Too Close to God
Date: 2015-04-18 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mountain Fiction
Description: The selected works of the New York Times best-selling author Jeff Long. One of the best mountain fiction writers of our time, author of The Wall, The Ascent, and Angels of Light among many others, presents his best stories from the last 40 years.
Publisher: Imaginary Mountain Surveyors
Rights: Copyright Jeff Long

Too

Close

To

God

Selected Mountain Tales

Jeff Long

Copyright Jeff Long © 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Before photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright, the Canadian Reprography Collective, before proceeding.

Published by the Imaginary Mountain Surveyors
www.imaginarymountains.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Long, Jeff

Too Close to God / Jeff Long

ISBN 978-0-9918076-5-9

I: Title. II. Title: Too Close to God.

Publisher: Dustin Lynx

Foreword: Katie Ives

Editor: Dustin Lynx

Cover photo: Jeff Long;
see www.longrangephotography.com

Layout and Artwork: Jerry Auld

The characters and events in these stories are works of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Furthermore, the opinions expressed in the forward and comments are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of the publisher.

To Barbara,

The mother of my daughter,

The keeper of my soul

Stories

Through the Skin of the World

The Word is the Mountain

When God throws Angels Down

Revenge

In Gentle Combat with the Cold Wind

The Virgins of Imst

The Ice Climber

The Soloist’s Diary

Abe (The Ascent)

Cannibals

Ike (The Descent)

Too Close to God

Acknowledgments

Through the Skin of the World

Climbing guidebooks begin with an obvious disclaimer that the activity is dangerous—a warning that, when I was young, gave the contents a nearly magical aura, as if the words themselves might transport me to some twilit land at the edge of life and death. Reading, I felt, then and now, is at its best a hazardous activity in which a sentence can unfold into unexpected, fathomless layers of new meaning, until reality no longer appears the same to us, and our vision of our place within it might irrevocably change.

To open the cover of this collection is to enter a realm that is not at all safe (as all locations for true adventure must be) where a reader might wander with doomed men up an infinite fastness of stone or find herself falling to the earth through the blue-shadowed air. A sense of mystery lurks amid wildwoods of blind alleys and spiraling paths, glittering ice walls and high rock faces. Cryptic signs draw us, higher up and deeper in: an ideogram from an unknown language carved into a tree; sounds that hover and vanish like frost crystals, leaving only the memory of distinct, yet unheard melodies; the torn pages of a comic book found on a ledge; the rotting parchment of lost climbers’ journals, dangling from a giant cliff; the song of a dying woman rising from the depths of a crevasse; and the knowledge that at the heart of this vast maze there might be the shimmers of eternity, the reflections of a void or only the answers of death.

Here, all at once around us, mirrors shatter, words disintegrate and maps rip apart—until, climbers or not, we too might realize, waking with a start, “the ritually fatal power of our dreams.”

I first came across the writing of Jeff Long in 2007 when I reviewed his novel The Wall for The American Alpine Journal. From the start, I found myself immersed in landscapes both surreal and recognizable. Like many climbers, I’d experienced those seemingly alchemic moments when the ordinary world appears transmuted by ice, rock, snow, movement, joy and fear into something more luminous, redolent with inchoate promises of transcendence and mystery. I’d thought that climbing might provide a portal to real adventure, a word that, since childhood, had become almost sacred to me.

Similar longings drive the characters of The Wall toward the destruction of themselves and others. Nonetheless, struggling high on El Capitan, haunted by loss and guilt, Long’s protagonist believes that somehow, “if he could finish this thing and get to the top, then the smoke would part, and the floor would lie revealed, and he would surely be able to read his own fate.” It was in this instant that I realized what could become so mesmerizing about Long’s prose. Beyond the workings of elaborate plots, a question lingers that hints at the core of our existence: whether the intricate patterns of events and images conceal mere random disorder—or else some sudden, startling glimpse of truth.

To admit to a love of fictional climbing narratives is to confess membership in a fervent underground society of readers. Those who appreciate the genre might find it strange that any preface to a collection of it must include, sooner or later, a defense. And yet, in the introduction to the comprehensive anthology One Step in the Clouds (1991), editors Audrey Salkeld and Rosie Smith began, as if with a sigh, “There is wide subscription to the idea that most climbing fiction has failed…. Time and again, when putting this book together, we have bumped against the same well-worn attitude.”

Despite their detractors, mountaineering fiction writers have, undeniably, produced a scattering of cult classics. Since 1952, René Daumal’s allegorical fragment Mount Analogue has defined the purpose of ascent for its devoted readers: “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above…. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up.” Thirty-seven years later, the narrator of M. John Harrison’s novel The Climbers questioned that enlightenment amid haunting images of ragged cities and dusky crags: “I realised I didn’t know any more than I had the last time I sat there. I didn’t know anything about anything.” In 1979 James Salter, one of the greatest living prose stylists, distilled the lives of 1960s alpinists into the spare, existential strivings of Solo Faces. With his 1980 novella, “Like Water and Like Wind,” David Roberts imagined the inner turmoil of a mountaineer who fabricates a tale of a successful ascent after a partner dies; in the process, Roberts provided some of the clearest insights into the unknown emotional conflicts behind real hoaxes. And in a 1970s fable, Bernard Amy took the concept of climbing as a spiritual pursuit to its logical end, depicting a man who tries to become “The Greatest Climber in the World,” only to learn after a long quest that “the ultimate stage of the spoken word is silence. The ultimate stage of climbing is not to climb.”

Among the various complaints made about the genre, Salkeld and Smith list perhaps the most common argument, summed up in Claire Eliane Engel’s A History of Mountaineering in the Alps (1950), “One of the elements which tend to paralyze the novelist who treats of mountain adventures is the fact that real stories—the stories of great climbs or mountain tragedies—are so perfect in all their details that it is difficult to imagine more effective or better planned episodes.” Here, Salkeld and Smith pause, “She had unconsciously put her finger on the major source of resistance: climbing is considered by its adherents to be somehow too sacred to fictionalize. Its vivid real-life dramas and intense loyalties, its acts of heroism and the all-too-frequent encounters with violent death are too precious, too poignant, too much part of some private lore and myth to become the raw material of fiction.”

Perhaps they are right: if mountain fiction appears oddly threatening to many climbing readers, it may be because it is inherently subversive. The best works question precisely what numerous mountaineers consider to be “sacred,” daring to tear down the immense architecture of myth that underpins much of our history, to turn it inside out, to reveal glimpses of its hidden scaffolding, to show how we project our inmost fears and desires across the glassy surfaces of icefields and granite walls.

Yet when pundits dismiss the possibility that a great alpine tale could be anything other than a straightforward report, they forget that “nonfiction” is never really straightforward. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, particularly at high altitudes. Fiction examines, at times with more integrity, all that gets shorn away in most trip reports and films: the secret thoughts that climbers don’t share for risk of offending sponsors or friends; the murky realities behind heroic narratives, the missing pieces of history; the varying perspectives that different team members have of the same ascent, the extent to which they find each other’s versions unrecognizable. In Alpinist 21, Slovenian climber Marko Prezelj insisted on referring to a summary of his own expeditions as “based on a true story.” Since “the essence of a climb burns out in the moment of experience,” he argued, even the most well-intentioned writers have only “the vague residue of memory and the cinders of words,” from which to improvise a tale.

“You could say that the absence of fictional writing from the literature of mountaineering is remarkable,” literature professor Stephen Slemon notes, “since mountaineering ‘non-fiction’ is constructed in very similar ways to the novel (centrality of the individual protagonist; the deployment of round and flat characters; the build to the climax; the turn to the metaphysical…). A radical critical position might start from the assumption that it’s all fiction in a structural sense—and that when people mistakenly call mountain books ‘novels,’ as they seem always to do, they are actually, curiously, being right.” By accepting fiction as a valid genre of mountaineering stories, we open a portal for tales that might, in fact, alter our fundamental understanding, not only of the pursuit, but also of ourselves.

Much of mountaineering is an act of imagination. Even backyard peaks and crags offer us the chance to become a character in a novella of our own creation, following the natural narrative arc that sweeps from base to summit and back again. In cultures around the world, mountains symbolize bridges between the earth and the heavens, the abyss and the heights, the worldly and the otherworldly. Elements of fiction and myth alter our perceptions of real landscapes, shaping the metaphors we layer upon peaks, weighting them with individual and collective dreams, thick as drifting snows.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the growth of modern fantasy and that of climbing literature both represented a response, in some ways, to the surge of industrialization and the decline of mystery, wildness and faith. The philosopher Tzvetan Todorov famously defined the “fantastic” as a genre of uncertainty, an intrusion of possible enchantment into a rational world: “The ambiguity is sustained to the very end of the adventure: Reality or dream? Truth or illusion?” Likewise, as the historian Michael Reidy points out in Alpinist 39, Victorian climber Leslie Stephen envisioned alpinism as a paradoxical form of “secular mysticism,” a solace for agnosticism, evoking moments of communion on snow-lit summits. More than a hundred years after Stephen’s quests, the theologian Belden C. Lane concluded that, for some climbers, high-altitude experiences fracture the usual conventions by which we measure the world. “[D]esert and mountain terrain provokes the identification and reordering of boundaries,” Lane explained in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (2007). “It confronts people with their edges…. ‘We need to witness our own limits transgressed,’ wrote Henry David Thoreau…. In stretching the self to its edges, the geography helps in forcing a breakthrough to something beyond all previously conceived limits of being.”

Jeff Long’s characters occupy this space of ambiguity and transgression, confronted by sublime and menacing visions that might be altitude-induced hallucinations, reflections of their own unconscious, metaphors of colonialism, or incursions of otherworldly forces. Ornate enigmas appear to invite interpretations, but yield only fragmentary and elusive clues, emblems of hope or horror, significance or meaninglessness, revelation or delusion. Although the stories were originally published separately, they blend together readily as a single work. The same leitmotivs emerge from tale to tale as if echoing each other: themes of hubris and retribution; of expeditions that fall apart; of desires that mirror the less-seemly sides of the Western imagination; of would-be conquistadors who find themselves conquered. “Birds and angels may disown the darkness they cast far below,” muses one climber at the base of El Capitan, as the light fades from the day and he realizes how close he came to attacking an innocent man. “But this one dark shadow is my own.” A second climber, in a different story, seems to offer a reply: “By climbing an infinite height, we have created an infinite depth….”

Amid shadows of ghosts and monsters, we begin to imagine the pieces of what forgotten things might rise up in our own minds and lives, the bones and dust behind the shimmering visions of alpine purity, the violent histories beneath symbols of dominion, worlds fallen into chaos where redemption becomes even more uncertain than survival.

The decades between the 1970s and 1990s, when these stories first appeared, proved a high point of climbing fiction in the English language. Back then, an array of mountain magazines featured creative short stories in their pages, nurturing the development of writers like Jeff Long. Some of those magazines have since folded. Today, only a few publications still print climbing fiction. This shift away from the unruly, the experimental and the artistic is not restricted to the alpine community. Obsessed with profitable data and technological information, many are apt to forget, as Azar Nafasi writes in The Republic of Imagination (2014), that “imaginative knowledge is one of the most potent ways of understanding and communicating with the world.”

At the same time, the recent publications of Tanis Rideout’s Mallory novel Above All Things (2012), Jerry Auld’s story collection Short Peaks (2013) and David Stevenson’s award-winning Letters from Chamonix (2014), among other examples, indicate that talented mountain writers are continuing to test the unique possibilities of fiction. Perhaps this new anthology may inspire more. For we need a greater influx of such tales—cures for the creeping traces of banality and conformity in outdoor journalism, the steady encroachments of native advertising, the reenacted-for-camera ascents and the made-for-media expeditions, the replacement of storytelling with PR-driven content stripped of real context and devoid of unsettling questions.

The mistake we frequently make is in viewing adventure stories as pure escapism. At their best, they are not a flight from reality, but a struggle toward some fleeting vision of the world that is starker—and often more honest—than the larger-than-life deeds and action-figure heroes of many expedition narratives. Fiction, with its strangely radical and marginalized status, may be best positioned, these days, to recall the real significance of the unknown, the value of solitary immersion, the limits of mere information. In a sense, Long’s prose may be more meaningful to current readers than when it was first published.

The spread of horror, science fiction and fantasy in other forms of literary fiction might well reflect just how much apocalyptic and dystopian visions increasingly symbolize their audiences’ own anxieties. We live in an era defined by words such as disruption, meltdown, disaster and precariousness; when, as Alastair Bonnett writes in Unruly Places (2014) an “atavistic” longing for lost wild places and extinct creatures may make us more ready to identify with “dark fantasies of nature’s revenge.” In a widely read 2013 New York Times editorial, Roy Scranton argues that the possibility of catastrophic climate change gives new urgency to a central philosophical problem: “[T]he question of individual mortality—‘What does my life mean in the face of death?’—is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination…. What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization?”

It is in the effort to answer such questions that we realize what only fiction offers: the ability to cross the threshold entirely into the dark and still return with a story, to report firsthand from the aftermath of an apocalypse. Long’s stories excel in capturing the final instants of dying and transfiguration. “In the labyrinth of death, as in the beat of a heart, there is nameless repetition,” a narrator explains. Another speaks of that persistent, ineluctable hope “to have mattered, one mute perception spanning the ages.” Perhaps, cast into the wreckage of all we know, we too might gaze up, as one character does, at scorched and shattered granite walls and see both horror and strange beauty, wondering “what the stars had thrust down from the vacuous sky.” We too might try to gather up our whole being in the seconds before plummeting through “the skin of the world.” Or we might keep striving beyond hope, wishing to complete something more before the fall of night.

Throughout the decades, amid the handful of critical articles on climbing fiction, another, more hopeful theme appears, futuristic and utopian: the idea of some as-yet-unwritten novel that would transform literature altogether. In the 1942 American Alpine Journal, E. Cushing and J.M. Thorington wrote, “We shall wait for it, in all probability, many a year, and in the meantime be obliged to content ourselves with lurid tales of crime on the heights.” Thirty-seven years later, George Pokorny echoed their words in Climbing Magazine, “The great peaks continue to succumb on all sides to the efforts of expert climbers using advanced techniques to assist them. It remains to be seen if a great mountaineering story will be created using a new and imaginative writing approach.”

What follows, in fact, is an attempt at just that: a collection of something more than mere climbing fiction, an attempt at a kind of total literature, a work of art that might begin to chart the invisible geographies of our deepest apprehensions and yearnings, piecing together torn scraps and fragments from American Westerns, modern fables and medieval allegories, refractions of biblical stories, Greek tragedies and Shakespeare—and between the gaps—the shadows and silences of the unseeable and the unspeakable, the suppressed and the erased. Jeff Long lists the writings of Jorge Luis Borges among his influences; gathered together here in one volume, these burnished, interlacing tales recall the Argentinean author’s short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which the pages of a novel serve as an infinite labyrinth. Long intended his own prose, he tells us, as a guide to future writers, a warning of the risks of dedicating oneself to an esoteric genre and of the potential that might yet be attained, a map of the borderlands of a still-unimagined, luminous and flawless work that one of you—readers—may now create.

Katie Ives, Editor-in-Chief, Alpinist

February 2015

The Word is the Mountain

The word is the mountain. Ascent is a physical act, of course, but not before it is an idea built from other ideas, like mountain and summit. We climb upon our language.

Take the Eiger. Without the history, legends, routes, topos, ratings, weather, height in meters or feet, personalities, obituaries, movies, and emotions that the word summons, no one would bother looking at it twice, much less risking their lives on it. Likewise, when we climb on Everest, we climb on a beekeeper’s hopes, and before that on a surveyor’s numbers, and before that on the hips of a goddess.

That is climbing fiction’s domain.

Without mountain literature, there is no climbing as we know it, for its own profound and useless sake. Our collective memory - our campfire stories, magazine articles, accident reports, guidebooks, poems, gear reviews, and books – binds the mystery that binds us. The mountain writer’s job is to put words to that mystery so climbers can cut the writer from their rope and know the mystery without words. Because silence is the mountain.

The mountain man Jim Bridger told of a glass mountain so transparent you could see elk, perfectly magnified, on the far side. Bernard Amy’s masterpiece, The Greatest Climber in the World, describes a boulderer whose greatest climb is the one he leaves unclimbed. A Tibetan saying: When you reach the summit, keep climbing.

With every fist jam and smeared toe, climbers pry at the stone for a glimpse inside at the wilderness as it is, not as words tell us how to see it. Monks meditate in search of the true reality. Climbers cut to the chase and climb to it.

Mountain literature ranks second to sea literature. Why second? Fiction, or its dearth. It is the great fictions of the sea—the Moby Dick’s and Lord Jim’s—that lifted sea literature into the mainstream. Over the decades, I have added my imaginary twigs and cut logs to our campfire, and sometimes pilfered a bit of flame to illuminate the mainstream. Once upon a time I hoped, in vain, to be the Melville or Conrad who would elevate mountain literature to prominence. Other climbing writers have (start with Jon Krakauer, include Joe Simpson, return to Jon, one of the best and most restless writers alive.) It will be enough if my efforts might serve as ink in some young writer’s pen.

My introductions are snapshots of events, but also windows on the writing life intended for young writers. When I started out, there were no mentors, how-to’s, workshops, or webinars to help speed my plow or protect me. The one thing I did have, no matter how far I roamed from the mountains, was the tribe you now belong to. Climb high, plumb the depths, read everything, and write as if mountains will fall and the sun go dark without your words. Fill the silence we seek, even as you guide us to it.

Jeff Long

February 2015

When God throws Angels Down

“She starts to inhabit her fall.”

Author Note

Find a high place, which is to say an abyss.

Move close. Edge your toes over the brink. Be very careful. Use a rope if you like. Take it slow, no falling allowed, that’s important. This is about risk, not an accidental spill.

Find your balance. Get comfortable with the depths. Only then, untie from the rope.

Now close your eyes.

Now open them.

Now jump.

And grow your wings. We all have wings.

Have faith.

Rise up.

The sunlight is waiting.

That is the act of fiction writing. It is at least the way I start writing every novel, especially a mountain novel, in free fall, committed body and soul, and with eyes wide open.

The Wall begins with a fall. For over a year, its working title was The Fall. That changed immediately with the publication of Simon Mawer’s masterpiece, The Fall.

In his novel Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams wrote a famously long passage about slaughtering a herd of buffalo. Like him I wanted to enter a physical event and sustain it for as long as possible through the inner life of a character. With The Wall that included the end of a character’s life.

Also, finally, it seemed time to confront this nonsense about fiction having no place in mountain literature. Only a fiction would allow us to ride inside a climber searching for hope and finding love as she plunges 3,000-feet to her final moment. More to the point, no matter how well it is written, non-fiction with its true high adventures and real life epics is born chained to reality. That straps it to a fundamental contradiction. Because the thing is, defying reality—breaking chains, transcending borders, trespassing without visas, imagining the unknown, inventing maps, ascending into hearts of darkness, and, even if only for an instant, regaining Eden—is exactly why we climb. And that is fiction’s province.

- JEFF LONG

When God Throws Angels Down

When God throws angels down, it starts like this.

A breeze stirs. It carries the slightest distraction, a scent of trees perhaps, or a hint of evening chill, or a song on a radio in a car passing three thousand feet below. In some form, temptation always whispers.

High above the earth, toes smeared against the stone, fingers crimped on microholds, the woman turns her head. Not even that: she turns her mind, for an instant, for even less. That’s all it takes.

The stone evicts her.

The wall tilts. The sky bends. Her holds don’t hold.

She falls.

By now, eight days high, her body is burning adrenaline like common blood sugar, one more fuel in her system. So in the beginning of her fall, she doesn’t even register fear. She is calm, even curious.

Every climber knows this rupture. One moment you have contact, the next it’s outer space. That’s what rope is for. She waits.

Her mind catches up with her body. A first thought forms, a natural. My hands.

All our lives, from the cradle to the grave, our hands are our most constant companions. Like the back of my hand. They give. They take. They roam and shape the world around us. But hers have turned to stone. Or time has stopped.

Each finger is frozen just so, still hooking on holds that no longer exist. Her high arm is still stretched high, her low arm still bent low. One leg is cocked, the other is straight to the tiptoe of her climbing slipper. She could be a statue of a dancer tipped from its pedestal.

Her paralysis does not alarm her. Hollywood shows victims swimming through air, limbs splayed and paddling. In reality, when a climber is climbing—really climbing, not fretting the fall, but totally engaged—and the holds blow and you peel, what happens is like a motor locking. “Rigor” is the formal term, as in rigor mortis. Your muscles stiffen. Body memory freezes, at least for a moment. It doesn’t matter what your mind knows. Your body stubbornly believes it is still attached to the world.

What surprises her is the length of the moment. Time stretches like a rubber band. The moment is more than a moment. More than two. Patience, she tells herself.

There will be a tug at her waist when the rope takes over. Then there will be an elastic aftershock. She knows how it will go. She’s no virgin.

Her synapses are firing furiously now. She overrides her Zen focus on what civilians call pulling up, and what climbers call pulling down. The rock has let go of her. Now she forces her body to let go of the rock. Her fingers move. She starts to inhabit her fall.

For the last day, they have been struggling to break through a transition band between two species of granite, one light, one dark. In this borderland, the rock is manky and loose. Their protection has been increasingly tenuous and their holds delicate as sand castles.

And so she was—necessarily—way too high above her last piece of protection, climbing on crystals of quartz, almost within reach of a big crack. She had the summit in sight. Maybe that was her downfall. It was right there for the taking, and maybe she grabbed for the vision too soon.

From the ground up, the beast has begrudged them every inch. They have done everything in their power to pretend it was a contest, not a war, nothing personal. Now suddenly it bears in on her, the territorial imperative of a piece of rock. El Cap is fighting back.

Part of her brain tries to catalog the risks of this fall. Much depends on the nature of the rope, the weight of the falling object, all 108 pounds of her, and the length of the drop. Any point in the system could fail, the runner slings, the carabiners, her placements, their anchor, the rope. The weakest link in that chain of mechanisms is the human body.

On her back now, helpless, she glances past her fingers. The rope is making loose, pink snake shapes in the air above her. She’s riding big air now.

A dark shape flashes past. It is last night’s bivvy camp, gone in a blink of the eye. Do they even know I’m falling? At this speed, the camp is the last of her landmarks. The wall is a blur. Her braids with the rainbow beads whip her eyes.

Except for the grinding of her teeth, she falls in silence. No chatter of gear. No whistle of wind. Oh, there’s a whiff of music, a spark in the brain. Bruce, the Boss. “Philadelphia.” Faithless kiss.

She’s fallen many times. At her level of the game, no climber has not given in to gravity. You build it into the budget. It comes to her that she’s counting heartbeats, six, seven, eight....

Her free fall starts to ease. Finally.

The serpent loops straighten. A line—hot pink—begins to form in the dead center of her sky. The seat harness squeezes around her pelvic bones.

Abruptly the line snaps taut with a bowstring twang.

The rope claims her. She gains weight, a carload of it, a solid ton of shock load.

The catch—or its commencement—is brute ugly. Her arms and legs jack down like puppet jumble. Her spine creaks. Head back, medusa coils flying, throat bared to the summit, she comes eye to eye with the abyss behind and below her.

It’s totally still in the valley. Autumn is in high gear. The leaves are blazing red and orange. But there’s hunger in the beauty. Pandemonium. You could get swallowed alive down there. She jerks her head from the hypnotic sight. She tunes it out. Turns it off.

The rope. She grabs for it.

The summit. She centers herself.

Eyes up, she takes a breath, her first since coming off, a deep, ragged drag of air. Like breaking to the surface again, she gasps.

Her fists lock on the rope. Sunshine is painting the rim. She curses, full of fighting spirit. They were so close, just hours shy. The fall will cost them.

She blames herself for rushing. They were banking on making land by night. They had gorged on all but the last gallon of their water, and eaten all but some scraps. They’d even high-fived their victory. Dumb. Jinxy. The wall moves with a tempo all its own. Full of wishes, too ready for flat land, she’d pushed too fast.

She yo-yos on the rope.

The recoil dangles her up and down in the depths. Eleven-millimeter kernmantle is built for shock. A fifty-meter section—the standard for climbing—has a break strength of five thousand pounds. Cavers shun “dynamic” climbing rope: it’s too bouncy for them in dark, bottomless shafts. But for a climber, elasticity is the very hand of the lord and savior.

Her mind brims with next thoughts. She doesn’t offer thanks. Fate is action, that’s her mantra.

The rope’s still quivering, and already she’s doing damage control. The fall could have been bad. She could have hit the wall or blown her harness. The line could have tangled in a limb or wrapped in a noose and snapped her neck. If not for years of yoga practiced everywhere, in gyms, dorm rooms, friends’ apartments, and campgrounds, her vertebrae would be scrambled eggs. But she’s whole, unwounded, not even a rope burn. The soreness will come, but not, by God, before she gets back on the horse.

Twisting in midair, she gathers herself together. The woods are darkening below. The sun band is creeping higher up the headwall, ebbing away. No way they’ll beat night today.

Knowing it will never work, she tries pulling herself up the taut, thin line and gains not an inch. It’s too thin, too taut, like a wire. She quits to save her strength. She settles into her harness, waiting. She needs a pair of jumar clamps and stirrups so that she can ascend the rope. One of her partners will lower the necessary gear, they’ll know.

She is impatient to return to the headwall above their hollow and finish what she started. It’s more than stubbornness, more than getting back in the saddle. She’s raving on endorphins, wild with energy. Her memory of the moves is crisp. She knows the holds. She’s cracked the code.

Come on, girls. “Yoo-hoo,” she calls. And waits. As the moments go by, she rehearses the sequence of moves: left toe here, pinch the white quartz crystal, reach right, stack her fingers on a seam hidden in a splash of sunlight.

In her mind, she makes it all the way to the big crack running straight to the skyline. The crack was so close, just a move away, and then she would have owned the stone. Now she’s forfeited the day. They’ll have to wait until tomorrow night for their seafood and wine at the Mountain Room Restaurant.

At last a voice seeps down from their camp in the vertical hollow. It is a single syllable, her name. But also it is a warning. Pain, she hears, and desperation.

Something is wrong up there. Her fall has wreaked some kind of havoc in the camp, there can be no other explanation. Clutching the rope, still as a fawn, she peers up in time to see the pink sheath blow.

For all its strength, a rope is a fragile thing. A grain of sand inside the sheath, a spot of acidic urine, even the rays of sunlight can destroy the core’s integrity. In this case, the rope fails at the threshold of their sanctuary. The hollow’s rim is not a knife edge, but it’s an edge just the same.

Fifty feet overhead, right where it bends from sight, the rope bursts into flower. It happens in a small, white explosion of nylon fibers. It looks like a magician’s trick, like a bouquet springing from a wand. Chrysanthemums, how pretty. But she knows the truth of it.

Quick as a bird, she steals a sip of air. Faith. She grips the rope with all her might and wills the world to freeze, the rope to weave itself together, her body to be light as a feather. Abruptly she is weightless.

It breaks her heart. She whispers, “No.”

It was not supposed to end this way. You climb hard, get high, tango with the sun. When you fall, you fall with grace and the rope takes over. You heal, if necessary, and reach into your heart. Chalk up, tighten the knots, and get on with the climb. That’s the way of it. Ascent abides. Always.

The physics of the breaking rope flips her sideways, and then facedown. Like that she goes, chest first into a hurricane of her own making.

She could close her eyes. She wants to. But of course she can’t. This is the rest of her life.

The air cools instantly. The light changes. It goes from that golden honey to starved blue steeples. She has dropped into the shadow zone. Already?

This is a different kind of falling. This one is full of forbidden thoughts. She has never not known hope. That’s the greatest shock. She is staring at the end of time. There is not one thing she can do to improve her situation. And yet she hopes. She can’t help herself.

Her mind goes on grasping. Command, of a sort, comes second nature to her breed. Even as she plunges, she calculates madly. In the back of her mind, Like a cat, land like a cat. On your hands and feet. Light as a cat.

Climbers have a natural fascination with falling. Its discussion, usually held by a campfire or on long road trips, draws heavily on legend, anecdote, and personal experience, and includes falls one has survived and falls one has witnessed and even falls one has merely dreamed about but forgotten they were dreams. You learn from the fuckups. The accident reports almost always come with names, if not of the victims, then most certainly of their routes, and dates, and the type of gear and precise condition of the rock, ice, or snow involved. Often they list the temperature. Anything to make the unknown seem known.

For many climbers, “terminal velocity” refers to a death drop, sometimes known as “cratering.” In fact, the term specifies that point when a falling object reaches zero acceleration. Air resistance from below becomes equal to the mass of the object times the force of gravity. You don’t slow down, but for what it’s worth, you quit falling any faster.

All of this occurs to her in an instant. A million synapses are firing now. Images, words, forgotten smells, and emotions all spring loose in a flood. She remembers sparks from a campfire, the exact scent of cedar smoke, that taste of his lips, his finger. Butterflies, the seashore, Mom, a singsong alphabet. More and more.

The terminal velocity of a human averages 120 miles per hour, or roughly 165 feet—the length of a fifty-meter rope—per second. But it takes time to reach that state of zero acceleration.

In her first second, she falls just sixteen feet. By the end of her third second, she has covered 148 feet; by the end of the sixth second, some 500 feet. That leaves roughly a half mile to go, and she is just reaching terminal velocity. What it comes down to is this. She has eighteen more seconds to live.

The wind robs her lungs. It just sucks her empty. It makes her deaf, that or the blood roaring in her head.

She commands herself to see. She keeps her eyes bared. This is for keeps.

The ground does not rush up at her. If anything, it opens wide, growing deeper and broader. She is a pebble tossed into still water, except the ripples precede her in great concentric expanses of earth.

Swallows make way for her.

The forest becomes trees.

Out beyond the road, the river runs black through the white autumn meadow.

Such beauty. It fills her. It’s like seeing for the first time.

She knows the blood chemicals must be taking her away. How else to explain this sense of being chosen? Of being received. Of being freed. She’s never felt such rapture. It’s glorious. I’m going right through the skin of the world.

And yet she fights paradise. The glory is too glorious, the abyss too welcoming. It means to kill her. That quickly she despairs.

If only she could catch her breath. There is no in between. Fear, ecstasy, anguish: each extreme, all amok. Death. She keeps that word at bay. She tries.

And yet here is the sum total of every climb and every ambition and every desire she’s ever felt. Stack them end to end and they reach to the moon, and for what? It strikes her. She has wrecked her life. Her barren life. A fool’s trade. All for nothing.

It is then that she spies her savior.

The trees part and there he is, a tiny, lone figure moving along the valley floor. He is approaching EI Cap. But also, impossibly, and yet absolutely, he is making a beeline for her.

Everything changes. Her fear dissipates. Her wolves lie still. A great calm pacifies the storm.

I’m not alone.

It’s so simple. Whoever he is, he’s coming for her. Nothing else explains it. Random chance does not exist for a woman with no chances left.

From high above, settling through the air, she watches him labor between the trees, bent beneath his loaded pack. He’s a climber, plainly, and well off the main trail. In forging his own path, he is marrying hers. It’s deliberate. It’s destined. There is not the slightest doubt in her mind. Whoever he is, he’s traveled the earth and followed his dreams and timed his days exactly to receive her.

If only he would lift his head. She wants his face. His eyes.

Above the trees, she opens her arms. She arranges herself like some beatific creature. The air sings through her fingers. The feathers of her wings.

And still he is unaware of her. She wants him to look up and see her. She wants him to open his arms and embrace her. With all the love in her, she loves this man. Every memory she contains, all her being, lies in his hands now.

Her heart swells, her giant heart. Oh, she loves this life. There was so much more to do. Even one more sunset. And children, God.

She pierces the forest, thinking, Forgive me.

Revenge

“Time itself had been revealed as a predator. My youth seemed to have been devoured.”

Author Note

A quarter of a century ago, Rock and Ice magazine published “Revenge” as nonfiction, because that’s what I thought it was. Except for changed names, it’s all true. Events occurred the way they are written, with the same weather, the same ledges on the same route, and the same terrible conspiracy to get our pound of flesh. But I’ve changed my mind. It’s fiction, at least for me.

Nothing got less real. I don’t want a redo. The facts stand. I was so sure that assembling the facts and writing it carefully would bring me peace. But it reads differently than when I wrote it. Now I can see on the page the darkness in the eyes in my mirror: one afternoon a quarter of a century ago, bathed in sunshine, I fell from grace. It took a second read in recent weeks to grasp the unpleasant fact that my belayer bailed or cut the rope, or else that it’s a very long rope and getting longer. All these years later it’s suddenly plain that the nonfiction still hasn’t caught me. That’s because it can’t. It would be unnatural. It lacks the imagination.

I’m encouraged. My hope no longer lies in fact alone, but among the invisible mountains and subterranean rivers deep inside my heart. Somewhere in there, I planted the seeds of amnesty. This is going to take some exploring. It’s not just a matter of renaming an apple, an orange. Reading it as fiction when I finally became ready to see it as more than nonfiction is exactly how I must have written it.

But that’s just me. If this works better for you as nonfiction, that’s fine because it is all as true as the day it happened.

Revenge

That first time, I came to the Valley alone and at midnight on the cusp of winter. I was bent on storming El Cap, a teenage conquistador in search of pagan wilderness. My climbing career had begun scarcely three months earlier on a chalk-marked boulder. But my partner Joseph had declared the summit entirely attainable. I trusted in our combined imagination.

In my pack lay four coiled ropes, and in the belly of their coils, forty pounds of begged and borrowed pitons and steel carabiners. Because I didn’t know Yosemite and because it was Christmas break and because I was stuffed with myth, a pair of red plastic snowshoes projected above the pack like a weak punchline. There were, of course, no deep drifts to breach. There was no snow to battle, no march to make, not so much as a hike to reach my destination. My thousand mile hitchhike from Boulder ended quietly at a Conoco gas station, the Camp 4 landmark.

Mine was that classic entrance—in pitch darkness, no moon, no stars, even—and I woke cold in the dirt to the Dream. Every pilgrim remembers it forever, that first view, that chalice of granite and sunbeams. I lay there, paralyzed by so much beauty rearing so high above the giant trees.

It seemed in all that light there could be no room for darkness.

Of course I would think that. I was eighteen. Tall, with a sun bleached mane long enough to pass for a Berkeley radical but with eyes much too innocent, I believed in everything back then. Spirits in trees. Infinite rock. Byron’s edict—to light the sky like a comet, then take the snuff in full glory. I’d already vowed an early death. Joseph had made a similar vow. Before 30 there would be nothing left of us but echoes and Taoist poetry. Need I say we were students? Yes, college sophomores. We shared authors—Mishima, Kazantzakis, Borges—like hits of opium pitch.

Joseph arrived two days later with his girlfriend. He was a year older than I, she a year younger. He was nearly my height, with longer hair than mine, hand scars, and an infectious pantheism. He had once freed a panther from the San Diego zoo, he said. I didn’t believe him. His girlfriend did.

The three of us set camp at the base of El Cap, beneath an overhang under what later became the Pacific Ocean Wall. It was cold and we kept a fire going. Our woodsmoke married the clouds at our feet. Until midmorning when the sun melted off the mist, we got to pretend Eden belonged to us. There was nothing to see but the ocean of fog and the islands of stone. We were happily marooned.

This was in the days before boom boxes and satellite dishes, before there were lightbulbs in the john at Camp 4 (when it was still called Camp 4) before those daylong revolutions of tour buses with amplified voices. There wasn’t even transistor radio reception, so the Valley was absolutely silent. You could think.

I made notes for a novel. Joseph prowled the forest. His girlfriend sang and painted watercolors. Every now and then sheets of ice loosened on the summit rim and the scree beds got strafed with glass rainbows.

On the fourth day we picked a line to the left of the Nose. The crack in the white granite leaked into heaven. Joseph said it was the Salathé and that ours would be its first winter ascent.

On the fifth morning, Joseph took me to one side. “I don’t think we should climb today.”

This was the third morning he had said it. I had yet to reply. Today I did. “We have to start the route,” I said. “We should have begun days ago. We could be partway there already.”

Joseph was adamant. He had the authority of more climbing and of “knowing” Yosemite. “This weather,” he said offhandedly. And besides, he added, his girlfriend needed more time with him. Surely I understood.

I didn’t argue, but my hunger was stark. As a sop, Joseph spent an hour showing me how to self-belay on aid. He wished me well. I started off alone.

It was a wild and woolly day. Bits of ice bombed down from the sunlit girdle on top. A gust of freezing updraft blew my own piss into my face. I placed the cold pins with aching fingers and drove them like ten-penny nails. The ropes whipped around at my feet with the agitation of foxes. I fell in love.

At the end of many, many hours, it seemed like I had risen halfway to the summit. The trees had grown small between my feet. The sun had wheeled around the Nose and turned the blue rock gold. In fact, I’d ascended barely 300 feet.

Near dusk I clipped my heavy racks of gear to the high point and rapped down. A hot meal was waiting for me in camp. Joseph’s girlfriend fussed over my barked knuckles. She was awestruck by my soloing. So was I, now that my feet were back on the ground.

To my relief, Joseph now declared himself inspired. He confessed that the cold rock and hot love had started to erode his will to climb. But watching me battle partway to the sun, he had regained his desire. Furthermore, he’d talked to two other climbers hiking up the base that day, and they had all agreed the route could conceivably go in winter.

It was settled then. First thing in the morning, Joseph and I would jug the fixed lines and leave the earth. His girlfriend would wait for us in Camp 4. We figured it would take five or six days to finish. We were so excited that Christmas Eve passed completely forgotten.

Long before dawn we were up and bustling. We wanted to get a jump on the short day and hit the ledges before nightfall. Verglas coated the scree—it was very cold. By headlamp, we packed our haulbag, cinching it tight. Joseph’s girlfriend stayed in her sleeping bag as he kissed her goodbye. We headed off to our destiny, lugging the fat haulbag between us.

We promptly got lost in that inky darkness, or so it seemed. Slipping and struggling up the scree slope, we swept our lights back and forth across the rock for our fixed green rope. Finally, breathless, we accepted that we’d bypassed the rope.

We turned around and started down, hunting among the multitude of crack systems for our genesis. We descended all the way to the Nose start without finding the rope. This was not auspicious. Mystified, we parked the haulbag and slowly clambered upslope again.

Not until dawn were we able to pinpoint the Salathé crack with complete certainty. All we could figure was that the wind had somehow deposited our rope out of sight. We backed into the trees, scanning the wall for it. There was the anchor... but no rope.

Our first reaction was relief and, for my own part, embarrassment. One of us could have been climbing on that rope when the anchor knots unraveled. I muttered something about getting my knots right the next time around.

But even as I made my apologies, Joseph erupted with curses. For above the anchor, our next rope was gone, and above that the final rope, too. At the highest point, where I had left all the hardware and our fourth rope, the rock was bare.

The truth crashed upon us like a wild animal.

We had been ripped off.

We stood there flatfooted. Our wings had been torn away, our odyssey squashed. There would be no ascent. There would be no trying. There would be no failing. This was something different than failure. I had journeyed to the furthest edge of my imagination, and someone had trespassed to shit on the Dream. For the first time in my life, I felt dirty.

Not one single piton had belonged to me, not one inch of rope. It was bad enough that I would have to get a job in order to replace what we’d borrowed. Worse by far, Joseph identified our thieves as the two climbers he’d spoken with yesterday.

It was clear. In nearly a week, they were the only other climbers we’d encountered in the entire abandoned park, and obviously only climbers could have accomplished the theft. They alone knew of our plans. They had waited for me to rappel down for the night and then cleaned us out.

As we rampaged through the woods following boot prints in the frost, we found two carabiners wrapped with our red duct tape. At the roadside, the footprints vanished. “I never knew their names,” Joseph said, “but I will never forget their faces.”

Innocence is not something lost or given away. It is something taken. And you don’t understand what it is until it’s gone. What hurt the most was that the myth had betrayed me. The fraternity of ascent was nothing, after all.

Fifteen years passed. I traveled. I climbed. I loved. I lost. I loved again. Business brought me to California, and I pressed a rendezvous with Joseph, who was now in the film industry. Despite our separate vows to exit before the age of 30, we were both still alive and kicking.

We met at the base of El Cap for a day climb. Inevitably, for old time’s sake, we selected the Salathé crack. While we shook out the rope, we paddled through a few memories of the camp beneath Pacific Ocean.

Nearly summer, the Valley was jammed, the sun hot. To my eye, Joseph had changed very little, while I had changed entirely. The feeling was highlighted by this vast tombstone to my innocence.

Over the years, I had learned that life is filled with insult and outrage and deception. I had lost climbing partners to big mountains on the far side of the world. I knew women who had been raped and beaten, who, with their children, had been abandoned. On a lesser scale, I had spent months in Kathmandu jails for a fellow climber’s smuggling and duplicity. Thieves—climbers—had twice more stolen gear from me in Yosemite. As a writer, I had seen my stories and articles plagiarized. Men in cars had spit on me and a bottle had been heaved at my bicycle spokes.

