Advance Base Camp, would be self-sufficient. The climbers kept their loads light for
the trail and so Abe did too – a sleeping bag, some food, and his streamlined jump kit,
his trauma box for mishaps along the trail. On second thought he went ahead and
stuck a twelve-pound cylinder of oxygen in his pack just in case someone crashed.
It was going to take three days to trek up to their next camp, four days for the yaks.
It was only ten miles away, but the altitude was going to slow them. If all went well,
the climbers would arrive at Advance Base Camp – ABC – on the same day their gear
did. Some of them would immediately return to Base Camp to recover from the
altitude and to escort the final yak carry back up. Others would get ABC up and
running. Still others would begin climbing toward the next camp. The siege was now
begun.
In bunches, the climbers left camp and aimed for the throat of the Rongbuk Glacier,
a huge body of ice left behind by the last ice age. On maps, the glacier resembled a
white octopus with its tentacles flung out among all the surrounding valleys. Abe set
off with the last wave. Li stood by the trail and wished them good luck.
Five minutes out of Base Camp, Abe turned around to take a photo of their
comfortable little tent city, but it was already gone. When he looked back up at
Everest, it, too, had disappeared, blocked from view by the Changtse, the satellite
peak.
Single file on the trail, the climbers were swallowed whole by a maze of looming mud
walls and loose stone and deep, icy corridors. Once again Abe had no idea where they
were going or what to expect. Li was right, they truly had come to the edge of the
world.
It would have been hard to get lost on that twisting path, at least on the first part of
it, for dozens of expeditions had been here before them, and the trail was clearly
imprinted. Where the tracks disappeared on long, jumbled fields of scree, they simply
had to follow heaps of old frozen yak dung. But even with the sun out and the air
warm, it seemed to Abe that a careless soul could wander forever in this labyrinth,
and he was glad to have Daniel leading them.
At a prominent fork in the glacier, they found a huge, thirty-foot arrow made of
piled rocks. It pointed left.
'Mallory and his bunch went that way,' Daniel said. The Brit's body had never been
found, and the mountaineering community was still divided over whether he had
summited.
'It takes you to the North Col,' Daniel said. That was what climbers called the 'trade
route' up the north side. It was by far the easiest climb up Everest's north side, and
for that reason was the most often repeated. With huge sums of money and
oftentimes national prestige at stake, most expeditions to Everest opted for a sure
summit rather than a new or more difficult route. Part of Abe wished they were
heading for the North Col's well-known terrain and relative safety.
'That's also the trail you take to the Chengri La,' Daniel added. Chengri Pass, which
James Hilton had turned into the fictitious Shangri-La in his
south into Nepal at a height of 18,000 feet. Over that
Parade had escaped during the '84 debacle.
'We go this way,' Daniel pointed, and they turned right into the shadows, moving
quietly, as if giants had built this stone arrow and might still be lurking nearby.
The trail roller-coastered up and down, mostly up. For some reason a sense of
vertigo kept sneaking up on him. From minute to minute, he couldn't shake the sense
of being out of control. Usually he only felt this way on steep rock, and yet it was plain
to see that both his feet were planted on flat ground. Abe tried to reason with his
fears. Finally he just accepted that he was going to have to live with them.
The climbers gained elevation. A day passed, then two, then three. In between they
suffered two long, cramped nights of too many people sharing too few tents. Despite
the bitter cold, Abe ended up sleeping outside under the stars both nights.
Their pace slowed, and so did their thoughts, or at least Abe's did. He tried to
remember Jamie's face, but to his dull alarm it eluded him. The more he tried, the less
he remembered. Before it was too late and she was altogether erased from memory,
Abe decided to quit searching for her and instead concentrated on Carlos's heels in
front of him, plodding, mindless.
'Eventually we'll acclimatize,' Robby told Abe. 'This will seem just like sea level.' Abe
listened to Robby's words but watched his lips. They were bright blue, a symptom of
the hypoxia all of them were enduring. As their bodies cued to the altitude, some of
the blue would return to pink, but Abe doubted 20,000 feet could ever feel like sea
level.
Their third morning on the trail, the climbers penetrated a long bank of penitentes,
or seracs. These were tall pinnacles of ice that had been sharpened to a point by the
sun. Some had warped into grotesque shapes. Others had collapsed. One had toppled
and speared the earth.
Abe looked around, startled by the unnatural quiet in this place. He knew what
these penitentes were but had never seen them up close like this. Abe rubbernecked
until Gus came up behind and nudged him onward.
If ever nature had erected a sign to warn away man, the penitentes were it. It was
like an evil forest in there. The thirty-foot fingers of turquoise ice were utterly
beautiful and seductive, but they were also deadly and looked it.
Here and there, big boulders sat five and ten feet above the ground, balanced atop
thin sun-carved columns of ice like huge petrified mushrooms. 'I feel like Alice in
Wonderland,' Abe said to Gus.
Gus glanced up at him sharply and hushed him with a finger. 'This place is
booby-trapped,' she whispered, and pointed at the hair-trigger stones and penitentes.
'If one of those bastards collapses, it could bring the whole place down.' There was no
way to tiptoe with a fifty-pound pack on, but Abe did his best to walk more gingerly.
Soon they came upon a horribly twisted animal dangling from an ice wall. Half of it
lay outside the ice, the other half still frozen into the blue glass. Birds had pecked
away the eyes, and the elements had stripped much of the rest down to bone.
'Road kill,' Gus whispered, poking at the hide and bones with her ski pole.
It had long matted hair and thick joints, and the ice and wind and sunlight had
rendered it almost shapeless. Though it looked like the thawing remains of a
mastodon, Abe knew it was a yak.
'Is that one of ours?' he whispered. Gus shook her head no.
'Did a rock fall on it?'
'Nah,' whispered Gus. She opened her pocketknife and stepped closer to the thing.
'If a rock fell on it, the yakkies would have butchered it for the meat. This poor thing
probably fell down a crevasse, probably during some expedition. Now the glacier's just
getting around to belching it up. Everest does that a lot, turning out its dead.'
Gus reached forward and grabbed one of the horns and wrenched the animal's head
up. With her free hand, she snaked her knife under the neck and sawed away with the
blade. After a minute, a fist-sized cup of metal fell out of the filthy hair and hit the
