Authors: Jennifer Donnelly
She looked up at him now, her finger marking a spot in a book.
"Fosbrooke here says Teleki got up over seventeen thousand feet on Kibo,
but his lips started to bleed badly and fatigue got him and he had to
turn back," she said. "The altitude's going to be a bugger."
"We'll just have to go slowly. Drink lots of melted snow. Climb high,
sleep low," Seamie said. "We carry loads up, make camp, then we come
back down to sleep and recover. We go slow, only netting one thousand
feet a day until we're acclimatized. Then, on the last few pitches, we
push like hell. Get up to the summit and get down again as quick as we
can."
"The good news is that Mawenzi's only supposed to be about seventeen
thousand feet. If Teleki didn't start bleeding till seventeen thousand,
we ought to be all right. We ought to be able to make it."
"But Teleki was on Kibo. Kibo was no picnic, but Mawenzi looks a hell
of a lot trickier. Meyer and Purtscheller reckon sheer faces on all
sides. Did you read Meyer on getting up the glacier? He said it took
twenty strokes of the ice-axe to cut each step. Twenty strokes for one
step, while climbing at an angle of three-five degrees and fighting
altitude sickness. Our angles are going to be a lot steeper."
"But we've got crampons. Meyer didn't have them."
Seamie thought of the spiked overshoes they'd brought. They were worn
strapped over boots, like ice skates, and had metal spikes protruding
from them. They were a new invention and largely untried.
"Who knows if they'll work?" he said.
"They will. Also we've a better map than Meyer and Purtscheller had.
And a quadrant. Telescope. Jacob's staff. We'll take sightings, add to
what we already know, and make an even better map by the time we start
off."
Like every good ascensionist, Willa knew that you climbed first with
your eyes. During the long sea voyage they had sketched a rough drawing
of Mawenzi based on photographs, descriptions, and rough maps made by
earlier climbers, but they were both well aware that they could read
every word on every page of every book they'd brought, take their own
readings and sightings, and it wouldn't matter--when it came to the
actual climb, they would still be dealing with an unknown. They would
have to find the route for themselves. Find out where the icefalls were,
the crevasses, the deadly couloirs and cornices. If they did this
successfully, they could well be the first human beings to ever set foot
on the Mawenzi summit. If they did not--they could die.
Willa sat back in her chair now and gazed at the fire. "Hadrian
climbed Etna in 121 to see the sun rise. Petrarch climbed Mount Ventoux
in 1336. Balmat and Paccard took Mont Blanc in 1786 and Whymper got the
Matterhorn in 1865. Can you imagine how they felt, Seamie? To be the
first? To know that their feet were the first to stand on the summit?
Their eyes the first to see what no one had ever seen before?"
"I mean to do more than imagine it, Wills."
She grinned at him. "Me, too," she said.
Their eyes met. He thought he saw something in hers, something made
of longing and hope. He nearly moved toward her, but then he got scared.
What if he was wrong? He looked away awkwardly, said he was dopey with
sleep and was going to turn in.
"I won't be far behind you," Willa said hastily. "Take the lantern. I have the fire."
The moment was gone. Seamie stood and bade her good night, angry with
himself for not doing something. He tried to work up his nerve again,
to at least say something, but before he could, they both heard eerie
laughter rising out of the night. It made Seamie's blood run cold.
"Listen to that!" Willa said. "Hyenas. Must be your toe. They can smell blood, even a tiny bit, from miles away."
The strange sounds grew louder, closer. Suddenly, a massive,
hump-back shape lunged out of the darkness. Seamie saw fangs flash as it
growled at him. It grabbed his hat--he'd put it on the ground by the
tent-- and disappeared.
"You bastard!" he shouted, running after the creature. "That's mine!"
The laughter rose higher as he raced after the thief. He stopped.
Eyes were on him, all around him, winking ghostly green. He realized
he'd run a fair distance from the campfire. He quickly returned to it
amid more squeals and barks.
"They're laughing at you, not with you," Willa said, trying not to laugh herself.
"They are, are they? Let's see if they laugh at this." He grabbed his
rifle and fired a round into the air. There was yipping, the sound of
skidding and sliding, claws in the dirt. And then it was quiet again.
"Think Tepili will let us sleep with him?" he asked.
