CROWNED BY LIGHTNING

1.

Nepal, 1989:

"We are old men now, sahib," Tenzing murmurs and he smiles. Time has worked her alchemical magic on Tenzing's teeth, Hillary notices. Twin row of solid gold gleam, where once only the left molar shone.

He feels a stab of disappointment. Tenzing hasn't refused: it isn't the Sherpa way to refuse outright, but the implication is there. We're both old men now. We should squat on the porch, sipping hot buttered tea. Talk about the past, don't try to relive it.

Perhaps he's right, Hillary thinks. Mountaineering is a young man's sport. And the high tops are conquered now. All save one.

Tenzing gestures to the houses lower on the slope. They are mud plastered hovels with roofs of corrugated zinc. "My village, my family, they depend on me. Trekkers stop here to visit me. I tell them lies, beautiful lies. They won't insult me by paying me for my time, but they leave things they no longer need. Boots, teabags, Rolex watches."

"I understand," Hillary says and he really does. Tenzing is their wise old man now, a source of civic pride.

Well, there are worse ways to spend your last years. Hillary pictures the young climbers, the Americans, the Germans, their impossibly smooth faces with the windchapped lips, their eyes shining. Listing to this old man.

"You want tea?" Tenzing snaps his fingers without waiting for an answer. To refuse is unthinkable.

A granddaughter brings a battered aluminum teapot and fills two dainty porcelain cups.

Hillary inhales the fragrance. "You have changed, my friend. Lapsang souchong. I remember the brick of pressed tealeaves, globs of rancid butter." Tenzing shrugs. "It's what rich men like me drink. But no, that is just a joke. I drink what the trekkers leave behind. And it's hard to find real yakbutter here. We're too close to the valleys."

The high mountains lie far to the north, hidden by the swirling clouds. Hillary remembers his first glimpse of the Himalayas, a flash of sawtoothed ivory, floating between the clouds like the smile of some savage Hindu god.

"I know nothing about Iraq," Tenzing says. "They tell me it's a hot land, dry as bones." He gestures with his biddie and the sharp stink of smoldering leaves assaults Hillary's nostrils. "They call us infidels there." Tenzing fingers his amulet, rubs Ganesha's long trunk.

"You know mountains," Hillary argues. "This is only another mountain."

"The biggest. The mother of mountains."

The Sherpa rises, stands gazing at his hands, which are brown and wrinkled as monkey paws, but still strong, still capable of grasping an icecoated rope.

"We'll probably die there, you know. When do we leave?" 2.

They take the weekly bus down to the valleys, a trip as hairraising and more risky than the most perilous ascent. The maniacal driver would have been better employed in a demolition derby, Hillary thinks. The four wheels of the bus seldom touch the ground at same time.

He leans back in the seat. One of the springs prods his bottom in a most annoying way.

"I looked for you in Darjeeling," he says. "You were working for the FTHMI I had been informed. Director, no less. I had never thought to find you in your native village. You once told me you had run away."

"One can always come back."

Hillary waits while the silence stretches. It's the oldest game of the East and Hillary has been forced to learn it a long time ago. I spoiled it. I have been too direct.

"Some years ago..." Tenzing hesitates. "Some years ago I died. The doctors brought me back." He giggles. His eyes glitter. "Some signs are not to be ignored."

A deathbed conversion. Instant wisdom. Tenzing has abandoned his worldly goods and returned as a humble teacher. Like a Kipling story. How banal.

"But you are leaving your village. You're climbing again."

"Some signs are not to be ignored."

*

Hillary tosses and turns on the thin cotton mattress of his hotel room. An huge moon silhouettes the crown of a palm tree. No leave stirs. He hates the lowlands. They are are hot and dusty and everything seems to be waiting for the start of the monsoon.

An ornate fan slowly turns on the ceiling, the copper blades sharp enough to decapitate him.

Lies, Tenzing had said, I tell them beautiful lies.

Of course he gives them lies. Why spoil a legend?

I could ask him, he thinks. Maybe he'll tell me the truth after all this time. It no longer matters, doesn't it?

Anyhow, Tenzing had never understood Hillary's urge to be the first, to climb a top just because it is there. But the Sherpa had been loyal in the time that word still meant something. When you didn't automatically picture a dumb dog, wailing on the grave of his master.

I was tired, so very tired. My oxygen mask had become clogged, filled up solid with ice and if Tenzing hadn't noticed I might have died of a heart attack right there.

And I didn't feel much better when the oxygen flow was restored. Tenzing was practically pulling me the final stretch to the top of the Mount Everest. Without him I would never have made it.

Hillary sighs. I might have imagined it all. A waking dream, triggered by exhaustion. But no, even in his memory the picture remains blurred. Dreams are sharp edged, clear. The very vagueness proves its reality. A few steps from the top Tenzing had let him go, allowing him to totter the last meters on his own power.

It had been snowing, the snowflakes zipping by like angry bees, but the summit had been curiously bare, the snow no deeper than his ankles. He had planted the little flags, almost falling face forward in the drifted snow. When he looked up the sight had cleared and he had seen his Sherpa, kneeling by a small snowhill. Feverishly digging with his ungainly mittens, then lifting a bronze statue of a smiling Buddha. It had been weathered to a dull crusted black.

