#36 Three Circles of Hell
1) The Abyss of Nothing
‘Whiteout’, said one survivor. ‘Blackout conditions’, said another. A third man reported stumbling through ‘an abyss of nothing.’
These are escapees from the shoulder-high snow and flattening winds which hit theAnnapurna mountain trail unexpectedly last week, at the height of Nepal’s tourist trekking season.
Nearly 40 bodies have been recovered so far; but hundreds have survived – either snatched out of the snow by keen-eyed, sharp-clawed helicopter pilots, or straggling down the mountainside as best they could, clutching at straws which turned out to be guide poles trailing the way down to safety.
Down to the non-descript place where patches of snow give way to blotches of warm earth; and queues of bedraggled survivors look like they’re waiting for the Night Bus home.
Messy.
Yet how splendid it must have been to come down in the world; to re-enter a lower realm of relative comfort, largely as you left it.
When the trekkers went up, however, weren’t they saying goodbye to all that? Pristine, surely, is what they were after. Above the snow line: the absence of things; and theend of men.
‘Blizzard conditions where the ground became the same as the sky and it was difficult to see which way was up and which way was down’, as one survivor described them, are also the preconditions for the Inhuman Being which tourist-trekkies are sort of, kind of looking for – aren’t they?
They may not admit it, and perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it – safer to have said they were searching for the Abominable Snowman.
Whoever he is, they only wanted to touch the hem of his garment; but when the Nepalese weather turned unexpectedly absolute, last week’s search party found themselves draped and dying in it.
2) The Abyss of Everything
A hospital waiting room where there’s no need to wait – surely no such thing. But now there is, in Dallas. Patients have fled the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital after one man died there and two of his nurses contracted the Ebola virus.