The Offering

1. Prasad - Food that God has touched - thus making it holy
2. Pooja - Worship; typically Buddhist ceremony to ask the Gods permission and blessing to climg Everest.
3. Biri - Poor man's cigarette; made out of tobacco rolled in a leaf.

4. Chomolungma - Tibetan name for Everest, means Goddess mother of Earth.

The Offering
by
Raman Jalota

    Swoooshhhh. The wind blows unceasingly. Here at twenty-one thousand feet the wind never stops. It’s not a white-out today but that can happen any second. James Callahan walked up to Denise and flopped by her side. She held out the cup of tea she was drinking. He firmly shook his head.
    “No, I can’t take anymore caffeine. Too nervous as it is.”
    “I love this tea. You can’t really get it back in Denver even though they sell all sorts of Darjeeling teas. Ummm ... this is heavenly. I can’t get over this flavor and the Khumbu Ice fall has given me a new sense of appreciation for life and its small pleasures.”
    “Wasn’t it as amazing as you thought it would be?”
    “No way! It was more spectacular than I imagined and more terrifying than I thought possible. What did you think?”
    “I have to confess, I had never been afraid of heights but walking on that ladder I couldn’t bring myself to look down. And I think that damned ladder actually shifted as I walked across. I thought my heart had stopped.”
    “I know, all those blocks of ice breaking off and falling and new crevasses forming constantly. It’s so breathtakingly dangerous!”
    “Denise, do you think we should have stuck together or was this alright, the three of us climbing ahead to camp two?”
    “Well, I am glad we got here early. I think they will be too exhausted by the time they get here and will be happy that we were able to pitch the tents for them.”
    “Well that sherpa is strong as a bull, he carried almost one-hundred-twenty pounds from Khumbu Ice fall to here!”
    As if on cue Gopal Narayan lifted the flap of the tent and unzipped the door.
    “Are you comfortable sahib, ma’am?”
    “Yes, we are fine. Do you care for some tea?”
    “No, I want to visit the sacred shrine of the Yeti. I’ll be back in two hours.”
    They looked at him, dumbfounded. He stepped out of the tent and lifted his eyes scanning the area of Lhotse Face, their next stop. He walked over the trail left by the New Zealand group for several hundred yards and then started walking down a ridge that was half covered with ice. Slowly he made his way down into the ravine for about five hundred feet, then stopped and walked north for a few feet. A small hole was carved into the side of the mountain. He knelt down and started praying.
    A few minutes later, he stood up and opened his parka. He took out a plastic bag and laid out a small brown bundle, some prasad1 from the pooja2 at the base camp and rose petals on the altar.
    “I offer you these gifts for safe passage through your home. Forgive us this transgression.”
    He started to walk away, stopped, took out another brown bundle from his pocket and tore open the top. He stuck a biri3 in his mouth and lit it with the new lighter he had bought at base camp. He knelt down and placed the lighter next to the offerings. Satisfied with his pilgrimage, he whistled a Hindi song from a recent movie as he walked back to the camp. He arrived just as the last of the American group made it.
    “Hey Gopal, where have you been?”
    “I went to a shrine and made an offering for the success of our expedition.”
    Sean Carver laughed. “Now that we have crossed Khumbu fall, we don’t need any luck. We just need clear weather.”
    Davey Markus patted him on the shoulder, “We want all the luck and blessing we can get. Thank you, Gopal.”
    “Are you superstitious or something? Hey, our team leader is a backwoods, superstitious hillbilly.”
    “Sean, don’t you feel that you already are in another world? This is not a place that belongs to man. This place belongs to the Gods. We mortals are merely visitors who are being given a glimpse of the heavens that belong to Gods. Don’t you feel that? This is the heart of the expedition, when you feel transported into another dimension, where you are one with the mountain!”
    Around midnight, Davey woke everyone. They came out of their tents and stared at the breathtaking beauty of the summit. A small moon had bathed the entire area with bluish light making every little detail crystal clear. Even the wind had slowed down to admire the beautiful landscape. A few snow crowns were being blown off the top, but the wind didn’t seem too bad.
    “Alright everyone, let’s go for the gold. On to camp three, early tomorrow. I’ll lead the first group, I want to make sure everyone gets a good place to fix their tent. This is treacherous area; every step you can die of exhaustion, hallucination or just weakness from not eating or sleeping for days.”
    “I will like to go with the first group and then onto South Col.”
    “Gopal, you can’t do that. We want to stay together from now on.”
    “If a sherpa stay at Lhotse face, he dies. I have to move on, sahib.”

.....