Tenzing didn't look in his direction once: He flung the statue into the emptiness, demolished the cairn with a few kicks of his oversized boots. The snowfall hid him almost immediately but Hillary knew. He wasn't the first. Somebody had beaten him to the top. A long, long time ago. 3.

Great rulers prefer grandiose lies. When the Hyksos, the People of the Sea, invaded the realm of Ramses III the pharaoh met them with a mighty army. He suffered defeat, not once but three times, and was finally forced to cede them a not inconsiderable portion of his territory.

On his tomb he's called, among the more conventional titles, Conqueror of the Hyksos.

Sargon the First did one better.

According to A. C. Belfours rather whimsical translation:

"I, Lord of Lords, Guardian of the Twin Rivers, caused a ziggurat to be build in praise of the great god Marduk, gaining merit in the eyes of mortals and demons alike.

High walls surround it, one and half days travel wide.

The roofs touch the sky.

Let none forget the name of Sargon, son of Mareck!" This was one lie history didn't swallow.

4.

Baghdad is a horror, hot and dusty, an endless checkerboard of tan skyscrapers and empty squares. Treeless avenues roll to the shimmering horizon. No pedestrians at all. It is the pareddown landscape of a lowbudget computergame, a senseless exercise in perspective.

"Mussolini would have loved this city," Hillary remarks.

"The dreams of an unkind emperor are made of stone," Tenzing replies. "I have seen other cities like this."

"The Quadissiya monument," the cab driver points and slows his car, "for our martyrs. Fallen in the holy war." A giant pointed dome dominates the sky, a dark and forbidding presence. Driving past Hillary notices that the dome is split as if cleaved by the stroke of scimitar. A hollow teardrop, he thinks, could that really have been their intention? Maybe. Saddam Hussein is a subtle and above all cynical man.

*

They find a hotel in the Old Town and it is reassuringly rundown. The beds are wooden pallets with mattresses of flaking foam rubber, the single faucet resides in the courtyard and gives a trickle of rusty water. A swarm of popeyed children follows at his heels whenever Hillary ventures outside, searching for the elusive official who could grant him a climbingpermit. Beggars accost him, offering glossy postcards of Saddam, sixteenyearold veterans show him their stumps with smiles of quiet pride. This could have been Cairo or Bombay, any city in the East. Yet he feels a tension in the air, a barely controlled hostility. Something is brewing.

*

Tenzing remains in his room, sipping hot tea and practising his Tai Chi moves. On the third day Hillary barges in, his face an alarming purple. "They must be crazy! Thirty thousands pounds just to climb it! Thirty thousand pounds a person and that means the porters too!"

Tenzing snorts, a rather western reaction. "So why ask them? They haven't exactly fenced it off, eh? Just start climbing and nobody'll be the wiser."

"It just isn't done," Hillary mutters.

*

Nine days later they leave before dawn, evading the gaggle of foreign correspondents, who would never rise at such an ungodly hour. Hillary feels no remorse. One of them recently asked him the standardquestion of which Hillary has has grown heartily sick: "But why do you want to climb it?" The pup hoped probably for another "Because it is there!"

"I haven't the slightest idea," Hillary had answered. "It's probably a passing fancy. Perhaps I won't go there after all."

Such a look of consternation! As if young Dreyder had caught the pope cursing! It had made Hillary's day.

*

A bus takes them as far as New Malbous and then the road simply ends. They stand at the edge of the desert: an seemingly infinite expanse of gravel and haphazardly flung boulders. It reminds Hillary of an abandoned construction site. Heat haze turns the sky milky. Their destination remains invisible, though Hillary seems to detect a slight darkening to the north.

"We could try camels," Tenzing finally proposes.

"Out of the question. Hundreds must go there each year. Thousands. We'll find some other form of transportation."

*

A telegram is waiting at the tiny post office: colonel Ridley has arrived with the oxygen bottles and the compressors and asks for instructions. Ridley'll never climb again, not with a teflon kneecap and only one lung, but he has become their unofficial factotum and jack of all trades.

"Please wait," Hillary replies. "There are some problems with the transport." Concluding with: "We want to scout out the land first." His friend Ridley, though retired from active duty long since, still thinks in military terms: scouting out the land first will certainly appeal to him. The truth is that Hillary hasn't the slightest idea how to proceed. His funds are running out fast.

*

They check in at the single halfway decent looking hotel. Maps and photographs cover the wall. There is even a Russian one, recently taken by a cosmonaut. Its shows their objective in grainy black and white, the impossibly long shadow bisecting the desert. No new details are visible, but the perspective is passing strange. To look down at something so huge! For the first time in his life vertigo grips Hillary's bowels. He closes his eyes and the feeling passes. But the sensation leaves him shaken. Perhaps Tenzing is right. Perhaps I'm really too old.

But the urge is still there. He must undo the lie that has blighted his life. He must become the hero he never was.

