

'No chance.' There was a long burst of static, then Carlos broke through again. He

sounded defeated, as if the group had let him down. Obviously they had no solutions

he hadn't already thought of and discarded. 'Li knows us, guys. He told me it's very

unfortunate. He's sad that we chose the wrong mascot. As far as he's concerned, this is

kind of like putting the family pet down. You wait until the children take off for

summer camp and when they come back, Rover's already gone to heaven. Li doesn't

want any trouble. This way everybody gets what they want. We bag our summit.

They bag their desperado. Just to show us what a stand-up guy he is, Li asked me to

convey his best wishes for our climb. He said we've earned it.'

Abe felt sick.

Finally Stump returned to the air.

'Well that's that, people. The kid's gone.' His voice had grown weak. This was

supposed to have been a quick radio call, a few last words to help levitate the high

team to the top. Instead they had been handed this terrible news, and in the process

had just whittled their battery power down to a splinter on a human rights debate.

Worse, and once again, all their forward momentum had been sapped.

'I lost a friend on a big mountain once,' Stump continued. 'And when it happened, we

quit the mountain. On the spot, right then and there. We just quit. It seemed like the

right thing. We can do that here, I guess. Over.' Abe took a moment to realize Stump

was polling them. He wanted a vote.

No one spoke for a long time after that. Each camp listened to the radio plasma and

Abe thought how the very stars were bombarding them with radiation, a steady

crackling assault. Between the wind and the turning of cosmic machinery, their defeat

seemed inevitable. Part of him accepted the end, theirs and the monk's. Part of him

rebelled.

Then Gus came on the radio. Stump had relinquished the walkie-talkie to her,

probably gladly.

'I've lost people in the mountains, too.' In different circumstances she would have

sounded monstrous with her throat infection and the raging static. But tonight, given

the monk's certain fate, her hoarse grating seemed to ring with grief. 'But we didn't

quit. And that seemed like the right thing, too.'

Suddenly Abe wished Daniel would take the radio and speak. He wanted to hear

what the man was thinking as these people described their losses. But Abe couldn't

make out his own thoughts. He'd probably seen more death in the hills than all of

them combined. He'd become a virtual undertaker to the luckless and star-crossed.

The Chinese weren't going to leave him a body to take under, though. There was

nothing to scoop this time, nothing to carry out in the litter.

Gus gave the other camps a chance to register their opinions. When none did, she

spoke into their silence. 'I've lived my life in the mountains. It's a hard way to go. But

I never quit, okay? Out here – Tibet, the Hill – there's nothing between us and our

choices. No buffer. No excuses. That's just how it is. And the monk made his choice.

And we made ours.'

In the background, Stump told her to say Over. Gus didn't bother. No one else

wanted air time anyway.

Their silence stretched on, though for no good reason. They had their minds made

up, every one of them. Even Abe. They had spent major portions of their lives getting

this close to the highest summit.

'It's settled then,' Stump concluded. 'We go. God speed us all. Over and out.'

10

Abe woke to D day with Christmas morning zeal.

'Kelly,' he croaked. His larynx was rusted shut with strep and he felt badly depleted.

The oxygen had not proved to be a magic bullet after all. He recalled Robby's

prescription for summiting. Quick penetration. Quick up, quick down. Abe cobbled

together his resolve. Today was the day they toppled the Hill. First Daniel, then all the

rest, a stream of barbarians, today they began crashing the breach. Abe palmed his

oxygen mask away. 'Kelly, are you awake?'

Her back was pressed tight against his, but her voice came from a great distance.

'You slept?' she said. Vaguely, as if from a long time ago, Abe recalled her dream of

death. It was a moot point. They were much too close to the summit for dreaming.

Abe sat up, still cocooned in his bag. His head brushed the tent wall and hoarfrost

rained down. From inside his bag, he switched on his headlamp. The whole interior of

the tent sparkled with their crystallized breath.

'The weather's let up,' Abe said. 'It's quiet. The wind's stopped.' There was a

peculiar humming sound, but Abe figured that was just high altitude tinnitus. He was

learning you could hear illusions as well as see them.

'What time is it?' Kelly rasped. It was dark enough to be night.

Extricating his arm from the loose clothing and the radio and gas cartridges and

headlamp batteries nested inside his sleeping bag to keep them warm, Abe poked his

wrist from the neck of the bag. 'Six-thirty.'

That meant Daniel and Gus and Stump and J.J. had been climbing for over three

hours. By now they should have punched through the Yellow Band, and judging by the

silence outside, there was nothing more to keep them from the top. The Ultimate

Summit was about to penetrate this purgatory all the way through the sky.

Abe cooked them a hasty breakfast of last night's leftovers – Top Ramen boosted up

with salami slices, raisins, and Tabasco sauce. While the icy block of food thawed over

a flame, he made the seven o'clock radio call. It was very brief. The camps compared

notes on the night's passage and the weather. The lower camps reported extremely

high winds, but everyone took heart when Abe said the air was as still as June in

Texas up at Four. The summit team didn't call in, and that was more good news. It

meant they were too busy climbing. No one mentioned the monk.

Abe and Kelly geared up inside the tent, a clumsy process. Between the cramped

space and the lines running from their oxygen bottles and headlamps and the dangling

cookstove, their movements were knotted and cumbrous. They could have opened

the tent door for more room, but that would have disheartened them. Though the

mountain had gone silent, it was bitterly cold. The tent walls let them enjoy the

appearance of cozy warmth for their final minutes at Four. At last they were ready to

ascend to the high camp. And tomorrow, Abe thought with a pleasure too distant to be

called joy, tomorrow the summit.

Kelly unzipped the tent door and the cold poured in. Like deep sea divers, they

clambered to their feet and stood upright by the cave mouth. Abe was unsettled by

the darkness outside the cave. By this hour there should have been more light, even

with the sun buried in clouds. If conditions didn't improve, Daniel and his team would

have to use a flash to take photos of their summit triumph projected for noon.

'It's so peaceful,' Kelly marveled.

'The storm has passed,' Abe said.

But he should have suspected otherwise when he placed one hand on the

green-and-white checkered rope that led out of the cave and up the face. It was

vibrating like a plucked guitar string and he realized that here was the source of the

odd humming noise. Abe made nothing more of it and went ahead with his

preparations. He clipped his jumars onto the rope and adjusted his goggles. Even in

this darkness one could go snowblind. He stepped from the cave onto the face.

The world turned upside down.

Abe flew. He was swallowed into the air.

It was instantaneous. The thought flashed past that he was falling, but he wasn't. It

was utterly impossible.

Far from disappearing, the wind had grown into a hurricane gale and with his very

first step onto the face Abe was ripped from his front points and actually lifted ten or

twelve feet up the mountain. If not for the rope, he would have sailed right off the

face, a bit of dust swept into the jet stream.

Abe lay plastered against the wall, too astounded to move, not certain he even could.

He wasn't hurt, but his confusion was almost painful. He had to fight back his shock

just to register bits and pieces of what was happening.

The darkness was in fact a snowy whiteness so flat and dense his eyes could hardly

see. Thunder had usurped the silence, indeed the silence was thunder, and the goggles

were torn from his face. If not for the oxygen mask strapped across his mouth, the

wind would have stripped the breath from his lungs. Loose pack straps lashed him

where the skin of his face was exposed.

Sucking hard at the oxygen mask, Abe hoicked his body around. Hand over hand, he

hauled himself down the rope and back to the cave entrance. There Kelly helped to

pull him inside. 'God, Abe. Are you all right?' She knelt beside him in the cave mouth,

aghast.

'Not good,' Abe said, crouching on one knee. The oxygen mask was dangling at his

throat. 'And it's got to be worse up high. Daniel and the others, they've got to be

pinned down.'

'I don't think so,' Kelly said. 'If they were pinned in Five they would have told us.

They would have made the radio call this morning. I think they're climbing. They're

on their way.'

There were other explanations for Five's radio silence, of course. Their radio

batteries might have gotten used up in last evening's arguing or frozen overnight.

Someone might have dropped the radio handset or they might just have slept in or

forgotten to call. The other possibility, the worst one, was that Daniel and the others

had set out in the early hours according to plan and the wind had exterminated them.

Abe left it all unspoken.

He couldn't get over the preternatural power of the wind and stared fearfully at the

mountainside. There were no bench-marks – no tree branches or tumbleweeds or

flags or wind socks – to help him gauge the force, nothing to even suggest the wind

was blowing. Any loose snow had been scoured away. But for all its peaceful

appearance, the North Face was now a gigantic maelstrom.

'Do we stay here or go up?' Abe asked.

Kelly didn't pause. 'We have to go up,' she answered. 'They'll need us up there.'

Abe slipped an extra bottle of oxygen into his pack for ballast, then braced himself

and stepped from the cave once again. This time, turning one of his jumars upside

down on the rope and slipping both tight, he managed to keep his footing. Kelly did the

same, and after the initial blast, they adapted.

He looked up and saw a ball of purplish Saint Elmo's fire fifty feet higher along the

rope. He'd seen such a thing on a friend's sailboat once, but never in the mountains.

The ball of glowing electric flame had been drawn to the metal of their next anchor,

and despite the wind it didn't move. Beyond that an immense dark white halo was

crowning the summit. Abe forced himself to breathe deeply. It was imperative that he

ignore this world of beautiful images. He had to concentrate on the climbing. He felt

very afraid.

The air was murderously cold and it shook and rattled their clothing. Even standing

side by side at the rest stances, neither could hear the other over the din without

shouting. But it gave them one advantage. It graced them with wings. Abe was

carrying three bottles of oxygen plus his jump kit for medical emergencies, and even

so his load felt lighter than empty. It was almost as if the mountain were sucking him

higher and higher. He couldn't shake the feeling that he and Kelly were being drawn

into an ambush.

Abe approached the first anchor cautiously. The blue ball of flame was seeping up

and down the rope around one of Daniel's titanium ice screws. Abe couldn't remember

if the phenomenon carried a dangerous electrical charge. There was no way around it,

however, and so he finally dipped his hand into the strange shimmering light to clip his

jumar onto the next rope. His hand tingled, no more. He could smell ozone, but on

second thought decided smell was impossible in such wind and through an oxygen

mask to boot. One more illusion. He kept on climbing.

They seemed to be moving much faster than human beings physically can at such

altitudes. They had no choice in the matter. Kelly had the worst of it. Despite a

hundred days of lost bodyweight. Abe still outweighed her by fifty pounds, and it told

now in their footing. A dozen times Kelly was rocked and buffeted off her feet. Each

time she patiently righted herself and dug her crampon points into the snow and ice

and started again. She didn't complain.

Abe positioned himself a few steps behind in an effort to cut the wind. He couldn't

afford to lose Kelly. Things were getting stranger by the minute, and his sole comfort

was in being able to watch over her. Love had nothing to do with it. This was altruism

stripped bare. The only way he could identify his own welfare anymore was by looking

after hers.

Kelly's pace began to falter. She took more rests and her rhythm was off, afflicted by

missteps and occasional wobbling. Abe was slow to fault her performance, blaming the

wind. Finally he realized Kelly was in trouble. Her coordination was melting away

before his eyes. She kept lumbering off to her right, plainly disoriented.

Abe called her name, but she continued up. He called again, then plodded fast

enough to catch her by one arm. 'Kelly,' he shouted. 'Are you okay?'

'Cold,' she mumbled through her mask.

