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 fo
rced 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.
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
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