fullback. His enormous thighs were offset by what he termed 'the littlest man,' a
genuinely small penis and a lone descended gonad which Abe had seen for himself
while probing for a hernia in Kathmandu. He had climbed on Everest twice before, and
both times seen expeditions flame out because of personality disputes. 'That's not
going to happen this time,' he'd warned them, and left it at that.
To the far left stood Peter Jorgens, beaming in his salt-and-pepper beard. With his
crisp widow's peak and sunbaked crow's-feet, Jorgens looked every inch the
Hollywood alpinist. In fact he was an accountant who had somehow ascended to the
presidency of the American Alpine Club. Abe had heard that Jorgens dreamed of
becoming secretary of the interior someday, and that this expedition was meant to be
a stepping-stone to Washington. Some of the other climbers considered it funny, and
sad, too, that Jorgens had already ordered a set of vanity plates reading '29,028' – the
height of Everest – for his family Jeep.
While Abe got his tripod legs screwed tight and attached his camera, the team stood
around wisecracking and catcalling at Everest, so many apes hooting at the moon.
They were in high spirits and Abe thought it fine and promising for them to be
thumbing their noses at the monster. It meant they were ready or thought they were,
and sometimes that was the same thing.
He panned his viewfinder across the bunch, smiling to himself. Each and every one
of them was dedicated to his reputation, though in reality they all were essentially
anonymous figments of their own imaginations. They hadn't come here to buy a name
by dying on the mountain; rather they'd come to emulate those who had, miming the
hard-core giants with their brilliant teeth and their posturing in the wind.
Abe was finally ready and called to the climbers to take their places again. Kelly
moved panther-soft, her black Lycra rippling like midnight, and J.J. squeezed some
more veins to the surface, and the truck drivers gaped. Abe focused and was about to
trigger the self-timer and jump in line, when suddenly, without warning, a puff of air –
the softest of breezes – brushed their faces.
Someone groaned. It was a bad news groan and everyone turned to look at the
jagged horizon behind them.
A tiny comma of a white cloud had appeared in the sky. The cloud was nothing more
than a mare's tail – altocirrus at 35,000 feet – and it drifted silkily. It hung up there
like white ink on a cobalt canvas, a beautiful Zen master stroke.
But the little cloud was a warning and every climber there understood, all except
Abe, who didn't know this mountain's traits.
'Damn,' J.J. whispered, as if he were just now realizing a mistake.
A moment or two passed. And then the mountain sprang into life. Everest's curt left
edge released a ghostly plume.
'Snow?' Abe asked quietly.
Carlos shook his head. 'Water vapor,' he said. 'The Indian air mass is hot. And when
it hits the cold mountain, zap. Smoke.' He checked his watch, synchronizing with the
pattern. Abe did the same. It was not quite two, Beijing time.
'That's not the monsoon, is it?' Abe asked.
'That?' Carlos said. 'That's just Everest. She likes to send up a flag in the afternoons.
Don't worry, Doc. The monsoon's still three months off. You'll know when it comes.
That's when we close the works and get the hell out of Dodge.'
Before their eyes, the white plume turned into a long ragged flag reaching east.
'It's probably one-ten, maybe one-twenty miles per hour up top there,' J.J. said.
'That's major air, man. Hurricane force.'
The white flag might as well have been black. It signified no quarter, nullifying the
climbers' coltish good humor. Abe took his cue from their spoiled bravado. He stowed
his grin like everyone else. Weather was everything on an Everest climb. But Abe was
handicapped, because they were half the planet removed from any skies he could
reliably read. All the same he meant to learn the patterns fast.
'That's that,' Stump called out with the enthusiasm of a man heading off for his own
execution. 'Let's knock off then and get on with the show.'
They turned their backs on the Hill. Everyone returned to the trucks.
The convoy moved down off the pass toward the floor of the Rongbuk Valley,
heading due south for Everest. As they wove back and forth down the steep,
miles-long pass, or
flattened out and the road jogged left and right through canyon walls. Soon the pass
vanished behind them, and their entrance and exit to the outside world was just a
memory.
There was a whole other world in here. If Shekar was poor, then the settlements in
the Rongbuk Valley were desperate. Poverty lay everywhere – in the soil, in the
adobe dwellings, in the children's astonishing nudity beneath the cold wind. Here and
there, little clusters of stone and adobe dwellings popped up like southwestern
pueblos. Some of the buildings were white-washed, some were banded white and
orange. The flat rooftops were ringed with sticks of firewood that must have been
brought from far away, for there was not a tree in sight. The people didn't smile from
their rock-strewn fields at the passing truckloads of climbers. They glared, then went
on with their tilling. Jorgens seemed not to register their bleak circumstances. Instead
he waved heartily at the brown land. 'When we leave in June,' he said, 'these fields will
be green. The ewes will be dropping their lambs. This road will be cut by dozens of
irrigation ditches. You'll see. It'll be pretty as a picture.'
There were more ruins – old stone fortresses and monasteries and desolate villages.
The convoy crossed dry irrigation ditches, then a wide riverbed. In the summertime,
Jorgens promised, it would carry runoff 'as thick and white as sperm' from the
Rongbuk Glacier at the base of Everest. Now it held only a blue thread of water. More
hours passed and the sun stayed dangling on the southern rim. Having descended into
a valley, they now began to climb out again. The road turned menacing with deep
gullies and big gutting scree. Abe kept expecting their tires to blow out or the oil pan
to get disemboweled. Patches of ice waited in the shadows and on switchbacks. The
truck nearly high-centered on one rutted patch, then skidded on another. They crept
along at five kilometers per hour. For some reason, Abe had never imagined a truck
engine could still function at 17,000 feet. Theirs did.
The truck rounded a hillock of glacier debris. To the right and left, satellite peaks
couched a long, perfectly flush moraine. And then, from out of nowhere, Everest leapt
up before them. It seemed close, but that was the optics of high altitude and it was
still miles away. The trucks crept along toward where the valley floor quit and became
mountainside.
'There,' Jorgens pointed for their driver. At the same time Abe saw it too, a tiny
bubble of color. A moment later, the bubble became a green tent and Abe caught sight
of two miniature figures. One figure approached them. As they closed on him, the man
grew larger.
Though his head was bound with a red-checkered
an Afghani rebel than a climber, and his eyes were covered with sunglasses, Abe
