It was just the right thing to say. Daniel was delighted. He grinned more fiercely.
'Ain't it though.'
They ate breakfast, then gathered by the jumbled heap of supplies, eager to climb.
Out came the ice screws and snow pickets and pitons of every shape, and 'Friends,'
the spring-loaded cams that looked so high-tech that James Bond had employed one
in a recent movie, and the deadmen, stacks of aluminum anchors. In one linked
silvery bunch lay their carabiners, or snap links, the all-purpose safety pins that
would channel ropes, complete belay anchors, connect harnesses, hold hardware,
brake rappels, and give a dumb extra hand with a 1,200-pound grip whenever an
extra hand was needed. Abe knew his way around most of this sharpened,
customized, taped, initialed, store-bought and homemade weaponry, even the two
battery-powered hand drills someone had brought for drilling bolts, a rock climber's
touch. What was unfamiliar to him he hefted and fiddled with and figured out on his
own.
Sporting his black eye still and a huge grin, J.J. got them in the mood when he
reached deep into the pile and extracted a 300-foot coil of orange rope and held it
over his head, whooping, 'Firepower.'
Three days passed before Abe got his turn to go up. In teams of two, the climbers
fanned upward. They took new territory, inflicting their calculations upon the
mountain, pinning their camps to the rock and snow and ice. Each team rotated to the
high point to push it higher, then retreated to ABC to rest and make room for fresh
troops. Forsaking the tactics which alpinists normally employed in almost every other
range on earth, the Ultimate Summit proceeded carefully and slowly. These were the
Greater Himalayas. Were Everest located at lower elevations, they could have made a
concerted push to the top in a single week.
They had entered the so-called deathzone, where big mountains tend to wreck the
delicate mechanisms of human physiology. Nothing lived up here for long except
lichen and a rare breed of spider with antifreeze glycerine for blood.
Up and down, up and down: When they weren't leading they were humping loads.
On any given day there were four to eight climbers occupying different levels of the
mountain. With the yaks unable to go any higher, they became their own beasts of
burden. Daniel's strategy called for five camps above ABC, each to be stocked with
progressively smaller quantities of food and cooking fuel. The upper camps – those
above 26,000 feet, if they got that far – would get bottled oxygen. Ounce by ounce,
every thread, every crumb, had to be carried on their backs.
At last Abe moved up. Because they were sharing a tent and wanted to try climbing
together, he and Kelly got teamed. That meant they were supposed to keep track of
one another, and to share 'hill rats,' or mountain food, which were broken into
two-man-day packets, and to climb as a pair. Today the two of them were scheduled
to reach Camp One, which one team had helped supply yesterday, and which another
team was using to sleep in while pressing the ascent to what would become Camp
Two. Tomorrow they would take the sharp end – the high point of the rope – to lead
toward Two. Maybe they would reach it, though Abe had no idea where Two was
supposed to be located or exactly what to do when they reached it. He was depending
on Kelly to know how to configure and erect a Himalayan camp from scratch. A few
yards beyond the border of ABC, the rocky detritus gave way to pure glacier. The
north bowl swept up toward the bergschrund – that fetal tear which separates a
mountain from its glacier – and then steepened.
Blowing wreaths of frost in the chill blue air, the two climbers clamped on their
crampons. Somebody had landed a batch of twenty pairs of a brand called Foot Fangs,
and Abe's were factory fresh, sharp enough to draw blood. He clapped shut the heel
mount with his palm and tugged the ankle strap good and tight and stamped once
against the snow. This was his first time in crampons on the mountain, and it felt a
little like mounting a horse, this stout bonding of foot to steel to ice.
They plied the glacial plain, navigating by instinct mostly. The wind had covered
over yesterday's tracks with snow the texture of sand grains. It was obvious where
they were going – to the fractured schrund a mile away – but between here and there
lay an obstacle course of crevasses, false promises and wrong turns. Parts of the
labyrinth were marked with bamboo wands brought up from Nepal and tipped with
red duct tape. Most of the way lay unwritten, though. Kelly said 'no problem' and
surged ahead.
They moved from one crevasse to the next, zigzagging back and forth in pursuit of
marker wands. In between they methodically probed for crevasses, Kelly with her ice
axe, Abe with a ski pole. Overnight some of the bamboo wands had tipped over or
simply been ingested by the crevasses. Abe noticed that the bamboo – still green
when they'd unloaded it from the trucks – had dried to a dead gray, every hint of
water sucked out by the mountain.
Most of the crevasses were easy to step across or hop over. Several were too wide
for that and so snow bridges had been hunted out and tested for human weight,
carefully, and then marked and roped for safety. These required long detours to
reach.
One crevasse gaped so wide it seemed impassable. But after a half-hour of walking
along its lower flank, they came to a battered aluminum extension ladder with
Japanese script along one side. Daniel had salvaged it from the garbage dump at ABC
and with Gus and Nima's help had carefully laid it flat across the twenty-foot gap and
staked it in place. Abe took an immediate dislike to the ladder. He was tempted to
crawl across it, but with a pack on it would have been even more awkward. Besides
that, Kelly had just walked it with robotic ease, clanking metallically. With each step,
his crampon teeth threatened to slide or catch on the metal rungs. At the halfway
point, the bottomless crevasse seemed to howl up at Abe. He scuttled across the rest
of the span like a stick figure on fire.
Kelly turned out to be better acclimated, but Abe managed to keep up. Their pace
was relatively quick – one step, one breath. Higher, the ratio would widen radically,
Abe knew, four or five lungfuls per step. Their crampon teeth squeaked on the ice
bed.
After two hours, Kelly paused and pointed up. Through his glacier glasses, Abe saw
pink and green sunrays suddenly flare over the northeast shoulder of Everest. It
turned into a wild jagged corona and he heard the mountain stretch itself. Its joints
creaked underneath his boots as the glacier settled. Snowbeds rustled. A distant green
avalanche sloughed loose, beautiful and deadly.
'No problem,' said Kelly. 'We're still ahead of the warm.' Once the sun hit, the upper
mountain would begin its daily thaw and send rocks and ice and maybe worse rattling
down. Abe was not looking forward to that deadly rain.
They moved off again. A gust of wind brushed across the glacier. Spindrift flowered
up from underfoot and for thirty seconds or so a ground blizzard whistled at knee
level. Because of its curvature, the immense northern bowl spawned dervishes.
Slender ice tornadoes tap-danced here and there. One crawled partway up the wall