A Change in Altitude (12 page)

One by one, they made their way into the banda. Another party, not the Germans, was supposed to have joined them, but the guide said they would be a day behind. Margaret laid her gear on a mattress that was at the outside of a string of three. At her head was another group of three mattresses, those set perpendicular to the first three. The two to Margaret’s left had towels on them, which suggested occupancy, so Patrick took the mattress at her head. But because Saartje and Willem had already laid out their bedding with their heads at the other end, Patrick did as well. Margaret thought he must have assumed that she wouldn’t mind his feet as much as someone else.

Earlier in the evening, one of the porters had washed the backs of their jackets as they had sat in them. The jackets had dried off as they’d huddled by the fire. None of the party was entirely clean, but they weren’t covered with muck. Margaret had already changed clothes and so slept in what she had on, but several of the others changed outside or awkwardly inside their sleeping bags. Patrick sat at the foot of his bag as Margaret slithered into hers. She propped herself on her elbows as she and Patrick chatted. Then he gave her a kiss, as he had done every night they had been married. Even if he was angry with Margaret, he never failed to kiss her. Eventually he turned and slid into his bag.

Arthur and Diana were still outside.

Margaret didn’t know if they were changing clothes or if Arthur was leading Diana to the latrine. A porter stood by the lantern just inside the door, eager to turn it out. He and the other Africans would sleep by the fire. It seemed wrong when they had extra beds, but Margaret had already learned that there was no talking a porter out of his routine. She’d tried convincing the guide to take the extra mattresses, but he’d made it clear it was his job to stay outside and guard the fire and the banda. She knew that as long as they tipped well at the end of the climb, he would be fine.

Margaret heard voices at the entrance to the hut. The porter turned off the lantern and shut the door just after Diana and Arthur entered the banda. Margaret couldn’t make out their faces or even their bodies. There was a rustle of movement as they sought their beds, an exchange of murmurs back and forth, and the distinct sound of them sliding into separate sleeping bags. Margaret thought Willem might already be asleep because she could hear male snoring, and it didn’t have the rhythm or pitch of Patrick’s. She imagined Saartje on her back, staring at the ceiling. As the wind buffeted the hut, Margaret could hear the African voices from outside.

She didn’t know if she had Diana or Arthur next to her. She turned onto her side away from them, facing the wall. The smell of the smoke from the fire had permeated the hut and was helping to make her sleepy. There were slight rustlings, which she took to be restless climbers trying to find a good position. She drifted off.

Margaret yelped and snatched her hand from where it dangled off the mattress’s edge. She rolled over and faced away from the wall. Too afraid even to bring the sleeping bag over her head, she wanted to wake Patrick. If only she could find the courage to reach out a hand and wiggle his feet.

Instead, a hand reached out and found hers.

“They’re rats,” Arthur whispered.

“They’re rats?” she whispered back.

“Yes.”

“I felt it run over my other hand.”

“I can feel them running over my feet from time to time. Of course, my feet are in the bag.”

“Oh God,” Margaret said.

“They’re a special feature of the huts at altitude.”

“Very funny.”

“Sometimes you get them, sometimes you don’t. We seem to have gotten lucky.”

“Oh God.”

Her body was sweaty. “I have to get out of here,” she said.

“And go where?”

The answer was obvious.

“Will all the huts be like this?” she asked.

“Who knows?”

“Will they bite?”

“The rats? Probably not.”

Arthur’s grasp was not so hard it hurt but firm enough that she couldn’t easily slip her hand from his. He held it the way you might catch the hand of a child who was stumbling forward.

Arthur’s hand was warm and solid, a man’s hand. Not calloused but firm. It was a human gesture, one creature trying to calm another. Or it was not. Either way, Margaret wouldn’t be the one to let go. She lay awake, her face turned toward Arthur, whom she couldn’t see. She felt only his hand, which was all she needed or wanted. She inched her face closer to their clasped hands. It seemed that she was safe within a certain radius of that grip.

