The three men walked the last mile to the settlement, because the ground was too rough there even for the massive tyres of their utility vehicles.
Clive led the way, jumping into and out of ditches like a gazelle.
Mount Eramju towered over them as they approached it, its upper slopes wreathed in a fine mist that somehow resisted the African sun.
Soon they were standing at the edge of the village. This time no crowd of curious children came running up to them. Instead, the villagers watched them warily from a distance.
“Remarkable.” said Clive. “Look how they live. Steel pots, nylon clothes, yet apart from that you’d almost think this was something from the Stone Age. These people value their isolation highly.”
“Makes no sense.” said Richard, wafting away the mosquitos with his hand.
“Can’t say I blame them.” said Al, and then, changing topic, he added, “You sure that thing’s only four thousand metres? Looks higher.”
“Satellites don’t lie, Al.” said Clive.
Clive took a water bottle from his side, unscrewed the cap and took a long swig. Their faces were all covered in dust, drips of sweat leaving trails of relatively clean skin. It was five days since any of them had been able to wash properly.
A solitary man walked slowly towards them, emerging from between the low grass-roofed huts.
Clive pulled himself up to his full height and fixed the man with a steely smile.
“Do you think he’s dangerous?” said Richard.
“No.” said Clive.
When the man was perhaps thirty yards away, he shouted, “Speak English?”
“We are English.” shouted Clive in reply.
The man walked silently up to them.
“We’ve brought you some cooking pots and clothes.” said Richard, hoisting the bag off his back and holding it up.
“Why are you here?” said the man.
“What’s your name?” said Clive.
“My name is Olumwe.” said the man.
“Olumwe, we’re here to climb your mountain. We’d like to survey the plant and animal life there.”
“No.” said Olumwe.
“No?” said Clive.
“The mountain is sacred to my people. Only the chosen ones may climb it.”
“The chosen ones?” said Clive. “Who chooses them?”
“The mountain chooses who should go there. They come from all around. They come alone.”
“How do you know the mountain hasn’t chosen us?”
“You are not alone.”
“Perhaps we were all chosen, individually, and we’ve all come together.”
“You are not chosen.” said Olumwe.
“There are two ways we can do this.” said Clive. “You can take our gifts. There’s cooking ware in there, shorts, t-shirts, chocolate and some other things. And we can make our way peacefully up the mountain. Or—”
Clive patted the hunting rifle slung against his chest.
Olumwe stared at him, and the three men instinctively tensed. Then Olumwe’s face broke into a wide, cold smile, revealing two rows of perfectly white teeth except for a single missing tooth, and he took the bag. The smile disappeared as fast as it had appeared.
“I will not stop you.” he said. “But you are not chosen.”
With that, he turned and walked back towards the huts.
“Listen, Clive.” said Al. “I didn’t sign up for this. You said they might be reluctant to let us go up there. You didn’t say anything about forcing our way into sacred territory.”
“Sacred territory!” scoffed Clive. “What a load of nonsense.”
“Now, hang on a minute.” said Richard. “Al has a point. We can’t just go wading in where we’re not wanted.”
“He took our gifts.” said Clive. “It’s a fair exchange. We’ve come a long way for this. Are you with me or aren’t you?”
Al and Richard glanced uneasily at each other.
“I don’t think we are with you.” said Richard. “There’s plenty to discover round here without trespassing on their mountain.”
“Al?” said Clive.
“This is a bit much, really.” said Al. “I’m not going up there. Sorry, Clive.”
Clive looked from one to the other and said, “Fine! If you’re going to be swayed by their silly superstitions I’ll go by myself. I’ll be back by nightfall.”
He turned and followed Olumwe into the village.
“He never used to be like this.” said Richard, gazing after him.
Several dozen alarmed faces watched Clive from a safe distance as he walked through the village. No-one spoke to him. No-one tried to stop him. The extreme poverty of the village was obvious; people were barely dressed, and in rags. Many were visibly suffering from one terrible disease or another.
The sun was ferocious and unforgiving. Without his wide-brimmed hat, even Clive would have had to seek shade, yet these people seemed to prefer the full sun to the shadows of the trees on the lower slopes of the mountain.
Soon he was past the village and was trudging steadily upwards on a track that was surprisingly well-defined: the vegetation worn away, most likely by countless human feet.
