again, the glacier, beneath his pillow of spare clothing.
Hundreds of feet thick, the ice was alive and moving. He could hear it popping and
groaning and cracking. And suddenly his vertigo returned and the very earth seemed
to drop out from under him.
Abe had once read that in the Dark Ages, peasants used to believe it meant certain
death to sleep upon a glacier. Now, listening to the dragons stirring within the
mountain, Abe came close to whispering a prayer. But for the life of him, he couldn't
remember a single one.
5
Long before the morning sun could reach around Everest's north-facing architecture
and unearth ABC, Abe left Kelly's warmth to go chop ice for breakfast. He was the
first up, or thought so until he found Daniel alone, perched upon a boulder. The man
was hunkered down upslope with a big expedition sleeping bag draped across his
shoulders, and he was facing the mountain. He might have been a gargoyle frozen in
place. His hair lay heavy with human grease, long and black upon the bag's cherry-red
Gore-Tex.
At Abe's approach, Daniel twisted. His eyes were glittering in a mask of sunbaked
cheekbones and black whiskers and the pale skin of his goggles mark. He looked wild,
but not because of the burnt flesh or unwashed hair or gleaming eyes which marked
them all by this point. Rather it was his grin. The white teeth in that dark mask
showed a joy so savage it made Abe cold.
'Here it is,' Daniel said. He turned back to relish the wall, his horseshoe jawline
thrusting out at the great North Face, and Abe stood beside him.
The North Face was astounding. Where its lines had been washed out by shadow
and light yesterday afternoon, this morning Abe could see the route's features in
clean, blue detail. ABC sat so close to its base that the mountain was foreshortened
and looked squashed. The upper reaches beetled out. Gullies and ridges seemed
warped out of their actual shape. The summit was barely visible as an insignificant
bump. All the parts of it stood assembled just so, and now Abe could see a logic to the
route that made Daniel's climb a little more imaginable, almost accessible.
'This beauty...' Daniel started to say with faraway remembrance, but he faded off.
'I didn't know it would be so elegant,' Abe remarked, and he meant it. For all its
brute, compacted massiveness, the line had a delicacy and straightness that would
appeal to any climber, even a newcomer like Abe. Now, with the route stretched full
above him, Abe could see that Daniel's direttisima was more direct, and ingenious,
than any he'd ever seen. Abe stood quietly by the monster's author, marveling at
Daniel's hubris.
It was almost as if Daniel had laid down a giant ruler in the middle of all this
geological anarchy and drawn a path of absolute simplicity. Not that simplicity meant
ease or safety. To the contrary, the Kore Wall was going to demand extraordinary
risk. From top to bottom, the 8,000-foot wall was exposed to weather and rockfall,
and there was no exit onto easier ridges should they run into trouble.
Daniel spoke again, his voice darker. 'This fucker...'
He rustled under his crisp Gore-Tex shroud and looked around at Abe. For an
instant – no longer – Abe saw a face from long ago, a look of utter blank panic or
worse, a look of terrible surrender. Then Daniel drew a deep breath and brought
himself back from the depths, and Abe drew a breath too.
'I can't believe I'm here.'
'Me either.' Abe meant himself.
But Daniel was lost in his soliloquy. He snorted, shook his head. 'I'll tell you one
thing,' he said. 'It's not for the love of it. No way. I hate this fucker.'
Abe digested that. 'Bad attitude,' he finally joked, at a loss otherwise.
It was just the right thing to say. Daniel was delighted. He grinned more fiercely.
'Ain't it though.'
They ate breakfast, then gathered by the jumbled heap of supplies, eager to climb.
Out came the ice screws and snow pickets and pitons of every shape, and 'Friends,'
the spring-loaded cams that looked so high-tech that James Bond had employed one
in a recent movie, and the deadmen, stacks of aluminum anchors. In one linked
silvery bunch lay their carabiners, or snap links, the all-purpose safety pins that
would channel ropes, complete belay anchors, connect harnesses, hold hardware,
brake rappels, and give a dumb extra hand with a 1,200-pound grip whenever an
extra hand was needed. Abe knew his way around most of this sharpened,
customized, taped, initialed, store-bought and homemade weaponry, even the two
battery-powered hand drills someone had brought for drilling bolts, a rock climber's
touch. What was unfamiliar to him he hefted and fiddled with and figured out on his
own.
Sporting his black eye still and a huge grin, J.J. got them in the mood when he
reached deep into the pile and extracted a 300-foot coil of orange rope and held it
over his head, whooping, 'Firepower.'
Three days passed before Abe got his turn to go up. In teams of two, the climbers
fanned upward. They took new territory, inflicting their calculations upon the
mountain, pinning their camps to the rock and snow and ice. Each team rotated to the
high point to push it higher, then retreated to ABC to rest and make room for fresh
troops. Forsaking the tactics which alpinists normally employed in almost every other
range on earth, the Ultimate Summit proceeded carefully and slowly. These were the
Greater Himalayas. Were Everest located at lower elevations, they could have made a
concerted push to the top in a single week.
