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
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