He had ascended perhaps a thousand metres when he noticed a man following along behind him on the trail in the distance. By steadying his binoculars on some rocks, he was able to see the man quite well. It wasn’t Olumwe; it was someone else. Someone stranger. The man walked as though in a trance, his gaze seemingly fixed on the summit and never deviating. He wore only tattered old shorts and carried not so much as a spear. He was making a good pace; faster even than Clive himself. Clive put the binoculars down, shaking his head in wonder at the strangeness of these people.
As he ascended higher, the trail began to weave from side to side, in order to avoid directly climbing the steep mountainside. Periodically he rested, drinking water and chewing pemmican. The altitude increasingly provided some minor relief from the oppressive heat, but not much. Through his binoculars, he enviously eyed the thin mist near the top. He also swung them downwards to observe the progress of the curious individual following along behind him on the trail. It occurred to him that the man had probably been sent to intercept him. But then, why wasn’t he armed?
He unslung his rifle and double checked that everything was in order. He considered firing off a warning shot, but in the end decided there was no need for it; these people knew a rifle when they saw one, and if the man wouldn’t leave him alone then he’d just have to end his days there on the mountain, with a Russian-made bullet in him.
On the upper reaches of the mountain, the path became extremely rocky and Clive was often forced to use his hands for balance. The trees that intermittently clothed the lower slopes gave way to low spiky bushes, and then those gradually gave way to nothing but grass and trailing shrubs, with patches of bare rock here and there.
Soon he reached the rocky escarpment near the summit. Casting a wary eye over it, he wondered whether to risk scrabbling up it or to get out the climbing equipment. It was covered in loose rocks and it didn’t look like cams would hold well anywhere. On the other hand, it was steep enough that, if he slipped, he might very well roll to the bottom of it.
He was pondering the matter when a noise behind him made him jump and he wheeled around, taking the rifle in his hands.
It was the man he had seen earlier. He had practically run up the side of the mountain, maintaining a brisk pace until he actually caught up with Clive.
“Stop where you are!” Clive shouted, levelling the rifle at him, but the man paid him no attention at all. His gaze remained fixed on the summit, and he walked past Clive and began to scramble up the escarpment.
Clive stood and watched as the man disappeared over the top. Then, seeing that the slope could be navigated with relative ease, he began to follow the man up it, freezing every so often as his feet dislodged loose stones, which went bouncing to the bottom, in many cases continuing all the way down the side of the mountain.
By the time he reached the summit he was shaking from nerves and exertion. He pulled himself onto the barren rocky outcrop that capped the mountain and stood upright to survey a horrifying sight.
The summit, an area perhaps a hundred square yards in size, was littered with corpses. They all lay on their backs and all were mostly in an advanced state of decomposition, seemingly rotted from their chests inward. The corpses had been heavily scavenged by vultures, and such two revolting birds were quarrelling over a comparatively fresh corpse on the opposite edge, pecking at its face and eyes.
Clive fired the rifle in the air and they flew off, hissing like kettles.
He spotted the man who had followed him up the mountain, lying somewhere in the middle, on his back. He put the rifle on his back and ran over to the man.
“Are you all right?” he said, unsure if the man could understand him.
The man made no reply. Clive noticed there was an odd network of marks on the man’s torso, almost like a spider’s web, sometimes forming rough hexagons and other polygons.
He shook the man’s shoulder.
“I said, are you all right?”
Finally the man’s eyes moved slowly to his face and the man looked directly at Clive for the first time.
In a near-whisper, he said, “I am chosen.”
Then his eyes returned to gazing at the sky, he sighed heavily, and then stopped breathing altogether.
Clive stumbled backwards, almost tripping on one of the many rotting corpses. He gazed uncomprehendingly at the grotesque scene before him. Many of the bodies seemed partially-covered with some blackish substance, as if someone had gone around pouring tar on them. He leaned close to one of them and with the muzzle of his rifle, poked at the black tar.
Then the hiss of a vulture startled him and he abruptly stood up and walked back to the escarpment.
“Enough of this.” he muttered to himself.
Scrambling down the unstable rocky slope, he almost lost control on the lower part, and landed painfully with his foot against a rock, mildly spraining his ankle.
He had intended to carry out a systematic survey of the plants to be found on the mountain on the way down, at least in so far as the very limited time available allowed, but now, with a slight limp and a thoroughly disconcerted mind, he descended as fast as his ankle would let him.
Four hours later he was back at the vehicles.
“You’re back early.” said Richard.
“Let’s get out of here.” he replied.
“Something wrong?” said Al.
“This place gives me the creeps, is all.” said Clive. “Let’s go.”
