Текст книги "The Lord of Death"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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“You’re some kind of wizard, Shan,” the American said in a hollow voice over his shoulder. “All these hundreds of miles of wilderness and you come right to her.”

Shan eased back from the lip and stood. “From the beginning the killer has tried to make it seem that one of the old rebels committed the crimes. If he ever needed more proof he would see to it that Public Security found this place, would make sure they knew this was where the rebels secretly disposed of bodies, that only one of them would know how to find it.”

Yates emptied his pack, dumping out the climbing gear at Shan’s feet.

“I can’t go down on the ropes,” Shan declared. “I’ve never done it before.”

“And I can’t do what has to be done at the bottom,” Yates countered in a grim tone.

Shan, filled with a new form of dread, lowered his head and listened to the American’s instructions as Yates produced two harnesses and began to fasten lines to a huge boulder near the edge.

She lay on her side as if sleeping, her face nearly as pale as the snow she rested on, one arm jutting at an unnatural angle from under her head. The cold, dry air had kept Megan Ross preserved as it did the dead climbers of Everest, though she had not been there so long as to become affixed to the stone. Shan gripped himself, telling himself not to look into her open eyes, then rolled the body over, straightening the arm along her side. But as he worked he seemed to feel her gaze, and when he finally looked into her face he saw the confusion and longing that had been there when she had died but also something else, an oddly plaintive expression. He glanced at Yates, who sat with his back to Shan, carefully avoiding looking at his dead friend, and was about to begin unwrapping the length of rope he had carried around his waist to fashion a harness for the body when he saw the bloodstains along the buttons of her shirt, faint but unmistakable fingerprints. With a shudder he unfastened the buttons, revealing a small silver gau, Ross’s prayer box, also bearing the marks of her bloody fingers at its latch. In his mind Shan replayed the awful moment when Megan Ross had died in his arms. He had almost forgotten that she had pushed her gau toward him, at the moment had simply assumed she had wanted to show him she was Buddhist. But now the fingerprints told him she had fingered the latch after being shot. She could have told him her killer’s name, could have explained everything with her last breath, but instead she had shown him the gau.

Glancing back at Yates, who had retreated further down the long slab that marked the opening of the crevasse, Shan opened the ornate box. There were prayers inside, rolled up in the traditional fashion, a turquoise stone, and a grainy photo torn from a book. He studied the photo with a chill then folded it again and buttoned it inside his shirt pocket.

As he reached Yates, Shan was rethreading the rope around his waist.

“You have to put it around her,” the American reminded him. “Make a harness.”

“No,” Shan said, “I’ve changed my mind. She doesn’t need to go down to the world anymore.”

The American searched Shan’s face, then shrugged. “If we took her down her body would become the star attraction in an international media circus,” Yates observed, obviously grateful he would not have to spend hours carrying the body of his dead friend. “What family she had she wasn’t close to,” he added, as if trying to persuade himself. “She was always going to die on a mountain.”

“In the Himalayas,” Shan said, “half those who do are never recovered.”

“I will let her friends know she died the way she wanted, doing something someone had never done, making her own rules, at the top of the world.” Yates offered a melancholy grin then rose slowly, bracing himself, then turned and walked back with Shan to the dead woman. He produced a wool cap from his pocket and placed it on her head, then cupped her cold cheek in his hand. “I want her to be more comfortable than this,” he declared. “I want the mother mountain to know she is here.”

They carried her down to a flat slab that faced southeast and rested her back against another rock, her hands in her lap, her legs, stiff from cold, bent under her as best they could. Yates stepped back, returned to straighten her wool cap, and nodded. Megan Ross was facing Everest, meditating, as she often did before a strenuous climb. Shan thought of the strange chain of events that had brought them to the dead woman, of how he had grown close to her after her death. Ama Apte had been right, Shan realized. Ever since the American woman had died, the mother mountain had been using her. The shining light of her death had guided him to the truth he so desperately needed.

Half an hour later, his arms aching from the climb back up to the plateau, Shan knelt in one of the old rock shelters, coaxing a smoldering pile of dried goat dung into flames to boil tea. He looked up to see Yates bend into the shadows of another of the crumbling structures, probing a pile of debris, extracting several scorched sticks. The American carried them back to Shan, studying them, deep in reflection, until he finally dropped them by the smoky fire. They were not sticks, but charred remnants of a wooden crate. On one, still visible after so many decades, was stenciled the words CAUTION! AMMUNITION! in English..