He sits down at the bar. The rows of bottles are festooned with frayed climbingropes, the oillamps anchored to the wall with oversized pitons.

"Not many tourist here," he says to the bartender. "I would have expected more."

"They come, they go. This isn't the season for climbing. Most wait for the turning of the winds." The bartender nods to the two man. "What'll you have?

I'm sorry, but no beer."

"Just tea." He hates the sicklysweet brew but the alternatives are worse. Tenzing slips from his bar stool. "I'll have a look outside. Maybe I can find us something with wheels."

"All right." Tenzing is clad in a dusty djellaba. Combined with his dark skin he could pass for a local. They may try to swindle him, but they'll never charge him the outrageous prices they would a white man.

*

At nightfall Tenzing hasn't returned.

The single bulb of their hotelroom flickers and buzzes. Hillary studies his maps. Some date back to antiquity. Take this one: a sketch by one of Alexander's soldiers. Fanciful, impossible ornate, but it shows the third level intact.

The cavein occurred during the reign of Murad the first and was heard all the way to Samarkand.

Hillary pictures a whole city smashing down on itself, pillars the size of sequoias snapping like matchsticks, a mushroom cloud of pulverized mosaics and splintered marble rising and darkening the sky.

Now what the hell is Tenzing up to? He should have returned hours ago!

Hillary folds the maps, opens the shutters of his window. The sight of the Tower rivets his gaze. The dust has cleared and the sky is completely transparent, a deep indigo studded with unwinking stars. The Tower skewers the horizon like a shining spear, its upper stories gilded by the afterglow.

A thousand photographs and paintings haven't prepared Hillary for the glory, the chilling hugeness of this greatest of all artefacts. It's simply too big for any human emotion, he realizes, it's completely out of our league. Strangely enough the Tower looks natural: Mountains piled on mountains, jagged peaks growing from the flanks, mighty valleys reduced to mere creases by the distance. The eye tries to climb the vastnesses and recoils. A girdle of glaciers starts at the four mile mark, dripping upwards like inverted icicles, finally petering out into scattered fields of frozen carbon dioxide. And the Tower still rises.

Hillary cranes his neck, but he is too close: the apex merges into the zenith and the upper, airless levels remain hidden by the intervening bulk. The door of his room opens.

"Found us a car. A four wheel drive."

When his employer doesn't react Tenzing follows his gaze to the marvel in the night sky.

"Ah, you noticed her too? She is certainly big. But it's still just another mountain, my friend" There is a slightly patronizing tone to his voice and it's the first time Tenzing has called him 'my friend', but Hillary doesn't hear it.

"It's impossible, Tenzing. You were right."

The Sherpa sits down on the sagging bed. "Have no fear. You'll climb her. All the way to the top."

5.

They start their drive two hours before dawn, when the air is still cool, not to say chilly. The Tower is a dark smudge in front of them, her upper reaches already lit by ruddy morninglight which won't reach the ground for a long time.

"Sargon," Hillary says. "I think I understand him now."

"Sargon, the king of liars? What is to understand? All men want to excel. He merely chose an unconventional field."

Tenzing never ceases to amaze Hillary. It is still hard to grasp that the man is quite educated in his own way. A mind like a steel trap: no fact once heard ever escapes. And now he's uttering platitudes like some stuffy clergyman!

"He grew up in the shadow of the Tower," Hillary lectures. "In those times a king became a god when he died. When a king's deeds become the stuff of legends his powers as a god grows. But who would remember him, no matter what he did? The mere presence of the Tower would crush his memory, remind even his most devout acolyte of what true gods can do. So he sought to tap into the legend of the Tower, to make it part of his own myth."

"I see," nods Tenzing. "But it didn't work." Hillary laughs. "We speak his name, now, even after he's been dust for what?

Three thousand years? Maybe he was a shrewder man than we realized."

*

Several hours later they reach a hardened road: a strip of shimmering blacktop.

"Twenty miles to the Tower," a sandblasted sign proclaims. "Visit the Babel Hilton! Hot and cold running water."

"Fancy that," Tenzing smiles. "Seems we took a wrong turn somewhere." Two whole days lost, Hillary thinks. We should have asked. No, not we: I should have done my research better. I behaved like some talmudic scholar who knows every street of the New Jerusalem, but not how to get there.

*

The Babel Hilton is fully booked and even the mention of Hillary's famous name has no effect. Sleek shiny cars fill her parking lot. This the playground of the idle rich and the tuxedoed ferrets who stalk them.

Hillary finally rents a room in a hotel that has no running water, hot or cold, and phones the colonel in the lobby.

There is some good news and some bad, the colonel tells him. The good news is that the National Geographic Society has had a change of heart: they will airdrop supplies on the first seven levels after all and provide porters. The bad news is bad indeed. The Ministry has expressly forbidden the expedition. If Hillary set as much as a foot on the first terrace he'll be arrested and deported as an undesirable alien.

"I traced the order to Kamil Gadoun," the colonel says. "The official in charge of the climbingpermits. Didn't you speak to him?"