On paper, Clive was the ideal husband. He smart and funny. He was brave and adventurous. He seemed to have a strange ability to summon money whenever it was needed. For the first few years they had known each other, Emma had thought him the perfect boyfriend. Then, slowly, a side of him had emerged of which she had scarcely suspected the existence. A ruthless cold determination had gradually replaced the warm, funny side of Clive.
In the two years since their marriage, and with no children on the way—he was, after all, away a great deal of the time, which didn’t help—she increasingly found herself wondering if she’d made the right choice.
For a brief time after his return from the African expedition, he seemed almost like his old self again, and she began to think that perhaps he’d just fallen into a bad mood for the past two years, and would now return to his former good humour. Then, a new obsession began to slowly make itself felt.
He returned one day from a trip to the dentist carrying a magazine. It was a magazine aimed primarily at women and was quite unlike his usual reading material.
“Look at this.” he said, opening the magazine and laying it on the the kitchen table in front of her as she drank a coffee.
“No.” she said. “No, Clive, you’re not doing that.”
“But look at it.” he said.
“It’s too dangerous.” she said. “What’s even the point? It’s one of the most explored mountains in the world.”
He stared at the picture, his head bobbing very slightly, as if some unusual emotion had seized hold of him.
“How can I call myself an explorer if I’ve never climbed Everest?” he said.
“Is it really about calling yourself an explorer?” said Emma. “I thought it was more about doing the actual exploring.”
“You know, you can go up there for £20,000.”
“We haven’t got £20,000.”
“Maybe even £5,000 if I do a no-frills package.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you? This is a joke.”
But he continued to stare at the picture, breathing heavily.
She looked at him uncertainly, nervously. She had never seen him quite like this before.
Over the following year, the Everest obsession only grew.
“If you’re going up there I’m taking out life insurance on you.” she told him.
“Do it.” he said. “I’ll pay for it. There’s specialist insurance that’ll cover it.”
It was a curious kind of caring, where he insisted on risking his life but at least didn’t want to saddle her with debt.
Soon the house was filled with pictures of mountains, although it was Everest that seemed to have by far the greatest magnetism for Clive. When they took a two-week holiday in summer, he insisted on going to a ski resort in the Alps, well out of season, where he practised ascending the local hills and even spend four days actually mountaineering, leaving Emma at the hotel.
In the autumn, he announced that he would attempt Everest the following April.
She positively flew off the handle.
“You’ve no experience with mountains anywhere near that high!” she protested.
“Doesn’t matter.” he said. “The guides can take anyone up there these days. You only need to be physically fit. I’ve more mountain experience than half of them.”
“Why, Clive?” she wailed at him. “What’s to be gained from it? Are you trying to prove to people you can do it?”
She had managed to persuade him to go for a walk with her by the river, an activity which he used to enjoy, but which now he treated as a dull chore.
He made no reply.
She got in front of him and took hold of his arms, almost shaking him, tears in her eyes.
“Give me a reason I can understand!” she said. “I’ll support you if you can just explain it to me.”
Then she outrightly broke down in tears.
“I want you to be happy.” she sobbed. “I just don’t understand it. You’ve changed so much.”
Finally his eyes, which had taken on a curiously blank quality in the preceding months, seemed to connect with hers. He looked down at the ground, shamefaced, and then back at her again.
“I don’t know.” he said. “I don’t know why I have to do it. I just know that I have to. I have to go up there, Emma. I know you’re worried. It’ll be fine. The vast majority of people these days reach the summit and get down again perfectly safely. It’s a bit of a tourist trap, is the fact of the matter. I’m fit, I have a lot of experience at lower altitudes, and I have experience of exploring cold environments. Hell, I’ve been to the Antarctic four times. I’ll be OK. I just need to get it out my system.”
She looked into his eyes and saw his soul already beginning to retreat back into its obsession, and she said, “OK. I don’t get it but OK. Just don’t cut me out, Clive. It’s like you’re having an affair with this ruddy mountain.”
He giggled, quietly and mirthlessly.
Al, also, found himself becoming greatly puzzled by Clive’s behaviour, while Richard had since somewhat distanced himself altogether from Clive. They had all known each other for many years, and in all that time, Clive’s distinguishing feature had been an obsessive interest in exploration, but the obsession had never before seemed to displace human connection.
Al and Emma met secretly in a cafe when Clive was away in Scotland climbing a much lesser mountain than Everest, Emma feeling almost guilty, as though she was having some sort of fling with Al, which she wasn’t.
“It’s since the Africa expedition.” said Al glumly.
“Exactly.” said Emma. “You know what I’m talking about. It’s not just me.”
