Eighty-One

‘Did he move?’

The old Sherpa has just said something and is pointing downward while looking childishly at his young colleague. He thinks he might have detected something: a tremor, a slight tremor in the right leg of the fallen man. And he is like a little boy who thinks he might have seen, through the window, the hump of a camel on Epiphany. He is elated, wants to share what he knows, to corroborate it, but at the same time to preserve the exclusivity of his discovery. The young Sherpa wasn’t looking. He is incapable of answering.

‘Huh?’

‘I think he moved.’

The young Sherpa then peeks out again and sees the same eternal scene. A child of Great Britain stretched out on a rocky ledge, head pointing west, legs sketching the outline of a gabled roof ravaged by a storm. This vision, somehow, attenuates his previous judgments. Facing the materiality of the fallen body once more restores the situation to a more prosaic plane. The possibilities are binary again, without digressions. Alive or dead. Whatever it is, that body doesn’t move.

‘I don’t think so.’

He says it gently, cautiously, without any intention of causing pain. The old Sherpa absorbs the impact. He thought he saw a leg timidly breaking the stillness of the Englishman. But, all in all, what difference would that make? Everyone knows about cadaverous spasms and the final sprint of the chickens fêting their acephaly. It doesn’t add anything. It isn’t information, it’s white noise on the eardrum of the German radio operator in the middle of the bombing of Dresden.

‘I just thought that maybe.’

The old Sherpa says that and gets up as though he’s made a definitive decision. As though he were thinking of going straight back to his house now. With the attitude of someone who has resolved all matters in question and wants to move on. He gets up, takes a step back, dusts off his snow suit, stretches his legs. He gives the sense that he’ll initiate the descent this very instant. But first he looks at the young Sherpa, who – concessive – tells him:

‘Might have been the sun, a reflection. What about when it gets dark?’

Then, for a moment, silence dominates the path to the summit of Everest. If the furious race of monsoon winds blasting the outlines of the Nepalese mountain range can be considered silence.