The Ascent(56)
“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 f*cking 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.
Chapter 13
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.
The gateway to the Canyon of Souls stood across from us at the next plateau, separated by an insurmountable distance of air, a canyon in and of itself whose floor was the vicious, unforgiving icefall. It was like a medieval castle surrounded by a moat. Other than a snow-covered arch of stone that curved like a rainbow and connected to the other side of the canyon, the opposite plateau was as remote as an uncharted desert island.
“This is the farthest point along the Godesh Ridge that any group of climbers has ever been,” Andrew continued. “I want you all to take a deep breath and taste how clean the air is. You’ll never breathe air this clean again in your lives.”
Curtis appeared beside me, looking ashen.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
He gnawed at his lower lip. “Friend of mine died at the Khumbu Icefall on his way to the top of Everest three years ago. I was there; I saw it happen.” He shook his head. “Forget it. I’m cool.”
I clapped him on the back but said nothing. My head was becoming increasingly achy, and I’d developed a dry cough over the past two days that I couldn’t shake. When I was able to find sleep, my dreams were fitful and frightening, though I couldn’t remember anything of significance about them upon waking.
Chad studied the icefall. Even Chad, who was typically unshaken, looked wary. “So how the hell do we get across?”
“That’s the tricky part,” said Andrew. He acknowledged the stone arch with a jut of his chin. “We use it as a bridge.”
Chad scowled. “You’re f*cking kidding me, right?”
“We can’t climb that thing,” Curtis added. “The sides and top are pure ice against rock. The ice will shatter the second we drive an anchor into it.”
“You’re right. That’s been the fatal mistake of every other group that came before us,” Andrew said. “They try to scale the arch and walk across its top.”
“And we’re not going to do that,” Curtis responded.
“No, we’re not.” Andrew grinned, and I was once again reminded of that look he gave me all those years ago in San Juan just before he threw himself off the cliff and into space. “We’re going to climb under it.”