big fur Khampa cap he'd bought from a nomad in Shekar. His black eye was buried
behind glacier glasses. 'We're getting up there.'
'No excuses,' Robby threw in, gasping along with the others. 'You are getting old,
Kelly. Especially for a woman.' Kelly delighted in having her beauty deflated, but no
one else was particularly amused. They were too tired.
'It's only a little more,' Daniel told them. As if to confirm him, some of the yak
caravan appeared, wending its way back down to Base Camp. Unburdened of their
loads and with gravity helping them along, the yaks and their herders were practically
running downhill. Their rapid descent made Abe feel that much slower.
Soon the afternoon winds began. The trail's corridor funneled blasts straight down
into their faces. Without breaking stride, Abe zipped his jacket closed to the throat
and fished some thin polypro gloves from a pocket. They wound through the
convolutions.
Abruptly, as if bobbing to the sea's surface after a deep dive, they emerged onto a
flat mesa, perhaps an acre wide.
And suddenly the whole earth just halted. And so did Abe.
With no warning, the gigantic gleaming body of Everest was rearing up in front of
them. They had lost sight of it for three days and now it jutted one and a half miles
above them, stabbing into the jetstream. Its curtains of afternoon light hung before
them like a dream.
At first the mountain distracted all attention from ABC, which lay in shadow at the
back of the mesa. The mesa was butted snugly against a soaring rock wall, and the
wall had shed copious piles of limestone down onto it. Including Daniel's pioneering
attempt six years ago, theirs was the fourth expedition to make camp on top of the
rubble.
Low-slung and mean, the camp had the lean, breathless look of a battlefield
headquarters. In effect, ABC robbed Base Camp of its function. From here on most of
the assault would be supplied and coordinated from ABC. Earlier expeditions had piled
rocks into semicircular walls to cut the wind, and the faster moving Sherpas had
erected tents in steps among the rubble, one above the other. Someone – probably
Nima, trying to make them feel comfortable – had attached one of their twelve-inch
American flags for the summit to a bamboo wand and wedged it among the rock.
Bright blue and yellow tarps covered a small stockpile of food and equipment, and
yaks and herders were wandering around.
The closer Abe got, the uglier the camp appeared. It seemed to squat in the
shadows beneath the rearing prow of white and black stone. Above ABC the mountain
didn't get just steep, it got vertical. This close, Abe couldn't see the top of the stone
wall and all of the mountain's other features vanished. He knew the wall was just one
more piece of the puzzle, though from here the Kore Wall seemed to stretch all the
way to the sky. Had he been the first to arrive here – had he been Daniel ten years
ago – he would have pronounced the route inconceivable and turned around.
Nima and Sonam were laboring among the rock, heaving chunks atop new walls,
building new spaces for more tents. Sonam nudged his sirdar, or boss, and pointed at
Abe, and Nima descended goatlike from the rubble to greet him.
'Oh, hello, sir.' Except for his bright Gore-Tex climbing uniform, Nima might have
been one of the yakherders. His cheekbones stood like fists, and his short city-cut had
grown wild and the black hair was below his ears.
'You are coming onto the mountain now,' Nima said. He was smiling.
'Yes, here I am,' Abe acknowledged. He was feeling nauseous and hitched his pack
higher on his shoulders, mostly for effect. He wanted to sit down. No, that wasn't true,
he wanted to lie down.
Nima wanted to talk. 'The mountain is very strong.'
'Yes, very impressive.'
Nima finally got around to his question. 'This yakherder in Base is all better now?'
Abe had forgotten all about the Tibetan boy. For a brief few days, he'd even
forgotten he was the team's archangel and had thought of himself as simply one of the
climbers. To an extent that Abe could not help but appreciate – for it let him be
something other than a doctor – they had begun replacing science with superstition.
Some had taken to refusing all medicine, relying instead on their crystals and vitamins
and herbs. Others had become alchemists, mixing cocktails of Halcion for sleep with
Diamox for respiration with codeine for coughing and aspirin for thinning their blood.
And J.J., of course, had his steroids. There was no thwarting them, so Abe didn't try.
There was no escaping duty, though.
'Nothing's changed, Nima. I checked him before I left Base Camp.' He didn't want to
raise any false hopes by explaining the subtle improvements. And besides, his nausea
was crawling up.
'But medicine, sir.'
Abe belched and swallowed. He wanted to be irritated, but that required too much
vigor. He had mounted to almost 22,000 feet on the mountain of his dreams, and his
only welcome was to be pestered about an epileptic yakkie in a coma? 'I did what I
could,' he said.
'Yes, sir,' Nima said.
Next to one of the empty tents, Abe backed against a rock and nestled down his
pack with a bovine groan. He unharnessed himself from the shoulder straps and
waistband and slumped forward, breathing deeply. One of the other Sherpas brought
over a cup of tea and just the fumes helped restore him. He drank and felt better. ABC
was a bleak place made all the bleaker because it lay in the very palm of the
mountain. Night was coming on and alpenglow had turned Everest into a vast crimson
spike. Its plume of red snow reached out for the plunging sun. Abe noticed that
everyone else seemed to be ignoring the mountain with a business-as-usual
nonchalance. He was alone in relishing the spectacle.
Everest didn't just overshadow ABC, it towered above. It utterly dominated the
land. Time and space had frozen tight here. The earth had stopped. As in Ptolemy's
scheme, the sun seemed to orbit this point. Here was the center.
From the outset Abe had imagined that this expedition was going to be a great
collective memory, one that he and his comrades would each harken back to in their
old age. Forever after, it would warm them on cold days, strengthen them, give them
an epic poetry to tell their grandchildren. Back in Boulder, Abe had lain awake beside
Jamie at night and stared up through the skylight, telling himself stories about how he
was going to climb a great mountain. But now, faced with actually ascending into this
pure light, his only thought was 'how absurd.'
'Doc?' Kelly was standing beside him, hunched beneath her big blue pack. For the
first time, Abe noticed a monarch butterfly she had embroidered onto the side pocket,
an iridescent creature that would have died within minutes up here. He wondered
what the yakherders thought of it, if they even associated it with reality.
'Is that your tent, Doc?'
Abe looked around at the other tents, already filling with people. 'Yeah, I guess,' he
said.
'You got a bunkie?'
Was this the beginning of what Thomas had warned him against? Abe hesitated, less
out of loyalty to Jamie than disappointment. Kelly obviously thought him safe to share
quarters with, and part of him didn't want to seem too safe to her. Even with her hair