But even without those incidents—without the death and injustice and betrayals and ugliness—time itself had been revealed as a predator. My youth seemed to have been devoured. I had crow’s feet now. My hair had thinned. My knees crackled and ached. And I no longer believed in the infinity of granite and sunbeams. There had been a time when my creativity knew no boundaries. Now it did.

It was a strangely bitter arithmetic that I applied to my past, strange because it didn’t feel entirely deserved, stranger still because the afternoon was so glorious. I had never tallied up the injuries and trespasses like this, and wasn’t pleased to be doing so now. Certainly I had many more triumphs and joys than losses. But Joseph’s company at this place unlocked a door. It brought the ghosts swarming.

As it turned out, Joseph was thinking similar thoughts. For a few minutes we made dark jokes about the rip-off fifteen years ago, and what it had meant to us. Joseph said things had gotten so bad in the Valley that climbers had taken to rigging booby traps to protect their property. We agreed that no fate was too bad for a thief.

And then something occurred that was more extraordinary than the wildest fiction. It is my proof that this story is true.

We had just uncoiled the rope and were tightening our shoes, when a man walked up and asked to join us. His partner had bailed on him and he craved a few final pitches before driving home to the Bay Area. Would we mind a third in our party? He said he was strong and quick and wouldn’t hold us up.

He had an Oriental face that looked Hawaiian. His shoes were worn, his hands scabbed with jam abrasions. He had his own rope. I glanced over at Joseph, who was oddly speechless. I took the initiative and said, “Sure, join us.”

Without a word, Joseph cast a crazy look at the stranger and started up the crack. He seemed to attack it with his hands and feet. When I reached him at the top of the first pitch, he spoke. “Did you see him?” he said.

I looked down and watched the Hawaiian start off the ground. Just as the man had claimed, he was strong and quick.

“That’s him,” Joseph said.

“Him?”

“The thief. Our thief.”

I exhaled my “No” as half a laugh.

“I’m serious.” His frown pronounced it.

“Of course it’s not him,” I said. The coincidence was too exquisite. Things like that didn’t happen in real life. But Joseph insisted.

“There were two,” Joseph said. “But I remember this one best because of his eyes. It’s him all right.”

“It can’t be,” I clung to my skepticism.

“I swear it,” Joseph said. “I talked to him for an hour. He sat beside me right down there. It was cold in the shadows. We watched you solo. He was the one who asked all the questions.”

“Impossible.”

“I know,” Joseph whispered. “But it’s him.”

“I’ll ask him,” I said.

Joseph shrugged. “He’ll lie,”

The more we talked—the closer the Hawaiian got—the more I accepted that destiny had just handed us our thief. The man’s face was unique and the population of Polynesian climbers was small. He appeared to be our age.

We quit talking about the Hawaiian as he approached. He joined us at our stance, grinning despite our cold sobriety. I took the rack from Joseph and led on.

The climbing forced me to concentrate. It didn’t allow any confusion. By the time I reached the next stance, I wasn’t confused at all. I was angry. Joseph climbed quickly, as if the moves were more a distraction.

“What do we do now?” I said. He could see that I had converted. This was the bastard who had stolen from us. The same one who had broken my spell of innocence. And suddenly he was also the bastard who had raped and beaten my female friends, who had killed my partners, who had cost me again and again. Here was the vandal, the backroads terrorist, the lightning bolt, the violence waiting to happen. I had come to believe you never catch the bastard, but here he was.

“He fucked with us.” Joseph’s sunniness was in total eclipse. I had never seen him this way. Even his voice had changed.

“Now what?” I asked.

Joseph hesitated, then passed sentence. “I say he doesn’t leave.”

My silence forced him to clarify.

“We ask him to untie for a minute,” Joseph said. “Then we kick him loose.”

“Kill him?” I said. But my shock was less than authentic. “You can’t kill him for stealing.”

My caution only served to fan Joseph’s fire. He was testing his own limits by testing mine, and seemed relieved by my answer. It allowed him to speak more graphically and violently, for now he knew his words were just words, not part of a murder plot. “We say he slipped,” Joseph said. “His knot failed.” He paused. “Fuck him.”

Picturing the thief’s face at the instant he would lose his balance and fall, I felt a radiant, barbaric pleasure. But then I pieced together the consequences. We would have to rappel into the blood and bones. For our single moment of revenge, we would have to live with a nightmare. “No,” I said. “No.”

“What? Let him go?”

“Don’t worry,” I told Joseph. “I have a plan.” By now the thief was at our feet, winded but marveling at the perfect day and the perfect crack. This granite was like a masterpiece, he remarked. We ignored him. I led up.

This was our final pitch. It was as high as I had climbed on Salathé on that cold blue day long ago. It was as high as this thief would ever go again.

Joseph swarmed up the crack. We stood side by side on the ledge and watched while the thief climbed towards our justice.

“Tell me,” Joseph said.

“He stole our ascent,” I said. “We steal his.”

“Take his rope?” Joseph scoffed. “No way. I say we hang him by his neck.”

Now it was my turn. In coldblood, I struck at Joseph’s overheated fantasies. “We break his hands.”

With a whisper, Joseph’s voice lost its backbone. “His hands?”

“We take a rock. We smash his hands... by accident.” I gave it the same pause Joseph had. “Fuck him.”

Joseph turned pale beneath his sunburn. And suddenly, with all those years between, I understood why he had turned me loose on El Cap that winter morning. It had been to solo my energies away, to exhaust my ambitions. He had never intended to climb this wall with me. For the first time I realized that Joseph had never taken me seriously. In a sense my long-ago dream had been stolen even before our thief had manhandled it.

Now I declared my own revenge.

It would not be Joseph’s cartoon retribution. No more play-acting. This would be real and bloody and filled with screaming and agony, and it would involve us—all of us—to our cores. I could hardly believe my own hard resolve. Yet, face to face with Joseph’s charade of ascent fifteen years ago and with this thief’s burglary of that, I could hardly deny myself the atonement.

Joseph was stunned.

“Is he the man or not?” I demanded, alive to Joseph’s slightest dodge. I made this his responsibility.

Joseph took his time. His blue eyes lost their voltage. At last he nodded his head, slowly at first, then faster. “Yes. He’s the man.”

“That’s that, then.”

Grimly we cast around for a chunk of rock heavy enough to drop on the thief’s hands. I wanted to cripple the thief so that he could never climb or steal again. In Saudi Arabia criminals still get one hand lopped off in public squares. This was for real. It was for good.

But even as I rehearsed the deed in my mind, an unpleasant certainty hounded me. If Joseph could promote his fictions once, why not twice? No doubt he’d believed himself capable of a winter ascent, too. It was he who’d showed me that faith, like imagination, has limits.

“I’m going to ask him,” I said. I want to be sure.”

Joseph straightened up. “It’s him, I tell you.”

“I’m going to ask him anyway.”

“Don’t. He’ll just say it wasn’t him. He’ll blame his partner. He’ll beg.” Joseph was afraid. Was he afraid I would learn the truth? But that suggested he knew the truth. More likely, I decided, Joseph was afraid that if we confronted the thief, he would beg. We had gone beyond forgiveness, though, and Joseph knew it and was terrified.

It occurred to me that if I asked the thief, then dropped the rock, we lost our “accident.” The mutilation would stand as what it was, punishment. So be it.

“I want him to know why it happened,” I said. What I meant was that I wanted to know why it happened. Maybe I would even get an answer.

“Don’t ask him,” Joseph pleaded. But I was going to.

We had selected a thirty-pound block with squared edges for the job. Each of us hefted it. It was easy to see how it would go. The thief would place his hand on the ledge. One of us would distract him. The other would drop the rock flat on the thief’s hand.

It all depended on timing. We had to trigger our assault the moment he gained the ledge. Too soon or too late and we would have lost our perfect revenge. If I wanted to have my answer, it had to come before the thief reached us.

As the Hawaiian worked his way up the final twenty feet, I talked to him. I complimented his footwork.

He modestly gave the credit to sticky rubber. I remarked on the piton scars-that fifteen years ago the scars had not been so deep. So ugly.

Joseph looked at me. The trap was set. We were caught now, all of us. There was no escape. The thief was just five feet away.

“That’s what they say,” the man replied. He was resting on his foot jams.

“It’s true,” I said.

“Oh, I believe you,” he replied. It’s just I wouldn’t know.”

“No?”

“First time,” he smiled up at us. Written on his face was a joy I suddenly recognized from long, long ago. “I’m a virgin. First trip to the Valley. I just started climbing four months ago.”

“No.” Joseph groaned it. For my part, a nausea took over, and I have had it ever since.

“Yeah, really.” The man’s pride was impeccable. It was as authentic as the stone we now laid back upon the ledge.

The stranger finished the crack. He got to his feet between us, exhilarated. “I’ve got to thank you. That was the best climb of my life.”

Down at the base again, we coiled our ropes. The last thing the stranger did was shake our hands.

“You guys...” he paused. He became hesitant, a little bashful, even guilty. Here was his confession, I knew. We all have one.

“I’m new,” he stammered. “But if you guys ever feel like climbing all the way....” We looked up at the golden summit.

Once upon a time I believed that in a chalice of light there could be no room for darkness. I was wrong. As the stranger disappeared into the forest waving his goodbye, as I glanced around for any last bits of gear, and the afternoon turned phantom, I saw the single thing that anchors my presence beneath the sun. Birds and angels may disown the darkness they cast far below.

But this one dark shadow is my own.

In Gentle Combat with the Cold Wind

“He looked like the end of the world - dark, empty and wordless.”

Author Note

So long as Tioga Pass was not snowbound, I could make the twenty-hour drive from Boulder to Yosemite in a single shot. With luck, there might be a single radio station to sing me through the desert leg. On this trip the Hank Williams disintegrated into static around midnight, leaving me alone with my imagination on the so-called Loneliest Road in America.

The headwind was eating my gas budget. I caught myself dozing three times, but didn’t dare pull over. I had just finished Carlos Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan, and knew its sly Yaqui shaman, talking lizards and ruthless desert demi-gods were poised to swarm my car. (Published as non-fiction anthropology, the book had been attacked as blatant fiction by critics, a distinction hounding mountain literature, too. For what it’s worth, this introduction is all true.)

The hitchhiker was standing along US 50 where the cathouse double-wides twinkled like sniper fire. His skin was stained that earth color of permanent transients. “I’m only going as far as Lee Vining,” I shouted. “Where’s that,” he said. It didn’t matter then, he was heading wherever he ended up. “Let’s go,” I said.

There used to be a popular bumper sticker: Ass, Gas, or Cash: No One Rides for Free. This guy paid in story. His tale started somewhere in Montana or the Badlands, a credible geography. One hot day in August, he said, he quit his job pumping gas and scraping bugs off windshields, and hit the road. In short order a hitchhiker robbed him, even taking his food stamps, and then his car threw a rod. He paused and looked at me. “I ain’t him,” he said, “that robber.” “I appreciate that,” I said, but kept one eye on his hands.

The story resumed. Now afoot, he happened upon a rancher who needed help butchering a cow. He stopped himself to qualify matters. The rancher might not have been a rancher, but instead one of those dead-end buckaroos who turn to rustling. Authenticity mattered to him. Hours later, clothes bloody, he walked away from the work with ten pounds of raw beef wrapped in rawhide.

The man was no Homer, but his story had a spirit and direction that stood on his rock solid faith in it. It shocked me. I had been writing stories since first grade, but was brand new to formal publication. The Soloist’s Diary had just come out, and struck me mute. Seeing my words typeset on a magazine page, no longer mine but the world’s, had paralyzed me. The inside of my head was suddenly, unbearably naked. My lockjaw had been going on for months. By contrast, this stranger was pouring out his story with all its warts and wrinkles, risking my scorn or eviction back into the wind, and yet joyful and excited to be bringing it alive. Was this my Don Juan, a shaman to help guide me to my path?

Wandering into the countryside, my passenger found himself on the wrong side of a high fence with concertina wire and Do Not Trespass/Bomb Range signs. He cooked some of his meat on an open fire, and hung the rest on sticks to dry to jerky. “Doesn’t that take days or weeks,” I asked. “I wouldn’t know,” he replied, “the meat was gone in the morning. There were tracks, big ones.”

This was getting better, his telling as much as the tale. He knew how to cast the fly and when to sink the hook. A few minutes ago, I had been my own river. Now I was his fish.

The tale got taller, and stranger, and finally insane, and that was fine because he belonged to the story as much as I did now. An animal with claws for feet had stolen the meat while he slept. He tracked it, came to a canyon with cages, and saw eyes glittering through the feed slots. “Dinosaurs,” he stage whispered to me. It was a crux moment. He paused for my judgment. Had he taken it too far too soon? Had he just lost me?

“Dinosaurs,” I said. “I know,” he said, “totally nuts. I didn’t believe it either. So I looked in more cages and that’s what they were, dinosaurs. And then I remembered at least one was loose with my chunk of steak in its belly. And I might be next.” Again he paused, this time to get my reaction. “Man,” I said, wrestling with the wind. He decided that meant a green light, and the pace picked up.

There were more narrow escapes, one from a biker gypsy lady who changed his voice to a dog bark, and another from a truck stop where long haul drivers ate children with barbeque sauce. He passed among coyotes, their legs severed by lasers. Not the whole leg, he qualified, more like the paws.

By the time we turned south on US 395, the man had fallen head first into his make believe. Dinosaurs and highway fiends had become his reality. He was no longer speaking to me, but the story. I glanced over. His eyes were too bright. He was counting with his fingers, taking inventory, trying to stay one step ahead of disbelief. He’d escaped all right, just not from dinosaurs. He was crazy and getting crazier by the syllable, a window on obsession and art. Did you have to be out of your mind to be a storyteller? Is this what a writing life did to you? And if he believed it was real, did that make it non-fiction? Was the dividing line with fiction just a state of mind?

Then he saw my ropes on the backseat, and the whole thing seemed to implode. “You ever been to the Himalayas,” he asked. The air leaked out of me. We had just crossed into my reality, where I could not forgive his incredibility. Me, the fiction writer, standing on my non-fiction. “My dad took me when I was a kid, ten,” he said. “Around about 1956, I guess.” I could not help but locate it on the map: Hillary and Norgay had been 1951, the first American ascent, 1963. The Peace Corps didn’t yet exist. There were no tourists in Nepal. End of story, I thought.

“We drove to Everest,” he said. “We had a jeep with 4-wheel drive.” “You climbed it, too,” I sighed. “Are you kidding,” he said, “It’s like 40,000-feet high. No, we went to find a body.” “A body,” I said. “A mountain climber,” he said, “some British guy, I’ll remember his name.” I tried to recall any casualties on the ’51 climb. Bullshit, I thought, all bullshit.

This was my fault. I had let myself believe a lunatic. My eyes looked at me in the rearview mirror. Where was the sin? The first story had drawn me, wasn’t that good enough? This second one had died in trespassing on my reality. Or had it? Had reality trespassed on the story? It wasn’t a story yet anyway, he had hatched it on the spur of the moment after seeing my ropes, straying from his world to try and meet mine. I was being a snob. Give him a year and some books or take him up a mountain, and I would be following him and his dad up Everest in a Jeep. And then another thought: who was I to condemn his tall tale? If anything, The Soloist’s Diary had begged far more blind faith than his stories.

We reached Lee Vining as the first snowflakes shot past. By morning Tioga Pass would be shut, but I had just made it under the wire, in large part due to the hitchhiker. “Mono Lake,” he read from a sign. “That’s the place I’m going to.”

We wished each other good luck, and he started to climb out into the wind. “Mallory,” I spoke to his back. It wasn’t a test, just a name to retire so I would never have to wonder about it again. As expected, he kept right on going. The door shut. And then it opened. “That’s the one,” he said, “George Mallory.” “Wait a minute,” I said. Where had the George come from? But the door shut. He was gone. A few years later I tried to repossess that night by turning the hitchhiker into my guest in this short story. It was perfectly logical that he might have read Mallory’s first name in a book. No matter, he was a fiction now. That was that.

But then, years later, the Chinese opened the Tibet-side of Everest, and as we all know you get there by truck and Land Cruiser. Back in the 50s, Tibet was closed to the world and under invasion, and there was no road on which to drive a Jeep to Everest. His tall tale had described something that didn’t then exist. I still don’t know what to do with that.

- JEFF LONG

In Gentle Combat with the Cold Wind

It was bitter that Halloween midnight, near Nevada. Across the entire desert there was only one movement not at the mercy of the north wind: a small and battered Volkswagen was feeling its way through the night, its passage marked by the wavering beam of its headlights. Even the stars had succumbed to the approaching blizzard, having vanished in cloud.

Peter Guerre, the car’s sole occupant, ignored the building storm. Preoccupied with his thoughts, he drove on toward Lee Vining. He was glad, now, that he hadn’t told the tale of his solo on Washington’s Column. The Column hadn’t been difficult, he decided: one long reach above that bolt on the fifth, that was it really, and he’d been faster than ever. Peter Guerre, better known as P.G., the Kingsbury Magician, fast, flashy, taciturn. Globe-trotting from Baffin Island to Patagonia, from Australia to Chamonix, he’d seen some of the best rock on the planet. Youngest climber on the Dhaulagiri expedition in ‘73, and one of the two lads topping out Lhotse on a Dutch invitation two years later, he’d gone on to cap it all with a staggering two-week solo of Pumori, for which he was still being lionized. At the age of twenty-four, his name was known, his legend inseminated. Ambitious and physically powerful, P.G. was renowned as a master craftsman who tamed stone and ice to his own devices. And, though the accolades left their mark, P.G. had discovered that he could afford modesty, that in fact it enhanced his reputation and gave him an air of intelligent gravity.

He recalled a large film-showing in Aspen last spring. Without a word as to his identity, he had politely introduced the film by title before addressing a softly spoken “please” to the projectionist who waited to engineer the lights. The room had hushed black, then lit up with stormy, antipodal sunshine. On a whim, P.G. had slipped from the room and left, his silhouette marring the screen momentarily then vanishing. After the film had run for several minutes, a common murmur amongst the audience showed that they had recognized one particular celluloid figure—a young man garbed in a wind-blown, rock-torn clothing, sporting a livid scar down one cheek and brandishing his ice axe like an educated demon. It was only then that they connected this bellicose Kingsbury Magician with their tall, gentle master of ceremonies. An hour later, when the Himalayan sun sank like a red diamond into the night and the auditorium lights flashed on again, everyone looked around eagerly for the paradoxical Magician. But the hero was gone, the podium empty. The audience, he learned later, had groaned. In his quiet way, P.G. found that very gratifying—existing as a silhouette faster than reality. The mountaineering itself was automatically satisfying, but it took on a double sweetness when he considered that each new climb was also one further appendage to his reputation. He had no idea where the wheel of fame would deposit him, he didn’t think about it. It was a hobby as much as a lifestyle. Some people collect butterflies, some collect knives, P.G. collected mountains, though more precisely he collected anecdotes about himself climbing mountains. Often his climbs yielded nothing in the way of kudos. His solo on the Column had been a complete bust in that sense, upstaged by Byrd’s solo on the Shield and by some unknown gymnast’s ascent of a 5.11+. But, as had become habit by now, P.G. had said nothing when, earlier that evening, he’d strode into camp, dumped his gear and gone over to stand by a campfire. For an hour he listened to the other stories: how Byrd was muttering to himself when friends found him on the summit edge, how the gymnast had overcome the final knob, stood up, and speechlessly dropped his hand in retrospective surrender. P.G. hadn’t bothered to mention his own bold sortie of the past few days, because by comparison it wasn’t so bold. The tale would come out some other time. And by then he would have vanished again.

A snowflake drifted down into his headlights, then flashed overhead. Two more hours to Kingsbury Grade, P.G. estimated, to home, a bath, food and sleep. He accelerated slightly. If it was snowing here in Lee Vining, it would be coming down heavily upon Kingsbury Grade. Snow on Halloween: a cold night for souls. Veering gently, he swept down off Tioga Pass, then slowed to enter Lee Vining. The town was dead, the Coffee Shoppe closed, the lights at the gas station off. A tenuous outcrop of brick and wood in the daytime, Lee Vining now looked like the end of the world—dark, empty and wordless. P.G. might even have failed to register the town in its brevity and silence, had not a second snowflake lanced his tired stare. Shaking his head sharply, he broke from his trance. As he crossed the outer fringes of midnight and the ghost town, his headlights picked out a third snowflake, a steady, white point. P.G. fixed his faraway highway stare on it. The snowflake didn’t drift or dance, it remained stationary. As he drove closer, it assumed proportion, then swelled into an object. At last P.G. saw that his snowflake was the figure of a man, and closer still, that of an old man.

The man was just beyond the town’s edge, stock-still and waiting, neither patiently nor impatiently to judge by his posture, just waiting. He stood at the side of the road like a tattered mannequin, hands stiffly lowered, head up. P.G. slowed down. He examined the figure with grim, half-bemused curiosity. The man was dressed in bizarre and ancient clothing: a greasy, torn cagoule, a moldering balaclava, both calves wrapped in cloth strips. In the chill desert on Highway 395, it was these last that struck P.G. more than the rest—puttees taping the frail legs of an alcoholic. He slowed even more, expecting the hobo to extend his thumb or wave him down. He was obviously in search of a ride, for why else would he be standing here on the side of the road at midnight? The Volkswagen edged closer. Despite the decrepit costume, there was something about the old man’s stance that gave him a look of fragility and sad dignity. The man didn’t raise his hand.

“OK,” murmured P.G., and he would have driven on, leaving the man to his obstinacy and cheap wine, but in the glare of the headlights the old man continued to stare with unflinching nonchalance. Ferocity or liquor? P.G. examined the old face more carefully and suddenly jerked his head in shock. Within the wizened crow’s-feet lacing of the old man’s eyes, the sockets were collapsed, sunken with disuse: the old man was blind.

P.G. stopped with a hiss, cursing the night. He must belong somewhere, thought P.G.—crouched in some empty garage or covered in newspapers beside a garbage can, but at least out of the snow. The old man waited by the car, his cagoule punched and bitten by the Nevada wind. P.G. leaned over and rolled down the window. He had to call twice before the old man’s face, sun blackened and with eyes squeezed shut, appeared at the window.

“So,” rasped the old man, “a ride north.” The proclamation twisted off with the night wind. P.G. shrugged. The old spook could go as far north as he was going, then find another ride. He wiggled the stick out of gear and stepped out. It was bitterly cold, dry and sharp. A little like Lhotse’s cold, he decided. His breath trailed him as he walked round through the two spears of light to his passenger.

“North,” mumbled the old man. P.G. opened the car door and guided him by one thin arm towards the seat. The old man limped heavily, scraping the asphalt. P.G. looked down at the cracked boots. Hobnails bordered their soles. Hobnails and puttees—antiquity itself.

“I’m Andrew,” the old man announced from inside the car. P.G. closed the door and walked back round to his own side. “Andrew,” the old man repeated as P.G. got in. His voice was bare like a worn bone. The manner and tone in which he announced his name located him far outside P.G.’s company, a passive dereliction. P.G. didn’t offer his own name. It would have been wasted breath to such an afflicted spirit. The old man, wrapped in his ancient cagoule, seemed anyway oblivious. Whipped by the accumulating storm, the Volkswagen shot away.

“I’m cold,” came a whisper.

“Heat’s on,” P.G. answered. It was already hot in the car, and he could smell the vents scorching a handful of junk Perlon he’d tossed on to the back floor. Nevertheless the old man was shivering, perhaps as a result of his wait by the roadside. For a time the old man and boy rode in silence, enveloped in the hollow can of a mutual environment, the wind outside pounding at the car. P.G. tried to plug back into his thoughts of the Column climb, but the heat and monotonous darkness seduced him. He had to break violently out of sleep a second time. He reached for the radio to dispel the journey’s weight, but just as he pinched the volume knob the old man trapped him with another whisper.

“We climbed,” he muttered. “We climbed high.”

P.G. snapped a glance at his passenger, but saw only the cowl of his hat and a shock of renegade white hair. Climbing? P.G. interpreted the old man’s remark as an ingratiating prelude to a conversation in general. But how could he have known that P.G. was a climber? The ropes and gear on the back seat? The smell of scorched Perlon? Then the old man’s ragged costume echoed its intimation. The garb was half-a-century out of time, but clearly alpinist in mode. Was the masquerade more deliberate than coincidental? A single moment passed as P.G. explored the possibility that this old man had been waiting for him, Peter Guerre, on the side of the midnight road, an ancient climber lying in wait for a young one. How ominous, P.G. chided himself, a cold blind Halloween vampire.

Since there was no tail to the old man’s opening statement, P.G. asked him with skeptical hesitation where he’d climbed. The old man raised a hand, orchestrating thoughts. P.G. watched the hand drop back on to the old man’s thigh. Finally the old man spoke, coherent but absurd.

“Everest,” he said. A smile ribbed his face. “I do remember that, that I climbed Everest.” There was neither modesty nor boasting in the coarse, empty voice. P.G. gave a little snort and turned his head to mock the blind man with a grin. He was amused. By his rigid credo a person who couldn’t fire a warthog into 85° ice, or figure out an easy 5.10, was a scrambler, or worse a liar. The old man was a liar.

“Cracker?” P.G. held up a half-rifled box of wheat thins. For several minutes he attempted a dialogue, hoping to recover the talk about the climb. But it was a wispy, halting exchange, acid with the boy’s doubt and lamed by the wino’s senility. It serviced neither of them. The old, striated face had locked shut. Suddenly, unprompted, the old man rustled.

“Yes,” he declared. “I climbed Everest.” The statement was vigorous this time, even proud. By the balls, you liar, P.G. grinned to himself. He’d been to Everest himself, climbed Lhotse, been through the Khumbu Icefall, descended by the South Col. He would let the old man build his fiction into a mountain, then, as at other times with other liars, expose the lie with the real mountain. Maybe not though, he demurred. In fact... why? This lie and these clothes were probably Andrew’s only possessions. P.G. found himself wondering how such creatures come to wander apart from the rest of their race, becoming alley and road animals without an anchor in the world. That’s just the way it is, though, P.G. conceded. Every town on earth has drifters like this one: men who appear, utter and then disappear. Their fictions atrophy, and they die.

Just then the snowstorm erupted, flinging itself in erratic, ballooning swirls at the windshield. By the time they’d passed Mono Lake there was a soft white mantle adhering to the scrub brush and coating the highway. P.G. started to chastise himself for having picked up the old man. Now he’d have to drop the spook off somewhere but with all this snow it couldn’t be just anywhere. Momentarily, P.G. considered his own home, then tallied the Samaritan complications and rejected the idea. Besides, there was a home for such spirits as this in Reno, fifty miles north, hours distant... but after all, P.G. sighed, it was merely an inconvenience, an extra couple of dollars for gas, an extra few hours. He found it a little touching that one climber should be giving a hand to another, even if it was to a liar dressed in rags. It suggested the traces of a climbing community, the young tending their elders. And trying to feed them crackers, scoffed P.G., and put up with their bullshit. Everest!

He broke the thought and aligned a new one, slowly rebuilding the Column. Last night at this time... two twisted trees, a bolt painted yellow, a thin wafer of rock to sit on... and cold. But had tonight’s snow appeared last night while he was cadging sleep, P.G. thought, he would have really suffered. The snow had waited though, he wasn’t called the Magician for nothing. He always managed to recover from the nights, their loneliness and raw chill. He always had control, slender sometimes, but sufficient.

The old man muttered something loud but incoherent then, disrupting P.G.’s reverie. Giving powerful nods of his wool-capped head, the old man seemed bent on confirming his illusions. P.G. turned his attention back to the road. It was becoming thickly coated with fat snowflakes, stretching on and on.

“Cold?” the old man suddenly barked. There was a rattling deep in his throat. “Cold?” he asked again, more gently. P.G. glanced over. His cagoule tucked beneath his chin, the old man sat very straight, his tweeded thighs pointing stiffly forward like old men keep their legs, simply and firmly planted. By the greenish light radiating from the dashboard, P.G. picked out the stained wraps of the puttees, even discovering a petal of rust on the small buckle clasping the knicker cuffs.

“Andrew,” P.G. said.

“Andrew?” answered Andrew. The face smiled at him, but again not at him. The old man was looking far away, somewhere else, dark and alone. P.G. examined the old face and its intense sunburn. For the first time he noticed the perimeters of its stain, two eyelets above the blistered, peeling nose and cheeks. P.G. had seen such faces before, goggles and sun, the mark of alpine climbing. It mildly surprised him. A pair of big sunglasses and a bender in the desert, P.G. guessed. How else such an odd sunburn?

“You still cold?” he asked the old man.

“I was told to go down,” replied the old man quietly. “Give me your air, go down. It was very high you see, and I hurt and wanted to go down.” Caught in his mountains, P.G. realized. Old Andrew’s stuck on Everest. He respected the old man for that. Impoverished as he was, Andrew still had the integrity to embody his lie.

“So I hadn’t any air,” continued Andrew. “Then I remembered the length of shadows in the afternoon and followed them back down.” P.G. listened, cynical, though not unsympathetic.

“Who were they?” he finally asked.

“Who sent you down?”

“No.” The old man apologized tangentially. “Names slip by me.” Sure thing, thought P.G.. As much as he liked the old man’s bizarre facade, the gall and fatuity, he still resented the actual lie that had been created. Long ago he’d decided that mountains belong to the climbers who touch them, not to flatland men with cheap words and bravado. Ambivalently, still curious though irritated, P.G. rejoined the conversation.

“You can’t remember any names at all?”

“There was... Tibet of course. We crossed south.” The old man’s hand brushed at the air as if to clear away the obvious. A little gold star for geography, P.G. sniffed to himself. “But the mountain parts I have trouble with,” finished the old man. “It’s been so long.”

“How about the South Col?” prodded P.G. “You probably remember that, don’t you?” A vision of bleakness and wind swept through him eidetically. He saw the area again, shingled rocks and hard scabs of snow, and a single piece of cardboard poking from its grave.

“No,” said Andrew. “I don’t know about the South Col.” He didn’t seem intimidated or embarrassed by his ignorance, though, and there was no righteousness to his statement. He acted as plainly as when he’d first said his name was Andrew. It confused P.G. He’d expected a pouting, rheumy defense to his attack on the unreal mountain. But the loose smile remained, and this ingenuous amnesia continued.

Pretend, thought P.G., pretend he did climb Everest. Treat the mountain like a mirror: the Nepali half reflects the Tibetan half, the South Col weighs against the North Col, the Khumbu Glacier against the Rongbuk Glacier. P.G. looked at the old man. Let him climb the mirror. Help him climb. The game suddenly intrigued him, this piecing fact with fraud, with fiction.

“Well,” asked P.G. “did you go through the icefall?” He calculated the mountain, carefully omitting the name of the icefall.

“The icefall?” questioned the old man.

“The Khumbu ice?” offered P.G. Its blue seracs surfaced in his mind again, the moon illuminating sharp holes, tiny orange and blue tents lit up like paper lanterns among the rubble below, and the listless red marker flags on bamboo wands that tilted lower each day, the icefall ingesting them. P.G. caught his breath at the vivid memory, that solitary night in the icefall which he could never share because it was so embedded and complex. He shook his head at the memory.

“I don’t think I’ve been there, that area,” the old man decided after a moment. “Maybe we went a different way, my colleagues and I.” Okay, thought P.G. Don’t hang yourself yet old man. Let’s play the game as far as it goes. He didn’t ask about the Rongbuk Glacier which lay in Tibet, he wasn’t sure about it, nor did he want to know about it for the time being. Khumbu Icefall and South Col went together with the Nepali Everest, and the old man had denied them all. P.G. applauded the old man’s consistency. It translated into an attempt from the Tibetan side, illogically but possibly as the old man had claimed. It dated the lie, marking it a lie of the twenties or thirties. But how Tibetan can Andrew keep his fiction, P.G. asked himself. One wrong answer from the old man and the mountain would vanish into its lie. It would have turned into naive malice and P.G. would drop it altogether. But the two of them were still ascending Everest, still composing its lines, conceding its unrealities. By building as many blanks as possible, P.G. knew, they could escape pure fact. He shifted into third gear. Snow was accumulating on the highway.

“I was twenty-two years old,” the old man offered. “I was young. Then I was told, give me your air. Go down.” The old man waved his hand and slapped it softly on his leg, a gesture of fatigue.

“It wasn’t Hillary who told you to go down, was it?” P.G. felt certain that Hillary had never sent anyone back down the mountain. There was no reply. The old man was beginning to sink back into his mute images. Don’t slip away, old man, P.G. thought.

“Was it Noyce or Odell or Mallory?” P.G. had to dredge their names from nearly forgotten history. The game was complicating itself inwards. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could feed the old man blanks.

Andrew mumbled again about the cold and lengthening shadows. And P.G. remembered how shadows stretched long and low on the mountain. It would grow cold while the summit was gradually devoured from below by the darkness, the body of the mountain swallowed bit by bit until at last the very crown faded. Then all the humans would get in their tents.

“Then what did you do? Where did you go down to?” P.G. tried to make his question unobtrusive to the old man’s reverie. Beneath the blind sockets the parched, cracking lips moved rapidly. There was a long pause. The old man raised and dropped his hand.

“I can’t remember.” It was final. Old Andrew couldn’t remember.

“You can’t say how high you got?” P.G. persisted, trying to reconstruct the flow of the story, the geometry of the mountain.

“It was very painful,” said the old man. “It was very cold.” P.G. remembered that too, how very cold it could be. Everything would freeze. The only way really to thaw out would be to climb, up or down, it didn’t matter much, but stasis was fatal. Even illusions were better than simple, frozen sleep. P.G. remembered sharing a tent with two other men. Throughout the cold night he had heard them shifting and muttering, talking within themselves. Then in the morning they had all emerged from their unreal worlds, put on their boots and climbed.

The old man sank back into his algid mutters. In the headlights everything was covered now with snow; the flat white world stretched on and on. It was very cold there. P.G. drove on with the blind man pressing on through the black morning. He tried to talk about their mountain some more, but the old man had gone to sleep.

The Virgins of Imst

“Out of the great blue, Imst had a naked saint.”

Author Note

One year before lightning killed Arnold Larcher while guiding a client in the Austrian Alps, I took a train to his village. One week turned into six months of climbing and masonry work. He, his family, and a Yugoslav assistant lived above his bakery and shop. My day began at 4:30 helping deliver breakfast rolls still oven warm. Twelve hours later I would sit with his wife and young children, peeling, coring, and slicing dozens of apples for the next day’s apple strudels. In between, I wrestled the ceramic blocks they use for the foundation and walls.

Arnold took me drinking, more and more lavish in introducing his American comrade from the “Hima-lieya” to the same villagers with the same tales of life above 8000 meters. My only way to make sense of the bragging was to tie it to the loud-mouthed tradition of Beowulf and Achilles.

In that same pub, I fell for a local beauty named Erika. We never exchanged a word, which gave free rein to my fantasies. Only near the end did I realize the entire village, and no doubt Erika, despised me.

Arnold and I had met a year before on Fritz Stammberger’s 1974 International Makalu Expedition. Arnold’s house and half of his bakery had gone up in flames at some point in the past. Between my partial deafness from a construction accident, Arnold’s accent, and the business of setting camps on the South Face, I presumed the accident had occurred months earlier.

In fact the fire had struck just a few days before his scheduled departure for Nepal. Instead of cancelling the trip or at least postponing his flight, Arnold had left his family in tents in the middle of town. I later learned that his wife had salvaged enough to get the bakery running again, and that the scandalized villagers had made a point of buying from her. That ended the day Arnold returned. Though he remained the only baker in Ehrwald, but the villagers found other bakers in the valley.

One evening Arnold pulled out the latest Alpinismus and broke the bad news. Fritz had gone missing on his way to solo Tirisch Mir in Pakistan, and was presumed dead. A year later I was asked to visit a glacier where a Canadian expedition had spied a body crumpled into a TV-sized ball in the ice. My job would be using garden shears to collect some fingers and the lower jaw for identification. To my relief, the idea was scrapped before I left.

Knowing Fritz’s larger-than-life nature, Arnold and I hoped his disappearance was just theater. We discussed what would happen if it were true. Just before catching our flight home in 1974, Fritz had taken me with him to the Nepalese ministry and obtained a permit for Makalu in 1977. Back at the Kathmandu Guesthouse, (aka the Guestmandu Cathouse for its free love hippies,) Arnold, and a Slovenian scientist and alpinist named Matija Malizec jumped at the chance for a re-do. Now, minus Fritz to lead, it seemed the expedition was over with.

As the years went by, my bit part in Arnold’s battle with the village came into better focus. In taking the masonry job, I had unwittingly violated a rigid master/apprentice system dating back centuries. In effect the whole country was unionized, and suddenly Ehrwald found itself host to a Wild West cowboy stealing jobs. I had long hair, didn’t attend Mass, wore blue jeans, barely spoke German, couldn’t yodel, and cadged my money (translation, didn’t buy locally.)

Worst of all, I was a living souvenir from a mountain range made legendary by Reinhold Messner, silently confirming Arnold’s never-ending Himalayan adventure. His drunken smack talk was actually part of a calculated counter-offensive. I was Arnold’s answer to the village’s excommunication. So long as I was there, he had a nightly excuse to revisit heights they would never know, and to demand the respect due a master alpinist.

And so they got rid of me. One morning Arnold grabbed me from the construction site. He was grim and angry. The police were on their way to arrest me for a lapsed visa. I checked my passport, and it was still good for one more day. I had been planning to take the train to the nearby border that afternoon and get the visa re-upped. But the writing was on the wall. A symbol for Arnold’s dignity, I was now a symbol for his exile. I jammed my gear into a duffle just as the police arrived at the front door of the shop. While Krystal welcomed them, Arnold snuck me out the back and down to the station. “Adios,” I said. He had taught me how to cuss in German. I was teaching him some Spanish for his trip to Colorado and Yosemite.

Summer arrived. Arnold made it to the States. We had a great road trip, and had perfect weather for Washington’s Column. Then Arnold had to return to his bakery and me to my trowel. “Adios,” he said. A couple of months later the funeral card arrived. Arnold was gone.

On the spur of the moment, I took over Fritz’s Makalu permit. I was much too young and foolish to lead an expedition, but it seemed better to try than see it disintegrate. Two of the ’74 expedition, Matija, and Rodney Korich, joined my ragtag bunch. The South Face had been climbed by then, so we went around the corner to the West Face. We made a game try, got bombed with rock fall, and made our exit.

Matija came to the States for a visit, and we corresponded until the mid-90s. His letters stopped. A little later I went to Bosnia as an election monitor with OSCE. Only recently did I get word that Matija was executed by Serbs in Bosnia. Matija, Arnold, Fritz, and others: these are some of the ghosts I try to keep alive.

The Virgins of Imst

Ten years before I wandered into the village of Imst for a few month’s work in the mill, a Yugoslav had found a lover like the one I did, and the huge mountain to the east had sheltered a dead saint in a cave. Because those Austrian Alps breed such precise echoes, it still seems perfectly natural that the Yugoslav and I were so much alike. Poor, foreign and naive, we also shared a vulnerability to our similar lovers who lived and dreamed with parallel abandon below the nearby mountain.

Matija was his name. Catholic as a rosary bead, he was nevertheless a strapping 20th century heathen, tall and bashful, but unafraid. Among other things he was a climber, though in a village tucked at the back of a Tyrolean valley hugged by steep green meadows and steeper mountain walls, the mere fact that he mountaineered held no special rank. Most of the local menfolk were or had been, too.

As alpinists go, the climbers of Imst have always been a mediocre breed, congenitally cautious, saddled with more pride than skill. They climb together, practice rescue missions together, drink, quarrel and yodel, tease each other’s wives, and above all obscure their mutual failings as climbers, acting exactly like the neighbors they are. What distinguished Matija that summer was that he was the finest climber Imst had ever seen.

And yet, as the story came to me, you could never have guessed he had an extraordinary skill, he was so ridiculously humble. The moment he was in public his dark eyes locked onto the cobblestones. He had the habit of blushing at his accent, and was mutely diligent at the lumber mill where he held a summer job. I had the same job, I climbed, I kept to myself, and like Matija ate my supper at the cheapest inn in town, the Hoffhaus. When a group of local men would arrive for an evening of red wine and tall tales, I’d wolf down my cheese noodles and meat and timidly exit. As I closed the oak door behind me, their pipe smoke would billow in the thick, lazy domain.

Erika was his love, or came to be towards the end of the summer, coltish and wildly attractive. She was blessed with roan gold hair and a Swiss model’s legs. Barely twenty, Erika had already located each and every beauty mark her archangel had hidden on her body, which is to say that her life was an uncomplicated task. She preened herself in an old-fashioned, lusty sort of way and was desired just as simply.