Tepili and the other porters had no use for tents. They'd built
themselves a manyatta, a small, sturdy enclosure made of thornbush
branches, fearsome enough to thwart the boldest hyena.
"I doubt it," Willa said. "He thinks we smell bad."
"How do you know?"
"He told me."
"He didn't."
"He did. He's right, of course. We do."
Seamie sniffed his armpits and winced. "Maybe we'll cross a stream tomorrow. Have a wash."
Willa was squinting at her pages, reviewing what she'd written.
"I'd feel a lot better if you were in the tent, Wills. They might come back."
"All right, then. I'm feeling pretty knackered anyway," she said.
They built up the fire with branches they'd found earlier in the
evening, then walked the few feet to their tent. They'd decided to bring
only the one. Less to carry that way. It was roomy enough to
comfortably accommodate two beds. Privacy was maintained by means of a
canvas dividing wall.
"You take the lantern," Seamie said. "I can see well enough to fall
into my bed. I've got the rifle in case the hyenas come back. 'Night."
" 'Night, Seamie."
He quickly took off his shoes, socks, and shorts, and climbed under
the mosquito netting hanging over the bed. He stared up at it for a
minute, then turned his head to the side. The lantern light silhouetted
Willa as she undressed. He could see her long legs and the curve of her
breasts as she slipped off her shirt. He knew that she slept in a
camisole and in the men's drawers she wore under her trousers. He
groaned softly. It was too much. He couldn't bear it anymore. He had to
tell her how he felt. Even if it changed everything between them. He
couldn't go on like this. He could see her bent over on her bed, writing
in her notebook. He was just about to call out to her when she spoke
first.
"Seamie?"
"What?"
The lantern went out. He heard her tussling around on her bed, trying to get comfortable.
"You still up?"
"Mmm-hmm."
"What makes a good climber? I'm trying to work that out for my book.
George says it's skill, but I think fearlessness enters into it. You
have to be very sober and careful about your preparations--making sure
all your clobber's in tip-top shape, planning your route and so
forth--but at some point you have to let go. You can't climb if you're
always thinking about falling."
Seamie thought about this, then said, "I think it mostly has to do with arrogance."
"Arrogance? Why?"
"Well, when you're climbing, everything's against you. Gravity, wind
and weather, altitude, time, geography. You're nothing but a speck on
the face of a monolith, one that's been where it is since the dawn of
time. But you don't care about any of that. If you did, you wouldn't be
there. But you are there, daring disaster and death and all of it, a
little fiea climbing up a mountain. A mountain. What is that, if not
arrogance?"
More silence, then, "I'd say you're right, but that would mean admitting that I'm arrogant," Willa said.
"Mmm. And ambitious. And competitive. And--"
"All right, mate. That'll do," she said, laughing. She was quiet for a
bit, then said, "What will you do? After Kilimanjaro, I mean. When we
get back home." Her voice was sleepy-sounding now.
"See if Shackleton's already left for Antarctica. If not, talk him into taking me with him. What about you?"
"I think the Alps again. And George and I have talked about Everest.
That's all it is, talk. It's too cold and too high, and yet neither of
us can stop fantasizing about the climb. He wants it very badly." She
yawned, then said, "I don't think he'll ever be happy, not in his entire
life, unless he gets it. I asked him why. He said, �Because it's
there.' That's George for you, another poet-explorer. I'm surrounded by
them."
"Willa?"
"Mmm?"
"I need to tell you something."
"Mmm?"
There was a long silence as Seamie worked up his nerve. Then he said,
"I ...I love you, Willa. Have for years. I don't expect that you feel
the same way about me. I know about you and George. But I had to tell
you. I hope this won't bugger things... but, well, anyway, there it is.
I'm sorry."
There was a long silence. Seamie was in agony waiting for her
response. When one didn't come, he was certain it was because she was
mortified. Or maybe she was furious.
And then he did hear something--a sound like cloth tearing. He knew
that sound: Willa was snoring. She snored like a drunkard and slept like
one, too. Once she was out, an earthquake couldn't wake her. He'd
discovered that at the Mombasa Club.
Seamie took a deep breath and blew it out again. He was relieved.
He'd given in to a momentary bit of madness and he shouldn't have.
