The Descent

  ALSO BY JEFF LONG

  FICTION

  Angels of Light

  The Ascent

  Empire of Bones

  NONFICTION

  Outlaw: The Story

  of Claude Dallas

  Duel of Eagles:

  The Mexican and U.S.

  Fight for the Alamo

  Copyright © 1999 by Jeff Long

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Crown Publishers, 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland www.randomhouse.com

  CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Long, Jeff.

  The descent / Jeff Long.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3562.04943D47 1999

  813′.54—dc21 98-46829

  eISBN: 978-0-609-60702-2

  v3.1_r1

  FOR MY HELENAS,

  A CHAIN UNBROKEN.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is a fairy tale that writers are recluses quietly cohabiting with their muse. This writer, anyway, benefited from a world of other people’s ideas and support. Ironically, ascent informed important moments in The Descent’s genesis. The book began as an idea that I presented to a climber, my friend and manager, Bill Gross, who spent the next fifteen months helping me refine the story. His genius and encouragement fueled every page. Early on he shared the project with two other creative spirits in the film world, Bruce Berman and Kevin McMahon at Village Roadshow Pictures. Their support made possible my “re-entry” into New York publishing. There a mountaineer and writer named Jon Waterman introduced me to the talents of another climber, literary agent Susan Golomb. She labored to make the story presentable, cohesive, and true to itself. With her sharp eye and memory of terrain, she would make a great sniper. I thank my editors: Karen Rinaldi for her literary candor and electricity, Richard Marek for his dedicated grasp and professionalism, and Panagiotis Gianopoulos, a rising luminary in the publishing world. I want to add special thanks to my nameless, faceless copy editor. This is my seventh book, and I only learned now that, for professional reasons, copy editors are never revealed to writers. Like monks, they toil in anonymity. I specifically requested the best copy editor in the country, and whoever he or she is, my wish was granted. My deep appreciation to Jim Walsh, another of the hidden minds behind the book.

  I am not a spelunker, nor an epic poet. In other words, I needed guides to penetrate my imaginary hell. It was my father, the geologist, who set me roaming in childhood mazes, from old mines to honeycombed sandstone structures, from Pennsylvania to Mesa Verde and Arches national monuments. Besides the obvious and well-used inspirations for my poetic license, I’m obliged to several contemporary works. Alice K. Turner’s The History of Hell (Harcourt Brace) was stunning in its scope, scholarship, and wicked humor. Dante had his Virgil; I had my Turner. Another instructor of the underworld was the indispensable Atlas of the Great Caves of the World, by Paul Courbon. “Lechuguilla Restoration: Techniques Learned in the Southwest Focus,” by Val Hildreth-Werker and Jim C. Werker, gave me a “deeper” appreciation of cave environments. Donald Dale Jackson’s Underground Worlds (Time-Life Books) never quit amazing me with the beauty of subterranean places. Finally, it was my friend Steve Harrigan’s remarkable novel about cave diving, Jacob’s Well (Simon and Schuster), that truly anchored my nightmares about dark, deep, tubular realms.

