Far below, the immense northern bowl with its crevasses and snowy expanses had
become a cup full of lines and white spaces. ABC was tiny, just a spray of colored
freckles. If anyone was moving among the tents, they were too small to see. The sun
was wheeling around the northwestern crest, cutting the bowl into dark and light
halves. Even as he watched, the sunlight gave up some of its territory, and the halves
were no longer halves.
Abe bit down on his vertigo and smiled weakly. He'd slept on ledges and in
hammocks on big walls in Yosemite, but never on a ridge jutting this thinly into space.
The placement looked insane, but Abe knew he should appreciate its logic. Very
simply, sitting on this ridge, the camp was out of reach of avalanches and rockfall. In
the long term, his dread of heights always simmered into a healthy fear. It was the
short term that was so rough. He tried reasoning it away.
They had lost the earth. They had thrown it down beneath their feet. Like monks
they were giving up their place in the world and becoming anonymous. Unlike monks,
they were striking pacts with their individual demons, honing a radical arrogance and
rising upon their whims.
Abe forced himself to stare into the abyss. See it, he told himself. Make it yours.
Sometimes that worked for him, incorporating the physical void into the center of his
soul. Today it didn't. He just felt sicker.
Since looking down was a wash, Abe looked up. A line of ropes led into a dark icy
gully and the gully led vertically into the unknown. Tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow, Abe thought. The higher they rose, the deeper the abyss.
He'd always thought that a moment like this – a moment of crystalline reckoning –
would be glorious and Zen-like. His mouth would drop open and his eyes would see a
million miles and he would think, So this is what it is. Instead Abe carefully knelt by
the edge and gripped the rope tight. Positioned just so, he took the liberty of emptying
his stomach a thousand feet into the deep.
Another week passed. Each morning the climbers wrapped themselves in Gore-Tex
and polypropylene armor. They donned their helmets and goggles and glittering
crampons, took up their sharp ice axes, draped ropes like ammunition bandoliers
across their chests. They locked and loaded into their harnesses and onto their ropes
and humped their backpacks with the grim pluck of grunts on patrol, infiltrating the
mountain in tiny platoons, probing it for weak points, relentless.
Some days the mountain just sat there like a titan's still life, not a color moving on
the hot blinding canvas. Then again there were days of rage, everything torn to rags if
you could see the Hill at all, the mountain reassembling its arsenal, shifting its
defenses, readying for a kill. The mountain changed, but the climbers were just as
metamorphic. Abe could see it.
The fat was vanishing from their bodies, stripped out by the rigors of their journey.
They were turning to bone and gristle. Abe could see it on warm mornings when the
camp-bound stripped down to their T-shirts. Their muscles had thinned out and their
arms were ropy with veins. Their hands had taken on the horny, banged-up look of
roughnecks' hands. The pads were cut and fissures spread like drying mud and simple
scrapes ulcerated. Their fingernails had quit growing or were just continually chipped
and worn down. Every cuticle was split and bleeding as if their fingers were rejecting
the very nails, spitting them loose.
Abe tried in vain to remember what they'd looked like before. Like Himalayan
deities, their skin had turned blue, the higher they climbed the lusher the blue. And
their urine had turned the color of blood because the glacier melt was loaded with so
much raw iron and minerals. At supper, pieces of fried skin fell from their faces into
their food. Their eyes had grown huge and hungry behind their goggles and glacier
glasses. The mountain had spawned a pack of maniacs, it seemed, zealots. The
mountain will fall, Abe thought. To people like these it will fall. And he was one of
them.
Slowly, in bits and pieces, they were gaining on the beast. They prosecuted their
ascent by inches, cannibalizing the remains of earlier expeditions to feed their upward
journey. Their 'yak gap' had put them behind schedule, but through brute risk they
were beginning to make up for it. By the end of two weeks of brilliant route-finding,
most of it accomplished by Daniel and Gus, the climb was almost back on track.
Morale rose high, but so, curiously, did the group's anxiety. Every one of them was
feeling overextended, and no one could quite explain it, not for a climb that was going
so well.
'We're like casualties waiting to happen,' Robby said. 'You'll see. The machine will
start to break down. Then it all becomes a matter of forward momentum, how far can
we go before we stop.'
The breakdown started soon.
Carlos had arrived with chronic tendinitis in both ankles, and to compensate had
taped them tight like a Super Bowl halfback's. That stabilized the ankle but cut the
blood supply to his feet, causing some minor frost nip on his toes. Abe prescribed
warm socks and nixed the tape. Two days later Carlos stumbled and wrenched his left
ankle, and Jorgens sent him down to Base Camp to recuperate.
On April 14, Robby and J.J. got food poisoning at Camp Two. They'd been pinned in
their tents for two days as a cold front moved through, and neither man was known
for his fastidiousness. While the storm buffeted them, they did what everyone else
was doing on the mountain. They lay low, slept, BSed, and cooked. The water for
cooking came from melted snow. The snow came from outside the tent. Robby and
J.J. didn't bother reaching very far outside their tent, and ended up ingesting their
own feces. Their violent bout of vomiting and diarrhea had abated by the time the
storm lifted, but each man was left seriously dehydrated. Since the combination of
dehydration and altitude sickness could be deadly, Abe sent them down to Base Camp
to rest.
Abe had read about winter-long science expeditions to Antarctica which became
disease-free while in isolation. After sharing each other's flus and colds in the first
month, everyone's immune system adjusted and the incidence of viral infections
plummeted. Only with the introduction of a new arrival was the stasis violated. In
theory, Abe knew the Ultimate Summit Expedition could become disease-free also.
But the reality was that time was against them and they weren't a truly isolated
population anyway. The yakherders had exposed them to a host of Asian viruses that
were still waylaying the climbers a month later.
For a while everyone suffered sore throats and packed sinuses. Some went on to
develop the infamous high altitude cough, a persistent wracking hack. Stump got the
worst of it. A few days after chipping his front tooth on a frozen chocolate bar at Camp
Three, he descended to ABC doubled over with 'cough fracture.' It was not unheard of
for Himalayan climbers to break their own ribs in coughing fits. Abe examined
Stump's beer keg of a rib cage and said the 'fracture' was probably not a break, but
that he'd definitely separated some ribs. He put Stump on Cipro, an all-inclusive
antibiotic, and sent him down to Base Camp to recover.
About the time Carlos returned to ABC from his convalescence at Base, limping
gamely, Thomas keeled over with a high fever, chills and wet rales. Abe was carrying
