Mother Goddess of the World

VII

Freds was right about that.

But Arnold was not the only source of trouble. Freds himself was acting a bit peculiar, I judged. Still, when I thought of the various oddities in his recent behavior—his announcement that his friend Kunga Norbu was a tulku, and now this sudden advocacy of a Save Mallory’s Body campaign—I couldn’t put it all together. It didn’t make sense.

So when Freds’s party and my trekking group took off upvalley from Pheriche on the same morning, I walked with Freds for a while. I wanted to ask him some questions. But there were a lot of people on the trail, and it was hard to get a moment to ourselves.

As an opener I said, “So, you’ve got a woman on your team.”

“Yeah, Marion’s great. She’s probably the best climber of us all. And incredibly strong. You know those indoor walls they have in England, for practicing?”

“No.”

“Well, the weather is so bad there, and the climbers are such fanatics, that they’ve built these thirty- and forty-foot walls inside gyms, and covered them with concrete and made little handholds.” He laughed. “It looks dismal—scuzzy old gym with bad light and no heating, and all these guys stretched out on a concrete wall like a new kind of torture… Anyway I visited one of these, and they set me up in a race with Marion, up the two hardest pitches. Maybe 5.13 in places, impossible stuff. Everyone started betting on us, and the rule was someone had to top out for anyone to collect on the bets. But there was a leak getting the wall damp, and I came off about halfway up. So she won, but to collect the bets she had to top out. With the leak it really was impossible, but everyone who had bet on her was yelling at her to do it, so she just grit her teeth and started making these moves, man”—Freds illustrated in the air between us as we hiked—“and she was doing them in slow motion so she wouldn’t come off. Just hanging there by her fingertips and toes, and I swear to God she hung on that wall for must’ve been three hours. Everyone else stopped climbing to watch. Guys were going home—guys were begging her to come off—guys had tears in their eyes. Finally she topped out and crawled over to the ladder and came down, and they mobbed her. They were ready to make her queen. In fact she pretty much is queen, as far as the English climbers are concerned—you could bring the real one in and if Marion were there they wouldn’t even notice.”

Then Arnold slipped between us, looking conspiratorial. “I think this Mallory scheme is a great idea,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “I’m totally behind you, and it’ll make a great movie.”

“You miss the point,” I said to him.

“We ain’t doing nothing but climb Lingtren,” Freds said to him.

Arnold frowned, tucked his chin onto his chest, chewed his cigar. Frowning, Freds left to catch up with his group, and they soon disappeared ahead. So I lost my chance to talk to him.

We came to the upper end of Pheriche’s valley, turned right and climbed to get into an even higher one. This was the valley of the Khumbu Glacier, a massive road of ice covered with a chaos of gray rubble and milky blue melt ponds. We skirted the glacier and followed a trail up its lateral moraine to Lobuche, which consists of three teahouses and a tenting ground. The next day we hiked on upvalley to Gorak Shep.

Now Gorak Shep (“Dead Crow”) is not the kind of place you see on posters in travel agencies. It’s just above seventeen thousand feet, and up there the plant life has about given up. It’s just two ragged little teahouses under a monstrous rubble hill, next to a gray glacial pond, and all in all it looks like the tailings of an extraordinarily large gravel mine.

But what Gorak Shep does have is mountains. Big snowy mountains, on all sides. How big? Well, the wall of Nuptse, for instance, stands a full seven thousand feet over Gorak Shep. An avalanche we saw, sliding down a fraction of this wall and sounding like thunder, covered about two World Trade Centers’ worth of height, and still looked tiny. And Nuptse is not as big as some of the peaks around it. So you get the idea.

Cameras can never capture this kind of scale, but you can’t help trying, and my crowd tried for all they were worth in the days we were camped there. The ones handling the altitude well slogged up to the top of Kala Pattar (“Black Hill”), a local walker’s peak which has a fine view of the Southwest Face of Everest. The day after that, Heather and Laure led most of the same people up the glacier to Everest Base Camp, while the rest of us relaxed. Everest Base Camp, set by the Indian Army this season, was basically a tent village like ours, but there are some fine seracs and ice towers to be seen along the way, and when they returned the clients seemed satisfied.

So I was satisfied too. No one had gotten any bad altitude sickness, and we would be starting back the next morning. I was feeling fine, sitting up on the hill above our tents in the late afternoon, doing nothing.

But then Laure came zipping down the trail from Base Camp, and when he saw me he came right over. “George George,” he called out as he approached.

I stood as he reached me. “What’s up?”

“I stay talk friends porter Indian Army base camp, Freds find me Freds say his base camp come please you. Climb Lho La find man camera come hire Sherpas finish with Freds, very bad follow Freds.”

Now Laure’s English is not very good, as you may have noticed. But after all we were in his country speaking my language—and for him English came after Sherpa, Nepali, and some Japanese and German, and how many languages do you speak?

Besides, I find I always get the gist of what Laure says, which is not something you can always say of all our fellow native speakers. So I cried out, “No! Arnold is following them?”

“Yes,” Laure said. “Very bad. Freds say come please get.”

“Arnold hired their Sherpas?”

Laure nodded. “Sherpas finish porter, Arnold hire.”

“Damn him! We’ll have to climb up there and get him!”

“Yes. Very bad.”

“Will you come with me?”

“Whatever you like.”

I hustled to our tents to get together my climbing gear, and tell Heather what had happened. “How did he get up there?” she asked. “I thought he was with you all day.”

“He told me he was going with you! He probably followed you guys all the way up, and kept on going. Don’t worry about it, it’s not your fault. Take the group back to Namche starting tomorrow, and we’ll catch up with you.” She nodded, looking worried.

Laure and I took off. Even going at Laure’s pace we didn’t reach Freds’s base camp until the moon had risen.

Their camp was now only a single tent in a bunch of trampled snow, just under the steep headwall of the Khumbu Valley—the ridge that divided Nepal from Tibet. We zipped open the tent and woke Freds and Kunga Norbu.

“All right!” Freds said. “I’m glad you’re here! Real glad!”

“Give me the story,” I said.

“Well, that Arnold snuck up here, apparently.”

“That’s right.”

“And our Sherpas were done and we had paid them, and I guess he hired them on the spot. They have a bunch of climbing gear, and we left fixed ropes up to the Lho La, so up they came. I tell you I was pretty blown away when they showed up in the pass! The Brits got furious and told Arnold to go back down, but he refused and, well, how do you make someone do something they don’t want to up there? If you punch him out he’s likely to have trouble getting down! So Kunga and I came back to get you and found Laure at Base Camp, and he said he’d get you while we held the fort.”

“Arnold climbed the Lho La?” I said, amazed.

“Well, he’s a pretty tough guy, I reckon. Didn’t you ever see that movie he made of the kayak run down the Baltoro? Radical film, man, really it’s up there with The Man Who Skied Down Everest for radicalness. And he’s done some other crazy things too, like flying a hang glider off the Grand Teton, filming all the way. He’s tougher than he looks. I think he just does the Hollywood sleaze routine so he can get away with things. Anyway those are some excellent climbing Sherpas he’s got, and with them and the fixed ropes he just had to gut it out. And I guess he acclimatizes well, because he was walking around up there like he was at the beach.”

I sighed. “That is one determined filmmaker.”

Freds shook his head. “The guy is a leech. He’s gonna drive the Brits bats if we don’t haul his ass back down here.”