  The Descent was informed by many other people’s work and ideas, too many to list without a bibliography. However, Turin Shroud, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince (HarperCollins), provided the basis for my own Shroud chapter. “Egil’s Bones,” by Jesse L. Byock (Scientific American, January 1995), provided me a disease to go with my masks. Unveiled: Nuns Talking, by Mary Loudon (Templegate Publishers), gave me a peek behind the veil. Stephen S. Hall’s Mapping the Next Millennium (Vintage) opened my mind to the world of cartography. Peter Sloss, of the Marine Geology and Geophysics Computer Graphics at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, generously displayed his state-of-the-art mapmaking. Philip Lieberman’s The Biology and Evolution of Language (Harvard) helped me backward into the origins of speech, as did Dr. Rende, a speech language pathologist at the University of Colorado. Michael D. Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code (Thames and Hudson), David Roberts’s “The Decipherment of Ancient Maya” (Atlantic Monthly, September 1991), Colin Renfrew’s “The Origins of Indo-European Languages” (Scientific American, October 1989), and especially Robert Wright’s “The Quest for the Mother Tongue” (Atlantic Monthly, April 1991) gave me a window on linguistic discovery. “Unusual Unity” by Stephen Jay Gould (Natural History, April 1997) and “The African Emergence and Early Asian Dispersals of the Genus Homo” by Roy Larick and Russell L. Ciochon (American Scientist, November–December 1996) got my wheels seriously spinning and led me to further readings. Cliff Watts, yet another climber and friend, guided me to an internet article on prions, by Stanley B. Prusiner, and gave medical advice about everything from altitude to vision. Another climber, Jim Gleason, tried his damnedest to keep my junk science to a minimum, all in vain I’m afraid he’ll feel. I only hope that my plundering and mangling of fact may pave some amused diversion.

  Early on, Graham Henderson, a fellow Tibet traveler, gave my journey direction with his observations about The Inferno. Throughout, Steve Long helped map the journey, both on paper and in countless conversations. Pam Novotny loaned me her Zen-like patience and calm, in addition to editorial assistance. Angela Thieman, Melissa Ward, and Margo Timmins provided constant inspiration. I am grateful to Elizabeth Crook, Craig Blockwick, Arthur Lindquist-Kliessler, and Cindy Butler for their crucial reminders of a light at the end of the tunnel.

  Finally, thank you, Barbara and Helena, for putting up with the chaos that finally came to order. Love may not conquer all, but happily it conquers us.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Book One: Discovery

  1: Ike

  2: Ali

  3: Branch

  4: Perinde Ac Cadaver

  5: Breaking News

  6: Dixie Cups

  7: The Mission

  Book Two: Inquisition

  8: Into the Stone

  9: La Frontera

  10: Digital Satan

  11: Losing the Light

  12: Animals

  13: The Shroud

  14: The Hole

  15: Message in a Bottle

  16: Black Silk

  17: Flesh

  18: Good Morning

  19: Contact

  20: Dead Souls

  Book Three: Grace

  21: Marooned

  22: Bad Wind

  23: The Sea

  24: Tabula Rasa

  25: Pandemonium

  26: The Pit

  27: Shangri-La

  28: The Ascent

  BOOK ONE

  DISCOVERY

  It is easy to go down into

  Hell …; but to climb back

  again, to retrace one’s steps

  to the upper air—there’s

  the rub.…

  —VIRGIL, Aeneid

  1

  IKE

  THE HIMALAYAS,

  TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION
/>
  1988

  In the beginning was the word.

  Or words.

  Whatever these were.

  They kept their lights turned off. The exhausted trekkers huddled in the dark cave and faced the peculiar writing. Scrawled with a twig, possibly, dipped in liquid radium or some other radioactive paint, the fluorescent pictographs floated in the black recesses. Ike let them savor the distraction. None of them seemed quite ready to focus on the storm beating against the mountainside outside.

  With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind and their yak herders in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food, Ike was relieved to have shelter of any kind. He was still pretending for them that this was part of their trip. In fact they were off the map. He’d never heard of this hole-in-the-wall hideout. Nor seen glow-in-the-dark caveman graffiti.

  “Runes,” gushed a knowing female voice. “Sacred runes left by a wandering monk.”

  The alien calligraphy glowed with soft violet light in the cave’s cold bowels. The luminous hieroglyphics reminded Ike of his old dorm wall with its black-light posters. All he needed was a lash of Hendrix plundering Dylan’s anthem, say, and a whiff of plump Hawaiian red sinsemilla. Anything to vanquish the howl of awful wind. Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl.…

  “Those are no runes,” said a man. “It’s Bonpo.” A Brooklyn beat, the accent meant Owen. Ike had nine clients here, only two of them male. They were easy to keep straight.