The easy explanation was that she'd run out of oxygen. Abe hoped it was that. He

stepped above her and fumbled for the cylinder tucked in her pack. The regulator

showed three-quarters full. Next he checked her mask. It was a standard military

issue for aviators, a diluter-demand system. It drew pure oxygen through a demand

valve and mixed it with air drawn from outside the mask. It was a simple enough tool,

but the exhaust valve and ports tended to freeze up. Abe had practiced dismantling

the assembly and putting it together down at Base Camp, and prayed it wasn't the

demand valve that had iced up. Fortunately it was the exhaust ports. He squeezed the

rubber mask in his mitten and freed the ice. Then he fitted the mask back over Kelly's

helmet and cranked her regulator up to two liters per minute.

'Try that,' he yelled.

She gave him a weary thumbs-up. After a while her pace improved.

At the head of two more pitches, the Shooting Gallery's steep narrow cleavage

opened wide and the angle of the slope grew more and more manageable. They found

themselves breaking trail upon a snowy tilted plateau. Compared to the vertical

gantlet of the last few days, the plateau felt almost level. They left the abyss behind

them, out of sight, almost out of mind.

The rope ended. Daniel had decided it was safe enough up here.

They continued on for another hour or so in the deafening howl, then Kelly stopped

and pointed. Not far in the distance, perhaps two hundred yards away, stood a

solitary orange tent. Daniel had taken it from the cache of gear the New Zealanders

had left in the cave. For the time being anyway, it represented the highest human

habitation on earth. The camp was built on snow, at the intersection of the plateau

and what Abe knew could only be the Yellow Band. Through his goggles the rock was

lime green and plated like lizard scales.

Kelly was pointing above the tent, though, and Abe moved his attention higher. He

saw a thick wide shelf of snow that had accumulated three or four hundred feet above

the camp. It probably held a thousand tons of snow, a perfectly formed avalanche

ready to cut loose. Then Abe saw similar pockets coiled all along on the downsloping

tiles. The whole region was primed for a catastrophe. The sight was almost enough to

make Abe turn tail and descend as fast as possible. But one further sight held him

steady, a rather sorry sight. There, almost within reach, stood the summit.

Abe was disappointed. For all its majesty and fury, Everest didn't finish with a

dramatic sculptured prow or a sharp pinnacle. Instead the mountain just rounded into

a sorry little hump-back, a gray lump shrugging at the gray sky.

The top was perhaps a half-mile away and a thousand feet overhead, but it looked

much closer and very easy, an afternoon romp. Just as Daniel had said, you could see

the summit tripod from here, a tiny, sticklike protuberance. The tripod reminded Abe

of an altarpiece for ants, ridiculous and not at all triumphant.

Kelly pulled at Abe's arm and shouted something. She had taken her glacier glasses

off. Abe bent his head closer. Their helmets knocked. 'I can't see anyone,' she shouted

above the wind, and Abe thought she'd gone snowblind.

'Your glasses,' Abe shouted back. He gestured to her to put them on.

Kelly didn't hear or else didn't care to. Either way she let the glasses dangle and

whip about on the string at her throat. She pointed at the summit again.

Abe realized she was hunting for some evidence of climbers on the summit slopes.

Now he looked, too. Their vantage point was ideal for spotting any movement up

there. If they could see the summit tripod, there was no reason they couldn't see a

moving figure wrapped in expedition colors.

In vain Abe tried tracing a route upward from the orange tent to the top. Then he

tried working down from the top along five or six different paths. Kelly took out her

camera and screwed on the telephoto, and they took turns scanning the top. They saw

no one. The climbers had disappeared.

Kelly's eyes were streaming tears from the wind. She shouted something, but Abe

shook his head, deaf in this hurricane. He tried replacing the glasses on her face, but

his fingers had gone wooden with the cold. Besides that, he could see Kelly's tiredness

and disorientation. He suspected her mask had packed in again with ice, and that

would need more work still.

'The tent,' he yelled.

Abe led off, plowing his knees through the snow crust. He left it to the wind to blow

Kelly in his wake. As they slogged up toward the orange tent, Abe tried to arrange his

thoughts for an orderly discussion. Matters of search and rescue or simple retreat had

to be weighed quickly and clearly and ruthlessly. But with each step he only got more

confused and tired.

It took them an hour to ascend the two hundred yards to camp. By the time they

reached the orange tent, Abe's fingers wouldn't work and all Kelly could do was kneel

and stare at the closed door. Finally he pried a flap open with his ice axe and slowly

peeled it open. He was careful not to break the zipper, because if they couldn't close

the door again the wind would surely kill them.

Abe pawed Kelly's pack off, then his own, and dumped them in the snow. Then he

pushed her inside and crawled in behind. It took five minutes to worry the door zipper

shut again.

'There's no one here,' Kelly yelled over the wind. She, too, had been hoping the

climbers would be inside.

Four sleeping bags lay heaped in the back of the tent. Daniel's team had broken the

rule and entered the tent with their crampons on. Abe could tell by the ripped,

punctured floor. Then he noticed that he had neglected to take off his own crampons.

Kelly's were still on, too. He took them off.

The tent walls shook so fast they buzzed. Abe was thankful the tent hadn't blown

away. Kelly sat in the corner, staring, mask off, mouth open. Her lips were bright blue.

They stared at each other, exhausted. Abe felt asleep. Or dead.

Another thought came to him. 'Oxygen,' he said to Kelly. Her eyes had closed

though. Abe set the mask back across her mouth. He checked the regulator on her

oxygen bottle. It was a quarter full. He checked his own. It was empty. He'd been

sucking on ambient air at 27,500 feet. For how long, he couldn't say.

Abe pulled the mask off Kelly's face and strapped it to his own face. It was like

robbing a child of candy. She didn't protest or even notice. He cranked the flow rate

up to four liters per minute and breathed as deep as one could up here, a modified

pant. After five or ten minutes, he felt warmer and less stupefied. His few priorities

marched into view. They had to breathe, drink and eat.

He unzipped the door. The wind blasted him and the tent bellied in the rear. As

quickly as possible, Abe opened his pack and pulled in two more bottles of oxygen,

then closed the door. It took awhile, but he finally got a second oxygen set assembled

with a regulator showing full. He nestled the second mask over Kelly's mouth and

turned it on. It would be good for four to six hours.

Kelly slept. Abe cooked. Rather than open and close the door each time the pot

needed more snow, he simply ripped the floor apart and took snow from underneath.

Since Kelly was out of the loop, Abe talked to himself. 'We're in trouble now,' he said.

He wondered if the regulator had lied. It seemed likely he was out of oxygen again,

but it was too much effort to check. He wasn't scared. To the contrary, a host of old

friends and half-familiar faces had come from nowhere to offer encouragement. They

were friendly and anxious for him, mumbling kind, if incoherent, advice. The tent

seemed much larger than it was. It filled with dozens of visitors. Abe kept at his stove.

There was suddenly so many to give water to.

At one point, the tent shook harder than ever. More voices cried out, adding to the

disembodied conversations Abe was enjoying. The tent door opened. More ghosts

joined Abe's gathering of souls. He looked for Jamie among the new faces, but she was

nowhere to be seen. Abe's father drifted through with his old oil-rig scars, and the

Tibetan monk rested against one wall, smiling, bundled in yak skins, looking more

boyish than ever. Daniel was there and Gus and all the others. The babble of voices

sounded like the roar of the wind and the roar of the wind reminded Abe of one vast,

unending prayer, a sort of high mass. And he was the priest. 'Water,' he offered one

and all.

Abe sat jammed against Kelly, who curled fetuslike. He handed out cups of melted

water and went on with his cooking, scooping new snow through the hole in the floor.

There was no room to work really – too many bodies in one tent – and he had to

protect his hanging stove from their elbows and commotion. Finally someone

volunteered to take over. It was Daniel. Pressed tight against Kelly and with someone

sitting on one of his legs, Abe fell asleep.

He woke slowly, still sitting upright. He was breathing oxygen through his mask.

The tent was full of people, but everything seemed different. The people had changed.

The wind had stopped. The simplicity and friendliness were gone. Once again the tent

was a small, shabby space. The walls had grown dark.

Daniel looked at him. He wasn't wearing an oxygen mask. 'You okay, Abe?' he asked.

Abe nodded yes.

'You were singing,' Daniel said. 'We came in. You were out of oxygen. And you were

singing.'

Besides himself, Abe counted a total of three others in the tent, Kelly and Daniel and

Gus. Gus and Kelly were dozing, crammed in one corner, zipped in bags. Daniel was

minding the stove.

Abe started to decipher his long, bizarre afternoon. He must have run out of oxygen

again. He'd been hallucinating, that was clear. Maybe he still was.

'We couldn't find you,' Abe said. He lifted the mask off to speak. 'We thought you

were dead.'

'So did I,' Daniel said. 'We had trouble getting through the Band. The wind trapped

us. We were close. But we ran out of time. We had to come down.'

'Where's Stump? Where's J.J.?' Abe asked. He accepted that Daniel had lost them.

Daniel squinted at Abe, perplexed. 'They came in the tent for a while. You gave

them tea and talked. Then they went down the ropes. They made it as far as Three

before dark stopped them. I talked to them on the night call.'

'I don't understand.'

'It's nine o'clock, Abe.'

Abe frowned. So many hours had passed. There was still a disembodied sheen to the

people and things in the tent, and he realized his escape from the underworld was not

yet complete.

'What else?' Abe asked. 'Any news?'

'Robby and Thomas came up to Four. But Thomas is dog sick. Unless there's some

improvement, they go down in the A.M.'

'And Jorgens? He's still at One?' It helped for him to be locating the others. Already

he felt more composed.

'Still in One. Tonight he went on the record. Not guilty.'

'Not guilty?'

'Jorgens said it wasn't him who turned the kid in.'

Abe hadn't forgotten the monk. But he had to remember if Jorgens's treachery

really mattered to him. He couldn't say. It seemed to matter to Daniel, though.

'Jorgens hangs for this one,' Daniel said. 'Stump and I decided. He can explain this to

his precious AAC.'

Abe hadn't thought of that one. The American Alpine Club took itself very seriously,

and Jorgens's presidency wouldn't last the first round of cocktails at their next

meeting. That would hurt Jorgens where he lived, more than any curse or fist could.

But Abe's small pleasure vanished when he pictured the board members who would

vote. Most were lawyers and professionals used to savoring all the grays between

black and white. And besides, few climbers thought of ethics as anything but a set of

rules governing how much chalk they put on their hands or how many bolts they

hammered in the rock. Ten thousand miles and months or years from now, the

notions of guilt and betrayal would strike them as absurd. They would say what

Jorgens would say, that a climber has no duty except to climb. And so revenge didn't

matter, especially not tonight at 28,000 feet with the ghosts crowding in.

'What about the boy?' Abe asked.

'Carlos said they take him off tomorrow. He hasn't seen the kid since the one time.

Hog-tied in the Tomb.'

Abe would have sighed if there was the extra air for it.

'Also, Li wants us down.'

'I thought we had ten days.'

'Two more days, Abe. Then our ten are up.'

'I guess so.' People, days, even reasons for being up here: It was so easy to lose

count anymore.

'Carlos said one other thing. The yaks down at Base, they've run off.'

'So?' For all Abe knew, yaks regularly ran off.

'Carlos said the herders are all freaked. The yaks were fine until today. They they

started getting nervous and running around. Then they bolted. They headed north.

