Twenty-Two

Once established in the region of Tibet and Nepal, the Sherpa ethnic group began to gain intimate knowledge of the mountain. Exploring it, traversing it, subverting it. The group’s customs started to change. Having left behind bucolic nature, they became one with the steep slopes of the mountains. They even deconstructed Buddhism’s original sobriety to move towards a new theocratic version of the universe: more baroque, more imaginative, colourful. They peopled their religion with local deities and shamanic variations. Mount Everest, for instance, was called – against all phallocratic intuition – ‘the mother of the world’. The giantess. It was in these first centuries of inhabiting the Himalayan territories that the Sherpas developed a physiological ability to commune with that mineral resplendence. Since then, the mountain has alerted them to imminent danger. Such premonitions are experienced as a high-pitched buzzing that arises, inexplicable, over the range. They call it kan runu, or: the ear that cries.

It is not, it must be said, an infallible system. Neither of the two Sherpas, not the young one nor the old one, perceived even the slightest buzz at the critical moment when an Englishman stumbled over the edge of the mountain and, with nothing to mitigate his fall, crashed against the very ledge where, even now, his body lies ambiguous, disjointed but present, waiting for the situation to be defined in these its silent surrounds. If the thundering monochord whistling of the incessant gusts of air that cut through the high peaks of the Himalayas can be considered silence.

A silence, in short, similar to the one the young Sherpa will hear in a month when he steps on stage for the first time and, facing the darkness of his audience, is forced to pronounce the first line of Julius Caesar:

‘Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!’