Yates was already away when Shan looked up, walking the perimeter, eyes on the ground for more evidence. As he watched, the American’s head snapped up and he flattened himself against a boulder, warily watching a cleft in the rocks at the far side of the plateau. Shan heard voices as he reached the American’s side, then in quick succession three ringing blows that he recognized as a hammer driving a metal piton into rock.

They edged through the cleft to find four figures working hard to erect a leanto of rock and canvas against the rock face. The smaller clearing where Kypo and three men in red and yellow climbing parkas worked was sheltered on three sides by the rock face and high outcroppings, with a shallow pool that caught meltwater as it trickled from the cliff above. Here had been an inner camp, Shan realized, as he saw the ruins of several more rock shelters, imagining the scene decades earlier when it was the hidden headquarters of the rebels. There were still vestiges of that time, a yak hair rope hanging loose from an iron hook driven into a crack in the rock face, faded paint on a flat boulder in the image of the flag of free Tibet.

Suddenly Kypo stop hammering the pitons being used for support ropes. The Tibetan spun about and advanced on Shan and Yates, the hammer still in his hand. The three men bent low behind one of the old walls, as if hiding. As they did so Shan glimpsed the red robes they wore under their parkas, which bore the logo of Tsipon’s climbing company.

“I want to speak with them,” Shan said.

“No. She says we must stay away from you. Both of you.”

Shan followed Kypo’s uneasy gaze toward the edge of the plateau, where it opened to a view of the Himalayas marching along the border to the east. Tumkot’s astrologer sat near the edge of the plateau, one hand resting on a low mound of stones and earth, on which a few wildflowers bloomed.There was an odd contentment on the face of Ama Apte as she looked up to acknowledge him. “Once this was the most secret place in all of Tibet,” she said. “Now all the world comes here.”

Shan was about to quietly settle beside the fortuneteller when he heard the crunch of gravel under running boots behind him.

“Ever since I arrived you’ve wanted me gone!” came an angry voice. Yates hovered over Ama Apte’s back, his face so fierce Shan braced himself lest the American try to strike the woman.

“You found out about what I was doing from Megan! You knew I was trying to find my father and you destroyed the evidence! You sabotaged my equipment, planted evidence so I would be deported. And now I find you here. It’s as good as a confession! You betrayed me because you betrayed my father!”

“Your father would have been gone from here, would be alive, but for me,” the Tibetan woman agreed in a tight voice, her gaze back on the horizon.

The words seemed to confuse Yates. “Then you admit it,” he said in a quieter, though harsh tone.

“It’s always felt as though I betrayed him,” Ama Apte agreed.

“How can you live with yourself?” Yates snapped.

“I think,” Shan said, fighting an unexpected melancholy, “she has only been trying to protect you, to help you.” He could see the tears now, flooding down Ama Apte’s cheeks. “You came to find your father, didn’t you?”

The American glanced in confusion at Shan. “What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t listened,” Shan said. “The old hermit told us how Ama Apte couldn’t flee across the glacier, that she had to be with family in the village. You told me yourself you couldn’t understand what force it was that kept your father on this side of the border when he could have fled a hundred times, when his own unit was ordering him, begging him to come back.”

Shan turned to Kypo, who now stood with a fearful expression by his mother. “You always wear sunglasses outside, like lots of Tibetans, because the sun in the thin air causes so many cataracts. But inside it’s different. Inside you wear contact lenses, one of the only Tibetans I know to do so, lenses that probably cost half a year’s income to buy.”

“His eyes are too sensitive to the light,” Ama Apte said in a wooden tone. “They need special protection or he will get cataracts, because of all his high climbing. So we found a special doctor in Shigatse.”

“I think you only wear your sunglasses when the lenses aren’t in, Kypo,” Shan said. “Take them off.”

The Tibetan retreated a step, glancing back toward the passage through the rocks, as if thinking of bolting.

Yates looked from Shan to the tall Tibetan in confusion. “You’re not making any sense, Shan,” he groused. “Kypo doesn’t have anything to do with-” His words died away as Ama Apte nodded and the Tibetan lifted his dark glasses. Yates took an uncertain step toward him, looking him in the eyes, unable to speak for a long moment. “Jesus!” Yates gasped at last. “Oh Christ.” He leaned closer to the Tibetan, in disbelief.