    Sean joined the first group of four. The climb was the hardest so far. When they reached the camp he gasped. This was a dangerous place to set up a camp. There didn’t seem to be enough space on the narrow ice-ledges of the Lhotse Face. And the wind had picked up. A continuous, shrill, weeping noise that never stopped. Sean watched paralyzed with exhaustion as Gopal helped others pitch the tents.
    “I am off, sahib.” Gopal started his climb to the South Col slowly.
    “Hey wait up, I need to take a pee.” Sean tagged along like a lost dog. Barely fifty feet from the tents was a shallow area up slope where he stopped.
    “No sahib, this is a sacred are of the Yeti. Please go to the other side.”
    He pointed down.
    “Bullshit! Yeti my ass!” Sean unzipped his Gore-Tex pants and urinated on a spot where some green leaves and crumpled rose petals lay.
    Gopal watched in horror, then dropped down to his knees, “Please forgive us Yeti. We did not mean no disrespect. Sahib does not know and has made an error.”
    Gopal folded his hands together in prayer for a few minutes, then slowly got up and started his climb to camp four. Sean laughed a silly, contrived laugh and walked back to his tent.

.....

    After dinner, everyone settled in their tents, sipping hot tea or cider and preparing for the penultimate climb. When the moon was obscured by clouds, a large gray figure moved down the mountain, towards the camp. A furry creature, almost ten feet tall, sniffed around the tents, nodded as he found what he was looking for and slashed the side of the tent with his nails. He reached in and lifted a dark green sleeping bag.
    Sean awoke with a shiver. He was being carried up high in open air, surrounded by the peaks that had been etched in his memory for the last two months.
    “What the hell! I must be dreaming.”
    The sleeping bag was placed onto a narrow ledge, but remained balanced precariously. Sean unzipped the bag and stared unbelievingly. A large man covered with grayish-brown fur stood towering over him.
    “What the hell is going on?”
    It was only when he stood up that he realized he was not in his tent. I can’t be without my boots and crampons. This is dangerous area. What the hell am I doing here?
    The tall creature pushed him backwards. He rocked on his heels and tried to move his upper body forward. Too late, he realized, he was over-balanced. With a scream, he fell forward and rolled a few feet before falling into the crevasse at his feet. His brain questioning what he had seen, he plunged to his death. No one heard him and no one missed him till the next morning.

.....

    Gopal, exhausted and breathing heavily, pitched his tent and crawled into his sleeping bag. Sleep came fast. He awoke with a start. A tall furry creature stood outside his tent, making strange throaty noises. Yeti.   He got out of his tent and bowed at the creature’s feet.
    “This is your home. All of Chomolungma4 is your home. We are just visitors and ask your forgiveness for disturbing the peace of your home.”
    The creature seemed to have quieted down. Gopal, hands folded in submission, looked up at his face.
    “Do I have permission to go to the top of Chomolungma?”
    The creature nodded his head slowly.
    “Will you grant me and all the rest of us, safe passage through your home?”
    The creature roared and stomped off, disappearing into the whiteness of the night.
    Gopal lay shivering in his bag. Did I see the Yeti? Or, was I just dreaming?

.....

    Finally the painfully slow group found themselves at South Col. A flat, littered, cold, icy field with Everest rising on the north, Lhotse to the south, Kangshung Face on the east and Lhotse Face on the west; this is the last cradle in the lap of the goddess mother of the world. This is also known as the ‘Death Zone’. No matter how hard one tries, one can only suck up about half the oxygen one needs in every breath. One’s oxygen starved brain slowly starts decaying. Bodily functions are suspended and dying at this elevation. This is also the last camp before the summit just a tiny one mile away! The last mile can take twenty hours or an eternity. It’s so close one can taste it and yet so far that over half the people who make it here don’t summit!
    Gopal entered Davey’s tent.
    “Sahib, I saw the Yeti last night. He .. he doesn’t want us here. He feels insulted. We don’t have safe passage through his home.”
    “You know, we have lost Sean already. He crawled out of his tent last night in a delirium and tried to sleep on a ledge. He fell to his death, probably just trying to find his boots!”
    “It must be Yeti. He felt slighted by him when he urinated where I told him not to.   He must have thrown him off the mountain.”
    “Gopal, I understand your feelings and concerns, but we have ten more climbers that are ready to summit. We are not turning back as long as the weather holds. Go get some sleep. We start soon after midnight.”
    Davey kept turning uncomfortably. His mind was playing games. He kept going over the next twenty hours in his mind. Leave after midnight, go to the end of the col and cross the icy wall; go up the triangular face to the corniced Southeast Ridge; make it to the Balcony and go on to the South Summit, leave full oxygen bottles there, move up the crest to the Hillary step; and then walk along the ridge to the Summit; leave by two in the afternoon no matter what, to make it back to camp four. The eight steps from camp four to the summit and back were repeated till he could recall each like a three year old, learning how to mouth words.
    He knew it was midnight and time to go. He hadn’t gotten any sleep just like the others; tossing and turning with anxiety, fear and apprehension. Denise and James were already up and out, staring at the three-sixty-view and giddy with anticipation. They were the first to start, walking together slowly like drunken men. The American contingent left together, two by two, followed at a little distance by wide-eyed and scared Gopal, who kept mumbling prayers to the Yeti, the mountain, the snow, the wind and anything else he could think of.

.....