That summer Erika was still a virgin. She didn’t act like one with her ribald coquetries and even more suspicious melancholies, but the villagers knew. This daughter was still a pure creature. Having grown up among such a wise alpine bourgeoisie, Erika had not failed to learn the price of certain commodities, the value of certain flowers. She knew just what she wanted out of life and thought she’d figured out how to get them... a big white house with an old tile oven, new furniture, a view of the lake, a cat, and maybe later some children. But for all her deliberateness Erika was young and susceptible to less articulate needs. One August night when the moon was ripe and you could practically hear the chamois rustling on the clefts, Erika lost her plotting innocence.

I should tell this story the way it was told to me, but that’s not enough. Matija may not have had humble black eyes, Erika may not have connived with her virginity so deviously, and it may not have been August when she invited him to her window. But it went something like that; a soft knock at the garden window, the starched linen curtains were drawn aside, and there stood Erika, her nightgown a solid white in the silver night. I had such an affair with a girl named Crystal, a midnight adventure that was repeated through the coming two months.

On the first night she opened the window, before she could whisper even a word of greeting or restraint, without the slightest chance of cunning, her gown fell open and for a moment struck me blind. Erika, like Crystal, as virgin as dew, was no doubt frightened by her accidental nakedness, perhaps even angry with Matija for being so enchanted by it. And then she drew him in and closed the window. There seemed to be nothing else to do.

Erika wanted Matija no more than Crystal really wanted me, but we were, the Yugoslav and I, both young and momentary, good for a secret. In that constricted Tyrolean universe where every shadow had a name, the people I called my friends were friendly, the lover was loving, but there was a limit. Unaware of our poetry, Matija and I succumbed, like images in a mirror, to the Austrian midnight and its innocences. From what I remember of the story, Matija was twenty-one, too.

The spring before Matija arrived in Imst two young bucks from Innsbruck, ‘rock gymnasts,’ as the Imsters secretly disparaged them, attempted to climb the large, rotten wall of rock that sits high above the town to the east. This wall forms the geometrically clean face of a mountain called Sonnenspitze, or Sun Mountain, named for its peak which marks the sun’s first appearance and very last shining. At the center of the wall, Sun Wall, a cave mouth forms a perfect dark O. Nowadays it’s known as the Virgin’s Hole.

No one in Imst had ever given much thought to what might lay in the cave because the Sun Wall had all the earmarks of the edge of the world. Sharp and chaotic, its rock is more treacherous than rotten coral. I once bouldered near the base of the Sun Wall and found the holds as large as they were worthless, so fragile that a wrong breath, much less a wrong move, would fracture the rock. It was unforgiving, just left unclimbed, and yet when the two boys from Innsbruck showed up there was a sudden embarrassed furor. This was, after all, a local mountain. It was felt that the rock gymnasts should go monkey around on their own walls. The sentiment went unheeded.

The two Innsbruckers came prepared. Expecting difficulties, they laid siege to the wall in American big-wall fashion, spending days and days on the vertical face, sleeping in hammocks at night. Finally after a week of strenuous acrobatics, with the whole village suffering their minute progress hour by hour, the two boys reached the cave.

Storm clouds had been blossoming all morning, so there was some question about whether the young climbers would weather it out or descend. The climbers of Imst began to prepare a full blown rescue of the two boys. Knowing the Imsters as I do, I doubt there was much solemnity as the locals stomped around the town square in their knickers and boots, hefting big packs and draping bandoliers of musical pitons and coils of rope over their shoulders with sweeping flourish. To this day I can’t figure out how they were going to rescue the boys. They certainly weren’t about to climb up to them, and the wall was so overhung they couldn’t have lowered down. For all their strutting around, in the end they were as helpless before the storm as the two boys were. After a fair amount of festive posturing the group set off to wait and see what would happen.

As it turned out, the two Innsbruck climbers had noticed the storm, too, then measured its severity against their dwindling food supply and decided to reverse direction without further ado. Their descent turned into one of those small epic tragedies for which the Alps are notorious.

The storm struck. All through the night the two young men battled their way downwards, blown by the wind and anointed by gentle, soaking snowflakes. Their exhaustion was compounded by the delicacy of the wall which required just as much care as their gingerly made ascent had.

Not long before dawn, one of the climbers lost his grip on the ropes and fell to his death. The other boy continued down, orchestrating the rappel with bleak uncertainty. Hours later, nearly dead, he lowered himself into the very center of the now somber Imst rescue team. In spite of his horrible journey back to earth, the boy feverishly insisted on relating a remarkable discovery.

There was, he swore to God, a body up in that impossible cave. Without headlamps, and because of the storm, the boys hadn’t investigated any closer, but both of them had seen the unmistakable contours of a woman’s body. She was white as pine, nude and impeccably preserved. According to the exhausted young climber, she’d had long black hair, and extending from the cold shadows he’d seen a half open hand, palm up. The boy was utterly convinced that she was beautiful, perhaps due to the beckoning hand and her awesome solitude. Then, the boy sobbed, they had descended.

Father Weissbrod’s pulpit had served him as a podium on more than a few occasions in his forty-eight years as the pastor of Imst. From it he rarely hesitated to scold adulterers and liars, or warn against various political sympathies, once going so far as to compose a sermon on inflation and the Volkswagen. The aging priest was bored. It has been a quarter of a century since the last war, twenty-seven tedious years of blessing sinners and herds of healthy cattle and leading invocations to the Holy Spirit on behalf of Imster small fry as they departed for regional ski meets. On the first Sunday after the disaster on Sun Wall, Father Weissbrod electrified his parish with some news of his own. He had made a discovery.

“The pure are like God,” I once heard the old priest postulate. “He draws them to his breast and makes them little gods.” In a more educated church this pagan sentiment, that God makes mini-gods, would have cocked more than a few eyebrows, but there in Imst it was taken as part and parcel of the gospel. Ten years before I sat in church and heard the shaggy-headed priest, he scanned his congregation and, with forgotten drama, revealed something to the effect that papal evidence spoke of a certain immortal woman.

More than 1,000 years ago, the body of Mary Magdalene disappeared from its resting place in the convent at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, and legend had it that the prostitute-turned-saint had been assumed into Heaven. This was given increasing credence over the centuries as Mary Magdalene visited such locations as Chartres and Le Puy, always manifesting herself in the form of lifelike statues. True or not, several churches owe their existence to her divine appearances, for which an enduring human faith or gullibility may take credit.

Barely three days had passed since the two boys from Innsbruck had descended from the cave on Sonnenspitze, when Father Weissbrod revealed in great detail who the woman in the mountain really was. “She is, God bless us, the saint.” He expected more skepticism than he got. There were a few slow witted scowls, but aside from these the Imsters immediately embraced the miraculous corpse of Mary Magdalene. Suddenly Imst had a purpose beyond its crops and cattle. Out of the great blue, Imst had a naked saint.

It must have seemed a raw injustice to Erika in that twentieth summer of her life when the young men, all of whom she’d known since childhood, callously fell in love with the saint lodged high within the Sun Wall. There were four or five highly eligible men in Erika’s realm, but just as she was familiar with who they were, they were familiar with Erika. They’d been tormented by her hot and cold charms long enough to understand her virginity, and rather than pursue another season of fruitless competition for her attentions, they turned their thoughts to the wall and unfamiliar chastity.

With inch-long beards in the style of a famous South Tyrolean climber, or mustaches fashionably cropped, the young men took to congregating in the town square, there to mull over the geological citadel that had begun to loom in their dreams. Tirelessly they discussed methods of reaching the woman in the stone.

Purity has odd rhythms. The distressing thing about that ‘summer of the saint,’ as Imsters still refer to it, was that the bachelors, one and all and all at the same time, turned into spiritual bridegrooms of the mysterious female. Against the unreachable beauty which the corpse in the cave represented to those stallions of Imst, Erika didn’t stand a chance. Like austere pilgrims, her former suitors suddenly abandoned Erika. When she leaned provocatively across the glass counter top at the bakery she worked for, the young men’s eyes celibately scanned the rows of bread, the pastries dusted with sugar, their own hands... surveying everything but that languorous cleavage which no one had touched yet.

Unfortunately for Erika, the woman in the cave was untouched, too, with the difference that the saint had become equated with an innocence so vast and grave that every male could aspire to be worthy of it. Ignorant of the fractures in Erika’s twentieth year, nonchalant about the lady in the mountain, Matija was noticed one day by a lonely, lovely girl who hungered with a vengeance.

Matija, shy and unadorned, had his small pretensions. I was told, for instance, that he shaved daily with an open razor just before his evening supper, and that he wore white T-shirts more religiously than an American. He preferred black bread over white, a taste I shared with him, even though in Austrian circles black bread is considered pauper’s food. Not without a touch of pride, Matija used to wear a wool hat from Plancia, his hometown, whenever he was outdoors, even at the lumber mill where sweat and sawdust eventually discolored it. Sometimes he would run home from work, a long-legged canter that seemed much too ambitious in the eyes of the Imsters.

“What are you training for?”

And he’d stop, puzzled. “I’m just running.”

The villagers would grin and continue strolling along, leaving behind a suddenly baffled Yugoslav. My blue jeans came under similar scrutiny, I know, and my dislike for climbing with a helmet. Small idiosyncrasies operated as borders, and where there were borders there was inevitable trespass.

To the locals it was bad enough to have two lads from nearby Innsbruck almost bag the neighborhood wall, but it was downright spooky to see a Yugoslav make a shambles of the neighborhood climbs. In the course of three weekends and a national holiday, the transient systematically demolished every existing route on and around Imst, then in the following two months invented previously unthinkable lines up vertical faces and smooth slabs. The only thing that prevented him from making a second attempt on the Sun Wall and its Virgin Hole was that no one was bold enough to accompany him. A full decade later I contemplated the face myself, but it just didn’t seem worth the danger.

The face is a massive trap spring-loaded with bands of decayed schist and roofs that are propped to collapse, all oft punctuated by falling rocks that whistle from out of nowhere. For a climber this kind of senseless risk is marginally seductive. So, as horrified as the locals were, they couldn’t help but debate ways of unlocking the wall. There had to be a way. They talked all summer.

“See the voyeur?” Matija may have asked Erika late one night, as I once asked Crystal. A small gray mouse, archetypal with pink ears and round beads for eyes, continued staring back at the two naked creatures in its room. With amused solemnity Matija would have kissed Erika just as insistently as I kissed Crystal, and later, after healthily climaxing, we dropped off to sleep, not meaning to, but captured by our own warmth. It was dangerous to fall asleep because I had to be gone well before the morning turned light. But this one night we indulged ourselves. Hours later, just before dawn, there was a loud snap in the darkness.

“Oh,” murmured Crystal, half rearing up with the quilt to her chest. “The stove is dropping ashes.” But it wasn’t the stove, it was her mousetrap. Our voyeur was dead. As if by design his tiny life had been given to wake us. I marked that moment as a magic one, despite the fact that while I dressed, Crystal matter-of-factly emptied the trap with the same hands she’d been touching me with, and then reset the deadly mechanism for its next victim. If only Matija and I had paid more attention to such inauspicious perceptions.

The summer of the virgin was a breathless one, unusual for the mercy it showed. It wasn’t without threats, but as if by virtue of ‘their’ saint the threats remained distant ones. The weather was unstable, for one thing, and the farmers were nervous about their crops. As it turned out, they pulled in a respectable harvest just days before the massive freeze in late September. One of the big wedging machines at the lumber mill broke down and for a while it looked like several of the workers would be laid off. Somehow a local machinist persuaded the machine to operate until the season was finished. Most threatening of all was the continuing possibility of a police investigation into the cave on Sun Wall.

Dead people have a way of turning up in the mountains. It’s not unusual for solitary mountaineers or German tourists, or sometimes a herder caught by late spring avalanches, to show up months or years after their accidents. But the discovery of the female on Sonnenspitze was different. Her location was sensational, her identity a complete mystery. She might have been an incredible suicide or the victim of a climbing murder, the police allowed, or maybe even the grisly remnants of an espionage operation during the last war. The constable sternly insisted that sooner or later he was going to get around to a full scale investigation, but he never had the opportunity.

Matija probably asked for nothing more than the covert security of Erika’s room and her touch, never taking the time to consider the indignities of tiptoeing across strawberry plants in order to crawl through a window, I know I never did. I only had thoughts for the facade Crystal and I covered ourselves with.

With my sleep cut by half it was only a matter of a fortnight or so before delirium took over. What felt like love, totally pervasive, dreamlike and warm, was in good part plain old exhaustion. The nights took on an invincible tone. It seemed that Crystal and I were surrounded in the daytime by fugitives and liars, that the deception wasn’t ours but everyone else’s.

We talked about running off to Greece and marooning ourselves on the beach of a random island, leaving Imst to stew in its suspicions. But for Crystal such talk was simply one more excitement in the overall adventure. She wasn’t about to sail off into never-never-land with an American pauper. She’d risked as much as she was going to by having me in her room. I should have guessed, but lying there with her soft body in my arms, I took her at her word. I prepared to make our escape.

Matija’s midnight love couldn’t have gone much differently. There’s a pattern to these things: darkness, whispers, a flurry of bold regrets prefaced by ‘if only,’ and dispassionate masquerades after the sun had risen. You don’t need wine to get drunk in a situation like that. Matija must have been just as disoriented as l was, consumed by the night, testing the fabric of each dawn with tired caution. I felt practically transcendent. I’d gone from being the oddball American who ate black bread and wore blue jeans to being a clandestine lover, possessing Crystal like a secret. I had, it seemed, penetrated the village.

Confident of the risks involved, trusting nothing but his nocturnal senses and his lover, Matija continued to visit Erika’s bedroom by night and turn trees into planks of lumber by day. Surely by late September he’d grown used to the prejudices of the village and had begun to understand the pride with which the lovely saint was coveted. Erika probably talked about it herself, and may on occasion have wished out loud that she, too, could have her purity back. With early snows impending, the season was nearly ended. Matija was collecting a final few schillings for his escape with Erika when love showed its true face.

Two months of midnights had passed without incident. Stealing across the stone fence, Matija dodged through the withered strawberry patch and arrived at Erika’s window. By habit he stuffed his wool hat into his jacket pocket, so there would be no chance of his forgetting it in Erika’s room, then he reached up and tapped at her window. There was no answer.

He tapped a second time. I sometimes had to repeat myself, too, while huddling in the shadows beneath Crystal’s window box. The linen curtains parted. I don’t have to imagine the nausea he felt when a bearded face, it doesn’t matter whose, appeared behind the glass. The most hideous part was that it smiled just before drawing the curtains shut again. We fled.

I’ve seen Erika. Two children and ten years have marked her beauty with slight laugh lines and a double chin, otherwise it is the same Erika. There’s no way of knowing if she regretted betraying Matija’s trust. She may never have entertained the possibility of his love in the first place. But I like to think that for part of that morning after, while she picked hot rolls and pretzels from the bins and dropped them in white sacks for the customers, she felt a twinge of sorrow. If Erika cared even that much, the village didn’t care at all.

It was by now the end of the summer and most of the laborers had returned to Yugoslavia and Italy. The mill’s owner certainly didn’t mope over the sudden disappearance of one more of his foreign workers, especially since this one had neglected to pick up his last paycheck. Such was the stuff of village jokes about foreigners.

It was four days later in the town square, while a politician from Ehrwald stubbornly touted himself with a PA system and boxes of campaign buttons, that Matija turned up once again. More precisely he was located disturbingly high overhead, hovering in the pink alpenglow on the Sun Wall. First a drowsy trombone player in the local band, then a plump Frau with late summer marigolds in one hand and a tether to her cow in the other, and then others, all the others... looked up towards the cave of their whore-turned-virgin and discerned not one black dot but two, the unfamiliar dot still several inches below their holy cave. No one could believe their eyes until it was plain that everyone was seeing the same thing. A climber was approaching their cave.

Just as stunning, the climber was alone. Soon an educated murmur had bolted through the crowd, identifying the dot as that Yugoslav, Matija. It was a safe deduction, he was the one man capable of soloing the wall. But why was he doing it? The politician continued enunciating his promises to the rapt audience without the slightest idea that, several thousand feet behind and above his makeshift podium, Matija was serenely stealing his thunder.

Those several inches separating Matija from the cave were in fact several hundred feet of treacherous stone, meaning he had a good six to ten hours more of climbing. He wouldn’t reach the cave until next day at the earliest, but to the good people of Imst it was just inches or less that separated their saint from desecration. That fear was poisonously immediate, for Matija was, ad infinitum, not of the town of Imst. He was unpredictable, an animal possessed by God knows what kind of chaotic reasoning. It’s not hard to see how tales of dragons and ogres managed to thrive in the midst of such xenophobia. No one allowed that maybe he was climbing up to see for himself, to confirm what no one else could seem to. Or maybe he was climbing to the cave simply to genuflect and continue on to the summit. No one granted him the slightest benefit of his character.

Instead, the villagers reacted with doubt and loathing. A Yugoslav, it was whispered, was capable of many things. He might push the body to the ground or ink his signature on her sacred flesh as proof that he’d been there. Alone, the animal could do anything, even foul the vulnerable corpse with his carnal touch or, if he was short of food, try to eat it.

Emergency sessions of every sort were announced; the village mayor discussed with his council and the walking club debated, and the firemen agreed that their saint was in imminent danger. While the people prayed that God would ward Matija away from their cave, Erika kept her rosy mouth shut.

There are still a few believers in Imst who will tell you that the storm which rose up that same night is enduring proof of some miraculous element, be it saint or symbol. As the story goes, nothing from the Innsbruck weather station to old Hansjorg’s infallible prostate gland had predicted the swollen ice clouds that engulfed the stars and swallowed the upper two-thirds of the Sun Wall.

Next morning when the villagers looked through roughly melted circles on their frosty windows, they saw every house and street encased in a single, all-encompassing sheet of transparent ice. Everything had turned into a glass replica of itself, not only houses but animals too. Horses died that night, soaked with rain and then frozen solid by the terrible cold. The mountain was hidden from view by the clouds, but there wasn’t the slightest doubt that it was lacquered with a cold sheet of verglas too. Matija, it was broadly surmised, couldn’t possibly have survived.

The villagers were well satisfied with this meteorological retribution; it reinforced the sanctity of their virgin in the wall, exposing a great protector who held His hand over the small secrets of the world. Under the guise of a mass held for Matija’s dubious survival, the villagers celebrated sweet justice. Father Weissbrod could barely conduct the mass. Instead of delivering the sermon, he gave a wink that everyone understood.

For days the strangely persistent clouds hung over the mountain and its town. The Imsters stayed close to their ovens, only venturing out for precarious walks to the grocery store or to the Hoffhaus for gossip. The rescue climbers speculated with lurid detail about what condition Matija’s body would be in when they finally recovered it. As to how they would retrieve the Yugoslav’s corpse from the face, none could finally decide.

At last the weather unknotted its deathly fist. The clouds thinned, the streets thawed. Exactly five days after the Imsters had first seen Matija nearing the cave, the mountain surfaced. Everyone looked toward the wall and with a gasp saw just one solitary dot, the mouth of the cave. Fresh consternation broke out. The rescue climbers immediately set off for the base of the wall to try and find the mangled Yugoslav, his rope crystallized around his waist. He wasn’t there. Immediately four of the fastest men were dispatched to hike up the back way to the summit, where it was hoped Matija may have struggled before expiring. He wasn’t there either.

That left one last place. But suddenly it seemed all right that he was there. Matija must indeed have reached the cave, he must have died in the presence of the saint. With a spontaneous change of heart the villagers instantly preferred this version of the story, it invested the tale with a rustic integrity. Matija had turned to the eternal virgin in the cave, risked all, and reached her with his last breath. That was adoration. It was a perfectly religious ending. But it wasn’t the end.

For a week, then two weeks, the rescue climbers just couldn’t get to the cave. They tried to go down on long ropes, but the wall was too overhung, and after a few timid false starts they quit trying to climb up. At last they contacted the national rescue team in Innsbruck, which in turn sent up a helicopter. While the helicopter hovered a few meters away from the wall, a volunteer swung back and forth on the very tip of a rope tied to the struts. After a dozen misses, he finally managed to pendulum right into the cave’s mouth. Even before he scrambled to his feet inside the cave, he’d found Matija’s wool hat.

All alone in this deathly place, with the irregular thunder of rotor blades reminding him of his lifeline back to safety, the rescue man probed the gloom with his headlamp. Starting at the front of the cave, he explored back into the deepest recess. There was no Yugoslav. But deep in the rear, blanketed with shadows, lay that other body. It was well preserved, and as the Innsbruck boy had said, it was clearly female. With great reverence the man knelt down and turned the woman’s body over.

Now, having visited the museum in Vienna, I feel sorry for that rescue climber who expected a mask of unearthly beauty and found instead what is now sealed in airtight glass and labeled the Virgin of Imst. It’s still a mystery how she got up there in the first place, and a mystery, too, where Matija disappeared to. Back to Plancia, I guess.

The message of the Virgin doesn’t lie in the scars that her people carved into her face as a child, nor in the oddly delicate hand with its fingers curled just so. There’s real poignancy to those tiny white flowers woven into her black hair despite the huge brow, but the message isn’t there, either. It lies for me in that instant Matija turned the virgin saint over and found the face of a Neanderthal girl. I still miss Crystal in a way, but like Matija, I’ve realized that there’s nothing more to say.

The Ice Climber

“The ice had absorbed the memory of them.”

Author Note

We came with hubris in mind, to boldly go where we didn’t belong and trespass upon our fears. Made of the legendary Rocky Mountain Spring Water in Coors beer ads, our icefall was short and sweet, maybe sixty-feet high. It was all ours, par for the course back when Boulder’s ice climbing population numbered about twelve.

Thanks to Jeff, Mike and Greg Lowe, I owned a pair of newly invented Foot Fangs. The very look of them, space age silver with double rows of front teeth, filled me with bravado. Brimming with heroic gumption, I meant to climb a small, overhanging forest of icicles near the top.

They called my partner, Steve Mullen, “Grieve” for the joyous grief he visited on one and all. He was a jester for all seasons, the kind of guy you wanted on a big mountain. While he geared up, I took a side path to the top. The streambed lay flat as a mirror, then plunged into the shadows below. I set an overkill anchor with three ice screws, tossed a rope end down to Grieve, clipped in, and sat on the streambed. We had intended to top-rope it from the bottom, but belaying from the top was safer.

Grieve’s head soon appeared over the edge. It was my turn. I left Grieve sitting on the streambed by the anchor, sorting out coils. “Keep me tight,” I told him, “I’m going for broke.” He made a crack, something like, “Newsflash: big guy proves gravity, drops like an apple, so what.”

The rope was waiting for me at the base. I tied in, climbed to the overhang, and went to work among the icicles. Instructing myself to use a delicate touch, break no icicles, and top out with a smile, I fell.

No problem, it was all covered. Falling was built into the plan. Indeed, it was the plan. Grieve would catch me. I’d return to the ice, plant the tools, and probably fall again. But time suddenly stretched to a long, slow crawl. My body was recognizing something my mind had not caught up with. I was falling for real. A tug of the rope gave me hope, only to renege. It astonished me. Game over… on such a pipsqueak of a thing? And then, fade to black.

I woke draped in rope coils with the ice at my back and the sky at my feet. Odder still, Grieve had decided to join me. He sat propped against the ice, asleep and, stranger still, upside down. A car passed on the far side of the river shards, upside down as well.

I didn’t want to move. The morning was so peaceful and uncomplicated. Nothing hurt, yet. A little nap would be nice. A little cogitation.

Once upon a time there was a sophist named Bishop Berkeley who declared the universe was nonexistent, and that the world was whatever we conceived it to be. Nowadays he might be a novelist. Or cult leader. Or a member of the Tea Party. A bit further south in that same English countryside, a curmudgeon named Samuel Johnson thundered that the world was an objective fact. When asked to prove Berkeley was wrong, Johnson answered, “I refute him thus,” and kicked a large rock.

Call it the curse of a philosophy major. As I lay there, my only thought was this: Berkeley or Johnson? Their debate blocked all forward motion. Had I just died? Like the hanged soldier in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Incident at Owl Bridge,” was I only imagining my survival? Or had I actually survived the fall and landed pain-free in an upside-down world? Was I gaming the system with a fiction, or had I just kicked the rock?

Grieve’s eyes fluttered open. He frowned at me from the nest of rope on his shoulders. “Whoa,” he said. “I know,” I said. He whispered it again, “whoa.”

“Why are you like that,” he asked. He drew a semi-circle in the air. That helped. I slid sideways and the world righted itself. I was bleeding from a cut on one arm. My white T-shirt was soaked. Where had my sweater gone? There, where I had parked it on a bush while I climbed.

Stunned, we sat side by side like characters in Waiting for Godot, killing time until whatever came next came. I saw my car on the roadside, and wished it would come get me. We were starting to feel the injuries, Grieve in his knee, me in my shoulder and arm. Part of a bone had broken loose in my elbow. Our heads ached.

Meanwhile we recreated the fall. Grieve remembered that he had forgotten to clip into the anchor. When I fell, the rope had yanked him toward the edge. Anyone else would have let go. Not Grieve. Sledding on his butt, he held on, took the ride, and woke up next to me. The slice on my arm came from his crampons.

A car slowed on the road. A man and woman got out. We were saved. Grieve waved. The man lifted his camera and took a picture of us. They hopped back into their car and drove off. “Whoa,” said Grieve. “Don’t worry,” I said as much to myself as him, “that didn’t happen.”

We sat there some more. The shadows grew bluer, the snow by my boots pinker. Another car stopped. A man and woman got out, took a picture, and drove off. “Whoa”, said Grieve. I was too scared to reply.

Only one thing could explain the repeating shutterbugs. I had died, and this was all a dream. I felt sicker. A whole new set of questions arose. Had my whole life been a dream, too? Annette Funicello, Jimi Hendrix, and JFK; that Mexican sunset when the girl I’d never kissed left her bikini top in the sand; my Irish setter puppy pointing butterflies, Yosemite, Makalu, Eldo, my mountains: all imaginary? Was there no rock left to kick?

“Maybe we should get help,” said Grieve. I was the one bleeding, which logically left him to descend the hill, cross the river, and wave down the next car. He tried to stand, but his knee wouldn’t bend. He started to lift it with both hands, but the pain defeated him. His face was turning blue from the cold and shock. “My turn,” I said and untied from the rope. The hand tools were cinched tight to my wrists, so I gripped each and headed downhill.

The Berkeley/Johnson debate swung in Johnson’s favor as I kicked and tripped on every rock in sight. It swung back to Berkeley once I reached the road. Three cars passed me over the next ten minutes. One stopped fifty yards lower. I started to say, “We need a little help,” but it was just another Kodak moment. The camera flashed, the man drove off.

I dialed it up a tad, stepping out into the lane. I performed my one-armed wave with more vigor and added some shouting. The cars veered and accelerated past me.

My possible invisibility did not explain the surreal phenomenon. Enough of me remained for them to steer around and photograph. It had to be a dream. I was trapped in a Twilight Zone episode.

As the next car flashed by I saw outright horror on the driver’s face. I did a quick zipper check, and it all fell into place. I was a monster. My t-shirt and one pant leg were soaked with blood, I was brandishing two weapons out of the Dark Ages, and the boots, crampons and helmet made me seven-feet tall. Off came the helmet and hand tools, but it hurt too much to bend for the crampons.

More cars sprinted by until finally one paused down the road with no photography interest. The engine stayed on, the brake lights bright. I was careful to walk on the far side of the road with my hands half raised. The driver’s window rolled down three inches at most.

The cops and ambulance arrived. Even wrapped in a sleeping bag, Grieve was blue and sinking. I wanted to lie down, but couldn’t. In their flat street shoes, a cop and medic took one step off the asphalt and nearly brained themselves. I took over the evacuation. Luckily the crampons were still on. I trekked to the top and fetched the rope to make a hand line and belayed the stretcher. With my good arm, I helped carry Grieve over.

They wanted to stick me in the ambulance, too, but I had no insurance, and the cut had stopped leaking. I didn’t want to leave my car, and I was damned if I was going to leave those ice screws behind. Two hours later I emerged from the canyon into sunlight and found the hospital. Grieve had snapped the ball off his hip. The surgery put him in debt for the next two years. The ER doctor took pity on me and sewed my cut shut. I went home, fell asleep, and next morning started writing The Ice Climber.

This non-fiction recount is meant to pull young writers into Berkeley and Johnson’s debate about the subjective versus objective. It puts a face to our challenge, the imagined versus the reality, the fiction versus the non-fiction. In choosing fiction to tell the story years ago, I had my reasons. You should have yours. When it comes time to tell your own stories, it may be useful to know which form has more power and toward what end and for which sorts of readers. The choice is yours. Seize it consciously. Then write what feels right.

The Ice Climber

In their midst was that boy, the enormous climber with wind harrowed hair and severe cheeks, his T-shirt pink with blood and crampons like weapons on his boots, barking hoarse shock, amazed. At his feet lay a head. And like a fetus crouched the body, his friend, rags and joints curled down in a green dimple of ragged river ice. A bald cop bent to touch the shaggy head whispering life away.

“He could have got killed,” yelled the climber to the cop. He yelled to the sky, to the ice, “damned ice. See where we fell there,” he pointed sobbing, while they huddled on the frozen river beneath a frozen waterfall, the unstirring corpse beneath them with wet rope tangling its limbs. The cluster of grave men waited in the shadows, waiting with the half-wild climber loudly shouting how his friend should be dead... should be dead. They hugged themselves in their windbreakers, cautiously shuffling for warmth where there was none. They were stunned by the surreal tragedy, the splintered icefall and blood. Finally, the cop rose among the cold canyon shadows and flipped the limp tip of rope onto the ivory river ice, a gesture of obituary. The man bent to the bald ground again.

“Now he’s died, boy.”

But the climber shook his head, unsure who was dead or what it was they’d said. There’d been the rope cracking, snapping ice, and the screws had spat a single black pop as they rattled in sharp flight down. They both had fallen, both slapped the ground and slid heaping down the icy slide onto the frozen river. Now one was bruised and one was dead. Only one had crawled from their freezing embrace on the river, the other had inexplicably stayed on the ice, in the ice, sibilant and with eyes like fists.

They closed the eyes.

The tall climber hushed himself with a blink. He grinned. His fingers were broken and now they hurt, crooked little sticks. And Jack was dead, when just before Jack had trembled, Jack clinging to the bare ice with his hammer points and crampons. There’d been that ridiculous fart to punctuate the strain of climbing, a nervous giggle, and Jack wiggling the rope with his hips, a grotesque farce of copulation and vertigo. Perched below the sweating clown they’d seemed so deliriously invulnerable that they could parody fragility, teasing more mortality. The delirium was gone though. Jack lay coiled in the pocket of river-ice, no longer Jack. The tall climber grimaced as the cops and ambulance men levered at those legs and arms, as they flinched at the face, draped, strapped and lorried Jack away, though Jack was already gone, slipped away.

“Where’s Jack gone?” mumbled the boy to the shadows. It was only a Saturday morning, bland and unextraordinary. He turned around with a slow sweep. Had Jack seeped among the swells in the icefall or flow with the river? Fingers draped a blanket across the gray mask. Had Jack raced away with the gusts of spindrift on the highway... between what things, underneath what fabric of the plain day was Jack still being as he’d been? The broken body was mute and empty, its vitality, its Jack-ness was gone.

A feeling of dispersal blew all around the tall climber. He felt light and raw, sick with relief, and yet he sensed a dark hole, a pit in his heart as if there was no certainty to the Saturday morning he’d survived. Someone unbuckled his crampon straps.

At the hospital the climber began tentatively to reassert himself to himself. It was a mechanical chore, prodding the stitches and tape on his arm, flexing his swollen fingers. There was pain, real enough. There was reality, but he still addressed the nurses as if they were barely ghosts in a fiction, filaments surfacing and sinking, murmuring, all wafting on through the dark noon. Words circled and died wordlessly. Images quailed into impressions. Through a window the climber watched lackluster shapes edge between tall and vague trees then the trees fused into shadow, the world slowly wheeling visions drifting and recomposing. At last he was left staring numbly at the marbled reflection of his own face in the dark window. A glassy figure entered, uttered, smoothed his wild hair. He felt his limbs dressed, his joints aching. Beyond that ache in his arms and thighs, the afternoon was only a tone of flickering animation. Everything seemed remote and temporary.

The boy drove home on the snowy spine of the highway, past road signs and road shops, between half built houses and half housed shadows. He heard tire chains slapping asphalt and the bleating of a car horn, the skeleton of Saturday afternoon. There was a bad smell, sulfur decaying or a dead skunk. Here and there he noticed a patch of tar and fur on the highway, a dead dog, a flattened rabbit, animals stuck into things, things breeding things. He passed a damp pile of guts. He passed a dry pile of bones. Passing and passed by rapid cars, the rapid landscape, the rapid air skirled into a false and rapid wind, the boy steered his way home.

On the vinyl seat where Jack had sat a thin string of carabiners and a few ice screws, a hammer, a wool hat. On the snowy walk where Jack had walked the footprints had pooled and refrozen. The door opened to him. The couch groaned. In the house where Jack had ambled... shadows.

When the sun dipped low a dog was still barking far away. The room turned gray and then dark. All the details of the furniture were gradually effaced. A photograph on the wall no longer cast colors or portraits; it became a flat plaque on the flat wall, then the wall itself was swallowed. Dusk ate everything. His legs sprawled in front of him, calves still cased in gaiters, his boots two dense hooves. They slipped fluidly into darkness too. The telephone rang dimly elsewhere and stopped, began again and stopped. He sat in the black echoes, still as a bone.

Knuckles came clapping on wood. Words flattened through the glass. The screen door squeaked and a woman stepped in cautiously, her face pale with the dusk. From the doorway she stared into the dark room and after a moment found the boy. He sat soundlessly. He noticed a single star glittering behind her shoulder, then looked away. Her voice quavered, betraying a knowledge of Jack, exposing her tears and questions. But he shrugged, fiercely disclaiming all riddles and pity.

At first she stammered, husky and sad, piercing the dark room with her noise. Then very slowly she affirmed his silence with her own silence, and her arms circled the leonine head. Slower still he raised a hand to touch the lines of her unseen face. By the bed she was soft, unbending her body, cloth dropping, her nude gently assembled piece by piece. The night softened. Later she fed him soup and bread, brought wine and crawled back into bed. Her long hair was a familiar veil on her chest and shoulders, silver in the stray moonlight.

Sleep was difficult. The woman was warm, but his fingers throbbed in their splints and now and then an image would displace the drowsing boy. It was an image like Jack which would lie as the boy was lying, curled, an image quiet like the boy was quiet. The boy snapped awake each time, afraid he was dead, that he was the ghost and not Jack. But it wasn’t Jack. The face of the image was changed enough to look like many faces. Jack was gone, his face was vague. Each time the image dissipated the boy lay shivering and speechless in the moonlight. Something was missing inside him. He drew in a breath, beyond melancholy or fear, and felt the empty thing inside him, a wordless confusion. Benighted things set all around him, inarticulate and staid: a table, a black mirror, his bound hand. The woman warmed him in her sleep. It wasn’t a cold emptiness or a physical one. It was a breathless cavity. Something was gone.

Before the trees became brief stalks in the east the boy edged from bed, aching and sleepless. The woman slept on as he hobbled from the room. Morning, cold and purple, was still too young to illuminate the room. The woman disappeared into the lingering night. The bed, the bottle of wine, her crouched clothing all sank into the blackness. He eased the willowy screen door shut and limped to the car. Frost starred the windshield. The tires crackled as they rolled from their shoes of brittle ice. There was no traffic in the canyon, it was very early. There was little light. The climber parked and picked his way down from the road, here and there pausing to gingerly warm his bare, taped hands beneath his parka. The river was animal beneath its sturdy shell.

And the icefall still loomed, steepled coldly, a gelid monolith. The climber approached carefully and pressed his hands to the ice. He peered into its dark, watery bulk. There was no chamber back in there, there were no cells to the ice, no place for ghosts to hide. It was a cold and sterile massif. Nothing had changed in a day and a night. It was still murky and full, as thick and depthless as yesterday. And yet when he tried to retrace tiny scars of their crampons on the ice he couldn’t find them. The lesions had melted and refrozen. Something had changed.

The ice had absorbed the memory of them. The climber frowned. He tried to recall the path of their ascent, but couldn’t. It was gone, lost into yesterday. The climber closed his eyes and tried to see again the faces of the bald cop and the nurses and doctors who’d drifted through his Saturday, but he couldn’t, not exactly, almost not at all. They were gone. And the breakfast yesterday, the radio, their jokes, gestures, the color of rope, the hat he’d forgotten on the car seat... he forgot. He couldn’t recall them as they’d been, the rope red or the rope blue, the yogurt and bran, the radio yammering, tea sweet, trees hiding snow, upturned stones, a scurvy deer bounding back into the forest, and them lashing tight their crampons, the worried-on straps, sharp hammers hefted, taped shafts shifted hand to hand and slammed in ice, the hard spring ice green, clean, unriddled, and though it was smooth it was fractured, the memory was fractured. Something had changed. Something was lost. The climber grunted. He couldn’t recover the exact details of the memory, there were too many and they were too fast. Yesterday’s morning had spun on, passed forward and bred the memory of another morning, this morning, the frosty windshield, this old down parka, fingers stiffly splinted, palms numb against the ice, and Jack melting, Saturday fading, while the ice climber shivered unwillingly. High above the icefall’s flank a blue star grayed into day. A slight chinook wind exhaled with the dawn, a whisper of incoherent warmth that would thaw the canyon and purge the shadows, a wind that would melt the ice, scourging the brief immortal.

The Soloist’s Diary

“Later we would know that they had descended while there was still a way back, an equally fatal course to take.”

Author Note

I wrote The Soloist’s Diary with the shyness of a leper, shielding it from scorn and amusement until all 80 pages were done. Even then I barely dared mention it to my friend “MT”. Handing him my one and only copy, I fled to brace for his judgment. Two weeks passed without comment. He seemed to be avoiding me. It was that awful. Then he admitted that it had disappeared. I was devastated, but blamed myself for burdening MT with it in the first place. I tried laughing it off, in keeping with those early Taoists who wrote poetry on scraps of tree bark and tossed them into streams. That sort of thing was big in Tree.

Tree was a sort of commune that existed mostly in our heads. It consisted of a handful of university renegades scattered around the world, though the numbers rose if you included the crazy monks of Cold Mountain, a few brothers in one of those monasteries built into Greek cliffs, Byron’s ghost, Rene Daumal’s ghost, the widow of Kazantzakis (whose ghost apparently wasn’t available,) and probably a hermit bricked away in a cave in Bhutan. We viewed ourselves as literati of the wilderness, both its children and voice.

We were writers and poets full of wild nonsense that sounded pure and right to our ears. We climbed, drank jugs of ice melt from local glaciers, and read copiously, from Finnegan’s Wake (over my head, and probably the others’, though no one admitted it) to Calvino and obscurities like Palm Wine Drunkard. Thanks to MT, I read every word in an abridged Webster dictionary from A to, well, part of G.

I had come to Tree’s attention because I had just returned from Nepal, 19-years old and scrawny from parasites, and was giving away—to anyone, for free—all the hash I had stuffed inside my ice screws and sealed with bubble gum. No one in our circles had ever visited the Himalayas, much less languished at a remote monastery, too ill and lamed by a blown knee to descend. It didn’t hurt either that, like MT, I didn’t smoke. It made my risks absurd to the point of enlightenment or just plain pointlessness, little different from the use-once-throw-away poetry of those carefree Taoists, or of climbing itself.

Months passed. MT was moving to San Cruz to study for his PhD. The day before his departure, he shared a secret. My manuscript still existed. “You found it,” I said. “It was never lost,” he responded. In fact he had sent it to two editors, Steve Roper and Al Steck, the visionaries responsible for Ascent magazine. He made no apologies, and was even offended by my ingratitude. My shyness had made the deception necessary. Also, the ruse was meant to spare me the pain of inevitable rejection. “But the thing is,” he said, “the manuscript wasn’t rejected. We’re going to be published.”

I was speechless. I wanted—needed—to write for the rest of my life. It went far beyond book tours, fame, bestseller lists, and big money, which rarely happen in mountain literature anyway. Rather it was a matter of survival, my only remedy for a non-stop imagination. Everywhere I looked stories sprang from the soil fully ripe, only to go to rot for lack of a proper harvest. The waste gave me headaches, hurt my grades, and plagued my sleep with more stories born to die. I took to jotting fragments into a notebook, not so I wouldn’t forget them but so that I could.

My one respite came from writing an entire story. As hallucinogenic as The Soloist’s Diary is, it confirmed my sanity. The infinite wall was my wilderness of dreams, the climb a portable sanctuary. Those fragments of other diaries left by climbers lost or mummified stood, in part, for the wreckage in my notebook.

If writing brought me temporary peace, then how much more permanent would publication make it? It was a decade too soon, though. I was unproven and probably unreadable and this was moving so fast. I needed time to think. I remembered to be excited for MT. We’d both hit the big league at the same time, an incredible coincidence. I asked which of his poems or short stories Ascent would be printing, and rattled off a few titles. He shook his head at my stupid question. “The Soloist’s Diary,” he said, and proceeded to educate me.

