Seven Summits (40 page)

The summit crater of Kilimanjaro is huge, nearly two miles wide, and feels Martian. Looking across the burnt expanse of raw lava, they could see another inner crater, and within that a hollow brown and black pit. To their left, like an iceberg floating in a sea of black rock, was the northern glacier. This remnant of ice is slowly diminishing, perhaps victim of some as yet unmeasured global weather trend; sitting solitary with the hot black rocks on three sides, it had the look of a doomed species. Opposite this glacier, across the crater to their right, was Gilman's Point, where the tourist route joined the rim. And 700 vertical feet above that was Uhuru Peak, the high point along the crater rim, the true summit.

They started across. Through a faultless sky the high-altitude sun bore down with equatorial intensity and young Daniel Emmett, following Dick's example, hung his bandana from behind his hat Lawrence of Arabia style. Their feet sank in soft sand. With anticipation they approached a snow patch, but when they started across they found a field of short ice pinnacles more difficult to walk on than the sand.

Everyone was feeling the effect of the heat and high altitude, but the Emmett kids were still walking sprightly and Frank went to great pains to conceal how tired he was. It took nearly two hours to cross the crater.

Everyone was exhausted when they reached Gilman's Point. They now had been climbing nine hours above 16,000 feet. Frank and Dick, of course, as well as Marts, were planning on hiking the remaining distance to the highest point, but Emmett said he was happy just to stay there with his family and wait for the others to return.

“Come on, Emmett. You're not getting off that easy,” Frank said, still concealing his fatigue. Then, without further ado, Frank stood and started up the trail.

“Pancho here has summit fever,” Dick said, and he got up to follow Frank.

“I can't believe this is the same guy I watched agonize up each step on Aconcagua eight months ago,” Emmett said as he too stood and followed Frank. Dan Bass was also in with the rest of them as they started toward the summit.

Frank was anxious to get to the top. He was thinking about that summit register, wondering if after all these years it was still there. Now, for the first time on the climb, he was on the same trail he had followed thirty years before. Nothing looked familiar, however, although that could have been a result of the passage of time and the fact he was throwing up every ten minutes at this stage that first climb. Now, even though tired from the heat, he had plenty of reserve strength. What a difference from when he had been twenty-two years old; now he was fifty-one.

The trail followed the crater rim. To one side they saw the caldera of the volcano, looking like a devil's punchbowl of brown and sulfur lava rock, crater cones, and steaming fumaroles, to the other side the African savanna 15,000 feet below. Frank had his ski pole in hand for balance, and was breathing with his practiced huff-huff-style pressure-breathing that was now so habitual as to be nearly involuntary.

The summit is still a ways, Frank thought, so I’d better be careful to pace myself.

Even through their tinted glacier goggles the equatorial sun seemed to bleach all the color from the dry hot rock. The white light burned out textures, while dark shadows were like holes to the middle of the earth. It was a black and white world colored amber through heavy sunglasses.

They were out of water, and each step seemed to wring from their bodies another measure of the little moisture that remained. Mouths felt dry from forced breathing of dry air, and, as they had now experienced several times on previous climbs, the thin atmosphere gave to their task a dreamy gloss so that the crunch of their steps in the lava trail seemed to come from a distance, like the soundtrack of a movie in which they were not the players but rather the audience, watching themselves in this slow plod.

Keep the pace, Frank told himself. Step, breath, breath, step.

Then he wondered, How much further?

Step, breath, breath, step.

And he thought, The register? Will it still be there?

Step, breath, breath, step.

What's that just ahead? A marker? And who's that? Dan Bass and Steve Marts? Good old Marts, there again with his camera filming Dick and me getting up another of the seven.

Step, breath, breath, step.

“Okay, wave your arms,” Marts yelled. “You're on the summit. Look excited!”

Frank grabbed Dick and gave him a bear hug. Emmett had already summitted earlier and passed them on his hurried way down, wanting to rejoin his family, who had forgone the last little section. Then Frank sat down to catch his breath. He was there.

“What a difference thirty years can make,” he told Dick when his breathing had slowed. “Damn, I feel great and last time I was here I was puking my guts out.”