The herders say it's a bad omen. Something's about to happen. It's been a strange

afternoon down there.'

Right now Abe didn't have any room for premonitions and superstitious babble. 'It

was a strange afternoon up here.'

'Welcome back.' Daniel smiled. Abe liked that they could joke about their madness.

To Abe's side, Kelly whimpered. She mewled like a kitten inside her mask. Her eyes

were closed and Abe thought she might be having her nightmare again.

'How'd that happen to her eyes?' Daniel asked.

Abe licked his lips and frowned. His headache was back and it was hard trying to

keep up with Daniel.

'She's snow-blind,' Daniel said. 'I gave her a half tab of Valium for the pain.'

'Valium? At this altitude?'

'Abe. I asked you. It was your idea.'

Abe looked at his hands. He clenched and opened them. He wondered what else he'd

said and done that afternoon.

'So what's the program?' he asked. Daniel's team had misfired on their summit

assault. Kelly was blind. They were down for the count. There weren't going to be

enough of them left to push it. The mountain had scored another defeat. Their only

remaining mission was to get off the Hill in one piece. He only hoped Daniel didn't

want them to descend right away, tonight, in the dark.

'I know the way now,' Daniel said. 'We cracked the Yellow Band. I thought it would

be simple and it wasn't. But now I know the way.'

Abe was sorry for Daniel. To have come so far and learned so much, and now to

have to turn his back on it all. But Abe had no doubt Daniel would return. Someday he

would complete his cycle upon this mountain. Carlos had told Abe about a mountain in

western Tibet where pilgrims circled around and around. This was that mountain for

Daniel, only the circles moved vertically, up and down.

'What do you say, Abe?'

'First thing in the morning,' Abe said. 'We can start at seven o'clock.' That would give

them a full day. They could descend most of the face in that time, maybe all the way

to ABC.

'I was thinking more like six.'

'Fine, six.'

Daniel grinned. 'Don't worry, Abe. This time, I know the way.'

Abe grimaced. He was appalled. They were talking about two different directions.

Daniel meant to go up.

'I thought you meant down.'

'He meant up,' a new voice intruded. It was Gus. She had been listening. She looked

broken to pieces by the combat. The sun and wind and fatigue had cut her face into

separate parts, and the parts were coming unglued. Everything was.

There was no possible way he could go farther. Now that the afternoon was over,

now that he was learning how lucid he'd been in his craziness, Abe was frightened. He

had to get out of this zone of illusions before it consumed him. But instead of risking

his hard-won alliance with Daniel by telling him no, Abe pointed at Kelly. She lay

asleep in a pile of down gear and gold hair.

'But Kelly's blind,' he said. 'I have to take her down.'

It was true, but also it was a way of cutting his losses. This way he could descend

and still have Daniel's respect. But his gambit failed.

'Negative.' Gus sounded a hundred years old. 'I'll take care of Kelly tomorrow. You

go up. I'll go down.'

'But Gus,' Daniel faltered.

'I'm whipped.' She stated it categorically, with no pathos. 'I can't go on. And I know

it.'

'Gus,' Daniel protested. But they knew she was right. Once a climber turns her face

from the mountain, there's nothing more to argue. Without faith, without obsession, a

climber was no more than bait for disaster.

Abe watched the gravity steal into her eyes. It was like watching a person die, a

terrible and private twilight. Yet Abe felt he'd earned this voyeurism and Gus didn't

turn from his gaze nor clothe her pain. Watching over Daniel had exhausted her.

'I'm sorry, Gus,' Daniel said. At the same time, Abe noticed, Daniel wasn't offering to

retreat. He didn't propose to descend with her, hand in hand. They weren't going to

stroll away from the mountain into a happy ending. This wasn't Hollywood. Nor was it

pity. Daniel's words were a simple, dry-eyed acknowledgment of her loss.

Gus was not particularly touched. She shrugged. 'I'm not sacrificing myself,' she

said. 'I'm making way.' Then she looked at Abe. 'I had my run. Now you have yours.

Get it over with.'

It was remarkable how she managed to bring it off. Here she was setting him up and

yet it sounded so benign. But the facts stood. Having exhausted herself trying to

deliver Daniel his summit, Gus was simply making certain her lover had a

replacement. Regardless of what had just been said, Gus was definitely sacrificing. She

was giving away her second try with the calculation of a kingmaker, and she was

giving away Abe's fear and maybe his life and, who knew, maybe even Kelly's life if it

depended on his medical know-how. Gus was willing to sacrifice them all, herself

included, in order to get Daniel to his salvation. And yet Abe could not resent her.

'Leave him alone,' Daniel said to Gus. 'You made your decision. He made his, too. I

misunderstood, that's all.'

Her eyes stayed locked on Abe's. 'He talks like you're blood, the two of you,' she said

to Abe. 'You act like it, too.'

'Stop it, Gus.' Daniel hissed at her.

She faced him. 'If Abe goes down, will you?'

'That's beside the point.'

'But it is the point,' Gus said. 'You can't do this alone.' She turned to Abe. 'And you

can't either.'

She quit talking. If she had said one false thing, Abe would have turned away. But

he'd felt the night in his heart for too long, exactly as long as he'd known Daniel. It was

time for them to escape, together. A thousand more feet of climbing and they would

break through to the sun.

'You're right,' Abe said.

'Damn it, Gus.' Daniel's shoulders looked thin beneath his parka. He was at once

angry and defeated.

'Shut up,' Abe said to Daniel. It surprised them both. 'I'm going. We're going.'

'Listen,' Gus said. 'The wind. It stopped.'

And it had. The tent walls were no longer buzzing. The thunder was gone. They

were talking at a normal volume.

'We should sleep,' Daniel said.

'It's so quiet,' Abe noticed. It was more quiet than just the absence of the wind. Now

he touched the still tent wall and found that it was solid and heavy, like cold wet

concrete.

Daniel zipped open the top of the door and shined his light outside.

'It's snowing,' he told him. 'Snowing hard.'

'It will stop,' Gus said. 'Like the wind, it will stop. Now you should sleep.'

11

Long ago, drinking straight shots on flat land at the end of a sunny day of rock

climbing, Abe had held forth that a mountain is nothing more than a pyramid of

memories and dreams. He had insisted. No mountain exists without the climber to

perceive it.

There was the opposite possibility, of course, that every climber is simply the

invention of long geological slumber. Just as climbers can manipulate their dreams, a

mountain can manipulate its own ascent. And when the mountain wakes, the dream

ends and the climber evaporates.

But Abe hadn't thought of that one that sultry twilight in a Mexican restaurant, and

now it was too late, for the Kore Wall came alive. It caught Abe, booted and spurred,

in the very act of checking his watch.

None of them had slept a wink, not once Kelly's Valium wore off and she started

begging for more. Abe had refused, saying she needed to be coherent for her descent.

She had cursed him and wept, but the tears only hurt her burned eyes more.

At 3:30 in the morning, Abe and Daniel started arming for their final assault by

headlamp. Gus and Kelly stayed in their bags to make room in the crowded tent. After

the men were gone, they would gear up for their own departure.

For a hundred days, they had forgotten time, living like exiles. Yet this morning Abe

couldn't remember it enough. Like a condemned man, he tracked every minute. His

destiny seemed to have become a matter of seconds.

At 5:15 Abe started working into his boots and super-gaiters. He snapped shut the

heel clips on his crampons at 5:40, strapped on his helmet eight minutes later, and

five minutes after that double-checked both his and Daniel's oxygen regulators. The

last thing Abe did before pulling on the wrist loop of his ice axe was check the time

again: 5:57 A.M., 6/12.

That was the moment the earthquake struck.

It was subtle. Kelly felt the trembling first. She said, 'What's that?' Then Abe felt it,

too. Then they heard the snow.

Like a giant serpent loosening its coils, the first of the avalanches let go with a hiss.

Each of them knew what it was with hair-trigger wisdom. Like the snow itself, their

awareness of the danger had collected heavier and deeper overnight. The Yellow Band

overhead was loaded with dry snow shingled with wet snow and they were in the cold

white field of fire. The first avalanche missed them. Eyes wide above their oxygen

masks, they listened to it empty down the limestone tiles and hit their plateau with a

boom. Moments later the backdraft blasted their tent with a roar of air. Spindrift the

texture of beach sand was pressure-injected through the closed zipper and the air

turned white.

Daniel started to yell something. But the mountain had its range now.

The second avalanche did not miss them.

The door blew out – not in – and a tremendous suction dragged at Abe's lungs and

heart and bowels, threatening to gut and empty him in one sweep.

An instant later the vacuum reversed. The tent walls collapsed. The fabric wrapped

Abe's every contour tight. The whiteness went black. Sound turned to silence. All

perception stopped.

Abe's first thought was that he'd died. He thought. I can live with this. It was so

peaceful. He felt warm. Nothing hurt. Paradise was rest. He'd been laboring to find

this calm since birth.

But then he drew breath. It was a wracked, burning suck of air, and with it he

plunged into hell. For half his lifetime, Abe suddenly knew, he had been dreading this

moment, when he would face the fate of the lost girl Diana. Yet now, like a wasp

capturing an insect alive for her young to feed upon, the Mother Goddess had

enclosed him in her core. The mountain was going to feed upon him through eternity.

Abe tried to move his arms. He was not surprised by their capture. But the

claustrophobia spasmed through him anyway. All his strength poured into thrashing

and bucking and tearing a hole through his imprisonment.

He had to move, even if it was only a fraction of an inch. He yelled and shouted, but

that only made it worse. He had the voice of a human being trapped inside a

mountain. Finally he passed out.

When Abe returned to consciousness, his throat hurt. There was no telling how long

he'd been out. Not long enough. He went mad again. Again he passed out.

When Abe came back this time, he tried to reason with his horror. But in trying to

picture his position – up or down or flat or sitting – or his location upon the mountain,

he lost control and consciousness again.

This time when he revived, Abe was too tired and ill to struggle. From a far distant

place, he felt pain. It was the stitched laceration on his right arm, he knew. But it came

to him simply as pain, without reference points. This was life then. Stripped of its

compasses and timepieces and sun, life reduced to a mere sensation. Abe no longer

wanted it.

Locked inside his coffin of snow, Abe felt inspired. If he couldn't control the

directions and movement of his life, then at least he could end it. The simple fact of

having a choice, no matter how final it was, calmed him. He didn't debate the issue.

One way or another he was going to gain his freedom.

Suicide was easier said than done. Abe slipped toward panic as he realized how

helpless he really was. It occurred to him that he could pack his mouth full of snow

and drown, however slowly. But upon opening his jaws for a bite he learned that the

oxygen mask was still on his face. He couldn't even honestly suffocate, it seemed. He

was doomed. Just before the avalanche hit, his oxygen regulator had showed a full

tank, and he hadn't yet cranked the flow rate from a half-liter per minute – his sleep

rate – to two liters per minute for climbing. A quick calculation told him another eight

to nine hours of air remained, and he couldn't even move his head to push the mask

off.

Abe's last hope was to go mad, then. But he no sooner invited the awful

claustrophobia to take him off into madness than it completely vanished. He was left

feeling calm and horrified at the same time. He remembered someone telling him that

Tibetan tulkus could select their moment to die. Through meditation they could

depart this plane of existence. He remembered the tiny cells in the monastery where

monks would have themselves buried for six and twelve months at a time. He stared

into the blackness.

Abe may have slept. At any rate another thought entered his mind like the sweet

arrival of dawn. It was less a thought than a whisper. It beckoned to him. It drew him.

