Snowblind Read online

  “How did Yunshan find you?” Ian asked, at last.

  “Who says I didn’t find it?” David said.

  “Don’t be vain,” Ian said. “The mountain comes for you when you need it. I guess Yunshan wants to show you something.”

  “Have you been going to church again? You sound like a priest.”

  Ian laughed, a braying sound that came out in short, wheezy barks. “Not often enough,” he said. “You should try it. I’ll take you sometime. All those old Semites had their revelations on mountaintops. It’s inspiring stuff. So, where did Yunshan find you?”

  “UC library.”

  “Ah—secular church.”

  The hood of David’s sleeping bag, cinched around his face, kept him from looking over to Ian when they spoke. Anyway, what would he see if he could? A nylon mummy draped over the stone, hardly a person. So he spoke out into the silvery night, and Ian’s voice, his hoarse rasp, came to him from out of the air. “In pictures in an old copy of the Alpine Journal,” David continued. They were from a photo reconnaissance from the 1920s, after the World War and before Chiang Kai-shek shut down south China, a time when there were still blank spaces on maps even as airplanes filled in the sky. The author—an Englishman with a fitting name, Mosshole, something like that—had wandered through the Kunlun, goggling and taking pictures and being imperious and British. He got tossed out by the new guard, and visitors were no longer welcome. And then Mao shut the borders, and that part of the world went dark for decades. “The pictures of Yunshan are incredible,” David said. “The mountain comes right up out of its glacier—a thousand feet of rock, then mixed climbing and a band of ice, another thousand feet of rock, and then the overhangs, more ice dripping down, snow, spires on top. Solid-looking granite.” David paused a moment to see if any response would return to him out of the night. “Ian? Mountains are made of rock, you know.”

  Ian’s fetishism of the mountains did not sit easily in David’s mind. He didn’t care for stories of the hidden world when the surface of the real world was so intricate and alive.

  Up and down the valley, the granite glowed, and David felt himself becoming mesmerized by the moon. He closed his eyes, popped them back open again. It was much too early to drift off. He flexed his hands, which were raw from tussling with the granite. Already they were cracked, bleeding, coated black with aluminum oxide. His fingertips felt plastic in the cold. He wondered if he would be able to feel the difference between fingers punished numb and fingers losing feeling from frostbite. He imagined the grief he would get from other climbers if he frostbit himself in California.

  The moon floated higher. David tried to stay awake. Going to sleep now would mean waking up at three in the morning with nothing to do but lie there and wait for dawn. Ian told a story, set in the desert. David lost track of whether it was in Australia after the year Ian had worked on a sheep farm or in New Mexico where he had been looking for mushrooms after a big spring rain. The land was all red and orange and flat except for the cliffs, which came up at perfect right angles. Distances were impossible to guess. A lean, hard, brown-skinned man with long black hair had wandered by and asked Ian whether he had seen his dog. They had ended up spending two days together driving dirt roads looking for a mutt the same color as the desert. The man had known just where to go at the hottest part of the day to see a mirage that looked like a tidal wave rolling off an inland sea. And then it was three in the morning, and David was awake and cold through and begging the dawn to hurry west.

  FOUR MONTHS PASSED. They celebrated the purchase of their plane tickets at a beer-and-whisky dive with a peanut-shell floor. Ian wore his snakeskin boots with the heads left on—mouths open—at the toes. He jumped up on the table and stomped out a jig. David pounded the table with his bottle, keeping his hand moving fast to avoid getting kick-bit. Ian tilted his head back and howled at the ceiling. The barman, roused at last, lifted his jiggly chin an inch off his massive chest. “Get out now,” he said, “’fore I break heads.”

  Ian collapsed back into his seat. “I found out what Yunshan means,” he said, when he caught his breath.

  “Oh?” David had forgotten all about that question.

  “The mountain on the cloud,” Ian said. “How about that?”

