“Wait!” she says, laughing. He is walking off with the water bottle. “Just a sip,” she says, gesturing to him that she would like the container back. He stops and takes another drink, then hands it to her, bowing his head slightly while wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Thank you,” he says, and continues up the trail.
They have made camp. It’s three in the afternoon and the fog has returned. It hangs lightly over the land, which is brown and wide and bare. The campground looks, with the fog, like a medieval battleground, desolate and ready to host the deaths of men.
Rita sits with Jerry on rocks the size and shape of beanbags while their tents are assembled. Mike is lying on the ground, on his backpack, and he looks to Rita much like what a new corpse would look like. Mike is almost blue, and is breathing in a hollow way that she hasn’t heard before. His walking stick extends from his armpit in a way that looks like he’s been lanced from behind.
“Oh Ashley!” he says to his tapeworm, or whatever it is. “Why are you doing this to me, Ashley?”
Far off into the mist, there is a song being sung. The words seem German, and soon they break apart into laughter. Closer to where she’s sitting, Rita can hear an erratic and small sound, a tocking sound, punctuated periodically by low cheers.
The mist soon lifts and Rita sees Grant, who has already assembled his tent, surrounded by porters. He and a very young man, the youngest and thinnest she’s seen, are playing a tennislike game, using thin wooden paddles to keep a small blue ball in the air. Grant is barefoot and is grinning.
“There he is,” says Jerry. “Saint Grant of the porters!”
At dinner the food is the same — cold noodles, white rice, potatoes, but tonight instead of orange slices there is watermelon, sliced into neat thin triangles, small green boats with red sails on a silver round lake.
“Someone carried a watermelon up,” Mike notes.
No one comments.
“Well, it didn’t fly up,” Frank says.
No one eats the watermelon, because the paying hikers have been instructed to avoid fruit, for fear of malaria in the water. Steven, the porter who serves the meals and whose smile precedes him always, soon returns and takes the watermelon back to the mess tent. He doesn’t say a word.
“What happens to the guy who carried up the watermelon?” Jerry asks, grinning.
“Probably goes down,” Frank says. “A lot of them are going down already — the guys who were carrying food that we’ve eaten. A lot of these guys you’ll see one day and they’re gone.”
“Back to the banana fields,” Jerry says.
Rita has been guessing at why Jerry looks familiar to her, and now she knows. He looks like a man she saw at Target, a portly man trying on robes who liked one so much he wore it around the store for almost an hour — she passed him twice. As with Jerry, she’s both appalled by and in awe of their obliviousness to context, to taste.
The paying hikers talk about their dreams. They are all taking Malarone, an anti-malarial drug that for most fosters disturbing and hallucinatory dreams. Rita’s attention wanes, because she’s never interested in people’s dreams and has had none of her own this trip.
Frank tells a story of a trip he took up Puncak Jaya, tallest peak in Indonesia, a mountain of 16,500 feet and very cold. They were looking for a climber who had died there in 1934, a British explorer who a dozen groups had tried to locate in the decades since. Frank’s group, though, had the benefit of a journal kept by the climber’s partner, recently found a few thousand feet below. Knowing the approximate route the explorer had taken, Frank’s group found the man within fifteen minutes of reaching the correct elevation. “There he is,” one of the climbers had said, without a trace of doubt, because the body was so well preserved that he looked precisely as he did in the last photograph of him. He’d fallen at least two hundred feet; his legs were broken but he had somehow survived, was trying to crawl when he’d frozen.
“And did you bury him?” Shelly asks.
“Bury him?” Frank says, with theatrical confusion. “How the heck we gonna bury the guy? It’s eleven feet of snow there, and rock beneath that—”
“So you what — left him there?”
“Course we left him there! He’s still there today, I bet in the same damned spot.”
“So that’s the way—”
“Yep, that’s the way things are on the mountain.”
Somewhere past midnight Rita’s bladder makes demands. She tries to quietly extricate herself from the tent, though the sound of the inner zipper, and then the outer, is too loud. Rita knows Shelly is awake by the time her head makes its way outside of the tent.
Her breath is visible in compact gusts and in the air everything is blue. The moon is alive now and it has cast everything in blue. Everything is underwater but with impossible black shadows. Every rock has under it a black hole. Every tree has under it a black hole. She steps out of the tent and into the cold cold air. She jumps. There is a figure next to her, standing still.
“Rita,” the figure says. “Sorry.”
It’s Grant. He is standing, arms crossed over his chest, facing the moon and also — now she sees it — the entire crest of Kilimanjaro. She gasps.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” he whispers.
“I had no idea—”
It’s enormous. It’s white-blue and huge and flat-topped. The clarity is startling. It is indeed blindingly white, even now, at 1 a.m. The moon gives its white top the look of china under candlelight. And it seems so close! It’s a mountain but they’re going to the top. Already they are almost halfway up its elevation and this fills Rita with a sense of clear unmitigated accomplishment. This cannot be taken away.
“The clouds just passed,” Grant says. “I was brushing my teeth.”
Rita looks out on the field of tents and sees other figures, alone and in pairs, also standing, facing the mountain.
Now she is determined to make it to its peak. It is very much, she thinks, like looking at the moon and knowing one could make it there, too. It is only time and breath that stand between her and the top. She is young. She’ll do it and have done it.
She turns to Grant but he is gone.
Rita wakes up strong. She doesn’t know why but she now feels, with her eyes opening quickly and her body rested, that she belongs on this mountain. She is ready to attack. She will run up the path today, barefoot. She will carry her own duffel. She will carry Shelly on her back. She has slept twice on this mountain but it seems like months. She feels sure that if she were left here alone, she would survive, would blend in like the hardiest of plants — her skin would turn ice-green and her feet would grow sturdy and gnarled, hard and crafty like roots.
She exits the tent and still the air is gray with mist, and everything is frozen — her boots covered in frost. The peak is no longer visible. She puts on her shoes and runs from the camp to pee. She decides en route that she will run until she finds the stream and there she will wash her hands. Now that this mountain is hers she can wash her hands in its streams, drink from them if she sees fit, live in its caves, run up its sheer rock faces.
It’s fifteen minutes before she locates the stream. She was tracking and being led by the sound of the running water, without success, and finally just followed the striped shirt of a porter carrying two empty water containers.
“Jambo,” she says to the man, in the precise way Grant does.
“Jambo,” the porter repeats, and smiles at her.
He is young, probably the youngest porter she’s seen, maybe eighteen. He has a scar bisecting his mouth, from just below his nose to just above the dimple on his chin. The containers are the size and shape of those used to carry gasoline. He lowers one under a small waterfall and it begins to fill, making precisely the same sound she heard from her bed, in her Moshi hut. She and the porter are crouching a few feet apart, his sweatshirt lashed with a zebra pattern in pink and black.