  “Bonpo!” one of the women barked at Owen. The coven seemed to take collective delight in savaging Owen and Bernard, the other man. Ike had been spared so far. They treated him as a harmless Himalayan hillbilly. Fine with him.

  “But the Bonpo were pre-Buddhist,” the woman expounded.

  The women were mostly Buddhist students from a New Age university. These things mattered very much to them.

  Their goal was—or had been—Mount Kailash, the pyramidal giant just east of the Indian border. “A Canterbury Tale for the World Pilgrim” was how he’d advertised the trip. A kor—a Tibetan walkabout—to and around the holiest mountain in the world. Eight thousand per head, incense included. The problem was, somewhere along the trail he’d managed to misplace the mountain. It galled him. They were lost. Beginning at dawn today, the sky had changed from blue to milky gray. The herders had quietly bolted with the yaks. He had yet to announce that their tents and food were history. The first sloppy snowflakes had started kissing their Gore-Tex hoods just an hour ago, and Ike had taken this cave for shelter. It was a good call. He was the only one who knew it, but they were now about to get sodomized by an old-fashioned Himalayan tempest.

  Ike felt his jacket being tugged to one side, and knew it would be Kora, wanting a private word. “How bad is it?” she whispered. Depending on the hour and day, Kora was his lover, base-camp shotgun, or business associate. Of late, it was a challenge estimating which came first for her, the business of adventure or the adventure of business. Either way, their little trekking company was no longer charming to her.

  Ike saw no reason to front-load it with negatives. “We’ve got a great cave,” he said.

  “Gee.”

  “We’re still in the black, head-count-wise.”

  “The itinerary’s in ruins. We were behind as it was.”

  “We’re fine. We’ll take it out of the Siddhartha’s Birthplace segment.” He kept the worry out of his voice, but for once his sixth sense, or whatever it was, had come up short, and that bothered him. “Besides, getting a little lost will give them bragging rights.”

  “They don’t want bragging rights. They want schedule. You don’t know these people. They’re not your friends. We’ll get sued if they don’t make their Thai Air flight on the nineteenth.”

  “These are the mountains,” said Ike. “They’ll understand.” People forgot. Up here, it was a mistake to take even your next breath for granted.

  “No, Ike. They won’t understand. They have real jobs. Real obligations. Families.” That was the rub. Again. Kora wanted more from life. She wanted more from her pathless Pathfinder.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” Ike said.

  Outside, the storm went on horsewhipping the cave mouth. Barely May, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. There should have been plenty of time to get his bunch to, around, and back from Kailash. The bane of mountaineers, the monsoon normally didn’t spill across the mountains this far north. But as a former Everester himself, Ike should have known better than to believe in rain shadows or in schedules. Or in luck. They were in for it this time. The snow would seal their pass shut until late August. That meant he was going to have to buy space on a Chinese truck and shuttle them home via Lhasa—and that came out of his land costs. He tried calculating in his head, but their quarrel overcame him.

  “You do know what I mean by Bonpo,” a woman said. Nineteen days into the trip, and Ike still couldn’t link their spirit nicknames with the names in their passports. One woman, was it Ethel or Winifred, now preferred Green Tara, mother deity of Tibet. A pert Doris Day look-alike swore she was special friends with the Dalai Lama. For weeks now Ike had been listening to them celebrate the life of cavewomen. Well, he thought, here’s your cave, ladies. Slum away.

  They were sure his name—Dwight David Crockett—was an invention like their own. Nothing could convince them he wasn’t one of them, a dabbler in past lives. One evening around a campfire in northern Nepal, he’d regaled them with tales of Andrew Jackson, pirates on the Mississippi, and his own legendary death at the Alamo. He’d meant it as a joke, but only Kora got it.

  “You should know perfectly well,” the woman went on, “there was no written language in Tibet before the late fifth century.”

  “No written language that we know about,” Owen said.

  “Next you’ll be saying this is Yeti language.”

  It had been like this for days. You’d think they’d run out of air. But the higher they went, the more they argued.

