014 SCORCHING MIST RELOADED There is only a con, and it is deadly. There is an evil, scorching mist that has left Oliver half blinded, his skin chargrilled. But then again, he couldn’t care less: he is on a roll; he can summon the universe foundational milk and claim that he is the Mother and the Father cartographer of the Milky Way and the fucking Cosmos —let alone the Himalayas. By the end of the day, blinded, burnt and ever so smiley, Wheeler has mapped out over 20K square meters of territory, he has traced the gorges and the ravines, the hills, the whole picture is clear as day in his mind. By dawn, after nine months of analogue scanning and photographing, the job is done: he has drawn with insane accuracy the only way up to Mt. Everest: there is a sharp-edged pass carved by glaciers in the ridge connecting Mt. Everest and Changtse, in Tibet. It will be from now on and thanks to him the crucial base camp to the future routes to the summit, known as North Col. The Reward At dusk Wheeler finds himself a frozen spot, sets camp, lights a fire with yak dung, and grabs his 125 year-old Cognac flask. He hasn’t touched it for nine months. He wanted to share it with his fellow climbers. But to hell with it: he has just made history and he knows it; and he also knows that he is the only one who knows. Next thing he looks at the flames and feels so lonely, tiny, incongruous, lesser than a grain of crushed millet, the exact opposite of his ground-breaking achievement. He is emotional. He cries and laughs, he is the fundamental lonely idol and he knows that whatever he knows is on the brink of extinction. The shadow of the beast has already darkened the flames. The only light lives inside its mouth, a set of teeth replicating the Himalayas; then the sound, the symphony of a thousand predators abusing Beethoven. The rest is silence. Now Here, Kathmandu and Jomsom, Nepal, June 2025th. Last night, the Blunderer dragged me out of the mouldy luggage room where I have been kept since the Narcissist’s vanishing, and stuffed me on the back of his jeep, my lumbar pad splattered against the back window. What a careless beast: it felt like he had pawns instead of hands: I had never been lifted so effortlessly, and I kind of loved it in a pin-up backpack sort of way. The Blunderer drove for hours like a maniac through impossible dirt roads and deadly high passes, and even though I have never seen such ominous, stunning canyons or endless rhododendrons hanging like rainbow stalactites over the dizzying ditches; even though I wanted to be the first backpack to climb Mt. Everest alone, without a fucking human attached to my pad bra, I would rather not see those pink skies nor the neon birds and the menstruating clouds again, if this psychopath were to drive. The Blunderer was wearing latex gloves and a mask, and kept talking on speakerphone to a man whose voice sounded like a black hole abusing deaf metal. I kept my cool and resisted the impulse to crack the suffocating back window and slid through the same ravines and gorges that PadmaSambhava had purged —at least, according to the Narcissist or Matthiessen. I was ready to embrace eternity when the black hole voice said: “Turn left on the next junction, and then look for signs to Mutkinath temple. The Harper God and Rishi are hiding underneath it.” EPILOGUE, MUTKINAH, NEPAL, JUNE 2025 The Blunderer roars like a Mammoth and smells like a hundred tigers in a toilet. He parks at the edge of a cliff, gets out, and comes to the boot of the jeep. Only then do I realise that he is the same bushy animal that hit the Narcissist’s skull. He is larger than any other human mammal I have ever seen. The snowed peaks flooding the landscape are lesser than the tiny lights of a white Xmas tree sheepishly tracing a halo around his Minotaur head. Next thing, he opens his mouth: it feels like witnessing a landslide sweeping Everest and Annapurna, brushing the peaks of the Earth towards the base camp of his uvula, that appears to be dancing flamenco. I say my famous last words, a prayer to North Face, Patagonia and all the privileged brands that have improved the history of my carrierspecies better than my cheap Chinese manufacturer. I see George Mallory, Oliver Wheeler, Peter Matthiessen, George Schaller and Howard-Bury before I see nothing else. The rest is silence. (TBC)
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