Right through the snow and ice and rock and years, it drew him down through the

planet and connected him with his own past. It was like dreaming. Sensations were

traveling through the mass of his imagination like earthquake tremors. I have become

the mountain, thought Abe. He was pleased. It was the ultimate union, the

mountaineer with his mountain. He felt saved.

And then he was saved. Impossibly, he was saved.

Hands, voices, light – he was wrenched from the tomb and brought back to the

world. No one asked if he wanted to come out to face it all over again. They simply

hauled him kicking and bawling into the blistering gray light and cold wind.

It started with his face. Someone's hand scooped away the snow from his eyes and

cheeks and hair. Abe looked up from the bowels of his tomb and saw a woman looking

the way angels must, torn by the elements, with her long blond hair torn loose of its

braid and guttering through the jet stream. The storm raged all around her.

'Abe,' Kelly screamed in the wind and snow. 'Abe.' How she had survived, he did not

know. She rocked back upon her heels, blind and spent.

Abe's head was trapped in the snow, but even so he could see the summit, or where

it had been. The sky had atomized, blue to gray. The color had leached out, the border

between earth and heaven was erased. The summit was gone forever.

Above and behind her a dark shape loomed. Daniel came into view fully equipped,

from his helmet to his crampons to the axe in his hand. As Abe squinted up at him in

the driving snow, he noticed the black figure-eight brake dangling from Daniel's

harness. The brake was for descent. Abe did not need to ask. They had been on the

verge of leaving him buried.

'Is he still alive?' Daniel yelled in the wind. He had shucked his mask, and Kelly's,

too. There was no more bottled oxygen up here.

Weeping as if Abe had been lost, not found, Kelly reached down into the pit. She

fumbled blindly and pulled off his mask and the smell of freshly mined rock poured

into his lungs, raw and pungent.

'Are you alive?' Kelly shouted at him. Abe tried to speak, but the lining of his throat

felt flayed. He tried to nod his head but it was lodged in place. With her glove upon his

mouth, he managed to move his jaw.

'He's alive,' Kelly shouted.

Daniel seemed disoriented by her answer. He looked almost shattered by the news.

'We've got to hurry,' Daniel shouted. 'There's more coming.'

Dear God, thought Abe, more avalanches. His serenity crumbled. He tired to yell

and beg and pray, but his vocal cords had done all they could. All over again he fought

his lost battle with the snow binding his limbs. Snowflakes fell from the sky and bit at

his eyes.

'Please,' Abe hissed at Daniel. By whispering, he got the word out.

'Keep it together. We've got you now.' Daniel was talking at him, not to him. It was

rescue rap, the kind of chatter you used to keep a bleeder from going under. Abe

didn't feel any wounds. But Daniel seemed repulsed by him, and for the first time Abe

wondered how badly injured he might be.

Daniel dropped to his knees beside Kelly, practically knocking her to one side.

Without a word, he grabbed her ice axe and began chopping and scraping at the snow

with the adze. He worked desperately.

'How long was I gone?' Abe whispered.

Daniel pawed at his sleeve and mitten. 'It's nine-fifteen,' he said, and went back to

work. Abe had been under for more than three hours. Avalanche victims rarely lasted

over thirty minutes. After an hour you quit digging. But these people had not quit.

'Thank you,' Abe whispered.

'Don't thank me,' Daniel said, and kept digging. He was angry.

'I'm sorry,' Abe said.

Daniel paused, panting for air. His mood seemed closer to guilt than anger now. It

was guilt, of course. He had nearly left another partner to die. Daniel resumed the

task of resurrection. His pace was furious.

For the most part, Kelly lay hunched against a pile of snow. Now and then she

summoned the strength to crawl forward on her knees and scoop away snow, but her

efforts were feeble and only put her in range of Daniel's axe strokes. 'Move away,'

Daniel ordered her and she obeyed.

Daniel freed Abe's head first. That let Abe look around at the devastation. The

avalanche had scythed across the slope and chunks of slab snow and raw limestone lay

everywhere. It was a miracle any of them had managed to claw their way from the

jumbled debris. Their tent had ruptured like a balloon and been churned under by the

slide. Orange tatters flashed in the air.

Overhead, the band of yellow limestone was fat with snow. Even the portions that

had emptied onto them were rapidly accumulating a new white covering. A long,

heavy bosom of snow hung immediately above, menacing them. Daniel was right to

work with such desperation. They had to leave this area or stay forever.

Daniel widened the pit, unearthing more of Abe's body. Abe's ice axe turned up,

then Daniel found the radio, but it was broken. Grimly he placed these relics to one

side and went on digging. Abe understood that they were in grave danger, but he

could not understand Daniel's severity and gloom. The man didn't speak. He didn't

smile. In Daniel's place, Abe would have been rejoicing to discover a friend alive. Abe

felt strangely unwelcome.

Then the screaming started. It was a keening almost too high to hear. Abe decided it

couldn't be screaming. The wind must have found a sharp stone to whistle on. But it

came again. This time he caught the animal note in it and there was only one kind of

animal up here. It was human. It was a woman.

'Gus,' Abe whispered. No one answered.

Again the banshee squealing laced the wind.

Eyes squeezed shut against the gray light, Kelly bared her teeth. She clenched her

jaw and aimed her head away from the sound. Daniel was equally callous. He didn't

say anything, just kept chopping and slashing at the snow. The axe hit chunks of

limestone. Sparks flew among the the falling snowflakes.

Daniel freed Abe's right arm all the way to the shoulder. 'Lift it,' he told Abe. 'Bend

it. Move it.' Then he worked lower to excavate a leg.

'What's wrong with Gus?' Abe demanded.

'You better be whole,' Daniel stated. 'We can't afford more broken bones.'

Now Abe saw the blood on their cherry red parkas. It smeared pink on the white

avalanche debris.

Abe grew alarmed. 'What happened?'

But Daniel wouldn't say any more. Kelly seemed close to hysteria.

It wasn't hard to answer his own question. The avalanche had mauled Gus badly.

Judging by the blood and Daniel's remark, she had sustained at least one compound

fracture. They had found her and then packaged her for the descent. And just as

Daniel was preparing to go, Kelly had discovered Abe. Daniel had been forced to leave

Gus screaming in the snow and dig Abe out. Don't thank me.

Abe waited for one of Daniel's downstrokes and caught at the axe shaft with his free

hand. Daniel tried to pull away, but Abe hung on. 'Start down,' Abe whispered up at

him from the bottom of the pit. 'I can do this alone.'

'I wasn't leaving you,' Daniel exploded at him. But he had been leaving, that was

plain to see. Until this moment Abe hadn't known how utterly wrecked the man was.

Gus had been right. Daniel could not afford his own memories.

'Daniel,' Abe whispered. He pulled the axe closer. Daniel resisted. Abe didn't know

what to say until he said it. 'I am saved,' he hissed.

Daniel froze.

Abe wasn't sure Daniel had understood him. And so he added, 'I don't need you

anymore.'

Still Daniel didn't move. He could have been listening to a ghost.

'I'll bring Kelly down with me,' Abe clarified. 'Go as far as you can go.'

Daniel exhaled with a groan and released the axe. He straightened from the pit and

stared down at Abe, then climbed to his feet.

'She wouldn't give up.' Daniel pointed at Kelly. He was visibly shaken by her faith

and intuition. For the first time it struck Abe that a blind woman had found him. 'Take

care of her,' Daniel shouted.

'I will,' Abe promised.

Daniel picked up the walkie-talkie and stuffed it into his parka. Then he staggered

off into the storm, half bent from his cracked ribs and bad back and other old injuries.

A minute later, Abe heard terrible screaming and knew that Gus was being lifted

and moved. It was going to be an ugly, brutal evacuation. There was no help for that.

The four of them had been lucky to survive the avalanche. Abe didn't pretend to

himself that their luck could hold.

Kelly had fallen asleep in the snow. Even as Abe chopped at the shroud covering

him, a thin layer of powder started to bury her. With his one free arm, Abe shoved

and cut at the snow. It was slow going. Another hour passed before he managed to sit.

Like a B-movie corpse wrestling up from the soil, he bulled his chest through the

snow.

Abe was exhausted. He wanted to rest, just for a minute or two, just to breathe, to

close his eyes and take a catnap, no more. It was the wrong thing to do, but he would

have done it anyway, if not for Kelly.

She was gone. The powder had drifted over her like a dune. 'Kelly,' Abe rasped. He

sat there, piled with debris, and called her name again. Fear won out over his fatigue.

Now that they were in full rout, the mountain was reclaiming its territory with a

vengeance. There were no prisoners up here. Those who lagged, died. If he hadn't

seen Kelly lie down, Abe would never have believed she was there. To the naked eye,

she had never existed.

Abe bucked at the snow and yanked at his legs. At last he was able to worm loose

from the pit. Panting, he rolled onto the surface and lay there. Snowflakes lit down

with astonishing weight. Abe knew he was under attack, yet the snow warmed and

coddled him. The snowflakes crashed into his face and melted and ran past his ears.

Abe commanded himself to get up.

'Kelly,' Abe whispered. He didn't suppose it would rouse her, but he needed the

reminder. Every muscle and joint ached from his subterranean struggles. He made

the pain work for him. It too was a reminder.

Teetering in the wind, Abe stepped toward the dune hiding Kelly. He plowed his

hands through the powder and grabbed her arms and lifted her into the storm light.

He brushed the snow from Kelly's face. She was mumbling and she turned her head

from the light. Saliva had frozen into her golden hair. Abe couldn't get over the fact

that, even blind, this woman had saved him. Abe bent to her. He kissed her.

It wasn't much of a kiss. His lips were scabbed and filthy and grown over with

beard. But some part of Kelly responded. She looped one arm around Abe's shoulder

and spoke his name.

'Help me,' Abe whispered.

'Rest,' Kelly invited him.

Abe shook her hard. When she wouldn't cooperate, he simply dragged her across the

snow.

There was nothing to fetch or bring down. They had lost everything in the

avalanche. Abe eyed the Yellow Band overhead. There was enough snow gathered up

there to wipe the face clean. Most of it would funnel straight down the Shoot. Anyone

caught out would get washed to the base of the mountain. He tried to hurry.

Before they could start down the rope, Abe had to find it. And before he could find it,

they had to cross the plateau. The whiteout was in full blow, though, and the snow had

piled hip deep. Daniel had slugged a path through, but that was hours ago. Fresh snow

had filled in behind him.

Abe wondered if he and Kelly were trapped after all. Every step cost him five or six

breaths. The snow gave way like quicksand. Gusts of whiteout cut visibility to a few

inches, only to be replaced by light so flat it killed all perspective. The closer they got

to the edge of the plateau, the greater their danger of walking right off the North Face.

Abe didn't give in. He dragged Kelly after him, keeping a sharp eye for the first rope.

The wind howled.

At last he reached the plateau's edge. It dropped away six thousand vertical feet. He

couldn't see the abyss – it was just more whiteness – but he did sense a change in the

wind. This new wind tasted different from the monsoon curling over the summit. It

was a Tibetan wind, blowing in from the north and sweeping straight up the immense

Kore Wall.

Abe had found the edge then, but there was no rope. For an hour, he hunted back

and forth along the lip of the wall. Without the rope they were marooned. Without the

rope there was nothing to do but go to sleep in each other's arms. Abe was just getting

used to that idea when the rope appeared.

