The Ascent (21 page)

Andrew’s voice floated down to me a third time, but I could no longer understand what he was saying.

“It’s opening up,” I informed him, not knowing if he could hear me or not. “I can move my arms.”

I could crane my neck and peer down the rest of the shaft, too, although the sight only caused my stomach to cramp. Around my groin, the harness was too tight, and I started to feel my feet going numb.

Hollinger was a few feet below me. The platform on which he lay sprawled and unconscious was just a narrow lip jutting from the wall of the shaft—a miracle that it had caught him. My own bulk blocked the daylight from funneling down so I couldn’t make out any specific details concerning the severity of his condition, but I could see that he was no longer wearing his helmet, which was not a good sign.

My feet touched down on the ice shelf, and I reached up and tugged at the secondary line to alert the others. The shelf felt solid beneath my weight. I plastered my face and chest against the frozen wall for fear that if I didn’t I’d lose my balance and fall off the ledge.

My left foot struck Hollinger’s leg.

“Can you hear me, Hollinger?” I whispered into the wall of ice. The warmth of my breath bounced back at me off the ice. “Can you hear me?”

Hollinger groaned but didn’t move.

I looked up. The opening was no bigger than the size of a quarter now. Raising my voice the slightest bit, I said, “He’s alive.”

Undoubtedly fearful their voices would create too much vibration, the others did not respond.

“Okay, Holly,” I said, pulling off my gloves and stuffing them into the pouch of my anorak. “Hang with me, man. Hang with me.”

Sliding one hand along the wall, I was able to grab hold of the secondary line. I ran it through the karabiners at my waist, then pulled at it to test the strength of the pitons the guys had secured in the surface of the glacier far above. It was strong and would hold. It would have to.

My fingers already beginning to tighten up in the cold, I fumbled with the clasps on the harness, unable to get them undone until my third attempt. Around me, the world seemed to sigh. I paused. There sounded a dissonant, sonorous splintering from somewhere below me, and my heart froze in my chest. Something snapped and fell away; I heard the hollow whistle of its descent but did not hear it hit the ground.

The ledge was crumbling under my weight.

I yanked the buckles from the harness and climbed out of it just like stepping out of a pair of pants, my heart slamming against my ribs, and crouched down, while the splintering, popping sounds resonated throughout the ice. Straddling Hollinger, I worked the harness over his legs and around his waist, where I fastened it with increasingly numb fingers. At eye level, I noticed a lightning bolt zigzagging in the ice wall, creeping higher and higher. A second fissure appeared beside it, peeling up the wall from the base of the ice ledge.

The harness secured, I grabbed Hollinger by his coat and tried to sit him upright. A ghostly moan escaped him. It was futile; he was deadweight.

“Come on …”

Sweat stinging my eyes, I tugged at the rope affixed to the harness. A second after that, the slack in the rope went taut. Hollinger’s body slid up against the ice wall, his head lolling like a spring-loaded toy on his neck. I could see the gash at his left temple and the black blood already freezing in ribbons down the side of his face and neck. There was blood on the ledge where he’d struck it, too.

The shaft creaked like a flight of ancient stairs. I held my breath as Hollinger ascended the shaft, his hip brushing my face in the confined space. He dangled like a rag doll, his limbs limp as streamers. His body blocked out the light.

I pulled my gloves on, flexing the feeling back into my fingers, and gripped the rope in two hands. Just as I planted one spiked sole against the ice wall, the ledge beneath me broke away. The sound was like a tree keeling over. Gravity forced me down with it, my vision blurring and the rope burning through my palms. I could feel the heat of friction through the wool gloves.

I plummeted maybe ten feet before the rope jerked me like a yo-yo. As I twisted at the end of my rope over the narrow abyss, I glanced over my shoulder, my breath harsh and arid. I saw nothing except darkness. Directly above my head, I could see the gaping wound in the ice wall where the ledge had been just seconds before.

Above, one of the guys shouted my name.

“I’m all right,” I called.

Once again, I planted my boot against the wall and proceeded to climb until the shaft grew too narrow for my legs to bend and the others had to pull me up.

I noticed the cracks in the ice wall were climbing steadily with me.