"He asked thirty thousand pounds. Which seemed exorbitant to me."

"It is. But why didn't you haggle?"

"An Englishman doesn't haggle." Hillary realizes how pedantic he sounds. He isn't even English, but a New Zealander. Not haggling in the Middle East? Why not ask for a nice hot pork sausage at the same time?

"You should have haggled. Now you have to pay him much more. You have hurt his pride."

Hillary purses his lips to thin angry line. "I had my reasons. One of them was that I don't have that kind of money."

"So get some more!"

7.

"Money?" Tenzing asks. "You need money? Nothing is easier!" It is a reaction Hillary hasn't expected. "You own a bottle with a jinn and have still one wish left?"

"Something better. You people don't understand about family. You once said that the mountain climbers, the serious ones, are like one big family?"

"I did? I must have been drunk at the time." He remembers the backstabbing, the clash of personalities at each and every expedition. Those who climb the great mountains have egos to match.

"Reinhold Hesse rents a suite at the Hilton. I recognized his name when I flipped through their visitors book."

"Hesse? The corporate raider?"

"The same. He's a modern predator, a boardroom warlord and a million dollars is just small change to him. He also climbs mountains. I met him two years ago."

"Met him? You? Where?" Hillary is flabbergasted. Tenzing moving in high circles? Hobnobbing with the ultrarich?

"In my own house, where else?" Tenzing already stands with his hand on the doorknob. "Should I go alone? I think it helps when you come along. He admires you. The grand old man of the mountains he called you."

"Grand old man of the mountains," Hillary grumbles but he follows Tenzing into the blazing sunlight.

*

"How much?" Hesse asks.

Hillary names a sum.

"Make it twice that," Hesse instructs his secretary. "No, ten times. Expeditions gobble money." He turns to Hillary. "You want that in cash? Stupid question. Of course you want it in cash! This is Iraq, this is the Middle East!

Make it payable in Krugerrands, Singer. They love the gleam of gold."

"Certainly, sir," the secretary replies.

"Always happy to help out." The tycoon thumps Hillary's shoulder. "We climbers, we're like one big family, yes?"

"O yes," Hillary nods. "We are. We most certainly are."

*

Hillary hasn't been drunk in years. And he isn't drunk now, not exactly. His speech sounds perhaps a little bit slurred, his gestures are rather flamboyant, but how often can a man relax, truly relax in the company of fellow enthusiasts, jolly good fellows, all members of that great tribe of climbers?

"You have met professor Dustbin?" Hesse asks. At least it sounds like Dustbin but he has probably misheard. Stupid foreign names.

"Professor Dustbin has studied the tower for years. All his life."

"Pleased to meet you, professor," Hillary says. The timid little fellow raises his hands as if to ward off the evil eye. "Please, it is doctor, sir Hillary. Not professor." A snaggletoothed smile. "They haven't even granted me tenure yet."

He warms to the fellow. Someone who takes the trouble to observe the forms. Noone has called Hillary 'Sir' for years. I was knighted after all. The queen did, not with a sword, but she signed a paper with her own hands, which is the same to all intents and purposes.

"The Tower," Hillary urges him, "has anything new been discovered recently?" The man has a nice voice, Hillary decides and he listens to it fading in and out, like the sound of breakers, while he nods at all the right moments.

"It's not proved, mind you, " the professor, no, the doctor says, "but using the C14 method we get an age of ninety thousand years, smack in the middle of the ice age."

"A corkscrew," comes Hesse's booming voice. "You know the painting that Dutch artist made? Bos, that was the name, Hiram Bos. He had never seen the tower of course, but I think he had the right idea. If you look at the Tower in the right light you can still see the pattern, around and around. Like a corkscrew or enormous winding stairs."

Someone starts to whistle "Build me a stairway to heaven." A new voice, shrill and breathless: "Not built up, but let down. We ran a stress analysis at the lab, studied the fracture zones around the Tower. I tell you, it came from outside, from outer space. Someone lowered the tower, set it down ever so gently."

"You're just quoting Charles Fort!"

"Why not? Why not? The man often made a lot of sense!" Is this what passes for small talk on a cocktail party of the ultrarich? Hillary thinks in some confusion. Or are all Hess's friends professors?

He closes his eyes. Just for a moment, he promises himself. just for a moment.

*

It is dark when he opens them again. His head pounds.

"Where the hell am I?"

"In your hotel room," Tenzing replies from the other side of the room. "And you didn't walk back. We had to carry you."

"Hell of a party," Hillary says.

"Hell of a party," Tenzing agrees, but Hillary doesn't hear him. He's asleep again.

*

"Drink this," Tenzing orders.

Hillary groans. The window is filled with molten gold and the gold presses against his naked eyeballs. The air feels stifling hot.

"Come on. It'll make you feel better."

Hillary sips the bitter brew. "Tastes familiar."

"Ginseng root and some ingredients I'd rather not mention."

"Eye of newt, powdered dragon teeth?"

"You're getting close."

8.

