up to Camp Two at the time. When Jorgens brought the news up at four in the
afternoon – they still had no radio contact – Abe immediately descended to ABC.
From Jorgen's description, Abe guessed Thomas had developed HAPE, or high
altitude pulmonary edema, a frequent killer at these heights. An indirect result of
dehydration, HAPE had a terrible irony: It drowned its victims in their own fluids.
Abe reached ABC at eight o'clock that night. Daniel was already there, sitting beside
the patient. He seemed much too relaxed under the circumstances. Thomas had
glazed eyes and cold perspiration, and Abe could hear the bubbly sound of wet rales
even without his stethoscope. Thomas coughed and colored sputum spattered the
front of his sleeping bag.
'HAPE,' Abe said. 'We better send one of the Sherpas down to Base for the bag.' The
Gamow 'bag' was a portable pressure chamber made of plastic. You put the patient
inside, pumped it full of air, and basically dropped him to 12,000 feet elevation in a
matter of minutes. It had saved many lives in the past few years.
'You're right and you're wrong,' Daniel said. 'We definitely ought to get the bag up
here. But there's no hurry. This isn't HAPE.'
'Of course it is. Look at him. He's got all the symptoms. Rales, the sputum.'
'Almost, not quite,' Daniel said. He was kind in his contradicting. 'I would have
thought the same if I hadn't seen it before. With HAPE there's no fever. And look at
the color of this stuff.' He tore a page from a magazine and scooped some of the
sputum up. 'See? It's rusty. Not pink. Pink's HAPE.'
'Pneumonia,' Abe said. And it was. The good news was that the pneumonia sounded
confined to the left lower lobe, and lobar pneumonia responded well to antibiotics.
Thomas would recover quickly, provided he went down to Base Camp.
'We're starting to look like a ghost town up here,' Abe said. 'And we're not even
halfway.'
'I don't hear the fat lady yet.' Daniel smiled.
On April 17, Pemba Sange fell down a crevasse above ABC during a routine carry.
Thirty feet down, the Sherpa landed on a false floor of snow. Happily the floor held
and he was safely extricated, but two days later two other Sherpas came down with
severe headaches, which Jorgens insisted was 'Himalayan AWOL.' After accidents or a
death, he said, hypochondria sometimes ran rampant among climbers or Sherpas or
both.
'Treat them like they're real patients,' Jorgens advised. 'Give them aspirin. Inject
them with vitamins, whatever it takes. Just get them on their feet. They'll get over it.
That or we pack them off to Base for the duration with no pay. We can't have slackers
up here. They'll kill our morale and eat us out of supplies.' He instructed Abe to stay
down for the day and play doctor with them.
In fact, the two Sherpas were really sick. Abe found them in their tent suffering
fevers and severe diarrhea and mildly disoriented. One of them had even started up
the glacier with a fifty-pound load before surrendering to his illness. No slacking here.
Winging it once again, Abe put the two on a five-day course of Cipro and told them to
go down to Base Camp when they felt strong enough.
The accidents and near misses left them all jumpy and fitful. They were stretching
their limits up here, and there was a growing sense that they were going to need
something more, some extra auspices. Otherwise the mountain was going to take a
victim.
When help arrived, it came from an unexpected quarter. It was the third week of
April and Abe was crossing the last of the crevasses in the north bowl, descending
from yet another tedious load hump, when he chanced to spy a kite floating in the
thermals above ABC. It was a box kite, the color of lemons and pomegranates, and
someone had nursed it a good two hundred feet into the air. There was no great
mystery who the someone had to be. Robby had brought three kites from the States,
hoping to stage a calendar photo of kites flying against the Himalayan backdrop. So far
he'd been too busy climbing or being sick to attempt more than one launch, and on
that occasion the winds had been too fierce. Today, apparently, he'd achieved takeoff.
With its tropical colors and alien weightlessness, the kite practically shouted its
presence, and judging by its height, it must have been up there for quite some time.
But it was only now that Abe happened to take notice. The rest of his way to camp, he
rode on its swoops and Promethean trembling, enchanted by its coltish delicacy.
Every moment the string seemed ready to snap, taxed by the wind, and the sky's
blueness alone looked enough to crush the toy.
At the edge of camp, Abe sat down on a rock to shuck his crampons, and Thomas
came up. He was swearing by a full recovery, but Abe could tell the man was still
weak. 'You got a visitor,' Thomas said.
'You're kidding,' Abe said.
'Nope,' Thomas said. 'Showed up this morning.'
For one crazy instant, Abe imagined that Jamie had somehow made her way to
Everest and trekked the long trail up to ABC. Just as quickly he dismissed the
thought. Even if Jamie had been the type, there were too many twists and turns in
this adventure, too many borders. He decided his visitor had to be Li Deng, in the role
of a patient or a bureaucrat or just in search of company. If so, he was definitely
unwelcome. The last person they needed up here was a liaison officer badgering them
about rules and deadlines and watching over them. They had a hundred days for this
climb, but counting them out bean by bean wasn't going to get them any higher.
'Hey,' said J.J., who had just come straggling down off the glacier. Others were
coming down behind him. 'Isn't that your idiot?' The story had gotten around about
Abe and his epileptic yakherder.
It was indeed the Tibetan boy. He was standing in mid-camp with the spool of kite
string in both hands, wearing a clean expedition T-shirt and quilted pants and dirty
animal skins.
Three of the Sherpas were sitting on rocks, offering jokes and helpful comments
while they watched him pilot the kite. Pemba's near brush in the crevasse had
sobered the Sherpas, but the kite, or its handler, seemed to have returned them to
their usual animation. Nima caught sight of Abe and immediately stood up and said
something to the Tibetan.
'Well look at who's here,' Stump said, kicking off his crampons. 'It's Abe's little stray.
I thought he'd disappeared.'
Abe saw the boy turn to view the growing knot of climbers and a wide, bucktoothed
smile splayed across his broad face. He had the look of a child with all the time in the
world. He bent and lodged the kite spool under some rocks, then made a slow beeline
toward the climbers. Nima trailed after him.
Abe's fatigue fell away. The last he'd seen him, the boy was a write-off. Now he'd
recovered enough to walk ten miles and fly a beautiful kite in the lap of the Mother
Goddess. There was something so simple and wonderful about it that Abe smiled right
back. After a dozen years of emergency work, he'd seen his fair share of so-called
miracles, but never so poetically rendered.
The boy walked haltingly, with a left-sided palsy, and it was plain to see that he'd
suffered neurological damage somewhere along the line. Once again Abe wondered
