Mysterium by Susan Froderberg

Author:Susan Froderberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

6.

THE SUMMIT

No one wanted to talk about it. For if they were to talk about it they would need to call upon logic and reason. They would have to tally the risk, reckon the drawbacks, rethink the reward. And all would necessarily conclude that there was only one intelligent choice and only one thing to do: Leave. Call it quits. Get off the mountain. Go down now.

But no one would speak of retreat.

A threshold crossed, they cast their gazes to the zenith.

* * *

THE MORNING is without cloud-form or wind-blow or portent of any kind as the crusaders ready themselves for the climb up the couloir and on to Camp I. Adams and Karma, Wilder and Devin and Sara gather their equipage. They clip on, buckle in, gird up, declare their goodbyes, leaving the porters and embers of the morning cookfire behind. The first steep stretch of the hump they now call the Bobsled, a moniker in honor of Devin Reddy’s calamitous ride down the masticating declivity. They laugh as they cant up the alabaster bank, entitled now to wisecrack about it.

Troy and Reddy had the day prior set out ahead to establish the higher camp, aiming for the crest of one of the mountain’s prominent white bones so as to settle them at a roost of twenty-one-thousand-plus feet in altitude, a site they would name in tribute to their leader: Camp I now christened Adams’ Rib. The two had passed through the snow-shed funnel of the Bobsled and from there had made their way up and over the bergschrund, walking with fanatical care and prayerful delicacy across the frozen ocean of broken waves and gaping ice that had severed from the head of the glacier. They sidetracked cataracts of seracs and skirted fathomless crevasses in a world without code or plumb or plane. They punched through a pasture of snow rollers and finger drifts in crust knee-deep that brought them to the base of the thousand-foot slope. They tiptoed up the precipitous rib on the front points of crampons, hammering the picks of their ice axes into deep turquoise ice, Reddy leading the first seventy-degree pitch, anchoring pickets and flukes along the way, belaying Troy up to lead the next section of vertical. Blood surged through their arteries and veins in hard-won joy. They were doing some real climbing now.

Adams had over the past week talked about the options for the various summit teams. It was agreed that Reddy and Troy should try for the top in tandem, Adams then joining forces with them to make it a trio. Wilder and Devin and Sara would triplet up and form the other team. This would have left Karma to choose between which of the two groups he would accompany, going with the vigor of youth or with the wisdom of the elders, if the sirdar Sherpa hadn’t decided to say nay to the summit either way. Without the squares of yellow to affix to his face, he would assist the others only to the highest camp.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.