[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
'Hell yes, you were right,' Jorgens said. 'That was close. One more word,
and we would have been packing for home. But you stopped it. Hell yes, you
were right. And
Page 46
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
J.J. was wrong.'
'No,' said Daniel, 'he was right too. Li owes us the damn yaks.'
Jorgens's head snapped back, not much different from taking a blow to the jaw.
In a panic, he cast around for Li, but Li had left, toting off his Swiss
chocolate coffee.
J.J. was beginning to recover his senses. He was shaking his head,
tossing blood drops right and left and lifting his eyebrows and declaring,
'Gaw, man. Gaw.'
Daniel looked down at J.J. and said, 'Damn it.' Slowly, with a pained hitch,
Daniel knelt down and rested one hand on J.J.'s shoulder.
J.J. focused on Daniel's face. His eyes cleared. He smiled. 'Daniel,' he said.
'Are we okay, Daniel?'
And suddenly Abe knew this had been a mutiny and everything would be different
from now on. The outfit had a new leader.
As if the demons ruling this Himalayan niche had decided the blood
offering was enough, the mountain finally opened to them. That very same
afternoon, the climbers'
destiny broke free of the valley.
Abe was facing north and he was the first to see them in the far distance,
huge dark birds swinging back and forth through the empty sky like albatrosses
following a fleet of galleons. One minute the northward view was nothing but
rocks and flat valley floor and the next there were these birds, and then,
even as he looked, a mass of dark, lumbering figures appeared at the far
mouth of the valley.
'Look,' he said.
'The yaks,' someone shouted, 'they're here.'
Everyone came out from their tents to watch the yaks arrive. It took almost
two hours. The herd came slowly, and from the distance Abe heard a guttural
blat and sharp cracking. The blat was easy to place, it was a shout, a
grotesque human shout.
As for the sharp cracking noise, Abe decided it was the snapping of whips.
Closer still, he saw it was the sound of stone on bone. The yakherders steered
their animals by throwing rocks at one or the other side of their horns.
All through camp, the climbers were whooping like cowboys on Saturday night.
Abe grabbed his old Pentax camera and a telephoto lens and hustled through
camp for a closer vantage. He saw Li near the mess tent doorway and paused, a
friendly gesture.
The Chinese official was wearing a look of vindicated authority and Abe
allowed that he deserved it. He hoped Li wouldn't carry it too far, however,
because it would only make him enemies among these climbers.
The braying shouts and cracking of rocks against horn grew more distinct, and
now
Abe heard the big black ravens calling from above the herd. 'Now you will
see,' Li said, 'the Tibetans are barbarians.'
Abe had to agree. Through his telephoto lens, the herders and their
animals resembled nothing short of a Gothic invasion. They moved stolidly,
like a storm cloud.
The yakkies' faces were black from the sun and their thick layers of clothing
were so filthy they had the color of the earth. Some of the men had removed
one arm from their jackets, nomad-style, baring a white shoulder. Some
wore long black braids, others Mao caps and ancient mountaineering goggles.
They loomed closer in the lens and Abe heard the primitive ringing of yak
bells, all pitched differently, and he saw that some of the men wore
pants made of thick leather, others of Chinese quilting. Some were
barefoot, others walked in ragged tennis shoes or hide wrappings.
'The edge of the world is here,' Li commented.
Abe didn't answer. It was easy to see these yakherders the way Li saw them,
as children of the wilderness, the real wilderness, even a brood of the
Page 47
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
darkness. If there was a Chinese Rome, it was Li's Beijing, and here he was, a
functionary faced with the hairy underbelly of his empire. From within the
safe walls of his bureau, order must have seemed automatic. But out here, the
blue sky and these gutting mountains and strange, dark natives wrecked the
order.
'We must be careful,' Li said, 'we must guard against the...' he searched,
'the danger.'
Abe had never seen a yak before, and he was a little disappointed by how small
they were. What few wild yaks remained in Tibet were said to be
prehistorically enormous.
These domestic versions were a comedown, standing midway between a St. Bernard
and an American dairy cow. They had the wild aspect of Texas longhorns, but
none of the menace. They were shy animals that spooked easily, and so the
climbers quit their joyous cheering. There were fifty or sixty of them, some
blond or tawny, some black.
Their hair hung shaggy.
The herders and their herd entered Base Camp and immediately it became
their camp, too. Now Abe saw why the yak and human dung had been so intermixed
on the ground. The Tibetans pitched their open-sided tents among the climbers'
tents and their beasts milled everywhere, bells chiming, grazing on straw.
From the midst of the yak mass, someone hallowed Abe. He searched the throng
for
the voice. It took him a minute to spot Daniel, who was taller than the
Tibetans and white with a pronounced limp and dressed in Western gear. But
something about him tricked Abe's eye and he was hard to distinguish from the
nomads.
'Heads up,' Daniel called over the backs of milling yaks. 'Tie down everything
you've got. These yakkies are pirates.' He was wearing what Abe termed the
Nordwand grin.
Something about the North Face just this promise of it, these yaks that
would bring them to its base had unleashed an epidemic of toothy hellbent
smile. Every climber had it. Abe could feel it stretching his own face.
'I wasn't sure they'd come,' Abe said.
'These guys? They'd come even if they weren't invited. We're like the
circus, the mall and the bank all wrapped up in one. We provide the
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]