before gravity pulled it back down. Then the wind stopped. The snow settled. The
dervishes died. It was still again.
More time passed. Overhead the wall of stone and ice grew enormous, but remained
untouchable. Somewhere at its base lay Camp One. Since Abe had no idea where, time
ceased to matter. They would get there when they got there.
Finally they reached the bergschrund. Here was the start of the technical climbing
and it was announced by the first rope. It was a thick snake of polypropylene, once
white, now gray. Fixed ropes like this one would allow them to carry heavy loads in
safety, giving them a handrail for guidance and support. As the angle grew more
radical, they would be hanging from the ropes. In addition to aiding their ascent, the
ropes were an insurance policy. If – when – the weather turned ugly, the ropes would
allow them to bail out in a hurry, rappeling down the ropes at ten times the speed
they'd gone up them.
Abe didn't recognize the gray rope as any of their stock and he guessed it had been
plundered from somewhere else on the mountain, maybe from the old pile Nima had
uncovered in ABC. Abe wasn't in the habit of using a rope he didn't know. Wind and
ultraviolet rays could age a rope in a matter of weeks, and there was no telling how
long this one had been getting whipped and fried at the roof of the world. But since
Kelly didn't hesitate to clip onto it, Abe didn't either. So much depended on sheer faith
up here.
They attached themselves to the rope with jumars, mechanical jaws that ratcheted
upward, but caught downward. Abe slid his jumar high on the rope, and when he came
to the four-foot-wide slash that was the bergschrund, he stopped beside Kelly. She
was peering into the deep chasm at her boot tips.
'You see it down there?' she said. 'That must be from Daniel's first go at the Hill.'
The huge block of ice they stood upon was calving from the slope, and deep in the
turquoise cleft Abe saw the taut green rope she was talking about. It stretched from
one wall to the other and looked like the final thread holding two naturally opposed
forces together.
'How'd it get so far down?' Abe asked. It had been six years since Daniel's last visit
here, yet the rope seemed centuries deep.
Kelly shrugged and turned her attention uphill. 'Yeti,' she said. The abominable
snowman. Things happened on mountains that couldn't be explained and humans
weren't very good at letting that be. They needed dragons or gremlins. Or yeti.
One at a time they took off their packs and leapt for the far side of the bergschrund.
Abe's Foot Fangs bit into the snow with a jolting halt. They were on the mountain
itself now, behind enemy lines.
The gray rope ended a hundred meters higher in a mass of knots that disappeared
into the snow and ice. Abe knew that somewhere under the surface an aluminum
plate called a deadman was locked in place, anchoring the rope. But to the naked eye,
it looked like the rope had been sucked into a devouring mouth. The mountain was
alive, no doubt about it.
They unclipped from the gray rope and clipped onto the next one, a section of
weathered blue nine-millimeter Perlon. This wasn't Ultimate Summit stock either,
and Abe realized the team was saving its new rope for more severe terrain. The line of
fixed old ropes went on and on like that to the top of the slope, jointed together with
bits and pieces of used nylon. Using the rope as an occasional handline, he slid his
jumar along just ahead of him. The slope steepened. More and more he had to haul
against the rope and kick his feet against snow that had been annealed by the sun and
wind. One short 65-degree required the front points of his crampons.
Kelly was kind, pacing their ascent to Abe's first time at these altitudes. She didn't
remark at his gasping, merely stopping each time he bent over his high knee to rest.
He felt ill and exhilarated at the same time. Part of him revelled in the height and
spectacle. Part of him just wanted to quit moving and lie down for a nap. Try as he
might, the ambivalence – the charged current between misery and magic – wouldn't
switch off. Twice he noticed colorful stains in the snow alongside the ropes, and
realized it was old vomit where others had found it tough going, too.
Camp One lay cupped at the tip of a knife ridge. Three bright yellow tents stood in a
lengthwise string, end to end, and it was the most precarious site Abe had ever seen.
At its widest point, the ridge was only five feet across, scarcely wide enough to hold a
tent. On either side, the ridge plummeted a thousand feet. The outermost tent had
part of its back wall hanging over the edge.
'Not too shabby,' Kelly said, checking her watch. It was only two o'clock – real time,
not Beijing time, they'd given that up upon reaching ABC – but their workday was
done. She was sitting in the doorway of one tent, dangling a foot over the edge.
Far below, the immense northern bowl with its crevasses and snowy expanses had
become a cup full of lines and white spaces. ABC was tiny, just a spray of colored
freckles. If anyone was moving among the tents, they were too small to see. The sun
was wheeling around the northwestern crest, cutting the bowl into dark and light
halves. Even as he watched, the sunlight gave up some of its territory, and the halves
were no longer halves.
Abe bit down on his vertigo and smiled weakly. He'd slept on ledges and in
hammocks on big walls in Yosemite, but never on a ridge jutting this thinly into space.
The placement looked insane, but Abe knew he should appreciate its logic. Very
simply, sitting on this ridge, the camp was out of reach of avalanches and rockfall. In
the long term, his dread of heights always simmered into a healthy fear. It was the
short term that was so rough. He tried reasoning it away.
They had lost the earth. They had thrown it down beneath their feet. Like monks
they were giving up their place in the world and becoming anonymous. Unlike monks,
they were striking pacts with their individual demons, honing a radical arrogance and
rising upon their whims.
Abe forced himself to stare into the abyss. See it, he told himself. Make it yours.
Sometimes that worked for him, incorporating the physical void into the center of his
soul. Today it didn't. He just felt sicker.
Since looking down was a wash, Abe looked up. A line of ropes led into a dark icy
gully and the gully led vertically into the unknown. Tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow, Abe thought. The higher they rose, the deeper the abyss.
He'd always thought that a moment like this – a moment of crystalline reckoning –
would be glorious and Zen-like. His mouth would drop open and his eyes would see a
million miles and he would think, So this is what it is. Instead Abe carefully knelt by
the edge and gripped the rope tight. Positioned just so, he took the liberty of emptying
his stomach a thousand feet into the deep.
Another week passed. Each morning the climbers wrapped themselves in Gore-Tex
and polypropylene armor. They donned their helmets and goggles and glittering
crampons, took up their sharp ice axes, draped ropes like ammunition bandoliers
across their chests. They locked and loaded into their harnesses and onto their ropes
and humped their backpacks with the grim pluck of grunts on patrol, infiltrating the