Abe studied the callouses on his open palms. There was little left to add. As
unsettling as he found her candor, he was also grateful for it. Everything was in the
open now. At least they wouldn't be wasting their time or their dignity or their hearts
on a distraction.
'I didn't mean to go on,' she apologized. But of course she'd meant to. She was
hunting for a partner, not a sackmate. This was a test.
Abe tried to think of the right reply, trusting her confusion more than Thomas's
bitterness. And he wanted to climb with her.
'You're right,' he said. 'That does sound bizarre. Love. It's not a word I ever thought
to hear at twenty-one thousand feet on Everest. Not with so much mountain ahead of
us.'
He let it go at that, and so did she. In their silence, Abe could hear snatches of
conversation as climbers familiarized themselves with one another.
'You know, I've looked at the photo a hundred times,' Kelly said. On to a new topic.
'But now we're here and I still can't figure out the line.' No one else had admitted as
much, though Abe had suspected he wasn't alone in feeling intimidated by this great
unknown. It was good to hear that underneath the cocky self-assurance they all
affected, at least one other climber had some fears, too.
'I thought it was me,' Abe said. 'I thought I was getting stupid.' He said it by way of
trade, his anxiety for hers.
'Then we're all getting stupid together,' Kelly said. 'I mean, you tell me...' and she
suddenly flipped onto her stomach and rummaged through a stuff sack. She extracted
a stubby pencil, a spiral notebook, and one of their Ultimate Summit postcards with a
color picture of the North Face. 'Look at this,' she said, and stabbed her pencil at the
photo. 'What's up here? And how do you get past this?'
For the next two hours they lay side by side like newlyweds talking about the future
and making plans. Zipped chastely into their separate sleeping bags, they kept their
hips and shoulders pressed together, hungry for the extra warmth. They talked on
and on, Abe with his headlamp lit, Kelly pumping out pictures and maps with her
pencil. To an extent it worked. Even between the two of them, they couldn't decide
how Daniel had deciphered this route. But at least they managed to reduce the
monster towering above them to a paper cartoon, something both could manage in
their minds.
'What are our chances then?' Abe asked her.
'Are you kidding?' Kelly nudged him with her hip and her teeth flashed in their ball
of light. 'You don't have that one figured out yet, Doc?'
Abe snapped off the headlamp and closed his eyes. Kelly's bravado comforted him
more than he cared to admit. Maybe the Hill wasn't such an alien place after all. It had
been conquered before. It could be conquered again.
But around midnight, the moon burned a hole in Abe's sleep and his eyes came wide
open. He lay still and listened to the night.
He heard a woman breathing softly beside him, her warm back against his, and he
liked that it was Kelly there. In a nearby tent someone was hacking away with a dry
cough. A stiff breeze was beating their camp, but, oddly, he could even hear people
rustling in their sleeping bags fifty feet away. It still amazed Abe how acoustically
transparent tents could be, like tonight with every tent a bubble of sound connected
to all its neighbors. Even in a high wind, Abe had discovered he could hear his
neighbors whispering. They may as well have been a tribe of Neanderthals piled one
against another in a cave.
But what Abe was really listening for was not human at all. And now he heard it
again, the glacier, beneath his pillow of spare clothing.
Hundreds of feet thick, the ice was alive and moving. He could hear it popping and
groaning and cracking. And suddenly his vertigo returned and the very earth seemed
to drop out from under him.
Abe had once read that in the Dark Ages, peasants used to believe it meant certain
death to sleep upon a glacier. Now, listening to the dragons stirring within the
mountain, Abe came close to whispering a prayer. But for the life of him, he couldn't
remember a single one.
5
Long before the morning sun could reach around Everest's north-facing architecture
and unearth ABC, Abe left Kelly's warmth to go chop ice for breakfast. He was the
first up, or thought so until he found Daniel alone, perched upon a boulder. The man
was hunkered down upslope with a big expedition sleeping bag draped across his
shoulders, and he was facing the mountain. He might have been a gargoyle frozen in
place. His hair lay heavy with human grease, long and black upon the bag's cherry-red
Gore-Tex.
At Abe's approach, Daniel twisted. His eyes were glittering in a mask of sunbaked
cheekbones and black whiskers and the pale skin of his goggles mark. He looked wild,
but not because of the burnt flesh or unwashed hair or gleaming eyes which marked
them all by this point. Rather it was his grin. The white teeth in that dark mask
showed a joy so savage it made Abe cold.
'Here it is,' Daniel said. He turned back to relish the wall, his horseshoe jawline
thrusting out at the great North Face, and Abe stood beside him.
The North Face was astounding. Where its lines had been washed out by shadow
and light yesterday afternoon, this morning Abe could see the route's features in
clean, blue detail. ABC sat so close to its base that the mountain was foreshortened
and looked squashed. The upper reaches beetled out. Gullies and ridges seemed
warped out of their actual shape. The summit was barely visible as an insignificant
bump. All the parts of it stood assembled just so, and now Abe could see a logic to the
route that made Daniel's climb a little more imaginable, almost accessible.
'This beauty...' Daniel started to say with faraway remembrance, but he faded off.
'I didn't know it would be so elegant,' Abe remarked, and he meant it. For all its
brute, compacted massiveness, the line had a delicacy and straightness that would
appeal to any climber, even a newcomer like Abe. Now, with the route stretched full
above him, Abe could see that Daniel's direttisima was more direct, and ingenious,
than any he'd ever seen. Abe stood quietly by the monster's author, marveling at
Daniel's hubris.
It was almost as if Daniel had laid down a giant ruler in the middle of all this
geological anarchy and drawn a path of absolute simplicity. Not that simplicity meant
ease or safety. To the contrary, the Kore Wall was going to demand extraordinary
risk. From top to bottom, the 8,000-foot wall was exposed to weather and rockfall,
and there was no exit onto easier ridges should they run into trouble.
Daniel spoke again, his voice darker. 'This fucker...'
He rustled under his crisp Gore-Tex shroud and looked around at Abe. For an
instant – no longer – Abe saw a face from long ago, a look of utter blank panic or
worse, a look of terrible surrender. Then Daniel drew a deep breath and brought
himself back from the depths, and Abe drew a breath too.
'I can't believe I'm here.'
'Me either.' Abe meant himself.
But Daniel was lost in his soliloquy. He snorted, shook his head. 'I'll tell you one
thing,' he said. 'It's not for the love of it. No way. I hate this fucker.'
Abe digested that. 'Bad attitude,' he finally joked, at a loss otherwise.