ground with a clank.
Gus picked the bell up. She let the clapper strike the metal cup once, gently. The
solitary note trembled through the glass forest. 'For my collection,' she said, stuffing
one of her gloves inside to muffle the clapper.
Abe was glad when they finally reached the end of that hour-long bed of crystal
thorns and stone mushrooms. The rest of the group was waiting for them on a
clearing, lounging against their packs or stretching sore shoulder muscles. J.J. was
reading one of Robby's old Silver Surfer comics, and the Sherpas were sharing some
got to their feet and started loading up.
Only then did Abe realize that the group had divided itself into pairs and trios to
pass through the penitentes, one team at a time. Nobody had told them to do it, they'd
just split up and staggered their own ranks so that if there had been an accident
among the penitentes, there would have been a minimum of victims and a maximum
of rescuers. Abe's confidence in the group soared.
They headed higher up a series of glacial steppes, holding close to a wall of blue and
white ice. Another two hours' ground away and the natural terracing grew steeper.
Here and there they had to grab at outcrops to clamber higher. The party slowed to a
crawl, gasping and resting their hands on their knees.
'I must be getting old,' Kelly said. Abe remembered she was just thirty. Her hair
hung in long golden rags, partly braided.
'Twenty-one thou,' Stump consoled her, referring to the altitude.
'Twenty-one seven,' J.J. corrected him. He looked jolly and warm and primitive in a
big fur Khampa cap he'd bought from a nomad in Shekar. His black eye was buried
behind glacier glasses. 'We're getting up there.'
'No excuses,' Robby threw in, gasping along with the others. 'You
Kelly. Especially for a woman.' Kelly delighted in having her beauty deflated, but no
one else was particularly amused. They were too tired.
'It's only a little more,' Daniel told them. As if to confirm him, some of the yak
caravan appeared, wending its way back down to Base Camp. Unburdened of their
loads and with gravity helping them along, the yaks and their herders were practically
running downhill. Their rapid descent made Abe feel that much slower.
Soon the afternoon winds began. The trail's corridor funneled blasts straight down
into their faces. Without breaking stride, Abe zipped his jacket closed to the throat
and fished some thin polypro gloves from a pocket. They wound through the
convolutions.
Abruptly, as if bobbing to the sea's surface after a deep dive, they emerged onto a
flat mesa, perhaps an acre wide.
And suddenly the whole earth just halted. And so did Abe.
With no warning, the gigantic gleaming body of Everest was rearing up in front of
them. They had lost sight of it for three days and now it jutted one and a half miles
above them, stabbing into the jetstream. Its curtains of afternoon light hung before
them like a dream.
At first the mountain distracted all attention from ABC, which lay in shadow at the
back of the mesa. The mesa was butted snugly against a soaring rock wall, and the
wall had shed copious piles of limestone down onto it. Including Daniel's pioneering
attempt six years ago, theirs was the fourth expedition to make camp on top of the
rubble.
Low-slung and mean, the camp had the lean, breathless look of a battlefield
headquarters. In effect, ABC robbed Base Camp of its function. From here on most of
the assault would be supplied and coordinated from ABC. Earlier expeditions had piled
rocks into semicircular walls to cut the wind, and the faster moving Sherpas had
erected tents in steps among the rubble, one above the other. Someone – probably
Nima, trying to make them feel comfortable – had attached one of their twelve-inch
American flags for the summit to a bamboo wand and wedged it among the rock.
Bright blue and yellow tarps covered a small stockpile of food and equipment, and
yaks and herders were wandering around.
The closer Abe got, the uglier the camp appeared. It seemed to squat in the
shadows beneath the rearing prow of white and black stone. Above ABC the mountain
didn't get just steep, it got vertical. This close, Abe couldn't see the top of the stone
wall and all of the mountain's other features vanished. He knew the wall was just one
more piece of the puzzle, though from here the Kore Wall seemed to stretch all the
way to the sky. Had he been the first to arrive here – had he been Daniel ten years
ago – he would have pronounced the route inconceivable and turned around.
Nima and Sonam were laboring among the rock, heaving chunks atop new walls,
building new spaces for more tents. Sonam nudged his sirdar, or boss, and pointed at
Abe, and Nima descended goatlike from the rubble to greet him.
'Oh, hello, sir.' Except for his bright Gore-Tex climbing uniform, Nima might have
been one of the yakherders. His cheekbones stood like fists, and his short city-cut had
grown wild and the black hair was below his ears.
'You are coming onto the mountain now,' Nima said. He was smiling.
'Yes, here I am,' Abe acknowledged. He was feeling nauseous and hitched his pack
higher on his shoulders, mostly for effect. He wanted to sit down. No, that wasn't true,
he wanted to lie down.
Nima wanted to talk. 'The mountain is very strong.'
'Yes, very impressive.'
Nima finally got around to his question. 'This yakherder in Base is all better now?'
Abe had forgotten all about the Tibetan boy. For a brief few days, he'd even
forgotten he was the team's archangel and had thought of himself as simply one of the
climbers. To an extent that Abe could not help but appreciate – for it let him be
something other than a doctor – they had begun replacing science with superstition.
Some had taken to refusing all medicine, relying instead on their crystals and vitamins
and herbs. Others had become alchemists, mixing cocktails of Halcion for sleep with
Diamox for respiration with codeine for coughing and aspirin for thinning their blood.
And J.J., of course, had his steroids. There was no thwarting them, so Abe didn't try.
There was no escaping duty, though.
'Nothing's changed, Nima. I checked him before I left Base Camp.' He didn't want to
raise any false hopes by explaining the subtle improvements. And besides, his nausea
was crawling up.
'But medicine, sir.'
Abe belched and swallowed. He wanted to be irritated, but that required too much
vigor. He had mounted to almost 22,000 feet on the mountain of his dreams, and his
only welcome was to be pestered about an epileptic yakkie in a coma? 'I did what I
could,' he said.
'Yes, sir,' Nima said.
Next to one of the empty tents, Abe backed against a rock and nestled down his
pack with a bovine groan. He unharnessed himself from the shoulder straps and