  THE FINAL WEEK stateside was a roar in David’s ears and a confusion of images with gaps in between he didn’t know how to fill. He made lists: Four gallons of kerosene. Fifteen pounds each of rice and flour. Fifty-four carabiners. Six cases of Baby Ruths. Two lead ropes, two tents, two spoons, two 100-count bottles of multi-vitamin pills transferred to plastic bags to save on weight and bulk. Twenty-four pitons. Two sets of cams. Eighteen ice screws. There were revisions, additions, subtractions, a file folder an inch thick of different versions and permutations. Ian had no patience for this papering of the mountain. “Start pasting this to your walls,” he’d say, “and I’ll call the asylum. They’ll come and take away your pen and put your hands to better use.”

  Then there were the duffle bags and the airports and the noise and press of people. Hours (days?) rattling around a railcar. A market for the rice and flour, where David understood nothing and Ian vomited in the dirt behind a stall after eating a bird on a stick, much to the amusement of two boys, who watched him unabashedly. A diesel truck farting black smoke bounced them over dirt roads up through foothills covered in orchards. A smiling woman gave them a bag of pears and waved them along wordlessly. The wheel ruts ended, and Ian found a man with a donkey cart who agreed to take them further, and they could feel the land swelling up, puckering toward hills and then mountains.

  Then, suddenly, there they were, at the toe of the glacier, and David’s mind felt present, and moving in real time, for the first time in weeks, though he also felt drained and hungover. They had a mound of gear two days away, back by the river where the cart had dumped them, but here they were, with a smaller mound at the snow line.

  “We’re in deep now,” Ian said. He was sprawled on the ground, head propped on a ripped and bursting duffel. “You’re the only one I know who can bury me this deep.”

  David blinked against the high-altitude sun. Far off in the distance, he could see the upper wedge of the mountain. It split the sky, an isosceles of black rock and gleaming ice, a hatchet head turned up to attack the blue.

  “If we were in Nepal,” Ian continued, lying on his back at the place where the earth ended and the snow began, high above the last bare-boned wintersweet, “we’d be drinking chai from a thermos and snapping photos of Sherpas toting our stuff. Here we’ll haul baggage for a week just to set up basecamp.”

  In fact, it took twelve days. They divided their supplies into sixty-pound loads and ran relays, first from the end of the donkey track to the snow, then up the glacier, inching toward the wall of peaks where the side of the mountain tore up out of the snow. Now the ink abstractions of David’s lists had coalesced into pounds and ounces, and the two men toiled under their loads.

  Up on the glacier, they could not help seeing Yunshan. In person, their lady mountain wore no come-hither look. Her face was elegant and severe. The rock, steep and smooth, overhung at her cheek hollows. A fine network of fragile-looking ice runnels veiled her chin and jaw in lace, then ran together high on her head in a crown studded with snowy towers. In fact, it was best not to look straight at the mountain, at least not yet. Better to stare at the saw-toothed chains of subsidiary peaks sprawling to the north and south and let Yunshan lurk on the periphery.

  On the snow, the sun was an enemy, turning the surface to knee-deep mush, weakening the skin over the glacier’s complicated insides. Two hours into the very first carry, David felt the snow slump beneath his feet as the outer layer collapsed. The crevasse pulled him down slowly, the snow sticking together even as it moved. He had time to escape, to pitch forward toward the stable pack. He even had time to imagine the fall waiting for him below: bouncing at the end of the rope that attached him to Ian, his sack pulling him backward and upside down, then h
ours spent down in the snow hole messing around with frozen prusiks and fighting to emerge through the bombs of snow sloughing off the sides. And still it was hard to move. He seemed mired in syrup, ballasted in place by the weight on his back. He lurched ahead and stuck his ice axe into the slush just as the snow beneath his feet fell completely away. For a moment he thought he would slide down anyway, but his axe found a firm layer and held. He crawled away from the crack, panting and pushing.

  “All right?” Ian said.

  “Hell . . . man . . .” David pulled for breath. “Let’s go wallow through a swamp instead. We’ll get nowhere like this.”

