axe, Abe with a ski pole. Overnight some of the bamboo wands had tipped over or
simply been ingested by the crevasses. Abe noticed that the bamboo – still green
when they'd unloaded it from the trucks – had dried to a dead gray, every hint of
water sucked out by the mountain.
Most of the crevasses were easy to step across or hop over. Several were too wide
for that and so snow bridges had been hunted out and tested for human weight,
carefully, and then marked and roped for safety. These required long detours to
reach.
One crevasse gaped so wide it seemed impassable. But after a half-hour of walking
along its lower flank, they came to a battered aluminum extension ladder with
Japanese script along one side. Daniel had salvaged it from the garbage dump at ABC
and with Gus and Nima's help had carefully laid it flat across the twenty-foot gap and
staked it in place. Abe took an immediate dislike to the ladder. He was tempted to
crawl across it, but with a pack on it would have been even more awkward. Besides
that, Kelly had just walked it with robotic ease, clanking metallically. With each step,
his crampon teeth threatened to slide or catch on the metal rungs. At the halfway
point, the bottomless crevasse seemed to howl up at Abe. He scuttled across the rest
of the span like a stick figure on fire.
Kelly turned out to be better acclimated, but Abe managed to keep up. Their pace
was relatively quick – one step, one breath. Higher, the ratio would widen radically,
Abe knew, four or five lungfuls per step. Their crampon teeth squeaked on the ice
bed.
After two hours, Kelly paused and pointed up. Through his glacier glasses, Abe saw
pink and green sunrays suddenly flare over the northeast shoulder of Everest. It
turned into a wild jagged corona and he heard the mountain stretch itself. Its joints
creaked underneath his boots as the glacier settled. Snowbeds rustled. A distant green
avalanche sloughed loose, beautiful and deadly.
'No problem,' said Kelly. 'We're still ahead of the warm.' Once the sun hit, the upper
mountain would begin its daily thaw and send rocks and ice and maybe worse rattling
down. Abe was not looking forward to that deadly rain.
They moved off again. A gust of wind brushed across the glacier. Spindrift flowered
up from underfoot and for thirty seconds or so a ground blizzard whistled at knee
level. Because of its curvature, the immense northern bowl spawned dervishes.
Slender ice tornadoes tap-danced here and there. One crawled partway up the wall
before gravity pulled it back down. Then the wind stopped. The snow settled. The
dervishes died. It was still again.
More time passed. Overhead the wall of stone and ice grew enormous, but remained
untouchable. Somewhere at its base lay Camp One. Since Abe had no idea where, time
ceased to matter. They would get there when they got there.
Finally they reached the bergschrund. Here was the start of the technical climbing
and it was announced by the first rope. It was a thick snake of polypropylene, once
white, now gray. Fixed ropes like this one would allow them to carry heavy loads in
safety, giving them a handrail for guidance and support. As the angle grew more
radical, they would be hanging from the ropes. In addition to aiding their ascent, the
ropes were an insurance policy. If – when – the weather turned ugly, the ropes would
allow them to bail out in a hurry, rappeling down the ropes at ten times the speed
they'd gone up them.
Abe didn't recognize the gray rope as any of their stock and he guessed it had been
plundered from somewhere else on the mountain, maybe from the old pile Nima had
uncovered in ABC. Abe wasn't in the habit of using a rope he didn't know. Wind and
ultraviolet rays could age a rope in a matter of weeks, and there was no telling how
long this one had been getting whipped and fried at the roof of the world. But since
Kelly didn't hesitate to clip onto it, Abe didn't either. So much depended on sheer faith
up here.
They attached themselves to the rope with jumars, mechanical jaws that ratcheted
upward, but caught downward. Abe slid his jumar high on the rope, and when he came
to the four-foot-wide slash that was the bergschrund, he stopped beside Kelly. She
was peering into the deep chasm at her boot tips.
'You see it down there?' she said. 'That must be from Daniel's first go at the Hill.'
The huge block of ice they stood upon was calving from the slope, and deep in the
turquoise cleft Abe saw the taut green rope she was talking about. It stretched from
one wall to the other and looked like the final thread holding two naturally opposed
forces together.
'How'd it get so far down?' Abe asked. It had been six years since Daniel's last visit
here, yet the rope seemed centuries deep.
Kelly shrugged and turned her attention uphill. 'Yeti,' she said. The abominable
snowman. Things happened on mountains that couldn't be explained and humans
weren't very good at letting that be. They needed dragons or gremlins. Or yeti.
One at a time they took off their packs and leapt for the far side of the bergschrund.
Abe's Foot Fangs bit into the snow with a jolting halt. They were on the mountain
itself now, behind enemy lines.
The gray rope ended a hundred meters higher in a mass of knots that disappeared
into the snow and ice. Abe knew that somewhere under the surface an aluminum
plate called a deadman was locked in place, anchoring the rope. But to the naked eye,
it looked like the rope had been sucked into a devouring mouth. The mountain was
alive, no doubt about it.
They unclipped from the gray rope and clipped onto the next one, a section of
weathered blue nine-millimeter Perlon. This wasn't Ultimate Summit stock either,
and Abe realized the team was saving its new rope for more severe terrain. The line of
fixed old ropes went on and on like that to the top of the slope, jointed together with
bits and pieces of used nylon. Using the rope as an occasional handline, he slid his
jumar along just ahead of him. The slope steepened. More and more he had to haul
against the rope and kick his feet against snow that had been annealed by the sun and
wind. One short 65-degree required the front points of his crampons.
Kelly was kind, pacing their ascent to Abe's first time at these altitudes. She didn't
remark at his gasping, merely stopping each time he bent over his high knee to rest.
He felt ill and exhilarated at the same time. Part of him revelled in the height and
spectacle. Part of him just wanted to quit moving and lie down for a nap. Try as he
might, the ambivalence – the charged current between misery and magic – wouldn't
switch off. Twice he noticed colorful stains in the snow alongside the ropes, and
realized it was old vomit where others had found it tough going, too.
Camp One lay cupped at the tip of a knife ridge. Three bright yellow tents stood in a
lengthwise string, end to end, and it was the most precarious site Abe had ever seen.
At its widest point, the ridge was only five feet across, scarcely wide enough to hold a
tent. On either side, the ridge plummeted a thousand feet. The outermost tent had
part of its back wall hanging over the edge.
'Not too shabby,' Kelly said, checking her watch. It was only two o'clock – real time,
not Beijing time, they'd given that up upon reaching ABC – but their workday was
done. She was sitting in the doorway of one tent, dangling a foot over the edge.
