Abe saddled himself. He wanted to keep up with the gang today and had packed for
speed, a manageable but still respectable thirty pounds. Holding on to a handline, he
picked his way horizontally across forty feet of stone to the base of the Shoot. Gus was
already there, similarly burdened.
'Daniel's barfing,' she said to excuse her partner's absence.
'J.J.'s sour too,' Abe said.
Gus slugged Abe softly on one shoulder. 'Then it's you and me, Doc. We'll show these
wimps. They can straggle behind.' Abe felt warmed by her camaraderie. She had read
apprehension. For weeks people had been talking about the horrors of the Shoot. Now
he was about to be exposed to them for the first time. Gus swept her headlamp back
and forth across four ropes lying side by side in the back of the Shoot. There was one
rope for each of the expeditions that had entered this corridor.
With one gloved hand, Gus plucked at the orange rope – the Ultimate Summit stock
– but let it go and tried a second and a third rope. She seemed to be shopping, though
to Abe's mind there was no question, the newest was the best. Then he saw her
dilemma. Overnight the ropes had become coated with transparent ice. They were all
sheathed with verglas.
'Heads up,' Gus said. She took the end of the new orange rope again and swung it
from the wall. Then she cracked it against the stone like a gigantic, ponderous whip.
The ice fractured off and maybe twenty pounds of chandelier glass came tinkling
down, pattering on Abe's helmet and hunched shoulders.
'Dibs,' Gus said, grabbing the first place on the rope. She thumbed open the metal
jaws of her two jumars and clipped them onto the cleared rope. She slid the
uppermost jumar high, then tugged to see if it caught on the downstroke and it did. As
the rope iced up, the jumars would slip now and then, but that was a nuisance, not a
hazard.
Abe didn't mind going second, even though it meant more work. With Abe beneath
Gus, the rope would be weighted and that always made jumaring the ropes – jugging
the line – much easier. But going first was a mixed blessing, because if one of these
ropes was abraded, it would break under her weight first.
Abe felt a twinge of something, shame perhaps, or guilt. The truth was he
appreciated Gus's making herself the guinea pig. He was scared. He knew his nerves
would smooth out eventually. Maybe in an hour or two he could take over jugging the
lead and spare Gus some of the risk.
Gus finished rigging her stirrups to the jumars, then headed up the line. The rope
creaked under her weight. Abe gave her a few bodylengths, then started up behind
her, walking his stirrups up a foot at a time.
The going was slow. Repeatedly the teeth in their jumars caked with rime and the
jaws missed their bite and slipped. Each time one of Abe's jumars fouled, he had to
unclip it and thaw the teeth with his warm breath and clip it back on the rope.
At the top of the first ropelength – or pitch – they rested, standing in their stirrups
since there were no ledges here. Abe leaned his shoulder against the cold rock. The
corridor was only five feet across at this level, and its boxlike sides channeled the wind
straight up between their boots.
'One down, six to go,' Gus said. Shoulder to shoulder, Abe could smell the coffee on
her breath. He checked his watch. It was going on four-thirty. At the rate of a half
hour per rope, they could possibly reach the top of their line by eight or nine.
Abe looked between his knees at the ground. Far below, almost a mile beneath his
boots, the glacier was giving off a phosphorescent glow. Closer in, a tiny headlamp was
bouncing white beams against the corridor's walls and Abe could feel the climber's
movement vibrating in the orange rope. Gus whipped the next rope to clear its ice.
They continued up.
The Shoot's slick stone turned to panels of ice, green beneath Abe's light. They put
on crampons and kicked at the ice, biting it with their front points. The ice squeaked, a
comforting noise that told them the ice was plastic this morning, not brittle. Here and
there the wall lay bare and their crampon teeth scuttered against the exposed rock
and sent out electric sparks, red and blue.
At the top of the second pitch, Abe realized that either his calculations were off or
his watch was. It was nearly six. Already an hour and a half had passed. At this rate, it
would be late morning before they got to the high point. And by then the sun would
have renewed its conspiracy with the mountain. Abe tried not to think of what that
was going to mean.
They went on and on. Dawn broke.
Near eleven the sun painted them with hot light. Abe was already sweating under
the pack straps, deep in his own animalism. Even if he could have thought in full
thoughts, he wouldn't have dared. Ascent hurt too much at these heights. Abe had
never had to fight his own body this way. The aches and pains were bad enough. The
lassitude was worse. He wanted to obey his instincts. He wanted to go down. But that
was unthinkable. He concentrated on brute primary motion. He kept his mind
slave-empty.
Abe lost count of the time, of the ropes, of his pain.
The Shoot opened to thirty feet across, and the ice took on the white marbling of
snow. The angle eased slightly. Tiny balls of snow – sunballs – loosened in the heat
and tumbled in minuscule avalanches that evaporated before they could grow bigger
than a fingernail.
'Look,' said Daniel.
'Huh?' said Abe. He lifted his head to see, but his helmet hit the high crown of his
pack. He shifted the load and cocked his head sideways and indeed, Gus had become
Daniel. Somehow, in the hours since dawn, Daniel had moved from last to first on the
line of ropes. Abe was startled to the extent his apathy allowed. He hadn't noticed the
changing. He couldn't remember passing Gus on the ropes nor Daniel passing him.
One thing was certain, Daniel no longer looked sick. His pack full and his power was
obvious in the way he dominated the ice.
Abe looked off to the right where Daniel was pointing. He blinked. He blinked again.
There was paradise out there. They had climbed so high they could look right
around the mountain and into Nepal.
Off in that far distance lay a land of kaleidoscopic peaks. They poked their summits
up among a white lather of clouds like a chain of bony, carved islands. Even as Abe
watched, wind vacuumed the clouds out from the distant valleys, exposing a
topography of light and dark hollows. The sunlight twisted in strange patterns. A
razor-sharp feather of snow, at least three thousand feet in length, appeared as a
streak of glycerine quick-silver, a divine flourish.
Abe lowered his head to break the spell. He looked at the glacier between his
crampon teeth. It was gleaming like a slick reptile down there, vast, coiled dragon's
vertebrae. He looked back to the south, enchanted, drawn by the promise.
For months now, he had spent his gaze – his belief – upon Everest alone. But here,
this morning with half the Himalayan range unfolded before him, Abe faltered. It
hadn't occurred to him that they might see Nepal before reaching the very summit,
and he hadn't really expected to reach the summit. This unexpected view brought to