  So they worked at night instead. On clear nights, an eastern moon lit the snow. When the moon declined, the mountain’s shadow engulfed them and shrank the world to the ten yards of light produced by a headlamp. During this period of moonset, they struggled through a black-on-black world with ruined depth perception. Mountain shapes reared up out of the dark, and David would be sure they had veered off their track and were cutting crosswise toward the chain of peaks. But then the mountain would become a hill, then a ridge, then a crest that would take ten steps to top. David would tell himself again to stop looking so far ahead and to keep his eyes within his cone of light, that outside of the light-cone, there were only tricks. The shapes in the gloom ahead, and to the left and right, were only there to distract and confuse. When the moon finally abandoned Asia, the mountain shadow dissipated, and the stars, hot pricks of light hung absurdly low, retook the sky. They switched their headlamps back off even though the starlight didn’t really do much to drive the night off the glacier. Batteries weighed just under an ounce a piece, and they had only eighteen of them.

  Meanwhile, the glacier churned down the valley. Middle sections, where the flow was strongest, slid away from the mountain a foot an hour. Creaks and groans chafed the night air and the nerves of the two climbers; sounds like trees—a whole forest—having their limbs torn off, the sounds of great tonnages of ice rubbing each other and the rock below.

  II

  THE SKY WAS blue, the mountain vertical, the air cold enough to keep the ice firm, but warm enough that David could still feel all of his toes. They were in the middle-mountain, now, where top and bottom seemed equidistant and equally inaccessible. Down below, through a vertical half mile, he could just make out the yellow half sphere of their basecamp tent, but it looked two-dimensional, like a grain of sand on the floor. Not much to hide under. Up, they could not even see the summit, blocked as it was by Yunshan’s tangled crown. No point looking at either, David told himself, they’ll just drive you nuts.

  A flight of griffon vultures—seven of them—spiraled on a fast updraft headed up toward their belay. The griffons were the only large live things they had seen since moving onto the glacier. David watched them and wondered what it was they ate, but maybe they were only using the mountain winds to gain altitude before drifting out over the plains. Still, he could hardly believe they could fly so high. They were enormous birds, wings outstretched and arched over their heads, which hung down off coils of neck. They seemed to eye David in return as they drifted by, with eyes made of black glass, frank and curious. Back off, he thought, I’m not dinner yet. A few hundred feet higher, two of them riding the column of air in opposite directions collided. They righted themselves after some squawking and scrabbling, and a shower of black feathers drifted down past the belay.

  It was David’s lead, and Ian handed him their anemic rack of gear. The specific items clipped to the nylon sling were the result of an intense two days of negotiation. These had been their rest days, a chance to inventory basecamp and readjust to the sunlit world. They spent most of the time staring at the mountain, trying to make some sense out of it, trying to imagine what might be up there.

  “The third runnel, just below her right cheek, you think that’s consolidated?”

  “Looks like cotton candy crap to me. Has it sloughed at all today? In the fourth runnel, two hundred feet up and over, we’d have a sleeping ledge.”

  “There? We’ll be sleeping upright. I think that’s a shadow tricking you.”

  It was nothing but steep. There would be few places to stand, let alone sleep. The sole exception was a recessed area lodged into her snowy forehead like a third eye. It might offer something like ground to walk and stand on, some relief from the unrelenting vertical.

  “The lighter we go, the faster we go,” Ian muttered from behind their spotting scope in the afternoon of their second Sunday. “The faster we go, the less we need. If we were just inhuman enough, we’d start up and never stop and be on top fifty hours later. We’re not ready for that. Damn! Too anchored. Too in touch with our suffering.” He was seated on one of a collection of rocks in the snow—mountain debris surfing the back of the glacier. He tossed the scope to David. “Five days,” he said. “We can do it in five days if we keep the packs under thirty pounds. Six if we get pinned by a storm.”

  “With packs like that, we’ll starve,” David said.

  “We don’t need food for the storm day. Just fuel.”

