The Ascent

He was thinking these thoughts and generally feeling sorry for himself when the

sound of a dislodged pebble interrupted him. An image – half man, half animal – took

shape in the glacier pond. Abe glanced up at the rim. Standing there, if a sideways

stoop upon ancient ski poles could be called standing, was the monk in old yak skins

and Daniel's black and orange baseball cap.

Abe's mouth came open. The two of them observed each other until Abe began to

wonder if this wasn't another one of his hallucinations. Then the monk teetered

between the ski poles as if he were fixed atop stilts and more pebbles pattered down

off the rim.

Abe didn't need Nima's translation to know he'd come to say good-bye. It was going

to be a two-way adios, Abe realized. Good-bye to the expedition. Good-bye to the

monk. The boy needed full-scale hospitalization. Yet four days from now he wouldn't

have even Abe's quackery for a stopgap. Abe let his breath out slowly. That was the

cold fact. This holy man was going to die.

The boy was in such bad condition that Abe wondered if he might have been hiding

near Base Camp the whole time. That or one of the yakherders had brought him in

overnight. One thing was certain, even if tulkus could fly, this one was anchored to the

few inches of soil he currently occupied. As if to confirm Abe's pessimism, the boy

sank his rump down upon a stone and stiffly lowered himself backward to rest. He

was too weak to take his hands from the ski pole straps, so the poles lay attached to

him, pitched askew.

'Tashi-dili,' Abe said, approaching. Nima had taught him that much. The monk

didn't return his greeting except to smile crookedly. He was wan and his eyes had a

dull luster. Closer up, Abe saw saliva stringing loose from his mouth. Abe didn't need

to open the boy's clothing to know the infection was back. He could smell the yellow

and orange fluid staining what had once been a clean white expedition T-shirt.

Abe squatted and palmed the boy's forehead. There was fever, though not so bad as

to account for this delirium and weakness. No, with this drooling, Abe's suspicion grew

that the boy had suffered a closed head injury. Between that and his wounds and

whatever damage lay beneath the abdominal bruises, the monk was in deep waters.

'What am I going to do with you?' Abe asked him in English.

The boy's eyes rounded onto him and he smiled at Abe.

'What are you going to do with him,' another voice asked. It was Gus over by the

water skull. She had materialized as softly as the monk.

'Start over again,' Abe said. 'Patch him. Drug him. Pray.'

Gus seemed frightened by the monk's presence in camp. 'Why did he have to come

back,' she demanded.

'I don't know. But he did. Now we have to get him squirreled away. It's going to take

me a few hours to clean him up and he can't be out in the open like this.'

'He shouldn't have come back,' Gus grumbled.

'It's okay,' Abe reassured her. 'The Chinese will never know about him. And in four

days we'll all be gone, us and the Chinese, and he can have the whole valley to himself.'

Once again they occupied the hut made of memorial stones, the Tomb with its

ceiling of cannibalized tentage. The boy lapsed deeper into inertia and finally a twilight

delirium that was close to the coma in which Abe had first found him. The word

passed among the climbers that the monk had returned, and they conspired to keep

his presence a secret. Lest the soldiers see people going in and out of the Tomb,

everyone stayed away except for Krishna, who brought Abe and his patient food and

drink. Abe slept in the hut that night, lying on the bare ground. The monk slept on

Abe's air pad.

And then something strange happened. With three days to go before their forced

departure from the mountain, Li came into the mess tent while the climbers were at

breakfast to make an announcement.

'Now what?' Robby grumbled.

'I have decided,' Li said. 'You may have ten more days to climb the mountain. After

that, I must obey my orders.'

When no one replied, Li expanded. 'There are things in life that require finishing.

You have taken many courageous risks. Now it is my turn to take a risk also.'

And still no one spoke, although Abe could see agitation blazing on every face. If Li

was waiting for them to thank him, he was out of luck. So far as the climbers were

concerned, the mountain had never been his to withhold. And this bizarre reversal

only reminded them of a power they could not ignore. It didn't seem possible, but Li's

generosity had made him even more unpopular.

'But why?' J.J. demanded.

'J.J.,' Thomas warned him off. They had just been granted a stay of execution, and

as rankling as the principle was, the fact of it gave them a second life.

'Even in difficult times, it is wrong to punish the innocent,' Li told them.

After Li had left, the climbers tried to fathom his sudden altruism. When Robby

tried to credit Jorgens's last-ditch request, Jorgens rebuffed him. 'It wasn't anything I

said. Li didn't look at me once the whole time I was talking.'

'What then?' Stump wondered.

'Does it matter?' Thomas asked. 'Now we got no one else to blame. That's as clean as

it gets in life.'

They left within the hour. With his sprained ankle taped and iced with a bag of

glacier chips, Carlos stayed down to man the Base Camp walkie-talkie. If necessary,

he could try to talk Li into an eleventh-day extension. The rest of the climbers surged

up the trail to finish off the Kore Wall.

9

Everest was a weather factory, so they said, but for a hundred days Abe had seen no

weather, no change. Day in, day out, the sky had seduced their eyes with its

blue-black constancy. What few clouds came had stayed in the distance, white

feathers that scattered in the wind. Abe had begun to believe it never snowed in

Tibet.

But on the afternoon they reentered ABC, the sky turned greasy silver. Daniel was

there, looming on the boulders, gaunt, irresistible, arms wide to them, and he

promised victory. But in the space of half an hour, the mountain wove a grimy cobweb

of storm clouds into the sky. By sunset, the cloud cover stretched from east to north

to west. The climbers took their meal early and scurried back to their tents just as the

first of the corn snow rattled down.

Bolts of lightning began igniting among the snowflakes, something Abe had never

witnessed before. He and Kelly zipped their door tight and crawled into their bags.

'What does this mean?' Abe asked. Kelly was lying beside him in the twilight,

propped on her elbow. It was too light to turn on their headlamps, but too dark for

much except talk. The wind loped through camp and their tent walls rhythmically

popped in and pulled out.