They had entered the so-called deathzone, where big mountains tend to wreck the
delicate mechanisms of human physiology. Nothing lived up here for long except
lichen and a rare breed of spider with antifreeze glycerine for blood.
Up and down, up and down: When they weren't leading they were humping loads.
On any given day there were four to eight climbers occupying different levels of the
mountain. With the yaks unable to go any higher, they became their own beasts of
burden. Daniel's strategy called for five camps above ABC, each to be stocked with
progressively smaller quantities of food and cooking fuel. The upper camps – those
above 26,000 feet, if they got that far – would get bottled oxygen. Ounce by ounce,
every thread, every crumb, had to be carried on their backs.
At last Abe moved up. Because they were sharing a tent and wanted to try climbing
together, he and Kelly got teamed. That meant they were supposed to keep track of
one another, and to share 'hill rats,' or mountain food, which were broken into
two-man-day packets, and to climb as a pair. Today the two of them were scheduled
to reach Camp One, which one team had helped supply yesterday, and which another
team was using to sleep in while pressing the ascent to what would become Camp
Two. Tomorrow they would take the sharp end – the high point of the rope – to lead
toward Two. Maybe they would reach it, though Abe had no idea where Two was
supposed to be located or exactly what to do when they reached it. He was depending
on Kelly to know how to configure and erect a Himalayan camp from scratch. A few
yards beyond the borde
r of ABC, the rocky detritus gave way to pure glacier. The
north bowl swept up toward the bergschrund – that fetal tear which separates a
mountain from its glacier – and then steepened.
Blowing wreaths of frost in the chill blue air, the two climbers clamped on their
crampons. Somebody had landed a batch of twenty pairs of a brand called Foot Fangs,
and Abe's were factory fresh, sharp enough to draw blood. He clapped shut the heel
mount with his palm and tugged the ankle strap good and tight and stamped once
against the snow. This was his first time in crampons on the mountain, and it felt a
little like mounting a horse, this stout bonding of foot to steel to ice.
They plied the glacial plain, navigating by instinct mostly. The wind had covered
over yesterday's tracks with snow the texture of sand grains. It was obvious where
they were going – to the fractured schrund a mile away – but between here and there
lay an obstacle course of crevasses, false promises and wrong turns. Parts of the
labyrinth were marked with bamboo wands brought up from Nepal and tipped with
red duct tape. Most of the way lay unwritten, though. Kelly said 'no problem' and
surged ahead.
They moved from one crevasse to the next, zigzagging back and forth in pursuit of
marker wands. In between they methodically probed for crevasses, Kelly with her ice
axe, Abe with a ski pole. Overnight some of the bamboo wands had tipped over or
simply been ingested by the crevasses. Abe noticed that the bamboo – still green
when they'd unloaded it from the trucks – had dried to a dead gray, every hint of
water sucked out by the mountain.
Most of the crevasses were easy to step across or hop over. Several were too wide
for that and so snow bridges had been hunted out and tested for human weight,
carefully, and then marked and roped for safety. These required long detours to
reach.
One crevasse gaped so wide it seemed impassable. But after a half-hour of walking
along its lower flank, they came to a battered aluminum extension ladder with
Japanese script along one side. Daniel had salvaged it from the garbage dump at ABC
and with Gus and Nima's help had carefully laid it flat across the twenty-foot gap and
staked it in place. Abe took an immediate dislike to the ladder. He was tempted to
crawl across it, but with a pack on it would have been even more awkward. Besides
that, Kelly had just walked it with robotic ease, clanking metallically. With each step,
his crampon teeth threatened to slide or catch on the metal rungs. At the halfway
point, the bottomless crevasse seemed to howl up at Abe. He scuttled across the rest
of the span like a stick figure on fire.
Kelly turned out to be better acclimated, but Abe managed to keep up. Their pace
was relatively quick – one step, one breath. Higher, the ratio would widen radically,
Abe knew, four or five lungfuls per step. Their crampon teeth squeaked on the ice
bed.
After two hours, Kelly paused and pointed up. Through his glacier glasses, Abe saw
pink and green sunrays suddenly flare over the northeast shoulder of Everest. It
turned into a wild jagged corona and he heard the mountain stretch itself. Its joints
creaked underneath his boots as the glacier settled. Snowbeds rustled. A distant green
avalanche sloughed loose, beautiful and deadly.
'No problem,' said Kelly. 'We're still ahead of the warm.' Once the sun hit, the upper
mountain would begin its daily thaw and send rocks and ice and maybe worse rattling
down. Abe was not looking forward to that deadly rain.
They moved off again. A gust of wind brushed across the glacier. Spindrift flowered
up from underfoot and for thirty seconds or so a ground blizzard whistled at knee
level. Because of its curvature, the immense northern bowl spawned dervishes.