Luckily, she hadn't heard a word he'd said. Their friendship would go on
as it had with no complications. And that was good.
They didn't need complications, not now with fifty miles still to go to get to Kilimanjaro and then a risky climb up Mawenzi.
Willa snored on, shockingly loud. And Seamie smiled. That noise, if nothing else, would surely keep the hyenas away.
"Four children sleeping on wooden pallets the mother scrounged from
the docks," Joe said angrily. "If she hadn't got the pallets, they'd be
sleeping on the wet floor. Three of the kids are consumptive. There's a
surprise. Mother chars. Leaves at five a.m., doesn't get back till seven
most nights. Father's an invalid, injured at the docks. No
compensation."
Joe was talking--almost shouting--from a narrow hallway outside a
small, dank basement room in a tumbledown house in Wapping. Water
trickled across the floor under the wheels of his chair and into the
room where a miserably poor family of six was being photographed. The
thin children wore little more than rags. The father lay in a single
bed, staring vacantly. The mother's anxious eyes darted between Joe in
the hallway and the enormous black camera on a tripod in the middle of
her room.
The man behind it, Jacob Riis, adjusted his camera's settings,
nodding absently as Joe ranted. His assistant took down everything Joe
said in a small black notebook.
Finally Riis walked over to Joe and said quietly, "You are making a great deal of noise, and I need to concentrate."
Joe winced. "Am I? Sorry, Jake. It's just that it makes me so bloody angry."
Jacob patted him on the back. "I know," he sighed. "I know. But your
anger doesn't get you your money. Good photos do. And good stories. Read
by good people, who then get angry themselves and yell at their MPs.
It's their anger we need. So quiet down now and let me work."
Joe nodded sheepishly. Since he was of no use here, he decided to go
outside. He would find the children and their parents some much-needed
food. He pushed himself up the plank ramp they'd laid over the basement
steps and out to the street. There were no shops in the immediate
vicinity of the house, so he headed north, where he knew there were a
few.
As he made his way over the rutted streets, he thought about Jake's
words: "your anger doesn't get you your money." Joe knew he was right,
but there were times when anger was all he had. Anger made him fight. It
had made him bring Riis here, it had made him work to interest
newspaper editors in his photos, and it made him keep hammering away at
his government's complacency. With any luck it would be anger--not his,
but the prime minister's--that would get him the money he wanted. All
one hundred thou-sand pounds of it.
The PM was angry already--not at the condition of the East London
poor, unfortunately, but at him. He was furious at Joe's unrelenting
criticism of the Uganda railway and the shocking sum that had been spent
to build it. He was so angry, in fact, that he'd summoned Joe to his
office a month ago, along with select members of the Colonial office, to
see if there was any way they could shut him up.
"It's a quid pro quo we're after," Campbell-Bannerman had said. "You
pipe down about the railway and we'll come up with some money for you."
"How much?"
"I think we could see our way clear to twenty thousand pounds."
"That's one-fifth of what I need. It's a bleedin' insult," Joe said, preparing to leave.
"Be reasonable, man! We need that railway."
"To do what?" Joe asked. "Carry a bunch of fat-arsed sportsmen
around? Take the quality sightseeing? Deliver land-grabbers to the
choicest acreage?"
"That's a damned cynical view," Freddie Lytton had said hotly. "The
Uganda line wasn't established to aid speculators, but to further
exploration and carry missionaries to the natives."
Joe had laughed out loud. "The government spent five million pounds
to transport missionaries, did it? Those Africans don't know how lucky
they are. We get prize farmland, new import and export markets, an
expanded empire, and they get a god they don't want and some bloody hymn
books." He shook his head bitterly. "Well, I guess fair exchange is no
robbery. At least they can all sing �Nunc Dimittis' while they're trying
to graze their cattle on the five flippin' acres we've left them."
"You, sir, are out of line," Campbell-Bannerman said coldly.
Joe ignored the censure. "You're planning additional branches on the
railway. I've read the engineers' reports. How much are they going to
cost? Another million? Two? What are you spending on hospitals in
Hackney? On schools in Whitechapel? On soup kitchens in Limehouse? Do
you know that right now, as I speak, little children are dying of
hunger--bloody hunger!--right here in London? No, of course you don't.
Because you've never set foot in the East End."