They seemed to be moving much faster than human beings physically can at such
altitudes. They had no choice in the matter. Kelly had the worst of it. Despite a
hundred days of lost bodyweight. Abe still outweighed her by fifty pounds, and it told
now in their footing. A dozen times Kelly was rocked and buffeted off her feet. Each
time she patiently righted herself and dug her crampon points into the snow and ice
and started again. She didn't complain.
Abe positioned himself a few steps behind in an effort to cut the wind. He couldn't
afford to lose Kelly. Things were getting stranger by the minute, and his sole comfort
was in being able to watch over her. Love had nothing to do with it. This was altruism
stripped bare. The only way he could identify his own welfare anymore was by looking
after hers.
Kelly's pace began to falter. She took more rests and her rhythm was off, afflicted by
missteps and occasional wobbling. Abe was slow to fault her performance, blaming the
wind. Finally he realized Kelly was in trouble. Her coordination was melting away
before his eyes. She kept lumbering off to her right, plainly disoriented.
Abe called her name, but she continued up. He called again, then plodded fast
enough to catch her by one arm. 'Kelly,' he shouted. 'Are you okay?'
'Cold,' she mumbled through her mask.
The easy explanation was that she'd run out of oxygen. Abe hoped it was that. He
stepped above her and fumbled for the cylinder tucked in her pack. The regulator
showed three-quarters full. Next he checked her mask. It was a standard military
issue for aviators, a diluter-demand system. It drew pure oxygen through a demand
valve and mixed it with air drawn from outside the mask. It was a simple enough tool,
but the exhaust valve and ports tended to freeze up. Abe had practiced dismantling
the assembly and putting it together down at Base Camp, and prayed it wasn't the
demand valve that had iced up. Fortunately it was the exhaust ports. He squeezed the
rubber mask in his mitten and freed the ice. Then he fitted the mask back over Kelly's
helmet and cranked her regulator up to two liters per minute.
'Try that,' he yelled.
She gave him a weary thumbs-up. After a while her pace improved.
At the head of two more pitches, the Shooting Gallery's steep narrow cleavage
opened wide and the angle of the slope grew more and more manageable. They found
themselves breaking trail upon a snowy tilted plateau. Compared to the vertical
gantlet of the last few days, the plateau felt almost level. They left the abyss behind
them, out of sight, almost out of mind.
The rope ended. Daniel had decided it was safe enough up here.
They continued on for another hour or so in the deafening howl, then Kelly stopped
and pointed. Not far in the distance, perhaps two hundred yards away, stood a
solitary orange tent. Daniel had taken it from the cache of gear the New Zealanders
had left in the cave. For the time being anyway, it represented the highest human
habitation on earth. The camp was built on snow, at the intersection of the plateau
and what Abe knew could only be the Yellow Band. Through his goggles the rock was
lime green and plated like lizard scales.
Kelly was pointing above the tent, though, and Abe moved his attention higher. He
saw a thick wide shelf of snow that had accumulated three or four hundred feet above
the camp. It probably held a thousand tons of snow, a perfectly formed avalanche
ready to cut loose. Then Abe saw similar pockets coiled all along on the downsloping
tiles. The whole region was primed for a catastrophe. The sight was almost enough to
make Abe turn tail and descend as fast as possible. But one further sight held him
steady, a rather sorry sight. There, almost within reach, stood the summit.
Abe was disappointed. For all its majesty and fury, Everest didn't finish with a
dramatic sculptured prow or a sharp pinnacle. Instead the mountain just rounded into
a sorry little hump-back, a gray lump shrugging at the gray sky.
The top was perhaps a half-mile away and a thousand feet overhead, but it looked
much closer and very easy, an afternoon romp. Just as Daniel had said, you could see
the summit tripod from here, a tiny, sticklike protuberance. The tripod reminded Abe
of an altarpiece for ants, ridiculous and not at all triumphant.
Kelly pulled at Abe's arm and shouted something. She had taken her glacier glasses
off. Abe bent his head closer. Their helmets knocked. 'I can't see anyone,' she shouted
above the wind, and Abe thought she'd gone snowblind.
'Your glasses,' Abe shouted back. He gestured to her to put them on.
Kelly didn't hear or else didn't care to. Either way she let the glasses dangle and
whip about on the string at her throat. She pointed at the summit again.
Abe realized she was hunting for some evidence of climbers on the summit slopes.
Now he looked, too. Their vantage point was ideal for spotting any movement up
there. If they could see the summit tripod, there was no reason they couldn't see a
moving figure wrapped in expedition colors.
In vain Abe tried tracing a route upward from the orange tent to the top. Then he
tried working down from the top along five or six different paths. Kelly took out her
camera and screwed on the telephoto, and they took turns scanning the top. They saw
no one. The climbers had disappeared.
Kelly's eyes were streaming tears from the wind. She shouted something, but Abe
shook his head, deaf in this hurricane. He tried replacing the glasses on her face, but
his fingers had gone wooden with the cold. Besides that, he could see Kelly's tiredness
and disorientation. He suspected her mask had packed in again with ice, and that
would need more work still.
'The tent,' he yelled.
Abe led off, plowing his knees through the snow crust. He left it to the wind to blow
Kelly in his wake. As they slogged up toward the orange tent, Abe tried to arrange his
thoughts for an orderly discussion. Matters of search and rescue or simple retreat had
to be weighed quickly and clearly and ruthlessly. But with each step he only got more
confused and tired.
It took them an hour to ascend the two hundred yards to camp. By the time they
reached the orange tent, Abe's fingers wouldn't work and all Kelly could do was kneel
and stare at the closed door. Finally he pried a flap open with his ice axe and slowly
peeled it open. He was careful not to break the zipper, because if they couldn't close
the door again the wind would surely kill them.
Abe pawed Kelly's pack off, then his own, and dumped them in the snow. Then he
pushed her inside and crawled in behind. It took five minutes to worry the door zipper
shut again.
'There's no one here,' Kelly yelled over the wind. She, too, had been hoping the
climbers would be inside.
Four sleeping bags lay heaped in the back of the tent. Daniel's team had broken the
rule and entered the tent with their crampons on. Abe could tell by the ripped,
punctured floor. Then he noticed that he had neglected to take off his own crampons.
Kelly's were still on, too. He took them off.
The tent walls shook so fast they buzzed. Abe was thankful the tent hadn't blown
away. Kelly sat in the corner, staring, mask off, mouth open. Her lips were bright blue.
They stared at each other, exhausted. Abe felt asleep. Or dead.