He was embarrassed for me. My story had been so shabby that his light edits had quickly turned into an extensive rewrite. For that reason Steck and Roper were insisting that he be a co-author, and moreover the lead author. I was going to be a sidekick on my own story. “It’s the common practice,” he said.

“I need to talk to Steck or Roper,” I told him. “Impossible,” he said, “they’re an inch away from killing the story. No one has ever heard of you, and it needed so much work. I’m doing everything possible to keep it alive.”

I wanted to at least see my manuscript. MT assured me it was safely locked away at Ascent, and besides there was no time. The magazine was going to press in a matter of weeks. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to damage our friendship, but this wasn’t right, was it?

There was no time for argument. MT left for California in the morning. We had already made plans to meet in Yosemite at the end of the month. By then, he hoped, I would understand how things work in the real world. At the month’s end, my car wouldn’t start, and I probably couldn’t have afforded the gas anyway. Ordinarily I would have sacked the trip. Not this one, though. I packed my gear and stuck out my thumb: first stop, San Francisco.

I called the Ascent office—as I recall it was Roper’s place, or was it Steck’s? They were happy to finally get a chance to meet me. One asked about my cave. I apologized for trespassing on their editorial decisions. We were all confused. Bit by bit we unraveled the mess. MT had told them I lived in a cave, and he was my only contact. They learned that MT claimed they would kill the story if I dared ask about its condition or the issue of co-authorship. They showed me my story. MT had told the truth about one thing: the magazine was about to be published. The pages were typeset and in galley form.

There stood my name in the shadow of his. I scanned the text. Except for arcane polysyllables and a few phrases, nothing had changed. My story was intact. I pointed out a dozen discrepancies, and they stopped me. It was too late and would be too expensive to change the galley. MT had won after all.

One of them produced a chair. They gave me a pencil and a cup of tea. “Change anything,” they told me. It took a few hours. My changes probably cost several hundred dollars, a huge sum to me. “Not your problem,” they said. I had circled MT’s name and moved it below mine, but didn’t want to go too far. One took the pen and crossed MT’s name out.

I met MT in the Valley. It was brief. I told him about my meeting. Outraged, as if betrayed, he ditched me. So much for a bus ride home. Hitchhiking never felt so good.

The Soloist’s Diary

...not to imply that I wish to specify the degree of pain and passion with which I die, nor the actual manner of death, nor even its approximate instant. But to control my death’s quality... to have mattered, one mute perception spanning the ages which this remote tirade against the rock has paradoxically rendered eternal, wrought in its own inconceivably lonely vast body.

Today: performed a most elegant movement. It was yesterday, I think, that I threw away all but twenty feet of rope.

Sound is the most tenuous of things: untouchable, deceiving, hiding in shadows, covering its damp tracks with echo, cacophony, history hanging on its subtle dark pallor or harmonies, a night which ridicules vision. So too I have trouble these days in hearing beauty. It is years now. All the rock is as it appears: a barrenness ending in human things with warped and mangled flesh, pale veins and tendons utterly void of strength. My nostalgia is infinite. My heritage of vacuum in the rich somber architecture of nature. My desire an impossible return.

Long ago I spoke with other wretched ones. One swore he remembered starting from waves, another from the desert. Still others mentioned primeval forests, rice terraces, lagoons; and another, a remarkable figure, yelled to me ages ago from across a crack that he had been born on the wall and was trying to find his mother somewhere high above him. I arrived by crude error and, forever, here....

I can vaguely remember starting to climb. Reduced to myths, I suffer on the rock. Various amnesias blot the tissue of my memory and deprive me of a heritage, making me into a creature of the rock. By climbing an infinite height we have created an infinite depth and our pasts have become doubtful.

But still... still it seems as if there was once a period of beginning, a time when the dead climbers seemed grotesque as they hung from the crack or became bones upon small ledges. Years of dedicated horror have eaten that innocence away. The ground is no longer visible, nor its image, and even the horizon is obscured by dense low mists. There are no sides to the wall. There is no summit, which is our first dilemma.

We climb because it’s what we did. For a long time now we’ve persuaded ourselves of our humanness by fluctuating and challenging the rock with our stifled personalities and raging diversions. There have been seasons of religious intent and seasons of ennui and of hatred. Our eyes flashed those days of flux, but the days are different now. Everything seems ancient. The days are indistinguishable from the rock and our eyes have nearly mineralized. We no longer take pride nor find pleasure in pretending. We no longer change. We simply climb.

So there was a world I knew. It consisted of the rock and the sky upon my back, of my strength, of Aaron and Gareth, of the cold nights, and water bottles and pitons, ropes, hammocks and fading things. They recede more and more. Within me I feel a far-belowness. There are caverns in me that are marvelously daubed with thick phosphorescent pigments and rich echoes, places that hide me from the wall and this gagging subjection. It is a sheer journey, a mercy of myself to myself. My mind, receptacle of images, is at once a holy strife. Half-formed characters grope their way into shimmering position. Many present moments but only one past, a darkened sanctuary.

In the mist there was nothing to see, only ashen forms a few yards distant. Unjointed shadows that faintly resembled things of the normal world existed down there. What seemed like a tree swimming before us was sometimes a tree; at others it was a thin strand of erect rock; sometimes it was nothing. Even the trees were without roots, free to wander. The outer world had disappeared. We were submerged, the brief scents, cool trees, and wet rock... without form. Only our touch was above suspicion in that place.

We edged cautiously through the forest, our huge packs looming up in perpetually slow light, with gray tails of mist gliding behind, attached to our thick, veined shoulders. Those wafting tails of mist were true ghosts, I suppose, dismal and pathetic remnants from earlier ages in nature. We felt this. They were no terrifying apparitions at all, just impotent little driftings without more purpose than to absorb all echoes, all definite perception, and all our thoughts. Everywhere we were relentlessly hung, pursuing and pursued.

We came across a tree with a patch of its bark shaved away. In the polished oval of wood there was carved a deliberate figure, a calligraphic revelation, a single character that seemed simple but was incomprehensible. I found it; it was one of the first nights. There it was suddenly, an impression, a solemn insolvent word deep in the mute forest; but as to whether there was meaning in it? Yes, I think so; but from that fossil I knew then and ever will, nothing. It was not to be the last of such scriptures.

It was a forest of petrified wood. Even the cold trees, their green needles hanging in a semblance of life, seemed forever frozen and empty of life. Petrified. Every tree stood faintly, fog-moistened and brown in the grayness. Each tree was a grotesque climax of the gloom of that place, and in a similar way the spectral birds with their dimly flashing colors increased rather than diminished the loneliness of that land. When the slight sound of their beating wings came plummeting between the trees, we weren’t raised out of the silence but only reminded of it and sunk deeper into its glaze.

Two ancient climbers were there, all rotted from aging and from the eternalness of apathy that was the fog. We were passing through the forest when suddenly we came upon them, two bent little figures squatting dwarfishly over a tiny birth of orange flame that was licking meekly at their world. There was no noise, not even spitting or crackling from the little fire. We watched them in silence, in astonishment, not knowing at all what they were. (Later we would know that they had descended while there was still a way back, an equally fatal course to take.) Both of them were clothed in rags; each had draped long scraps of old cloth over the shoulders of their parkas, shredded and emptied of feathers, vacant and flat. Both were wearing pants heavy with mud and holes, and both were barefoot in the cold, their feet flattened, cracked like baked mud.

Standing there apart from them and their flame, I had to struggle to keep from choking, and my mouth was slack and whistling hollowly with my ruptured panting. I could hardly force air into my lungs, and I was hard at forcing it back out again. It was them and their fire; something in the separate baseness of it strangled me. There they crouched with their tangled hair wet, matted in heavy clenching nests upon their shoulders. They weren’t talking. They were just crouching intensely over the flame, absorbing its meaning, squatting under, within; possessed by the mist.

We withdrew silently and went far around their little circle with its handful of contemplated flame, away from the primality of their Neanderthal scene, away from the awfulness of their underworldness and their abysmal degeneration, and especially away from the fact of our similarity.

Gareth came to camp with a human bone nestled gingerly in his open hands. We followed him to a broken hut built of granite and rotted pine. In its shadows lay a thin skeleton half-buried, a layer of dirt covering its legs. Something in the hasty nature of its covering imparted an air of breathlessness to the scene, as though near death the man had hurriedly dipped himself into the shallow grave. We stood about looking at it for a few minutes, then Aaron and Gareth drifted away. I stayed waiting while the earthen skull stared sightlessly into the depths of the wasted ceiling. I was filled, for the few moments I contemplated the hollow sockets, with something beyond myself but soon, discerning no message, I left the sepulchral shadows and reentered the mist. Night came. We had no idea where the rock wall began. We’d searched for days in the mist, ground-bound. Now we ate our rice, carrots, onions, drank our tea. And sat by the fire.

Mosquitoes, the lips and arms of succubae, their opaque wings humming, sang at me in the darkness, luring me from my veil of smoke. But I wouldn’t leave the fire. Feeling the black air on my cold back I knew somehow that if I so much as closed my eyes to the light of the fire, the night would devour me. I could do nothing but cling to the fire. Out there was some character of the void and seemingly I was the only one of the group to sense it. I said nothing to warn Aaron and Gareth; instead I hugged the flames with my worried brow, afraid, protecting the others with my fear. I heard popping, clattering noises and whirled about to face the night. I grabbed a thick stick and mumbled hoarsely, but there was nothing. Later in the night, when the others slept, something touched my shoulder. I was instantly alert. But again it was nothing. My horror: it was far worse being touched by nothing than by any something. The nothing offered no substance, no resistant solidity to belie oblivion. I can remember that. I was new to voidness then.

We found the wall and soon after the preliminary crack. A queer beach spread out before the wall. We thought at first we’d come upon the site of some massacre or a gruesome sacrificial field. There were men lying everywhere, not in any dense abundance, but randomly scattered all about. Some were more recently dead and were only partially eaten and decomposed, others were only bone or shadow. The remains lay positioned so that we were unnerved at times when one or the other of us suddenly tripped over the hidden bones of an unexpected body. There was no predicting where to set our feet. Grass and brush were everywhere; the bodies were anywhere. We were, as children, stunned. It was my first exposure to dead bodies, and it was a grisly first. The limbs twisted in terrible directions, skulls were bashed and empty, parts missing. Tropical birds and ravens had long before settled on them and had picked away their eyes. Animals had since died and had been buried, so to speak, on the dead compost of the skeletal piles. This too I remember, how the animals fed upon and died upon a single substance.

Lying everywhere were weathered pieces of manila, nylon, refuse, words.

We should have known. They were fallen climbers. We looked up and acknowledged the rock. It was above us irregularly, and hardly visible for the mist. Gareth drew a circle in the air and pointed upward; Aaron secretively scratched a figure into the dirt. This terrible deadliness was a new dimension to climbing for all of us. In climbing we’d always known an elusive risk, but such rampant danger? We’d assumed a dignified nonchalance before in the presence of rock. Here, though, was a graveness. There are victims of accident and there are victims of something more (something of themselves). These were like so many mites shaken off an animal. Other occasions would arise in my future, occasions for my will, but by the time those sediments and springs of seeming freedom initiated balance, or ties to the earth (in apparition), I would long since have been swallowed by my choice, and circumstances would never again permit a contradiction of this. Naively I opted for the wall as I treaded its beach of grass and lost ones.

We groped about at the base of the rock wall, seeking out the proper crack to begin climbing. We knew of it but had no method of finding it. It was in fact merely a climber’s tale that had fertilized our venture. The vague rumor of an unclimbable wall... but we could see nothing for the mist. Nevertheless, from the root of the abruptly rising rock we could sense that it was a huge wall, and too that it was occupied. From the base it was an empty slab, no sight or sound coming down, yet we could easily feel its population. We put our hands to the rock and knew that somewhere above us were other climbers touching its glabrous angles.

For two days we wandered along the base of the wall, searching for the primary crack, craning our heads back to stare upward into the mist and to imagine the great wall. Amidst the scree, the congestion of dead shattered things slowly grew. That afternoon we were touching the crack. It was horrible. There was a cozy simplicity then, sanctioned by such a mass above us, an unseen thing. There was no drama in the beginning. We were unsure of everything and had set no regimen for the ascent. We inserted our pins into the crack and ascended. And there upon the rock was the vision of the outside. Everywhere were dead climbers and climber’s things. Ropes hung from hanging bodies. The sky was rock.

Scarcely above the thickest of the mists appeared immense, inverted platforms of granite that blocked our sight upward and looked impassable. We had never encountered anything like it before. The entire wall just changed direction and flattened out as an endless ceiling, a panoply. That they are territorial gates which allow progression but no descent is possibly the greatest factor that traps us here on the wall, but something more prevents us from even attempting to retrace our path to reach the ground again. We took several months to sew our way across the ceilings and can never retreat. The roofs composed an agglomeration of hundreds of down-vaulting rotten bulges and overhanging crumbling dihedrals requiring innumerable fixed anchors. Had we been able to see through the mist before starting, we would have witnessed this catastrophe of nature: a flat, horizontal wall thousands of yards above the ground, extending along a parallel over the forest for miles, with nothing to suggest that the entire colossus shouldn’t topple as a mountain in itself to Earth. Its confusion is indescribable; my accounts have oftentimes been discounted by Aaron, and his by Gareth, for we each formed perspectives and fears of the overhangs, none the same, none even consistent within themselves. There were, hanging from the rock, thousands of geometries which we had to skirt, but there were so many and they were so varied. Forms seemed to recur as we wove about beneath baffling plates of rock, doubting our paramnesias. The filaments of color, the membranes that laced the ceiling like wafers, were static, but their effect was disturbingly animate. As we negotiated the stone roofs, we were closed upon by the rock. As soon as the last man had finished cleaning the pitch, we would look back in the direction from which we’d come and would know we were lost backwards, that we could only move by ascending, by going outward. We had come out of a myth, an elder Earth, and felt wrongly, fatefully, about it from the instant we were suspended.

Then one early gray dawn we could see the ending of the roofs, and we perceived a summit awaiting us over the rim. Before the ground below disappeared, I was struck by a last real vertigo while surmounting what we thought to be the last of a seventy-day wall-roof. I was on the pitch leading. I mantled onto a long and wide cup of amber flakes, but as I did so I was confronted by two tiny, insane things. They were crack animals such as we ate, but something in their extra-familiarity was abnormal. One opened its beak and shrilled at me, its black tongue lapping vilely. I backed away, one hand on the wall for balance. Wildly they sprung about, in a frenzy at my trespass. They were just crack animals, no larger than my hand, smaller than many I’ve killed, yet they had me backed against the rock. I went to my knees and began swatting at them, swinging my free hand at them with a fierceness to balance my fright. But they came on anyway. Their insistence was all the more intimidating; I’d never before had a crack animal chasing me, always they only hid. They pattered about in little circles, striving to drive me off their world. By chance I tapped one with my fingers and the creature was lifted up and across the lip of the basin. It shrilled feebly, then sank away. The other paid no heed and that one too, as light as a pebble, was caught with a swipe of my hand. It fell and I watched. And for the first time, still spastic from their miniature aggressions, I realized something of what was meant by my height. The yawning panorama had absorbed them valuelessly.

Suddenly I understood what danger I was in. Hitherto believing I had escaped by climbing apart from the world, I was reprimanded with sickness for having diluted a truth; there can be no escape from the ground, it would say, that womb, that voracious pit all spread out below in mocking. I froze and dizzied, became faint and desperate for solidity. I wanted the reassuring pressure of something firm against my body. I wanted total security of compassion in matter. I fell onto my belly, but as I lay prostrate it seemed my back might somehow betray me, perhaps fall and pull me with it. I clutched deeper and unhappier into the slight turf of the basin, then carefully, very slowly, I rolled onto my back. Crossing my arms over my chest, I cautiously looked into the sky, but it was all empty, depthless too, full of content (its blueness) but barren even of cloud, a formless form. I lay pinned hysterically on a platform in the thin mist, a last dream before the rock became the sky and the earth disappeared behind me and under my body, in both directions and backwards. I closed my eyes and lay miserably on my back, throbbing with wild intuitions of the hungry earth and the hungry sky absorbing me into its granitic eternity. We began coming upon decaying parchment fragments like chronicled flotsam on the rock. Folded or tucked into old haul bags, or tied within pieces of plastic that hung from the wall, we usually found these mementos in some isolated spot, rarely in the company of other journals. The dead men presumably preferred it that way.

Later we found several pairs of men wrapped in homosexual postures... tender deaths. And there were some signs of brutality, as in the case of one climber who’d been thrashed with a hammer. And brawls, verbal destruction, even two lynchings, all strung as twilights of inconsummate longing upon the rearing, unspeaking rock. Several of the journals mentioned tales that a certain climber, upon reaching ‘a summit plateau,’ kept on climbing, hanging slings and carabiners on tree limbs, playing out his few remaining meters of rope through ascenders as he crawled immortally over rocks and tree roots that carpeted his horizontal stone. At times he grew desperate as he maneuvered upon the ground, at times he was confident of his safety. He slowly perished that way, carrying the wall with him.

Toward the bottom many complained of banshee whispers. But gradually the individual ascents, each one toward the lassitude of varying degree, forced upon them all the realization that much of what was thought to be external (ghosts and screams) was in fact internal. However, it was hardly a soothing realization. Each climber had become an isolate, a centered organism with its own pantheon of unsharable, internal phenomena, accumulating a private transparency, echoes reshaping a convulsing and writhing world, effecting interior disasters (or salvations) whereby the climber would untie and return quickly to the blurred ocean and the soft humus below.

We continued on up the headwall. The months of progress over it were like research through vague tombs, daily efforts to recapture a past figure’s deeds and character in some prehistoric network. Gareth began assembling biographies, Aaron began compiling a grammar of linguistic cores. We read of men, of the signs they had used to appease their restlessness, and then we destroyed their diaries and the scraps of the wall’s history have long since blown away.

Except for the idea and reminders of our solo climber. Nearly every journal we read included two separate passages regarding this gentle creature. Everyone on the wall seems to have acknowledged him at some point. His story is like a branch.

Crudely put, he began as a beginner. Some of the journals swear this climber had never climbed before. Apparently he just approached the wall, then simply banged his way up the rock, a process variously interrupted for food, rest, and night. His style was comically inadequate, as testified to by journal italics. He was slow and an early doom was predicted for him by the many climbers who continually passed him. He was described as friendly and impeccable. Several climbers urged him to retreat from the wall. He didn’t. One party had to revive him from a coma brought on by exposure after a short fall. They stayed with him on a ledge for two days, urging him to get off the wall, and then climbed on. He followed slowly. In time he crossed the first great overhang and was thereby committed for the rest of his life to climbing the rock wall. His history becomes a blank for some time until a record of terrifying notice about his transformation. Perhaps he had found some hidden couloir with its own crack system and meditated there. It’s not unlikely that he came into contact with the legendary Taoist climbers, or the yamabushies. I don’t know. No one knows. The next mention is of his ease and his beautiful style, and awed descriptions of his smooth speed. He was said to have climbed naked, even on cold days when everyone else was suffering in their down jackets; one or two journals spoke of him climbing without the use of hands. One climber swears to have seen him ascending without touching the rock at all.

There are tales of cryptic chanting and footlessness. Some say he required no water but fed instead upon sunlight and his own saliva. One passage speculates with rather extreme detail and rhetorical treatment on the possibility that the soloist reached a top. The fragment is abstract but painstakingly defines the soloist lodged in a landscape of ascension ‘serenely reflected.’ After hopeless deliberation I considered it highly probable that the summit had indeed been reached by the soloist. I stared up the wall to its governing horizon of rock and sky and was pleadingly thrilled. If the summit truly existed, and if the soloist had reached it, then obviously there was a chance that we too would find it. It had a tremendous impact on our morale and pace. We covered large stretches of rock each day for many weeks, believing we could almost see it, but soon enough our excitement was played through and the tedium we had grown used to again resumed. We slowed our pace, climbed more methodically, hauled the food-sacks and water, the hammock, winter gear, our pens and paper. Little by little our newfound energy was sapped and expended. In its place we were left with a transient faith. That was enough, to believe there was a summit.... Years seemed to have seeped into my core... the delirium of past-ness, an impetus beyond memory.

Many climbers were left abandoned when their partners died, and for a while they’d carry on. Not as well, but at least for a while. We found traces of one climber who had taken off horizontally, knowing his suicide, seeking desperately perhaps an edge or corner to the wall. His packet of notes described the pathetic ambition; we know nothing about the actual attempt. He questioned the value of upward ascent and bravely, we thought, separated from the vertical flux. He left the traffic of the wall and became alone twice over, first he was cast into hermitage by his partner’s death (a sliced rope, we read), and then he tossed away all hope of reaching anywhere on the regular route, climbing sideways, wandering across the face. The cracks were few, though, and doubtful. His notes could have been anything: diversions, a dirge, dreams, a hoax. We wondered if he ever reached an edge to the wall. And as we wondered, we too began to sense the ritually fatal power of our dreams.

We climbed and found no summit. In winter it was too cold to climb so we settled on a huge corklike outcrop. Each winter morning we would wake coldly and everything around would be frozen. The lichen would be frosted, and the thin bed of water made into streaked glass. I later learned how to concentrate on the particles of sunlight and fire myself with their semblance of heat. We had nothing to burn. So we emerged from our bags and gathered close together to talk. To make warmth, or at least collectively to forget the cold.

But silence came. One bitter morning something happened. We gathered, shivering, standing in a tight circle, our hands tucked in the bellies of our sweaters, and we tried to talk. But terrible day, terrible sun... my first word became a white vapor, a netherness. Our winter breaths were marked by clouds of frost, a common fact of winter, one about which we’d never before cared. Until this day. “Gareth,” I said. And there Gareth hung, there he vanished in a puff of frost. We started, then gaped as it hung and drifted a little higher, finally evaporating. Before our very eyes the word withered. We all heard me say the word, each of us understood what I meant by it, but suddenly, breached by our space, it was emptied of inertia, of its semantic value. It was no longer the same, it was humiliated by the vaster elements, condemned to limbo. (Aaron later added the phenomenon to his grammar.)

We were astonished. We blinked.

“Gareth,” I said. This time we tracked the punctured cloud anxiously. The breath of frost rose again, but again it came apart. Our eyes deepened. The word was for a moment, but then it wasn’t. It went nowhere. It was inaudible music, a particular cadenza which was for us an artifact, an instant of locality beneath the compromise of matter. The whole affair is almost not worth mentioning, but... you see?

Strange. As we got higher and left below us the mist, and eventually the clouds too, and as the sun was less and less filtered, colors disintegrated. I can’t make distinctions between particular colors anymore. There is the sky color, no matter what color. And the rock is constantly the color of rock. Even we climbers and our multihued gear have lost color.

One day we would be in a gigantic chimney-crack, or again we’d find ourselves coaxing holds from an incipient groove, or squatting upon a ledge or hanging lazily beneath small, shading overhangs. But it was all the same rock, and only our experiences and perceptions fluctuated. After a while it seems the world froze and that the flux we sensed was merely internal and practically unreal. For a moment time has fallen asleep. At some other point we were born. Now, solidified like rock, time is ethereal and volatile as the sky. We climbed upon time as though it were mineral, and as we did we breathed it and our bodies exhibited time’s marks. Our grayed hair dozed in lengths.

We had long since escaped the pit, when suddenly it stirred and rose up after us. Some of the very old journals we’d collected had records of the mist ascending the wall. Those earlier men had described demons and angels that flew about within it, hunting, haunting climbers. The mist, it was recorded, was filled with music and scents, and now and then the sound of heavy objects fluttering down through thick air, or banshee screams of other climbers. They described peculiar agonies and frequent suicides. Gareth and Aaron and I meticulously read the accounts, but none of us could understand why the mist should be of such consequence. It seemed to us that the tracts concerning the mist were more like fairy tales that wearied climbers had invented for their survival.

But the day came when the wet smoke rose. Serenely it rose up, fathomless, extending for miles up into us, swirling about our ankles and knees, then drifting on high above, swallowing us on our wall. In it were the brilliant wet colors we’d known below, and there the agony began, for the vivid colors wrought memories we’d forgotten. Images flooded and exhausted us. After the first desperate days we became more and more vacant, and climbing was at last impossible. We found a large, flat tower of rock and made our camp there and for a long time hovered in our opiate, the mist, engulfed in the past, moist nostalgias, its rich texture even softened the callouses on my hands, ruining them. When I touched the rock they shredded like springtime fingertips. Aching, limbs would collapse not just from weariness, but from emptiness.

In the morning we would wake and excitedly begin chattering to one another, trying urgently to relate each valuable detail of our night’s dreams. The excited lesions of speech would quickly fall away as we collected ourselves in sad dissipation and sat closer together, one by one describing our nocturnal utopias. It was private territory and we each knew it would be a violation of the dreamer’s sacred cosmos if we dared offer a word of interpretation. Instead we’d nod ambiguously and wait several minutes before the next would set in with a dream, eager to spin it out.

Frequently, by the time our dreams had been told, half the day was gone. Though the sun was layered with heavy mist, we could still discern its relative position by its lighter aura in the murky sky; thus we could mark our days. After the dream-telling was done, we would retire to separate parts of the ledge, maybe to exercise on the rock or to sleep, but usually just to sit and remember. And later, when the sun was going down for the night, and the mnemonic afternoon was expended, we were visited by spirits. Those which other climbers had called demons and angels came to hover by and talk to us individually. We each had a personal conclave that hung by us; as mine was invisible to Aaron and Gareth, so theirs were to me. They were pit phantoms come to convince us to return to where we’d risen from. Mother phantoms came, and various succubae, and old friends showed their tender concern for me. Even philosophers and poets would come up to talk with me. They appealed to my passions and my reason, arguing and cajoling, debating, kissing my head. I sat hunched up, my eyes squeezed tight, listening and sometimes crying a little, envisioning past loves and duties, recalling ideals I’d once championed. They were sweet echoes, but I felt a need to deny them all. “What of the future?” I would ask the phantoms, and they would flicker hesitantly before ignoring my words. My firmness would dissolve and I’d remember all the good things, all the fine pasts, just by sitting there against the wall, sighing. At last I flailed my arms against the phantoms when they demanded I dance in the air with them. My knuckles began bleeding where I’d knocked them violently against the wall.

I stared at my blood and many things rushed into place. Rough hair, nails broken, hominidal fears at night, and hungers, yes, the bloodness being the great hunger. I licked my knuckles clean and watched as more of my own blood welled up. I began lapping the scrapes, drinking of myself. Hunger seeped through me, and when the phantoms circled again I croaked at them to leave me. “Look at me now,” I warned them. They reformed out beyond the ledge. You rest, they whispered, well leave. But I knew they’d return. Dreams and seasons have no evolution.

I glanced about. There were Gareth and Aaron, one lying in his bag, the other sitting in a corner smiling. I wanted to scream to them of the danger. Instead I went to Aaron, shook him gently, and pointed to the wall. His eyes were glazed in distance and his smile seemed permanent, but he nodded his head and murmured assent... “Tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll climb.” When I shook Gareth he struck at me, weeping.

So with pieces of sling and old rope I lashed him fast to the wall. He didn’t mind much. He struggled, but not with meaning. He was too possessed by the mist.

And next day, early in the morning I shoved and pushed Aaron awake. I was frightened that he might continue his depthless smiling, so I beat him. That morning we began our escape.

The first day we ascended only a short distance, but most importantly we began bleeding again and feeling ourselves as bodies and not as dreams. Each afternoon we’d return to the mist-enclosed ledge. Gareth recovered day by day, but still tended to collapse into reverie, so we kept him tied to prevent his suicide. We climbed each day, surrounded by the mist, shoving our way through its melancholia, fixing ropes for the coming day when Gareth could sanely join us.

I sat on a ledge for a long time, the rope draped around my waist and piled at my feet in loose coils as Aaron led above. Somewhere far below me Gareth was waiting for us to come sliding down to him with food. But I came awake instantly. Something about the rope insisted an end to my stupor. No words had been spoken, no warning, but I was suddenly alert to a tension burning down from above. Maybe the rope conducted the tension, maybe it was the air that was adhesive and saturated with urgency. And suddenly it came in an eruption of space. The ropes tension collapsed on itself as I clenched it anxiously. One moment there was tautness and demand streaking down into my hands, in the next I was left holding a limp substance, useless and without strength. Aaron was falling. The stillness woven deeply in the fibers leapt and the rope jumped fiercely; my palms screeched, taming the motion, searing, stopping the serpentine speed into sluggishness and final stasis of smelt flesh and inertia. I heard a distant slap high above me. Aaron had finished falling. The rope began pulling insistently at my waist, weighted on its far end. I set against it and wrapped it about my thigh, wondering why and how long the fall had been. In a minute there was the grappling sensation of lessening pressure, followed by a vibrating tug, and then a relaxation of the invisible pressure pulsing through the cord. Finally the hard pull eased, its tautness properly restored, fluid rather than enmeshed in the drastic sleekness of weight. I began working in the slackness as Aaron revived himself and started up the crack again.

From somewhere I remembered how immediately before the fall the air had been warm, the sun directly above me. But I was beginning to shiver with the coldness, and the sun was low by the time the rope released itself once again. Another crashing. This time the slap came two times quickly as I held the fall, then sounded twice more just before I felt his total weight pulling violently against my waist. This, I could feel, had not been a good fall.

I waited for Aaron to call something down, but he didn’t. He said nothing, just his weight. Invisible, existent only by the proof of the rope, he revived himself again. I could feel the rope jerking and releasing as he tried to pull himself into a prehensile position. Again I forced pain away from my burned hands, oblivious to the chill about my throat, demanding the same patience that dominated our life on the wall. I waited. Finally Aaron found a hold and the rope became unweighted again. I waited more. And while I lurked in my shadow (the pre-night), I heard what I had never dared to hear, an end to hope. It came like a small, dry bat through the fog; a groan, a tiny, bleached noise, muffled, half-sheltered by its shock, smothering. It was a memory, stars blowing hilted, stars in their cobalt flood of fear and aloneness infecting me in the night. An acute hum. I hit out, thrusting in every direction at the frightening blindness, and by chance my hand struck the rock. The spell snapped; there was rock, and my consciousness was restored, transfigured. My eyes came open. I could feel the rope again, and bit by bit I let the rope slide through my hands, running it as smoothly as my braking palms would allow. I worked him down through the mist gradually. Our sun was pallor, buried in the universe, already hinting at its usual bile black. One knew simply that one was; if he heard voices, or groans, he was conscious, and nothing more, of another, less verifiable existence. Aaron didn’t answer. I continued letting out the rope.

At last I could hear his feet scraping weakly at the rock as he tried vainly to keep his balance against the arcing wall. And his hands kept slinging against the opaque, moonless stone. I continued lowering him. Finally his slumped body materialized, all wet and dark. On his head was blackness, a frigid blue shimmering, and his sleeves were also wet and bloody. I pulled him onto the ledge and laid him out. The mist became verglas and illuminated his epileptic form. The gray cold was at its margin. Drained by the night, I knelt and manipulated him down an overhang toward insomnial Gareth.

For the fallen one, days were spent in the heap of his drugged, lacerated half-corpse. But soon enough he could drag himself about, and would lie gazing out into the mist, numb with his private thoughts. He slept, pampering his scabbed face even in his sleep, careful not to touch a large bald patch where his scalp had ripped. On a few fingers the nails were pulled off while on the rest, the cuticles had burst and bled, and his knuckles were flayed. A few times we had to kick him hard before he come awake from his delirium. But Aaron never really recovered from his fall, for though his wounds healed they were poisoned by the mist, and he was skittish and impacted with nightmares. One day the mist began to recede. Just like that, and we again became indistinguishable from the rock, and knew then we had risen slightly further.

We found a female mummy. She left no diary or notes. She was dried and desiccated after many years from hanging upon the wall. Tucked in her nylon hammock, she was well-covered with a thin silvery poncho that had at one time been painstakingly sewn as a lid to the hammock, but had long since been partly opened to reveal this precious corpse. Her hair was still long and beautiful, golden and soft. Short phrases of poetry were inscribed in the stone, and a multitude of names covered the rock above her head and chest; wreaths and bouquets of remembered loves that were immortalized here and dedicated to this one. How many had passed this way, brutal and hardened by the elements, and lifted the torn flap to witness her? Had there been even an intimation of company? But no, instead, each moving fragment of a body on this glossy wall, dissuaded by worn faith and weariness, persists deathlike to its own final isolation, there to be devoured by loneliness and gravity. For a moment, peering reverently at the body of this dusty and lofty female, I was gorged with her delicate process, her every grace. The fine woman. And the rock pushed at me with its slickness and with its fine-flaked, deep, deep sterility... but the woman, she never pushed toward death; instead to her own vanities, her clutching thighs, her fertility and population. I am her child, but what labors must I undergo to forget her? Some would challenge the contradiction on sheer principle and insist that consistency either is or is not valid. I never suffered as I poised between the rock and the female, but I can never eliminate that possession which was their harmony.

Another season of nailing and bouldering above our ledges transpired and we entered a weird, vertical plateau, still believing in the soloist and the escape he represented. Artistic exercises suddenly flooded the rock. There were carvings, bas-reliefs, etchings, poetic and philosophic engravings, statuettes, and figurines. Curiously, they all seemed confined to a particular zone, its area covering roughly three hundred square feet. It began and ended with no reason, its perimeter was not dictated by an encroachment of bad rock nor was it lined with cracks. It just ended, top, bottom, and side, by common aesthetic agreement. Climbers had religiously fixed pitons and bolts throughout the zone so that those hapless ones who followed would not accidentally chip or scar the art pieces while climbing through. All we had to do was snap our etriers onto the provided pins and we could easily ascend the vertical museum. We spent some two months in the region, rappelling and wandering about the abutments and fineries, returning to our hammocks each night to await the day when we could again resume our discoveries.

Everything was carved out of the wall rock. Pitons and drills had been skillfully wielded by the sculptors and masons, and the work had been beautifully polished by the wind. Some of the pieces were fragile, subject to destruction but at least temporarily surviving the elements.

All of the pieces, whether poetry or sculpture, reflected the medium of rock and the unavoidable reason for climbing forever. Everything was immediately apparent to us. But where had all the energy for this work arisen? Some of the pieces were overtly human creations and consisted of major rock workings, with heavy chiseling methods, while others were less forceful. These last works were milder compromises between natural design and human interpretation. Of these, some works were simple mineral patterns that were emphasized and highlighted by chip-out around the borders. The most gentle of the man-rock compromises were what we called the shadow creations. These offered grave difficulties to the understanding. Upon first glance they seemed just misshapen knobs, chicken heads, crystals jutting abnormally from the surface of the wall, but after some time we discerned that at certain moments the sun cast from these knobs particular and significant shadows which would stray sinuously across the granite entablatures surrounding them. The shadows were ephemeral, of course, and the work was only complete for a few minutes each day, but they were the most precious and abundant of works in all the zone. The more I became familiar with the shadow creations, the more I discovered in them. To my amazement I found that some of the knobs had been so carved as to give off a shadow pattern of one sort in the morning and an antithetical pattern in the afternoon. But then one day our hearts nearly burst when we recognized our own shadows. The rock, the immovable sun were devouring us in our introspection. Naively we had conceived of our immersion as a source of invention; it was our last intelligible clue.

In the mornings, with the first rays of sun, we would begin climbing. While Gareth and Aaron started up the crack, I would pack the sleeping bags and hammocks, rig the sacks for easy hauling, then jumar to where the others were waiting or climbing. I’d haul up the gear, fix it to the pins, and wait. Or climb, then wait. Or wait, then climb. The three of us could cover ten or twelve pitches in a period. We made leisure into a doctrine, trying not to sweat because water was so precious, breathing as regularly as we could, following the rhythm of our bodies religiously, and surviving by being conscious of that process of survival. When we came to what looked to be a sure death pitch, we would clamor for the lead, anxious to contradict our lethargy. But even death pitches lost their possibility and we’d sometimes hang for days, becalmed at one point and lacking all desire to do anything. We’d hum to ourselves all day as we lay, tightly pressed against the rock, in our hammocks, noting our passive miseries, sucking on pebbles, staring blankly at our hands or the similar sky. But these spells would grow heavy with their own unique tedium and soon enough we’d begin climbing again just because it was something else to do. Seasons passed.

A winter was approaching. Still, we were nowhere. Still following the primary crack, many pitches beneath us and no top, only the dull sky overhead and beneath us; no deviation from the grievous music that would rattle our afternoons.

And then, the first instance in over a year, curled and dead, self-buried beneath a shelf of rock and loose stones, lay a naked, still shimmering climber. I mantled frantically up onto the miniature pedestal and caught sight of his body, and after fixing the rope for the others to follow, I unburied him. His flesh was cold, yet it was still pliable, and when I caught his hand it was limp and flexible. The fingers would bend or straighten when I worked them, as would all his joints, and with a start I noticed that there wasn’t the slightest sign of discoloration or rotting. A saint, canonized? Some monk of the mount who had overextended himself? The corpse was not only intact, it was also undead. It smelled sweetly, like pine, and though it was dry it seemed fresh, even unctuous. And yet it was a dead thing. It didn’t breathe nor could it move. It was affixed in a limbo midway between deadness and life. It was ready to move; it was flexible and unrigid, but it was unable to actually initiate the movement it seemed to contain. It was a wonderment, but at second thought it was a terrible thing, a boneless, cold mass. It had bones, and was in every way a human body, but because of its preservation it seemed empty. It showed no sign of escape. Most terrible of all, when Aaron and I dragged it from its recess and pulled one of its eyelids open we discovered it was lacking an iris and pupil. It looked as though the eyeball was pure, white marble, unveiled and with a dull sheen to it. I could, I swear, even see the tiny crystals in its surface. But neither Aaron nor I would touch the eye.

And Gareth was behind us, gasping and snarling, tossing and wrenching his ruined wild head. I looked to Aaron for help, but he had pendulumed to an adjoining belay area, frightened immediately by what we both must have accented in our ancient suspicion, the finality of Gareth’s despair. All that night I was left on the ledge with Gareth and his madness. Aaron stood desperate, waiting somberly and shivering only some yards across and below. Gareth kept his head-shaking on and refused to answer to his name, keeping his clasped fists in primal hidden postures of innocence and disbelief. “Man,” I said, “What man?” But he only shook his head and wept on, snarling; so I tucked the unthinkable damp corpse back beneath its covering of rock and snapped myself into a piece of anchored sling lest my peril in Gareth’s presence be realized this night.

Then I walked to the limit of the sling and reached my hand out to Gareth and pulled him to me and hugged his tense head against my shoulder for our first contact in years. With this motion he groaned once and, weeping, gave over his fists to me quietly and at last. It was the journal, a mere few paragraphs of language, but it was the solo climber’s own journal and at that we all three were cast irrecoverably into infinity.

Abe (The Ascent)

“Standing here in the pit of this basin, it struck him that ascent was less an escape from the abyss than the creation of it.”

Author Note

In 1990 my friend David Breashears invited me to join him on a BBC expedition to the north side of Everest. The trip did not start auspiciously. A few of us arrived ahead of Brian Blessed, the British actor, and the rest of the BBC crew, only to find ourselves in the middle of a democracy revolution. We were the last foreigners to be allowed entry or exit, meaning we were present for a historic moment, one that would soon help inspire my novel, The Ascent.

Kathmandu was locked down with blackouts and martial law, giving us a taste of blunt force just before we were slated to enter Tibet, a nation crushed by the People’s Liberation Army. By day we sipped orange Fantas on the rooftop of our lodge, rode bikes to Nagarjung for training hikes, and photographed peaceful marchers. By night we wandered through roadblocks of burning tires and piled furniture. It was fun.

Then came the showdown. A huge crowd marched upon the King’s palace. I joined several other foreigners at the front with my camera, but around noon got thirsty and returned to my lodge. That’s when the popcorn started rattling in the distance. The army had positioned machine guns atop either side of the final block. Among the 100 to 200 killed were most of the foreigners at the front. The government promptly issued a report that there were no casualties. Through the night the bodies were trucked to mass graves.

Next morning a friend and I defied the military lockdown and walked to Bir Hospital, rumored to hold the wounded and remaining dead. Every intersection sported a machine gun nest. Broken glass littered the empty streets. Dogs limped. When the soldiers finally allowed us to enter the hospital, we found hundreds of casualties sitting packed together with no room to lie. Blood painted the walls. Most had head and bone injuries from beatings. The doctors took us behind a curtain to photograph the bodies of eight foreigners who had obviously been special targets. Filthy with gore and mud, and mostly naked from being dragged, they lay in a row on the cement floor. Later I timed my walk from the palace to my lodge: twelve minutes separated me from lying with them.