Margaret knew nothing about what was in Arthur’s mind, though she might have guessed. When she brought her face closer to their hands, the movement felt similar to crawling toward the warmth of a fire. Not toward the fire itself but simply toward the warmth. She wondered what Patrick would have done in similar circumstances. Would he have taken Saartje’s hand, tried to calm her down, thought nothing of it? As Margaret would discover in the morning, Patrick was not next to Saartje but rather Willem. Poor man.

It was possible that Arthur moved his face closer to his hand as well. Margaret didn’t know. Nor did she know the moment when Arthur fell asleep.

Having been told to get up by Patrick, Margaret woke to the sound of muffled and angry voices. She hustled to pack up her belongings in the meager light of the lantern. She identified the voices as belonging to Diana and Arthur. Margaret had brought Dentyne gum along with her in case the cleaning of teeth wasn’t on the agenda. It was three a.m. on the day of the scree and the glacier.

The cook presented the climbers with hot coffee and cookies. A proper breakfast would be had at Top Hut once they’d managed the glacier. People blew on their fists to keep warm, or held their mugs with both hands. Lanterns had been lit, since it was still dark and would be until sunrise at six thirty. Margaret saw Arthur sitting on a stool near the blaze. Diana, at the opposite end of the circle of warmth and safety made by the fire, was in conversation with the guide. Margaret searched for Patrick and found him ten feet behind her, just at the edge of the circle, sipping his coffee.

His jacket was unzipped.

“Aren’t you freezing?” she asked.

“Margaret, what’s going on?”

“What?”

“With Arthur?” Patrick’s breath was rank.

“With Arthur what?”

“When I woke up this morning and leaned over to wake you, you and he were holding hands.”

Margaret was surprised. Arthur and she had held hands all night?

“There were rats,” she said quickly.

“What about the rats?”

“A rat ran over my hand. I woke up and must have cried out. Arthur explained that there were rats in the hut. I was terrified, Patrick. He clasped my hand to calm me.”

Patrick was tight-lipped.

“It wasn’t like that. It was what you’d do with a child who was scared.”

“Can you honestly say you haven’t noticed his interest in you?”

At first Margaret was silent. “That doesn’t mean I have a thing for him,” she said finally.

“Margaret, where’s your head? You let him hold your hand. How do you think Diana felt when she woke and saw your hands clasped together?”

Margaret tossed the dregs of the coffee onto the ground.

“You should have woken me up,” Patrick said. “I’m your fucking husband.”

“You’re not my fucking husband,” Margaret said. “You’re my beloved husband.”

“Christ.” Patrick shook his head as if there were nothing to discuss.

Margaret might have pursued the matter, but the guide called them to gather round. She wondered who else had seen her hand in Arthur’s, and if that explained the angry voices outside the banda when she’d woken.

The porters gave them flashlights so that they could make their way. Diana appeared beside Margaret.

“Do try to keep up today,” Diana said icily. “Make an effort, will you?”

Negotiating the scree was a case of three slow steps up, followed by an inevitable two-step slide backward. While the body did the work to accomplish three, the reward was only one. The trek was Sisyphean.

If Margaret looked up, she could see small blots of light dotting the steep scree, but the bodies themselves were in darkness. The going was torturous. Her legs screamed; her throat screamed. She thought of Diana’s admonition and knew that keeping up was out of the question. Margaret would have to endure Diana’s condescension once again. But Diana was the least of her problems. Margaret wanted to stop. She had the porters behind her, and from time to time one or another would come up and ask her if she was all right. One gave her a cup of purified water, for which she nearly wept. She could barely speak to thank him.

She wondered why she had signed on for the expedition at all. Theirs was meant to be the fastest and steepest and yet the easiest path to Point Lenana, but that fact was relative, she realized, and directed at experienced climbers. At the very least she should have been in better physical condition. She remembered the nearly criminal nonchalance she’d felt at the thought of climbing the mountain. She recalled the moment Patrick had come into the guest room and said,
We’re climbing Mount Kenya
. Margaret might so easily have said,
Not me
.

There was a short period of rest at the top of the scree. The other climbers accommodated Margaret by allowing her to catch her breath, always in short supply. She was given water, and they were permitted another small meal: two oatmeal biscuits.