  “This is what we get for pandering to civilians,” Kora muttered to Ike. Civilians was her catch-all: eco-tourists, pantheist charlatans, trust funders, the overeducated. She was a street girl at heart.

  “They’re not so bad,” he said. “They’re just looking for a way into Oz, same as us.”

  “Civilians.”

  Ike sighed. At times like this, he questioned his self-imposed exile. Living apart from the world was not easy. There was a price to be paid for choosing the less-traveled road. Little things, bigger ones. He was no longer that rosy-cheeked lad who had come with the Peace Corps. He still had the cheekbones and cowled brow and careless mane. But a dermatologist on one of his treks had advised him to stay out of the high-altitude sun before his face turned to boot leather. Ike had never considered himself God’s gift to women, but he saw no reason to trash what looks he still had. He’d lost two of his back molars to Nepal’s dearth of dentists, and another tooth to a falling rock on the backside of Everest. And not so long ago, in his Johnnie Walker Black and Camels days, he’d taken to serious self-abuse, even flirting with the lethal west face of Makalu. He’d quit the smoke and booze cold when some British nurse told him his voice sounded like a Rudyard Kipling punchline. Makalu still needed slaying, of course. Though many mornings he even wondered about that.

  Exile went deeper than the cosmetics or even prime health, of course. Self-doubt came with the territory, a wondering about what might have been, had he stayed the course back in Jackson. Rig work. Stone masonry. Maybe mountain guiding in the Tetons, or outfitting for hunters. No telling. He’d spent the last eight years in Nepal and Tibet watching himself slowly devolve from the Golden Boy of the Himalayas into one more forgotten surrogate of the American empire. He’d grown old inside. Even now there were days when Ike felt eighty. Next week was his thirty-first birthday.

  “Would you look at this?” rose a cry. “What kind of mandala is that? The lines are all twisty.”

  Ike looked at the circle. It was hanging on t
he wall like a luminous moon. Mandalas were meditation aids, blueprints for divinity’s palaces. Normally they consisted of circles within circles containing squared lines. By visualizing it just so, a 3-D architecture was supposed to appear above the mandala’s flat surface. This one, though, looked like scrambled snakes.

  Ike turned on his light. End of mystery, he congratulated himself.

  Even he was stunned by the sight.

  “My God,” said Kora.

  Where, a moment before, the fluorescent words had hung in magical suspense, a nude corpse stood rigidly propped upon a stone shelf along the back wall. The words weren’t written on stone. They were written on him. The mandala was separate, painted on the wall to his right side.

  A set of rocks formed a crude stairway up to his stage, and various passersby had attached katas—long white prayer scarves—to cracks in the stone ceiling. The katas sucked back and forth in the draft like gently disturbed ghosts.

  The man’s grimace was slightly bucktoothed from mummification, and his eyes were calcified to chalky blue marbles. Otherwise the extreme cold and high altitude had left him perfectly preserved. Under the harsh beam of Ike’s headlamp, the lettering was faint and red upon his emaciated limbs and belly and chest.

  That he was a traveler was self-evident. In these regions, everyone was a pilgrim or a nomad or a salt trader or a refugee. But, judging from his scars and unhealed wounds and a metal collar around his neck and a warped, badly mended broken left arm, this particular Marco Polo had endured a journey beyond imagination. If flesh is memory, his body cried out a whole history of abuse and enslavement.

  They stood beneath the shelf and goggled at the suffering. Three of the women—and Owen—began weeping. Ike alone approached. Probing here and there with his light beam, he reached out to touch one shin with his ice ax: hard as fossil wood.

  Of all the obvious insults, the one that stood out most was his partial castration. One of the man’s testicles had been yanked away, not cut, not even bitten—the edges of the tear were too ragged—and the wound had been cauterized with fire. The burn scars radiated out from his groin in a hairless keloid starburst. Ike couldn’t get over the raw scorn of it. Man’s tenderest part, mutilated, then doctored with a torch.