Jesus…

“Faster!” I shouted. “The shaft’s gonna split!”

But they were pulling me as fast as they could. I shifted enough to see them haul Hollinger’s lifeless body out of the shaft. Silver daylight spilled down into the hole. I winced and tried to grab the rope, but the shaft was too narrow. It was like being bound by rope at the shoulders.

The circle of light grew bigger and bigger. The silhouettes of heads appeared. For one terrifying moment, I thought I was going to get stuck coming up through the hole.

“Hurry!” I yelled, my voice cracking.

Spears of ice peeled away from the shaft walls and spiraled into the abyss. Chunks of ice fell in my face.

“Here, here, here.” Chad’s voice was suddenly in my ear. The burst of daylight stung my eyes as the guys hoisted me out of the shaft. I was weightless when they carried me across the glacier, my heart hammering, my lungs aching to breathe.

“Go,” I wheezed. “Get away. It’s … it’s going to …”

There came a thunderous clap. I was dropped, my spine absorbing the shock of the fall. I managed to sit up in time to see a channel tear across the surface of the glacier from the shaft’s opening, swallowing the snow that covered it. Crazily, I thought of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons and the way Bugs would tunnel underground, creating a channel of disturbed earth in his wake.

“Get up.” Curtis grabbed the hood of my anorak and nearly strangled me.

I gathered my legs under me and sprinted across the face of the glacier toward the mountainside, tears freezing in rivulets down the swells of my cheeks. The earth roared at my back. There was a niche in the mountainside—a den hidden beneath a brow of black rock—that we were racing toward. We slammed against the mountainside and rolled into the opening in the face of the rock just as the tensile stresses spread over our wake, separating our trail of footprints on either side of the impromptu canyon.

Everything grew silent. In anticipation of further stresses, we huddled together like foxes in a den and listened for the splitting bark crunch of widening crevasses. But all remained quiet. The world was once again frozen in stasis.

Chad broke the silence. “Jesus Christ, we almost bought the farm on that one.” He uttered a pathetic little laugh.

I slung my pack against the wall of the cave, then unbuckled my helmet and set it down beside me. “How’s Hollinger?”

“I’m here,” he said.

“He’s awake,” Petras said.

“What happened?” He sounded groggy. “Christ, my head hurts …”

“Took a spill, Holly,” Chad said. “Dropped down five stories like an elevator with its cables cut.”

Hollinger groaned. “My gear.”

“It’s gone,” said Petras. “Swallowed up in the crevasse.”

“My goddamn
gear
. My fucking
helmet
. What the fuck am I … am I gonna do?”

As my eyes acclimated to the dark, I could make out Hollinger sitting against the opposite wall between Petras and Curtis. He cradled his wounded, bloodied head in his hands.

“I’ve got an extra helmet,” Curtis told him.

A flicker of light filled the cave. Andrew stood, holding his electric lantern in front of him. He walked past the entrance of the cave, his silhouette like that of a lawn jockey, and stood in the center of us. The roof of the cave yawned into eternity. It looked as if half the mountain had been hollowed out.

“Where do we go from here?” Chad said after a moment.

Like someone telling ghost stories around a campfire, Andrew raised the lantern to his face and said, “We go up.”

4

BLIND RS BATS, WE SCALED THE WALL OF THE

cave. A difficult and tedious feat, the ascent required faith solely on our sense of touch—feeling for specific grooves in the rock, fumbling for lines with our hands, threading the ropes through the pitons merely by touch. And the higher we climbed the darker it grew, the only light down below at the entrance of the cave. But even that would be gone soon as darkness reclaimed the land.

Time meant nothing; I had no idea how long it took us to reach the plateau. Winded and muscle weary, half of us nearly dropped to our knees and shed our gear as if we’d just returned to Earth after a year of space travel.

Hollinger had the most trouble, what with his head wound and his overall spirit shaken. The wound itself wasn’t too troubling—Petras and Curtis had examined it in the light of Andrew’s electric lamp before we began the climb and noted it was nothing more than a flesh wound—but the flame within Michael Hollinger’s soul had been extinguished.