Slender ice tornadoes tap-danced here and there. One crawled partway up the wall
before gravity pulled it back down. Then the wind stopped. The snow settled. The
dervishes died. It was still again.
More time passed. Overhead the wall of stone and ice grew enormous, but remained
untouchable. Somewhere at its base lay Camp One. Since Abe had no idea where, time
ceased to matter. They would get there when they got there.
Finally they reached the bergschrund. Here was the start of the technical climbing
and it was announced by the first rope. It was a thick snake of polypropylene, once
white, now gray. Fixed ropes like this one would allow them to carry heavy loads in
safety, giving them a handrail for guidance and support. As the angle grew more
radical, they would be hanging from the ropes. In addition to aiding their ascent, the
ropes were an insurance policy. If – when – the weather turned ugly, the ropes would
allow them to bail out in a hurry, rappeling down the ropes at ten times the speed
they'd gone up them.
Abe didn't recognize the gray rope as any of their stock and he guessed it had been
plundered from somewhere else on the mountain, maybe from the old pile Nima had
uncovered in ABC. Abe wasn't in the habit of using a rope he didn't know. Wind and
ultraviolet rays could age a rope in a matter of weeks, and there was no telling how
long this one had been getting whipped and fried at the roof of the world. But since
Kelly didn't hesitate to clip onto it, Abe didn't either. So much depended on sheer faith
up here.
upward, but caught downward. Abe slid his jumar high on the rope, and when he came
to the four-foot-wide slash that was the bergschrund, he stopped beside Kelly. She
was peering into the deep chasm at her boot tips.
'You see it down there?' she said. 'That must be from Daniel's first go at the Hill.'
The huge block of ice they stood upon was calving from the slope, and deep in the
turquoise cleft Abe saw the taut green rope she was talking about. It stretched from
one wall to the other and looked like the final thread holding two naturally opposed
forces together.
'How'd it get so far down?' Abe asked. It had been six years since Daniel's last visit
here, yet the rope seemed centuries deep.
Kelly shrugged and turned her attention uphill. 'Yeti,' she said. The abominable
snowman. Things happened on mountains that couldn't be explained and humans
weren't very good at letting that be. They needed dragons or gremlins. Or yeti.
One at a time they took off their packs and leapt for the far side of the bergschrund.
Abe's Foot Fangs bit into the snow with a jolting halt. They were on the mountain
itself now, behind enemy lines.
The gray rope ended a hundred meters higher in a mass of knots that disappeared
into the snow and ice. Abe knew that somewhere under the surface an aluminum
plate called a deadman was locked in place, anchoring the rope. But to the naked eye,
it looked like the rope had been sucked into a devouring mouth. The mountain was
alive, no doubt about it.
They unclipped from the gray rope and clipped onto the next one, a section of
weathered blue nine-millimeter Perlon. This wasn't Ultimate Summit stock either,
and Abe realized the team was saving its new rope for more severe terrain. The line of
fixed old
ropes went on and on like that to the top of the slope, jointed together with
bits and pieces of used nylon. Using the rope as an occasional handline, he slid his
jumar along just ahead of him. The slope steepened. More and more he had to haul
against the rope and kick his feet against snow that had been annealed by the sun and
wind. One short 65-degree required the front points of his crampons.
Kelly was kind, pacing their ascent to Abe's first time at these altitudes. She didn't
remark at his gasping, merely stopping each time he bent over his high knee to rest.
He felt ill and exhilarated at the same time. Part of him revelled in the height and
spectacle. Part of him just wanted to quit moving and lie down for a nap. Try as he
might, the ambivalence – the charged current between misery and magic – wouldn't
switch off. Twice he noticed colorful stains in the snow alongside the ropes, and
realized it was old vomit where others had found it tough going, too.
Camp One lay cupped at the tip of a knife ridge. Three bright yellow tents stood in a
lengthwise string, end to end, and it was the most precarious site Abe had ever seen.
At its widest point, the ridge was only five feet across, scarcely wide enough to hold a
tent. On either side, the ridge plummeted a thousand feet. The outermost tent had
part of its back wall hanging over the edge.
'Not too shabby,' Kelly said, checking her watch. It was only two o'clock – real time,
not Beijing time, they'd given that up upon reaching ABC – but their workday was
done. She was sitting in the doorway of one tent, dangling a foot over the edge.
Far below, the immense northern bowl with its crevasses and snowy expanses had
become a cup full of lines and white spaces. ABC was tiny, just a spray of colored
freckles. If anyone was moving among the tents, they were too small to see. The sun
was wheeling around the northwestern crest, cutting the bowl into dark and light
halves. Even as he watched, the sunlight gave up some of its territory, and the halves
were no longer halves.
Abe bit down on his vertigo and smiled weakly. He'd slept on ledges and in
hammocks on big walls in Yosemite, but never on a ridge jutting this thinly into space.
The placement looked insane, but Abe knew he should appreciate its logic. Very
simply, sitting on this ridge, the camp was out of reach of avalanches and rockfall. In