Free Dead Lucky by Lincoln Hall Page B

an hour of slowly traversing back and forth across a huge rocky hillside, every turn a switchback.
    As soon as we crested the pass, our two minibuses pulled into the widening of the road which served as a parking area. The only view was of the damp grayness of the clouds enveloping the ridge-top. A canvas tent provided accommodation for a family of Tibetans, who excitedly rushed toward the minibuses as we pulled in. They were selling local fossils and cheap trinkets that had come from Lhasa or Kathmandu. There was absolutely nothing here but rocks, yet the Tibetans had identified a business opportunity and members of our team set about assuaging their disappointment with some retail therapy. Meanwhile, I hiked up the track toward the best lookout point. Nothing could be seen, of course, except the mist.
    In the silence away from the others, I considered the panorama hidden by the clouds. In the course of two treks and my 1984 climb I had stood at this spot five times. On two of those occasions, the peaks had been partly obscured by clouds. Three times the mountains had been etched so sharply against the impossibly blue sky that I could still view the scene in my mind. Beginning in the east with the pyramid of Makalu, I knew the skyline took in the profile of Kangchungtse, Chomolonzo, Lhotse, Everest, Nuptse, Changtse, Gyachung Kang, and Cho Oyu. I knew that beyond the clouds, nine peaks higher than 25,000 feet spanned the horizon, and that only Everest stood perfectly balanced, slightly left of center, the only one projecting three-dimensionality.
    For a roadside mountain panorama, it could not be equaled anywhere. Strangely, just knowing what magnificence lay across the valleys and beyond the clouds was enough for me to feel that we had arrived. In the vastness of Tibet, four hours more in the minibus was nothing at all.
    THE FIRST SIGHTING of Rongbuk Monastery is always a surprise. On that final afternoon of driving, many miles of rough narrow road ran parallel to the river, much of it sixty to one hundred feet above a glacial torrent that is the product of snow-melt from Everest. Along that stretch of river there are no buildings at all, only the occasional ruined stone meditation hut high on a stark mountainside. Everyone who travels this route peers ahead in the hope of seeing Mount Everest, which is at its most majestic when approached from the north. But because the steep-sided valley is also narrow, even when the weather is good there are only a few glimpses of the mighty peak to be had before the final curve in the road, when the monastery buildings and the giant stupa leap into frame. Just as suddenly, the valley opens out to give the best view yet of Everest, and although center stage is taken by the world’s highest monastery, the dramatic backdrop of the world’s tallest mountain is overwhelming.
    But on April 18, 2006, a less panoramic scene greeted us. Clouds hung heavy over the valley, so all that we could see of the mountains were the cliffs and talus slopes that form their foundations. On my most recent visit to the Rongbuk Valley I had trekked cross-country from Tingri, walking along the road at a pace that allowed me to remember the details of the route. And so, when the road curved away from the river and headed toward a small notch between ridges of moraine, I knew that we were almost there. As we crested the rise, the low, dark clouds swallowed the valley ahead. Snow blew diagonally forward in the direction of the mountain we had come to climb. The mass of the monastery was starkly obvious, but its whitewashed walls made it ghostlike in the storm.
    Ghosts certainly existed in this place. One million Tibetans had died at the hands of the Chinese since the People’s Liberation Army began their invasion of Tibet in 1950. In the thirty years after the Dalai Lama fled in 1959, all of Tibet’s great spiritual leaders either had been killed or had escaped into exile. With the living heart and