okay, Daniel?'
And suddenly Abe knew this had been a mutiny and everything would be different
from now on. The outfit had a new leader.
As if the demons ruling this Himalayan niche had decided the blood offering was
enough, the mountain finally opened to them. That very same afternoon, the climbers'
destiny broke free of the valley.
Abe was facing north and he was the first to see them in the far distance, huge dark
birds swinging back and forth through the empty sky like albatrosses following a fleet
of galleons. One minute the northward view was nothing but rocks and flat valley floor
and the next there were these birds, and then, even as he looked, a mass of dark,
lumbering figures appeared at the far mouth of the valley.
'Look,' he said.
'The yaks,' someone shouted, 'they're here.'
Everyone came out from their tents to watch the yaks arrive. It took almost two
hours. The herd came slowly, and from the distance Abe heard a guttural blat and
sharp cracking. The blat was easy to place, it was a shout, a grotesque human shout.
As for the sharp cracking noise, Abe decided it was the snapping of whips. Closer still,
he saw it was the sound of stone on bone. The yakherders steered their animals by
throwing rocks at one or the other side of their horns.
All through camp, the climbers were whooping like cowboys on Saturday night. Abe
grabbed his old Pentax camera and a telephoto lens and hustled through camp for a
closer vantage. He saw Li near the mess tent doorway and paused, a friendly gesture.
The Chinese official was wearing a look of vindicated authority and Abe allowed that
he deserved it. He hoped Li wouldn't carry it too far, however, because it would only
make him enemies among these climbers.
The braying shouts and cracking of rocks against horn grew more distinct, and now
Abe heard the big black ravens calling from above the herd. 'Now you will see,' Li said,
'the Tibetans are barbarians.'
Abe had to agree. Through his telephoto lens, the herders and their animals
resembled nothing short of a Gothic invasion. They moved stolidly, like a storm cloud.
The yakkies' faces were black from the sun and their thick layers of clothing were so
filthy they had the color of the earth. Some of the men had removed one arm from
their jackets, nomad-style, baring a white shoulder. Some wore long black braids,
others Mao caps and ancient mountaineering goggles.
They loomed closer in the lens and Abe heard the primitive ringing of yak bells, all
pitched differently, and he saw that some of the men wore pants made of thick
leather, others of Chinese quilting. Some were barefoot, others walked in ragged
tennis shoes or hide wrappings.
'The edge of the world is here,' Li commented.
Abe didn't answer. It was easy to see these yakherders the way Li saw them, as
children of the wilderness, the real wilderness, even a brood of the darkness. If there
was a Chinese Rome, it was Li's Beijing, and here he was, a functionary faced with the
hairy underbelly of his empire. From within the safe walls of his bureau, order must
have seemed automatic. But out here, the blue sky and these gutting mountains and
strange, dark natives wrecked the order.
'We must be careful,' Li said, 'we must guard against the...' he searched, 'the danger.'
Abe had never seen a yak before, and he was a little disappointed by how small they
were. What few wild yaks remained in Tibet were said to be prehistorically enormous.
These domestic versions were a comedown, standing midway between a St. Bernard
and an American dairy cow. They had the wild aspect of Texas longhorns, but none of
the menace. They were shy animals that spooked easily, and so the climbers quit their
joyous cheering. There were fifty or sixty of them, some blond or tawny, some black.
Their hair hung shaggy.
The herders and their herd entered Base Camp and immediately it became their
camp, too. Now Abe saw why the yak and human dung had been so intermixed on the
ground. The Tibetans pitched their open-sided tents among the climbers' tents and
their beasts milled everywhere, bells chiming, grazing on straw.
From the midst of the yak mass, someone hallowed Abe. He searched the throng for
the voice. It took him a minute to spot Daniel, who was taller than the Tibetans and
white with a pronounced limp and dressed in Western gear. But something about him
tricked Abe's eye and he was hard to distinguish from the nomads.
'Heads up,' Daniel called over the backs of milling yaks. 'Tie down everything you've
got. These yakkies are pirates.' He was wearing what Abe termed the Nordwand grin.
Something about the North Face – just this promise of it, these yaks that would bring
them to its base – had unleashed an epidemic of toothy hellbent smile. Every climber
had it. Abe could feel it stretching his own face.
'I wasn't sure they'd come,' Abe said.
'These guys? They'd come even if they weren't invited. We're like the circus, the
mall and the bank all wrapped up in one. We provide the entertainment and put on a
feed and pay them to watch all at the same time.' In the distance, Gus was watching
them talk. When Abe nodded to her, she turned away.
'You knew they'd show up?'
'That's the easy part. The question with these guys is always when. The trick is
understanding that Tibet's on the Mexican time plan. Around here you have to be
ready for lots and lots of
'So now the climb begins,' Abe said.
'Abe,' said Daniel, and he suddenly sounded cold sober, 'the climb began a long time
before we ever got here. But you know that.'
Abe glanced at him quickly. The words were cryptic, the smile was not. But Daniel
had no intention of explaining himself. Already he was looking away, reveling in the
chaos with his cocked white grin.
A sharp light, a dark voice, someone's hand – Abe's sleep blew to pieces.
'Doctor, sir.' It was a Sherpa crouching at the far bright end of a headlamp. His voice
was solemn, not so different from the wind.
'Nima,' Abe registered. Something was wrong. Someone was ill. He knew this ugly
rousing and blinding light and voices soft and solemn. They needed him.
'One man,' the Sherpa said. 'Very sick.'
'Now?' Abe pleaded. He was so warm in his cocoon of goose down and the night was
so cold. He resented it a little that Nima had just woken him from a shoreline of white
sand and bare flesh and lime green tequila. Abe squinted and shielded his eyes. He
had a headache and craved glacier water.
'This man very sick,' Nima repeated. 'Please you coming now.' There was demand
behind his calm. The calm was Sherpa, the demand was not, not to a white employer.
Abe paid more attention.
'Bring him here then.'
'Not possible, sir.'
'I'll look at him. But I want to do it here. All my equipment is here.' There was some
truth to that. Mostly he didn't want to go out into the wind.
Nima was adamant. 'Not possible.'