His superstitions appeared to be manifesting before his eyes. The disappearance of half the food had already rattled him; his plummet through a covered trap in the glacier only reinforced his superstitions. (Of course, he did not take into consideration the luck involved in having that ice ledge intercept him, preventing his death.)

As I passed him while climbing the cave wall, I could hear him muttering to himself—something about trespassing on the hidden land.

Andrew lifted his lantern and studied our location. Curtis and Chad followed suit, their own electric lanterns coming alive. A grand chamber, immense and sprawling, opened before us. Stalactites corkscrewed down from the ceiling perhaps a hundred feet above our heads, dripping calcareous water into russet pools. The air was stale and warm, underscored by a nonspecific mineral smell.

“It cuts through,” Andrew said, the light from his lantern diminishing as he moved farther down the chamber. He followed a trickling stream of water that snaked through a gouge in the stone floor. Running water meant there was a place where that water
originated
, and that typically meant a way out.

Gathering our gear again, we trailed Andrew through the chamber. It narrowed slightly, forming a tunnel all around us, the ceiling of which resembled the gullet of a whale. I tried to remember the story of Jonah and the whale but found that childhood memory was difficult to summon. In fact, for the past hour or so, my entire train of thought had been jumbled and muddy. At first, I thought it had something to do with the incident at the sinkhole—perhaps my body was still percolating mind-numbing adrenaline—but when it didn’t wear off, I began to wonder about our altitude.

“How high up are we?” I whispered to Petras.

Petras deliberately lagged behind and said, “Don’t really know. We must have climbed forty or fifty yards back there. Why? What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure. My head’s funny.”

“Dehydrated?”

“I’ve been drinking water like it’s going out of style.”

“You think it’s altitude sickness?”

I didn’t respond.

Daylight, purplish in its old age, filtered in from an opening in the ceiling farther down the tunnel. Motes as big as tennis balls danced in the beam. It wasn’t until we drew closer did I realize they were giant snowflakes spiraling lazily in the air. Above us a fissure in the rock framed a panel of pink sky. The walls curled upward, forming natural staircases in the rock. One staircase led directly toward the opening.

Chad laughed dryly. “It’s the fucking Stairway to Heaven.”

Andrew doused his lantern and led the way up the backbone of rock toward the opening. We climbed out one by one, Petras and mebringing up the rear. As I poked my head into the fresh, frigid air, I noticed my hands were shaking badly. It wasn’t alcohol withdrawal, not this time. Petras’s voice still rang clear as a bell inside my head:
altitude sickness
.

Beyond, the horizon was blistering with a spectacular sunset. There were colors in it I had never seen before. The shadows created by the jagged outcrop of rocks caused something to stir inside me. It was the same feeling I used to get when looking at a raw chunk of stone, a hammer and chisel in my hands.

We hiked the outskirts of the ridge until nightfall, then set up camp within a basin that overlooked a snow-covered valley.

After everyone had fallen asleep, I crept out of our communal tent, pulling my coat tight about my goose-pimpled frame. A piton and hammer in tow, I negotiated down the rocky slope until one particular slab of stone caught my eye. It loomed in the moonlight, jutting sideways from the earth like one of the toppled smokestacks from the
Titanic
.

I walked two complete circles around it, admiring how it glowed in the tallow light of the moon, before lifting the piton and placing its spiked tip against the rock. Then I raised the hammer and struck the head of the piton. The sound seemed to echo over the mountain pass, into the atmosphere, and out like a comet into the unending depths of space.

1

“THIS.” SAID ANDREW. “IS THE SANCTUARY OF

the Gods.”

We stood atop the third and final pinnacle of the Godesh Ridge, surrounded on every side by the rising gray caps of the Himalayas. Towers of stone, stacked like risers in a high school gymnasium, loomed all around us. At the center was a pyramid of stone, glossy with black ice, perhaps forty or fifty feet high. Directly below, an immense icefall ran like a frozen river, the sound of its movement like the shhhhh of static. Boulders of ice the size of automobiles crumbled sporadically from the glacier and tumbled into the icefall. Seracs—enormous pillars of ice—rose like skyscrapers out of the white. They looked solid and immobile, but they could collapse under the slightest weight without predictability.