“It’s not just you. I know exactly what you’re talking about. This Everest thing, it’s totally out of character. He’s not his usual self.”
“He’s changed a lot in the past two or three years,” said Emma, “but before Africa, at least I could say he was still the man I married. Now, I don’t know anymore.”
Al’s fingers were intertwined, his elbows resting on the table in front of him. He jabbed at his lips with his thumbs.
“I wish I could say something useful.” he said. “Something to explain it.”
He let his hands fall onto the table and he looked directly at her.
“I just don’t know what’s got into him.” he said, shaking his head.
She took one of his hands and squeezed it slightly, forgetting herself.
“At least you can see what I see.” she said. “You don’t know how much that means to me.”
Then she drew her hand back, almost blushing.
“Sorry.” she said, although it was unclear what she was apologising for.
“If you need me, I’m here for you.” said Al.
In February, Clive flew to Kathmandu and from there he took a small propeller plane to Lukla. Lukla was a village in the Himalayas, full of squat modern-looking buildings. Clive had joined an expedition led by Australian climber Steve Patterson, who ran a company specialising in getting people safely up the mountain.
That year Patterson was taking six people up Everest, including Clive. They assembled in a room in a low blue-painted hotel in Lukla, together with American climber Hank Bennett and the team’s doctor, Sheila Carson, also Australian.
In the end, Clive, who was well-used to raising money for expeditions, had got together nearly £40,000 for a premium-rate guided tour up to the summit, partly in return for agreeing to help promote a certain brand of camera.
Carson took her place next to Patterson, at the front of the room, and explained various medical considerations to the group, including the symptoms of altitude sickness, the use of dexamethasone, and the effects of oxygen deprivation.
“As you know, Everest is 8,848 metres high.” she told the group. “Above 8,000 metres you are gradually dying.”
“The trick is to get up and down before you’ve finished dying.” chipped in Patterson chirpily.
“Even with supplemental oxygen, which we’ll be using all the way,” Carson continued, “the atmospheric pressure is so low that no matter how hard you breathe, you can’t get enough oxygen into your blood.”
Clive looked around at the other members of the group. There were two Americans, a German, a Swiss woman and a fellow Englishman, whose name was Alan Springfield. One of the Americans was an elite climber who had trained in Alaska, but the other had little experience and appeared somewhat overweight.
It didn’t matter, he told himself. As long as he got up there, whether the rest of them made it or not was of little concern to him.
For eight days they trekked from Lukla to Everest Base Camp, gradually acclimatising, ascending a further two-and-a-half thousand metres to the base camp at 5,364 metres.
Alan seemed particularly drawn to Clive, as a compatriot, but Clive found he had no appetite for conversation. Every attempt people made to converse with him only got on his nerves. All he could think about was the summit.
On the third day of the trek, the group got their first view of Everest. They stopped to enjoy the sight. Even though at that distance, Everest seemed a little underwhelming, its iconic shape was visible. Most of the group, exhausted as they already were, only gazed placidly at the distant mountain, while Patterson regaled them with more facts and figures.
Mike, the overweight American, seemed somewhat terrified, but the vision of the mountain produced by far its greatest effect in Clive. As he stared at the distant mountain, it seemed to fill his entire mind, until he could hardly tell himself apart from the mountain. Something titanic and ineffable subverted all of his thoughts until there were no thoughts left; only an inescapable monolithic reality: four-and-a-half trillion tons of rock, capped with ice and cloud.
“Clive? Clive.”
A voice seemed to be calling him from far away, almost from another world, another dimension of being. It was Alan, the stockbroker from England.
“I said, it’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?”
But even after Clive became aware that he was standing on a rocky mule trail and that Alan was asking him something, he still couldn’t bring himself to reply.
“Sorry to disturb you then.” said Alan, sarcastically, and he wandered off to talk to Mike.
From Base Camp the summit lay only three-and-a-half thousand metres vertically upwards. Had they started from sea level, most of them could have easily made the summit in a few hours and come all the way back down again in time for tea, but the cold, the treacherous terrain, and, above all, the lack of oxygen and low air pressure, made for an entirely different proposition.
Over nearly two months, they hiked up to higher and higher camps, reaching Camp 3, and then finally they climbed up to Camp 4, ready for the summit attempt in the evening.
By then, the Swiss woman had dropped out due to altitude sickness, coughing blood and suffering terrible headaches. Mike, surprisingly, was still in the running. All the climbers were complaining about the cold air freezing their lungs, the headaches, nausea and exhaustion. All, except Clive. Clive appeared not to care, and Patterson even had to repeatedly had to tell him to slow down, to keep pace with the group.
