upper mountain and survey their people down the Shoot. Abe peeked. A hundred feet
down the ropes, Gus was spidering upward once again, and beneath her another
hundred feet J.J. was on one knee.
Daniel exposed his Kmart wristwatch. 'Clockwork,' he grinned. 'Eleven oh-five. The
daily wake-up call.'
Abe grinned back. He grinned wide. 'Good clean fun,' he said. He wiped the ice melt
off his goggles and rapped a knuckle against his helmet. But for all his bluff pluck, he
still lay fast against the wall. Behind his hell-bent grin Abe could feel his sphincter
seized up and his pants damp. He was gripped.
He'd known fear before, even been nailed by stray rockfall. But this was different.
There was the suddenness of it for one thing, and for another there was Daniel's
nonchalance. It informed Abe that rockfall was a commonplace up here, no more
extraordinary than the dandruff in their tea and Top Ramen, or the blood on their
ragged lips or their fits of delirium.
'You took a hit,' Daniel said. He was offering Abe an exit. There was no dishonor in
retreat, not for the wounded.
Abe rejected the offer. 'I'm good,' he said. It hadn't been so bad. No damage down,
and they needed him to hump the load. He would go on.
Daniel was pleased. Abe could tell by the way he nodded and the set of his jaw. They
were together now. They were brothers. 'We're there.' Daniel pointed. 'Our high
point.'
Abe saw an outcrop of gray stone fifty feet higher. A mass of coiled rope and parked
gear hung from pitons driven into a crack.
'From here it's only another couple hours,' Daniel estimated. 'I can lead it fast. We'll
be okay at Four. It's a cave.'
'Yeah,' said Abe. Daniel was double-checking his morale. All for one, one for all. The
fear had seemed huge and catalyzing and significant, but now Abe buried it deep.
They moved up the rope and nestled beneath the outcrop. It wasn't much of an
abutment, but it was enough. They would be protected from rockfall here.
Abe peeked around the corner at the remainder of the Shoot without learning much.
The corridor took a bend and there was no sight of Camp Four. There was no more
orange rope up there. The Ultimate Summit had not yet made its mark above this
stone.
While Abe shook out a coil of new rope and Daniel tightened the wrist loop on his ice
axe, another hail of stone and rotten ice came slashing down.
'Rock!' he shouted down the line.
This time Abe had nothing to fear. He hid behind the outcrop and the rockfall
whined and hummed past harmlessly. With a curious detachment, he watched first
Gus then J.J. react. Gus balled tight with her armadillo technique. J.J. cumbrously
turned his pack upslope to let it take any beating. Everyone had theories on how to
survive a rockfall.
The debris skipped left, mostly strafing empty air. Here and there puffs of ice
smoke showed where rocks barked the wall. After a minute Gus and J.J. started
jumaring again. Abe was impressed with how slow and tiny they appeared, even
though they weren't so far below. The mountain had miniaturized them. They looked
trivial and expendable.
Daniel started up the Shoot, trailing a rope. Hanging from the rack crossing his
chest, his Soviet ice screws tinkled dully. He wasn't carrying much in the way of
protection. He didn't need to, he was that good.
The sun continued to plasticize the ice, softening it for Daniel's toe plants – quick,
powerful kicks to seat his front points. He flicked the tip of his ice axe into the
mountain with the finesse of a switchblade fighter, every motion surgical and
understated. Abe had never seen an ice climber operate so economically. Where most
climbers hammered at the ice for deep purchase, flailing and overdriving their tools,
Daniel seemed content to stroke it, scarcely entering the ice at all.
As Daniel advanced, Abe fed him rope through a brake mechanism. If the leader fell,
the second was supposed to catch him. Daniel wasn't the type to fall, however, which
freed Abe to gaze at Nepal and stare into the abyss. Time bent around him. From his
little perch, ABC was much too small to see and all the other camps were out of sight.
He tried guessing where Base might lie along the glacial tendrils, but the Tibetan
plateau swallowed his estimations whole. He had the sense of having climbed right out
of the world.
After another half hour, Gus reached the outcrop, groping for air like some chemical
warrior. While she was bent over, gasping and coughing, Abe clipped her pack off to a
runner sling attached to the anchor and helped her from the straps. Gus recovered
enough to straighten up.
Down below, J.J. was approaching with amazing torpor. He had the dense,
coagulated motions of a deep sea diver. He would slug his way up a few steps, then
hang on the rope for minutes at a time, paralyzed by the thin air. Then he would move
again. His progress was pained, but Abe felt no pity. He just watched. It was like
watching a bug move.
Daniel's rope slid through the brake with little pause. Abe snuck a glance around the
outcrop, but Daniel was already out of sight up the corridor.
Another rockfall shelled them. Gus huddled against Abe under the outcrop. J.J. was
still two hundred feet down, still exposed. He turned with all the speed of a tortoise.
