cheekbones and black whiskers and the pale skin of his goggles mark. He looked wild,
but not because of the burnt flesh or unwashed hair or gleaming eyes which marked
them all by this point. Rather it was his grin. The white teeth in that dark mask
showed a joy so savage it made Abe cold.
'Here it is,' Daniel said. He turned back to relish the wall, his horseshoe jawline
thrusting out at the great North Face, and Abe stood beside him.
The North Face was astounding. Where its lines had been washed out by shadow
and light yesterday afternoon, this morning Abe could see the route's features in
clean, blue detail. ABC sat so close to its base that the mountain was foreshortened
and looked squashed. The upper reaches beetled out. Gullies and ridges seemed
warped out of their actual shape. The summit was barely visible as an insignificant
bump. All the parts of it stood assembled just so, and now Abe could see a logic to the
route that made Daniel's climb a little more imaginable, almost accessible.
'This beauty...' Daniel started to say with faraway remembrance, but he faded off.
'I didn't know it would be so elegant,' Abe remarked, and he meant it. For all its
brute, compacted massiveness, the line had a delicacy and straightness that would
appeal to any climber, even a newcomer like Abe. Now, with the route stretched full
above him, Abe could see that Daniel's
than any he'd ever seen. Abe stood quietly by the monster's author, marveling at
Daniel's hubris.
It was almost as if Daniel had laid down a giant ruler in the middle of all this
geological anarchy and drawn a path of absolute simplicity. Not that simplicity meant
ease or safety. To the contrary, the Kore Wall was going to demand extraordinary
risk. From top to bottom, the 8,000-foot wall was exposed to weather and rockfall,
and there was no exit onto easier ridges should they run into trouble.
Daniel spoke again, his voice darker. 'This fucker...'
He rustled under his crisp Gore-Tex shroud and looked around at Abe. For an
instant – no longer – Abe saw a face from long ago, a look of utter blank panic or
worse, a look of terrible surrender. Then Daniel drew a deep breath and brought
himself back from the depths, and Abe drew a breath too.
'I can't believe I'm here.'
'Me either.' Abe meant himself.
But Daniel was lost in his soliloquy. He snorted, shook his head. 'I'll tell you one
thing,' he said. 'It's not for the love of it. No way. I hate this fucker.'
Abe digested that. 'Bad attitude,' he finally joked, at a loss otherwise.
It was just the right thing to say. Daniel was delighted. He grinned more fiercely.
'Ain't it though.'
They ate breakfast, then gathered by the jumbled heap of supplies, eager to climb.
Out came the ice screws and snow pickets and pitons of every shape, and 'Friends,'
the spring-loaded cams that looked so high-tech that James Bond had employed one
in a recent movie, and the deadmen, stacks of aluminum anchors. In one linked
silvery bunch lay their carabiners, or snap links, the all-purpose safety pins that
would channel ropes, complete belay anchors, connect harnesses, hold hardware,
brake rappels, and give a dumb extra hand with a 1,200-pound grip whenever an
extra hand was needed. Abe knew his way around most of this sharpened,
customized, taped, initialed, store-bought and homemade weaponry, even the two
battery-powered hand drills someone had brought for drilling bolts, a rock climber's
touch. What was unfamiliar to him he hefted and fiddled with and figured out on his
own.
Sporting his black eye still and a huge grin, J.J. got them in the mood when he
reached deep into the pile and extracted a 300-foot coil of orange rope and held it
over his head, whooping, 'Firepower.'
Three days passed before Abe got his turn to go up. In teams of two, the climbers
fanned upward. They took new territory, inflicting their calculations upon the
mountain, pinning their camps to the rock and snow and ice. Each team rotated to the
high point to push it higher, then retreated to ABC to rest and make room for fresh
troops. Forsaking the tactics which alpinists normally employed in almost every other
range on earth, the Ultimate Summit proceeded carefully and slowly. These were the
Greater Himalayas. Were Everest located at lower elevations, they could have made a
concerted push to the top in a single week.
They had entered the so-called deathzone, where big mountains tend to wreck the
delicate mechanisms of human physiology. Nothing lived up here for long except
lichen and a rare breed of spider with antifreeze glycerine for blood.
Up and down, up and down: When they weren't leading they were humping loads.
On any given day there were four to eight climbers occupying different levels of the
mountain. With the yaks unable to go any higher, they became their own beasts of
burden. Daniel's strategy called for five camps above ABC, each to be stocked with
progressively smaller quantities of food and cooking fuel. The upper camps – those
above 26,000 feet, if they got that far – would get bottled oxygen. Ounce by ounce,
every thread, every crumb, had to be carried on their backs.
At last Abe moved up. Because they were sharing a tent and wanted to try climbing
together, he and Kelly got teamed. That meant they were supposed to keep track of
one another, and to share 'hill rats,' or mountain food, which were broken into
two-man-day packets, and to climb as a pair. Today the two of them were scheduled
to reach Camp One, which one team had helped supply yesterday, and which another
team was using to sleep in while pressing the ascent to what would become Camp
Two. Tomorrow they would take the sharp end – the high point of the rope – to lead
toward Two. Maybe they would reach it, though Abe had no idea where Two was
supposed to be located or exactly what to do when they reached it. He was depending
on Kelly to know how to configure and erect a Himalayan camp from scratch. A few
yards beyond the border of ABC, the rocky detritus gave way to pure glacier. The
north bowl swept up toward the bergschrund – that fetal tear which separates a
mountain from its glacier – and then steepened.
Blowing wreaths of frost in the chill blue air, the two climbers clamped on their
crampons. Somebody had landed a batch of twenty pairs of a brand called Foot Fangs,
and Abe's were factory fresh, sharp enough to draw blood. He clapped shut the heel
mount with his palm and tugged the ankle strap good and tight and stamped once
against the snow. This was his first time in crampons on the mountain, and it felt a
little like mounting a horse, this stout bonding of foot to steel to ice.
They plied the glacial plain, navigating by instinct mostly. The wind had covered
over yesterday's tracks with snow the texture of sand grains. It was obvious where
they were going – to the fractured schrund a mile away – but between here and there
lay an obstacle course of crevasses, false promises and wrong turns. Parts of the
labyrinth were marked with bamboo wands brought up from Nepal and tipped with
red duct tape. Most of the way lay unwritten, though. Kelly said 'no problem' and
surged ahead.
They moved from one crevasse to the next, zigzagging back and forth in pursuit of
marker wands. In between they methodically probed for crevasses, Kelly with her ice