“Yeah, Pancho, you're definitely getting stronger as you get older. Kind of doing things backwards.”

“But at least I’m doing them. That's what counts.”

Then he thought about the register. There was a small concrete block with a plaque on it, and he looked there first. There was no register but the plaque read:

“We the people of Tanzania would like to light a candle and put it on top of Mount Kilimanjaro to show beyond our borders, giving hope where was despair, love where was hate, and dignity where before there was only humiliation. Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere.”

Frank thought how it was a beautifully poetic marker to find on a summit, but tragically ironic in view of the poverty and political chaos they had observed in Moshi and Arusha.

But where was the register?

Frank scouted the summit area, looking under rocks. There was nothing.

“I didn't need it anyway,” he said to the others. “It's just as good as a memory.”

And what a memory.

Frank sat down again and scanned the savanna that stretched to the sky.

I never could have imagined, he thought to himself, when I was here last time. Never imagined all the stuff that's gone under the bridge these intervening years. All the great stuff.

The descent of the tourist track, or Kibo trail, was an easy but long plunge-step routine down wide slopes of volcanic sand. The Emmett kids made a game of it by racing ahead and reaching the base hut well before the adults. Word had preceded their arrival that a large group with two kids had climbed the Machame route, and now several of the hikers they encountered congratulated them.

Emmett, pausing to consider the age range and the inexperience of their party, said, “You know, it
was
a hell of an accomplishment.”

Back at the Kibo hotel they had a celebration dinner and discussed their next plan. They would fly back to Nairobi, from where part of the group, including Emmett's family and Dan Bass, had to return home. The rest of them—Frank, Dick, Marts, Emmett, Luanne, Marian—would fly to Copenhagen, where they would rendezvous with two additional team members, Frank Morgan and Peter Jennings, both friends of Emmett's. From there, as a complete team, they would continue to Moscow and then on to Elbrus.

Once again because of politics, to get out of Tanzania they flew a circuitous route to Addis Ababa, then back south to Nairobi, where they reunited with Luanne and Marian. In the Nairobi terminal Frank glimpsed a newspaper headline: “Russians down KAL 747, 269 feared dead.” The story had just broken and the report was brief, so in Copenhagen they asked their cab driver what he knew.

“Everybody knows it was one of your CIA planes. So the Russians shot it down. What do you expect?”

The hotel desk clerk said more or less the same thing. Next morning they rendezvoused with their other two teammates, Morgan and Jennings, and together discussed what to do. The
International Herald Tribune
made it clear it was not a spy plane, so now they were concerned a world boycott might cancel flights to Russia. They contacted the U.S. Embassy which, as usual, equivocated. They dialed the British Embassy and a counsular officer said they were advising their subjects not to travel to Russia. “Several flights have been canceled, and if you go, there is a good chance you will be stuck trying to get out.” Then they dialed the Russian Embassy and were connected to some gruff-sounding official with a two-pack-a-day voice.

“You have visa?”

“Yes.”

“You have plane ticket?”

“Yes.”

“Ahh, then, you go Russia!”

They were still uncertain if they should take the risk.

“Pancho, I’m glad you picked Elbrus for that first practice climb,” Dick said.

“That's easy for you to say. You climbed it. We jolly well
have to
go back.”

The women were less certain. As it was they were coming on the expedition knowing they would have to spend most of it waiting in the hotel at the base of Elbrus, but adding to that an indefinite extension in Moscow was too much to contemplate.

“Darling, I have only one consideration to add,” Luanne said to Frank, “and that is if we should get stuck in Moscow, you'll never hear the end of it.”

Morgan and Jennings said they didn't mind waiting an extra day in Copenhagen to see what happened. “We've got some shopping to do, anyway.” But Frank was adamant they should get to Moscow, and finally he swayed everyone to his way. They would leave the next day.

“Which means we better get our shopping done,” Morgan said to Jennings with a mischievous grin.

“What do you guys need to buy?”

“Lingerie.”

“What?”

“Brassieres and negligees,” Morgan said.

“And don't forget the black panties,” Jennings added with a demonic gleam. Luanne and Marian glanced at each other with the same look of dismay.

“What in the world?”

