doubts whether they'll ever let me.'
Kelly weighed his sincerity and was satisfied. 'That's what I mean,' she said. 'I know
I'm not the greatest climber in the world. I'm not a Daniel, say. But then no one else is
Daniel either. We all brought our weaknesses here.'
Now seemed the time for Abe to sketch some of his own past, and as an act of faith –
to whom he couldn't say – he mentioned Jamie.
'I didn't know her name,' Kelly said. 'But I knew you were married. Jorgens told me.'
Abe was quick to deny it. He had indeed said that to Jorgens, but only to gain some
sort of advantage that was lost to him just now. 'But I'm not,' he told Kelly. 'Not really.'
Kelly looked at him. 'Right,' she said. She'd heard that one before.
Abe started to elaborate. Kelly cut him off.
'I've been here before, you know. At the foot of the Hill with three months to go. A
woman in a tent with a man I've never met. And every time before I've thought, this
time it's going to happen. But every time it's been a bust.'
She was talking about Thomas, Abe realized. Thomas or others. Or perhaps she
meant only the summit.
Abe decided he was better off talking about her dreams of the summit than of
Thomas. 'How high have you gotten?' he asked.
'To the South Col,' she answered. Besides designating the easy route on Everest
Nepal-side, the South Col was also a feature, a broad dip in the ridge between Everest
and another of its satellite peaks, Lhotse. Situated at over 26,000 feet, the col
provided a virtual meadow for climbers to camp in before making their final leap
upward.
'So close,' Abe said. 'Was there a storm?' That was mountaineering diplomacy
talking. One put questions about failure delicately, and storms were a favorite
scapegoat.
'No,' Kelly said. 'I don't know what you've been told. But there was no storm.'
Abe didn't press.
'This might sound bizarre,' she said, 'but I once thought love might have something
to do with it.' And still she didn't say Thomas's name. 'I was wrong. Wrong up here
anyway. Up here it only breeds distraction. It gets in the way.' She glanced at Abe,
and he saw the plea in her eyes. 'That's not what love should be,' she finished softly.
Abe studied the callouses on his open palms. There was little left to add. As
unsettling as he found her candor, he was also grateful for it. Everything was in the
open now. At least they wouldn't be wasting their time or their dignity or their hearts
on a distraction.
'I didn't mean to go on,' she apologized. But of course she'd meant to. She was
hunting for a partner, not a sackmate. This was a test.
Abe tried to think of the right reply, trusting her confusion more than Thomas's
bitterness. And he wanted to climb with her.
'You're right,' he said. 'That does sound bizarre. Love. It's not a word I ever thought
to hear at twenty-one thousand feet on Everest. Not with so much mountain ahead of
us.'
He let it go at that, and so did she. In their silence, Abe could hear snatches of
conversation as climbers familiarized themselves with one another.
'You know, I've looked at the photo a hundred times,' Kelly said. On to a new topic.
'But now we're here and I still can't figure out the line.' No one else had admitted as
much, though Abe had suspected he wasn't alone in feeling intimidated by this great
unknown. It was good to hear that underneath the cocky self-assurance they all
affected, at least one other climber had some fears, too.
'I thought it was me,' Abe said. 'I thought I was getting stupid.' He said it by way of
trade, his anxiety for hers.
'Then we're all getting stupid together,' Kelly said. 'I mean, you tell me...' and she
suddenly flipped onto her stomach and rummaged through a stuff sack. She extracted
a stubby pencil, a spiral notebook, and one of their Ultimate Summit postcards with a
color picture of the North Face. 'Look at this,' she said, and stabbed her pencil at the
photo. 'What's up here? And how do you get past this?'
For the next two hours they lay side by side like newlyweds talking about the future
and making plans. Zipped chastely into their separate sleeping bags, they kept their
hips and shoulders pressed together, hungry for the extra warmth. They talked on
and on, Abe with his headlamp lit, Kelly pumping out pictures and maps with her
pencil. To an extent it worked. Even between the two of them, they couldn't decide
how Daniel had deciphered this route. But at least they managed to reduce the
monster towering above them to a paper cartoon, something both could manage in
their minds.
'What are our chances then?' Abe asked her.
'Are you kidding?' Kelly nudged him with her hip and her teeth flashed in their ball
of light. 'You don't have that one figured out yet, Doc?'
Abe snapped off the headlamp and closed his eyes. Kelly's bravado comforted him
more than he cared to admit. Maybe the Hill wasn't such an alien place after all. It had
been conquered before. It could be conquered again.
But around midnight, the moon burned a hole in Abe's sleep and his eyes came wide
open. He lay still and listened to the night.
He heard a woman breathing softly beside him, her warm back against his, and he
liked that it was Kelly there. In a nearby tent someone was hacking away with a dry
cough. A stiff breeze was beating their camp, but, oddly, he could even hear people
rustling in their sleeping bags fifty feet away. It still amazed Abe how acoustically
transparent tents could be, like tonight with every tent a bubble of sound connected
to all its neighbors. Even in a high wind, Abe had discovered he could hear his
neighbors whispering. They may as well have been a tribe of Neanderthals piled one
against another in a cave.
But what Abe was really listening for was not human at all. And now he heard it
again, the glacier, beneath his pillow of spare clothing.
Hundreds of feet thick, the ice was alive and moving. He could hear it popping and
groaning and cracking. And suddenly his vertigo returned and the very earth seemed
to drop out from under him.
Abe had once read that in the Dark Ages, peasants used to believe it meant certain
death to sleep upon a glacier. Now, listening to the dragons stirring within the
mountain, Abe came close to whispering a prayer. But for the life of him, he couldn't
remember a single one.
5
Long before the morning sun could reach around Everest's north-facing architecture
and unearth ABC, Abe left Kelly's warmth to go chop ice for breakfast. He was the
first up, or thought so until he found Daniel alone, perched upon a boulder. The man
was hunkered down upslope with a big expedition sleeping bag draped across his
shoulders, and he was facing the mountain. He might have been a gargoyle frozen in
place. His hair lay heavy with human grease, long and black upon the bag's cherry-red
Gore-Tex.
At Abe's approach, Daniel twisted. His eyes were glittering in a mask of sunbaked
