The Ascent(42)

It was the canteen Andrew had placed inside my cabin before departing on this trek. Sitting up on one arm, I unscrewed the cap and brought the canteen to my nose and inhaled.

Bourbon.

What the hell is going on here?

I was still pondering the meaning of it before I had time to consider what I was doing. Two swigs from the canteen and the bourbon seared my throat and exploded in the pit of my stomach like a car bomb, its warmth spreading through me like the serpentine tentacles of some nonspecific cancer.





PART THREE





THE GODESH RIDGE





Chapter 11


1



THE ONES THAT WERE FOUND WERE PRACTlCALLY

unidentifiable. Hardly human, they were fragile, blue-skinned husks whose eyes had frozen to custard smears in their sockets, whose mouths were textured with colorless sores and frozen in a grimace of torment and pain.

Typically they were wrapped in layers of clothes, tattered and faded and solid as planks of wood. Others were found nude, fooled by the onset of hypothermia where their skin burned and sweat dimpled their flesh even in the freezing temperatures. There was one story about a man frozen solid to the wall of an ice cave, glazed like a donut by a two-inch sheen of ice. His hands were sheared clear of the wrists as rescuers attempted to hammer the corpse from the ice, the blood within frozen to a dark purple slush.

Others returned defeated. Frostbitten, starving, anemic, and delirious from high altitudes and snow blindness, they staggered back into base camp like petrified zombies, their tendons hardened to broomsticks, their hands hooked into claws or molded into flippers. These were the lucky ones.

Lastly there were the ones who were never seen again. Thedisappeared. Separated from their groups or foolish soloists with no perception of mortality, these poor bastards were fated to slip down mile-deep crevasses, tumble off a shaky precipice, or become swallowed up by a sudden avalanche. Occasionally search parties would locate articles of their clothing or uncover evidence of what had presumably befallen them—a broken anchor halfway up the face of a cliff or a length of rope with a frayed end swaying in the cool wind over an abyss—but their bodies were never found.

What gear that was eventually recovered told a tale of frantic last moments: utensils scattered about rocky formations; pots and pans half filled with glacier water purified with iodine tablets; boots tossed in snowdrifts; vinyl flags staked in erratic patterns in the mountainside. Some left behind claw marks in the ice.

These were the stories that fueled the myth of the Godesh Ridge. I did not doubt them—I had heard similar ones about much of the Himalayas that I knew to be true—but I did not pay them much mind, either. I’d done my fair share of research in Annapolis while I was still debating whether or not to join Andrew and his crew in Nepal. These stories circulated the Internet like high school rumors. Despite the myth that surrounded the Godesh Ridge—the fact that it was a Nepalese hidden land or John Petras’s beyul and quite possibly haunted—the stories were no different than any other mountaineering story found in a book or in a copy of National Geographic. I paid them little mind.

However, as we began the ascent up the southern face of the mountain, the stories returned to me in all their gory detail. In my mind’s eye, I could see the frozen bodies with white, rubbery skin coated in a slick mat of ice, the scattered assortment of hiking gear melting impressions in the snow, the random boot jutting footless from a bank of powder.

It wasn’t fear that brought these thoughts back to me. It was the bourbon from last night finally filtering out of my system. I’ddowned half the canteen before screwing the cap back on and rolling over, my stomach burning with the calming roil of booze. My hands had stopped shaking, and my vision, even in the darkness of the tent, seemed to clear. Outside, I could hear the powerful wind barrel down the chasms and stir the trees along the edge of our camp.

Now in the light of a new day, I was going through withdrawal all over again.

The brown earth and whitish reeds graduated to snow midway through the afternoon. An hour after that, the snow was already several inches deep. I paused at one point and cupped a handful of snow, which I brought up to my face, wiping away the sweat and dampening my hair. Our group had paired off in twos, except for Petras and me who’d taken up the rear of the line to keep Shotsky company; in the lead, Andrew and Curtis appeared to be about a quarter of a mile ahead of us. They looked like small, colorless stones poking out from the snow.

“Good idea.” Shotsky dropped to his knees and massaged handfuls of snow against his face. “God, that feels good!”

“You hanging in there?”

“Yeah,” he said, planting both hands into the snow and resting on all fours. I could see vapor billowing from his mouth with each exhalation.

“Don’t leave your hands in the snow too long,” I cautioned him. “Or your knees.”

He was in shorts, as were Petras and I. When he stood, which required some assistance, I could see his thick knees were fire engine red and dripping with melted snow.

“Jesus,” Shotsky said, running the back of one hand along his forehead. “I’m sweatin’ like a whore on Judgment Day.”

“Come on,” I urged him and was immediately tossed a glare from Petras.

We continued up the incline. To our right, huge black rocks rose out of the snow like smokestacks of a sunken ship on the floor of theocean. By late afternoon, the sky had opened. The winding, serpentine backbone of the Himalayas was visible straight through to the horizon, great blue vestiges whose arrangement appeared to be preordained.