Daniel zipped open the top of the door and shined his light outside.
'It's snowing,' he told him. 'Snowing hard.'
'It will stop,' Gus said. 'Like the wind, it will stop. Now you should sleep.'
11
Long ago, drinking straight shots on flat land at the end of a sunny day of rock
climbing, Abe had held forth that a mountain is nothing more than a pyramid of
memories and dreams. He had insisted. No mountain exists without the climber to
perceive it.
There was the opposite possibility, of course, that every climber is simply the
invention of long geological slumber. Just as climbers can manipulate their dreams, a
mountain can manipulate its own ascent. And when the mountain wakes, the dream
ends and the climber evaporates.
But Abe hadn't thought of that one that sultry twilight in a Mexican restaurant, and
now it was too late, for the Kore Wall came alive. It caught Abe, booted and spurred,
in the very act of checking his watch.
None of them had slept a wink, not once Kelly's Valium wore off and she started
begging for more. Abe had refused, saying she needed to be coherent for her descent.
She had cursed him and wept, but the tears only hurt her burned eyes more.
At 3:30 in the morning, Abe and Daniel started arming for their final assault by
headlamp. Gus and Kelly stayed in their bags to make room in the crowded tent. After
the men were gone, they would gear up for their own departure.
For a hundred days, they had forgotten time, living like exiles. Yet this morning Abe
couldn't remember it enough. Like a condemned man, he tracked every minute. His
destiny seemed to have become a matter of seconds.
At 5:15 Abe started working into his boots and super-gaiters. He snapped shut the
heel clips on his crampons at 5:40, strapped on his helmet eight minutes later, and
five minutes after that double-checked both his and Daniel's oxygen regulators. The
last thing Abe did before pulling on the wrist loop of his ice axe was check the time
again: 5:57 A.M., 6/12.
That was the moment the earthquake struck.
It was subtle. Kelly felt the trembling first. She said, 'What's that?' Then Abe felt it,
too. Then they heard the snow.
Like a giant serpent loosening its coils, the first of the avalanches let go with a hiss.
Each of them knew what it was with hair-trigger wisdom. Like the snow itself, their
awareness of the danger had collected heavier and deeper overnight. The Yellow Band
overhead was loaded with dry snow shingled with wet snow and they were in the cold
white field of fire. The first avalanche missed them. Eyes wide above their oxygen
masks, they listened to it empty down the limestone tiles and hit their plateau with a
boom. Moments later the backdraft blasted their tent with a roar of air. Spindrift the
texture of beach sand was pressure-injected through the closed zipper and the air
turned white.
Daniel started to yell something. But the mountain had its range now.
The second avalanche did not miss them.
The door blew out – not in – and a tremendous suction dragged at Abe's lungs and
heart and bowels, threatening to gut and empty him in one sweep.
An instant later the vacuum reversed. The tent walls collapsed. The fabric wrapped
Abe's every contour tight. The whiteness went black. Sound turned to silence. All
perception stopped.
Abe's first thought was that he'd died. He thought. I can live with this. It was so
peaceful. He felt warm. Nothing hurt. Paradise was rest. He'd been laboring to find
this calm since birth.
But then he drew breath. It was a wracked, burning suck of air, and with it he
plunged into hell. For half his lifetime, Abe suddenly knew, he had been dreading this
moment, when he would face the fate of the lost girl Diana. Yet now, like a wasp
capturing an insect alive for her young to feed upon, the Mother Goddess had
enclosed him in her core. The mountain was going to feed upon him through eternity.
Abe tried to move his arms. He was not surprised by their capture. But the
claustrophobia spasmed through him anyway. All his strength poured into thrashing
and bucking and tearing a hole through his imprisonment.
He had to move, even if it was only a fraction of an inch. He yelled and shouted, but
that only made it worse. He had the voice of a human being trapped inside a
mountain. Finally he passed out.
When Abe returned to consciousness, his throat hurt. There was no telling how long
he'd been out. Not long enough. He went mad again. Again he passed out.
When Abe came back this time, he tried to reason with his horror. But in trying to
picture his position – up or down or flat or sitting – or his location upon the mountain,
he lost control and consciousness again.
This time when he revived, Abe was too tired and ill to struggle. From a far distant
place, he felt pain. It was the stitched laceration on his right arm, he knew. But it came
to him simply as pain, without reference points. This was life then. Stripped of its
compasses and timepieces and sun, life reduced to a mere sensation. Abe no longer
wanted it.
Locked inside his coffin of snow, Abe felt inspired. If he couldn't control the
directions and movement of his life, then at least he could end it. The simple fact of
having a choice, no matter how final it was, calmed him. He didn't debate the issue.
One way or another he was going to gain his freedom.
Suicide was easier said than done. Abe slipped toward panic as he realized how
helpless he really was. It occurred to him that he could pack his mouth full of snow
and drown, however slowly. But upon opening his jaws for a bite he learned that the
oxygen mask was still on his face. He couldn't even honestly suffocate, it seemed. He
was doomed. Just before the avalanche hit, his oxygen regulator had showed a full
tank, and he hadn't yet cranked the flow rate from a half-liter per minute – his sleep
rate – to two liters per minute for climbing. A quick calculation told him another eight
to nine hours of air remained, and he couldn't even move his head to push the mask
off.
Abe's last hope was to go mad, then. But he no sooner invited the awful
claustrophobia to take him off into madness than it completely vanished. He was left
feeling calm and horrified at the same time. He remembered someone telling him that
Tibetan
depart this plane of existence. He remembered the tiny cells in the monastery where
monks would have themselves buried for six and twelve months at a time. He stared
into the blackness.
Abe may have slept. At any rate another thought entered his mind like the sweet
arrival of dawn. It was less a thought than a whisper. It beckoned to him. It drew him.
Right through the snow and ice and rock and years, it drew him down through the
planet and connected him with his own past. It was like dreaming. Sensations were
traveling through the mass of his imagination like earthquake tremors. I have become
the mountain, thought Abe. He was pleased. It was the ultimate union, the