He completed his turn just in time to take a rock square against his pack. It made a
pillowy thud and J.J. was promptly plucked from his stance. He swung out from the
wall and bounced across the slope. J.J. didn't shout out or scramble for cover. There
was no cover. He simply turned his pack upslope and took a second hit and swung
again. Then the rockfall was down. He twisted around and resumed his reptilian
progress.
'Piece of gum?' Gus asked. Abe nodded yes. He was parched. The sun was
unmerciful. What little water he had left in his bottle had to last until they reached
Four and could melt more. That could be many hours. Water, water, everywhere, he
thought, and leaned against the blazing ice.
Gus gave him a pink chunk of her Bazooka with the exaggerated care wall climbers
use to hand things back and forth. It was soft from her body heat. 'You owe me,' she
said.
Abe chewed carefully because his teeth had begun to loosen. Mostly he sucked at
the sugar. It revived him from his stupor, then dropped him back into it all over again.
He wondered if the chunk of rock or ice had given him a concussion. He felt all the
more tired and debilitated seeing Gus's animation. A nap would have been nice.
'You're on,' Gus said. Daniel's voice was chirping down at them from the Shoot.
Neither could hear what he said but both knew what he meant. It was showtime.
Abe kept his dread mute and worked into the pack straps. He wanted to stay under
this outcrop for the rest of his life. He loved this stasis, this bombproof sanctuary, and
this piece of wet gum on his sunburned tongue.
'Want me to go?' Gus prodded him. She didn't want to go either.
'Photosynthesis,' Abe said, trying to make a joke of his inertia. Gus gaped without
comprehending. He clipped his jumars onto Daniel's rope and left the outcrop,
ascending with all the
speed he could muster. Daniel couldn't safely advance until Abe
arrived to belay him and tend his climbing rope. Every minute wasted was another
minute Daniel could be investing in their reach for Four. More to the point, every
wasted minute exposed Abe to more rockfall. The wall's angle eased slightly. Abe let
his quadriceps take the brunt of the toil.
The Shoot curved left. Daniel came in view. Above him the corridor seemed to
extend without end. Abe despaired at that. He'd hoped the Shoot was nearly played
out. He reached a little ledge and Daniel helped him out of his pack.
'Damn, Abe. You're running heavy.'
For the first time all day, Abe was glad he hadn't lightened his load. It was a good
respectable carry and it was plain that Daniel appreciated that. For all its brute
danger and hard labor, today was going to turn out well after all. No climber can know
in advance how well he will perform at high altitude. Abe was performing. He
belonged.
Abe had meant to ask how far it was to Four. After Daniel's praise, he didn't. They
would get there when they got there. At any rate, Daniel answered without being
asked. 'See it?' he grunted.
Abe looked. Less than eighty feet overhead stood the mouth of a cave. It opened in
the rock like a desert miracle. Only one rope led up to the cave. It looked very old and
most of it lay buried within the ice wall. Daniel had already opened a coil of new rope
to climb with and fix at the cave entrance. One end was tied to his harness.
'How about that,' Abe marvelled. His words rasped out, no saliva left. He couldn't
remember spitting out the gum, then found it lodged inside his leathery cheek. It
might be okay to drink the last of his water now. They were almost there.
The rope Abe had just ascended began jerking. That would be Gus coming up.
'I'll just run this pup out, fast like,' Daniel said. He was cranking one of his precious
Soviet ice screws into the ice to bolster their belay anchor. The screws were only six
inches long, stubby with threads coiling around the exterior of the tube. Inside his
beard, he had weariness cut in deep lines besides his mouth. 'Ten more minutes and
we're home.' He started off.
Abe could see the cobalt sky between Daniel's outstretched legs. He was moving
quickly, especially for a man nearing 26,400 feet. Among climbers, 8,000 meters
marked the border between what was mortal and ordinary and what was something
more. Back in Boulder, Abe had been awed at the very prospect of grappling his way
into that fabled region. Now that he was here, over twice as high as Mount Olympus,
8,000 meters seemed impoverished, hardly Olympian. Far from anointing them, the
mountain had reduced them to virtual idiots, with spit on their faces and shit in their
pants and scarcely enough wind in their lungs to complete a full sentence. He tried to
remember what treasure he'd come to find. Everest was supposed to have bestowed
on him all the sacraments in one, baptizing and confirming and confessing him all at
once. But the only blessing he was likely to return home with was a piece of red string
tied around his throat by an epileptic in yak skins. So much for glory, he thought, and
paid out more rope to Daniel.
Daniel scooted up fifty, then seventy feet. He didn't bother placing any protection.
Setting an ice screw took time, and besides the Shoot was laid back now at a relatively
comfortable 70-degree angle. For a climber of Daniel's abilities it was next to
impossible to fall from such a plane.
Just the same, Daniel fell. In truth he was shoved. Shot. Ambushed by the Yeti.
It was a lone piece – rock or ice, all the same thing. Abe never heard it. He was
watching, but all he saw was Daniel suddenly kicked backward into space. He didn't
touch the slope for a full ten feet, the shock was that powerful, and when he did it was
to glance off and fly another five feet.