Kypo’s eyes were blue.

Ama Apte bent over, racked with a sob. She made an effort to rise, seemed sapped of strength. There were no words from any of them, there seemed to be no words to speak.

“We always felt safe here,” Ama Apte finally said. “For months our band kept telling ourselves we could always safely escape from here across the border if things went badly. Even when the enemy soldiers became better organized, got better equipment and began climbing higher, this ridge was inaccessible to them. They had no helicopters then, and the resistance moved so quickly, hid so easily that this ridge was ruled out as a possible hiding place because everyone was certain it would take ropes and hours of work to move up its face. Only our friends knew of the secret passage.

“In the end there were less than two dozen of us. The Americans were shutting everything down. Samuel said that if he went back they would send him home to America, said it was only his remaining on this side that kept the Americans connected to us.” Ama Apte paused several times to scrub tears from her cheeks. “He would make jokes about how we would build a little house of stone and logs in a valley where no one ever came and invite the yetis for dinner on festival days.” She stopped and abruptly pulled a weed from one of the clumps of heather at her side.

“The solders came as we were finishing breakfast. They killed five of our band before we knew what was happening. Some fled up into the ice field. We killed most of those in the first wave but they kept coming, a full company or more. I shouted at Samuel to run to the ice field and hide, and he grabbed my hand and we began to move up the trail. But I was shot in the leg and fell, hitting my head, knocking me unconscious. When I awoke it was late afternoon, and no one was left but the dead. My face was covered with blood. They had left me for dead. Samuel was there beside me, riddled with bullets. He had thrown away his rifle because the magazine was empty. He had an empty pistol in his hand.”

“It isn’t possible,” Yates murmured, his voice still full of disbelief.

Ama Apte slowly unbuttoned the neck of her shirt and pulled out her gau. “In all these years,” she said, “only Kypo has seen what my gau has held.” But she opened it now, in front of Shan and Yates, cradling it against the wind. There were several rolled up papers, traditional prayers. But on top of them were two yellowed photos. The first was of a young Dalai Lama. The second, tattered from much handling, was of a smiling Samuel Yates, holding a young, beautiful Ama Apte, Mount Everest peering over their shoulders.

Chapter Sixteen

Shan looked up at Chomolungma and saw a huge slab of snow and ice careen down the side of the mountain. Tectonic plates were crashing together below their feet. This was the place where worlds were shaken.

“It was never supposed to end that way,” Ama Apte said, looking up at Yates with wet eyes. “It was my fault that he died.”

“I think,” Kypo interjected, “it was my fault.” He understood that her pregnancy had slowed her down, had made it impossible for her to flee with Samuel Yates.

His mother reached and grabbed his hand. “Never! You were the one good thing that rose out of it.”

“My uncle,” Yates said, scrubbing at his own eyes now, “told me there was an unusual joy in my father’s letters at the end.” He turned and embraced Kypo. The Tibetan, embarrassed at first, awkwardly returned the embrace. Yates looked back at Ama Apte. “But where is he?”

“Two others came back from hiding in the ice field,” the Tibetan woman explained. “I told them it wouldn’t be the way of Samuel’s people, to be disposed of like the others. They helped me to scrape a hollow, bring gravel and some soil from the foot of the glacier. I brought heather, though it has always struggled to grow.”

Yates acted as if he had just seen the rock-covered mound at his feet for the first time. He sank to his knees, extended his hand to one of the spindly flowers that grew out of it. “He’s here?” he said, his voice twisted in confusion. He ran his hands over the grave. “He’s here. You knew him,” he murmured to the woman. “You knew him better than anyone. But you tried to have me thrown out of Tibet,” he added in a confused tone.

“Megan didn’t tell me everything, only that you were looking for evidence of the old resistance,” the astrologer replied. “I thought you were one of those reporters who came through from time to time to stir things up about the past, write something that just rekindles the anguish. I wanted you away. But then I saw your face at the camp, up close for the first time, and I thought I was looking at your father. Then it became even more important that you go because if you were anything like your father you wouldn’t stop until you were confronting the people from the past, and you would never know how dangerous they were until it was too late.”

“You put his cross on that altar,” Yates said.

Ama Apte nodded. “He and I would go there sometimes on the seventh day, on his Sundays. I would pray my way, and he would pray his.”