“For gifts,” Jennings said. “You know, the women in Russia have to be
starving
for that kind of stuff. I mean, they'll go
bananas
when they see it. I can just picture their sweet young faces now.”

“We'll be in like Flynn,” Morgan added wistfully.

Frank Morgan and Peter Jennings, both bachelors in their early forties, lived in Jakarta, where Morgan ran a law firm assisting foreign companies doing business in Southeast Asia and Jennings headed up Fluor Corporation's Indonesian operations. Any resemblance the pair might have had to normal business types, however, ended with their job descriptions. The two lived Somerset Maugham lives like in a South Seas idyll. They each had beautiful homes with full staffs (Morgan even had one servant whose only duty was to care for his parrot) and they shared a weekend pad in Bali on the sand at an exclusive stretch along Kuta Beach (where the young French tourist girls were always sunbathing topless) that was so exquisite it had been featured in
Architectural Digest.

Emmett had known Morgan since they were roommates at Harvard Law School, and it was there these two best friends had made a pact that every year or two they would try to get together for some kind of adventure. They had been impressively faithful to their resolution; in the last fifteen years they had been on two climbing expeditions to the Himalaya (including the Bicentennial Everest Expedition in 1976, where I had come to know both of them), ski trips to the Arctic, jungle mountaineering in New Guinea, and white water rafting on uncharted rivers in Borneo. When Emmett had been invited on Frank and Dick's Russia climb, then, he had asked if Morgan could come along, and Morgan had brought his partner-in-crime, Jennings.

When Morgan and Jennings returned from their shopping spree Emmett became concerned that the over $500 worth of lingerie the pair were trying to jam into their already stuffed backpacks might not make it through Moscow customs. In addition to the assortment of black lace panties and bras Emmett spotted something that looked like a deflated flesh-colored beach ball.

“What's this?”

“Our life-sized blow-up doll. Isn't she cute?”

She was also very X-rated.

“What are you going to do with her?”

“She's our climbing partner,” Jennings said. “We're going to leave her on the summit of Elbrus. It'll blow the Russians’ minds. Can you imagine the next group that comes up after us and sees her sitting there?”

Emmett could also imagine the Moscow customs getting ahold of her, so as much as he hated to dampen the fun he felt obligated to draw the line: lingerie, yes; blow-up doll, no.

He need not have worried, though. Just like in 1981, they were whisked through customs, and also like in 1981 they were greeted by the stainless-steel-toothed smile of Mikail Monastersky, the affable, vodka-loving head of the mountaineering division of the Soviet Union's All-Sports Federation, the same man who had hosted Frank and Dick on the last trip.

They loaded in a microbus for the drive to the hotel. On the way Frank leaned forward and asked Monastersky, “Do you have any news about the KAL disaster?”

“What is this?”

“The Korean airliner you guys shot down.”

“Oh, that. No, problem. Everything's okay.”

“Okay? The world is up in arms!”

Dick kicked Frank in the shin, but Frank wouldn't ease up.

“There's going to be a boycott of flights in and out of Russia. We might get stuck here!”

Waving his arm Monastersky said, “Oh, that will not happen.” Then, changing to what he seemed genuinely to believe was a more important topic, said, “Mr. Wells, we have everything taken care of for you. We are so happy you have returned to the Soviet Union, with so many of your friends. For this, we have decided to pay for all your expenses.”

Monastersky waited for the translator to finish, then using his own limited English said, “You climb in Soviet Union free!” He broke into a wide steel grin, wrinkling his already grizzled face. He lit another cigarette, and concluded, “So tonight eat dinner, make party, drink vodka!”

True to his word, the following day Monastersky had everything arranged. They toured Red Square, followed by an evening at the fabulous Moscow Circus. Part-way through the performance Jennings complained that an earache from an infection he had contracted two weeks earlier during an expedition in the interior of Borneo was hurting so bad he would have to excuse himself and go back to the hotel. (This was an expedition that I had organized and led to make the first direct coast-to-coast crossing of Borneo. We had started it only a few weeks after I had returned from Everest, and Jennings wasn't the only one who got sick; I nearly died from a severe bout of typhoid fever.) The interpreter who was accompanying them thought it might be better if they went to the hospital.