The Ascent

the prayer flags for his own use, or else bought them from a yakherder. Kelly didn't

know which.

The tulku chanted and murmured while he turned the narrow pages of an old book.

The puja had the gravity of a mass but the air of a carnival. Through the entire two

hours, the Sherpas and climbers came and went, talking loudly and laughing and

taking pictures.

The ceremony had become more than a puja, Abe knew. It was a binding together.

When Daniel had laid out the monk's sorry tale last night, the climbers had reacted

with Abe's same disbelief, then personalized it. Kelly had teared up. Jorgens had

objected to jeopardizing 'his' climb by harboring a fugitive. Carlos had ranted about

the Chinese overlords. In the end they had agreed with Daniel, though. Silence gained

them everything. The little tulku would have time to heal and finish his escape. The

climbers could climb. And Li would be spared doing his duty.

Carlos originally explained to them that their puja would address Tara, a goddess

associated with compassion. As it developed, the tulku chose a different god for his

ritual, Mahakala. Carlos passed around a small book on Tibetan culture, and Abe saw

the picture of Mahakala. He was intrigued by the monk's selection.

Black and ferocious, the god was a demonic creature with six arms and a rosary of

human skulls. He held numerous weapons and his head was surrounded with a halo of

flames. He was drinking brains from a skull. Abe tried to square the image with his

frail patient. Carlos said it made perfect sense.

'Mahakala – Gompo, to lay Tibetans – he's the Great Black Lord of Enlightenment,'

Carlos said. 'He's a killer, but also a protector. He defends us against selfishness and

slaughters the demons of ignorance. On the Tibetan hit parade of deities, this guy

scores in the top three. He's the perfect symbol of killing the self to achieve

knowledge. Rebirth out of destruction, all that good stuff. With this dude watching

over us, we're double safe, man. It's a good choice. Excellent.'

Nima and Sonam distributed puja strings, blessed pieces of red twine that were tied

loosely around people's wrists or throats. 'You keep it on until it rots off,' Kelly

explained.

'What about Li?' Abe asked. 'What if he sees these strings?'

'We'll just say the truth, that these are our lucky charms. Maybe I'll give him one,

too.'

Abe didn't get a string until the very end.

Closing the long, wooden covers of an old prayer book, the tulku got up on unsteady

legs and came over and tied a red string around Abe's throat himself.

Abe didn't know the Tibetan word for thank you, and so he determined to give a

present in return. All he could think of was a second stethoscope from his medical kit.

But by the time Abe returned from his tent with the stethoscope, the monk was gone.

'Where did he go?' Abe asked Nima.

'I don't know, sir.'

They looked for the boy, but he had disappeared.

The prayer flags stayed up, flapping prayers into the blue sky. And the puja strings

turned dark red from their sweat. Abe figured that he would never see the monk

again. He had vanished outward into that idea called Tibet. He wanted for the monk to

be more than just a voice and this puja string. But that's all that was left.

6

The siege tightened through May.

Camps One and Two had fallen easily, as if the mountain didn't want them anyway.

They took Three in a snowstorm up a long gully filled with slag and junk ice; nothing

difficult, but it took some fight. Four was next, but first they had to pacify a wild mean

narrows dubbed the Shoot, short for the Shooting Gallery. Rocks and loose ice

bombed the Shoot at all hours. No one had gotten hurt yet, but people knew that even

puja strings and prayer flags couldn't hold down the odds for long.

Near the end of April – he'd lost all track of the actual date – Abe headed up the

line, this time humping forty pounds of rope, fuel, two sleeping bags, and five 'hill

rats' or two-man-day packets of high altitude rations that were fast-cooking and easy

on the GI tract. The food, gas, and bags were for Three, the rope was for their

continuing drive on Four.

The camps were spaced a day apart from each other. Abe felt strong and could have

pushed from One to Three in a day, but that kind of leapfrogging was a fast track to

exhaustion and edema. He'd noticed how everyone else was saving their physical and

mental reserves for the summit bid, and he saw no reason to ruin himself hauling

heavy on a milk run. He wanted his crack at the top, too, though the closer D day

approached, the more nebulous it became. Some people said a month, most just shook

their heads and talked about something else.

Abe arrived in Three alone. Thomas and J.J. had already spent a day and night

there. It was midafternoon, maybe 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the two men were

putting the final touches on two rectangular box tents. Thomas's crewcut had gone to

seed, but not enough to shield his balding crown, and he had fresh red sunburn on top

of old sunburn scabs. He looked like a thermometer ready to explode. J.J. was

stripped to his muscle shirt: Gold's Gym. Neither man greeted him. They'd been

watching his torturous coming for the last two hours, and by the time of his arrival it

seemed like he'd been among them forever.

This was Abe's first visit to Three, and now he saw for himself the problems he'd

been hearing about. The camp was an aberration. There was no ice or snow to cut tent

platforms into, and the rock lay at a 60-degree angle with no ledges. It would have

been a hopeless site except for the multimillion-dollar Japanese expedition of '87.

With portable drills, anchor bolts and aircraft tubing, the Japanese had constructed a

metal ghetto here, or at least the skeleton of one. The result was four artificial

platforms with flat floors and roofs and perpendicular walls. In its heyday, the camp

would have accommodated up to twelve climbers.

The wind had shredded the nylon walls of each box tent and falling rock had sheared

some of the poles and smashed some of the infrastructure, but in three years Everest

hadn't yet managed to shed this evidence of earlier colonists. Now the Ultimate

Summit climbers had occupied the camp, cannibalizing platforms that were wrecked

to repair and buttress the ones that weren't. It was a vertical shantytown, a

sorry-looking place for such a magnificent abyss.

'Where's Kelly at?' J.J. asked. As a rule, the buddy system was inviolate. It was

peculiar for Abe to show alone.