It is the late afternoon before Hillary feels fit enough to rise and step outside. The hotels is built against the first plateau. An immense wall hides the rest of the Tower, a wall a hundred and twenty meters high, which stretches for fifteen miles in each direction.

Ancient temples line the wall, some in use since Sumerian times. A dozen empires have left their flotsam, graffiti scratched across graffiti: Herodotus of Milete was here, King Gilgamesh loves Inanna, Antonius sucks eggs. The ancients carved the resisting rock into fluted pillars, boring in like some species of especially persistent termite.

They buy skewers of roasted lamb in a tiny shop which is little more than a hollow in the wall. The soot of untold generations of kebabsellers thickly layers the ceiling.

"His ancestors probably hawked roast mastodon," Hillary jokes. But he isn't joking. Not exactly.

The Tower fills him with a particular kind of helplessness. Deep in his brain a tiny voice is wailing: "Tell me, please tell me! What does it all mean?" Most of human history has swirled around the fundaments of the Tower, barely scratching it.

Herodotes tells Hillary's favorite story about the Tower. How the armies of Alexander the Great overran the Middle East, rolling on like a tidal wave, washing down the walls of great cities as if they had been made from sand. A headlong rush. Until Alexander reached the Tower.

For three days he contemplated the mighty edifice, leaning on his spear, then curtly ordered his army to retreat.

The moment the top of Tower dropped behind the horizon Alexander dismounted. He drew a line in the desert sand.

"This," he said, "is the edge of my empire, now and forever. I have no wish to wake sleeping gods."

I understand even less than Alexander, Hillary thinks. The great warrior met a magic so powerful he prudently chose not to confront it. But I? I'm not allowed to believe in magic. This tremendous building was constructed, made. Take the foundation stones of the first level: polygonal slabs of granite, easily twentyfive meters wide. We could lift one of them, barely, using our most powerful machinery. But those stones show the chiselmarks of bronze tools. They must have been fashioned by hand, the work of patient craftsmen. No two are the same, yet they fit so perfectly together that no seam can be detected.

Hillary stares at the configuration of the wall, a stone honeycomb with none of the exactness of a true honeycomb. He has seen that particular pattern before in quite a different context. A cluster of soapbubbles? No, close, but no.

"You have that look again," Tenzing remarks.

"It shows, doesn't it? Tenzing, tell me. What does it mean? It's too big to be meaningless."

"You chose the wrong religion if you're looking for answers. Lord Vishnu made the whole universe, I am told, all the stars, the mountains, with his own hand. What is one more tower?"

Hillary has to smile. "You have all the answers, don't you?"

"O no. I just never asks the wrong questions."

*

Tenzing knows the true nature of the Tower of course. It isn't as if this knowledge has ever been lost, but it's no use telling Hillary. His friend just wouldn't believe.

9.

That night Hillary dreams of his dead wife. They had been divorced for eight years when the dark angel called her name. A hit and run driver, never identified.

He had felt genuine sorrow then. The divorce had been his fault after all: When she looked into his eyes she saw the reflections of the Mount Everest, the New Zealand Alps, the Antarctic wastes and never, never her own face. Someone must have made a terrible mistake, was his first reaction when they told him the news. He had always expected to die young and now he had survived her.

*

His wife is sitting on her own gravestone and she looks as old as Hillary himself. At her feet stands a small bronze statue.

"You're still lying," she accuses him. "You never gave Tenzing your real reasons. Just the same old crap about 'because it's there'."

"You're not my wife," he says, suddenly very angry. Angry and afraid. "My Lisa was a lady. She would never use words like that."

"Lord Hillary!" she screeches, "Sir Hillary! Of course I'm not your wife. Your wife is dead. The worms ate her. They'll eat you and you'll die with a lie on your lips!"

*

Hillary never confronts Tenzing with the truth, never mentions his glimpse of the cairn or the statue.

Maybe there is an alternate reality where he does and Tenzing grins and embraces him: "So you saw after all! It was such a beautiful secret to keep!

The white men climb mountains, they discover temples a thousand years old. How absurd! The fool who raised the cairn had understood nothing, he was as blind as you. Conquering a mountain, don't make me laugh!" Hillary stands bleeding, sandblasted by Tenzing's amused scorn until only a pure core is left, a part of his being that isn't English or white, perhaps not even human and that part cries: "But I loved the mountains. I loved the lonely tracks, the freezing winds and the crumbling ledges, each vivid splash of lichen on the grey rock!"

And Tenzing, his great teacher, his guru says: "Yes, you loved the mountains." With these words Hillary is made whole, for the first time in his life. His true love, he understands now, has white snowy tresses and blue lakes for eyes and her breath is the pure mountain air. And he has loved her deeply and well and has never been untrue.

Such a thing does not happen.

10

The colonel arrives four days later, waving a permit.

He is a big man, like a hairless bear, his broad face peeling with sunburn.

"What did you do, Edmund? That Gadoun, he showed so many teeth I thought he was going to eat me!"

"A friend lent a hand," Hillary explains. "Tenzing knew him slightly."

"It is good to have friends with checkbooks."

"He's a climber," Hillary adds.

"Ah. Now where should I dump the oxygen gear?"