The American placed his hands, palm down, on the mound. “I never expected it to be like this.”

“What did you expect, Na-than?” Ama Apte asked in a tentative voice. She pronounced the name tentatively, with a gap between the two syllables, as if trying it on for size.

Yates shrugged. “I don’t know. I wanted to say goodbye, to be able to say I understood him. He was always behind me, looming like a ghost, as if we had unfinished business.”

“He took you to the unfinished business,” Shan said, gesturing to the two Tibetans.

Yates replied with a small, sad grin. “All these years, if only I had known, I could have-”

The shots came as two quick successive cracks and echoed off the rock face. Kypo grabbed his mother, trying to push her against the mound but she resisted, squirming away, leaping up and running toward the large clearing beyond the outcroppings. Shan was three steps behind her.

The coats of the three monks had been ripped open to expose the robes they had tucked underneath. Constable Jin wore a victorious smile as he paced in front of the monks, who stood in a line flanked by the two truck drivers who had assaulted Shan and Yates. Ama Apte slowed as she approached, then halted and silently complied as Jin aimed his pistol at her and gestured her toward the rock wall behind the monks.

The constable greeted Shan with an enthusiastic nod. “Comrade Shan! Imagine this. A few hours prospecting in the mountains and I strike gold!”

The larger of the Manchurians, with gray strands of hair blowing at the edge of his wool cap, glared at Shan, as his younger companion watched the pistol in Jin’s hand with a ravenous expression.

“These men are sought as witnesses to the murder of Minister Wu,” Shan ventured. “No doubt you will be commended for bringing them to Major Cao.”

Jin acted as if Shan had told a good joke. “My new friends and I are thinking more along commercial lines. We live in a free market economy now, I hear.”

“Your new friends,” Shan shot back, “killed Director Xie of Religious Affairs.”

“The official view,” Jin countered, “is that these monks committed that crime.”

Shan moved closer to the constable. “It’s a remarkable thing, Jin, when the truth starts to come out in a case like this, a little trickle becomes a sudden flood. Everything changes in an instant.”

“What are you saying?”

“I am saying that Public Security has all the evidence it needs,” Shan lied. “They will soon know the truth about these two truck-drivers. When they’re arrested they will sing like birds and you’ll be just one more conspirator. Worse, a law enforcement official who turned corrupt.” Shan mimicked a pistol with his fingers, pressed it to his head and pulled the trigger.

“Shoot him!” the older Manchurian snapped. “Shoot him and dump him with the other.”

“The other?” Shan asked. “So you did help dispose of the American woman.”

“Megan Ross is climbing somewhere,” Jin said in an uncertain tone.

“She was murdered with the minister. She is in the gully behind you.”

Jin took a step backward, aiming the pistol alternately at Shan, then at the monks. For the first time he appeared worried.

“Give me the pistol you fool!” the older trucker barked. As he spoke his companion jerked something shiny out of his pocket, flicking it with his wrist. A long narrow blade, a switchblade, appeared inches from Shan’s face.

“All we need are the gaus,” grunted the Manchurian with the knife.

“No,” Jin said. “They won’t give up their gaus.”

The oldest of the monks nodded. “We have blessings.”

The Manchurians guffawed.

“You are not able to force us,” the monk continued.

“We can force you with a bullet in your head,” the older man snapped.

“No,” the monk said calmly. “I don’t think you understand.” The youngest monk reached inside his clothes to extract the oversized lotus covered box Shan had seen at the base camp, opening it inside his coat, out of the wind. He produced a cylinder of paper fastened with a strip of red silk, which he unrolled for all to see. It held a drawing of a scorpion, with sacred words in Tibetan script running along its appendages.

“What the hell is that?” one of the drivers sneered.

“A protector charm,” came Ama Apte’s voice. She had approached Jin again, was only a few feet from his back.

“The night before those police came,” the young monk explained in an earnest voice, “our abbot went into his chambers and made this, speaking words of power over it. He only had time to make three. If he had made more, the others would be safe now.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” the older driver demanded.

“The charm,” Shan said with foreboding, “is against injury from demons.” He remembered his first confrontation with the monks in the depot tent, how frightened they had been of him, how they had clutched their gaus.

A frown creased Jin’s face as he stared at the charm.

“Fuck your mother!” the young Manchurian spat, and lunged for the constable’s gun.

