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sank altogether.
'Goddamn it, get the system, people,' Jorgens bellowed helplessly. He spotted
one of the Sherpas. 'Norbu, tell these damn drivers, system it.'
'Yes sir,' Norbu said, and turned away, having no idea what Jorgens meant, or
if he did, no intention of doing it.
Alpenglow radiated orange and pink off the highest tips of the surrounding
peaks.
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But down in the valley it was dark. The darker it got, the harder
people drove themselves, frantic to make a shelter against the night
and make this refuge habitable.
First one truck, then all of them disgorged their contents and bolted for the
Pang La.
Abe watched the truck's headlights cast crazy patterns in the dusk.
Finally, like spiders retracting their white silk, the trucks and their
cobweb of lights were gone and the climbers had Everest to themselves. They
were alone. To Abe's surprise, his heart felt heavy. Not since his father's
death a few years ago had Abe felt so profoundly abandoned. It wasn't
logical, but there it was.
They secured the gear as best they could, but soon it got too dark for them to
be useful. The climbers and Sherpas gathered at Krishna Rai's food box and
stood around in the wind and stars and shared a twenty-pound block of cheddar
cheese and three cans of tuna mixed with ice crystals. No one could coax the
Indian kerosene stoves into firing, and so there was no boiled water for tea
or for brushing their teeth. Daniel and his companions shared what little
water they had, but it wasn't much more than a swallow apiece.
Everyone economised on the dialogue. But when they did speak Abe
could hear their low mood. This was their first night at the grand
destination and the entire team was now together for the first time. The
evening should have been filled with joy and excitement and camaraderie.
Instead the climbers were about to drag off to bed thirsty and
exhausted and hungover from the thin air. Abe could tell he wasn't alone in
already feeling flatass defeated. He figured the only thing to do was go sleep
it off.
But then something happened that strangely lifted their spirits. A meteor
shower suddenly emerged in the sky above Everest.
'Look,' someone said, and they all turned to see the extraordinary
thing, this bunched strafing surge of lights.
The meteors appeared like wild parrots, a whole flock of colors slashing
through the night. They sprang through the blackness in silence.
'Is it real?' someone marveled. There were dozens of flashing
meteors, then a hundred and maybe more. Abe had seen comets and falling
stars before, but never in such abundance as this, and never so incisive and
brilliant and obtainable. He felt sure they would slug straight into the
mountain.
'It's not the Perseids,' Carlos pronounced for their benefit. Abe had
already been treated to his theories on the universe. 'They come in August.
But I don't know what else it could be, not this bright and not this many and
at this season, I don't know.'
The shower went on and on. Abe forgot his thirstiness and fatigue and the cold
wind.
Everyone did. They all just stared at the extraordinary fireworks.
People remarked aloud as the green and red and white lines materialized from
deep space and stung downward toward their Hill. The general tone was awe.
Stump was so entranced that he forgot to instruct Robby and Tom to catch the
stars on film. After a
few minutes, Abe could hear the Sherpas muttering darkly in their own
language, and he felt them shifting around and realized they were afraid.
'So beautiful,' Kelly was murmuring.
Then Nima spoke. 'This thing, very, very bad,' he pronounced to the group.
'I don't think so, Nima,' someone consoled him. 'It's just meteors.'
'It is scientific,' the Chinese liaison officer Li explained, and by his tone
Abe could make out his impatience with the Sherpa's fear.
But by Nima's silence, Abe could tell science had little place in this
outland.
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3
Ten days straight the climbers looked north toward the Pang La, praying for
their yak caravan to materialize, marking their calendars, waiting. Every
day the skies were swept so bare that Abe imagined he could see the stars
at high noon. It was so still in the mornings he could actually hear tiny
icicles melting, their droplets chiming like bells. The weather was
perfect. But the yaks didn't come.
'Our valley is a gigantic prison cell,' Abe wrote in his growing
letter to Jamie.
'Barren. Tedious. There is no life here. Time has stopped.
Everything occurs in enormous proportions  the blue sky, the mountainsides,
the Rongbuk Glacier. I've never known such vastness. It humbles me. The
closest things to human scale in this outsized land are the tiny fluorescent
red and blue and green lichen that freckle the rocks. The lichens and us
 we share this dead place. I can almost hear my hair growing.'
Base Camp was up and running. Tents were pitched, walls taut, latrines dug.
The heap of gear had been sorted and resorted. The climbers were ready to
climb.
There were two ways to attack a mountain of this size and height. The
simplest, by far the most dangerous, was the so-called alpine ascent,
which pitted two to four climbers against the clock as they made a
single-minded dash for the summit. Using this strategy, the climbers would
continue progressively higher, taking their camp and supplies with them. When
someone pulled off an alpine ascent in the Himalayas, it was treated as a
brilliant theft, a jewel stolen from under the dragon's nose. The problem was
risk. Stripped for speed and isolated high on their mountain, an
alpine team depended on perfect conditions, perfect teamwork and perfect
health. One mistake, one stormy day, and it was all over, you froze to glass
where you lay. Everyone agreed that an alpine attempt on a route as
complicated and vast as the Kore Wall would have been insane. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]