From Bir we made our way to the Yak and Yeti Hotel where the professional journalists were concentrated. Few had ventured from the hotel yesterday, none yet this morning. I handed off my film of the demonstration and the bodies to an eager American correspondent. I didn’t want money, just credit and a copy of the images. “Absolutely,” he said, “we’ll get it Stateside the instant mail service resumes.” I asked about immediate transport via diplomatic pouch. He frowned. I could feel any headlines about tiny Nepal already evaporating.

Returning to our lodge, we walked straight into a hornet nest of adventure travelers furious that our little human rights jaunt might have endangered their upcoming treks. For our information, revolutions were considered acts of war, and as such not covered by their insurance policies. So was I going to pay if their treks were cancelled due to my meddling? This democracy revolution thing was a local tug of war, didn’t I know, and none of our business. My astonishment would soon come in handy.

A day later the King abdicated, the curfew lifted, and the BBC crew arrived. We headed straight for the Tibetan border and Everest. Jim Whittaker’s long planned Peace Climb, intended as a literal “summit” of Soviet, Chinese and American superpowers, had survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and the slaughter at Tiananmen Square the previous year. Their climb was in progress.

By arrangement, our mini-expedition hitchhiked on their permit and ropes, and occupied our own little camp by the pond where the latrines now stand. That’s where I wrote The Ascent, disappearing into my tent whenever we weren’t on the mountain. An old and familiar fever had settled upon me. I had to get the whole book on paper, right here and now before I left Everest.

It was not convenient. There were ruins, photo sites, personalities, and Rongbuk Monastery to explore. But my latest taste of Kathmandu had triggered a sense of urgency. The martial law, the state sanctioned massacre, the Know Nothing adventure travelers, the journalists’ failure to investigate: on a miniature scale, all spoke to where we were and why I had come: Tibet.

For thirteen years, ever since my release from the jails of Kathmandu in 1977 and well before the Free Tibet movement, I had been writing articles, editorials, and letters about the destruction of Tibet’s extraordinary culture. I wrote a feature piece for Rocky Mountain Magazine about the CIA training Tibetan guerrillas in Colorado. Most of the guerrilla command and the Dalai Lama’s special envoy had lived in the cell next to mine, leading me to weave in a secondary story with myself as a bit character. I was learning: story is everything.

Interest in Tibet picked up in the late 1980s, due in part to Galen Rowell’s writing and photographs. Once again a climber was one of the first to witness events unseen by professional journalists and the public. He espoused a different kind of photojournalism in which the photographer participates in the image, a creative approach that mixed visual and narrative storytelling.

As attention grew, it seemed Tibet might actually get a shot at autocracy. In the mid-1990s hopes soared when Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon. Richard Gere and Harrison Ford had been supporters for a long time. 1997 marked the release of two feature films about Tibet. One was Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, about the young Dalai Lama. The other was Seven Years in Tibet starring Brad Pitt, who played Heinrich Harrer, the alpinist (first ascent of the Eiger), and author. Most of Seven Years in Tibet was filmed in South America. Few people know that David Breashears secretly shot some of the most powerful scenes inside Tibet, assisted by the explorer and Everest powerhouse Pete Athans and acclaimed writer and Himalayan authority Brot Coburn, who translated and doubled as Brad Pitt, a climber portraying an actor portraying a climber. Yet again climbers were in the vanguard, witnessing and sharing worlds beyond ordinary imagination.

At the time of the BBC Everest shoot (1990), the Hollywood movies were still years away. But something was in the air. It had less to do with street level activism, lobbying in Congress, or marches on the UN, and more to do with the kinetic energy of storytelling. I sensed it: people didn’t want editorials, condensed histories, Buddhist teachings, or fact sheets. They wanted to be told a story, and I wanted to tell at least one.

I have a glass ceiling. At 25,000-feet I crash. Pulmonary edema, retinal hemorrhages, and mini-strokes send me back to earth. This time I flamed out at Camp IV on the North Col route. Overnight my left side went numb and weak, and the hemorrhages wrecked my vision. I descended straight into the hands of a Harvard ophthalmologist who had been waiting for weeks for someone to develop retinal hemorrhages. Wearing oxygen, I returned to Base Camp with a snow-blind climber, and was evacuated by Land Cruisers to Kathmandu. I wanted to stay, but was ready to leave. The first draft of my novel was complete. Rough as tree bark, it would need five more drafts. But my little stack of legal pads contained the general shape, characters, and tension I wanted to express Tibet’s plight.

Even as I plunged into my next book, The Ascent took on a life of its own and commenced to pull me after it. My mention of The Cowboy Junkies led to a road trip to Everest with lead singer Margo Timmons and her husband Graham Henderson. It was late November and iron cold. Our group suffered the washboard roads cocooned in sleeping bags. We reached Rongbuk Monastery, and the monks rented us rooms in the ruins by the prayer hall. Upon learning Margo was a singer, they suspended their evening prayers and requested a song.

Three days earlier we had left Kathmandu, elevation 4,500 feet. Rongbuk stands at 16,000 feet. Still jetlagged, we had headaches and just wanted to crawl into our bags. Margo is an artist, though, and tough as a boot. No different from a writer, her voice is her gift, and now she shared it. The literal translation of a cappella is “in the manner of the church.” So it was. I don’t know where she got the air to sustain the opening phrases. And then blood began trickling from her nose.

Margo did not pause to wipe it away, just kept singing to the end. The monks stared at each other, amazed by the beauty. One spoke. They wanted an encore. In the lap of Everest, Margo gave them one.

As with all my climbing novels, The Ascent failed to get a foothold in the mainstream, and did not earn out its small advance. In the old days, editors held a long view about a writer’s body of work. Then corporate publishing invaded, slicing advances, firing editors, and fixating on writers’ sales numbers. The Ascent’s numbers cost me when it came time for my next advance. That’s why the term “labor of love” exists.

But the rewards far outweighed the losses. Margo’s songs were one reward, a revelation. Out of the blue I received the American Alpine Club’s Literary Award, which led to me joining the committee, a huge honor and also a way to indirectly extend my voice. The greatest honor was the British Boardman-Tasker award for mountain literature, triply significant because The Ascent was its first American winner, and because it brought attention to a human rights novel and helped spread my preachments about climbers as witnesses.

Around the same time Steven Seagal optioned the novel. Warner Brothers commissioned me to adapt it for film. Our first meeting, in his living room showcasing a select few samurai swords, took me by surprise. As we discussed the story, one element after another fell away. The opening chapter was all wrong? So was the second chapter, and pretty much all the rest. The expedition? He did not speak. Everest? Not necessary.

My education was just beginning. To begin with, Seagal is a very smart man who knows his market. Over many years and films, he has crafted a persona that is bankable. Bankable means a fairly steady box office return, and that means a fairly predictable budget for his next films. Budget sets the scale and scope of the concept.

Take the words mountain, Everest and snow. They are the kiss of death in Hollywood. To us they name environments we know as climbers. To a producer, they are shorthand. Midway through my script one afternoon, a production assistant stopped reading and asked pointblank if I was crazy.

She pointed at a passage: “Night: the horses’ hooves clap on the frozen river.” “The horses?” I asked. “The night?” ‘Ice,” she hissed. Clearly ice was bad, very bad. I came to appreciate that to her the word represented a universe of problems and uncontrollable expenses. Ice meant cold, and brought with it accidents, higher insurance rates, more expensive sets, lost time waiting out storms, remote locations with long distance logistics, and much more. Ice also spoke to other films with ice, including the size of their budgets, cost overruns, and the big ticket flops like K2.

I changed the sentence. “Night: the horses’ hooves splash in the river.” “Don’t let it happen again,” the lady warned me, and continued reading.

Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet came out. China was not happy. It became known that any other anti-Chinese films would lock the production company out of their market, not just for that film but the company’s whole backlist of cartoons, dramas, and so on. It worked. Warner Brothers killed the film. My screenplay for a completely different story, but still based on the film rights to my novel and titled The Ascent, disappeared into a vault.

- JEFF LONG

Abe (The Ascent)

From far north, a breeze rushed and the forest creaked in a wave. The rescue men waited in the frozen white of their car beams, acid from too much coffee, souring among the pines. Abe had never felt cold like this. He tried warming himself with the memory of their midnight breakfast in a truck stop—the fake maple syrup, the bacon, the men’s jokes to a waitress with yellow teeth—but then another breeze came through.

It had been an all-night drive to reach this dead end in the heart of Wyoming. Sometime around one the Jimi Hendrix on their airwave had surrendered to honky-tonk and then near four the cowboy ballads had fallen into dark mountain static. The road had quit at dawn and the forest had swallowed them whole and now here they were, kicking about a wild goose chase. If the dead or wounded—the lost—in fact existed, there was no evidence, none, no car, certainly no tracks, not with this fresh dusting of snow.

None of them were big men really. And yet they mustered like unshaven giants—at least to Abe’s eye—stomping the snow with lug-soled boots and snorting great streams of white frost through their nostrils. They scared him, though for the most part that was because he had finally, at the age of almost eighteen, succeeded in scaring himself. For as long as he could remember, Abe had wanted to climb mountains. The trouble was he was no mountain man, just an east Texas oil patch brat, a college freshman who’d never climbed in his life except through the pages of National Geographic and adventure books.

A ghost of white powder cast loose from the boughs to ride the air in ripples. Snow splashed Abe in the face, then went on. Once more he was left facing the forest in a cupful of men, a watchful boy with a long blade of a face and brass wire-rims and a squared-off homecut. He was wearing immaculate white-on-white winter camouflage purchased with hurried guesswork yesterday afternoon at Boulder’s army surplus store. The rest of the men were dressed in real clothes: wool and down mostly, most of it patched up and greasy from use.

Abe could tell they weren’t yet finished hanging their jokes on him. It was hard saying what stung more, the justice of their mockery or the mockery itself. He didn’t blame them. He looked ridiculous. He didn’t belong here, that was sure. But then again, they were all outsiders. Dawn had broken an hour ago with a bright but steely winter sun. And so their engines were kept running and their headlights were on and they were pretending to get illumination and heat from the man-made beams. To some extent, they were all making believe.

At long last their wait ended. “Got him,” a voice among them shouted, and the pack of men thronged the shortwave set. It was a Fish and Game pilot calling in. He’d been scouring the peaks since first light and had, he announced, just sighted one of the accident victims.

The rescue leader spoke up, a gruff, meticulous sort with a stained mustache and a white helmet stenciled with ROCKY MOUNTAIN RESCUE. “Ask him can he sweep for the other victim,” he said to the radio man. “Tell him there’s got to be two. Nobody climbs alone. Not in this kind of backcountry. Not in winter.”

But the leader was fishing. In fact, they had no facts. No names, no locations, no missing person reports. Nothing but a drunk elk poacher’s phone call about a climbing accident on a mountain in Wyoming.

The pilot answered from far off. He refused. The weather had turned and he couldn’t stay. There was only the one victim. He’d looked. He approximated his coordinates for their map finding.

“Ask him the man’s condition,” said the leader.

“Oh, he’s down there,” came the thinning voice. “He’s alive all right. Flopping around on the high glacier.”

“Damn it,” snapped the leader. “Is the man hanging on a face? Is he wandering? Is he tore up? What’s his condition?”

“Wait till you see this one,” the pilot said. “In all my days...” Their reception tore to rags.

“Repeat, over.”

The voice resurfaced, small and halt. “... like a gutshot angel,” they heard. That was it, just enough to frown at and shrug away.

“Screw that,” someone said.

“Well, whoever he is, let’s go save him,” said the leader, and they broke the huddle to go saddle on their gear.

In all the mass of hardware and meds they off-loaded from the trucks and jeeps, there was not one single item Abe knew how to use or even handle. Abe recalculated his foolishness. He was a liability, not a savior, and his bluff was getting called. But he couldn’t bring himself to confess.

He had joined up, gambling the rescue team would teach him the ropes, literally, as time passed. Afraid they would judge him too young, or his unchipped fingernails or bayou accent would expose him as a flatlander, he had entered the rescue office shyly and with his hands in his pockets. When they asked if he had experience, Abe had said yes, though carefully, keeping the sir off his yes, and dropping the names of some mountains in Patagonia which he figured to be safely obscure. Only two days later—yesterday afternoon—they’d phoned him in urgent need of dumb backs and strong legs. And now he could not share that this was the first snow he’d ever seen and the coldest sun he’d ever woken to. This was his first mountain.

They set out through the trees, shortcutting along a frozen river. The water was animal beneath its sturdy shell. Abe could hear it surging under the ice. Its serpentine motion came up through his boots. Here and there the river ice had exploded from the cold and its wounds showed turquoise and green.

Christmas was near and so they were undermanned, meaning everyone was overloaded. Some carried hundred-meter coils of Goldline rope and homemade brake plates, others hauled the medicines and splints and the team’s sole, precious Stokes litter, a crude thing made of welded airplane tubing and chicken wire.

Abe stayed alive to the other men’s cues, to how they breathed and how they set their feet and leaned into their pack straps and to how they just plain managed. With every step he was reminded all over again of his hubris, for he’d loaded his pack himself, hastily and without any order, and now something was stabbing his kidneys and the bags of saline solution kept rocking him off-balance. Each boot step chastised him. He didn’t belong, he didn’t belong.

The sun died at noon in a gangrene sky. Shortly after, they broke the treeline, but their first clear view of the coppery mountains was undermined by dark storm clouds looming north and west. Even Abe could tell the advancing storm was going to be a killer, the fabled sort that freezes range cattle to glass and detonates tree sap, leveling whole forests.

The line of men struck north across a big plateau scoured bare to the dirt. The wind sliced low, attacking them with a fury that Abe tried not to take personally. In a matter of minutes his glasses were pitted by the high-speed sand. If not for the ballast on his back, the wind would have sent him tumbling down the mountainside.

Midway across the plateau they startled a herd of skeletal deer grazing among the stones. “They oughtn’t be up here,” one rescuer observed. “It’s strange.” The deer clattered off with the wind.

The cold day drew on. The air thinned and people quit talking altogether. They hunched like orphans beneath the overcast. Wind bleated against the rocks, a maddened sound.

As it turned out, none of the team had ever visited this region. For budgetary reasons, Wyoming was far beyond their normal range of operations. Abe was secretly gratified that the group seemed as lost as he felt. When the leader unfolded their USGS topo to match its lines with the geological chaos around them, the wind ripped his map in two and then ripped the halves from his hands. After that the group tightened ranks. The mountains took on a new sharpness against the ugly sky.

Nearing the coordinates given them by the pilot, the team reached a natural doorway that suddenly opened onto a hidden cirque of higher peaks. Despite the poisoned sunlight, it was a spectacular sight in there. To Abe it looked like a vast granite chalice inlaid with ice and snow. On every side glacial panels swept up to enormous stone towers girdling the heights. All around, men muttered their awe, and Abe thought this must be how it was to discover a new land.

And then they saw the climber.

“He’s alive,” someone said, glassing the distance with a pair of pocket binoculars. “There’s one alive.”

Abe couldn’t see what they were talking about until a neighbor handed him a camera with a telephoto lens and pointed.

Perhaps a half-mile distant and a thousand feet higher, a lone figure was kneeling upon the glacial apron, unaware that rescue had arrived. His head was bare, black hair whipping in the wind. He swept one arm up and out to the storm and Abe could see him shouting soundlessly.

“That poor bastard,” the man with the binoculars declared to the group, “he’s talking to the mountain.”

“Say again.”

“I swear it. Look yourself.”

Abe breathed out and steadied the telephoto lens. The mountain dwarfed the tiny figure and Abe tried not to blink, afraid of losing this solitary human to all that alien expanse.

The climber repeated his motion, the arm raised high, palm out. Abe realized that he was seeing desperation or surrender or maybe outright madness.

After a minute, the climber bent forward and Abe noticed the hole in front of his knees. It was a dark circle in the snow and the climber was speaking to it as if sharing secrets with an open tomb.

“He’s praying,” Abe murmured, though not so anyone could hear. But that’s what he was seeing, Abe knew it instinctively. Abe was shaken, and quickly handed the camera and telephoto lens back to its owner.

“Well if he’s got a buddy, I don’t see him,” the man with the binoculars pronounced. “One’s better than none, folks. Let’s go snatch him before this front hammers us in.”

They hurried. Another twenty minutes of hard march over loose stone brought them to the base of the glacier. Abe edged over and stood on the ice, feeling through his boot soles for the glacier’s antiquity. He’d never seen a glacier before, but knew from his readings that this plate of snow and ice had been squatting in the shadows ever since the last ice age.

The rescuers opened the big coils of rope and strapped on their scratched red-and-white helmets and their cold steel crampons. Abe watched them closely and covertly. Between bursts of wind, they heard a distant howling. It didn’t sound human, but neither did it sound animal. A gutshot angel, Abe remembered.

With a hunger that startled him, Abe wanted to get up close to the blood. It was imperative that nothing keep him from that fallen climber. Something profound was awaiting them up there. He could tell by the way these hardened men had turned somber and frightened. Whatever it was, Abe wanted to see the sight raw, not after they had packaged it and brought it down in a litter. It was an old hunger, a simple one. Abe wanted to lose his innocence.

They set off up the glacier, three to a rope, alert for crevasses. Abe was alive to the new sensations. They stepped across a two-foot-wide crack in the field. It cut left and right across the glacier. As he straddled the crevasse, Abe filled his lungs, trying to taste the mountain’s deep, ancient breath.

One of the rescuers pointed at skid tracks leading up the glacier. It reminded Abe of an animal’s blood trail. “There’s his fall line,” the man said. “How’d he live through that?”

Abe stared at the rearing stone and ice, but it was a cipher to him. Standing here in the pit of this basin, it struck him that ascent was less an escape from the abyss than the creation of it. He peered at the heights. A girdle of hanging snow ringed the upper rim. It was an avalanche about to happen. The thought gave new urgency to his step.

As they drew near, Abe heard more distinctly the climber yelling and calling to himself. Closer still, and the climber heard them and he turned his shaggy head. Abe was surprised. The climber was a boy, no older than himself.

But even from twenty yards away, the young climber’s eyes were too bright and his clothes were rags, what was left of them, and on his knees in that limbo of gray light Abe thought he looked more like the Lazarus of his grandmother’s worn leather King James than a mere teenager in the wilderness.

The rescuers slowed their mechanical pace, intimidated by the strange sight. His jacket was gone and his sweater half off. Now Abe saw that the boy had pulled the clothing away himself. He had started to bare himself to the wilderness.

“You’re okay now,” someone offered to the climber. But there was no trust in the climber’s look, no welcome, certainly no relief. He didn’t speak.

Abe saw that his white T-shirt was soaked in blood and that his left shoulder bulged with a dislocation. His left hand clutched a short ice axe, and with the blood on its silver pick, the axe looked like a medieval weapon.

The rescuers formed a wide circle around the young climber as if they had brought something dangerous to bay. His black hair hung clotted with snow and he had wolf eyes, blue and timid, and he’d been weeping.

“Hey there.” Someone’s cold voice. “We got you now.”

“You want to lay down that axe there?” another rescuer tried. His voice was too loud, and it struck Abe, they were afraid of this boy.

The way the climber stared through them, Abe felt like a ghost. The boy didn’t lay down his axe. Its handle lay loose in his gloved hand, a green wrist strap in place. Abe guessed the axe was responsible for the long, seeping gash in his opposite arm.

While the climber knelt in their center—mute now, seeming deaf, too—they discussed him, diagnosing his wounds and trying to understand what had made him so empty and menacing. But to Abe’s ear, they were simply diagnosing their own fear.

“What do you think?” one of the rescuers asked another. “Hypothermia?”

“Maybe concussed. Probably. I don’t see a helmet.”

“One way or the other, he’s about as gone as they get.”

“Well what we need’s his second,” the leader got on with it. “Where’s your second at, boy?”

Getting no answer, the leader turned away. “Joe,” he said, “take some men and hunt around. There’s got to be a body somewhere. Maybe it hung up higher on a rock or what have you.” The one named Joe patted three men on their helmets and they started up.

The two men by Abe’s side continued their evaluation. “I don’t see frostbite. A puncture wound on the right thigh, though. And look at the inside of his hand. It’s cut to the bone.”

At last they noticed the rope tied to his waist harness. It was a beautiful blue rope with red hatching and it led directly into the hole. Abe saw the pink blood marks in the snow and recognized that the climber had stripped his hand raw pulling on the rope.

“Now we’ll just take it from here, son,” said a man with brushy sideburns. He edged close and gently reached for the blue rope. With a howl, the boy reacted, swinging his axe in a wild arc. He missed goring the rescuer by an inch.

And then they heard a voice.

Dreamlike, it called from far away. It could have come from another valley or from the top of the mountains. Or the bottom of a crevasse. “Daniel?” it said.

“Oh dear God,” one of the rescuers breathed.

The leader whistled loud and sharp, and uphill Joe and the others came to a halt. “Down here,” the leader shouted. “We found the other one.”

“Daniel?” someone said. “Is that your name, Daniel?”

The boy looked at them with a mask of pure horror. “Daniel,” the rescuer pressed him. “Is that your buddy down there?”

Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and tipped back his head. His lips curled back from his teeth and he opened his throat to the sky. What came out was a terrible wrenching groan, something from a nightmare. Then his rib cage spasmed with huge, hoarse sobs.

Abe’s mouth fell open at the climber’s pain.

While the climber did his weeping, two of the rescuers rushed him from behind and took away his axe. They were gentle, but he was strong and they ended up jostling his disjointed shoulder and he screamed.

“Daniel,” the tiny voice called out from the crevasse.

This time they heard it more distinctly and it nearly caved in Abe’s heart. Someone among the rescuers whispered “no.” Except for that there was silence for a minute. Even the mourning climber fell mute.

“Are you all right?” asked the voice.

It was a woman down there.

“What the hell?” someone demanded.

Now their pity hardened. Abe saw them grow blunt. Astounded. Their gentleness was gone.

“You brought a girl up here?”

The climber turned his eyes away from them and stared blankly at the hole in the snow.

“All right, boys.” The leader finally rallied them. “That storm’s not going away. Let’s do our job.”

It was one thing to disarm the boy, they discovered, something else to separate him from his blue rope. He didn’t want to relinquish that bond with the voice from below. He held on to the rope with his good hand, the one with the mutilated palm. But once they had tied it off to an ice screw and cut the blue knot, Daniel gave up and seemed to go somewhere else in his mind.

He knelt there, unbudging, as if his legs were bound to the very mountain. In a sense, they were. They learned this for themselves when they lifted Daniel and laid him flat on the snow and ran their hands up and down his body. Both of his knees were shattered, both femurs fractured. Daniel seemed not to care. He seemed dead within his own body.

Abe stood back as the team frantically raced against the storm. Over where they’d laid the boy, two men labored at piecing the halves of the litter together and several arranged ropes for the carry out. Two more knelt over Daniel, fitting his legs with air splints from the Vietnam War and taping his arm across his chest. They weren’t exactly rough, but they weren’t gentle either. They didn’t try to reduce the shoulder, just stuck him with a hit of morphine.

Abe was staggered by the dire scene, by the blood and unhinged bones and the dark clouds and the voice in the hole. Several men set to work with the blue rope.

“We’re the rescue, miss,” one called down into the crevasse. If she said anything in return, no one heard it, not with the wind mounting and the frenzied shouting and the clank of gear. A man hauled out long hanks of blue rope until it came taut. They tugged on the line experimentally.

“She’s down there probably seventy, eighty feet,” guessed the man with the hanks of blue rope in his hand.

“Get her the hell out,” the leader called over. “And be quick.”

Abe went over to help. Bending to take up the blue rope, he noticed it was smeared with gore, what had once been Daniel’s flesh and blood. For the next five minutes he and the other men yanked and hauled on the rope, but it was fixed in place.

“You budge, miss?” the man with sideburns shouted down the crevasse. Abe put his head directly over the hole. A few feet below the surface, the ice showed dark green. Below that was blackness and Abe turned his eyes away quickly, as if the darkness were obscene.

“Nothing,” said the little voice in the hole.

Abe was surprised by how clear the voice rose to him once his head was right over it. It slid up the glass walls, distinct and free of echoes, counterpointing the building storm.

They pulled again, and this time Abe thought there was progress, but it was only the rope’s natural stretch. “How about that?” shouted Sideburns.

“No,” said the voice.

They tried again, this time with a complicated winch system of slings and ropes and customized equipment. When that produced no results they tried a different configuration of parts and pulled again. Again it didn’t work. She was jammed.

“How about it Ted?” Sideburns asked a small man.

“I’ll try,” said Ted. While a third man cut away the snow fringing the hole, Ted shucked his jacket, then his sweater and shirts. He tied another rope around his waist and had them lower him down the crevasse. No matter how he shimmied though, the ice walls were too tight. He got only about five feet down into the darkness and finally called for them to pull him out. He shook his head no and dressed again.

“What on earth possessed him?” Sideburns said, glaring over at Daniel. “Now look at what it is.”

“He should have known a whole lot better,” someone agreed. “I wonder how old she was.” Past tense. Abe cut him a side glance, but already he was trooping off, and Sideburns and the others were walking after him. Abe dumbly followed them, then realized that they were indeed abandoning the effort. He halted.

“You want me to keep trying?” he said.

The men kept walking. “She’s jammed,” one pronounced.

“I can start digging,” Abe offered hopefully.

No one bothered answering him.

Abe saw how useless he was to them, illiterate in their universe of glaciers and mountain storms and green ice. Their very language—of brake plates and ‘biners and front pointing and all the rest of it—excluded him. He felt stupid and vulnerable and put himself to work picking up whatever litter didn’t blow away.

“You,” Abe heard. The team leader had spotted him off by himself. “Come over here.”

Abe approached. The leader handed him a small notebook and a pencil.

“I want you to go over and talk to that girl in the crevasse. Get her name, hometown, a phone number, you know, next-of-kin kind of stuff. Don’t panic her. Keep her spirits up until we get things figured out. Can you do that?”

Abe nodded his head. He walked over to the black hole and knelt down in the imprints left from Daniel’s knees. He peered into the darkness and licked his lips, suddenly shy.

He couldn’t see this woman trapped below the surface, and she couldn’t see him. All they had were words, and Abe wondered if words could be enough. He felt like a child talking to a blind person. Before he could speak, however, the woman spoke to him.

“Hey,” the voice called up from the darkness. “Is everybody gone?” She didn’t ask, Is anybody there? It struck Abe that she had no expectations. None. And yet she sounded calm and with no begrudging.

“No.” Abe cleared his throat. ‘’I’m here.”

“Is Daniel going to be okay?”

Abe flinched at the question. Whose was this voice that put another person’s welfare before her own? But at the same time, Abe felt relief. He reckoned that whoever it was down there had to be comfortable and secure, otherwise she would have sounded hysterical. Such calmness had to have a reason. Maybe she’d landed on some soft snow down inside, or simply bounced to a stop on the end of the rope. Abe’s spirits picked up. Everything was going to be okay.

“Yes. He’s fine,” Abe answered. “What’s your name?”

“Diana.”

She didn’t ask for his name, but Abe told her anyway. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, then remembered what the leader wanted. “Where are you from?” he asked.

She said, Rock Springs.

He asked for her phone number. She gave it, but warily. When he asked her address, she suddenly seemed to lose interest in his interrogation.

“Is that the wind, Abe?” Her voice was weary and yet alive with instincts. She knew there was a storm building.

Abe lifted his face to the cold gale. They were racing both the storm and nightfall now. Any minute now, the others would come over and figure out how to pull this lonely woman out of the crevasse and they could all leave the mountain and go home.

“We’ll get you out,” Abe said. “Don’t worry.” His words sounded little as they fluttered down the hole, mere feathers. The woman didn’t waste breath returning the brave assurance and Abe felt rebuked.

“Are you hurt?” Abe asked.

“I don’t know.” Her voice got small. “Are you going to get me out?”

“Of course. That’s why we came.”

“Please,” she whispered.

Abe tried to understand what that might mean.

“Is there anything you want? Maybe I can lower something.” Abe was thinking of food or water.

“A light, please.”

Abe goggled at the simplicity of it. He tried to summon an image of being trapped down there, but nothing came. He couldn’t visualize lying caught in the glassy bowels of the earth. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll try.”

Abe stood and approached one of the rescuers, who eyed the hole in the snow before parting with his headlamp. He seemed reluctant or maybe just sad, and his attitude irritated Abe. On his return to the crevasse, Abe borrowed one of their coils of Goldline rope.

“I have a light,” Abe yelled down the crevasse. He felt more useful now. He was this woman’s sole link to the surface. Once they rescued her, she would recognize Abe by his voice and embrace him. She would hold him tight and weep her thanks into his shoulder.

Lying on his belly, Abe flicked the headlamp on, stretched his arm and head into the hole and shined it down. He had thought to find the climber sitting far below at the bottom of a rounded well shaft. Instead the crevasse presented crystal lips no wider than a man’s rib cage.

To his right and left, the crevasse stretched off into dark, terrifying rifts. Except for this accidental hole, the crevasse was covered over with snow, perfectly concealed from above. Forty feet down, the icy walls curved underneath where Abe was lying. The blue rope led down and under and disappeared from sight.

“Can you see the light?” Abe shouted.

“No,” she said. “It’s dark here.”

Abe was glad to extract his arm and head from that awful hole and return to the surface. Even those few seconds had threatened to rob his self-possession.

While Abe talked and asked questions, he tried lowering the headlamp on the Goldline rope. But the braids were new and stiff and the curve of the walls blocked passage at the fortyfoot level. Abe pulled the headlamp back out.

“Can you catch it?”

“I can try.”

“I’ll keep the light on so you can see it coming.”

Abe reached as deep as he could before letting the headlamp go. Its light ricocheted from the deeper walls, then blinked out. Abe thought the headlamp had broken in the drop. Then he heard the voice.

“Ah God,” she groaned.

“Did you get it?” Abe had expected joy. She had been delivered from darkness. But as the silence accumulated, Abe realized that with the light had come the truth, and now the woman could judge her awful predicament.

“What do you see?”

There was no reply. Abe hung his head into the hole and waited but all he heard was the wind outside. The storm was ripe. He looked up at the darkening sky, then over at the rescuers bustling around the litter. They had snugged Daniel into a sleeping bag and strapped him into the litter. Some of the men were putting their packs on and they looked close to leaving. Now the team could devote all of its energies to extracting Diana.

The team leader walked over to Abe and sternly crooked his finger to draw him away from the hole. Abe pushed up to kneeling. “All right,” said the leader. “We’re going down now. We’ll need every hand. Go saddle up.”

Abe was sure he had misunderstood. “Her name is Diana,” he explained. “She has a light now.”

The leader exhaled unhappily. “You didn’t do her any favor.”

Abe didn’t know what to say. “She’ll be fine,” he finally blustered.

“I’m glad you think so. Anyway, we’re shorthanded. If we can get the litter down before this storm ... hell, if we can get the litter down period, we’ll be lucky.”

Abe persisted. “We can dig her out.”

“Dig her out?” The leader’s eyes glazed over. “She’s deep. Way too deep. That kid had no right bringing her to this.”

“But if we all pull... “

“Look, Tex...” And suddenly Abe knew they knew him. He had fooled no one. “Down at the bottom, a crevasse thins into a V. You fall far enough, hard enough, and you get wedged down there. After a while your body heat melts you down tighter. Every minute that girl’s alive, every breath, she’s working down deeper.”

“But we’re not leaving her down there.”

“We’ll come back.”

“When?”

The leader paused. His crow’s-feet pinched into a fan. “When we can.”

“But we have to save her.” For the first time, Abe noticed how the rest of the team was shunning the hole.

“We can’t, not with things how they are. Maybe later, after she starves some more, loses some of her tissue mass, maybe then. But I doubt it.”

Abe shook his head-against this directive, against his vision of a human being pinned in an envelope of clear ice, broken and freezing and blind and yet still aware, still full of her own history and future. She had probably eaten a breakfast yesterday much like they had last night, had probably walked on the same river ice and spooked the same herd of starving deer and crossed this same glacier. And now they were condemning her to infinite darkness.

“Look,” said the leader. The icy tails of his gray mustache waggled. “Sometimes this is how it goes. You do a triage. You figure the odds. You save the ones you can save. And you leave the ones you can’t. Now it’s going to be a long carry out of here. We’re leaving. I want you to go saddle up. I’ll go tell that girl the news.”

“No,” said Abe. “I’ll tell her.” He had the right to the last word. He had touched this blue rope. He had given this woman light and whatever terrible sights that attended.

The leader made a few thoughtful stabs at the hard snow with his ice axe, then he walked off without saying more. The rescuers at the litter had turned their backs to Abe and the hole.

Abe checked his watch, then shook it. Only twenty-five minutes had elapsed since their arrival. Surely hours had passed. He couldn’t fathom what was unfolding all around him. They hoisted the litter like a coffin, three men to a side, one standing back and feeding out a safety rope in case they slipped.

The wind sucked at Abe’s face, then slapped him. The first snowflakes rattled against the shell of his new white windjacket. The storm was cracking wide open. Their little motions and hopes could do nothing to hold the sky together any longer. The rescue was over, at least for the woman inside this mountain. Abe lay down by the hole to tell her so.

“Hello?” Abe called down.

There was no reply. Abe could feel the blackness down there surrounding that solitary light.

“We have to carry Daniel down,” he called into the hole. “We’re shorthanded, so all of us have to go. But we’ll come back.” He added, “I promise.” Immediately Abe wished the words away. They had already broken one promise. They had come to save the survivors or carry bodies out, and they were only doing half the job. More promises could only mean more betrayal to this trapped woman.

There was still no answer, and Abe started to push away from the crevasse. Then Diana spoke.

“You’re not leaving me?”

Abe shook his head no, but the word wouldn’t come.

“You promised,” she screamed. Then, quickly, as if chiding herself, she said, “no,” and again, more firmly, “no.”

“They’re shorthanded... “Abe started again.

“It was my fault,” she said. Her words came to Abe low and awkward with the cadence of a last testament. In her weariness or delirium, Abe heard something far worse than acceptance. It was a tone of surrender similar to what her rescuers were using. “Tell Daniel that. Can you hear me, Abe?”

Abe lowered his head deeper into the hole. “Yes.”

Now her voice gained strength. “It was me that fell and pulled us down. It was me. Tell him. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened to him. I’m sorry for what happened to me. I know Daniel and he’ll take this on. Tell him not to.”

Abe wanted to protest that the fall had been bad luck and was not a matter for contrition. But maybe that was how Diana had decided to make her peace with it. “Okay,” Abe said. “I’ll tell him that.”

“Now I want you to tell me something, Abe.”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” For some reason, Abe felt compelled to add the full truth of it. “Almost.”

She took a long minute. “I thought something like that,” she said. And now Abe saw how they’d used him with this woman. They’d used him to buffer the horror and to interrogate her. And they’d used him for this death sentence.

“Well, Abe,” she started, then fell silent. After a moment, she finished. “There’s no blame on you either. Remember that.”

Abe’s throat clenched at that. She was forgiving him, too. He searched for something to say. At last he thought to ask her age.

“Twenty,” she said. “Almost.”

“You know, I can wait some more,” Abe offered. “I don’t mind.” Until he spoke it out loud, the thought hadn’t occurred to him. He could spend an hour here, then race down to catch the others who would be moving slow with the bulky litter. And if he could spend an hour, why not two?

Diana didn’t give him a chance. “Is that wind bringing a storm?” she asked.

“The storm’s here,” Abe said.

“Then get out of here.” There was courage in her voice, but hysteria, too. Then she screamed his name. She invoked it. “Abe,” she cried.

She needed him to stay. At least until they freed her, this woman wanted Abe with her whole heart. That was more than he’d ever known with a woman.

“I’m here,” he replied. “I’m not leaving.”

By staying Abe would make himself hostage to his own promise. By staying he would force the rescue team to return and acknowledge the life in this pit of ice. Elated by his decision, Abe clambered to his feet. He caught up with the leader as the litter team trudged downslope.

“I’m staying with her,” Abe announced.

The leader wasted no words. His broad face darkened. He took one step closer and shoved Abe hard in the chest, knocking him to the snow. “You damn cowboy,” he said. “I don’t take threats.”

Abe wasn’t hurt by the blow, only surprised.

“It’s no threat,” Abe said. But it was, clearly. And now he saw that he threatened their tranquility. They had already reconciled themselves to their forsaking the woman. The rescuers were good and decent men, that went without saying. But by staying, Abe seemed to expose them as something less or different or just more complicated.

“Get your pack. Or leave it, I don’t care. But get your ass down this mountain. I don’t want you on this mountain. I don’t want you on this team,” the leader yelled over the wind. “You don’t know anything.”

Without that last insult, Abe might have obeyed.

One of the rescuers, an older man with bad knees, came gimping up to see what the disturbance was about. “The cherry thinks he’s staying,” the leader said to the older man. “He thinks he’s going to save the day.”

Now Abe was angry. “You didn’t leave her food or water. You didn’t even talk to her.”

“That’s because she’s already dead.”

“But she’s not.”

The older man took a minute to study Abe’s earnest face. There was no friendliness in his look, but no hostility either. He was measuring Abe the way he would a mountainside or an approaching storm or any other obstacle. “Leave that poor girl alone,” he counseled Abe. “There’s not a thing we can do now except let her go. Have some mercy.”

Abe heard the logic there, but he had decided. “No sir,” he said.

“Listen to me. All you’ll do is torment her. With food and water, she could drag on for days. Don’t do that to her.”

“That’s not the point,” Abe said. “If it was me....”

“If it was you, you’d pray to God I had a gun to finish you quick.”

Abe shrugged. He was afraid to argue because he knew they were probably right. But he was staying.

“I admire your chivalry,” the older man said, and Abe blushed because the man was talking about naïveté. “Just the same, you’ll put everybody at risk all over again, and all to rescue you. Not her. She’s gone. Now come on with us.”

“No sir.”

“Damn it,” the leader blew. “You see?”

“I don’t want to leave her either,” the older man said. “If you ask me, it ought to be that one over there” —he jerked a thumb at the litter—”who’s stuck in the hole. As far as I’m concerned, he as good as killed that girl. All the same, it’s her who stays and him that gets saved.”

“There’s no right or wrong in the mountains,” the leader added. “There’s just whatever happens.”

“What’s your name?” the older man asked.

“Abe Burns.”

“Well, Abe, if we were down in the World, I’d have you tied up. But we don’t have the manpower to carry you out. So that’s no good. All we can do is rely on you to do what’s right.”

“Yes sir,” Abe said. “I’m trying.”

“Quit your jacking off,” the leader shouted. “We got an avalanche overhead and a storm and a hurt man.

And no time for you to get a hard-on for a dead woman.”

Abe didn’t hesitate. He knocked the leader backward onto his pack and would have kicked him, too, except he had on crampons and the teeth would have cut the man.

“Jesus,” the older man hissed at the leader, “Jesus.” Then he turned to Abe. “You know, you can’t save her.”

“I don’t care,” Abe admitted.

“Then why?”

Abe didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

The older man looked around at the peaks. “Have it your way,” he said. “I just wish you wouldn’t do this to yourself.”

“It’s your funeral,” the leader cursed Abe, struggling to his feet. He pointed at the hole. “She’s already had hers.”

The older man shouted the litter crew to a halt two hundred yards down the glacier and Abe trailed him down. The team set down the wounded man, who was delirious with the morphine and warmth. The rescuers all went through their packs, donating food and an extra sleeping bag and a bivouac tent and a little kerosene stove for melting water. They did it quickly, with little respect for Abe but no discourtesy. They thought him a fool, that was plain, but no one said it out loud. They simply left him their surplus. To a man, the rescuers were sullen. Clearly they did not relish carrying Daniel down at the expense of the woman in the crevasse. But the decision had been made. One went so far as to wish Abe well. Then they were gone.

Abe trudged back up the slope with the supplies. In all, their charity weighed about twenty pounds, and suddenly that seemed very little against the dark mass of storm and twilight.

Abe lay the things beside the crevasse and assembled the bivouac tent as best he could before the wind blew everything away or the snow buried it or he got too cold. He set the tent door inches from the mouth of the crevasse, which made for an awkward entrance. But it would facilitate communication, and that was the whole point. Once inside the tiny tent and burrowed into the sleeping bag, Abe felt like he was the one trapped. Only then did he call down into the hole and tell Diana what he’d done.

The woman didn’t answer. Not a whisper issued up from the crevasse.

“Diana?” he called. Abe had prepared himself for resistance, which was why he’d waited to set camp before announcing his presence. Her silence confused him.

“Well, I’m here,” Abe said.

Hours passed. The storm swallowed them alive. What light remained was scooped away by the wind.

Abe fell asleep and began dreaming he’d fallen into the crevasse. He couldn’t move his arms or legs and it was hard to breathe except in shallow birdlike bursts. He woke from the dream to find himself smothering in complete darkness. The tent had collapsed beneath a heavy mantle of snow and his limbs were lodged tight inside the cocoon of the sleeping bag.