As Jin dodged, Ama Apte leaped at the truck driver, pushing his arm down, causing him to twist about, slamming her shoulder with a fist, knocking her down so she gripped his legs. Then, strangely weakened, she let go. For a moment they all froze, looking at the Tibetan woman in confusion. Then she twisted, her hand to her shoulder, and they could see the knife embedded in her flesh.

Kypo, nearest the man who had stabbed her, crouched, about to spring, but then with a blur of motion Yates was on the man, hammering with his fists, slamming a knee into the man’s belly as he doubled over, clenching his fists together and pounding them into his head. As the Manchurian crumpled to the ground Shan prepared to block the attack of his companion. But suddenly Jin’s gun was aimed at the older Manchurian.

“I am the constable of this township, damn it!” he shouted in an uncertain tone. “No more!” He swung his gun back toward Shan and Yates. “But we aretaking these monks with us.”

“No,” Shan stated. “Your new friends are just leaving. They have less than twenty-four hours left.”

“Twenty-four hours?” Jin asked as the older driver pulled his gasping companion to his feet.

“Go down with them and try to collect a bounty and you’ll be arrested. Public Security knows about the yellow bucket that summons them, and has the license number of their truck. Law enforcement isn’t as efficient as people think. It takes about twenty-four hours for the ownership and drivers of a commercial vehicle to be verified. Major Cao will have sent in the information just after daybreak. By this time tomorrow every border station, every police officer in Tibet will be watching for that truck.” He spoke to the Manchurians now. “Your only chance is to leave Tibet before then. That’s a lot of hard driving, but you might make it. Get out of Tibet and keep going. Mongolia always needs trucks.”

“Not without what we came for!” the older man snarled.

“When they catch you,” Shan replied in a level voice, “they will separate you. One of you is guaranteed a bullet in the head.”

“One?” the younger driver asked.

“They will work on you both, separately, with wires and blades and mechanics tools, later with chemicals. The one who talks first, providing evidence against the other, will get fifteen or twenty years’ hard labor. The other will be executed in less than two weeks. One of you will talk, it’s just a matter of which one.” Shan fixed the man with a meaningful gaze. “You’re still young, you can make a new life after fifteen years.”

The two Manchurians glanced at each other uneasily.

Shan looked up at the sun. “Of course by the time you get back to your truck you’ll have maybe twenty hours.”

“Fuck your mother,” the older man spat again.

Shan said nothing, just pointed at the man’s companion, who had begun running toward the passageway down the mountain.

As he watched the second man disappear into the rocks a frightened moan rose from beside him. Jin too had been watching the fleeing Manchurians, had ignored Ama Apte, lying on the ground beside him. The Tibetan woman, a long stain of blood spreading down her sleeve, had struggled to her feet. She was suddenly behind Jin, the switchblade at his throat. She grabbed the gun from the terrified constable and tossed it to Kypo. Her son quickly popped out the magazine, walked closer to the gully and tossed it in, then threw the gun into the rocks near the passageway. Jin’s face twisted in confusion as Ama Apte released him. He looked at the monks, then at Shan, as if help. “This fortuneteller is crazy!” the constable gasped.

“Before she was a fortuneteller,” Shan observed, “she was a soldier for the Dalai Lama.”

Ama Apte grinned, then loosened her grip to let Jin slide away.

“We’re going to have some food,” Shan announced to the crestfallen constable, gesturing his companions to the smoldering fire of goat dung and old crate fragments. Jin cursed and peevishly walked in the opposite direction.

“I can’t believe you let the Manchurians run away like that,” Yates complained as the others moved to the fire.

“I told them it would take twenty-four hours to track their truck’s papers. At most it will take twelve. They might get a few hours’ north of Lhasa, that’s all.”

They ate in an unsteady silence, Kypo tending his mother’s wound, which had begun to bleed profusely. “She has to go down to the lower elevation, to the village,” Yates said.

Shan nodded agreement, then began silently checking the soles of the monks’ boots.

“What are you doing?” the American asked.

“She has to go down,” Shan said. “But they cannot.”

With a grimace Yates looked up at the rough icebound landscape above them, then glanced at the climbing equipment they had left by the gully. “There’s a hundred ways to die up there.”

“The trail on your map goes all the way over,” Shan pointed out, with an expectant glance at Kypo.

