Across the lake a dusterplane was spraying the green circles of sharecrop orchard. Flamingos fled from it, peeling up from the water in a pink wedge of wings.
The storm was getting up by then; there was nothing else we could do that night. Lise suggested we come back when the weather had cleared. But I know that we all felt, no, we knew, that the storm had come out of the thing in the crater.
‘The storm closed in while we were returning to camp. I don’t know how we made it. A blizzard, in the tropics. Unglaublich. I know now there was more than snow in it, but I now know more about many things. We put our tents up and took shelter. We had no idea it would be so long or terrible. The first day our radio stopped working: we had no contact with our base camp. The second day the strange things started happening. Our tents began to fall apart. A little yellow patch about the size of a pencil-point would appear on the waterproof fabric and within minutes grow to the size of my hand. The same happened to our weather-wear; to anything that had plastic in it, which is almost everything in modern mountaineering. Of course, you know what was happening.’
‘The spores, the virons, whatever you want to call them, scavenge hydrocarbons to use as building blocks for Chaga life,’ Gaby said.
‘And plants and vegetable proteins too,’ Peter Werther said. ‘But never the living flesh of animals, never breathing, moving things. Strange, so? It knows us, you see.’ His gloved hand gripped the wooden railing. Weaver birds were building one of their hanging basket-nests under the roof. They came and went with stalks of grass and reed. Humans did not perturb them. They had more important agendas.
‘The story is well known. Lise and Christian and Joachim stayed to wait for Sabine. Because I had the most experience in the mountains, I tried to go down to get help. Their stories end with me walking out into the blizzard and disappearing. That is where mine properly begins.’
He offered cigarettes. This time Gaby took one.
‘I was a fool. No experience could have prepared me for what I found out there. It was total white-out, but at the same time, strange shapes were looming out of the snow, like nothing I had ever seen before. Coming out of the ground under my feet, before my eyes. As I watched! In twenty steps I was lost. But I stumbled on, not knowing if my next step would take me over the edge of a drop, my weather-proof clothing rotting and falling apart around me. Rotted through, like… what is the word?’ He said something in German.
‘Mildew?’ Ute Bonhorst suggested.
‘Ja. My only protection against the storm was coming apart in my fingers. At that altitude, in such a wind-chill, you develop hypothermia within minutes. All you want to do is give up and lie down in the snow and let it all stop. That is what you want most of all, for it all just to stop.’ He looked out at the patterns the crop-duster wove on the sky. A thin coil of smoke rose from his cigarette. ‘That is what I did. It was all I could do, do you understand? I was too cold, too confused, too afraid. I lay down. I went to sleep. And I died. I know it, in here.’ His gloved hand tapped his breastbone. ‘I died up there on that mountain. And the mountain brought me back to life.
‘There is no time in death. There are no dreams. That is how you know it is death and not sleep. But you do not awake from death, and I awoke. It seemed like an instant, though I have worked out since that I was dead for over a year. When you wake from death, it is all the terrible things about being born again. You are forced from a warm, comfortable womb of flesh into a world that you cannot understand. I woke in darkness, kicking at the bubble of soft skin into which I was curled. It unfolded around me like the petals of a flower, in speeded-up film, ja? You have seen pictures of the things they call hand-trees. There are thousands of them, millions probably; all pure white. In one of those I came back to life, half-way up the face of a huge reef of Chaga growing out of the mother-mass. It must have been five hundred metres high; the top was always covered in that damn fog. The forest would not let me see too far, so that I would not try to leave it. It did not want to lose me. Every time I tried to escape, it would bring me back. I would have to fall asleep in the end, and I would wake in a hand-tree back where I started, on the side of that damn sky-reef. It stole time from me – whole years were lost in sleep. I imagine myself passing through pipes and tunnels and tubes underneath the earth, like the veins and arteries of the Chaga.
‘I woke naked except for a few scraps of metaclass="underline" buckles, a zipper, the remains of my Rolex. You owe me a Rolex, you hear me? Everything had been digested by the Chaga. Even my hair, my eyelashes, eaten by the Chaga. I was naked high on the side of a mountain, but I was not cold. I do not know what it had done to me but I never needed clothing while I lived with it. I had been changed. And I could breathe the thin air as easily as if I were down on the coast: another change. It did something to my sweat glands: have you noticed how insects never seem to bother me? I am a natural insect repellent. Mosquitoes avoid me: that was one gift the Chaga let me keep.
‘It fed me, it sheltered me, it gave me water to drink. There are things like huge flowers up there; when it gets dark they open up and you can shelter inside and they will close around you and protect you. And when storms blew and the rains came, the reef would provide little soft caves – like pores in your skin – where I could curl up and listen to the sound of the wind across the high forest. Sometimes when I fell asleep it would move me to another place, another time. How I knew was that all my hair would disappear again.
‘The Chaga is full of ghosts. On the journeys I was allowed to make, I found traces of humans – abandoned game lodges, skeletons of cars and buses. Once I found a cache of old photographs still in silver frames – the glass had preserved them from the Chaga. They became my family, the people in those photographs. I felt that while I had been dead up there in the snows, the world had ended and I was the last man on earth. No, that is not quite right. I felt more like the world had just begun and I was the first man. I was Adam, alone and naked in a new Eden.
‘But there are not just the ghosts of the past up there; there are the ghosts of the future. I see you do not understand me: I will try to explain to you how I felt. In places the Chaga has memorized the shapes of the buildings that once stood there and stored them as, ah?’ He said a German word Gaby could not catch.
‘Templates,’ Ute Bonhorst said.
‘Exactly. Templates that time would one day fill in with wood, and brick, and concrete, and in the end, people. Ghosts of things to come. One day I found a tree of human skulls – it had grown from an old Wa-Chagga cemetery, but they did not seem to me to be the skulls of the dead, but of the yet-to-be-born, waiting for flesh and skin to grow and thought to fill them. There was a place, high up on the reef – a good two hours’ climb – where the Chaga had grown a television tree. It was like a baobab with screens set into the trunk, each tuned to a different channel. It was my eye on the world. From it I learned how long I had been dead and what had happened to those I had left up on Kibo, and what had happened to the world to which they had returned. I learned how deep I was within the forest and what a difficult journey it would be if I were to return to that world and my friends who did not know that I had been brought back from the dead.