suddenly the body stiffened under his hands. The muscles seized and shuddered and
the boy gave an inhuman cry as if to answer all of Abe's questions.
Naked to the world, the body released its momentary tension, then spasmed again,
and the boy commenced to jerk and moan, gripped in the throes of a violent grand mal
seizure. Abe had seen epileptic fits before and knew what was happening. But the
yakherders were terrified by the monstrous sight, this human pinned and writhing
upon the cold dirt. Shouting, they scrambled backward against the wall and those by
the door darted out into the black wind.
Abe didn't hesitate. Still on his knees, he swept away the loose rocks and slid the
bunched sleeping bag under the boy's skull to prevent his braining himself. All the
while, the boy's hard fists and elbows flailed against Abe. Even though unconscious, he
seemed to be doing battle with some terrible enemy.
Abe hunched against the blows, but a sudden flurry caught him square in the face
and he shouted with pain and surprise. Blood flew from his nose and then another
blow caught him and knocked him flat. The safest thing seemed to be to lie close to the
epileptic and cover his head, so he huddled against the body and gritted his teeth and
felt the frozen earth against his cheek.
Finally someone thought to grab hold of Abe's ankles and pull him free of the
violence. It was Nima, and he propped him against the stone wall. There Abe panted
and pinched the blood from his nose and waited out the convulsions. The boy went on
twitching and fighting his demons in that ill-lit little hovel.
And then, abruptly, the boy went still. His possession simply ceased. His silence and
immobility were doubly blunt against the wild moments before. Abe stayed lying
against the wall in case there were any neural aftershocks. One pummeling was
enough.
All around him, Nima and the yakherders were staring at the still, heaped body,
mumbling and praying. They were horrified. But Abe was not.
He was relieved. He was cheered even. At least he knew now what was wrong. The
boy was an epileptic. Somewhere out there in the terra incognita called Tibet, this boy
had suffered a seizure and fallen and been set upon by animals. Nothing more. Now
Abe knew. Beyond sewing the torn flesh and treating the infection, there was little
Abe could do about that. The boy had his own mountain to climb. It was that simple,
after all.
With the same patient manner he unraveled knots, Abe worked on the boy's
wounds one by one. He started an IV to rehydrate the feverish boy and asked Nima
to recruit one of the herders to keep the bag of saline solution warm with his body, but
Nima chose to do it himself. While the bag was warming, Abe injected an ampule of
D-50, pure dextrose, through the IV needle. It was an old paramedic trick to revive
the unconscious. With diabetics it worked instantly. With this boy it didn't work at all.
Abe went ahead and connected the saline bag.
Finally Abe was able to seal the boy's bruised and torn and bandaged body back into
the warm sleeping bag. He knelt back on his heels and rested his hands on his thighs.
Abe had felt this helpless before, but never so hopeful at the same time. Still the
margins of chance were thin in this harsh borderland. Undiluted, destiny was more
likely to turn out here as it was meant to.
When Abe emerged from the hut, dawn was just seeping down the western slopes.
It had been hours since he'd disappeared into the hut's smoke and gloom and now the
sun was softly peeling away the frost.
The valley's blue air turned clear and a tiny flock of dawn quail gabbled and
tuttered. The yaks lay on their curled legs, crunching cud, drowsy.
In the distance, on the far side of the camp, the liaison officer had risen, as was
usual, to perform his morning t'ai chi. With slow, fluid sweeps of his hands, Li stalked
his invisible opponents and defeated them. His motions were more beautiful this
morning than Abe remembered.
And up the valley to the south stood Everest. Its jagged right-hand edge was lit
golden and the mountain was still, not a breath of wind stirring its snows.
4
Their calm was broken.
On the morning of April Fool's Day they cut loose from Base Camp. Abe woke early
and lay still, smiling. Watching his tent wall come alive with pure tangerine light, he
felt hope. The yak caravan had left yesterday, taking with them two tons of gear and a
whole circusful of noise. Only the young herder had remained behind, and though he
hadn't regained full consciousness, his delirium and fever were abating, and so was
Abe's pessimism. With bed rest and fluids and Western vitamins, the boy would
probably recover. Abe had spent an hour instructing Krishna, their cook, on how to
tend the patient. Krishna had solemnly promised to be devout in his care.
In this morning's hush it was easy to forget the shock of Daniel's fist on J.J.'s skull
and the mutiny against Jorgens's plodding
horrible seizures. Abe thought to himself, Today has promise, today is new. It was the
kind of thing he used to tell Jamie every morning before they slipped from bed and
dressed. She had liked to hear it. He had liked to say it.
Abe hooked on his wire-rims and opened his sleeping bag and piece by piece dressed
with the clothing he kept warm every night for this very moment every morning. On
his way to the mess tent, he paid a visit to the expedition's water skull.
It was a sheep skull nestled into a rocky crevice by the glacier pond which provided
their water. It was still possessed of a good portion of its flesh, meaning it was in a
state of slow decay. The grisly head lay rotting within inches of their drinking water,
and Li had made several complaints, citing the People's Republic's campaign against
rats, flies and other germ carriers. But the skull served as a sort of Tibetan mousetrap
for bad spirits, and supposedly kept the water pure on a supernatural level. And since
Krishna Rai boiled all their potable water, hepatitis or cholera or any other plague
nesting in the head was rendered more unlikely than demon possession. Despite Li's
fussiness, the skull stayed in place.
Abe had come to enjoy waking early and sitting here in wait for the sunshine. It was
quiet and primeval and satisfied his streak of pantheism. But this morning he didn't
linger. The camp was alive. Krishna made farewell omelets with the last of their eggs
and talked about how he would miss them while they were on the mountain. Li
wagged his finger at the little cook and told him in English, 'Now you will be alone with
me and I will teach you how to play chess,' and Krishna laughed even though he didn't
like Li.
At the end of breakfast, Stump said, 'Let's do it to it,' with the enthusiasm of an
original thought. Outside the mess tent, Robby and Carlos started singing the
They loaded their packs and hefted them for weight, then added or subtracted
things and closed the packs and slung them on. In the coming week, some of the
yakherders were scheduled to make a second trip up with any mountain supplies still
remaining in the dump. By the middle of April it was projected that the next camp,