It took all Abe’s strength to jackknife his body up and down and punch the tent and himself free of the snow. Frenzied with claustrophobia, he managed to claw open the door. There he lay with his bare head extending into the blizzard, gulping huge, searing lungfuls of air and snowflakes, overjoyed to find himself free of the dream, even if not the mountain.

It was only then that he heard singing. The song was eerie and distant and sounded like nothing human, and Abe guessed the wind was playing through the high towers. That or some animal had been driven up from the forest. Or spirits were on the loose.

Abe listened harder. Between the howl of wind and the hiss of corn snow guttering off his tent wall, he found a rhythm and a tune and a sunniness to it. It was a Beach Boys song.

Even as he listened, Abe felt the storm layering him with snow all over again. He shook the tent hard but carefully, for after all his snaking around there was no telling where the crevasse lay now. Rooting through the folds of the tent, Abe found a flashlight and shined it outside. He was horrified and at the same time enchanted by how the falling snow actually devoured his light. The beam reached a few feet beyond his little nylon cave, then vanished.

It took him several minutes to locate the crevasse. The hole had closed to a small circle, as if sealing its catch away from the world for good. Still lying inside his sleeping bag and tent, Abe edged closer. The singing became more distinct, but that only made it more alien because Diana wasn’t singing real words, only jibberish.

Now Abe found the ice axe they had left him. In thrashing around, he’d landed on top of the axe. The pick had slashed his sleeping bag and down feathers had spilled everywhere. There was blood on the metal head, and for a bad moment Abe thought he’d cut himself and was too cold to feel the wound. Then he realized this was Daniel’s axe and Daniel’s blood.

Reaching his arm outside, Abe poked at the edges of the hole to widen it. He began chopping, methodically cutting away at the snow even though the debris poured down the crevasse, adding to Diana’s misery. ‘’I’m sorry,” he shouted to her, “I’m sorry.” It was for himself that Abe cut at the snow. He needed to keep open this doorway to the underworld. He was afraid to lose contact, quite certain that without Diana’s company, he would never make it through this ordeal.

When Abe had finally cut down to the blue rope and gained proof of his companion, he rested. He slept. When his eyes opened again, it was day, but it might as well have been night still. The storm was raging more fiercely than before. Abe couldn’t see anything outside the tent and he couldn’t see anything inside it, either, without the flashlight.

Abe turned to rebuilding his tent. Section by section, he propped the walls up with the broken poles and taught himself to rustle the fabric every few minutes to shed the snow. And all the while, he listened to Diana’s mindless singing.

“You’re going to make it,” Abe shouted down the crevasse. He found some cheese and a chunk of wet bread and a plastic bottle of mostly frozen water. “You want some food?” he yelled.

Diana made no answer. She just sang on and on.

While Abe ate and drank, he listened. It was essentially the same tune over and over. The words weren’t real words. They were sounds to mark a path. Locked in place, Diana was circling around and around. Soon the vortex would suck her into its deepest part. Abe knew he was listening to the sound of death.

Finally Abe joined in the singing. He’d heard this song many times before, but he couldn’t remember what the words were either. With the woman’s same abandon, Abe threw his voice out into the void all around them.

After a while Diana seemed to notice the extra voice. Somewhere in her benighted skull, Abe’s singing freed Diana to depart from the song and actually talk. She began to emit bursts of story. Abe labored to hear what she had to say. It was a freewheeling autobiography, woven together from memories and fictions and pleas for her mother’s comfort. It made Abe weep sometimes, and other times just bored him.

The stormy day passed. Night moved in again.

As the darkness stretched out and Abe drifted into delirious catnaps, it was hard to tell what was real anymore. He grew colder and a little crazy himself, and it was hard to know what was even spoken. Much of what Abe heard he may have imagined. Diana may or may not have been a college student with a bad job and a drafty trailer-home and allegiance to some crazy woman. She seemed to have three brothers named John and Wes and Blake, which Abe began to suspect because those were his own uncles’ names. Her talk about mountains was probably real, because she described spring wildflowers Abe had never heard of. She wanted to climb Everest someday, though that might as easily have been Abe’s overlay. Abe gave up trying to keep the woman—or himself—lucid with questions or dialogue.

Abe finally concluded that the name of her dogged savior was completely lost to her, for she’d quit saying his name altogether. He accepted that she had ceased to understand he was lying on the surface above or even that she was caged inside the mountain. Abe’s presence had not loaned one ounce of dignity to her long and ugly dying, and he resigned himself to anonymity. It was then, during a lull in the gale, that she cried out.

“I love you,” she yelled.

Abe knew she meant someone else, yet all he could think to reply was the same. “I love you,” he shouted into the crevasse, and so she wouldn’t think it was just her own echo, he added, “Diana.” Her name sank down the hole, a pebble dropped into the ocean.

But something happened. A single word came drifting back up the hole. “Abe,” she spoke.

The storm and the waiting went on for a very long time. Abe’s watch had come off in his struggles, so he had no idea how much time passed, only that he and his invisible lover were both losing their faculties and blurring their memories and mixing in the same dream.

At one point Abe turned his palms up and noticed that he’d rope-burned the pads down to the white gristle. He didn’t remember doing that, but the snow was pink with blood around the blue rope, and the pink was fresh.

In the end, there was silence.

Dawn never broke, but an exhausted light did finally seep into the sky. Overnight, Abe had taken ill from the water or maybe from the storm itself and the cold and the sounds, and his tent had collapsed again. He was very cold and thirsty and tired. But the storm had passed. The wind had quit. He flapped open the tent door. The crevasse had pinched nearly shut. Nothing more could be done.

“Hello,” he called into the crevasse. The word emerged as blue frost.

There was no answer. No more song, no more jibberish. Maybe she was still alive, just mute now, eyes wide, a zombie pinned in its crypt for the rest of time.

Abe shook loose from the snow and wormed out of the tent. The night and day and night had bled him of his strength. It took his full concentration just to stand up. His parka was soaked and frozen. His feet were dead blocks.

He faced the crevasse, which had puckered shut again. The hole was only a few inches across now. The blue rope was buried deep again. The earth was sealing over. “Good-bye,” Abe croaked. He said it to a memory, to the place itself. He said it to a deep part of himself.

Without another thought, Abe abandoned the tent and the torn sleeping bag and his pack, which had blown away anyway. The water bottle was frozen solid and useless. The thought of food turned his stomach. He simply backed away from the hole and faced downhill and let gravity herd him off the glacier.

Abe stumbled and kicked and plowed his way out of the high cirque and across the plateau, which was now scalloped with drifts like a hard, white sea.

He descended into the forest.

The path they had taken up the frozen river was buried under two and three feet of snow, but he was patient. Every time he seemed lost, Abe stopped and listened for the water running through its deep veins. He followed that song, humming to himself.

It took all day. Not once did Abe sit down, because then he would have lain back and disappeared into the dream. He reached the trailhead at dusk and started down the road into night.

Abe kept moving simply because he could. There was no other reason. Survival was the furthest thing from his mind. Night came on.

The path turned black. The forest walled him in, squeezing him tight. After some time Abe couldn’t be sure his legs were still moving. He felt motionless and suspended.

Just before dawn on the next morning a single bright light appeared like a hole in the darkness. It was a big truck with one broken headlight and it was filled with rescuers. While the engine idled, Abe stood transfixed by the hard white light. One by one the rescuers emerged to touch him.

When they laid him down, it was tentatively, not quite certain of his reality. They had been on their way to retrieve Abe or Abe’s body from the cirque. They dressed the wounds in his hands and started an IV and zipped him into a sleeping bag in the back of the truck and started the long road back to Boulder. The roof rocked back and forth.

Two rescuers sat beside Abe to monitor his vital signs and pour him full of soup and coffee and herbal tea, whatever hot liquids the group could muster. Abe’s voice was nearly gone from dehydration and the raw cold and his singing, so they filled his silence answering questions they thought he might have asked.

Daniel was in intensive care, they said. He had gotten very agitated at the hospital and kept repeating the woman’s name until a nurse explained that someone had stayed at the crevasse. After that he’d dropped into deep sleep. He had multiple fractures, but the doctors said Daniel would recover.

“That’s the good news,” said the man pumping up a blood pressure cuff on Abe’s arm. “The bad news is the girl. She was a dropout from the university at Laramie. She moved back to Rock Springs to take care of her sick mom, Alzheimer’s or something. Anyway, that’s where she hooked up with this fella and he got her into the climbing.”

“She was getting good. But nowhere close to good enough for that wall,” the second rescuer said. “I guess the boyfriend’s some local legend. First ascents all around here. That’s what this was supposed to be. A new route. New wall. New mountain.”

“Some wedding present,” the first man said.

“Yeah, that, too. They were supposed to get married. In the spring.”

Abe could tell they found their information poignant and moving. But he was confused.

The two rescuers exchanged a glance.

“She’s not still alive up there?” one asked in a low voice.

Abe looked from one to the other with blank eyes, wondering if he’d done something wrong.

“Who?” he whispered timidly.

Cannibals

“Enough chocks, pins, and ‘biners to ring like a Swiss cow when I walked.”

Author Note

That first time, I landed in a subterranean night, moonless and blind. Unsure if this really was Yosemite, I stood where the grape farmer and his wife had dropped me. A breeze rushed through the trees, drugging me with cedar.

I woke on a picnic table to those molten gold walls lighting the mist rags and giant trees. It was deep winter and frost coated my sleeping bag, but the ground was bare, not a snowflake, much less the head-high drifts my climbing partner had warned about. I glanced at the brand new yellow plastic snowshoes jutting from my pack. Something was off.

We had spent months appealing to Kiwanis, Rotarians, Shriners, and Lions to support our “expedition” to Patagonia over Christmas break. It was a silly fantasy. We knew about as much as they did about Cerro Torre and other monsters on our tick list. Moreover, Vietnam was raging, these were Nixon men in golf slacks, and we were damn hippies from Berkeley East, aka the University of Colorado. Our sole take was the plastic snowshoes from a sports merchant eager to get the tax write-off. Scratch Patagonia, insert Yosemite. By thumb.

Camp 4 was empty except for a single tent. The door unzipped. A man my age, a kid, climbed out. He had long Viking hair, blonde and thick as straw. We made some hot tea. It was Dave’s first trip, too. He had a good heart. We teamed up for some jam cracks, built a fire, shared a jar of Jiffy peanut butter for dinner, and retired to our separate tents.

The sound of yelling and a ferocious brawl woke me up. Bears, I thought. Dave was under attack. I raced over with the heaviest chunk of wood in our fire pit. He was under attack all right, just not by bears. Ripped to shambles, filled with terrible shouts, the tent writhed among the pine needles. I pulled Dave through the torn door. His wild eyes returned to normal. “Zombies or the demon child,” I joked. I had memorized The Night of the Living Dead to tell girlfriends and campfire faces. The Exorcist novel had just come out, sparking an intense desire to enter the priesthood that lasted about 24 hours.

I got Dave settled in my tent. Morning arrived: more gold walls and big trees. The beginning of his story emerged. He was a combat vet freshly back from Vietnam. I thought it was a myth, but he described a young woman spitting on his uniform in the airport. What cut deepest was her beauty.

Dave’s nightmare shook me with a strange power. Until the draft board 4-F’ed me for my knees, I had kept Vietnam at bay with the mountains. Now Vietnam was coming to the mountains. I don’t remember anything more of that trip. My partner showed up, we climbed something or other. I made a point of saying goodbye to Dave. It was important to me. He stayed, I’m told, and became a major force in big wall climbing.

Geof Childs, the climber, master storyteller (Stone Palaces, “Cannon Mountain Breakdown”, “Leviathan”,) and a lifelong friend, was another survivor of that war. I tried to learn from his economy and organization. He had chosen the extra training to become a Ranger, comparing the difference with regular soldiers to attempting El Cap with big wall climbers vs. Boy Scouts. In coming years, more vets appeared among the rocks and mountains. The real ones like Dave and Geof didn’t give details. They were there, like us, for the ascent.

- JEFF LONG

Cannibals

NOVEMBER 24, 1974.

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP)—One month after an international expedition of climbers was reported lost on 27,800-foot Makalu in the Nepalese Himalaya, a sole survivor has been found. Daniel Bogle of Eldorado Springs, Colorado, was recently led to civilization by a Tibetan yak herder.

Bogle claims avalanches trapped him and climbing companion Cameron Corder of Butte, Arkansas, high on the mountain for nearly ten days. The partially eaten remains of an unidentified man were found at the base of the mountain. Bogle denies accusations of cannibalism.

Yes, I survived but not because I ate Corder. For one thing, raw meat doesn’t digest at those altitudes. I’d have killed myself with constipation. Besides, there was food up there, though the amount varies each time I tell the story. Sometimes I detail the scene with a cornucopia of food. At other times the tent is bare of morsels, only bones. Over these past ten years, sometimes I’ve told the truth, other times I’ve taken liberties. This time, the truth. It’s not really my story, anyway. Corder was largely responsible.

I remember him in bits and pieces, not chronologically but in order of biological impact. He had massive hands, suitably enormous for his six and a half feet of muscle and thick bone. His face was furrowed by premature wrinkles. When his eyes chanced upon you, you reacted. Their deep blackness set the tone for the rest of his face, the dark simian brow, the beard and blacker mane of hair. Instinctively you felt that Corder was a creature of melancholy, a naked conscience.

I knew all about Cameron J. Corder, of course, there being no other climbers near his size and power who spoke with an Arkansas drawl. But I’d never actually met him before our introduction in Kathmandu, where the international expedition of British, Italians, French, and Americans was mustering rank. Corder and I were the American pair. When Corder first appeared on the brown cobblestones of an alley that reeked of curry and goat blood, my impression was one of a gigantic human animal built for labor and physical, not intellectual, ascent. He was dressed in gym shorts, sandals, and a white T-shirt, clothing that did not hide his numerous scars. Both his legs were scarred with slight pale lines and with deeper, wider purple stripes. His right arm was marked with a shiny dent where a bullet had passed through the triceps.

We shook hands and immediately found a tea shop that served cold Indian beer. Pulling out our photos of Makalu, we smeared our fingerprints up and down the routes, possible and impossible, on the west face of the mountain.

During the remainder of that week, Corder and I explored Kathmandu’s charming decadence. Dodging bicycles in alleyways where old women were laden with twisted firewood or rice, we ferreted out beer stalls and found black marketeers from whom, for the sheer gall of it, we bought Nepalese rupees and Afghan hash.

I was still young then. Twenty-two years old with not a worry. I owned eighty-dollar climbing boots, a bellyband of three-inch sling, and sixty dollars’ worth of metal—enough chocks, pins, and ‘biners to ring like a Swiss cow when I walked with my rack on. No stereo, no car, not even a bed. My prized possession was 165 feet of prime European rope, a blue Perlon line freckled with clean white diamonds. I lived to climb. With a bachelor’s in philosophy, what else, I took spot jobs as a stonemason, a waiter, even a paperboy. If I went to the movies with a woman, she paid for herself. You see, ascent was everything. And I was so innocent, with so little past.

I can’t say when Vietnam took hold again of Corder’s mind. Not once in the city had he mentioned that he was a vet. I had heard back in the States that he’d been on a helicopter during the war and that he’d endured some mysterious ordeals. But he didn’t talk about them, not until long after we’d passed through the jungle and had reached the mountain. By that time he was possessed.

The longer I think about it, the more it seems Corder could have managed more sanctuary from his memories than he did at Makalu. The acid whiteness of the bleached mountain, its angles and lifelessness, couldn’t possibly have been more alien to his memories of Vietnam; and yet he was stricken. I think he may have been reminded initially by that jungle we had to pass through in getting to the mountain. Down there among the rotted Hindi shrines, among the ghostly herds of monkeys, Corder must have begun remembering. The jungle, like other jungles, was lukewarm. Every 15 minutes it had us genuflecting with knives to scrape away the monsoon leeches. Down there, I’m quite sure, Corder’s Vietnam loomed up, though he kept it to himself like an embarrassing souvenir until those final ten days of avalanches.

Through September and early October, the climb progressed with talented vigor. All of us in the expedition were proud of ourselves for being so gentlemanly and industrious. Rope stitched the route together, an 8,000-foot thread of polypropylene that snaked toward the summit.

On October 23 Corder and I occupied the highest camp, Camp VI at 26,500 feet, and were prepared to force the line another 500 feet higher so the British pair could leapfrog and go on to the top. Early the next morning, on October 24, a blizzard set in.

That afternoon the first avalanche struck, taking the two Italians at Camp II with it. The avalanching effectively marooned two French climbers, an Englishman, a Scot, Corder and me on the upper regions of Makalu’s west face, all of us at camps above 23,000 feet. The crackle of walkie-talkies was fierce and prolonged that evening as each pair of us debated our alternatives. There were only two really, though it seemed the universe depended on our choice: we could go down or we could stay put. The high altitude had us stunned and delirious, so our decision that night was a poor one. We chose to stay put—the two French on Camp III, the two British in Camp V, and we two Americans in Camp VI.

Tipped at a forbidding 70-degree angle, the face was composed of very hard, blue ice. Our tents were pitched precariously on platforms carved from the snow or stolen from brief ledges of rock. Just above Corder and me, dangling with erotic menace, hung a wide bosom poised to avalanche. We talked about it, willed it to either freeze solid or fall to the north, and hoped that by waiting a few more days we could outwit it. But on October 25 a second slide hurtled past Camp III, knocking the French and their tents into the abyss. We knew we were doomed, too. In medieval times travelers swore that avalanches were giant snowballs, triggered by the flapping of a solitary swallow’s wings. Our avalanches were inspired by something even quieter than that—Corder. Or, to be more precise, Corder’s sin. So Corder thought.

“Yes... yes,” he murmured as we lay in our sleeping bags, hesitating as much to breathe the thin air as to sort his thoughts. With our crampons and axes, our jumars, helmets, and ropes, all our tools for both ascent and descent useless in the tent with us, Corder began to talk about Vietnam.

I’d never heard of soldiers hunting animals in Vietnam, though more than a few American soldiers were killed by wild animals in the surreal jungles of Indochina. As Corder said at the start of his rhapsody, “Grunts ate monkeys, tigers ate grunts.”

“King Bees,” Corder drawled softly. “They done it most. Fire up a tiger, go down, gut it, and sell the hide and teeth back in the cities.” Gradually, almost somnolently, I learned Corder’s slang. King Bees were CH-34 helicopters that had been manufactured in Korea and were flown by Vietnamese pilots. The term ‘King Bee’ applied collectively to the craft and it’s crew. “They were 90 pounds of person and 500 pounds of balls. They weren’t always lucky, but they were always right there, you know. I remember one King Bee, a gunner, he took off into the jungle to fetch the carcass and never came out again. The cat must have got him.”

When the blizzard paused and when Corder slowed down with his storytelling, I could hear the ropes outside fluttering in the rarefied wind. Individual snowflakes clattered dryly against the nylon tent wall. I half expected the sullen hiss of an avalanche to sweep our tent and us away at any moment. But Corder had started; he kept right on going. At first I was sure he was talking to suppress the avalanche; then, slowly, I realized he was trying to come up with a reason for our predicament.

“American crews couldn’t go hunting any old time like King Bees.” He startled me. Hours had passed since his last words. “We had a whole lot of laws on us. There was trouble for firing things up. But we done it anyway.” Spindrift, driven by the wind, formed a silent dune by a rip in the far corner. The fiberglass tent poles bowed overhead like the ribs of a whale.

“But sometimes it was legitimate, like once....” He drew at the thin air. “Viet Cong used to use elephants for transport, and this one time we spotted a big gray all rigged out with .51 caliber machine guns, one on each side for anti-aircraft. We only had five rockets left, but we went down on it anyway and missed with everything except a white phosphorous. You can believe we burned that beast. It took off like hell, knocking trees down every which way, and it’s sure they never got their guns back.”

I was paralyzed by the avalanches that were still to come, stock still and afraid, but somehow Corder’s little sketches of Vietnam seemed vitally relevant. He was building to something, and that progression was more dynamic than my own concerns. Already Corder had begun to take possession of our tent. There were two of us listening to the walkie-talkie morning and night at seven o’clock, two of us drinking tea, two of us gasping for air 24 hours a day, but more and more there was only one real presence in that tent, and it was Corder’s.

“I was gunner on a Huey,” he took up again. “There was Huey slicks and there was Huey guns. Slicks carried troops, and guns rode shotgun for the slicks. There was all kinds of guns. Cobras and Bravo models. And then there was November models—the best.” I felt he was comparing himself to me. “They had every killing thing. Twin miniguns, 20-millimetre Vulcan cannons, chunkers. And fast, man, 160 knots. When we came along with those November guns, we had the power.” His story was not meant for me, though once or twice he remembered me with a glance. He was addressing an image, and in speaking aloud he drew it nearer.

“‘Roger, Roger,’ you know. Like, keep your heads down; we’re coming in with Spooky,” he explained. “Then they’d go ‘Roger, Roger’ and duck their asses down for the fireworks. Those guns was so goddamn fast they didn’t go bang-bang or rat-a-tat. Just this low grunt for ten or 20 seconds, and that’s all she wrote. Even the grass was mowed.” Corder touched the tip of his tongue to each wide split in his weathered lips. Suddenly he looked at me. “Don’t worry,” he winked. “I’m not crazy, brother.”

A day passed, nearly as cold and dark as night. The wind and snow continued to rattle against the bellowing tent wall. At seven the British called, their voices pinched by the radio’s static, their fear, and, no doubt, bronchitis. Our position was the same: wait out the storm. It would let up in a day or two. So we hoped, but it didn’t.

I’ve been asked if I felt despair in that violent region so far above the earth. It wasn’t that I trusted Corder’s sanity or our decision to wait, nor that I believed the weather would suddenly spare us. There was just so little sense of urgency, how could there be despair?

On the morning of October 28, for no particular reason, Corder and I shared a nearly empty yellow bottle of oxygen. Five minutes for him, five for me. In those five-minute gulps of pure air, the world turned richer, fuller, and focused into smells, sights, and sounds. We had a painful sense of what we had missed. I watched Corder’s face suddenly fatten with some vast, oxygenated memory and, with it, distress. Then it was my turn again, and while I stared at him and inhaled the thick air, Corder’s exhaustion lines and sunburn and dandruff overwhelmed me.

“You’re dying, Corder.” I whispered through the mask, and he nodded back in terror. “We’re....”

The oxygen ran out. The mask’s rubber bladder collapsed, and we were again stupefied.

Corder’s face returned to its side of the tent; his eyes clouded over. The urgency evaporated. I lay back with the cold snow outside and the tired desire to sleep and escape the tedious dream of wind and nylon that surrounded me.

We weren’t without certain tasks. Snow had to be knocked from the sagging walls. The walkie-talkie, though it was becoming silent, had to be kept warm with body heat. Water had to be melted for drinking. I made a habit of reaching through the north door to fill cook pots with snow, a special ritual that Corder fouled when he emptied his piss-bottle all over the drinking-water snow.

“Damn it, Corder,” I snapped. He’d violated one of my only taboos, making my presence in the tent even more transparent and unreal. “Drop Vietnam. Take a look where you are.”

The giant pushed one big bare hand out of the top of his sleeping bag and wiped his eyes. “I can’t,” he insisted in a soft voice. “It’s eating at me.” I didn’t retort, though I wanted to. Restraint was all-important; I couldn’t afford to have Corder annoyed at me. Believe me, he pleaded, second-guessing my silence. “It’s on me. I got to.”

Afterward Corder was quiet for half a day before resuming his tales. At last, five days into his imagery of Vietnam, Corder began to actually weave a bona fide story, not just piecemeal anecdotes.

Not often, but now and then, Corder’s November gun would stray on its return from missions in order to hunt tigers and elephants. They always hunted from the air. From up there, Corder told me, the tigers were fluid orange and red lights that glowed through the overgrowth. Elephants were black shadows. Once driven from the trees by rocket fire, the orange lights and black shadows turned into miniature animals. As Corder snaked his miniguns down, the pilot tipped the craft to broaden the field. Excitement mounted. Everyone wanted to reach out to touch the animals and, like magicians, to drop them in their tracks. While I listened for the hiss of incipient avalanches, Corder told me how slow roses of blood would blossom when the rockets hit an elephant’s rib cage. He gestured with his hand to show how the tigers would hatefully dodge the November’s quick shadow.

To pass the time while Corder unwound his story, I kept a veiled eye on our food. It wasn’t promising. There was a small, freeze-dried slab of beef, four fresh tea bags, two packets of Quaker Oats, a cube of cheese, and three marbled Hershey bars. I rationed the food, apportioning equal shares until the fifth night, when I decided Corder had gone crazy. His gentle, twangy voice had begun to accelerate the tale, and he’d even let his tea freeze in its cup while he rambled.

The food was scarce, but I wasn’t worried. I believed that, like me, Corder had brought provisions. We’d make it.

“Let me have the food,” I thought I said it aloud. Perhaps I didn’t really say anything. When Corder didn’t move, I watched myself reach across and pull the man’s pack onto my legs. Although it felt light, there was some weight to it, some food anyway. I watched myself upend the pack.

A book landed on my sleeping bag. Nothing more. Corder had brought a Bible.

The afternoon was a vacuum, not a sound except for snowflakes on nylon and Corder breathing.

“We’re out of food,” I told him when he awoke. “Here... tea,” and I handed him a cup, then half a candy bar. “That’s it.”

“Where’s my gear?” Corder demanded.

I didn’t answer. I watched myself not answer. Corder knew I knew.

“Where’s my Bible?”

I handed it to him. “You screwed up,” I said, but without an ominous tone. Corder might have suspected.

He grabbed at the book. It should have been two pounds of food—bread and fish, so to speak—not paper. I lay down, thinking there was a chance Corder had killed both of us. But it was a sure thing that Corder had killed himself. He wouldn’t last long at that altitude. Over the next two days sleep and imagination were the antagonists. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see the future: murder, then food.

So, I had made my choice. I started hiding bits of food for myself. If the storm continued, I knew we’d both be dead inside of three days anyway; on the other hand, if there was only one of us, the survivor might last as long as nine or ten days. I wanted to live, and all Corder could seem to think about was death and hunting wild animals.

One incident among the many animals slaughtered and people killed had affected Corder deeply, and that was the death of a white tiger. I think, after piecing together Corder’s accounts, that I can understand some of his feeling of guilt. Up in their helicopter, from their vantage point of height and omnipotent fire power, the crew members had lost patience with the common and ordinary. The earth had become a topography for them, small and insipid. Animals and men were now nothing but targets, more to test the crew’s indifference than its weaponry. One day, near the border of Cambodia, Corder’s crew spied a watery white shape surging through the dark trees below. It was an albino tiger. The gunship dropped lower, hovering like an insect as the young soldiers fed their curiosity about the extraordinary animal. For such a long, long time they had seen nothing beautiful, uncommon.

Beneath the thunder of the rotor blades, the pilot suggested the tiger be spared, and over the headphones the co-pilot agreed. They would show mercy. But just as the gunship started to lift away, the act was spoiled. Corder shot the tiger with his miniguns. I suspect he did it out of fascination, or maybe because of a desire to be completely free of that impoverished landscape or to commit a crime where there was no law. The reason doesn’t matter; it didn’t matter as the gunship throbbed above the white carcass, and it didn’t matter as Corder and I lay half-conscious at Camp VI. The tiger was dead.

On the morning of October 29, our sixth straight day of storm and solitude, we lost radio contact with the British at Camp V, 800 feet below us. We waited until seven o’clock that night, assuring each other that their batteries must have frozen or their antenna broken, but they were gone. An avalanche took them, of course, though to Corder and me they’d been bluntly erased. I accepted their nonexistence without a second thought. The world had become a very plain and simple finger painting for me. Sunset, had we been able to see it, would have been a few broad stripes of color. The ice would have been purple. The summit would have been an inky triangle. The deaths of six fellow climbers fit quite naturally into this matter-of-fact tableau.

Far from mourning the loss of the climbers at Camp V, Corder accepted it as unsophisticated destiny, part and parcel of his sin. I finally understood—his sin was the murder of that white tiger. But guilt no longer interested me; I was too hungry and exhausted to share Corder’s moods.

“It’s happened like this before.” He was glaring through me again, a glare I was learning to equate with further confession.

“Hey,” I said soothingly, “it’s okay.”

Corder blinked and emitted a shy, repentant grin: white teeth in a black beard, black and white like a Dürer etching. Death’s-head. He lay back, quiet for a few minutes, then launched into his tale again.

After Corder “fired up” the white tiger, the gunship had hung above the jungle for a moment or two, then arced away from the isolated clearing. The pilot and co-pilot were disappointed in Corder, but no one ever mentioned the tiger again. A week later the gunship was shot down, killing everyone but Corder. Corder put one huge hand on my shoulder as I lay in my filthy sleeping bag and swore to God that, just before he died, the co-pilot had looked him straight in the eye and coldly whispered, “Don’t blame yourself.” At that point, and with enduring guilt, Corder had realized he alone was responsible for the deaths of his friends. It had been he, after all, who had tampered with a pattern of mercy.

Within five minutes a second and third gunship had tracked the distress signal from Corder’s ship and had come snapping over the jungle’s edge, laying down heavy veils of gunfire all around the craft. Two minutes later Corder was safely plucked from his burning gunship. But for seven minutes he was alone, surrounded by flames, gunfire, and his dead fiends, one of whom had accused him with his last breath. For seven minutes Corder was tormented by the belief that an animistic force had pursued and destroyed everyone but him—because he was the guilty one.

After the crash of his gunship and the death of his crew, the giant gunner had encased himself in guilt and horror. He had a prostitute for a girlfriend who habitually dressed in white; she disappeared the same day Corder’s Huey was shot down. Even more ominous, he confided to me, every now and then one of his dead crew members would quiver into view on the streets of Ban Me Thuot in central Vietnam.

“They wouldn’t say nothing, just sort of look at me like I done... well, the tiger.”

He was reassigned to another gunship, and it was shot down the next morning. Corder survived this catastrophe, too, only to be haunted by the ghosts of two gunship crews.

“So now you know.” He paused. “What do you think? Crazy, huh?” I knew what I thought, but didn’t know what to say. It was a strange story, I cautiously admitted. A terrible story. I was afraid to say any more. He was huge, and I was more than a little convinced that Corder was out of his mind. Eight thousand vertical feet from the foot of the mountain, I was trapped in a tent with a madman.

There were a few edible odds and ends tucked deep inside my sleeping bag, but I felt justified in withholding them for myself. It had come down to that kind of deceit. We were dying. Lives had ceased to be but, as I said, the mountain made us all seem so insignificant.

“You aren’t going to eat me, are you?” Corder joked, cocking a wasted grin at me. I looked long and hard at his face, at his black beard and his ragged mane of hair, at his nose scabbed with old sunburn. I thought he could survive on the flesh of his memories. Corder glanced at me. His eyes hungered for forgiveness. Utterly convinced of his sin, he was, in confessing to me, inviting death.

On October 31, my suspicions that Corder was deranged were confirmed when he began to repeat his stories of the white tiger, his helicopter crashes, and his young whore in immaculate clothing. I was lying beside him, my back pressed up against the great wall of his rib cage to absorb every possible bit of warmth.

For the eighth straight day he was talking when I woke from my nauseous doze. The blue and orange tent fabric was coated with our breath, which had turned to hoarfrost. His deep, gentle voice was repeating the story. At first I was groggy, ill from the long frozen night, and I was irritated that Corder was echoing himself. Then I noticed that his tale was more severe and cogent this second time around, it made a little more sense. As Corder droned on, I envisioned the floating gunship that had laced the humid skies. I could feel the miniguns shudder as the tiger leaped high and dropped. I understood the graceful white curve of his young whore’s hip.

Throughout the day I lay against Corder’s back, delirious from the high altitude, starvation, and his tale. I ached because the snow was hard and cold, and I couldn’t move except to face Corder. The tent wall was sucked in and out as the storm respirated. Near dusk I stealthily chewed a piece of cheese, savoring the strength it would give. As quietly as possible, I sipped from a bottle of water I’d kept thawed inside my sleeping bag. Corder rambled on, crazy as a loon.

I had two hopes. One was that Corder would weaken enough so that, even if his madness turned physical, he couldn’t hurt me. I was praying that his arms were already too heavy to move. With very little effort Corder could have pushed me through the side of the tent. The drop was a mile and half. My other hope, so primal one might call it a drive, was that by nibbling at my hoarded food I could outlive the storm and descend to safety. Of course, if Corder had discovered my deception he probably would have killed me outright.

The end came as suddenly and innocently as the first avalanche ten days earlier. The tent wall turned dark blue at sunset. In tides the wind relaxed, then slapped at the mountain, then relaxed. Dropping off to sleep, I wondered again when the storm would stop, when Corder would be quiet. He had begun for the fourth time to retell his story of the white tiger. It was all like a dream: the storms and deaths, Corder’s immaterial story, my deception with the food. That thought was still with me when I woke up in pitch darkness, unconsciously groaning to protest an absence, a blank spot.

The storm had stopped. There was silence.

“Corder,” I rasped, my voice unfamiliar. “Corder, you can shut up now.” But he kept talking even after I’d turned on my flashlight and clambered over his rib cage. His eyes were as motionless as his jaw. His powerful features were locked and blue, hollowed by the cold. Corder was dead.

In prying the giant’s body from the tent floor that night, I realized I was going to have enough strength to descend. When I unzipped the door, I saw the stars were glittering. The storm had truly broken. There was a long, chilling moment as I hesitated, unsure whether the corpse in my hands was dead or just pretending to be while it continued talking about the white tiger and eternal guilt. Then, with one decisive shove, Corder was gone and I was left alone inside that bony, sagging tent.

I can still feel his heart in my ears, beating, his voice like mine. You should believe me when I say I am not the cannibal. But Corder is inside me.

Ike
(The Descent)

“Ike picked up one of the coins. ‘Where’d you find these?’”

Author Note

What some call a Spartan streak in climbers, I consider monastic. Climbers and monks: both share a cloistered, tribal detachment from the world; both live by an arcane code that strikes outsiders as mystical; both commit body and soul to scarred gods with 0% body fat; both perform brute labor free of charge; both practice intense contemplation; both know the cold hours of night and the prayers that draw each dawn. Not least, both observe the sacrament of wine.

So I learned that semester when a professor gave me three hours of philosophy credit for attempting a winter solo of El Cap (three whole pitches before total failure.) Barely back from that fiasco, I joined the professor and the rest of our class on a retreat to an old fashioned, Gregorian-chanting monastery in the Sangre de Christo range. It was there among the gaunt brothers that I plunged into hell, all thoughts of heaven merrily jettisoned.

We are surrounded by stories all day and night long. Every now and then one of them rears up, a fully formed giant… if you have the eyes to see it. One reason young writers need to read everything in sight is to learn the difference between a yarn and a short story and a book, and between a non-fiction and a fiction. It is up to each of us to construct a personal radar. Without it, the whispering stories are nothing but a snaky hiss. With it, though, you can start to recognize worlds waiting just beyond ordinary human perception. Only then can you begin to judge if an idea really merits the years of exploration, research, and obsession it can take to write.

On this particular afternoon at the monastery, the abbot was talking to us about higher matters in a room with whitewashed walls. He spoke the name Dante, a hopeful moment, only to return to the difference between existential and mystical nothingness. Unfortunately the warm sunlight, mixed with exhaustion from keeping monk-hours, had caused most of our bunch to doze off. Desperate to stay awake, if only as a courtesy, I cast around for some saving distraction.

How many times have I survived a symphony by battling a terrorist in the violin section or leaping for the ballerina in mid-topple from the stage? Alternate realities, strangers from strange lands, wild adventures not yet launched: they beg for our voice. Buried in sunshine, I found one at my feet.

The floor was made of big terracotta tiles dry laid on a sand base. That was a start. One glance at the joints and the stonemason in me recognized a good and patient craftsman. I pried at the joints for the conquistadores and rancheros lying underneath. But the joints were too straight and regular for creative profit. The tiles, though, were crazed with hairline cracks. Chaos is my garden.

Tracing one crack to another, I abruptly found myself on an nameless big wall with a hundred vertical paths to select from. Here waited a dihedral, there a jam crack. I discovered a bivy ledge, retreated from face holds breaking my fingernails, and feasted on eggs from a rookery of turquoise- and lemon-colored parrots. My fantasy stalled, though, as I realized it was a sorry excuse for my weaknesses on El Cap.

Once again my eyelids grew heavy. Behind me the yoga girl with beads in her hair was snoring. The abbot’s drone was relentless, a meadow of bumblebees. Flailing to stay awake, I resorted to conspiracy theories. Surely he knew his audience was asleep. Was it intentional? Satanic, perhaps? Once we were all sedated, would the monks dance around our bodies? Pick our pockets? Did the abbot notch his conquests in the adobe above his pillow? The conspiracy angle lacked action, though. I was nodding off again, brought low by a failure of imagination.

Then came a miracle. Hell appeared before me, a sprawling, tubular frontier of mythical horrors. My eyes shot open. The revelation electrified me. I had misread the terracotta topo. The cracks were not leading up a mountain, but into the bowels of the earth. Spread below my feet was Dante’s and Verne’s real estate, though not without strong help from the likes of Whymper and Robbins.

Down I went, rappelling from a ledge of the Inferno into the leaden Greek underworld, softly traversing above fiery medieval horrors, and sneaking through H.G. Wells’ realm of cannibal Morlocks. The list went on. The deeper I looked into the tiles, the vaster and darker the subterrain spread. The mouth of hell yawned wide, ready to swallow the scientific expedition I was already constructing.

For the rest of our retreat, monk-hours paled next to my sleepless state. No more chapel by candlelight for me, I wanted unpolluted night. I exempted myself from clearing the fields, fasted like a penitente, and took to the desert at night not to defy temptation but rather have a meet-and-greet with Satan. I needed to know him, his language and octopus flesh and primal eyes.

The clock was ticking. Visions evaporate. Every notion and detail, every whiff of a word, I threw into my notebook. I couldn’t wait to read this book, but also recognized it was a book not yet ready to be written. Bluntly put, I needed permission.

Permission is the single biggest obstacle an artist faces, at least in the beginning. It’s one thing to concoct a street level hero or heroine with a made-up name, and something completely different to dare reviving Sam Houston, JFK, or Elizabeth I. In the space of a moment you can nail together a countertop for Joe’s deli. But to lay claim to public property, to confiscate the Little Big Horn, the Santa Fe Opera house, the chalkboard in Einstein’s patent office, or the commons known as Hell, requires permission, and the only person who can grant that to you is you. First ascents are like that, and first descents, too.

IKE (The Descent)

It is easy to go down into Hell...; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air—there’s the rub...

—VIRGIL, Aeneid

The Himalayas,

Tibet Autonomous Region

1988

In the beginning was the word.

Or words.

Whatever these were.

They kept their lights turned off. The exhausted trekkers huddled in the dark cave and faced the peculiar writing. Scrawled with a twig, possibly, dipped in liquid radium or some other radioactive paint, the fluorescent pictographs floated in the black recesses. Ike let them savor the distraction. None of them seemed quite ready to focus on the storm beating against the mountainside outside.

With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind and their yak herders in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food, Ike was relieved to have shelter of any kind. He was still pretending for them that this was part of their trip. In fact they were off the map. He’d never heard of this hole-in-the-wall hideout. Nor seen glow-in-the-dark caveman graffiti.

“Runes,” gushed a knowing female voice. “Sacred runes left by a wandering monk.”

The alien calligraphy glowed with soft violet light in the cave’s cold bowels. The luminous hieroglyphics reminded Ike of his old dorm wall with its black-light posters. All he needed was a lash of Hendrix plundering Dylan’s anthem, say, and a whiff of plump Hawaiian red sinsemilla. Anything to vanquish the howl of awful wind. Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl....

“Those are no runes,” said a man. “It’s Bonpo.” A Brooklyn beat, the accent meant Owen. Ike had nine clients here, only two of them male. They were easy to keep straight.

“Bonpo!” one of the women barked at Owen. The coven seemed to take collective delight in savaging Owen and Bernard, the other man. Ike had been spared so far. They treated him as a harmless Himalayan hillbilly. Fine with him.

“But the Bonpo were pre-Buddhist,” the woman expounded.

The women were mostly Buddhist students from a New Age university. These things mattered very much to them.

Their goal was—or had been—Mount Kailash, the pyramidal giant just east of the Indian border. “A Canterbury Tale for the World Pilgrim” was how he’d advertised the trip. A kor—a Tibetan walkabout—to and around the holiest mountain in the world. Eight thousand per head, incense included. The problem was, somewhere along the trail he’d managed to misplace the mountain. It galled him. They were lost. Beginning at dawn today, the sky had changed from blue to milky gray. The herders had quietly bolted with the yaks. He had yet to announce that their tents and food were history. The first sloppy snowflakes had started kissing their Gore-Tex hoods just an hour ago, and Ike had taken this cave for shelter. It was a good call. He was the only one who knew it, but they were now about to get sodomized by an old-fashioned Himalayan tempest.

