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.
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.
The more tried and true strategy, the one the Ultimate Summit Expedition had
been built around, was the old-fashioned siege. This called for methodically setting
permanent camps at successive heights and linking each to its neighbors with
thousands of feet of 'fixed' safety rope. In contrast to the blitzkrieg motion of an alpine
ascent, siege climbers shuttled up and down repeatedly, stocking the highest, newest
camps – what climbers called 'building the logistics pyramid' – and acclimatizing
slowly. The rule of thumb for siege ascents was 'climb high, sleep low,' the idea being
that you climbed high and slept low at progressively higher elevations.
From his childhood reading through the mountaineering classics about the first
ascents of Annapurna and Nanga Parbat, the early British assaults on the north side of
Everest and their first conquest of Everest on its southern side, Abe knew the
concepts behind laying siege to a mountain. What he lacked was the mindset. Robby
clued him in one afternoon.
With every word, the garrulous man made it clear they were at war. He described
the upper camps as firebases, with all the rough-and-ready charm of temporary
defenses injected deep into enemy territory. Every camp would depend on its lower
neighbor for support and reinforcement. None was designed for long-term occupation
on the Hill. The very highest camp would be placed and stocked for one-day guerrilla
strikes on the summit.
'On summit day, you go for quick penetration,' Robby preached. 'Quick up, quick
down.'
Abe listened, rapt. Climbing in the Himalayas was like climbing nowhere else in the
world. It had a language all its own, a risk and a mindset, and Robby – and all the
others – brimmed with it. The very language of ascent abounded with war terms:
siege tactics, assault, base camp, supply lines, logistics, planting camps, pushing the
line, retreat, victory, conquest, and planting the flag. Abe was getting a clear sense
that one brought to Everest a lifetime of battle plans, of occupied landscapes – high
ground, always the high ground – and of risks, blood, and wet socks on cold nights.
Taken altogether, it was a kind of high-speed imperialism, the rise and fall of a
dynasty within a few months. The idea behind their occupation was less to inhabit a
land than to enter into history.
But without the yaks, they couldn't even begin to climb.