The Tibetan nodded. “It’s the route of the sherpas who come across without papers. Tenzin took it last month. There’s a cliff on the Nepal side but it has a hidden goat path down it.”

“There’re border patrols,” Yates argued. “Helicopters that drop off snipers.”

“And there’s also fog and heavy wind and snow squalls. We can deal with the weather better than they can.”

“These monks don’t know anything about climbing,” Yates said, shifting to English.

“They seem to know,” Shan replied, “a lot about surviving. They have to go now. More will come for them.”

Ama Apte spoke from her seat on a rock, obviously struggling against the pain of her wound. “The mother mountain watches. She will protect you.”

Yates stared at the Tibetan woman for a long silent moment then stepped to her, cradled her in both of his arms before turning to Shan. “The mother mountain will protect us,” he repeated, then pulled out his map. “But I don’t know how far it is. And it’s nearly twenty thousand feet at that pass. We have no oxygen.”

“I came across that way,” the youngest monk declared, “years ago. I was born in Nepal. From here it is maybe four hours, no more.”

Shan studied the towering glacier with foreboding. It was a killing field, with crevasses covered with brittle windblown crusts, jagged spires of ice, expanses of treacherous, loose scree. We should rest first, he was about to say, when he spotted Jin standing on one of the flat outcroppings near the edge of the little plateau. He had taken out his much reviled radio, and was speaking into it. Jin might not get a bounty for turning in the monks to Public Security, but he would gain enough glory for the promotion and transfer he so desperately wanted.

“Go!” Shan shouted to the monks, pulling the youngest to his feet and pointing toward the distant pass. “He’s calling in soldiers!”

By the time Yates and Shan had hurried Kypo and Ama Apte to the passageway and gathered up their equipment the monks were already past the winding gravel path that led to the ice and were on the glacier itself. Shan cast a worried glance at Kypo and his mother, then ran desperately to catch up with the monks, fearful that one would fall and break a bone, ending all chance of escape. He had reached them and was explaining how they must use ropes to connect themselves when the crack of a gunshot split the thin, chill air.

They turned to see Jin at the trailhead, shouting something that was lost in the distance. But there was no mistaking the threatening way he shook his fist at them, or the object he held in his other hand. He had retrieved his pistol and found more ammunition in his pack. As they watched, Jin took off at breakneck speed in pursuit of their little party.

They moved at a brutal pace, jogging when they could find purchase in the swales of gravel that sometimes defined the trail, slowing to creep around crevasses that opened unpredictably beside them, pausing to study Yates’s map and compass when the young monk, their only guide, hesitated in selecting the route.

Steadily upward they climbed, one foot in front of the other, squinting against the glare, fighting gusts so abrupt they were sometimes caught off balance and pushed backward. The rising spring temperatures had brought a treacherous softening to the ice in spots, exposed swaths of bare gravel elsewhere. For the first hour the monks softly chanted a barely perceptible mantra as they walked. But eventually the lack of oxygen took its toll, and they conserved their breath.

Tiny, sudden snow squalls drove crystals of ice and snow against their unprotected faces. Shan and Yates exchanged agonized glances as the two older monks began to audibly wheeze, knowing that at any moment one of them might clutch his head and burst into the moans of pain that signaled cerebral edema. They stopped often, watching for Jin, consulting Yates’ map after the young monk fearfully announced he no longer knew where they were.

Three hours later they stopped, spent, gasping in the thin air, passing around Yates’s water bottle, the only one left, scooping handfuls of raisins from a bag the American had stuffed into his pack at the warehouse. Shan’s heart thundered as they moved, not only from the altitude but also from the knowledge that they had reached their limit, that they were demanding that their bodies perform beyond endurance, the condition when death took many climbers. They had two pairs of gloves among them, which they alternated wearing, and Shan’s fingers were growing stiff from the cold. The hardest, highest part of the climb was still ahead.

They did not speak as they kept ascending, sometimes slipping until a hand reached out to assist, never able to maintain the same gait for more than a few steps, sometimes creeping along the side of ice crevasses with no way of knowing if the lip would crumble under their weight.

As the wind ebbed and the clouds cleared, each man’s eyes lingered on the summit of the mother mountain Chomolungma, so close it seemed they could reach out and touch it. They had grown so used to the groaning and cracking of the glacier that only Shan looked back toward a particularly sharp retort to their rear.