“The worst is over,” Patrick said. “I’m afraid we have to keep going, though. The guide wants to get us to the glacier before the sun comes up.”

“Why does it matter?” Margaret asked. “There won’t be any sunshine.”

“I assume they have their reasons. They’ve done this a hundred times.”

“Can you imagine?”

“Frankly? No.”

In the dark, Margaret couldn’t make out the faces of the others, which was a blessing. They’d been asked to turn off the flashlights during the rest period in order to conserve batteries. Patrick put his arm around Margaret and gave her a squeeze, which she accepted as a peace offering. Had she had the energy, she would have hugged him back.

They were asked to turn the flashlights on and to line up. The route ahead was fairly flat; they’d reached a kind of plateau. Margaret began to yearn for the sun to come up, even if all they were to see was cloud. The dark was eerie. On the scree, she hadn’t worried about animals. What animal, no matter how wild, would go near the scree? But now, in the open, they might smell the humans. Or had the party reached the point at which the larger animals no longer roamed?

When the sun rose, the immediate past erased itself. As soon as it was daybreak, they knew that the cloud cover had broken. Though they couldn’t actually see the rising sun, Margaret’s spirits lifted. Here and there, the light hit the flat planes of the rocks above them. What they’d done, she soon realized, was to climb above the clouds. There wasn’t much view, but the landscape ahead grew clearer and clearer, and for the first time, they could make out the smaller peaks that would lead to the summit. The light, rosy and soft, was a photographer’s dream. Margaret stopped Patrick and took her camera from his backpack. She snapped a dozen pictures in all directions. She held her face to the sun. She wanted every ray to penetrate whatever skin was showing. She now believed they would make it to the top. Willem and Saartje began chatting. Arthur popped his head round from time to time to say something to Willem. Only Diana remained silent, seemingly unmoved by the sight of the land come alive. The grim grays and browns were gone, replaced with the saturated blue of the sky, the sparkling gray of the rocks, and, in the distance, the menacing white of the glacier.

At the beginning of the glacier, the guide addressed the climbers. The glacier was a serious matter, he said. First, he demanded that everyone who had not already done so put on sunglasses, explaining that snow blindness was real and crippling and dangerous. Second, he wanted them to take a good look at the slope of the ice. Margaret’s legs began to tremble, and she guessed she was not alone. The guide continued to explain that they would, in fact, all be safe if they followed his lead. He would cut footholds into the ice; the climbers would be clamped into a guide rope, with the guide at the front and porters with pickaxes interspersed among them; all they had to do was put one foot in front of the other and pay attention. They would be able to hear him, the guide reassured the group, even those at the back. They would be across the glacier in no time.

The guide came along then and put them in order. He would be first, then Diana. Clearly, he had recognized Diana’s restlessness and knew she would want to be first among the trekkers. Arthur was next, then a porter. He put Margaret after that, followed by Patrick and another porter. Saartje and Willem, the last of the trekkers, led the rest of the porters. The guide gave Willem a pickax and told him he would alert him if and when it was needed.

Margaret felt reassured by her position. Arthur and a porter ahead of her, Patrick behind. She was no longer last. For the first time on the climb, Margaret felt confident, despite the continued trembling in her legs. The only requirement was nerve, and she believed she could manage that. All she had to do was think about the scree to realize how easy the glacier might be if she just followed instructions.

The guide carefully clipped them to the rope at appropriate intervals. Once he had fastened himself in, he raised his hand high to signal one step forward. They were to practice this for the twenty feet or so to the beginning of the ice to get the rhythm of walking in tandem. Once they reached the glacier, Margaret could hear the guide digging in with his pickax. The climbers were following prior footsteps, but they had to be sharpened up, cleared of any ice that may have melted in the interim. Except for the wind, the only sound was that of the guide with his ax. They moved a step forward. This procedure continued until five footholds had been carved, and Margaret moved out onto the ice for the first time. The steps sloped slightly into the ice—not enough to make one tilt toward the upper glacier, yet enough so that a minor slip wouldn’t topple the entire group.