Eighty-Nine

The old Sherpa often wonders what he would do with the mountain if he were in charge. Here an objection might be raised: what does he mean when he says in charge? How could he be in charge of a mountain? The phrase doesn’t have a hermetic meaning in this case. He means, without any big mystery, that he would be responsible for, and at the same time, the only one able to make, decisions about what happens on Mount Everest. Does a mountain meet the requirements for someone to be put in charge of it? What can be done with a mountain? Besides climbing it, of course. At this point, the old man would reply that the possibilities are infinite. He’d be exaggerating (because there aren’t that many), but he’d enumerate: the mountain could be closed to preserve it in its current state; the mountain could be commercially exploited in a thousand different ways; or it might be drilled in order to extract some mineral resource from it, might be transformed into the planet’s largest system of wormholes. Copper, silver, lithium – who knows what might be found? Or its usefulness for tourism might be enhanced: you could build four or five resorts… something big, with heated pools, Jacuzzis, timeshares… But, of course, all these possibilities seem atrocious to him.

So what would the old Sherpa do with the mountain if he were in charge? He has already decided: if he were responsible for Mount Everest, he would give it to the Sherpas. There’s nobody who’d take better care of it. Nobody better than us, he thinks. All the power to the Sherpas. He’d allow them to conduct tourism, hiking, whatever they’d consider appropriate. Hang gliding? Skiing? Sure, whatever the Sherpas decide. They’d never harm the giantess.

Of course – the old Sherpa qualifies – you would have to require of the tourists and of the Sherpas themselves that they comply with certain basic conditions, minimal infrastructural norms, maintenance of the environment, hygiene… But, in that case, again it seems apt to ask how a control system would be put in place in order to ensure that those elemental rules of coexistence in the mountain would be followed. Because there is always the possibility that the implementation of this utopia, of this phalanstery on high, might find itself blocked by negligence, by greed, by inefficiency, by simple, stupid spite. Thus it is necessary to establish a contingency plan, extra insurance in case someone breaches the pact. That much is obvious. But the old Sherpa has already figured it out: at the slightest incident, he would blow up the mountain with the largest load of dynamite in the history of the world.

If the young Sherpa knew of these ideas of the older man’s, he would reply with a dazzling smile: ‘Dynamite? How old-fashioned!’