"We can carry it. It only a short walk. The same friend got us a room at the Hilton."

*

The journalists appear the next morning, happy as hunting dogs who have once more found the spoor of their fox.

Hillary is interviewed several times, the video lenses staring at him like blind eyes. He has nothing new to add. Yes, he's delighted with the news that the caches have been installed. They have tried the Russian compressors and they work perfectly. No, they have no intention of reaching the top. Sixty kilometers is an absurd distance and most of the way the air'll be too thin to compress and it's quite impossible to carry enough oxygen.

*

They are sitting in Hesse's suite when the bellboy arrives with a urgent telegram:

"Don't start climbing yet. There is chance you can make it all the way to the top. Please wait for our representative." Hillary hands the telegram to Hesse.

"You know that acronym? I have never been very good at remembering all those alphabet agencies."

"The Iraqi Army. Strange. I wonder what they want?"

"Nothing good, I am afraid," the colonel says. "beware the wolf who wags his tail."

*

A knock. Three soldiers enter without waiting for an answer.

"For safety," one of them says. "Yours." He stalks to window of Hesse's suite, gazes down for ten, fifteen seconds, all the while nervously fingering his gun, then shouts something in his own language.

An officer enters, closely followed by a civilian.

"You got our telegram?"

"Certainly," Hillary answers. The officer wears a smart khaki uniform, he notices, and no gold braid at all. No indications of his rank, so his rank must be stratospheric indeed.

The officer shakes their hands, but never offers his name.

"We want to help," he says in heavily accented American, spitting and mangling the foreign words. "The army wants to help at this... this great and glorious enterprise."

He places a hand on the shoulder of the civilian. The man winces. "Dr. Bull'll explain, eh? He's our advisor and he knows the technical...eh, things. We hired him to build the Babylon space cannon."

Dr. Bull is an angry and impatient man, Hillary decides. One who has perforce learned to humor his employers, but he doesn't have to like it. Hillary has heard of the space cannon and Bull's checkered career, his involvement with the South Africans, his subsequent prison term.

The man is a bit of a disappointment, though, no crumpled lab coat with interesting stains, not even a mad gleam in his eyes. The creases in Bull's trousers are sharp enough to cut butter.

The Canadian declines a drink, spread his glossy prints and straightaway launches into a lecture. Hillary dislikes the man from the start: How boorish to go right to core of the matter, to disdain even the most elementary forms of civilized intercourse like a bottle of beer or a chat about the weather.

"You understand our scheme?" Bull finally asks.

"It sounds incredible!" the colonel erupts. "You seriously propose to bomb the Tower? Do you want to bring it all crashing down on our heads? It has stood for millennia but nobody has ever tried to bomb it!" Bull shakes his head. Like a longsuffering teacher who is forced to start his explanation all over again.

"The Scuds and Excorcetsaren't bombs, just missiles. And these won't explode at all. The rocket is launched straight up, parallel with the tower. It rises. The moment the fuel is gone, when it starts to fall back, much smaller rockets are triggered. They are mounted at right angles to the hull. They push the Exorcet closer to the Tower. The rocket crashes down on the first plateau it encounters.

The payload consists of pressurized oxygen cylinders, water, food. All packed in thick sheets of kevlar and asbestos. We plan to drop at least four rockets on each plateau."

Hillary frowns. "I understand. But won't you need an awful lot of rockets?"

"Thousands probably. But we have a awful lot of them stockpiled." The general beams. "Don't need them now the space cannon is online. So much scrap."

"It might work," the colonel says.

"How long?" Hillary asks.

"A month. No more."

Hillary hesitates. Is it possible to hear the sands of time running out? An almost subliminal rustle. He has been hearing it for weeks now.

"All right," Hillary decides. "We'll wait." 11.

The Scud leaps from the mobile launcher, riding a blue flame up into the sky.

"Next!" the general barks, no doubt only for their benefit for none of the soldiers speaks English.

"Ka zoom!" The thunder of ignition sounds like something from a comic book. Hillary can almost see huge letters hanging in the air.

"They like it," the colonel observes.

"The heirs of Sargon," Hillary mutters.

"Beg pardon?"

"Just a theory of mine. They hate the Tower. It makes them feel small. They are marking it this way, cluttering it up with obsolete hardware. Like a dog pissing against a tree."

"I rather doubt if they see it like that. They just like making loud noises, I guess."

12.

"There has been a change in our plans," Hillary tells the reporters on the morning of their departure. "We're taking no porters." He ignores the frantic questions, the forest of waving arms and patiently waits for the hubbub to subside.

"No porters at all," he repeats. "The caches are on position. On the higher levels we'll find enough oxygen cylinders to walk all the way to the moon. Just two man. Sherpa Tenzing and I."

"Yes? United Press wants to know if we aren't taking an awful risk? Well, yes. All the more reason to attempt the ascent alone. This way we risk no lives but our own."

*

The crowds follow them to the first plateau, cheering, waving the flags of a hundred nations. The din is incredible.

