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emulate those who had, miming the hard-core giants with their brilliant teeth
and their posturing in the wind.
Abe was finally ready and called to the climbers to take their places
again. Kelly moved panther-soft, her black Lycra rippling like midnight, and
J.J. squeezed some more veins to the surface, and the truck drivers gaped. Abe
focused and was about to trigger the self-timer and jump in line, when
suddenly, without warning, a puff of air 
the softest of breezes  brushed their faces.
Someone groaned. It was a bad news groan and everyone turned to
look at the jagged horizon behind them.
A tiny comma of a white cloud had appeared in the sky. The cloud was nothing
more than a mare's tail  altocirrus at 35,000 feet  and it drifted silkily.
It hung up there like white ink on a cobalt canvas, a beautiful Zen master
stroke.
But the little cloud was a warning and every climber there understood, all
except
Abe, who didn't know this mountain's traits.
'Damn,' J.J. whispered, as if he were just now realizing a mistake.
A moment or two passed. And then the mountain sprang into life. Everest's curt
left edge released a ghostly plume.
'Snow?' Abe asked quietly.
Carlos shook his head. 'Water vapor,' he said. 'The Indian air mass is hot.
And when it hits the cold mountain, zap. Smoke.' He checked his watch,
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synchronizing with the pattern. Abe did the same. It was not quite two,
Beijing time.
'That's not the monsoon, is it?' Abe asked.
'That?' Carlos said. 'That's just Everest. She likes to send up a flag in the
afternoons.
Don't worry, Doc. The monsoon's still three months off. You'll know when it
comes.
That's when we close the works and get the hell out of Dodge.'
Before their eyes, the white plume turned into a long ragged flag reaching
east.
'It's probably one-ten, maybe one-twenty miles per hour up top there,'
J.J. said.
'That's major air, man. Hurricane force.'
The white flag might as well have been black. It signified no quarter,
nullifying the climbers' coltish good humor. Abe took his cue from their
spoiled bravado. He stowed his grin like everyone else. Weather was everything
on an Everest climb. But Abe was handicapped, because they were half the
planet removed from any skies he could reliably read. All the same he
meant to learn the patterns fast.
'That's that,' Stump called out with the enthusiasm of a man heading off for
his own execution. 'Let's knock off then and get on with the show.'
They turned their backs on the Hill. Everyone returned to the trucks.
The convoy moved down off the pass toward the floor of the Rongbuk
Valley, heading due south for Everest. As they wove back and forth
down the steep, miles-long pass, or la, Everest disappeared from view. After
a half-hour, the Pang La flattened out and the road jogged left and right
through canyon walls. Soon the pass vanished behind them, and their entrance
and exit to the outside world was just a memory.
There was a whole other world in here. If Shekar was poor, then the
settlements in the Rongbuk Valley were desperate. Poverty lay
everywhere  in the soil, in the adobe dwellings, in the children's
astonishing nudity beneath the cold wind. Here and there, little clusters
of stone and adobe dwellings popped up like southwestern pueblos.
Some of the buildings were white-washed, some were banded white and
orange. The flat rooftops were ringed with sticks of firewood that must
have been
brought from far away, for there was not a tree in sight. The people didn't
smile from their rock-strewn fields at the passing truckloads of climbers.
They glared, then went on with their tilling. Jorgens seemed not to register
their bleak circumstances. Instead he waved heartily at the brown land. 'When
we leave in June,' he said, 'these fields will be green. The ewes will be
dropping their lambs. This road will be cut by dozens of irrigation ditches.
You'll see. It'll be pretty as a picture.'
There were more ruins  old stone fortresses and monasteries and desolate
villages.
The convoy crossed dry irrigation ditches, then a wide riverbed. In the
summertime, Jorgens promised, it would carry runoff 'as thick and
white as sperm' from the
Rongbuk Glacier at the base of Everest. Now it held only a blue thread of
water. More hours passed and the sun stayed dangling on the southern rim.
Having descended into a valley, they now began to climb out again. The
road turned menacing with deep gullies and big gutting scree. Abe kept
expecting their tires to blow out or the oil pan to get disemboweled. Patches
of ice waited in the shadows and on switchbacks. The truck nearly
high-centered on one rutted patch, then skidded on another. They crept along
at five kilometers per hour. For some reason, Abe had never imagined a truck
engine could still function at 17,000 feet. Theirs did.
The truck rounded a hillock of glacier debris. To the right and left,
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satellite peaks couched a long, perfectly flush moraine. And then, from out of
nowhere, Everest leapt up before them. It seemed close, but that was the
optics of high altitude and it was still miles away. The trucks crept along
toward where the valley floor quit and became mountainside.
'There,' Jorgens pointed for their driver. At the same time Abe saw it too,
a tiny bubble of color. A moment later, the bubble became a green tent and
Abe caught sight of two miniature figures. One figure approached them. As they
closed on him, the man grew larger.
Though his head was bound with a red-checkered kaffiyeh and he looked more
like an Afghani rebel than a climber, and his eyes were covered
with sunglasses, Abe somehow recognized the man. It was Daniel, of course.
He walked with wide, rolling strides, but Abe could see the hitch in his one
leg  that would be the spiral fracture; [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]