Ike felt his jacket being tugged to one side, and knew it would be Kora, wanting a private word. “How bad is it?” she whispered. Depending on the hour and day, Kora was his lover, base-camp shotgun, or business associate. Of late, it was a challenge estimating which came first for her, the business of adventure or the adventure of business. Either way, their little trekking company was no longer charming to her.

Ike saw no reason to front-load it with negatives. “We’ve got a great cave,” he said.

“Gee.”

“We’re still in the black, head-count-wise.”

“The itinerary’s in ruins. We were behind as it was.”

“We’re fine. We’ll take it out of the Siddhartha’s Birthplace segment.” He kept the worry out of his voice, but for once his sixth sense, or whatever it was, had come up short, and that bothered him. “Besides, getting a little lost will give them bragging rights.”

“They don’t want bragging rights. They want a schedule. You don’t know these people. They’re not your friends. We’ll get sued if they don’t make their Thai Air flight on the nineteenth.”

“These are the mountains,” said Ike. “They’ll understand.” People forgot. Up here, it was a mistake to take even your next breath for granted.

“No, Ike. They won’t understand. They have real jobs. Real obligations. Families.” That was the rub. Again. Kora wanted more from life. She wanted more from her pathless Pathfinder.

“I’m doing the best I can,” Ike said.

Outside, the storm went on horsewhipping the cave mouth. Barely May, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. There should have been plenty of time to get his bunch to, around, and back from Kailash. The bane of mountaineers, the monsoon normally didn’t spill across the mountains this far north. But as a former Everester himself, Ike should have known better than to believe in rain shadows or in schedules. Or in luck. They were in for it this time. The snow would seal their pass shut until late August. That meant he was going to have to buy space on a Chinese truck and shuttle them home via Lhasa—and that came out of his land costs. He tried calculating in his head, but their quarrel overcame him.

“You do know what I mean by Bonpo,” a woman said. Nineteen days into the trip, and Ike still couldn’t link their spirit nicknames with the names in their passports. One woman, was it Ethel or Winifred, now preferred Green Tara, mother deity of Tibet. A pert Doris Day look-alike swore she was special friends with the Dalai Lama. For weeks now Ike had been listening to them celebrate the life of cavewomen. Well, he thought, here’s your cave, ladies. Slum away.

They were sure his name—Dwight David Crockett—was an invention like their own. Nothing could convince them he wasn’t one of them, a dabbler in past lives. One evening around a campfire in northern Nepal, he’d regaled them with tales of Andrew Jackson, pirates on the Mississippi, and his own legendary death at the Alamo. He’d meant it as a joke, but only Kora got it.

“You should know perfectly well,” the woman went on, “there was no written language in Tibet before the late fifth century.”

“No written language that we know about,” Owen said.

“Next you’ll be saying this is Yeti language.”

It had been like this for days. You’d think they’d run out of air. But the higher they went, the more they argued.

“This is what we get for pandering to civilians,” Kora muttered to Ike. Civilians was her catch-all: eco-tourists, pantheist charlatans, trust funders, the overeducated. She was a street girl at heart.

“They’re not so bad,” he said. “They’re just looking for a way into Oz, same as us.”

“Civilians.”

Ike sighed. At times like this, he questioned his self-imposed exile. Living apart from the world was not easy. There was a price to be paid for choosing the less-traveled road. Little things, bigger ones. He was no longer that rosy-cheeked lad who had come with the Peace Corps. He still had the cheekbones and cowled brow and careless mane. But a dermatologist on one of his treks had advised him to stay out of the high-altitude sun before his face turned to boot leather. Ike had never considered himself God’s gift to women, but he saw no reason to trash what looks he still had. He’d lost two of his back molars to Nepal’s dearth of dentists, and another tooth to a falling rock on the backside of Everest. And not so long ago, in his Johnnie Walker Black and Camels days, he’d taken to serious self-abuse, even flirting with the lethal west face of Makalu. He’d quit the smoke and booze cold when some British nurse told him his voice sounded like a Rudyard Kipling punchline. Makalu still needed slaying, of course. Though many mornings he even wondered about that.

Exile went deeper than the cosmetics or even prime health, of course. Self-doubt came with the territory, a wondering about what might have been, had he stayed the course back in Jackson. Rig work. Stone masonry. Maybe mountain guiding in the Tetons, or outfitting for hunters. No telling. He’d spent the last eight years in Nepal and Tibet watching himself slowly devolve from the Golden Boy of the Himalayas into one more forgotten surrogate of the American empire. He’d grown old inside. Even now there were days when Ike felt eighty. Next week was his thirty-first birthday.

“Would you look at this?” rose a cry. “What kind of mandala is that? The lines are all twisty.”

Ike looked at the circle. It was hanging on the wall like a luminous moon. Mandalas were meditation aids, blueprints for divinity’s palaces. Normally they consisted of circles within circles containing squared lines. By visualizing it just so, a 3-D architecture was supposed to appear above the mandala’s flat surface. This one, though, looked like scrambled snakes.

Ike turned on his light. End of mystery, he congratulated himself.

Even he was stunned by the sight.

“My God,” said Kora.

Where, a moment before, the fluorescent words had hung in magical suspense, a nude corpse stood rigidly propped upon a stone shelf along the back wall. The words weren’t written on stone. They were written on him. The mandala was separate, painted on the wall to his right side.

A set of rocks formed a crude stairway up to his stage, and various passersby had attached katas—long white prayer scarves—to cracks in the stone ceiling. The katas sucked back and forth in the draft like gently disturbed ghosts.

The man’s grimace was slightly bucktoothed from mummification, and his eyes were calcified to chalky blue marbles. Otherwise the extreme cold and high altitude had left him perfectly preserved. Under the harsh beam of Ike’s headlamp, the lettering was faint and red upon his emaciated limbs and belly and chest.

That he was a traveler was self-evident. In these regions, everyone was a pilgrim or a nomad or a salt trader or a refugee. But, judging from his scars and unhealed wounds and a metal collar around his neck and a warped, badly mended broken left arm, this particular Marco Polo had endured a journey beyond imagination. If flesh is memory, his body cried out a whole history of abuse and enslavement.

They stood beneath the shelf and goggled at the suffering. Three of the women—and Owen—began weeping. Ike alone approached. Probing here and there with his light beam, he reached out to touch one shin with his ice axe: hard as fossil wood.

Of all the obvious insults, the one that stood out most was his partial castration. One of the man’s testicles had been yanked away, not cut, not even bitten—the edges of the tear were too ragged—and the wound had been cauterized with fire. The burn scars radiated out from his groin in a hairless keloid starburst. Ike couldn’t get over the raw scorn of it. Man’s tenderest part, mutilated, then doctored with a torch.

”Look,” someone whimpered. “What did they do to his nose?”

Midcenter on the battered face was a ring unlike anything he’d ever seen before. This was no silvery Gen-X body piercing. The ring, three inches across and crusted with blood, was plugged deep in his septum, almost up into the skull. It hung to his bottom lip, as black as his beard. It was, thought Ike, utilitarian, large enough to control cattle.

Then he got a little closer and his repulsion altered. The ring was brutal. Blood and smoke and filth had coated it almost black, but Ike could plainly see the dull gleam of solid gold.

Ike turned to his people and saw nine pairs of frightened eyes beseeching him from beneath hoods and visors. Everyone had their lights on now. No one was arguing.

“Why?” wept one of the women.

A couple of the Buddhists had reverted to Christianity and were on their knees, crossing themselves. Owen was rocking from side to side, murmuring Kaddish.

Kora came close. “You beautiful bastard.” She giggled. Ike started. She was talking to the corpse.

“What did you say?”

“We’re off the hook. They’re not going to hit us up for refunds after all. We don’t have to provide their holy mountain anymore. They’ve got something better.”

“Let up, Kora. Give them some credit. They’re not ghouls.”

“No? Look around, Ike.”

Sure enough, cameras were stealing into view in ones and twos. There was a flash, then another. Their shock gave way to tabloid voyeurism.

In no time the entire cast was blazing away with eight-hundred-dollar point-and-shoots. Motor drives made an insect hum. The lifeless flesh flared in their artificial lightning. Ike moved out of frame, and welcomed the corpse like a savior. It was unbelievable. Famished, cold, and lost, they couldn’t have been happier.

One of the women had climbed the stepping-stones and was kneeling to one side of the nude, her head tilted sideways.

She looked down at them. “But he’s one of us,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Us. You and me. A white man.”

Someone else framed it in less vulgar terms. “A Caucasian male?”

“That’s crazy,” someone objected. “Here? In the middle of nowhere?”

Ike knew she was right. The white flesh, the hair on its forearms and chest, the blue eyes, the cheekbones so obviously non-Nepalese. But the woman wasn’t pointing to his hairy arms or blue eyes or slender cheekbones. She was pointing at the hieroglyphics painted on his thigh. Ike aimed his light at the other thigh. And froze.

The text was in English. Modern English. Only upside down.

It came to him. The body hadn’t been written upon after death. The man had written upon himself in life. He’d used his own body as a blank page. Upside down. He’d inscribed his journal notes on the only parchment guaranteed to travel with him. Now Ike saw how the lettering wasn’t just painted on, but crudely tattooed.

Wherever he could reach, the man had jotted bits of testimony. Abrasions and filth obscured some of the writing, particularly below the knees and around his ankles. The rest of it could easily have been dismissed as random and lunatic. Numbers mixed with words and phrases, especially on the outer edges of each thigh, where he’d apparently decided there was extra room for new entries. The clearest passage lay across his lower stomach.

“‘All the world will be in love with night,’” Ike read aloud, “‘and pay no worship to the garish sun.’”

“Gibberish,” snapped Owen, badly spooked.

“Bible talk,” Ike sympathized.

“No, it’s not,” piped up Kora. “That’s not from the Bible. It’s Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet.”

Ike felt the group’s repugnance. Indeed, why would this tortured creature choose for his obituary the most famous love story ever written? A story about opposing clans. A tale of love transcending violence. The poor stiff had been out of his gourd on thin air and solitude. It was no coincidence that in the highest monasteries on earth, men endlessly obsessed about delusion. Hallucinations were a given up here. Even the Dalai Lama joked about it.

“And so,” Ike said, “he’s white. He knew his Shakespeare. That makes him no older than two or three hundred years.”

It was becoming a parlor game. Their fear was shifting to morbid delight. Forensics as recreation.

“Who is this guy?” one woman asked.

“A slave?”

“An escaped prisoner?”

Ike said nothing. He went nose-to-nose with the gaunt face, hunting for clues. Tell your journey, he thought. Speak your escape. Who shackled you with gold? Nothing. The marble eyes ignored their curiosity. The grimace enjoyed its voiceless riddles.

Owen had joined them on the shelf, reading from the opposite shoulder. “RAF.”

Sure enough, the left deltoid bore a tattoo with the letters RAF beneath an eagle. It was right side up and of commercial quality. Ike grasped the cold arm.

“Royal Air Force,” he translated.

The puzzle assembled. It even half-explained the Shakespeare, if not the chosen lines.

“He was a pilot?” asked the Paris bob. She seemed charmed.

“Pilot. Navigator. Bombardier.” Ike shrugged. “Who knows?”

Like a cryptographer, he bent to inspect the words and numbers twining the flesh. Line after line, he traced each clue to its dead end. Here and there he punctuated complete thoughts with a jab of his fingertip. The trekkers backed away, letting him work through the cyphers. He seemed to know what he was doing.

Ike circled back and tried a string in reverse. It made sense this time. Yet it made no sense. He got out his topographical map of the Himalayan chain and found the longitude and latitude, but snorted at their nexus. No way, he thought, and lifted his gaze across the wreckage of a human body. He looked back at the map. Could it be?

“Have some.” The smell of French-pressed gourmet coffee made him blink. A plastic mug slid into view. Ike glanced up. Kora’s blue eyes were forgiving. That warmed him more than the coffee. He took the cup with murmured thanks and realized he had a terrific headache. Hours had passed. Shadows lay pooled in the deeper cave like wet sewage.

Ike saw a small group squatting Neanderthal-style around a small Bluet gas stove, melting snow and brewing joe. The clearest proof of their miracle was that Owen had broken down and was actually sharing his private stock of coffee. There was one hand-grinding the beans in a plastic machine, another squeezing the filter press, yet another grating a bit of cinnamon on top of each cupful. They were actually cooperating. For the first time in a month, Ike almost liked them.

“You okay?” Kora asked.

“Me?” It sounded strange, someone asking after his well-being. Especially her.

As if he needed any more to ponder, Ike suspected Kora was going to leave him. Before setting off from Kathmandu, she’d announced this was her final trek for the company. And since Himalayan High Journeys was nothing more than her and him, it implied a larger dissatisfaction. He would have minded less if her reason was another man, another country, better profits, or higher risks. But her reason was him. Ike had broken her heart because he was Ike, full of dreams and childlike naïveté. A drifter on life’s stream. What had attracted her to him in the first place now disturbed her, his lone wolf/high mountains way. She thought he knew nothing about the way people really worked, like this notion of a lawsuit, and maybe there was some truth to that. He’d been hoping the trek would somehow bridge their gap, that it would draw her back to the magic that drew him. Over the past two years she’d grown weary, though. Storms and bankruptcy no longer spelled magic for her.

“I’ve been studying this mandala,” she said, indicating the painted circle filled with squirming lines. In the darkness, its colors had been brilliant and alive. In their light, the drawing was bland. “I’ve seen hundreds of mandalas, but I can’t make heads or tails out of this one. It looks like chaos, all those lines and squiggles. It does seem to have a center, though.” She glanced up at the mummy, then at Ike’s notes. “How about you? Getting anywhere?”

He’d drawn the oddest sketch, pinning words and text in cartoon balloons to different positions on the body and linking them with a mess of arrows and lines.

Ike sipped at the coffee. Where to begin? The flesh declared a maze, both in the way it told the story and in the story it told. The man had written his evidence as it occurred to him, apparently, adding and revising and contradicting himself, wandering with his truths. He was like a shipwrecked diarist who had suddenly found a pen and couldn’t quit filling in old details.

“First of all,” he began, “his name was Isaac.”

“Isaac?” asked Darlene from the assembly line of coffee makers. They had stopped what they were doing to listen to him.

Ike ran his finger from nipple to nipple. The declaration was clear. Partially clear. I am Isaac, it said, followed by In my exile / In my agony of Light.

“See these numbers?” said Ike. “I figure this must be a serial number. And 10/03/23 could be his birthday, right?”

“Nineteen twenty-three?” someone asked. Their disappointment verged on childlike. Seventy-five years old evidently didn’t qualify as a genuine antique.

“Sorry,” he said, then continued. “See this other date here?” He brushed aside what remained of the pubic patch. “4/7/44. The day of his shoot-down, I’m guessing.”

”Shoot-down?”

“Or crash.”

They were bewildered. He started over, this time telling them the story he was piecing together. “Look at him. Once upon a time, he was a kid. Twenty-one years old. World War II was on. He signed up or got drafted. That’s the RAF tattoo. They sent him to India. His job was to fly the Hump.”

“Hump?” someone echoed. It was Bernard. He was furiously tapping the news into his laptop.

“That’s what pilots called it when they flew supplies to bases in Tibet and China,” Ike said. “The Himalayan chain. Back then, this whole region was part of an Oriental Western Front. It was a rough go. Every now and then a plane went down. The crews rarely survived.”

“A fallen angel,” sighed Owen. He wasn’t alone. They were all becoming infatuated.

“I don’t see how you’ve drawn all that from a couple of strands of numbers,” said Bernard. He aimed his pencil at Ike’s latter set of numbers. “You call that the date of his shoot-down. Why not the date of his marriage, or his graduation from Oxford, or the date he lost his virginity? What I mean is, this guy’s no kid. He looks forty. If you ask me, he wandered away from some scientific or mountain-climbing expedition within the last couple years. He sure as snow didn’t die in 1944 at the age of twenty-one.”

“I agree,” Ike said, and Bernard looked instantly deflated. “He refers to a period of captivity. A long stretch. Darkness. Starvation. Hard labor.” The sacred deep.

“A prisoner of war. Of the Japanese?”

“I don’t know about that,” Ike said.

“Chinese Communists, maybe?”

“Russians?” someone else tried.

“Nazis?”

“Drug lords?”

“Tibetan bandits!”

The guesses weren’t so wild. Tibet had long been a chessboard for the Great Game.

”We saw you checking the map. You were looking for something.”

“Origins,” Ike said. “A starting point.”

“And?”

With both hands, Ike smoothed down the thigh hair and exposed another set of numbers. “These are map coordinates.”

“For where he got shot down. It makes perfect sense.” Bernard was with him now.

“You mean his airplane might be somewhere close?”

Mount Kailash was forgotten. The prospect of a crash site thrilled them.

“Not exactly,” Ike said.

“Spit it out, man. Where did he go down?”

Here’s where it got a little fantastic. Mildly, Ike said, “East of here.”

“How far east?”

“Just above Burma.”

“Burma!” Bernard and Cleopatra registered the incredibility. The rest sat mute, perplexed within their own ignorance.

“On the north side of the range,” said Ike, “slightly inside Tibet.”

“But that’s over a thousand miles away.”

“I know.”

It was well past midnight. Between their café lattes and adrenaline, sleep was unlikely for hours to come. They sat erect or stood in the cave while the enormity of this character’s journey sank in.

“How did he get here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you said he was a prisoner.”

Ike exhaled cautiously. “Something like that.”

“Something?”

“Well.” He cleared his throat softly. “More like a pet.”

“What!”

“I don’t know. It’s a phrase he uses, right here: ‘favored cosset.’ That’s a pet calf or something, isn’t it?”

“Ah, get out, Ike. If you don’t know, don’t make it up.”

He hunched. It sounded like crazed drivel to him, too.

“Actually it’s a French term,” a voice interjected. It was Cleo, the librarian. “Cosset means lamb, not calf. Ike’s right, though. It does refer to a pet. One that is fondled and enjoyed.”

“Lamb?” someone objected, as if Cleo—or the dead man, or both—were insulting their pooled intelligence.

“Yes,” Cleo answered, “lamb. But that bothers me less than the other word, ‘favored.’ That’s a pretty provocative term, don’t you think?”

By the group’s silence, they clearly had not thought about it.

“This?” she asked them, and almost touched the body with her fingers. “This is favored? Favored over what others? And above all, favored by whom? In my mind, anyway, it suggests some sort of master.”

“You’re inventing,” a woman said. They didn’t want it to be true.

“I wish I were,” said Cleo. “But there is this, too.”

Ike had to squint at the faint lettering where she was pointing. Corvée, it said.

“What’s that?”

“More of the same,” she answered. “Subjugation. Maybe he was a prisoner of the Japanese. It sounds like The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.”

“Except I never heard of the Japanese putting nose rings in their prisoners,” Ike said.

“The history of domination is complex.”

“But nose rings?”

“All kinds of unspeakable things have been done.”

Ike made it more emphatic. “Gold nose rings?”

“Gold?” She blinked as he played his light on the dull gleam.

“You said it yourself. A favored lamb. And you asked the question. Who favored this lamb?”

“You know?”

“Put it this way. He thought he did. See this?” Ike pushed at one ice-cold leg. It was a single word almost hidden on the left quadricep.

“Satan,” she lip-read to herself.

“There’s more,” he said, and gently rotated the skin.

Exists, it said.

“This is part of it, too.” He showed her. It was assembled on the flesh like a prayer or a poem. Bone of my bones / flesh of my flesh. “From Genesis, right? The Garden of Eden.”

He could sense Kora struggling to orchestrate some sort of rebuttal. “He was a prisoner,” she tried. “He was writing about evil. In general. It’s nothing. He hated his captors. He called them Satan. The worst name he knew.”

“You’re doing what I did,” Ike said. “You’re fighting the evidence.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What happened to him was evil. But he didn’t hate it.”

“Of course he did.”

“And yet there’s something here,” Ike said.

“I’m not so sure,” Kora said.

“It’s in between the words. A tone. Don’t you feel it?”

Kora did—her frown was clear—but she refused to admit it. Her wariness seemed more than academic.

“There are no warnings here,” Ike said. “No ‘Beware.’ No ‘Keep Out.’”

“What’s your point?”

“Doesn’t it bother you that he quotes Romeo and Juliet? And talks about Satan the way Adam talked about Eve?”

Kora winced. “He didn’t mind the slavery.”

“How can you say that?” she whispered.

“Kora.” She looked at him. A tear was starting in one eye. “He was grateful. It was written all over his body.”

She shook her head in denial.

“You know it’s true.”

“No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” Ike said. “He was in love.”

Cabin fever set in.

On the second morning, Ike found that the snow had drifted to basketball-rim heights outside the cave’s entryway. By then the tattooed corpse had lost its novelty, and the group was getting dangerous in its boredom. One by one, the batteries of their Walkmans winked out, leaving them bereft of the music and words of angels, dragons, earth drums, and spiritual surgeons. Then the gas stove ran out of fuel, meaning several addicts went into caffeine withdrawal. It did not help matters when the supply of toilet paper ran out.

Ike did what he could. As possibly the only kid in Wyoming to take classical flute lessons, he’d scorned his mother’s assurances that someday it would come in handy. Now she was proved right. He had a plastic recorder, and the notes were quite beautiful in the cave. At the end of some Mozart snatches, they applauded, then petered off into their earlier moroseness.

On the morning of the third day, Owen went missing. Ike was not surprised. He’d seen mountain expeditions get high-centered on storms just like this, and knew how twisted the dynamics could get. Chances were Owen had wandered off to get exactly this kind of attention. Kora thought so, too.

“He’s faking it,” she said. She was lying in his arms, their sleeping bags zipped together. Even the weeks of sweat had not worn away the smell of her coconut shampoo. At his recommendation, most of the others had buddied up for warmth, too, even Bernard. Owen was the one who had apparently gotten left out in the cold.

“He must have been heading for the front door,” Ike said. “I’ll go take a look.” Reluctantly he unzipped his and Kora’s paired bags and felt their body heat vanish into the chill air.

He looked around the cave’s chamber. It was dark and freezing. The naked corpse towering above them made the cave feel like a crypt. On his feet now, blood moving again, Ike didn’t like the look of their entropy. It was too soon to be lying around dying.

“I’ll come with you,” Kora said.

It took them three minutes to reach the entranceway.

“I don’t hear the wind anymore,” Kora said. “Maybe the storm’s stopped.”

But the entry was plugged by a ten-foot-high drift, complete with a wicked cornice curling in at the crown. It allowed no light or sound from the outer world. “I don’t believe it,” Kora said.

Ike kick-stepped his boot toes into the hard crust and climbed to where his head bumped the ceiling. With one hand he karate-chopped the snow and managed a thin view. The light was gray out there, and hurricane-force winds were skinning the surface with a freight-train roar. Even as he watched, his little opening sealed shut again. They were bottled up.

He slid back to the base of the snow. For the moment he forgot about the missing client.

“Now what?” Kora asked behind him.

Her faith in him was a gift. Ike took it. She—they—needed him to be strong.

“One thing’s certain,” he said. “Our missing man didn’t come this way. No footprints, and he couldn’t have gotten out through that snow anyway.”

“But where could he have gone?”

“There might be some other exit.” Firmly he added, “We may need one.”

He had suspected the existence of a secondary feeder tunnel. Their dead RAF pilot had written about being reborn from a “mineral womb” and climbing into an “agony of light.” On the one hand, Isaac could have been describing every ascetic’s reentry into reality after prolonged meditation. But Ike was beginning to think the words were more than spiritual metaphor. Isaac had been a warrior, after all, trained for hardship. Everything about him declared the literal physical world. At any rate, Ike wanted to believe that the dead man might have been talking about some subterranean passage. If he could escape through it to here, maybe they could escape through it to there, wherever that might be.

Back in the central chamber, he prodded the group to life. “Folks,” he announced, “we could use a hand.”

A camper’s groan emitted from one cluster of Gore-Tex and fiberfill. “Don’t tell me,” someone complained, “we have to go save him.”

“If he found a way out of here,” Ike retorted, “then he’s saved us. But first we have to find him.”

Grumbling, they rose. Bags unzipped. By the light of his headlamp, Ike watched their pockets of body heat drift off in vaporous bursts, like souls. From here on, it was imperative to keep them on their feet. He led them to the back of the cave. There were a dozen portals honeycombing the chamber’s walls, though only two were man-sized. With all the authority he could muster, Ike formed two teams: them all together, and him. Alone. “This way we can cover twice the distance,” he explained.

“He’s leaving us,” Cleo despaired. “He’s saving himself.”

“You don’t know Ike,” Kora said.

“You won’t leave us?” Cleo asked him.

Ike looked at her, hard. “I won’t.”

Their relief showed in long streams of exhaled frost.

“You need to stick together,” he instructed them solemnly. “Move slowly. Stay in flashlight range at all times. Take no chances. I don’t want any sprained ankles. If you get tired and need to sit down for a while, make sure a buddy stays with you. Questions? None? Good. Now let’s synchronize watches....”

He gave the group three plastic “candles,” six-inch tubes of luminescent chemicals that could be activated with a twist. The green glow didn’t light much space and only lasted two or three hours. But they would serve as beacons every few hundred yards: crumbs upon the forest floor.

“Let me go with you,” Kora murmured to him. Her yearning surprised him.

“You’re the only one I trust with them,” he said. “You take the right tunnel, I’ll take the left. Meet me back here in an hour.” He turned to go. But they didn’t move. He realized they weren’t just watching him and Kora, but waiting for his blessing. “Vaya con Dios,” he said gruffly.

Then, in full view of the others, he kissed Kora. One from the heart, broad, a breath-taker. For a moment, Kora held on tight, and he knew things were going to be all right between them, they were going to find a way.

Ike had never had much stomach for caving. The enclosure made him claustrophobic. Just the same, he had good instincts for it. On the face of it, ascending a mountain was the exact reverse of descending into a cave. A mountain gave freedoms that could be equally horrifying and liberating. In Ike’s experience, caves took away freedom in the same proportions. Their darkness and sheer gravity were tyrants. They compressed the imagination and deformed the spirit. And yet both mountains and caves involved climbing. And when you came right down to it, there was no difference between ascent and descent. It was all the same circle. And so he made swift progress.

Five minutes deep, he heard a sound and paused. “Owen?”

His senses were in flux, not just heightened by the darkness and silence, but also subtly changed. It was hard to put words to, the clean dry scent of dust rendered by mountains still in birth, the scaly touch of lichen that had never seen sunshine. The visuals were not completely trustworthy. You saw like this on very dark nights on a mountain, a headlight view of the world, one beam wide, truncated, partial.

A muffled voice reached him. He wanted it to be Owen so the search could be over and he could return to Kora. But the tunnels apparently shared a common wall. Ike put his head against the stone—chill, but not bitterly cold—and could hear Bernard calling for Owen.

Farther on, Ike’s tunnel became a slot at shoulder height. “Hello?” he called into the slot. For some reason, he felt his animal core bristle. It was like standing at the mouth of a deep, dark alleyway. Nothing was out of place. Yet the very ordinariness of the walls and empty stone seemed to promise menace.

Ike shone his headlamp through the slot. As he stood peering into the depths at a tube of fractured limestone identical to the one he was already occupying, he saw nothing in itself to fear. Yet the air was so... inhuman. The smells were so faint and unadulterated that they verged on no smell, Zen-like, clear as water. It was almost refreshing. That made him more afraid.

The corridor extended in a straight line into darkness. He checked his watch: thirty-two minutes had passed. It was time to backtrack and meet the group. That was the arrangement, one hour, round trip. But then, at the far edge of his light beam, something glittered.

Ike couldn’t resist. It was like a tiny fallen star in there. And if he was quick, the whole exercise wouldn’t last more than a minute. He found a foothold and pulled himself in. The slot was just big enough to squeeze through, feetfirst.

On the other side of the wall, nothing had changed. This part of the tunnel looked no different from the other. His light ahead picked out the same gleam twinkling in the far darkness.

Slowly he brought his light down to his feet. Beside one boot, he found another reflection identical to the one glinting in the distance. It gave the same dull gleam.

He lifted his boot.

It was a gold coin.

Carefully, blood knocking through his veins, Ike stopped. A tiny voice warned him not to pick it up. But there was no way....

The coin’s antiquity was sensuous. Its lettering had worn away long ago, and the shape was asymmetrical, nothing stamped by any machine. Only a vague, amorphous bust of some king or deity still showed.

Ike shone his light down the tunnel. Past the next coin he saw a third one winking in the blackness. Could it be? The naked Isaac had fled from some precious underground reserve, even dropping his pilfered fortune along the way.

The coins blinked like feral eyes. Otherwise the stone throat lay bare, too bright in the foreground, too dark in the back. Too neatly appointed with one coin, then another.

What if the coins had not been dropped? What if they’d been placed? The thought knifed him. Like bait.

He slugged his back against the cold stone.

The coins were a trap.

He swallowed hard, forced himself to think it through.

The coin was cold as ice. With one fingernail he scraped away a veneer of encrusted glacier dust. It had been lying here for years, even decades or centuries. The more he thought about it, the more his horror mounted.

The trap was nothing personal. It had nothing to do with drawing him, Ike Crockett, into the depths. To the contrary, this was just random opportunism. Time was not a consideration. Even patience had nothing to do with it. The way trash fishermen did, someone was chumming the occasional traveler. You threw down a handful of scraps and maybe something came, and maybe it didn’t. But who came here? That was easy. People like him: monks, traders, lost souls. But why lure them? To where?

His bait analogy evolved. This was less like trash fishing than bearbaiting. Ike’s dad used to do it in the Wind River Range for Texans who paid to sit in a blind and “hunt” browns and blacks. All the outfitters did it, standard operating procedure, like working cattle. You cultivated a garbage heap maybe ten minutes by horse from the cabins, so that the bears got used to regular feeding. As the season neared, you started putting out tastier tidbits. In an effort at making them feel included, Ike and his sister were called upon each Easter to surrender their marshmallow bunnies. As he neared ten, Ike was required to accompany his father, and that was when he saw where his candy went.

The images cascaded. A child’s pink candy left in the silent woods. Dead bears hanging in the autumn light, skins falling heavily as if by magic where the knives traced lines. And underneath, bodies like men almost, as slick as swimmers.

Out, thought Ike. Get out.

Not daring to take his light off the inner mountain, Ike climbed back through the slot, cursing his loud jacket, cursing the rocks that shifted underfoot, cursing his greed. He heard noises that he knew didn’t exist. Jumped at shadows, he cast himself. The dread wouldn’t leave him. All he could think of was exit.

He got back to the main chamber out of breath, skin still crawling. His return couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes. Without checking his watch, he guessed his round trip at less than an hour.

The chamber was pitch black. He was alone. He stopped to listen as his heartbeat slowed, and there was not a sound, not a shuffle. He could see the fluorescent writing hovering at the far edge of the chamber. It entwined the dark corpse like some lovely exotic serpent. He lashed his light across the chamber. The gold nose ring glinted. And something else. As if returning to a thought, he pulled his light back to the face.

The dead man was smiling.

Ike wiggled his light, jimmied the shadows. It had to be an optical trick, that or his memory was failing. He remembered a tight grimace, nothing like this wild smile. Where before he’d seen only the tips of a few teeth, joy—open glee—now played in his light. Get a grip, Crockett.

His mind wouldn’t quit racing. What if the corpse itself was bait? Suddenly the text took on a grotesque clarity. I am Isaac. The son who gave himself to sacrifice. For love of the Father. In exile. In my agony of Light. But what could this all mean?

He’d done his share of hardcore rescues and knew the drill—not that there was much of a drill for this one. Ike grabbed his coil of 9-mm rope and stuffed his last four AA batteries into a pocket, then looked around. What else? Two protein bars, a Velcro ankle brace, his med kit. It seemed as if there should have been more to carry. The cupboard was pretty much bare, though.

Just before departing the main chamber, Ike cast his light across the room. Sleeping bags lay scattered on the floor like empty cocoons. He entered the right-hand tunnel. The passage snaked downward at an even pitch, left, then right, then became steeper. What a mistake, sending them off, even all together. Ike couldn’t believe he’d put his little flock at this kind of risk. For that matter, he couldn’t believe the risk they’d taken. But of course they’d taken it. They didn’t know better.

“Hello!” he called. His guilt deepened by the vertical foot. Was it his fault they’d put their faith in a counterculture buccaneer?

The going slowed. The walls and ceiling grew corrupt with long sheets of delaminating rock. Pull the wrong piece, and the whole mass might slide. Ike pendulumed from admiration to resentment. His pilgrims were brave. His pilgrims were foolhardy. And he was in danger.

If not for Kora, he would have talked himself out of further descent. In a sense, she became a scapegoat for his courage. He wanted to turn around and flee. The same foreboding that had paralyzed him in the other tunnel flared up again. His very bones seemed ready to lock in rebellion, limb by limb, joint by joint. He forced himself deeper.

At last he reached a plunging shaft and came to a halt. Like an invisible waterfall, a column of freezing air streamed past from reaches too high for his flashlight beam. He held his hand out, and the cold current poured through his fingers.

At the very edge of the precipice, Ike looked down around his feet and found one of his six-inch chemical candles. The green glow was so faint he had almost missed it.

He lifted the plastic tube by one end and turned off his headlamp, trying to judge how long ago they had activated the mixture. More than three hours, less than six. Time was racing out of his control. On the off-chance, he sniffed the plastic. Impossibly, it seemed to hold a trace of her coconut scent.

“Kora!” he bellowed into the tube of air.

Where outcrops disturbed the flow of wind, a tiny symphony of whistles and sirens and bird cries answered back, a music of stone. Ike stuffed the candle into one pocket.

The air smelled fresh, like the outside of a mountain. Ike filled his lungs with it. A rush of instincts collided in what could only be called heartache. In that instant, he wanted what he had never really missed. He wanted the sun.

He searched the sides of the shaft with his light—up and down—for signs that his group had gone this way. Here and there he spotted a possible handhold or a shelf to rest upon, though no one—not even Ike in his prime—could have climbed down into the shaft and survived.

The shaft’s difficulties exceeded even his group’s talent for blind faith. They must have turned around and gone some other way. Ike started out.

A hundred meters farther back, he found their detour.

He had walked right past the opening on his way down. On the return, the hole was practically blatant—especially the green glow ebbing from its canted throat. He had to take his pack off in order to get through the small aperture. Just inside lay the second of his chemical candles.

By comparing the two candles—this one was much brighter—Ike fixed the group’s chronology. Here indeed was their deviation. He tried to imagine which pioneer spirit had piloted the group into this side tunnel, and knew it could only have been one person.

“Kora,” he whispered. She would not have left Owen for dead any more than he. It was she who would be insisting on probing deeper and deeper into the tunnel system.

The detour led to others. Ike followed the side tunnel to one fork, then another, then another. The unfolding network horrified him. Kora had unwittingly led them—him, too—deep into an underground maze.

“Wait!” he shouted.

At first the group had taken the time to mark their choices. Some of the branches were marked with a simple arrow arranged with rocks. A few showed the right way or the left way with a big X scratched on the wall. But soon the marks ended. No doubt emboldened by their progress, the group had quit blazing its path. Ike had few clues other than a black scuff mark or a fresh patch of rock where someone had pulled loose a handhold.

Second-guessing their choices devoured the time. Ike checked his watch. Well past midnight. He’d been hunting Kora and the lost pilgrims for over nine hours now. That meant they were desperately lost.

His head hurt. He was tired. The adrenaline was long gone. The air no longer had the smell of summits or jet-stream. This was an interior scent, the inside of the mountain’s lungs, the smell of darkness. He made himself chew and swallow a protein bar. Ike wasn’t sure he could find his way out again.

Yet he kept his mountaineer’s presence of mind. Thousands of physical details clamored for his attention. Some he absorbed, most he simply passed between. The trick was to see simply.

He came upon a glory hole, a huge, unlikely void within the mountain. His light beam withered in the depths and towering height of it.

Even worn down, he was awed. Great columns of buttery limestone dangled from the arched ceiling. A huge Om had been carved into one wall. And dozens, maybe hundreds, of suits of ancient Mongolian armor hung from rawhide thongs knotted to knobs and outcrops. It looked like an entire army of ghosts. A vanquished army.

The wheat-colored stone was gorgeous in his headlamp. The armor twisted in a slight breeze and fractured the light into a million points.

Ike admired the soft leather thangka paintings pinned to the walls, then lifted a fringed corner and discovered that the fringe was made of human fingers. He dropped it, horrified. The leather was flayed human skins. He backed away, counting the thangkas. Fifty at least. Could they have belonged to the Mongolian horde?

He looked down. His boots had tracked halfway across yet another mandala, this one twenty feet across and made of colored sand. He’d seen some of these in Tibetan monasteries before, but never so large. Like the one beside Isaac in the cave chamber, it held details that looked less architectural than like organic worms. His were not the only footprints spoiling the artwork. Others had trampled it, and recently. Kora and the gang had come this way.

At one junction he ran out of signs altogether. Ike faced the branching tunnels and, from somewhere in his childhood, remembered the answer to all labyrinths: consistency. Go to your left or to your right, but always stay true. This being Tibet—the land of clockwise circumambulation around sacred temples and mountains—he chose left. It was the correct choice. He found the first of them ten minutes later.

Ike had entered a stratum of limestone so pure and slick it practically swallowed the shadows. The walls curved without angles. There were no cracks or ledging in the rock, only rugosities and gentle waves. Nothing caught at the light, nothing cast darkness. The result was unadulterated light. Wherever Ike turned his lamp beam, he was surrounded by radiance the color of milk.

Cleopatra was there. Ike rounded the wing and her light joined with his. She was sitting in a lotus position in the center of the luminous passage. With ten gold coins spread before her, she could have been a beggar.

“Are you hurt?” Ike asked her.

“Just my ankle,” Cleo replied, smiling. Her eyes had that holy gleam they all aspired to, part wisdom, part soul. Ike wasn’t fooled.

“Let’s go,” he ordered.

“You go ahead,” Cleo breathed with her angel voice. “I’ll stay a bit longer.”

Some people can handle solitude. Most just think they can. Ike had seen its victims in the mountains and monasteries, and once in a jail. Sometimes it was the isolation that undid them. Sometimes it was the cold or famine or even amateur meditation. With Cleo it was a little of all of the above.

Ike checked his watch: 3:00 A.M. “What about the rest of you? Where did they go?”

“Not much farther,” she said. Good news. And bad news. “They went to find you.”

“Find me?”

“You kept calling for help. We weren’t going to leave you alone.”

“But I didn’t call for help.”

She patted his leg. “All for one,” she assured him.

Ike picked up one of the coins. “Where’d you find these?”

“Everywhere,” she said. “More and more, the deeper we got. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“I’m going for the others. Then we’ll all come back for you,” Ike said. He changed the fading batteries in his headlamp while he talked, replacing them with the last of his new ones. “Promise you won’t move from here.”

“I like it here very much.”

He left Cleo in a sea of alabaster radiance.

The limestone tube sped him deeper. The decline was even, the footing uncomplicated. Ike jogged, sure he could catch them. The air took on a coppery tang, nameless, yet distantly familiar. Not much farther, Cleo had said.

The blood streaks started at 3:47 A.M..

Because they first appeared as several dozen crimson handprints upon the white stone, and because the stone was so porous that it practically inhaled the liquid, Ike mistook them for primitive art. He should have known better.

Ike slowed. The effect was lovely in its playful randomness. Ike liked his image: slap-happy cavemen.

Then his foot hit a puddle not yet absorbed into the stone. The dark liquid splashed up. It sluiced in bright streaks across the wall, red on white. Blood, he realized.

“God!” he yelled, and vaulted wide in instant evasion. A tiptoe, then the same bloody sole landed again, skidded, torqued sideways. The momentum drove him facefirst into the wall and then sent him tumbling around the bend.

His headlamp flew off. The light blinked out. He came to a halt against cold stone.

It was like being clubbed unconscious. The blackness stopped all control, all motion, all place in the world. Ike even quit breathing. As much as he wanted to hide from consciousness, he was wide awake.

Abruptly the thought of lying still became unbearable. He rolled away from the wall and let gravity guide him onto his hands and knees. Hands bare, he felt about for the headlamp in widening circles, torn between disgust and terror at the viscous curd layering the floor. He could even taste the stuff, cold upon his teeth. He pressed his lips shut, but the smell was gamy, and there was no game in here, only his people. It was a monstrous thought.

At last he snagged the headlamp by its connecting wire, rocked back onto his heels, fumbled with the switch. There was a sound, distant or near, he couldn’t tell. “Hey?” he challenged. He paused, listened, heard nothing.

Laboring against his own panic, Ike flipped the switch on and off and on. It was like trying to spark a fire with wolves closing in. The sound again. He caught it this time. Nails scratching rock? Rats? The blood scent surged. What was going on here?

He muttered a curse at the dead light. With his fingertips he stroked the lens, searching for cracks. Gently he shook it, dreading the rattle of a shattered lightbulb. Nothing.