It was checkered green and white. All Abe could see were the green dots, a long

chain of them. He grappled the line to the top of the snow, then went off to find Kelly.

She didn't want to wake up, but he bullied her. Then he lost the rope again. Finally he

located the chain of green dots and they could start down.

Their torturous descent reminded Abe of the childhood riddle about the cannibals

and the missionaries trying to cross a river. They had one rope, one blind climber and

one climber on the verge of surrender. He tried the various configurations, going down

first to check the anchor, going down last to make sure she descended and going down

side by side to describe what she could not see. At her best, Kelly ran the drill like a

sleepwalker, eyes closed, limbs wooden. She was at her best for only twenty or thirty

feet at a time.

Over and over, Abe reached the bottom of the rope to find Kelly hanging limp in the

wind. She had neither the hand coordination nor the vision to clip into the anchors,

which complicated Abe's own descent. After several hundred feet, he rigged a

separate line to lower Kelly himself. Like a sack of rocks, she knocked against the wall,

sometimes whimpering protests, mostly just dangling mute. The method bloodied her

nose and scraped holes in her clothing. But it was far quicker than waiting for a blind

woman to feel her way down the steepening ice and rock.

They were halfway to Four when the mountain tried for them again. Abe's feet were

planted square against the face, and there was no mistaking the earthquake this time.

The tremors traveled up the long bones of Abe's legs. His crampon teeth scratched

across the bare rock like a stylus gone wild.

Abe felt sick all the way into the core of his heart. He looked up the Shoot's narrow

walls for the avalanche that had to come. It came.

Abe grappled with the rope and got a handful of Kelly's jacket. He shoved her

beneath an outcrop.

The main mass of the avalanche sluiced past in a tube of thunder and rubble. The

bulk of it struck the face several hundred feet lower.

Abe and Kelly clung to one another and kept their faces to the wall, breathing inside

their parkas to keep from suffocating in the cloud of fine spindrift. The aftershock beat

them against the rock and ice, but their rope held.

Kelly hung on to Abe. He hung on to her. He felt more tremors shaking them

through the wall. Then he realized the tremors were actually from a person sobbing.

But when he looked at Kelly's face, she wasn't the one doing the crying.

All day long, Abe pressed to catch up with Daniel and Gus. Teamed together, he and

Daniel could speed the descent and pool their precautions. At the top of each rope, he

felt the line for human vibrations. He peered into the depths, but didn't see a soul.

They landed at the cave just as darkness tinged the white storm. Abe had hoped to

reach Two or One or even ABC before nightfall. But he was getting used to dashed

hopes. At this hour it would have been foolhardy to try for a lower camp.

Abe unzipped both tents at Four, sure Daniel and Gus would be inside one of them.

But the tents were empty. It looked like Daniel had stopped here just long enough to

melt some water and root around for an oxygen bottle. Then he'd gone on. Abe

wondered if the two had survived the afternoon's avalanche.

Abe led Kelly inside and zipped her into a bag. With rest and care, her sight would

return. But it wasn't likely they would get such a respite until ABC or lower.

He started some snow on the stove, then assembled the last two bottles of the Kiwis'

oxygen supply and fitted an extra mask over Kelly's mouth and took the other for

himself. They got a single pot of water from the remaining butane. It would be their

first and last water on the descent.

In the morning, Kelly's eyes were no better, but at least they were no worse. Abe's

whisper had upgraded to a hiss. Outside, the storm continued. Since they had slept

fully clothed, not removing even their boots, they were able to leave first thing.

They reached Three at noon. The tent walls had been perforated by falling rock.

One of the platforms had taken a direct hit, knocking its legs out. The camp looked

desolate. Daniel and Gus had spent the night here. Frozen blood and dirty dressings

lay everywhere. There was no butane for melting water, no food, no oxygen. No

reason for Abe and Kelly to pause a minute longer.

Camp Two no longer existed. It had been scoured away by avalanches. Abe followed

Daniel's makeshift string of ropes across a blank stretch, then picked up the line as

four expeditions had laid it out over the years.

Minutes after traversing a gully, another avalanche scrubbed away the route behind

them. Once the billowing powder settled, Abe saw that the ropes leading up to Three

had been erased once and for all.

The terrain below Two eased considerably. Ironically, the easier angles made

descent more difficult. In the Shoot, where the wall was pitched at 70 to 80 degrees,

gravity had done most of Kelly's work. But as they approached One, Abe had to cajole

and push and lift Kelly across sections that defied simple lowering. It exhausted them

both.

Just before dark they reached the yellow tents at One. The wind had flattened one

of the tents and one was missing altogether. Abe scavenged for anything of use.

Except for some rock-hard nutrition bars – useless because of their loose teeth – the

camp was barren of food. There was no gas to melt water, no oxygen for Kelly, no

sleeping bags, no medicine, not so much as an aspirin. He wondered what had

happened to Jorgens and Thomas and Stump. It was entirely conceivable the

mountain had stalked and caught them.

Abe considered spending the night here. They could haul the collapsed tent inside

the one still standing and wrap themselves in it and probably survive the night. On

the other hand, there was still a little more light left.

While he was trying to decide what to do, Abe spied the third tent. It looked alive as

it wiggled slowly down the slope beneath them. At first he thought it was just blowing

downhill. Then he saw a tiny figure – Daniel – fishing it into the depths with a rope.

He had bundled Gus inside and made it into a crude sled.

Abe put his lips near Kelly's ear. 'I see them.'

'They've found us?' she cried.

'No. It's Daniel and Gus.'

Kelly tried to put a good face on it, but she was crushed. Abe had to pull her to

standing and then herd her down the slope. He didn't waste time trying to attract

Daniel's attention. The two teams of climbers joined together a thousand feet lower at

the bergschrund, the deep crack dividing the mountain and its glacier. It was a border

of sorts. And they needed to escape across it. It was so dark Abe and Daniel could

barely see each other. Across its gaping four-foot-wide split, the Rongbuk Glacier

awaited them with all its crevasses and obstacles.

No sooner did Abe reach the schrund than he realized they were going to get caught

out tonight. It would have been suicidal to try crossing a mile of open glacier at this

hour. The past several days of snowfall would have collapsed all their markers and

new crevasses would have opened during the earthquake. So there was no

alternative. They would have to wait until morning.

'I thought you were lost,' Daniel greeted Abe. He seemed oblivious to their danger.

It was night. The wind was extreme. None of them had eaten or slept or drunk much

for two days and nights.

'Daniel, we've got to get out of this wind.'

'I don't think we're going to make it,' Daniel replied. His voice creaked. His blue eyes

were rheumy. The bones of his face declared famine.

'We'll make it,' Abe said. 'But we need shelter.' A blast of wind knocked him back

against the snow. Daniel nodded his agreement, but he had no solution.

'Here,' Abe pointed. He was standing on the upper lip of the gaping crack. 'Maybe we

could go down in there.' Abe knew that climbers sometimes bivouaced in crevasses.

But the thought of descending into the crystalline underworld had long been his

waking nightmare. It was their only hope though.

'Maybe,' Daniel shouted into his ear. Daniel had scrounged a headlamp from one of

the deserted camps. He shined it into the black depths. To Abe's surprise, there

seemed to be a distinct bottom some fifty or sixty feet down. Avalanches had

apparently filled in some of the hole.

Together, Abe and Daniel cut a long section of rope loose and lowered Gus into the

crevasse. She made soft noises when they knocked her against the walls. Kelly was

next, then Daniel. Abe went last, checking to make sure the rope was firmly anchored

for their exit. He dreaded descending into the opening, almost preferring the darkness

of night to the possibility of another earthquake sealing the crevasse's lips above

them. But Daniel's little light beckoned to him, and he went toward it.

The crevasse walls were spaced ten feet apart and had the slick feel of glass. Closer

to the light, he could see the glass was dark green and turquoise. It terrified him.

Abe touched beside the others. Instantly he sensed that the snow they were

standing upon was a false floor. It could go at any moment. The illusion of security was

better than none at all, though, so he gingerly settled his boots onto the surface. At

least they were out of the wind and driving snow down here.

After a while the climbers were settled enough so that Abe could take a look at Gus.

He untied the ropes that bound the yellow tentage around her. With Daniel holding

the light, he opened pieces of her clothing, one at a time to preserve her warmth.

Gus had broken her left femur, possibly snapping the ball off her hip joint. Abe

couldn't be sure of that without an X ray. The blood had come from a compound

fracture of both her tibia and fibula.

'Her foot was turned backward,' Daniel explained. 'I twisted it around.' Then he

added, 'I just hope I twisted it the proper direction.' It was a worthy hope. If Daniel

had rotated her foot the wrong way, this leg would have been set 360 degrees out of

alignment. It would have been the same as tying a tourniquet around her leg.

Despite Daniel's makeshift splinting with an ice axe and a tent pole, the broken leg

was grotesque. He had controlled the bleeding, it seemed, but that wasn't good

enough. The fractures – probably the splints, too – had cut off the blood supply to her

foot. It was swollen and black with frostbite. If she lived, Gus was going to lose the

foot, at least. Abe didn't see how she could possibly live through the night. It was

amazing that clots and blood loss and shock and exposure hadn't finished her off

already.

There was little Abe could do to improve on Daniel's handiwork. The splints and

bandaging were as good as they could be. He tried without luck to get a pulse at the

ankle of Gus's shattered leg. His fingers were too cold to feel much, but he knew that

wasn't the real problem. The leg was dying. Abe was helpless. Without his trauma kit

and oxygen, Abe couldn't even begin to work on her.

'Are there any other injuries?' Abe asked.

Daniel mumbled, 'What?', less punch-drunk than distracted. Abe had never seen

him like this. The fire in his eyes had burned to common ash. Daniel looked downright

mortal for a change, as if pain and defeat and exhaustion were things that could

happen to him, too.

'Just hold the light,' Abe told him.

Gus's teeth showed yellow in a ghastly grimace under the lamplight. Kelly lay

hibernating in a ball in the snow. Daniel said, 'It's done now.'

'I know,' Abe said. It was so done, there was no sense even remarking on it. In Abe's

mind, the climb no longer even existed.

'Gus talked,' Daniel said. 'On the way down, she talked.'

'That's good,' Abe said.

'No.' Daniel touched her forehead. 'It's not so good.'

Daniel had checked out. He was delirious. Abe found himself resenting that. He had

counted on Daniel, they all had. They had hitchhiked on his composure and talents

and depended on him to be sane and wily and dominant. Abe felt betrayed by this

new frailty. He had counted on Daniel to defend them from this awful catastrophe

with plans and reassurance and energy. But this shipwrecked creature kneeling in

Abe's light was too lost to find his own way, much less lead others through to safety.

'Tomorrow will be hard,' Abe said. 'You should rest.' They had several thousand feet

to drop, plus the glacier to cross. The snowfall would have wiped out their marker

flags at the crevasses, and the earthquake might have opened new ones. They would

have to rig a sled and drag Gus, and Kelly would have to be led by the hand.

'Gus said this happened because of her,' Daniel went on. 'But I don't know. What do

you think?'

Abe knew better than to talk to delirium. Hadn't they both heard that kind of final

confession before? Abe went ahead and talked, though. If he could find just a spark of

lucidness in Daniel, maybe he could fan it to sanity. Otherwise Abe was going to have

three invalids to shepherd in the morning, and that was more than he could bear.

'Of course it's not Gus's fault,' Abe said. 'There was an earthquake.'