Soldiers surround them, whacking the screaming crowd with rubber sticks. Some carry Uzis. It a detail Hillary doesn't like at all. The CNN helicopter hovers over them all the way to the third plateau and then veers to the south. Running out of fuel, Hillary thinks. Good. Silence descends.

"A circus," Hillary complains. "I feel like a dancing bear."

"You got it wrong. They were the dancing bears." Tenzing unfolds the tent and the thin kevlar instantly snaps into the shape of an igloo. "Let's cook some food."

*

Hillary sits in front of the tent. The smell of growing grass fills his nostrils and he takes a deep breath, pulling the pure air into his lungs. The second plateau is overgrown with enormous trees, trees that haven't felt the axe for thousands of years, maybe never. The Tower has always been a place of power, a holy place. No mortal would have dared to invade the realm of gods merely to cut firewood.

Waterfalls tumble down the grey wall of the next plateau, tiny white threads, their roar an almost subliminal rumble.

The last light is ebbing fast and a chill breeze starts up. ruffling the high grasses. Tenzing is already asleep and his rasping snore is suddenly a most welcome sound, a reminder that Hillary isn't the only human here. The cold slowly enters his bones, but he doesn't rise. He needs the cold, it is like a scalpel of ice, cutting through all selfserving lies. A wake, Hillary realizes, I am holding a wake for the man I once was. When did I go wrong, he wonders, when did I start to change into someone I wouldn't even want to know?

After the knighthood perhaps, meeting all those wellbred people and me with no breeding at all? They all knew New Zealanders are sheepfarmers, salt of the earth, but you wouldn't invite them into your stately home. Yet they did, ever so graciously.

In selfdefence I became more British than the English themselves. If you hear me now I sound like a newsreader from the BBC, I talk like someone who has swallowed a hot potato.

Damnit, I started out as a bloody beekeeper before the mountains claimed me!

I was a pilot in the war and if someone had called me Sir Hillary I would have laughed my head off.

No, the knighthood had nothing to do with it and anyhow, I have met their kind of people before without feeling the slightest urge to become like them. The rot set in after the Everest. I wanted the fame, the glory of being the first on the top, all right, but I wanted to earn it! I never aimed to steal my fame from some courageous soul, from someone who was devout enough to leave an offering for the gods of the mountain when he reached the top, gasping in air that was much too thin to breath. Someone very much like Tenzing. He pictures a humble buddhist monk, swathed in layers of poorly cured hide, kneeling in the snows of summit, his lips blue from oxygen starvation. We stole their mountains, we stole their pride. Knowing that an Oriental had been the first at the top of the highest mountain would have made a difference.

Perhaps not a great difference, but a difference.

*

The morninglight finds Hillary asleep in the wet grass.

Tenzing prods his leg with point of his boot and Hillary opens his eyes.

"Do I snore that bad?"

"I... I just wanted to sit outside. Think things over."

"Did it help?"

"Not much," Hillary confesses.

"Never think when you should sleep." He looks at the sky.

"We're going to get wet."

Several higher levels of the Tower are visible now they have left the first plateau behind. A nimbus of clouds swirls around the tower. Thunder rumbles and suddenly the tower is crowned by lightning: spiderwebs of electric fire unfold.

"Uh oh, here comes the rain."

Tenzing is right. The tent stands only four meters away: They are soaked to their underwear before they reach the entrance.

*

They crawl across the lip of the third level around twelve o'clock. Hillary lights a fire and they dry their clothes. The cavein forms a shallow crater of half a kilometer wide. Broken pillars lie like a forest of fallen trees.

"I wonder what caused the collapse?" Hillary says.

"The passage of time. Nothing else." Tenzing walks closer to the edge, gazes down. "You can see part of a mosaic. Must be hundreds of meters long."

"Anything interesting?"

"Nah. Just the usual blobs and dotted lines."

13

That night Hillary dreams of the lightning. He sees the Tower sheeted in crawling fire. Each flash forms an intricate word, but they fade far too fast to read.

There is no thunder. The sky pulses in eery silence, webbed with writhing light. Hillary feels a extreme frustration. He is told the secret of the ages, all the secrets, but he's too slowwitted to catch more than a scattered word and then only the shortest ones. Stone. Eagle. Rome. Duck. Not much of a gospel. The dream goes on for hours. Never changing. The swirling nets of eyehurting fire. The silence.

Hillary awakes tired to the bone.

"Does your religion say anything about dreams?" he asks Tenzing.

"Sure. You get them when you eat too much."

*

The fourth level is a swamp.

The fifth another primeval forest.

The sixth a monstrous mosaic overgrown with ocher and orange lichens. The caches of the National Geographic Society are painted a clear orange and they never find them.

The seventh level is an alpine meadow. They are almost six miles from the ground now and they can see the lights of Basra on a clear night. They decide to camp for a few days. Hillary feels tired all the time and each night is an ordeal. The nightmare keeps repeating: the lightningfilled sky, the absolute silence.

*

Tenzing stands at the edge of the plateau. The ruddy light of the setting sun caresses the landscape, magnifying each detail, showing ancient sandcovered roads, the meanders of rivers dry so long no legend names them. And things more ancient still.