    As always happens, the excruciatingly slow progress of the climbers, hampered by the blowing wind, barely got them to the Balcony at daybreak. Gopal was now ahead of the group, though slowed by the elevation, his motivation to protect the others kept him moving steadily. As he walked to the South Summit, he slowed down and let Davey catch up with him. A bare twenty feet from the South Summit, the mountain seemed to move under their feet. A solid tube of ice about six inches thick and ten feet long slithered just five feet in front of them.
    “That is the snake of the Yeti.” Gopal shouted to Davey.
    Davey stood for a moment mesmerized, then shook his head to clear it and kept moving.
    “That is his warning to us. It’s not safe to go any higher. We must turn back!”
    Davey looked at their goal, just 300 feet away; up to the Hillary step and then the Summit. Just four out of the eight steps remained in his memory ... leave full oxygen bottles here, move up the crest to the Hillary step; walk along the ridge to the Summit; leave by two in the afternoon no matter what, to make it back to camp four.
    It was obvious, what needed to be done. He shook his head and took off his backpack. He made a pile with his oxygen bottles there; sitting back, he basked in the sun that tried unsuccessfully to warm the thirty mile per hour wind that had dropped the temperature to twenty below.
    He waited for everyone to make it to the South Summit, hugged them and pointed them to the Summit. Everyone makes it. What a success! He thought of the missing Sean Carver for a split second and then confidently moved ahead for his own seventh summit. Gopal stood at the South Summit staring at the group as they walked onward one by one. His face was ashen as he stared beyond their target.
Barely ten minutes after they left South Summit, without any warning; a thick white cloud appeared out of nowhere and flattened the landscape into thick white nothingness. Davey shouting and communicating now with hand signals tried to convey as best as he could:
    “Let’s try and wait out the storm for a few hours. Failing that, we move back to camp four. Not more than three hours at this spot!”
    With almost zero visibility, everyone stopped moving. Slowly they sat down at the spots they were standing on and raised their arms around their heads. The wind whistled at eighty miles an hour and thick white patches of snow floated around them, attaching to the twelve squatting figures two hundred feet from the Summit. Twelve small mounds of snow formed slowly as the storm kept up for four hours.
One small mound moved two feet away towards another, gloves brushed snow off each other’s faces, scraped snow off their goggles, finally nodding in agreement Denise and James hugged together as the storm built a slightly bigger mound around them.

.....

    Sitting in his cocoon of snow, Davey screamed at the Gods who had screwed an almost perfect expedition. We have to turn back! How do I get everyone to do that? Shit! It’s probably already four ‘O clock! We must move now or we die! Maybe we will die if we move, but what the hell can I do?
    He shook his head and scraped the snow off his goggles. It was white! Everything was white. He could not see a single thing. He jerked off his goggles. Sharp ice crystals stung his eyes. It was still white! He slowly moved his left foot down and then brought his right foot next to it. Jesus! Which way am I facing? Which way is the camp? Where’s everybody? Where’s anybody?
    A tall creature stood at the South Summit staring at the small mounds of snow on the way to Hillary step. He moved between the mounds sniffing till he found the one he was looking for. He gently scraped the snow off Gopal and stood him up.
    Gopal felt an arm under his shoulder jerking him up. He stared at the white nothingness around him. Who is it? What is it?
    He was gently turned around and then the arm was around his shoulder pushing him forward. He lifted his foot and let the pressure on his shoulder guide him. Slowly he inched his way down to the Balcony.
    I can see now! The storm was over. He had walked out of the storm. It hung above him, covering the last seventeen hundred feet of Everest. He stood there blinking his eyes. What had happened? He looked around for his savior.   There was no one else around him. He shouted the names of everyone in the expedition. Nothing.
    He sat at the Balcony for two more hours, then slowly made his way to the South Col. He walked into Davey’s tent and tried the radio.
    “Base camp? This is Gopal Narayan ... with the American expedition ... You know, with Davey Markus. Everyone’s stuck in snow storm at South Summit.”
    “This is Base camp. Where are you?”
    “I am at South Col. I made it here somehow. We got stuck in snow storm ... eight or ten hours. I don’t know, what has happened to everyone. It’s still storming up there. No visibility ... they are still up there.”
    “We can’t do anything for you, over there. You have to do what you think is best.”
    “I ... I can’t see anything above me. I can’t do anything. What can I do? Please tell me.”
    After a long pause, “If you can’t see anything and can’t do anything to help the others, then you better get out of there. If you stay there, you die! Come down soon as you can.”
    Gopal sat in Davey’s tent, staring at the radio for a long time. I am still in dangerous territory. This is the death zone! I can climb down to Lhotse Face in six hours. Then I will be safe.
    He picked up his backpack, discarding the empty oxygen bottles and started his descent. A shadowy figure moved behind him in the near distance, keeping an eye on him, assuring his safe passage.
Six thousand feet up, ten mounds of frozen snow lay on the face of Everest like pieces of prasad on an altar; the ultimate offering to the Gods.

THE END     3102 words

Copyright © 2004 Raman Jalota. All rights reserved. No part of this electronic publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

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