Abe was sure he had no more adrenaline left after their long, hot gauntlet of rockfall.
But he did and it jolted him with a chemical voltage that bulged his vision and sped his
mind and turned his hands into vise grips. He locked down on the rope. He stared
hard at the sure death of an alpinist.
Daniel skipped twice more on the ice and by that time he was halfway down to Abe.
There was no time to react really. Abe made a try at pulling in some of the slack rope,
but it piled in wild serpentine loops over his arms and shoulders.
Minus the ten or fifteen pounds they had all lost on this expedition, Daniel still
weighed a good one-eighty. With the instantaneous wisdom a catastrophe inspires,
Abe knew the man would strike him with a gross force approaching a ton or more.
Abe's sole hope was to be missed. And to hold on to what was in his hands. And to
pray that the anchor would hold, that the world would not let him go.
Daniel neared. Abe could hear his Gore-Tex windsuit hissing on the ice. Then he
heard the metal chattering of Daniel's ice axe beating loose against the wall, and a
loose ice tool was like a chainsaw amok.
Abe's lips peeled back from his teeth. Now it was clear what he had come so far to
face, not the summit but the abyss. It wasn't Daniel's death he was witnessing, but his
own.
And then Daniel was past. He sliced within inches, close enough so that one crampon
tooth ripped a neat gash down Abe's right arm. He heard the fabric unzip. When the
opening burned – when it sluiced a line of blood against the ice – he knew the fabric
had been his flesh parting.
But his wound and his pain were beside the point. The anchor could not hold. Not
at a speed beyond all reckoning. All the same at terminal velocity.
Abe wondered if it would seem this fast all the way down. He wondered how deep
into the pit he would stay alive. Sometimes people went all the way without losing
consciousness. Sometimes they lived for a while, tucked down a crevasse, say. He
remembered that Gus was on a rope that was anchored to him. And J.J. was on a rope
attached to her. They would all go, tangling into a ball of bloody yarn. The glacier
would eat them. In a hundred years someone would find what was left. Abe was sorry
for the others. He was sorry for himself.
The loops of rope draped across his arms began vanishing, one by one. He didn't
follow Daniel's descent with his eyes. He just stared at the anchor. He counted four ice
screws. They had been so close. A drink of water, that's all he'd really wanted. The
rope whipped away from his arms. For a moment there was peace.
The peace shattered. Abruptly Abe heard a howling.
It was himself. He was filling the void with a cushion of sound. Here was his precious
sacrament then, all he was going to get, last rites.
In that millisecond of acceptance, the rope came taut. Abe's hands flew from their
grip. The ice wall sprang into his face, smashing against his helmet. One – then two –
then three – ice screws blew free like rivets in a submarine bottoming out.
But the last screw held. For no good reason but the faith that had placed it – Daniel's
faith, not his – the titanium ice screw stayed firm.
Abe was saved.
&
nbsp; He returned to himself tenuously. He took his time. He trusted nothing. Until he
touched it all with his fingertips, piece by piece, he could not take for granted even
that single bent ice screw with the mass of ropes and loose screws dangling from it.
Even then he hardly dared to trust that he'd survived.
For a space of time, Abe simply drew in perceptions and let his senses sort through
them. His goggles were still intact and the light filtered through with the color of new
lettuce. The still air was moving now, bringing with it a whiff of the solar winds just
beyond their tissue of stratosphere. In the ice dust from the blown anchor holes, Abe
could smell time itself, geological afterbirth. He felt the breeze cooling his face, listened
to it whistling through the stem of Daniel's good ice screw. His right forearm hurt, but
the pain was ritual, bearable. He held the hurt with his left hand. From a great
distance, he watched the blood running through the sleeve and between fingers that
were his.
In that dazed state, Abe sat on his ledge. Head back against the ice, he stared into
the blankness of Tibet. He might have dozed.
At some point Daniel appeared. The black-haired ghost rose up along the newest of
the ropes, seeming no worse for the wear. Abe knew that couldn't be so, not after such
a fall. On second glance, he saw that this figure was moving slower than the old Daniel.
But that was to be expected from a dead man.
'Abe?'
Abe didn't answer. He knew the mountain was playing a trick on him. Starved for
oxygen, the human brain freely invented its own fictions, populating the world with
angels and demons and other imaginary beings. High altitude climbers often reported
a third man on a rope for two. They would talk aloud to their guest. They would cook
food for him.
'Are you okay? Look at your arm.'
Abe ignored the hallucination.
'It hit you too?'
'No,' Abe said. 'That was you.'
The apparition sat down beside Abe on the little ledge.
'Man. What a ride.'
'Now what,' Abe said aloud. He didn't mind the company, but he wasn't speaking to
it. He was talking to himself, company enough.
'How about one more go?' Daniel asked. 'We were so close. And I saw something. Up
in the cave. It might be good.'