It is so easy to see, he thinks in wonder, so unmistakable. Their satellites mapped the world, they could read the numberplate of Breznev's car and they missed this?

Thousand of ridges radiate from the tower, branching until they cover the whole plain of the twin rivers. Call hem fracture zones but haven't you encountered that particular pattern before? Many times? Don't they look like, for instance, the roots of some mighty tree? And those curiously formed highlands scattered all over the delta, well, even a child would recognise fallen leaves.

I cling to the fossil bark of the Ygdrassil, he thinks and he feels suddenly six years old again, the world a marvellous mystery. This is the Great Tree, the Tree of Life. Her branches once reached to the stars, united Heaven and Earth. Somewhere in the incredible distant past she must have fallen, because the Tower itself is no more than a stump. Perhaps the Himalayas and all other mountain ranges are no more than her shattered trunk, her broken branches, whatever the geologists say.

Hillary would never see this, he realises, his brain would refuse to understand. There is a strange blindness in all Europeans, in all the white men with their clever machines and their fanatic belief in laws of nature. They could never bear to live in a truly magic universe. A prehistoric civilisation who built a tower sixty miles high is something they don't like very much, but they can live with that. Not with the Tree of Life

14

The next morning Hillary oversleeps, something which he has never done before, no matter how tired. Tenzing shakes him awake.

"Bad news. I listened to the radio. Our hosts have begun a war."

"A war!"

"Yes, they invaded Kuwait."

"That is incredible! They must be crazy!"

"I don't think so. Just a bit reckless. But I guess we're on our own now. Foreigners won't be welcome any more."

*

"Food!" Tenzing calls. "Lobster soup according to the wrapper. With noodles."

"Smells good," Hillary says. He doesn't feel hungry, though he hasn't eaten for almost eight hours.

The food hits the lining of his stomach like a handful of burning coals. Hillary feels the blood drain from his face, clutches his belly.

"You are sick," Tenzing observes.

"Yes, yes. I am."

He wipes the sweat from his forehead. He feels hot, feverish. And his stomach won't stop hurting.

"Is it the height? Maybe we should start using the compressors now?" Tenzing rubs his chin. "Or even turn back? Mountainsickness is not something you can just ignore. It won't go away."

"Air won't help. It's cancer. The doctors gave me a year." A new stab, horribly fierce, doubles him up. "They were wrong." He feebly waves at his backpack and his fingers feel like dough, like putty. "I have some pills in there to stop the pain."

*

The next morning there are crimson threads in his vomit. He wipes the drool from his chin and slumps back. The ache has grown into a red hot spike through his bowels. The pills no longer help.

"That does it," Tenzing says. "We go back."

"No. I don't want to die in a hospital bed."

"We could drop to next level? I can carry you. The air will be thicker there."

"Don't."

"You want to drink something?"

"No, no." He bites his lip. "Tenzing? I think I'm dying."

"Do you see a blue light?" Tenzing asks, a look of lively interest on his face.

"A smoky red glow?"

"No, not at all."

Tenzing shrugs. "It's too soon perhaps?"

"You'll go on, Tenzing? Reach the top?" Hillary tries to point but his hand falls back before he can complete the movement. "This mountain. It is all yours. Don't let some white man steal it from you."

"Thanks."

"You'll go now? I want to see you start your journey. While I still can."

"All right." Tenzing shoulders his backpack. He turns. "You're sure this is what you want?"

"Quite sure."

*

The darkness is closing in, invading Hillary's field of vision. He sees his friend at the end of a long tunnel, a tiny dot against the tan wall. Tenzing is steadily climbing, moving up.

It's all right, Hillary thinks. Go for the glory. You deserve it and you were always a better climber than I.

We took your mountains away. We planted our stupid flags. This one is yours. All yours.

The darkness constricts like a noose and his eyes cease to see. 14.

Tenzing climbs for three more hours and pulls himself over the ledge. A desolate tundra awaits him. Dwarfish trees, pools with a thin coating of ice. The next plateau looms in the distance like a bank of dark fog. It is a forbidding sight. Tenzing shakes his head. The new wall will be a few degrees steeper than the last, the stone a little bit less eroded, providing increasingly poorer footholds.

And after this plateau there will be another. And another, level after level. The air will turn cold as Kali's kiss and finally give out altogether. He sees himself walking beneath a dead black sky, under unwavering stars.

"Sorry, Hillary," he says. "It just isn't practical."

*

Hillary's corpse is already stiff when Tenzing passes him on his way down. He forces the clenched fingers open and places a pebble from the higher plateau in the right hand.

Tenzing closes his eyes, searching for the right words.

Yes, this is the way the invocation starts, the ancient rite to guide the soul home.

"Listen, O errant soul, you have found yourself in a strange place, a terrible place, far from the hearthfires of men. Do not be afraid." The ritual will take fortyeight days and he'll run out of food in less than a week. It doesn't matter. Tenzing has gone hungry before.

"Follow the sound of my voice. I am your friend. I'll guide you home..."