Jeff Long - The Ascent_玖贝云文库

Jeff Long, himself a veteran climber, based this story on his own experiences in the

Himalayas. Author of a previous novel, Angels of Light, he lives in Boulder, Colorado.

'The Ascent is an astonishing novel, a darkly brilliant tale haunted by the ominous yet

charged with hope and beauty' – David Roberts, author of Moment of Doubt

'An unbelievably powerful story... I would recommend this to anyone interested in the

Himalayas' – John Acklerly, Director, International Campaign for Tibet

The Ascent

Jeff Long

The right of Jeff Long to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in

accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 1992

by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING PLC

First published in paperback in 1993

by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING PLC

A HEADLINE FEATURE paperback

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of

the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent

purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or

dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 0 7472 4048 5

Phototypeset by Intype, London

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsManufacturing, Glasgow

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING PLC

Headline House

79 Great Titchfield Street

London W1P 7FN

To Barbara

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One writes the way one solos upon a mountain, alone and yet not at all alone. I owe

The Ascent to many people, among them Cliff Watts, Charles Clark, Michael

Wiedman, and Kurt Papenfus, all physicians, all climbers. Over the years, David

Breashears, Brian Blessed, Fritz Stammberger, Arnold Larcher, Matija Malezic, and

Geof Childs have shared their ropes and wings with me in the Himalayas. I give

special thanks to John Paul Davidson and all the members of the BBC crew of Galahad

of Everest, and to Jim Whittaker of the 1990 International Peace Climb. Thanks also

to Craig Blockwick, James Landis, Gwen Edelman, Verne and Marion Read, Rodney

Korich, Jerry Cecil, and, as always, my parents for their support, and to Jeff Lowe,

Mary Kay Brewster, Annie Whitehouse, Karen Fellerhoff, and Brot Coburn for their

extraordinary tales. Elizabeth Crook, Steve Harrigan, Doe Coover, Pam Novotny, and

Rex Hauck helped raise me from the abysses of my own making.

I will remember forever Jeanne Bernkopf, who showed me that language is spirit,

and spirit, the rope with which we all inch higher. In the human rights arena, the

following people and organizations provided guidance and inspiration: Michelle

Bohanna, John Ackerly, Tenzin Tethong, Lisa Keary, Marcia Calkowski, Rinchen

Dharlo, Woody Leonhard, Spenser Havlick, Steve Pomerance, Matt Applebaum,

Leslie Durgin, Buzz Burrell, Chela Kunasz, the International Campaign for Tibet, the

Office of Tibet, the U.S.-Tibet Committee, and the Lawyers for Tibet. I am especially

grateful to Cindy Carlisle and Michael Weis for their vision and tenacity. Finally,

without my editor Elisa Petrini's magic these pages would be nothing but stone.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The Kore Wall route is an imaginary monster, drawn in bits from the south and west

faces of Makalu and glued to the north face of Everest. Himalayan veterans will also

note my fiddling with certain geographical features of the region, for example the 'loss'

of the second road exit from the Rongbuk Valley, the blending of Shekar Dzong with

the Rongbuk Monastery, and the movement of Chengri La from some twenty miles to

the east. I hope these liberties won't ruin the mountain's realities.

This story is fictional, but the tragedy of Tibet is not. China's illegal occupation of

Tibet constitutes one of the great crimes against humanity in this century. Having

killed off one sixth of the Tibetan population over the past forty years, the People's

Republic of China continues to systematically plunder and destroy the Tibetan

culture, religion and environment. What was once Shangri La, however imperfect, is

now a graveyard and gulag garrisoned by Chinese troops and overrun by 7.5 million

Chinese colonists. A century ago, Native-Americans of the Wild West were conquered

with similar violence fueled by similar ideals of racial supremacy. However, a century

ago, there was no such sanctuary as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The

twenty-first century may yet see Tibet restored to its sovereign status.

[map]

PROLOGUE – 1974

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 ho 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 short-waves 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 moustache 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 angle,' 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 highspeed 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 sensation. 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 forty-foot 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?'

Jeff Long - The Ascent

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