'I told her that. An act of God. She said, no, we should blame her.'

'She's out of her head.'

'In a way she's right, you know.'

'That's crazy. You're giving Gus credit for an earthquake?'

'No.' Daniel swung his eyes up in the yellow light. 'For our presence.'

'And you listened to that?'

'We weren't supposed to go up this last time, remember?' Daniel said.

'Each of us chose,' Abe pointed out. 'It was my choice.'

'But it wasn't your choice,' Daniel said.

'No one forced me.'

'No. But someone allowed you.'

'I'm tired, Daniel. Say it straight.'

'Li said we couldn't climb. Then he said we could. I wasn't there. But you were.'

'Ah, that.' Abe had pushed it from his mind.

'It's my fault, really.' Daniel lost him once again. Abe waited. 'She gave me the

mountain. That makes it my fault.'

Abe shook his head. Daniel had cracked after all. 'Daniel,' he said, 'that's nuts.

Nobody gave you the mountain.'

'Not the mountain,' Daniel conceded, 'but the way, you know?'

'Daniel, I'm tired.'

Daniel leaned toward Abe and the light gouged his face with shadows. 'Abe,' he said.

'She told me. It wasn't Jorgens, Abe.'

Abe closed his eyes. He felt stabbed. If not Jorgens, then... He turned his head one

way, then the other, but there was no way not to hear.

'It was Gus. She told me. She traded the kid.'

'No,' Abe said. But he knew it was true. It should have been Jorgens. But it had been

Gus. She had sacrificed a child to this mountain. Worse, she had done it for love.

'She thought we could finish the mountain and still have time to descend and save

him,' Daniel said.

Abe stared at the mangled, suffering woman. He was dumbfounded. How could she

have thought such a thing?

'She was wrong,' Daniel said.

Abe was quick with it. 'Yes,' he said.

'I've lived with this for two days and nights now.' Daniel was mournful. What an

awful truth to carry, Abe thought, and through such destruction. And here Gus lay

near death and the monk was gone and all for nothing. At least they had not climbed

the mountain. That would have been obscene.

'Do one thing for me,' Daniel said. 'It's the only thing I'll ever ask from you.'

'What is it?'

'Don't hate her.'

There hadn't been time for Abe to think of that yet. But now that Daniel had

mentioned it, of course he would hate her. If they made it through this – if Gus didn't

die and the crevasses permitted passage and the Chinese ever let them leave – of

course he would hate her.

'I don't know, Daniel.'

'Please,' said Daniel. 'She did it for me. Now it's mine to deal with.'

That night they curled against one another and lay against Gus to keep her warm.

Snowflakes settled through the lips of the bergschrund and lighted down on them as

gently as dust at the bottom of the sea. The glacier creaked like a huge armada of

empty ships.

Gus survived the night. In the morning, they hauled her up from the glacial pit and

started off for ABC. Abe kept expecting someone to see them from camp and come up

to guide them across the dangerous plains. No one came. At the end of the day they

learned why.

The storm quit around three in the afternoon. They entered ABC at five. The camp

was absolutely deserted except for a surprised yakherder. He was an old man who

had brought three yaks up to plunder what remained.

'Help us,' Abe rasped to the man in English. But the herder refused to come any

closer.

'He thinks we're ghosts,' said Daniel. 'They think we died.'

Sunset brought the last avalanche, the largest yet. A bolt of roseate light had just

lanced through the cloud cover when they heard the mountain crack high overhead.

The slide started all the way up at the Yellow Band and it took fully three minutes for

the mushrooming whiteness to devour the north wall.

ABC was a mile away from the base, but the aftershock still shook the climbers and

the spindrift stung Abe's face. When the avalanche hit the Kore's base, its rubble

fanned long and wide. The apron of debris barreled closer and closer to camp. The

yaks snorted and tore away from the horrified herder and he ran after them.

Abe didn't move, though. He didn't flinch. He was too tired, but also he knew it

would be futile to dodge. He had learned that much here.

For the rest of his life, Abe would be glad he stood and watched, because a rainbow

sprang up in the white powder. Its colors were almost not colors, they were so close to

white themselves.

Then the slide came to a halt and the rainbow settled back to earth and there was

silence.

12

It took five days for Abe and his rabble to plow their way through the sea of snow

from ABC to Base Camp. Somewhere in the middle of that tempest of piled drifts and

missed turns and sudden storms, one of the yaks died.

They were a sorry sight. Blind and seasick, Kelly rode one of the yaks. Comatose, or

nearly so, Gus had to be carried by hand on a litter made of tent poles. Even the old

yakherder had to be taken care of. Along with his goiter and some species of lung

disease he had senile dementia. He was more lost than they were.

As for Daniel, he was in ruins. He performed the tasks Abe gave him. Otherwise he

seemed puzzled and uncertain. He never strayed out of eye contact with Gus's body,

and at night he guarded over her.

Abe did not sleep during their entire exodus. Without warning the earth would start

trembling, and even when it wasn't, he imagined it was. At night Kelly had him hold

her tight, though in truth it was he who needed the holding. While she dreamed of

demons stirring deep inside the earth, Abe stared up at the iron-cold stars, wide

awake.

He was changed. They all were. What they suffered was worse than defeat. They

had been believers – richly pagan in their devotion to the mountain – but the

earthquakes had exposed their foolishness. They had lost their faith. Abe could see his

despair in the others.

On the fifth morning, Abe went ahead for help. The snows had gotten deeper and

bogged them down. Weak and slow, he feared the group wouldn't last another night

out.

Alone, he ripped a path through the frozen desert.

After many hours, Base came into view on the flat valley floor. The camp may as

well have been avalanched, for the blizzards had buried it under five feet of snow.

Fully half the tents had collapsed. Those remaining were connected by a network of

deep trenches.

Abe found the other climbers gathered for dinner in the big khaki mess tent. It was

dark and cold inside. A kerosene lantern hung from the bamboo roof support, though

it leaked less light than inky black smoke.

Abe took a minute to adjust to the dim light. The smell of food dazed him. They

didn't see him at first.

'Abe?' someone asked. 'Is that you?' The voice became a face. Stump had survived

the descent.

It looked like a bomb shelter in there. Part of one wall was lined with the remains of

their gear and food. At one time the expedition pantry had lacked for nothing. Now

they were ransacking the last of their stock.

Abe searched around for others. Through J.J.'s parka, he saw white tape binding his

rib cage. Thomas was slumped over the table behind a curtain of derelict hair, eyes

bloodshot. Robby lay propped in one corner with huge frostbite blisters bubbling

across his fingers. An ancient man leaned forward from the shadows. It was Jorgens,

emaciated. In the space of a week, he had aged a quarter-century.

'Impossible,' Jorgens protested. He was stunned the way men are upon learning

they've forsaken a companion.

'We called and we called,' he stammered. 'But the radio was dead. We waited for

you. We watched the Hill. But you were lost.'

'No one could have lived through those avalanches,' Thomas added. 'We got mangled

ourselves. And the snow was getting deeper. We had imperatives...'

None of them moved. Abe scarcely listened to them. He felt disembodied. The

climbers seemed less real than hallucinations.

'Are you the only one?' Stump asked.

Abe shook his head. The ice in his beard rattled like beads.

Thomas posed a different type of question. 'You made it down. But did you make it

up? Did you guys top out?'

Stump frowned at Thomas. The question of victory sounded mercenary. All the

same, Stump didn't tell Thomas to shut up. Like the others, he waited for Abe's

answer.

Abe looked from one pair of eyes to the next. His answer was obviously of great

importance to them, but he was suddenly unsure what the answer really was. For

some reason the summit tripod loomed large in his memory. It seemed close enough

to put his hands on, to tie his red puja string to the wire. He felt for the string at his

throat, but it was gone. He wondered where it could have disappeared to.

Abe tried putting it into words. At last someone led him to a chair. It was Krishna.

He placed a cup of hot tea on the table before him.

'Where are the rest of your people, Abe?' Stump gently asked. Abe heard his pity

and saw the doubt in his eyes. Stump didn't think there were any other survivors. It

took an effort for Abe himself to believe that his band of refugees was not a phantom.

'They're there all right,' Abe finally croaked.

'But where, Abe?'

'In the snow. On the trail.' That was the best he could do. He searched for something

more relevant. 'Hot tea,' Abe recommended. 'They would like that.'

Stump and Nima and three Sherpas set off to rescue whoever was left. At midnight,

by the light of their headlamps, they found the refugees. The night sky had clouded

over and so, fearing a new storm, they immediately started back down the trail. It

was nearly dawn before they reached camp.

They laid Gus on the wicker table in the mess tent because Abe's hospital had caved

in beneath the snow. At his request, the hospital had been partially excavated

overnight, and so he had access to all the medicines and oxygen and other supplies.

Steeped in caffeine and braced with hot food, Abe went to work on her.

The sun was just creeping over the east shoulder of the Rongbuk Valley, and the

tent wall lit up as he cut away Gus's bloody clothing and exposed her injuries to full

view. The months had taken their toll on Gus. Her beautiful athlete's body was gone,

replaced by a construction of sinew and bones. Every rib showed and her carefully

wrought muscles had vanished. Her moon-round breasts had withered.

'What's that stink?' Robby asked. From experience, Abe knew. Daniel would know,

too. Clostridia: gas gangrene. Abe dreaded what was coming. But first things first.

Because Daniel refused to leave, Abe gave him a Betadine scrub to wash Gus's upper

body. That let Abe consider the destruction below her waist.

With a pair of kitchen scissors, he finished cutting away her windpants and the

layered underclothing. Every snip of the scissors revealed more injury, more atrophy,

more loss. Between her legs, cupped in her panties, Abe found Gus's most secret loss.

She had been pregnant with Daniel's child, after all.

The remains were a week old, dating back to the avalanche. The mountain had

killed it. Quickly, so Daniel wouldn't know, Abe balled the desiccated sac inside her

panties and laid it in the pile of rags. Its disposal would have to wait.

Abe turned his attention to the injured right leg. He cut away Daniel's makeshift

splint and exhaled.

The leg was so damaged that the broken bones were almost secondary. Only now

did Abe verify that Daniel had rotated the leg properly. Daniel had done the best he

could under deadly conditions, but even so Gus's knee joint was completely

devastated.

'Daniel,' Abe said. Daniel paused in his tender cleansing of her bony arms. 'You need

to go away, Daniel.'

'I can't do that,' Daniel said.

'Okay,' Abe said. 'But look away.' With Jorgens's help, Abe began to reorganize the

leg. Bones popped and grated. Abe kept one hand on the knee and felt its parts leap

and dip. Jorgens – the ex-marine – had to leave the tent to vomit. At the sound of the

gruesome noises, Daniel crouched by Gus's ear and whispered, though she could hear

nothing.

That was just the beginning. Next Abe tried to determine the extent of her

fractures. The limb was so swollen he could barely trace the bones, much less find any

'override' of broken ends. There were at least three major breaks, possibly four, and

traction would have been his choice of treatment. But any sort of splints, even a soft

plastic air splint, would cut the blood supply to her mottled foot even more. He

couldn't afford that.

The frostbite had spread above her ankle. Every toe had turned black with necrosis.

They would have looked like mummified claws in a freak show, except the blackness

wasn't dry. It was draining and the unbroken blisters were inflated with gas. Death

was creeping into Gus through her toes.

'I'm sorry,' Daniel whispered to Gus. 'Forgive me.' The sight of her toes had set him

off.