  “We’ll be ghosts by the end of it.”

  “We’ll float up the mountain. We’re in the land of the mind. Monks fast for weeks in these mountains. We can do that. You know we can both lose a few. We’re skinny, but we’re not Ethiopians.”

  The plan taking form was no plan at all. They’d abandon their aluminum and nylon advantage for a tool kit of promises: strength, luck, speed. But to climb in one lightning stroke. No tedious hauling or unspooling of fixed ropes. No slow grind of mind and body against mountain stretched out over weeks. This was beautiful.

  “We can shed some gear weight, too,” David said, at last. They would depend on speed, and speed was a function of weight. Every ounce would count. “It’s all snow and ice up there. We won’t need as many pitons.”

  “You realize,” Ian said, “we’ll be heroes if we pull this off.”

  Now, attached to the mountain by a few bits of nylon and chromoly, David took the rack of gear from Ian, stared straight up at the undercurve of the lady’s cheek, and wished for every one of the nine pitons and eight cams left at basecamp. The mountainside bulged out beyond vertical, sheltering the cliff bands below and leaving them bare. The day was ending, the sky blueing toward purple. Above the overhangs hovered Ian’s promised sleeping ledge and the potential for rest. But steep, complicated overlaps of rock blocked the way, and David couldn’t yet see a route through.

  “Talk to me while I’m up there,” David said.

  “Careful what you ask. I’ve been thinking about bones,” Ian said.

  “Keep it to yourself, then.”

  David climbed past the belay, where Ian had anchored himself to the top of an ice runnel with two screws. The ice immediately thinned to a glass curtain, and David swung his axes trying to think like a surgeon, but feeling like he was the one under the knife. He felt the surface vibrate with each move, had no idea what kept it from disintegrating into falling shards. The runnel ended in a translucent point glued to black diorite, and David dry tooled away from the ice, scratching at the mountain’s bare hide with his axes, crampons sparking and scraping against the rock. Whiffs of dynamite hung in the air, the exhale of rock crushed by steel points. He teetered on the barest contact between metal and stone.

  Ian was rattling on about something. Cathedrals. Ossuaries. Prophets on mountaintops. Tibetan lamas.

  David reached a little groove that would take a piton, but not one of the ones he carried. He fumbled in a cam, but it was so absurdly upside down and flared that he took it back out. He searched for other options. He looked down between his crampons and saw Ian’s face notched there, staring back up at him as through a bombsight. If he fell, Ian would have nowhere to go.

  Ian didn’t look away, and David felt goaded on by his partner’s wide-open eyes. If Ian wasn’t going to turn away, how could David? The rope hung down from David’s waist, uninterrupted, sixty, then seventy feet. So? he thought.
I won’t let go.

  David reached the overlaps, where the rock bulged out above him like an inverted staircase. He pounded a piton into a rotten crack, but from the way the rock flexed, he knew that it would rip out if he fell. He clipped his rope to it anyway. The analytical part of his mind was receding; its warnings, barely heard echoes. His blood was up, and it felt good to clip his rope to the pin, like carrying a lottery ticket in his back pocket. Ian was screaming at him now.

  David reached up and out and hooked the tip of one axe pick into a cavity between two of the steps. He leaned back, and the pick crunched against the rock, but held. He moved higher out under the staircase. Gravity, like a second rope tied to his waist, pulled him backward and down. The blood surged to his arms now, and the pump clock began to tick. Tick-tock, his swollen veins strangled his forearms, and he could feel his fingers relaxing around the axe shafts. Just above, the bulge flattened, and above that hung Ian’s ledges, safety, a place to rest. But he couldn’t see any of that, only the rock right in his face, the final edge of the curve. There must be something up there, but he could not see it. Could he believe in it without some visual assurance that he could get from here to there? He looked back at that one rotten piton, the only thing separating him from a fall that would surely rip their anchor and send their tethered bodies down to the glacier. There might still be time to reverse what he had already climbed, to retreat and rethink their route.