headlamp batteries nested inside his sleeping bag to keep them warm, Abe poked his
wrist from the neck of the bag. 'Six-thirty.'
That meant Daniel and Gus and Stump and J.J. had been climbing for over three
hours. By now they should have punched through the Yellow Band, and judging by the
silence outside, there was nothing more to keep them from the top. The Ultimate
Summit was about to penetrate this purgatory all the way through the sky.
Abe cooked them a hasty breakfast of last night's leftovers – Top Ramen boosted up
with salami slices, raisins, and Tabasco sauce. While the icy block of food thawed over
a flame, he made the seven o'clock radio call. It was very brief. The camps compared
notes on the night's passage and the weather. The lower camps reported extremely
high winds, but everyone took heart when Abe said the air was as still as June in
Texas up at Four. The summit team didn't call in, and that was more good news. It
meant they were too busy climbing. No one mentioned the monk.
Abe and Kelly geared up inside the tent, a clumsy process. Between the cramped
space and the lines running from their oxygen bottles and headlamps and the dangling
cookstove, their movements were knotted and cumbrous. They could have opened
the tent door for more room, but that would have disheartened them. Though the
mountain had gone silent, it was bitterly cold. The tent walls let them enjoy the
appearance of cozy warmth for their final minutes at Four. At last they were ready to
ascend to the high camp. And tomorrow, Abe thought with a pleasure too distant to be
called joy, tomorrow the summit.
Kelly unzipped the tent door and the cold poured in. Like deep sea divers, they
clambered to their feet and stood upright by the cave mouth. Abe was unsettled by
the darkness outside the cave. By this hour there should have been more light, even
with the sun buried in clouds. If conditions didn't improve, Daniel and his team would
have to use a flash to take photos of their summit triumph projected for noon.
'It's so peaceful,' Kelly marveled.
'The storm has passed,' Abe said.
But he should have suspected otherwise when he placed one hand on the
green-and-white checkered rope that led out of the cave and up the face. It was
vibrating like a plucked guitar string and he realized that here was the source of the
odd humming noise. Abe made nothing more of it and went ahead with his
preparations. He clipped his jumars onto the rope and adjusted his goggles. Even in
this darkness one could go snowblind. He stepped from the cave onto the face.
The world turned upside down.
Abe flew. He was swallowed into the air.
It was instantaneous. The thought flashed past that he was falling, but he wasn't. It
was utterly impossible.
Far from disappearing, the wind had grown into a hurricane gale and with his very
first step onto the face Abe was ripped from his front points and actually lifted ten or
twelve feet
face, a bit of dust swept into the jet stream.
Abe lay plastered against the wall, too astounded to move, not certain he even could.
He wasn't hurt, but his confusion was almost painful. He had to fight back his shock
just to register bits and pieces of what was happening.
The darkness was in fact a snowy whiteness so flat and dense his eyes could hardly
see. Thunder had usurped the silence, indeed the silence was thunder, and the goggles
were torn from his face. If not for the oxygen mask strapped across his mouth, the
wind would have stripped the breath from his lungs. Loose pack straps lashed him
where the skin of his face was exposed.
Sucking hard at the oxygen mask, Abe hoicked his body around. Hand over hand, he
hauled himself down the rope and back to the cave entrance. There Kelly helped to
pull him inside. 'God, Abe. Are you all right?' She knelt beside him in the cave mouth,
aghast.
'Not good,' Abe said, crouching on one knee. The oxygen mask was dangling at his
throat. 'And it's got to be worse up high. Daniel and the others, they've got to be
pinned down.'
'I don't think so,' Kelly said. 'If they were pinned in Five they would have told us.
They would have made the radio call this morning. I think they're climbing. They're
on their way.'
There were other explanations for Five's radio silence, of course. Their radio
batteries might have gotten used up in last evening's arguing or frozen overnight.
Someone might have dropped the radio handset or they might just have slept in or
forgotten to call. The other possibility, the worst one, was that Daniel and the others
had set out in the early hours according to plan and the wind had exterminated them.
Abe left it all unspoken.
He couldn't get over the preternatural power of the wind and stared fearfully at the
mountainside. There were no bench-marks – no tree branches or tumbleweeds or
flags or wind socks – to help him gauge the force, nothing to even suggest the wind
was blowing. Any loose snow had been scoured away. But for all its peaceful
appearance, the North Face was now a gigantic maelstrom.
'Do we stay here or go up?' Abe asked.
Kelly didn't pause. 'We have to go up,' she answered. 'They'll need us up there.'
Abe slipped an extra bottle of oxygen into his pack for ballast, then braced himself
and stepped from the cave once again. This time, turning one of his jumars upside
down on the rope and slipping both tight, he managed to keep his footing. Kelly did the
same, and after the initial blast, they adapted.
He looked up and saw a ball of purplish Saint Elmo's fire fifty feet higher along the
rope. He'd seen such a thing on a friend's sailboat once, but never in the mountains.
The ball of glowing electric flame had been drawn to the metal of their next anchor,
and despite the wind it didn't move. Beyond that an immense dark white halo was
crowning the summit. Abe forced himself to breathe deeply. It was imperative that he
ignore this world of beautiful images. He had to concentrate on the climbing. He felt
very afraid.
The air was murderously cold and it shook and rattled their clothing. Even standing
side by side at the rest stances, neither could hear the other over the din without
shouting. But it gave them one advantage. It graced them with wings. Abe was
carrying three bottles of oxygen plus his jump kit for medical emergencies, and even
so his load felt lighter than empty. It was almost as if the mountain were sucking him
higher and higher. He couldn't shake the feeling that he and Kelly were being drawn
into an ambush.
Abe approached the first anchor cautiously. The blue ball of flame was seeping up
and down the rope around one of Daniel's titanium ice screws. Abe couldn't remember
if the phenomenon carried a dangerous electrical charge. There was no way around it,
however, and so he finally dipped his hand into the strange shimmering light to clip his
jumar onto the next rope. His hand tingled, no more. He could smell ozone, but on
second thought decided smell was impossible in such wind and through an oxygen
mask to boot. One more illusion. He kept on climbing.