'J.J.,' Abe said. 'Take him out of here.'

'I'm okay,' Daniel said.

Robby saw the toes and guessed what was coming. 'I'll help J.J.,' he volunteered,

and the two of them led Daniel out.

'Don't do too much,' Daniel pleaded with Abe from the tent door.

Abe opened the kit he'd never imagined using. He didn't dwell on the instruments,

barely knowing how to use them anyway. He wished now that it were a real physician

standing here in his place. Stump choked back his repulsion enough to disinfect the

toes by pouring a bottle of purple Betadine solution over them. Abe selected what

looked like a pair of stainless steel garden shears and Stump dumped Betadine over

them, too.

Abe was surprised by the shears' leverage and sharpness. The bones parted with a

snip. He stayed as distal as possible on each toe, figuring he could always trim them

more aggressively as the gangrene advanced. As it was, he had to prune most of the

joints anyway.

Stump poured more Betadine over what was left and Abe lay cotton dressings on

top and taped it lightly. The two of them finished washing Gus's thin body, then

dressed her in clean clothing and put her on oxygen. Finally they laid her in the

eight-foot-long plastic Gamow bag and pumped it tight with a foot pump. Each time

Abe peered through the clear face panel, Gus looked a little more at ease.

'That was an ugly job,' Stump told Abe. 'You did it well.'

'Now she has her chance,' Abe said.

'I guess,' Stump allowed.

'I need to take these rags to the garbage pit,' Abe said.

'I'll do it,' Stump said.

'It's okay,' Abe insisted.

The trench to the pit was still frozen and slick. He dumped the rags on top of other

camp refuse, then headed off toward the stone hut. No one had approached the Tomb

since the storm. It took Abe ten minutes to plow his way up the little hill.

Inside, the fabric ceiling bulged down under the weight of snow. Abe pried a stone

out of the floor and laid the tiny fetus underneath. Then he tamped the stone tight

again and left. No one would ever know – not Daniel, not Gus. Conceived here, this

one secret, anyway, would stay here.

The sun came hot that day. It blazed away at their cirque, triggering avalanches on

distant slopes and melting nearly half the snow in camp. By midday, the trenches

between tents had become waterways. Everest glistened to the south, once again

untouchable.

Every hour or so Abe peered through the face panel on the Gamow bag to check on

Gus. The big plastic tube lay in one corner of the mess tent like a piece of furniture no

one wanted to talk about. They ate lunch and dinner in there, but scrupulously

avoided mentioning it.

Abe slept beside the Gamow bag that night. He wanted to be close for any

emergencies, and it was up to him to know what an emergency looked like.

Periodically he opened the chamber to check on Gus's oxygen supply and take her

pulse and respiration, then closed it up and pumped it full again. At one point, he woke

and the beam of his headlamp caught Daniel's gleaming eyes. He was crouched on the

far side of Gus's chamber.

'Can we take her out of there?' he asked Abe. 'I want to hold her. Just for a minute.'

'If you do that, she'll die,' said Abe.

'But it looks like a coffin,' Daniel said.

'Not yet it's not.'

Daniel placed one hand on the chamber. 'Before it's too late,' he begged. 'One more

time.'

'Not yet,' Abe said.

'I have to tell her something.'

Abe knew what Daniel had to tell her, he'd been hearing Daniel whispering to the

comatose woman for days now. He loved her. He forgave her. If she loved him, she

should forgive him. And she had to fight and live because they had a life to share.

'Maybe later,' Abe said.

'Later... it might be too late. She needs to know.'

'Maybe she hears you.'

'But if she doesn't...' His desolation was breathtaking. Daniel was in mourning. No

one believed in Gus's capacity to survive anymore. How terrible, thought Abe. One

more terrible thing.

'I'm afraid, Abe.'

'The trucks will come,' Abe said. 'They'll take us out of here. Gus will go to a

hospital.'

'The trucks won't come. I know.'

Abe dropped it. 'Go to sleep, Daniel. We need to sleep.'

The issue of their evacuation was on everybody's minds. In the beginning, they had

waited for yaks to move them away from it. Their helplessness seemed never ending.

The alternative to waiting was also on everybody's minds. Daniel knew the way out

of here. They had followed him up the Hill. If need be, they could follow him across

one of the high passes into Nepal. But no one favored such extremes. For one thing

they knew from Daniel's experience the awful price they were likely to pay for

crossing the range in the monsoon. His Lepers' Parade was not something anyone

wanted to join, especially after the spectacle of Gus's blackened foot.

The blackness spread. When he ran his fingertips along her ankle and shin, the flesh

crackled with subcutaneous crepitus. By evening it was clear Gus would have to lose

the leg to her knee or else die. Abe informed the others and asked for volunteers.

Never having done this, he had no idea how many people the operation might take.

Then he went off by himself to read in his medical books about amputation.

At the appointed hour, people came into the mess tent, even Kelly who still hadn't

recovered her vision. They took Gus out of the plastic chamber and laid her on top of

the wicker table that had served as their dining table a thousand years ago when

times still allowed for good jokes and big plans and long rap sessions. Abe steeled

himself. He emptied himself of emotion.

Under Abe's direction, they took up various assignments. Someone had to look after

her oxygen supply. Someone had to take her pulse periodically. Someone had to be in

charge of the blood pressure cuff Abe had fitted around her upper thigh for a

tourniquet. Someone else had to sterilize their scalpels and knives over a gas stove.

The Sherpas were instructed to take care of the kerosene lanterns and keep them

bright. And J.J. was charged with finding Daniel if he could, and even if he couldn't to

keep the man out of the tent at all costs.

Stump and Abe tied a piece of nine-millimeter climbing rope around Gus's black

ankle, then tossed the end over the roof support and hoisted her leg straight into the

air. Most of Abe's work was going to be on the underside of the leg. There were no

ripsaws or hacksaws in camp, much less a surgical saw, and so the leg had to be

separated at the knee joint itself. The front of the knee would be simple, all bone. It

was the back of the leg with its hamstring attachments and the veins and, most

important, the big popliteal artery, that would require all the unriddling.

Abe made his first cuts several inches down around the calf. Carefully he skinned

the flesh over the joint for flaps to later sew over the stump. The bone and muscles

stood exposed now in an eight-inch band at her knee. Abe wanted this to take fifteen

minutes, tops. Longer than that, and they'd have to loosen the tourniquet. Things

could start going wrong when that happened.

He found the big artery and fished enough into the open to clamp it with a hemostat.

Below the clamp, he sewed the artery tightly shut with suture, then cut the artery to

the lower leg.

'Fifteen minutes,' Carlos said.

The words startled Abe. He hadn't realized how silent the tent was. 'But I just

began,' he protested.

They loosened the tourniquet and there was some blood, but not as much as Abe

had feared. 'Let's keep going,' he said. 'Pump it tight again.'

Next he sliced the hamstrings, parting the meat from its white tendons. 'Thirty

minutes,' Carlos sang out. Abe exhaled. He was going too slowly.

'You're doing fine, Doc,' Stump told him. Frost coated the inner wall of the tent, but

sweat was gleaming on Stump's face.

Abe took a deep breath and bent to the task again and again. He cut through vessels

and nerves, only stopping long enough to cauterize the ends with heated knife blades.

The smell overpowered several people. Abe didn't know who they were, only that

they left. He could feel the cold air rush in each time someone went out or came in. He

could hear the night wind suck and slap at the tent canvas.

A blast of cold air blew in. 'Gus?'

Abe lifted his head. It was Daniel, eyes enormous in the kerosene light. A moment

later J.J. wrestled in through the door, bested again. 'I tried to stop him,' he said.

'For God's sake, get him out,' Jorgens said.

'Gus?' Daniel cried.

Her leg was cinched to the roof like an elk carcass. Most of the tissue had been

debribed. The bone was white and bare. The sight unhinged J.J. He just stood there.

'Get him out, damn it,' Jorgens yelled again.

'Daniel,' came a woman's voice. It was Kelly, blind in the corner.

Daniel was weeping.

'Daniel,' she said. 'Come with me now. Take my hand.' She was reaching from the

shadows. 'Lead me out.'

It worked. Daniel took her hand and they left.

Abe returned to the leg. Three hours passed. When he cut the final ligament, Gus's

thigh slapped onto the table. The lower leg dangled overhead while Abe raced to

finish. At midnight they laid her back in the chamber and pumped it full of air. For

another hour afterward, five of them sat around like tornado victims, speechless.

'Poor Gus,' someone finally pronounced. It was Jorgens. 'She's climbed her last

mountain.'

On the next afternoon, beneath another boiling white sun, they heard the sound of an

engine gunning through the snow. 'The trucks,' someone shouted, and everyone

poured into the blinding light to see their rescuers. The old herder's two yaks stood

nearby, grazing on the last of some dried grass scattered on top of the snow.

In the far distance a vehicle was cutting straight toward them from the north. All

they could make out was the glare of its windshield between two brilliant roostertails

of slush, a ship of pure light.

'Home! We're going home!' It could have been anyone's voice. It was everyone's

sentiment.

They gathered to watch the vehicle approach. Even Li emerged from his tent to join

in their excited babble. This was the first Abe had seen him since their retreat from

the face.

'Wait a minute,' J.J. said, shading his eyes with a piece of cardboard. 'That's no

truck. It's a Land Cruiser.'

'Makes sense,' Stump reasoned. 'You send in your icebreaker first. It's got

four-wheel drive and good mobility. The rest will come behind.'

'Come to papa,' Robby shouted at the Land Cruiser.

'Mr. Burns,' Jorgens said to Abe. 'Would you please ready your patient for transport.

Gus goes first.' For a moment, anyway, some of the timber returned to his bearing.

'I'll see to it that Mr. Li agrees.'

Li was glassing the distance with a pair of binoculars, too busy to answer.

Jorgens went right on laying the groundwork. 'With the Gamow bag on the back

floor, that will leave room for two. Burns goes, obviously. And it's either Kelly with her

eyes or Corder or...'

Abe was standing close enough to hear when Thomas muttered, 'What the hell.' Abe

glanced at him, but the man was staring off into the north intently.

Slowly, as if disbelieving his own eyes, Li lowered the binoculars. His smile had

faded.

'Pete,' Stump said. Sober looks were suddenly epidemic. Abe wondered what was

wrong.

'I'm going out with Gus,' Daniel was insisting. 'We'll make room for Kelly. But I go

with Gus.' There were no two ways about it.

'I don't think so,' Stump said.

'It's okay,' Jorgens said to Stump. 'Corder should go with her.'

'No,' Stump said.

Jorgens stopped.

'We're not going anywhere.'

Engine whining, the Land Cruiser closed on them. It hit a wet drift with an explosion

of diamonds and the vehicle slung left, then right. The spray of slush reached for

them, sparkling in the sun. The yaks spooked and bounded into the snow, but were

too famished to run very far.

The Land Cruiser breasted another drift. Thirty feet from the front of the mess

tent, it braked.

'Tell those guys to keep the engine running,' Daniel said. 'Let's load Gus on.'

No one moved. Daniel plucked at Abe's sweater. 'Come on, Abe. Let's move. We can

make Shekar by dark.'

The engine cut off. Abe's heart sank.

'Tell that driver to fire it up. We're taking Gus out of here.'

Daniel walked between them as between statuary. The climbers were motionless

and silent.

He was the only one among them who had not seen this same Land Cruiser before.

He did not recognize the three soldiers who now emerged.