Finally the fateful hour came when the group were to push for the summit, and then an unexpected problem occurred. They were due to depart at 11pm, to reach the summit by morning. By 2pm the next day they would have to turn around in order to get back to Camp 4 before dark, whether they had made the summit or not. Not getting back by dark meant possibly spending the night in the death zone, where the air is not thick enough to support human life indefinitely, and a night in the death zone is typically fatal.
During the course of the day, a storm had unexpectedly veered towards the mountain, and by 11pm Camp 4 was immersed in a violent snowstorm, with high freezing winds and thick fog.
Even so, Patterson had to almost physically restrain Clive from attempting to summit.
Clive seemed barely responsive to verbal instructions, but this isn’t entirely unusual at such an altitude, so Patterson assumed that Clive was simply a little confused due to the low oxygen and air pressure.
Dr. Carson hadn’t joined them on the actual climb, but Patterson contacted her via satellite phone and together they carried out a cursory medical examination of Clive. Aside from his slightly odd mental state, which was really not altogether out of the ordinary under the circumstances and wasn’t necessarily a showstopper for him, there was only one other thing observably unusual about him. When Patterson, following Carson’s instructions, made to check Clive’s heartbeat with a stethoscope, he found an odd rash on Clive’s chest, silvery-blue vein-like lines forming strange polygonal patterns.
By midnight the storm has lessened but Patterson and his team considered the weather still too unsettled to depart. Patterson reluctantly began to consider calling off the summit attempt. In fact, he was to return to Camp 2, and then make a second attempt on the summit, which would be successful for all but two of the remaining five.
At 12.20am, the altitude-befuddled team realised that Clive was missing. They began to search for him as best they could under the circumstances, and it was during this search that Mike also disappeared.
Mike had a bad case of summit fever—the insatiable desire to make the summit, even when common sense and experience advise against it—and he had decided that if Clive was going for it solo, he would too.
Clive trudged steadily up the precarious slope, the only thought in his head being that he wanted to reach the top. As he neared the summit he encountered at least two other people who were, by then, heading in the opposite direction, down the mountain, having inadvisably braved the storm, and they tried to warn him that he was too late, and should turn around, but he ignored them completely.
A little later on the same people encountered Mike and issued the same advice to him.
“If Clive’s going, I’m going.” he said, slurring his words, without even explaining who Clive was.
By then at least the storm had died down, and the day, although now useless to mountaineers attempting the summit, had turned bright and clear.
In the end, only two solitary figures remained, trudging up the mountain.
Clive, by far in the lead, progressed with astonishing speed, although his overall progress was somewhat slowed by a tendency to wander dangerously off in the wrong direction, away from the fixed ropes and relatively well-defined route that led to the summit.
Even so, around 4 am he reached the Hillary Step, which was covered in snow, Sherpas having been unable to clear as usual it due to the storm, and somehow successfully traversed it.
From there he staggered resolutely onwards, almost impervious to the cold.
Around noon, he finally stumbled onto the top of the world. He staggered to the middle of the snow dome that formed the summit, hardly twelve metres wide, and lay down on his back, staring up at the blue sky, a wide smile on his face. Then he closed his eyes and something began to stir underneath his shirt.
When Mike reached the summit, dazed from lack of oxygen, confused, apathetic, and cold as death, he encountered a terrifying sight, the sheer horror of which penetrated through the apathy of his befuddled mind like a dagger through his heart.
A finger-like fungus was growing from Clive’s prostrate body, the tip of it swelling visibly moment by moment, ready to burst and release its spores.
In a befuddled fugue inspired by both terror and altitude sickness, he shuffled over to Clive’s body and, perhaps by some prehistoric instinct, began to push him towards the Kangshung Face to the east. He had almost completed the task of ridding the world of the fungal obscenity when the cornice collapsed beneath him, and together they plummeted into the unclimbed abyss below.
After Clive’s death, Emma leaned heavily on Al. Together, they devoted themselves to attempting to understand exactly what had happened to Clive, and even set to work on a biography. They decided not to return to Mount Eramju, feeling that whatever was there, was best left alone. At the same time, they were intrigued by local accounts of the “chosen ones” and hopeful that one day, perhaps Clive’s body could be recovered, and that post-mortem analysis could somehow shed light on the entire mystery.
That Clive’s behaviour was connected to whatever was going on at Mount Eramju, they felt certain, although they could not prove it.
Two years after Clive’s disappearance, they married. Clive’s body has never been found.
