A glorious defeat, a deep mystery: this is the kind of story that the English just love, as don’t we all. All the public-school virtues wrapped into one heroic Tale—you couldn’t write it better. To this day the story commands tremendous interest in England, and this is doubly true among people in the climbing community, who grew up on the story, and who still indulge in a lot of speculation about the two men’s fate, in journal articles and pub debates and the like. They love that story.
Thus to go up there, and find the bodies, and end the mystery, and cart the bodies off to England… You can see why it struck my drinking buddies that night as a kind of sacrilege. It was yet another modern PR stunt—a money-grubbing plan made by some publicity hound—a Profaning of the Mystery. It was, in fact, a bit like videotrekking. Only worse. So I could sympathize, in a way.
VI
I tried to think of a change of subject, to distract the Brits. But Freds seemed determined to fire up their distress. He poked his finger onto the folded wreck of a photo. “You know what y’all oughta do,” he told them in a low voice. “You mentioned getting lost and climbing Pumori? Well shit, what you oughta do instead is get lost in the other direction, and beat that expedition to the spot, and hide old Mallory. I mean here you’ve got the actual eyewitness right here to lead you to him! Incredible! You could bury Mallory in rocks and snow and then sneak back down. If you did that, they’d never find him!”
All the Brits stared at Freds, eyes wide. Then they looked at each other, and their heads kind of lowered together over the table. Their voices got soft. “He’s a genius,” Trevor breathed.
“Uh, no,” I warned them. “He’s not a genius.” Laure was shaking his head. Even Kunga Norbu was looking doubtful.
Freds looked over the Brits at me and waggled his eyebrows vigorously, as if to say: this is a great idea! Don’t foul it up!
“What about the Lho La?” John asked. “Won’t we have to climb that?”
“Piece of cake,” Freds said promptly.
“No,” Laure protested. “Not piece cake! Pass! Very steep pass!”
“Piece of cake,” Freds insisted. “I climbed it with those West Ridge direct guys a couple years ago. And once you top it you just slog onto the West Shoulder and there you are with the whole North Face, sitting right off to your left.”
“Freds,” I said, trying to indicate that he shouldn’t incite his companions to such a dangerous, not to mention illegal, climb. “You’d need a lot more support for high camps than you’ve got. That circle there is pretty damn high on the mountain.”
“True,” Freds said immediately. “It’s pretty high. Pretty damn high. You can’t get much higher.”
Of course to people like the Brits this was only another incitement, as I should have known.
“You’d have to do it like Woody Sayres did back in ’62,” Freds went on. “They got Sherpas to help them up the Nup La over by Cho Oyo, then bolted to Everest when they were supposed to be climbing Gyachung Kang. They moved a single camp with them all the way to Everest, and got back the same way. Just four of them, and they almost climbed it. And the Nup La is twenty miles farther away from Everest than the Lho La. The Lho La’s right there under it.”
Mad Tom knocked his glasses up his nose, pulled out a pencil and began to do calculations on the table. Marion was nodding. Trevor was refilling all our glasses with chang. John was looking over Mad Tom’s shoulder and muttering to him; apparently they were in charge of supplies.
Trevor raised his glass. “Right then,” he said. “Are we for it?”
They all raised their glasses. “We’re for it.”
They were toasting the plan, and I was staring at them in dismay, when I heard the door creak and saw who was leaving the kitchen. “Hey!”
I reached out and dragged Arnold McConnell back into the room. “What’re you doing here?”
Arnold shifted something behind his back. “Nothing, really. Just my nightly glass of milktea, you know…”
“It’s him!” Marion exclaimed. She reached behind Arnold and snatched his camera from behind his back; he tried to hold on to it, but Marion was too strong for him. “Spying on me again, were you? Filming us from some dark corner?”
“No no,” Arnold said. “Can’t film in the dark, you know.”
“Film in tent,” Laure said promptly. “Night.”
Arnold glared at him.
“Listen, Arnold,” I said. “We were just shooting the bull here you know, a little private conversation over the chang. Nothing serious.”
“Oh, I know,” Arnold assured me. “I know.”
Marion stood and stared down at Arnold. They made a funny pair—her so long and rangy, him so short and tubby. Marion pushed buttons on the camera until the videocassette popped out, never taking her eye from him. She could really glare. “I suppose this is the same film you used this morning, when you filmed me taking my shower, is that right?” She looked at us. “I was in the little shower box they’ve got across the way, and the tin with the hot water in it got plugged at the bottom somehow. I had the door open a bit so I could stretch up and fiddle with it, when suddenly I noticed this pervert filming me!” She laughed angrily. “I bet you were quite pleased with that footage, weren’t you, you peeping Tom!”
“I was just leaving to shoot yaks,” Arnold explained rapidly, staring up at Marion with an admiring gaze. “Then there you were, and what was I supposed to do? I’m a filmmaker, I film beautiful things. I could make you a star in the States,” he told her earnestly. “You’re probably the most beautiful climber in the world.”
“And all that competition,” Mad Tom put in.
I was right about Marion’s reaction to a compliment of that sort—she blushed to the roots, and considered punching him too—she might have, if they’d been alone.
“—adventure films back in the States, for PBS and the ski resort circuit,” Arnold was going on, chewing his cigar and rolling his eyes as Marion took the cartridge over toward the stove.
The Sherpani waved her off. “Smell,” she said.
Marion nodded and took the videocassette in her hands. Her forearms tensed, and suddenly you could see every muscle. And there were a lot of them, too, looking like thin bunched wires under the skin. We all stared, and instinctively Arnold raised his camera to his shoulder before remembering it was empty. That fact made him whimper, and he was fumbling at his jacket pocket for a spare when the cassette snapped diagonally and the videotape spilled out. Marion handed it all to the Sherpani, who dumped it in a box of potato peels, grinning.
We all looked at Arnold. He chomped his cigar, shrugged. “Can’t make you a star that way,” he said, and gave Marion a soulful leer. “Really, you oughta give me a chance, you’d be great. Such presence.”
“I would appreciate it if you would now leave,” Marion told him, and pointed at the door.
Arnold left.
“That guy could be trouble,” Freds said.
VII
Freds was right about that.
But Arnold was not the only source of trouble. Freds himself was acting a bit peculiar, I judged. Still, when I thought of the various oddities in his recent behavior—his announcement that his friend Kunga Norbu was a tulku, and now this sudden advocacy of a Save Mallory’s Body campaign—I couldn’t put it all together. It didn’t make sense.