At the next rest stop they drank and ate in silence. There was no point, Val judged, in trying to cheer them on. She could have pointed out to them again that they were having an adventure at last, after trying so many times and paying so much money. But she doubted that would go over very well now. One of the distinguishing marks of true adventures, she had found, is that they were often not fun at all while they were actually happening. And in one of their camp conversations Jim had quoted Amundsen to the effect that adventure was just bad planning. So that if she called it that, they might blame her for it. Jack was certainly ready.
And she blamed herself. It had been a mistake to take the righthand route, as it turned out. Although still—as she walked on thinking about it, trying to cheer herself up—it seemed that what had happened showed that Amundsen was wrong, and that adventures could also be a matter of bad luck as well as bad planning. You could plan everything adequately, and still get struck down by sheer bad luck. It happened all the time. Chance could strike you down; that was what made these kinds of activities dangerous. That was what made all life dangerous. You couldn’t plan your way out of some things. You had to walk your way out, if you could.
In any case, while there was no obvious way to cheer them up during the rests, there was also no great need to urge or cajole them along. The situation was plain; they either walked on or died. The intense cold they were living in reminded them of that at every moment.
She tried her GPS and it gave her a reading, showing them on the 172nd longitude. About the halfway mark of their hike. Not bad at all, except that they were getting very tired. They had hiked around thirty miles, after all, and were beginning to run out of gas; she could see it in the way they moved. Jorge was limping slightly. Elspeth was letting her ski poles drag from time to time, no doubt to give her arms a rest. Jack was doing the same, and moving like a pallbearer. Jim was trying to keep to his friend’s slow pace, though often he pulled ahead and then stopped and waited, not a good technique. Only Ta Shu still had the contained efficiency of someone with some strength left in his legs, placing each step precisely into her bootprints, using his ski poles in easy short strokes. He looked like he could stump along for a long time.
Val herself was feeling the work, but was well into her long-distance rhythm, a feeling of perpetual motion that was not exactly effortless but a kind of contained low-level effort, one that she could sustain forever; or so it felt. Obviously there would come a time when that feeling would wear away. But she had seldom reached it, especially when guiding clients, and right now it was still a long way off.
Her endurance, however, was not the point. They could only go at the speed of the weakest members of the team, and there was nothing she could do for them. Well; she could give them her meltwater. And so at the next break she did that, giving one cup to Jack and another to Elspeth, over their objections. “Drink it,” she ordered, her tone peremptory in a way she had not let it be until now. “I’m not thirsty.”
But of course after that she was. The parching in her mouth and throat reminded her of multiday wall climbs back in the world, when they had only carried a quart or two a day for days on end, and spent the last couple days hanging on sunny granite faces sick with thirst, hauling themselves up despite that, their sweat white. Dry mouth, dry throat, the tongue thickening until it became a foreign object lodged in the mouth, obstructing the breathing; the physical reality of being a water creature drying out, therefore losing substance; getting thin. One could dry up and die, parch to death. It was a feeling more painful than cold by far, though down here it often combined with the cold, allowing it to penetrate more quickly, so that one ended up freeze-dried, like the mummified seals in the Dry Valleys.
Well, fine. But just as she had done on the big walls, she gritted her teeth, bit the inside of her cheek lightly, and powered on. She would drink one arm of her next melt, and then alternate after that. She was fine. She could walk forever. But the clients couldn’t.
The little cloud was thickening, a white blanket thrown right over the sun, holding its position with maddening fixity. You could laugh at the Victorians for talking about a battle with Nature, but when you saw a cloud hold its position like that, in the freshening wind now striking them, it was hard not to feel there was some malignant perversity at work there, a Puckish delight in tormenting humans. It might be the pathetic fallacy, but when you were as thirsty as Val was it felt tragic.
She slowed down to hike with each of the others in turn, inquiring after them. Except for Ta Shu, and perhaps Jim, they were hurting; nearly on their last legs, it appeared, with more than thirty kilometers to go. Well, she would shepherd them there. Bring them on home. Give them her water, give them her mental energy. There was something about taking care of clients in such a way that felt so good. Others before self. The Sherpas’ business Buddhism, their ethic of service. Being a shepherd, or a sheepdog. Husbanding them along.
At the next stop, however, she tried again to give Jack her water, and suggested that he eat, and he refused the water and yanked the power bar out of his belt and tore off a piece savagely, muttering “Lay off, for Christ’s sake. We’re doing the best we can.”
Jim and Elspeth and Jorge all nodded. “This is hard for us,” Elspeth said to Val wearily.
“Of course,” Val said. “I know. Hard for anyone. You’re doing great. We’re making a very long walk, in excellent time. No problem. Let’s just keep taking it easy, we’ll get there.”
And as soon as possible she had them moving again, despite Elspeth’s suggestion that they take a longer break. That would only allow muscles to stiffen up; besides, the sheer impact of the cold made it impossible. They had to move to stay warm.
So she took off, trying to tread the fine line between going too fast and tiring them or going too slow and freezing them. She lost the glow she had felt during the previous march about the ethic of service and all that; in fact another part of her was taking over, and getting angry at these people for getting so tired so fast. Sure, she should have kept anything like this from happening. But they had no business coming down here to trek if they were not in shape. Even these so-called outdoor-speople were still very little more than brains in bottles—weekend warriors at best, exercising nothing but their fingertips in their work hours, the rest of their bodies turning as soft as couch cushions. Watching computer screens, sitting in cars, watching TV, it was all the same thing—watching. Big-eyed brains in bottles. These clients of hers were actually among the fittest of the lot, they were the best the world had to offer! The best of the affluent Western world, anyway. And even they were falling apart after walking a mere seventy kilometers. And thinking they were doing something really hard.
But in their spacesuit gear the level of raw suffering was not that great, if they could just learn to thermostat properly. Indeed the whole idea of Antarctic travel as terrible suffering which required tremendous courage to attempt struck Val as bullshit, now more than ever. It was all wrapped up with this Footsteps phenomenon—people going out ill-prepared to repeat the earlier expeditions of people who had gone out ill-prepared, and thinking therefore that you were doing something difficult and courageous, when it was simply stupid, that was all. Dangerous, yes; courageous, no. Because there was no correlation between doing something dangerous and being courageous, just as there was no correlation between suffering and virtue. Of course if you went at it with Boy Scout equipment like Scott had, then you suffered. But that wasn’t virtue, nor was it courage.