somehow recognized the man. It was Daniel, of course. He walked with wide, rolling
strides, but Abe could see the hitch in his one leg – that would be the spiral fracture;
and the exaggerated agility would be the amputated toes and scoped knees. He was
baked to copper by two weeks of Tibetan sun, and even with the daylight failing in
this deep valley his grin was an act of magnificent anarchy.
'Daniel,' Abe said aloud, greeting his own history.
Jorgens craned forward and squinted through his black horn-rims at the figure,
then at Abe. 'Good eyes,' he said.
Daniel waved the lead truck to a pause and pulled up to Abe's open window. 'Hey,
Jorgens,' he said, and reached through the window and across Abe to shake hands. It
struck Abe that he'd never heard Daniel actually speak, only howl. His voice rasped
slightly, the edge of bronchitis or a windpipe raw from the cold. 'I was starting to think
we'd have to climb without you.'
Abe looked at the paltry encampment in the distance and its other sticklike
inhabitant, then up at the huge mountain, and concluded Daniel was making a joke.
But Jorgens didn't snort his amusement and Daniel kept on grinning, and Abe wasn't
so sure after all.
Jorgens canted his head toward Abe. 'You two have met,' he said to Daniel.
Daniel backed off to get Abe in focus. He studied Abe's face for an intent minute,
then stuck his open right hand through the window to him. 'Once upon a time,' he said,
and it struck Abe that Daniel had never really seen him before. Abe's would have been
just one more face in a circle of pain.
'It was a long time ago.' Abe wasn't offended.
'Abraham Burns,' Daniel said, half to himself.
'I take it this is your pick for Base Camp,' Jorgens interrupted.
Daniel slung his face toward the distance. 'Looks like hell, doesn't it. But if we camp
over that way, the wind kills us. And over the other way, we get no sun. Gus and me,
we've spent the last week trying all the sites out. So here it is, as good as it gets.'
'Let's do it then. Show us where. We've got everything to do before night drops on
us.'
Daniel raced down off the running board, loped ahead of the truck, and then swept
his hands in a big half-acre half-moon on the ground.
The convoy circled on his geometry and came to a halt. The driver of Abe and
Jorgens's truck switched off the ignition. The cab fell silent.
'Home sweet home,' Jorgens pronounced.
Abe tried hard not to gawk. On the one hand, it looked the way it was supposed to
look, just as India had smelled the way India should smell when he'd first stepped off
the plane. But it was different, too.
Maybe he should have known better, but Abe had imagined their group would land
on Everest's soil like astronauts – or migrant workers – carrying with them
everything necessary for life where there was no life. Food, shelter, literature, even
oxygen: all of it imported. And like astronauts – or Okies – they would arrive bearing
hopes and dreams, most forcefully the dream of virgin territory, of a fresh start, of
frontier. But what Abe saw through the cracked windshield destroyed all such
sentiment and he was shocked.
At first glance, it looked like the aftermath of a gigantic New Year's Eve party with
confetti thrown across the whole landscape. Then Abe saw that it was trash, years and
years of trash. Like jackals, the wind had raided the garbage dumps of past
expeditions and cast debris across the entire moraine. Pieces of paper and plastic
clung stubbornly to rocks, hundreds of pink and blue and yellow entrails.
That wasn't the worst of it, either. Abe opened the door and hopped nimbly to the
ground and landed, literally, in shit, in the dried feces of their mountaineering
ancestors. And now Abe saw that in every direction, human and yak dung lay coiled
and dropped in random piles, each one mummified by the sun.
Wasteland, Abe thought, and immediately filed the pun for his slide shows. But the
filth and desolation kept on hitting at his mind. It was so unexpected.
Daniel breezed past, hustling to get the trucks unloaded and camp set up. 'Welcome
to paradise,' he said without a trace of irony.
None of the other climbers seemed fazed. If anything, the trash lent a festive spirit
to the place and people seemed energized by the emptiness of this Himalayan
clearing. Abe looked around, groping to get his bearings. When he finally did move, he
moved slowly. He wasn't the only one. In contrast to the Sherpas, most of the
climbers looked clumsy and crippled by the altitude.
Everest was actually ten miles distant, but from here on they were on foot. Though
the valley floor was as flat as a billiard table, the climb began here.
In between them and Everest stood a satellite mountain called Changtse which
blocked the lower five thousand feet of their route from view. But above Changtse's
dark, blunt massif, Everest was projecting brilliant white light. The sight only
exaggerated the squalor of Base Camp, for the valley had fallen into shadow. It would
be daytime up there for hours to come, while down in the valley, the climbers were
already layering on sweaters and parkas for the night.
Eager to depart before the sun was altogether gone, the truck drivers pitched in.
They hastily unroped the tarps and clambered on top of the gear and started tossing
it from the trucks into a mountain of jumbled boxes, packs, and utensils.
Standing atop one of the truck cabs, Jorgens was shouting, 'System it, people,
system it,' for he'd painstakingly tapped together a computerized blueprint for the
supply dump and spent extra money for color-coded boxes.
But as the sun sank lower and the wind blew harder, Jorgens's dream of a system
completely disintegrated. The drivers were rough and indifferent to their loads. They
kicked and pitched and shoved at the gear and the climbers simply tried to keep up
with them. The pile of gear grew taller and more hectic. Everyone worked with a
gasping determination. No one relished spending their first night at Everest in the
open.
As Abe labored, he felt oddly desperate. He had thought they would arrive on this
island and carefully inhabit it, and instead they had crashed upon its rocky shores and
were now frantically salvaging their gear before the ship 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.
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