'What are you guys waiting for? Stump, give me a hand.'

The soldier's pea-green uniforms were filthy. They looked ravenous and tired. The

two younger soldiers seemed very happy to be here again. The officer did not.

Taking the initiative, Li approached them. He highstepped through the snow. Li and

the officer stood by the Land Cruiser and conferred for several minutes, casting

nervous glances at the climbers. Jorgens started to join them, but Li held up his open

palm to stay in place. After some more words, Li came over to the climbers.

'Not good,' he said with mechanical bravado. 'Pang La is closed. Earthquake, snow,

not good.'

'The hell,' snarled Daniel. 'If they got in, we can get out.'

Daniel's ignorance confused Li and he goggled at the climber.

Stump stepped forward. 'They didn't get in, Daniel,' he said.

'The hell,' Daniel said again and he started to wave at the Land Cruiser. Then it sank

in. His hand dropped back to his side.

'Where have these men been for the last week?' Jorgens asked.

'Rongbuk Monastery,' Li said.

It was simple to see. The soldiers had set off with their prisoner. Then the

earthquake had trapped them on this side of the pass. They had started back toward

Base Camp, only to be caught by deep snows. Without food or sleeping bags, probably

without fire even, they had taken refuge in the ruined monastery for the last seven

days. Now they had completed their fateful circle.

'These men require food,' Li said. 'They require shelter. They require medical

attention. They require...'

Daniel cut him off. 'Where's the kid at?' he demanded.

'What you say?' Li was outraged, though Abe perceived more bluff than anger. The

man had to be just as disappointed as they were at being trapped, but with one

significant difference: He was now trapped with them, and they were the enemy.

'What did they do with the boy?'

'I forbid...'

Daniel's black eyes dismissed the L.O. and without another word he bulled past him

toward the Land Cruiser.

'You,' Li shouted. 'You stay away.'

Daniel didn't highstep through the snow, he simply slugged his shins through it and

tore a path. The officer saw Daniel coming and he ordered the two younger soldiers to

intercept him. But the week without food and warmth had depleted them. Daniel

pushed between them.

The officer barked a high reedy command in Chinese. When Daniel kept coming, he

unsnapped a leather holster cover at his hip. Abe watched the man perform his

motions, and they seemed perfectly natural. Of course he would draw his gun. It was

as inevitable as Daniel's advance.

With ritual determination, the officer pulled his automatic pistol and gestured Daniel

away. That didn't work, of course. There was too much forward momentum. But

when the officer extended his arm its full length and aimed the pistol at Daniel's face,

things stopped, or at least paused. Daniel had came to a halt.

Abe wanted to shout. This was a mistake. They were climbers and their climb was

over. They had finished with this place. It had finished with them. There was nothing

more to do here. This was unfair. They had tried to free Daniel. Now was his turn to

free them. He should let them go home.

All the climbers could see of Daniel's head was the greasy mane that hung to his

shoulder blades, black against his once white sweater. Over his shoulder, the officer's

face was in full view, cold eyes in partial eclipse.

For a full minute, the two men remained frozen and contemplative. Their impasse

was physically painful. Abe ached from it. The heat and whiteness lodged them in

their footsteps, all of them. The silence was immovable, larger than a mountain.

And then something happened. Bored by the human drama, one of the yaks moved

its head away. The small bell around its neck rang. A single note shivered through the

air. It was enough.

The silence broke. Daniel moved, skirting around the officer. The black pistol stayed

upraised, pointing at the climbers for a moment, then drifting downward. The officer

looked straight through them, and by that Abe knew he had come very close to pulling

the trigger.

Daniel circled to the back of the Land Cruiser. He pressed the door handle and

pulled. Everyone was watching as the Tibetan boy slowly spilled out upon the snow.

Even the soldiers seemed surprised by the power of their prisoner's appearance.

The boy was tied – with expedition rope – hand and foot. He was unconscious and

dirty in yak skins, exactly as Abe had first encountered him. He lay in a heap, jaw

slack upon the melting tire tracks.

Daniel bent to him. 'He's alive,' he said to them all.

'Ah, Jesus,' Stump muttered, and it was not a hallelujah Jesus. Abe felt the same

way. So did the others, he heard them.

'Why didn't the bastards just finish him?' someone said.

All the simplicity they had earned, all their separation from the world outside, was

ruined by this boy's reappearance. They were haunted, not by his death, but by his

life. It was a mean sentiment, Abe knew, but an honest one. No one, from the climbers

to Li to the weary soldiers, wanted to deal with this anymore. The monk would not let

go, though.

Abe started through the snow, following Daniel's track. He was the doctor and there

was suffering and misery lying piled before him. They all had their roles to play, and

this was his.

'Stop,' Li commanded. 'This Tibetan minority is a criminal of the state. This matter

is our internal affair. You have no right.' His words sounded rote, straight from a

government primer.

Abe pressed forward. Li spoke something in Chinese to the officer, who instructed

his two subordinates to step into Abe's path.

'Mr. Jones and Mr. Corder,' Jorgens interjected. 'Our liaison officer has stated a

position. And I remind you, we are guests in this country.'

'So are they,' Carlos said. 'These Chinese don't belong here any more than we do.'

His words were bold, but he didn't move to join Abe and Daniel.

'Screw your politics,' Thomas retorted. He'd had his fill of this country. 'I came to

climb. Period.'

They were all performing their designated parts, no more or less. Abe could not do

any differently than he next did. Like Daniel, he went around the soldiers.

'Repeat,' Li declared. 'Stop. Now.'

Abe knelt beside Daniel in the snow. He put his head close to the boy's mouth. The

respiration was delicate and fast. Even before taking the pulse, Abe knew it would be

rapid and thready. The boy's hands were bare and blistered with frostbite. His feet

would be black. His condition had been terminal enough without getting trussed and

frozen and starved for a week. They had just saved his executioner the price of a

bullet.

'Untie these ropes,' Abe said.

Daniel worked at the ankle knots, Abe at the wrists.

'You,' shouted Li. 'This criminal is property of the People's Republic of China.'

Abe held up a handful of loose rope. 'This is not your property. This belongs to us.'

He was talking about more than the rope. This child's captivity belonged to them, too.

Even without the betrayal, they had acted as if silence were enough.

'Let's take him to the mess,' Abe said.

'You, stop,' Li shouted. He issued a string of words to the officer. Abe and Daniel

went ahead.

When they lifted him, the boy weighed less on Abe's end than some of the pack loads

he'd carried on the mountain. They had taken scarcely one step when the gunshot

barked. The body twitched in Abe's hands. It may have been Abe twitching, he wasn't

sure.

A cry of anguish wailed out.

Terrified, Abe spun his head toward the officer. A thin signature of smoke bled from

his gun barrel. But the gun was pointing away. It had been more than a warning shot,

however.

Ten feet away, the yak that had carried Kelly down from ABC lay crumpled in the

snow. A geyser of blood pumped into the air from its head. The old herder was

struggling through the snow to his animal.

Now the officer pointed his gun at the boy dangling from Abe and Daniel's hands.

This time, Abe thought, it was checkmate. They couldn't push it any farther. There

came a point when you had to turn away from the summit and admit defeat.

'Damn it,' Abe whispered.

'It's not done,' Daniel said to him across the limp body.

'It is, Daniel. They'll kill him.'

'They'll kill him anyway.'

'Daniel, it's done,' said Abe. 'It is.'

'We can't leave him,' Daniel protested.

'We must,' he said. And with that a faraway darkness sealed itself off.

'Please,' Daniel said.

But before they could lay the boy on the ground or return him to the Land Cruiser,

the standoff ended. A slight snap sounded from among the climbers, an ounce of noise.

All eyes shifted from the officer and his black gun aimed point-blank at the body

between Abe and Daniel. They saw Kelly. She was holding a camera.

The Chinese didn't know she was blind. Abe didn't know if there was even any film

in the camera. But she had it pointed in the right direction. She triggered the shutter

again. With a single finger she stopped the violence.

Carlos was next. He groped for the camera dangling around his neck and took a

picture, then three, then twenty on autodrive. Robby aimed his own camera.

The officer's face darkened. Li winced. Even if they confiscated every camera and

strip-searched every climber, there were still witnesses.

Abe made the most of their pause. He spoke directly to Li.

'I'm a doctor,' he said. 'I must treat him. It's my responsibility. It's my duty.' He left

the boy's future unspoken. There was no future. He could feel the soul ready to spring

free of this poor body.

Li considered this opening. 'Yes,' he finally declared. 'You must treat the prisoner. It

is your responsibility. Your duty. You are our doctor.'

They laid the boy in a sleeping bag beside Gus's red and yellow chamber. He

balanced the benefits of rotating his patients in the Gamow bag. But Gus seemed to be

stabilized inside the pressurized atmosphere, and the monk was unlikely to recover

anyway.

The Chinese soldiers set up camp in the stone Tomb a hundred yards from the rest

of the tent city. Li had several of the Sherpas move his tent up onto the hillside beside

the hut. Both camps dug in. It suddenly seemed likely they would be trapped here

until the end of the monsoon in late August or September. Stump and Thomas

butchered the dead yak and hung the meat in a tent. Some of the others took an

inventory of their remaining supplies. There was enough food to last until August.

Kerosene for the stoves would run out by July.

A day passed with little change. A distinct boundary sprang up between the

Western and Chinese camps. Only Krishna crossed it, to deliver hot meals up the little

hill to the soldiers and liaison officer.

That night Abe was lying curled and shivering on the frozen earth, breathing his

own hot animal breath inside his sleeping bag. He couldn't sleep without drugging

himself, and that wasn't an option, not with two unconscious patients bracketing him

like bookends.

'Abe,' he heard. Abe flipped on his headlamp and Daniel's gaunt face hung in the

glare. It gave him a start. Godforsaken: The word assembled in his mind. Some of the

others had been remarking on Daniel's crash ever since the descent. The amputation

seemed to have broken him altogether. They said he slept in some rocks by day. At

night you could hear him stalking through the camp, plodding through the snow,

ceaseless.

'Aren't you cold, Daniel?'

Frost was guttering from Daniel's filthy beard and he was trembling. But he denied

the cold.

'Will she be okay?' Daniel asked.

'Her pulse is stronger. The wound seems clean. I've got her jacked full of every

antibiotic we have. We nailed the gangrene cold. There's no reason she can't recover,

Daniel.' He paused. 'Now there's an extra bag in the corner. Why don't you bring it

over and get warm and sleep. You can sleep beside her.'

'What about him?' Daniel was staring at the Tibetan boy.

'I don't know.'

Daniel knelt beside the still body and pulled the corners of the sleeping bag back to

see the boy's face. 'He deserves better than this,' Daniel said. 'He deserved better

from us.'

Certainly the boy had deserved better from them. In a sense they had been the final

guardians of his passage from Tibet, and they had failed him. Abe no longer blamed

Gus alone. The others did. Daniel had told Kelly about what she had done. At his

request, Kelly had told the others. He wanted them to know why she'd done it. He

wanted them to blame him, not her. But even blaming her was beside the point.

For the boy had been in danger since the moment he appeared in their camp. He

had come to them bleeding and in rags, and they had done nothing but give him a

clean expedition T-shirt and a baseball cap and stick Band-Aids on his torture

wounds. That and their silence was supposed to have screened this frail, lone, child

from the Chinese wind. What had they been thinking?

'You're right,' Abe said. 'He deserved better. But the truth is, I just don't think it's