Was blind, but now I see.... The words drifted into his consciousness, and he was uncertain whether they were a song or his memory of it. The sound came more distinctly. ‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear. It washed in from far away, a woman’s lush voice singing “Amazing Grace.” Something about its brave syllables suggested less a hymn than an anthem. A last stand.

It was Kora’s voice. She had never sung for him. But this was she. Singing for them all, it seemed.

Her presence, even in the far depths, steadied him. “Kora,” he called. On his knees, eyes wide in the utter blackness, Ike disciplined himself. If it wasn’t the switch or the bulb... he tried the wire. Tight at the ends, no lacerations. He opened the battery case, wiped his fingers clean and dry, and carefully removed each slender battery, counting in a whisper, “One, two, three, four.” One at a time, he cleaned the tips against his T-shirt, then swabbed each contact in the case and replaced the batteries. Head up, head down, up, down. There was an order to things. He obeyed.

He snapped the plate back onto the case, drew gently at the wire, palmed the lamp. And flicked the switch.

Nothing.

The scratch-scratch noise rose louder. It seemed very close. He wanted to bolt away, any direction, any cost, just flee.

“Stick,” he instructed himself. He said it out loud. It was something like a mantra, his own, something he told himself when the walls got steep or the holds thin or the storms mean. Stick, as in hang. As in no surrender.

Ike clenched his teeth. He slowed his lungs. Again he removed the batteries. This time he replaced them with the batch of nearly dead batteries in his pocket. He flipped the switch.

Light. Sweet light.

He breathed it in.

In an abattoir of white stone.

The image of butchery lasted one instant. Then his light flickered out.

“No!” he cried in the darkness, and shook the headlamp.

The light came on again, what little there was of it. The bulb glowed rusty orange, grew weaker, then suddenly brightened, relatively speaking. It was less than a quarter-strength. More than enough. Ike took his eyes from the little bulb and dared to look around once more.

The passageway was a horror.

In his small circle of jaundiced light, Ike stood up. He was very careful. All around, the walls were zebra-striped with crimson streaks. The bodies had been arranged in a row.

You don’t spend years in Asia without seeing a fair share of the dead. Many times, Ike had sat by the burning ghats at Pashaputanath, watching the fires peel flesh from bone. And no one climbed the South Col of Everest these days without passing a certain South African dreamer, or on the north side a French gentleman sitting silently by the trail at 28,000 feet. And then there had been that time the king’s army opened fire on Social Democrats revolting in the streets of Kathmandu and Ike had gone to Bir Hospital to identify the body of a BBC cameraman and seen the corpses hastily lined side by side on the tile floor. This reminded him of that.

It rose in him again, the silence of birds. And how, for days afterward, the dogs had limped about from bits of glass broken out of windows. And above all else, how, in being dragged, a human body gets undressed.

They lay before him, his people. He had viewed them in life as fools. In death, half-naked, they were pathetic. Not foolishly so. Just terribly. The smell of opened bowels and raw meat was nearly enough to panic him.

Their wounds... Ike could not see at first without seeing past the horrible wounds. He focused on their undress. He felt ashamed for these poor people and for himself. It seemed like sin itself to see their jumble of pubic patches and lolling thighs and randomly exposed breasts and stomachs that could no longer be held in or chests held high. In his shock, Ike stood above them, and the details swarmed up: here a faint tattoo of a rose, there a cesarean scar, the marks of surgeries and accidents, the edges of a bikini tan scribed upon a Mexican beach. Some of this was meant to be hidden, even to lovers, some to be revealed. None of it was meant to be seen this way.

Ike made himself get on with it. There were five of them, one male, Bernard. He started to identify the women, but with a rush of fatigue he suddenly forgot their names altogether. At the moment, only one of them mattered to him, and she was not here.

The snapped ends of very white bone stood from lawnmower-like gashes. Body cavities gaped empty. Some fingers were crooked, some missing at the root. Bitten off? A woman’s head had been crushed to a thick, panlike sac. Even her hair was anonymous with gore, but the pubis was blond. She was, poor creature, thank God, not Kora.

That familiarity one reaches with victims began. Ike put one hand to the ache behind his eyes, then started over again. His light was failing. The massacre had no answer. Whatever had happened to them could happen to him.

“Stick, Crockett,” he commanded.

First things first. He counted on his fingers: six here, Cleo up the tunnel, Kora somewhere. That left Owen still at large.

Ike stepped among the bodies, searching for clues. He had little experience with such extremes of trauma, but there were a few things he could tell. Judging by the blood trails, it looked like an ambush. And it had been done without a gun. There were no bullet holes. Ordinary knives were out of the question, too. The lacerations were much too deep and massed so strangely, here upon the upper body, there at the backs of the legs, that Ike could only imagine a pack of men with machetes. It looked more like an attack by wild animals, especially the way a thigh had been stripped to the bone.

But what animal lived miles inside a mountain? What animal collected its prey in a neat row? What animal showed this kind of savagery, then conformity? Such frenzy, then such method. The extremes were psychotic. All too human.

Maybe one man could have done all this, but Owen? He was smaller than most of these women. And slower. Yet these poor people had all been caught and mutilated within a few meters of one another. Ike tried to imagine himself as the killer, to conceive the speed and strength necessary to commit such an act.

There were more mysteries. Only now did Ike notice the gold coins scattered like confetti around them. It looked almost like a payoff, he now recognized, an exchange for the theft of their wealth. For the dead were missing rings and bracelets and necklaces and watches. Everything was gone. Wrists, fingers, and throats were bare. Earrings had been torn from lobes. Bernard’s eyebrow ring had been plucked away.

The jewelry had been little more than baubles and crystals and cheap knickknacks; Ike had specifically instructed the trekkers to leave their valuables in the States or in the hotel safe. But someone had gone to the trouble of pilfering the stuff. And then to pay for it in gold coins worth a thousand times what had been taken.

It made no sense. It made even less sense to stand here and try to make it make sense. He was not normally the type who couldn’t think what to do, and so his confusion now was all the more intense. His code said Stay, like a sea captain, stay to sort through the crime and bring back, if not his wayfarers, then at least a full accounting of their demise. The economy of fear said Run. Save what life could be saved. But run which way and save which life? That was the excruciating choice. Cleopatra waited in one direction in her lotus position and white light. Kora waited in the other, perhaps not as surely. But hadn’t he just heard her song?

His light ebbed to brown. Ike forced himself to rifle the pockets of his dead passengers. Surely someone had batteries or another flashlight or some food. But the pockets had been slashed and emptied.

The frenzy of it struck him. Why shred the pockets and even the flesh beneath them? This was no ordinary robbery. Stopping down his loathing, he tried to summarize the incident: a crime of rage, to judge by the mutilations, yet a crime of want, to judge by the thievery. Again it made no sense.

His light blinked out and the blackness jumped up around him. The weight of the mountain seemed to press down. A breeze Ike had not felt before brought to mind vast mineral respiration, as if a juggernaut were waking. It carried an undertone of gases, not noxious but rare, distant.

And then his imagination became unnecessary. That scratching sound of nails on stone returned. This time there was no question of its reality. It was approaching from the upper passageway. And this time Kora’s voice was part of the mix.

She sounded in ecstasy, very near to orgasm. Or like his sister that time, in that instant just as her infant daughter came out of her womb. That, Ike conceded, or this was a sound of agony so deep it verged on the forbidden. The moan or low or animal petition, whatever it was, begged for an ending.

He almost called to her. But that other sound kept him mute. The climber in him had registered it as fingernails scraping for purchase, but the torn flesh lying in the darkness now evoked claws or talons. He resisted the logic, then embraced it in a hurry. Fine. Claws. A beast. Yeti. This was it. What now?

The dreadful opera of woman and beast drew closer.

Fight or flight? Ike asked himself.

Neither. Both were futile. He did what he had to do, the survivor’s trick. He hid in plain sight. Like a mountain man pulling himself into a womb of warm buffalo meat, Ike lay down among the bodies on the cold floor and dragged the dead upon him.

It was an act so heinous it was sin. In lying down between the corpses in utter blackness and in bringing a smooth naked thigh across his and draping a cold arm across his chest, Ike felt the weight of damnation. In disguising himself as dead, he let go part of his soul. Fully sane, he gave up all aspects of his life in order to preserve it. His one anchor to believing this was happening to him was that he could not believe it was happening to him. “Dear God,” he whispered.

The sounds became louder.

There was only one last choice to make: to keep open or to close his eyes to sights he could not see anyway. He closed them.

Kora’s smell reached him upon that subterranean breeze. He heard her groan.

Ike held his breath. He’d never been afraid like this, and his cowardice was a revelation.

They—Kora and her captor—came around the corner. Her breathing was tortured. She was dying. Her pain was epic, beyond words.

Ike felt tears running down his face. He was weeping for her. Weeping for her pain. Weeping, too, for his lost courage. To lie unmoving and not give aid. He was no different from those climbers who had left him for dead once upon a mountain. Even as he inhaled and exhaled in tiny beadlike drops and listened to his heart’s hammering pump and felt the dead close him in their embrace, he was giving Kora up for himself. Moment by moment he was forsaking her. Damned, he was damned.

Ike blinked at his tears, despised them, reviled his self-pity. Then he opened his eyes to take it like a man. And almost choked on his surprise.

The blackness was full, but no longer infinite. There were words written in the darkness. They were fluorescent and coiled like snakes and they moved.

It was him.

Isaac had resurrected.

Too Close to God

“Something quieter than intercourse, the mark of history all over his face.”

Author Note

Blame Nancy Reagan.

It became the campfire story of all times. After a plane filled with pot crashed in Lower Merced Lake above Yosemite in December 1976, local climbers salvaged a small fortune from beneath the ice. Freshly returned from the jails of Kathmandu, I heard some of the tales drifting smoke-like to Eldorado Springs.

Borrowing the machinegun style of Hunter Thompson, I wrote the bare bones into a proposal, took a deep breath, and sent it off to Playboy magazine. It was a long shot, and premature in my strategy of moving from climbing magazines to regional and then national magazines, and from there to books and film.

In those days writers sent their proposals with a SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope, for rejections) by snail mail, and then waited… and waited. Superstition held that getting your proposal in front of an editor on a Monday afternoon multiplied your chances of acceptance. Friday afternoons were poison. Calling an editor guaranteed immediate rejection. I was ready to believe anything.

Twice a day, with all the low blood pressure I could summon, I sauntered across the bridge to the tiny post office to check my empty box. Knowing the torture could go on for many weeks, I made a habit of starting my next story immediately after a submission. The SASE usually arrived the third month. This time, Playboy called me the first week. I thought it was a prank.

They were putting together a drug issue, and my piece was perfect, a story with high adventure and rugged characters. They needed it in four weeks. I delivered it in two. A few days later they called again. They were killing my article. The whole issue had been scrapped because of Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign. I thought that was craven of them, but was overjoyed with the kill fee, about $500. That was five times more than I made for a published piece. Kill me some more, I thought.

I couldn’t get the lake story out of my head. It felt big. I had never written a book, but this seemed a good debut. Properly budgeted, eating Hungry Man Chunky soup out of the can and finding cheaper rent, the $500 would give me six months of writing time. I moved to a chicken coop at Paul Sibley’s old homestead in Marshall, Colorado: $15 per month. The coop was legendary, practically a rite of passage. Smoke from a decades-old coalmine fire seeped up through sandstone cracks. Every night I dreamed about Soviet missiles raining down on the nearby Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.

The coop was the size and temperature of a deer hunter’s meat locker. Every morning I jumped out of my expedition sleeping bag and drove to the University of Colorado library. Convinced the Muse had to personally whisper in my ear, I shunned outlines as blasphemous. That’s like dead reckoning without a map or compass. Half the time I wandered lost or backtracking from cul de sacs and dead ends of my own making. I wrote longhand with a #2 Ticonderoga pencil until my head ached, about five hours, and then called it a day. I still shake my head at the wasted time. Telling stories is an art, but writing is a fulltime job. A proper workday is twelve hours long, and not uncommonly sixteen. The Muse has to sit outside my door. Inspiration has its place, but outlines have a greater place.

Angels of Light was one long, unbroken learning curve filled with firsts. It was my first book-length manuscript, but not my first published book. My first editor, one of the best in New York, had no interest in a climbing novel. Instead he wanted me to write a true-crime non-fiction about a self-styled mountain man who killed two game wardens. The result, Outlaw, had a nice debut with national reviews, a book tour, and even a few bestseller lists. The director of a major TV-movie called Shogun, turned Outlaw into a TV-movie of the week. A group of friends and I clustered around a little portable TV with rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil. Static destroyed half the airing, but the usual cheap wine tasted especially good that night.

Once again I showed Angels of Light to my editor, but now he wanted the Alamo history I had proposed. I dared to make Angels of Light a negotiation term, and received a generous two-book contract that, in reality, made Angels free. I would have paid to see it published.

An independent producer optioned the book and commissioned me to write a script. Things were perking along, with two published books, a TV movie, and now it seemed a feature film. Everything was in good order, with copyrights, registered film rights, contracts, and a years-long paper trail that included Playboy. But then the Morlocks surfaced again. In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Morlocks were debased cannibals lurking beneath our feet. I had already encountered one with The Soloist’s Diary and would meet more in coming years. They are a hungry bunch.

Unknown to me, my producer hired a messenger who claimed (and later denied) an active role at Lower Merced Lake. The messenger’s mission was to deliver my script to his buddy, the writer and director John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian) But along the way the messenger decided my script needed his expertise, and demanded money and co-author credit. When the producer fired him, the messenger disappeared with a copy of my script. Unfortunately, he would reappear.

Nancy Reagan now paid another visit to my story. Her Just Say No campaign had gathered steam, and my producer decided the hidden treasure should have nothing to do with marijuana. In my seventh draft, I erased the drugs and inserted a set of Treasury Department plates for printing money. That draft went off to a film agency where it went to a script reader who promptly vanished, like the messenger, with a copy of my script. Two-weeks later a script called Cliffhanger appeared under a pseudonym, featuring my Treasury plates and still bearing the names of some of my characters. The only thing I don’t want credit for is the bizarre notion, in draft one of the movie, that crampons are worn on your hands for climbing a roof.

By the time it hit theaters, I was writing my fifth book, a climbing novel called The Ascent.

- JEFF LONG

Too Close to God

Like that wild boy who flew too close to the sun, there was no way the climber was not going to fall. The difference was that John’s wings were melting under the moon, and that for him ascent was not escape but captivity itself. It was too soon for him to admit desperation, though, and so John Dog Coloradas worried his hands—taped, raw, and smoking with a fresh coating of gymnastic chalk—tighter and higher in the cold granite crack, grimacing because there was no pain and there should have been. There would be time enough once he and Tink hit flat land to thaw their fingers and check for frostbite. For now he bit a lungful off the night breeze, smelling pines so far below you couldn’t hear them. Moonlight seared the wide, stark acres of stone, starving his shadow, beckoning him higher with its quicksilver. He could taste the chalk powder in the back of his throat, and from much farther away, perhaps a cave or a stand of timber on the summit, the scent of moss crossed his tongue, too. And beneath all the smells of Yosemite Valley he smelled the storm.

It was going to snow but not before it rained. And so he kept twisting and fusing his hands and feet into the indifferent stone, wrestling against the tyranny that hung on him like a monkey in heat. Nasty as it was, the threat of getting wasted by a Pacific cold front didn’t astonish him. In the pantheistic order of things, it made perfect, dust-to-dust sense. If he could have spared the motion, he would have shrugged. Maybe they’d make it, maybe not. Since they had departed the earth five short days and long nights ago, the climb had been freighted with miscalculation and fuck-ups: too little food, too much water, some important pieces of equipment dropped from numb fingers, a half-day spent following the wrong crack. Any big-wall climb magnifies such venial errors. A big-wall climb in winter can make them downright carnivorous, and here it was Christmas Eve. The Duracell batteries in their blaster had given up the ghost, robbing them of Talking Heads and the Himalayan climber’s standard Pink Floyd, and John’s sole wish was for an end to this combat with gravity one way or the other. He was, as they say, running on the little red ‘E.’ When you pull off a close one, climbers call it an epic, as in radical. When you don’t, you’re stuff, so much meat for the chop shop of mountain lore. Sometimes you can swing in the wind for a full season before they get you down.

John could feel the continent drifting all around him, and he wondered again about hypothermia. His mane of thick, black Apache hair weighed 50 pounds tonight, or so it seemed every time he bent his head back scanning for signs of the summit. Summits are elusive things. Ever protean, they shift around, encouraging false hope, defying prediction. Sometimes they leak farther away even as you watch. Other times they suddenly drop away under the tips of your toes. You can fight a mountain almost to your coffin, lose fingers to frostbite, your mind to despair, and finally reach the summit only to find not a damn thing there, just a slag heap without a chin. Or top out with great élan, only to discover the true summit stands across and then up a ten-hour knife ridge. The temptations in mountaineering to cheat—to quit and lie—are abundant; as always in matters of faith, it’s between you and yourself. Tonight there was no such temptation. Since sharing a palmful of peanut M & M’s for supper while the sun went down and the wind picked up, John and his partner, Tink, had been stalled on this final stretch of unyielding rock. They’d taken turns failing on it, and now they were out of time for failure. First would come sleet perhaps a few degrees above freezing, then the temperature would show some real downtown hostility. Soaked, they would lose core heat, turn foolish, get sleepy. By morning they’d look like two dragonflies shellacked with Superglue. John had begun to hate the summit, which did precisely as much to bridge the gap as loving it would have. The galling thing was that it hung almost within reach. Just a half-pitch above—40, maybe 50 feet more as the rope stretches—the summit was radiant in a spill of moonlight. All that divided John’s darkness from a safe, flat haven was that silvery line. And all he had to do was touch it. Then he heard the noise. And again, elbow askew, hips dry-humping in close to the rock, he cowered from the monster.

It sounded like bones loosening as a huge, immaculate sheet of ice peeled loose from the summit. Ninety feet long, 30 wide, but only a few inches deep, the glassy slab glinted once in the moonlight as it drifted away like a fat man swan-diving, it sucked at the sky for six, then ten heartbeats. The free-fall was downright delicate. Then a corner touched against the girdle of rock 3,000 feet lower and the ice exploded with a roar. Crystalline shrapnel scourged the spidery forest that crowds El Cap’s prow, decapitating Jeffrey pines and mangling the manzanita that each spring and summer perfume rock climbers who dot the walls, indistinguishable at a distance from the wild blackberries few tourists dare to eat. The shrapnel would have been a killing rain, but no one and nothing was dying tonight, not yet anyway. Frogs, rodents, and fox bats living and hibernating in the granite cracks were slotted deep and safe; the peregrine falcons that nest on the dawn-facing wall weren’t due to arrive for another five months; and what Coyotes remained in the Valley were off sampling mice in quieter coves.

Except for John and Tink, then, all was well. Ironically, they were in danger for precisely the reason they were momentarily safe—because the headwall upon which they dangled was so severely overhung. The overhang meant that most of the falling ice whirligigged out and away from them. The overhang also meant they could not retreat.

“Fuck,” breathed John, a brief anthem of relief. His fingers were blown, and he was tiny, a slight creature willing itself up the hard space and colors that form the vertical boundaries of Yosemite. It didn’t matter that no one belongs 3,000 feet above the dark soil of California on Christmas Eve in the path of a blizzard, any more than it mattered that John did belong because he’d chosen to leave the ground in search of dragons or in flight from the common mud or on fire with whatever else it is that propels ascent. He had a soul, he had his reasons, and he was frightened. All that really mattered was the Valley spread below—half a mile wide, half a mile high, gashed deep into the harsh earth by not-so-ancient glaciers. The Valley had its own terms.

“Watch me,” he groaned. Frost poured from his mouth. Ten stories below, Tink couldn’t quite hear the command, but he heard the groan and was already watching as best he could, a vigilance more of touch than sight. He was reading the rope’s vibration with his palms, listening to John’s desperation. Tink was scared and his wide white eyes stared blindly toward the summit. It’s always worse waiting for disaster than fighting it, but he was patient. He loved John, though he was still too young to realize you could admit that about another man. That he was here on this wall in these circumstances was a testament of that love. John was the only friend he had, and when he first suggested climbing the Mosquito for Christmas, Tink accepted because it was John, not because it was the Mosquito Wall. Agape has its limits, however. Tink knew that if his partner fell, all their protection, including the belay anchor, would probably rip, dumping them into forever pronto. In a way that only a white suburban American boy can be, Tink was presently optimistic about their situation. He was optimistic for both of them. Fervently optimistic.

John grappled his weight a body-length higher. The hardware slung from his racks tinkled musically, the sound a horse makes shaking its bridle. He stuffed his fist into the rock and cocked the flesh against whatever flakes and crystals might catch it. The hand stuck with satisfactory firmness, and he pulled up against it, releasing with his lower fist so he could jam that, too. The smoothness of the move pleased him. If only the rest of the crack would go this well. He was taking things one inch at a time, and his frown ebbed. Except for the hunger and cold and impending storm, and those two fingernails he’d torn clean away yesterday morning while opening a fisherman’s knot, and the sapping ache in both knee joints, this was where he loved it most, on the far, jagged edge of the world. True, you took more pain up here, what with the sun and the wind and the god-awful sheerness picking you bare, but then again, where else was everything so obvious? It wasn’t so much easier to see—especially for John with his talent for finding the labyrinth in each and every event, even this straightforward, squared-off crack in the rock—as it was just plain easier to do. Up here it was like a Clint Eastwood movie, where the metaphors are always blunt. Physical. Where what you touch—and nothing but—that’s what you get.

Over his shoulder, the distant storm was boiling to a soft crescendo. You could see lightning glittering like hungry eels in the snow clouds, but not a sound escaped the roiling violence. Since three o’clock that afternoon, he and Tink had been monitoring the slow black tidal wave of clouds that now engulfed half the sky. What had begun as a bud on the west of what an ice climber named Bullseye liked to call ‘Our Video,’ was now bending to flood the moon, his only source of light. In Islam, the new year cannot begin if the moon is covered. So it was for this orphan of the Jesuits. Forty feet more to 1987.

Two ropes were knotted at John’s waist. One bellied out into open space, arcing down and then back into the wall where the far end was tied to Tink. The second rope fed through a series of rusting pitons and nuts fixed into the wall. It was this second rope that was supposed to catch John if he fell.

He pinched a slight granite flake and shifted his weight from the toe of one foot to the other. It was a wintry motion, slow and brittle. The moon, carved white, hung beside his feet. Forty feet more, he coaxed himself. Forty feet into midnight and he’d be up. There he would anchor the ropes and haul their gear up one line while Tink ascended the other. Forty feet to reentry to the horizontal planet where trees grew upright and he could stand without clinging, where he could forget the aggravations, the paranoia, the stink of old human shit waiting on the ledges, the community dandruff in his lukewarm Cup-a-Soup.

He’d been here before, muscling against the elements, hugging close to big walls while exhaustion or fear of storms or the mountain itself conspired to dislodge him. He’d always survived, sometimes just barely, but never stupidly. Sports Illustrated or People or The Chronicle, one of those, had made much of this obstinacy after his haunting fiasco in the Andes on the South Face of Aconcagua, attributing his ‘barbarian survivability’ to his aboriginal past. “Grandson of a Chiricahua Indian shaman, half Indian and magician himself, Coloradas can stick a finger or toe to almost any surface—granite, brick, or the sandstone of his native desert spires—and it will stick like a spot weld. One of the nation’s premier rock climbers, a natural-born mountaineer....” A grim, cold cuate, shivered John. Beat, froze, and 40 feet short. He eased upward, locking his taped knuckles harder inside the unforgiving fissure. The way it felt, the movement it invited, the very smell—all were echoes of a thousand similar cracks. There were other echoes, too, other dimensions as he pulled higher and edged the inner toe of each worn rubber sole against new crystals. Not all were as immediate as the bite of stone against his fist or the urgency rearing high in the cloud bank. Some of the resonance was so old and persistent that it was next to silence. There was, for instance, no ignoring the Chiricahua advice that no one is your friend, not even your brother or father or mother; only your legs are your friends, only your brain, your eyesight, your hair, and your hands. My son, echoed the void gaping under each of John’s heels, you must do something with those things.

He fell.

It was that sudden.

As if skinning off a glove, John felt his hand sliding from the crack. His toes lost their granite purchase. He gave a reflexive slap to the rock. Then he was off, flying toward the ground far below. Again the wall’s exaggerated angle was a blessing, allowing him to drift mute and free, full of fear. He hit nothing. The air was clear. The emptiness seemed to buoy him up. I’m falling, he registered. It was a soft moment, which allowed him thoughts.

Climbers call long falls screamers, but rarely scream when they fall. Their lives don’t flash before them. They have no special grip on their fear, no mystical insights of self-control. They drop like quiet, ripe fruit, which is not to say they aren’t terrified. Their rib cages vapor lock. Their eyes see. And they hear a voice. Not always, but sometimes. Even among the hardcore, fat-free warrior set—the 5.11 boys with their streamlined lats flaring like vestigial wings, 19- and 20-year-olds with tendinitis in their overtaxed knuckles—even among the fanatics, the voice is usually nothing more than adrenaline babble. It’s easy for climbers to confuse the wild surge of biochemicals, tape deck tunes, and naked risk with the song of being. When the abyss sweeps up to devour them, they vainly believe themselves tagged by the hand of God, when in fact ‘flushed’ is more like it. But sometimes, rarely, a falling climber really does hear the voice.

He listened, and heard nothing. Absolutely nothing. It said nothing. It sounded like nothing, which, unless you’re dying, may sound like the proverbial, one-handed Zen cow patty.

Twisting sideways, then backward, John glimpsed the cadaverous moon rocking all out of kilter. This shoulder, he predicted without question, this hip. They’ll hit first. Shit, John, you’ve done it now. Even so, he wasn’t particularly concerned. For one thing, his arms instantly felt as if he’d gone to Cancun on vacation. The lactic acid let go. His lungs quit laboring. He felt great. All his heroic struggling to be elsewhere was suddenly a moot point. Cascading past the glowing stone, John felt like Zeno’s arrow, the one forever caught between source and end point. He was at peace.

And then he heard a thin, metallic pop. It was an inconsequential noise, a mere kernel of popcorn exploding. But it was followed by a second pop, and the bottom dropped out of his gallows. John gritted his teeth. Dread deepening, he realized he was unzipping. He had time to think, Shit, the pins. And then his brain mainlined the fear because his wings had truly been clipped. One by one, the rusting old pitons, the pins he’d clipped into, were failing. Every time a climber hammers a piton or wedges a nut into the rock, he customizes and expands his own health insurance policy. The idea is that each piece of protection (or ‘pro’ in the abbreviated surfer-climber patois) is capable of catching your bodyweight times the velocity of your fall. The size of the pro is less significant than the physics of its placement, but since no one can see inside the crack, no one can state with certainty what will or won’t hold. Matters of faith. As John climbed the crack, he had attached his leading rope to seven ‘fixed’ pitons placed on sunnier days by earlier climbers. Because he was in such a hurry though, he’d neglected to back up the old pro with some of his own setting. Now it was truth or consequences. The weathered old pins were jerking loose from the crack like machine-gun slugs. Pop, pop, pop. It sounded like breakfast cereal. Climbers call it a zipper fall for the way you unzip the pro. Having nothing else to do as he unzipped, he counted the pops.

He passed Tink. He saw the moonlit teenager as an instant of mercy. Spare me, thought John. Catch me, Tink. Please. But not a sound passed his lips. It would have done no good anyway. He felt the rope tighten at his waist and counted two more pops. With each pop the rope relaxed again. Gone, he realized. Gone away. The wind poured into his ears and he began to drown in the waves of his inner ocean. Panic began to unpiece him. His graceful, unending breaststroke from here to nowhere began to take on a frenzied, ridiculous tone, which set off a deeper alarm. Climbers still talk about one of their own who erred near a summit and was heard to calmly sigh “shit” as he sailed past a lower ledge, trying to keep his balance. John was on the verge of losing all balance. He’d lost control of the big picture; now he was losing control of the little one, himself.

And then he heard the voice. It said nothing. Absolutely nothing. It calmed him. The tempest in his ears suddenly abated. His clenched jaw relaxed. The shout in his soul faded. Everything became acceptable.

Just as suddenly he stopped with a long, dreamlike bounce. The rope stretched elastically snatching him away from the abyss, and then he was slammed pell-mell into the wall, his shoulder and hip striking first. His lungs emptied with a frosty whoof.

Tink had caught his fall.

He felt pain, but it was a distant, unflowered sensation. John didn’t care. Like a supplicant, he reached both hands above his head and grasped the rope, gasping. He touched his forehead to the rough Perlon line. “Padre nuestro,” he started to chant, then gave into his adrenaline and simply sat there. Still clutching the rope, he dangled above the inky forest floor. He raised his head to what stars were left. He heard the abrupt, macho burp of a faraway frog. In a slow noiseless spin, the world began to accumulate around him again. The same moon was gleaming across the same cold acres of vertical granite, illuminating his long, black hair and the sparse whiskers on his wide jaw. It was like him to watch himself dangling there, tied to a puppet string, far too close to God.

At an even six feet, he was barrel-chested, with legs that were longer than Apache but slightly bandy all the same. He didn’t have to wonder what his vagabond mother had looked like; one glance down his hybrid body told all. Besides the long legs, she’d carried narrow feet and small hands that looked too delicate on him. He was self-conscious about those hands. They seemed so inadequate for all the gripping and grabbing and pinching that climbing demanded. Yet they’d pulled him across land no one had ever touched or seen, and that was something. So many scars had laced their flesh and then sunk under new scars that now and then he forgot their service.

Certainly his hands seemed less than true to the desert savagery that was his other half. The Indian in him was prominent: straight hair, black eyes, and huge Mongolian cheekbones. On an expedition to the Chinese flanks of Everest two years ago, Tibetans had regularly addressed him in their native tongue, convinced he was one of them. What he most often recognized in the mirror, though, was neither the Anglo nor the Indian. What he saw was the overlay of one culture upon the other, something quieter than intercourse, the mark of history all over his face: smallpox scars. To his eye, the pockmarks ruined his wide, angular cheeks. He saw himself as a bad invention, the product of too fierce a seed or a not-quite-certain matriarchy. The pitting scars were proof that his mother had vanished into mystery marooning him and his brother with a dusky nomadic man who knew roughnecking and bars and a thousand stories of his father’s fathers and who could track bobcat from horseback and cut water from cactus and braid rope from yucca and coax crude oil from the barren earth—a man who’d struggled like a hero to be both father and mother to two dusky sons but never quite got it down. His father had forgotten to get John immunized, and by the time he’d remembered, the disease had finished with his younger son’s face. John didn’t blame his father. That was part of the fatalism that carried him so brilliantly across the stone walls and kept him a prisoner of the Valley.

He’d even quit blaming himself for the scars he found so ugly. He could look in the mirror these days and touch the pockmarks and accept that he was marred, but it wasn’t his fault. With a sort of reverse vanity that had infuriated his Jesuit high school teachers, he carried everywhere with him a sort of pet humility. Sports Illustrated had loved it (“a captivating modesty”). He was reticent in crowds, shy around strangers, and girls in school never quit teasing that he must be retarded or mute. The pockmarks gave him a vigilance. When he looked at people, his dark eyes always saw them looking first, studying his face, his skin, his fallibility. Actually he suspected that handsomeness is almost never generic, that maybe people were intrigued, not repelled, with his face. That wouldn’t be the first admission he’d put off. Too many years had gone into feeling marked. Maybe, he sometimes smiled in the mirror, maybe he carried penitente blood in him along with the Chiricahua and Anglo. Maybe he just enjoyed tormenting himself. Sort of like climbing with knees he could scarcely bend some mornings and hands plagued by arthritis. Or hoping for Harvard someday when Berkeley had proved too confining after three short semesters. One thing John had learned was to travel light. Buttoned in the left-hand pocket of his corduroy shirt was a folded Polaroid of Liz, his girlfriend, and a tube of wild cherry Chap Stick for the windburn. Four ounces of luggage, that was it.

Only a few years earlier an American ornithologist on sabbatical had discovered a well-preserved corpse in a Swiss valley. Dressed in tweed clothing and hobnailed boots, the body was lying where it had been disgorged at the mouth of the Zermatt Glacier. No one could figure out who it was until the local climbing club laid claim to the young man, identifying him as a certain alpine soloist of the 1880’s. Like John, he had been carrying next to nothing in his pockets: a round-trip train ticket only half-used, some sprigs of edelweiss, three coins. There’s something about human beings in mountains, they seem to care less about the anchors that other folk require. The result is that they take on a curious lightness. How else to explain, for instance, the middle-aged Spaniard strapped in 14th century armor who was similarly resurrected at the foot of a pass in the Pyrenees in 1937. Climbers had a way of eluding gravity, even climbing out of their graves.

The moon floated perilously close to the billowing storm clouds. Frost poured from John’s nostrils. He suddenly felt like taking a nap, just a short one.

“John?” Tink’s voice fluttered down and prodded him. John looked up toward the paltry cobweb of nylon slings and ropes that anchored both their lives to El Cap. For the moment he didn’t bother to answer. Somewhere in that mess of ropes hung the silhouette of the world’s best climber, at least for the past six months. Tink was up there somewhere, stoically holding John’s 180 pounds through a makeshift pulley system. The boy had been stationary for the last two hours, dangling from the rock while feeding out rope as John deciphered the crack. Belaying could be very cold work. It could also be punishing, especially when your partner took a screamer the length of a football field. Belayers had been known to lose teeth, break bones, and burn their hands to the ivory catching falls half that distance. All the same, John luxuriated in the glory of his own survival for a moment longer.

“John?” Tink repeated, more urgently. John was tempted to let him wonder a bit longer, not because he was sadistic but because he could. He’d earned a minute’s rest down at the end of the rope. But he roused himself.

“You OK?” John called up, stealing the initiative. His voice quavered a little, which annoyed him. It annoyed him, too, that he would be annoyed. Machismo was not one of his ambitions.

“Yeah.” He could hear the boy’s relief, and then a philosophical “wow.”

“Nice catch, Tink.” The wind spun John in tiny circles, back and forth.

“What?”

“You caught my ass.”

“What?” Climbers use a small but efficient vocabulary of monosyllables for communicating in wind and around corners. None of John’s compliments were making much sense to Tink.

“Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim,” John tried again.

Though it didn’t belong in the vocabulary either, Tink understood this time. They’d been kicking that old dog all climb long. Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim, to the last of their red-and-yellow M & M’s. Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim, to each other during the morning pee, to an unsafe belay anchor on the 14th pitch, to the end of their good weather.

“Yeah.” Tink was no longer amused. Nor was John.

It was cold, he was exhausted, and the summit was a whole lot more than 40 feet away now. He’d have to climb the pitch all over again. Glittering overhead, liquid in the moonlight, hung the icy summit. The holy fucking grail. He sighed. He had memorized most of the moves up to where the rock had spat him out, but even so it would take another hour to get to the top, maybe two or three. He doubted the storm would wait that long. John moved his limbs one by one, checking his shoulder and hip for damage. Bruised, he knew. He studied his taped hands as if they were traitors. He felt old. Ten months into his 28th year, he was old, at least by Valley standards. It was high time to quit climbing, but difficult to let go. More than the lifestyle of a rock jock tiptoed in the balance, it was also a heritage, a full-blown past rooted in centuries of simple lust for the mountains. On both sides of his family Anglo and Indian ancestors had loved and coveted their abrupt landscapes. At least he liked to think so. More than anything else, the defiance of gravity guided his thoughts about heritage and gave him license to think of himself as a mountain man. The thought of leaving these walls and mountains caused him pain—pain, he sometimes rhapsodized, like the fur trapper Hugh Glass must have felt, grizzly-scarred and lame, bidding adios to his people at the 1824 rendezvous in Jackson Hole. Like Maurice Herzog, the great French alpinist, must have felt as he watched the doctor snip off frostbitten joints in the jungles below Annapurna. Echoes. The thought of turning his back on the mountains and never returning was as terrible to him as it was romanticized. That was all part of it, though. The over-blown melancholy. The power and the glory.

“You got me?” he shouted. The wind opened a window for his words. Tink heard.

“Take your time.” Tink didn’t really mean it. He sounded weary and frozen.

John let Tink wait just a little longer. He knew this wasn’t the time and place, but he wanted to rest and digest the adrenaline, draw in the moment all the same. Once the climb was over, he’d forget these thoughts about aging or, better yet, fish the thick spiral notebook out of his gear box down in Camp Four and jot down his confessions under the heading ‘Mosquito Wall.’ The notebook was dense with similar ramblings filed under such names as Muir Wall, North America Wall, the Shield, Bonatti Pillar, Super-Couloir, Walker Spur, Everest North Face, Ama Dablam, and all the other major routes he’d done or attempted. Finger paintings, Liz called the journal, the stuff of his never-ending childhood. His eyes followed a lone set of headlights creeping along the Valley floor. An orange satellite cruised up beside Taurus, then sank into storm clouds.

And then, for just two or three moments, between wisps of sharp breeze, John heard something new and separate. It was a faint, irrelevant buzz, like the drone of a gnat. Just as suddenly it was gone, next to imaginary. The noise was an airplane, off course and sliding to its doom. Though John didn’t give it a second thought, he would remember this moment. He sniffed the air and wondered how Tink had put up with his stink for so many days. He smiled, just barely, then grabbed the rope. Up, he commanded. Up so you can go down. Up. Down. The no-exit, alpine circle game. Sisyphus never had it so good. He pulled hard.

“Fly or die, Tink.”

The salute came right back down at him. “What?”

“Fuck this whale.”

“Yeah, John. Fuck it.”

John started all over again.

Acknowledgments

There is one species who may love writing more than the writer, and that is the editor. Until actually working with one, you will never know the long, blinding hours, the sacrifices, intelligence, faith, hope, and devotion to the written word that make an editor. I’m including agents, or at least some, because in modern publishing they serve as editors, too. Not all are created equal, especially not compared to the extraordinary men and women named on this page. When I see one of my books or short stories, I see the editors who made it possible. People think of editors as pencils. In fact, they are teachers. That is everything.

My first thanks go to Dustin Lynx and Jerry Auld, the masterminds behind the Imaginary Mountain Surveyors. Writers themselves, they have created a house built on equality, respect, quality, and a rock solid belief in climbing fiction. All my life I’ve tried to imagine a book more immersive than the reading experience alone. Welcome to their expedition.

Impossibly, a circle connects here with my very first editors, Al Steck and Steve Roper, the visionaries who fathered Ascent. Neither book nor magazine, Ascent was a magic carpet that collected climbing writers from every corner, publishing every year or so when the event was deemed ready. I am not the only writer who was born in their Berkeley office. No wonder they are regarded as legends.

Other key figures include Ken Wilson, the British editor/publisher of Mountain magazine. For many years the most important gatekeeper in mountain literature, he cultivated climbs and writers alike. Climbing magazine was Fritz Stammberger’s baby. Built like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but in the wilderness, not a gym, he died too soon. Post-Fritz, Climbing magazine begat two world class editors in the form of Michael Kennedy and Alison Osius. With Jeff Jackson’s arrival, you could feel the fire grow. Besides editing full time, all three were top shelf climbers and writers.

Then I came into the hands of editors who did not have mountains in their bones. They took exceptional risks with my climbing fiction because such a thing didn’t exist in New York publishing. My first agent Gwen Edelman brought me to my first editor James Landis (William Morrow,) known as one of the best ever. Another agent, Susan Golomb, gained fame for her dynamic energy and expert eye for cutting-edge mountain books. Karen Rinaldi (Crown Press) raised the bar in my career.

Last of all, my deep thanks to three believers for navigating my climbing fiction into the mainstream. Emily Bestler (with her own imprint at Atria) combines smarts, savvy and candor with a gypsy’s command of the crystal ball. Josie Freedman (International Creative Management) is my archangel in Los Angeles, one of those forces of nature who makes it all look easy. Finally, and foremost, Sloan Harris (ICM/New York) has the etiquette, integrity and instincts of a martial arts master. Without him I would be lost in that labyrinth of skyscrapers, xenophobic literati, cutthroat reviewers, and cold-eyed fates. These have been my partners in the dance.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the venues in which versions of these stories first appeared:

‘The Soloist’s Diary’ Ascent, Volume II, Number 2, 1974.

‘The Ice Climber’ Climbing, Number 35, March-April 1976.

‘In Gentle Combat with the Cold Wind’ Mountain, Issue 56, 1977.

‘The Virgins of Imst’ Climbing, Number 60, May-June 1980.

‘Cannibals’ Rocky Mountain Magazine, March-April 1981.

Chapter 1 of ‘Angels of Light’, Beach Tree Books, N.Y., 1987.

‘Revenge’ Rock and Ice, Issue 46, November-December 1991.

Prologue of ‘The Ascent’, William Morrow & Company, N.Y., 1992.

Chapter 1 of ‘The Descent’, Jove Books, N.Y., 1999.

Chapter 1 of ‘The Wall’, Simon & Schuster, Inc, N.Y., 2006.