Beyond the Summit Read Online Free PDF

recalcitrant cows.
     
    When he caught her and pulled her to the ground, they laughed and wrestled until Shanti finally rolled onto her back, threw her dress over her head, and wiggled her bare hips in anticipation. Dorje took her immediately and had the most beautiful girl in the Khumbu the rest of the summer—always robust and playful, ever ready. When summer ended and they returned to their villages, he often sneaked into her parent’s house at night to make love. In the fall trekking season, it was hard being away so many nights. He missed her brown, almond eyes and feeling her legs locked around him. Smiling to himself, Dorje decided yak herding provided some benefits but it had nothing to do with those shaggy, unruly beasts.
     
    Three hours after leaving Gorak Shep, Dorje and Marty reached Base Camp, a wasteland of rock and ice strewn with rubbish: used oxygen canisters, empty food tins, frail guy wires, and tent canvas shredded by icy winds. A 2,000-foot icefall at the head of the glacier loomed before them like a torrent of violent rapids frozen in time, silent, its force restrained. However, walking to the base of the frozen river, Dorje discovered it was very much alive, constantly twisting and collapsing on itself in a bizarre and chaotic landscape.
     
    “Now that’s serious ice-ness,” Marty announced in a flat voice.
     
    “It is the most dangerous place on the mountain,” said Dorje. “Many Sherpas have died here.”
     
    “Then I must go up.”
     
    “Why?”
     
    “To prove that I am not afraid.”
     
    “Prove to who?”
     
    “My father,” Marty answered with a nervous sweat seeping down his brow. “If you’re afraid, wait here, but it’s time for me to do some head smacking.”
     
    Still confused about head smacking, Dorjecouldn’t let him go alone into this eerie maze of shifting, unstable ice with turquoise pinnacles towering a hundred feet above them.
     
    His voice measured, no longer playing with each syllable, Marty asked, “Have you ever been in a cave?”
     
    “I do not know this word.”
     
    “It’s cold and so black you can’t see a thing. Bats fly into your face. Unseen things slither around your legs and feet. And you never know when you’ll step off a cliff and fall into a deep, dark hole.”
     
    “I would not like such a place.”
     
    Stopping, Marty stared at immense blocks that had tumbled and landed precariously poised to topple again. “When I was seven, my father made me go in the cave first.”
     
    “But you were afraid.”
     
    “Terrified, same as I am now. I started crying and urine ran down my leg. That only made him madder. He hit me and said no son of his would grow up a coward.”
     
    “Did you go?”
     
    “I had no choice. He would have beat me like the day I refused to clean the deer he’d shot when I was only seven.”
     
    Feeling a rush of compassion, Dorje said, “You can choose now. Your father is not here.”
     
    Marty rolled his eyes. “Oh, yes, he is. He goes everywhere with me.”
     
    Walking in the icefall was almost impossible as they stumbled over recent avalanche debris and shattered ice. When they encountered a maze of enormous crevasses threatened on all sides by crumbling séracs, Marty’s body started shaking like an autumn leaf barely clinging to a branch jostled in the wind. “I can do this,” he murmured. “I can do it.”
     
    Dorje didn’t understand Marty's invisible demon. “We must turn around. It is too dangerous without the crampons and ice axe climbers use.”
     
    “Not yet. I must go another 100 yards.”
     
    For what ? Dorje started to shout but the words froze on his lips as a sérac suddenly split in half and swept past them in a merciless jumble of ice that rocked the ground before shooting into a gaping crevasse. Silence filled the air as they stared at the ice-strewn slope under the tilting remains of the pinnacle—the only route back to Base Camp.
     
    “I’ll show you I’m not