"I like your style," said the business mogul. "Come to my Tokyo with me for a short holiday." The businessman wore a traditional black robe from the Shogun. John saw this offer as a way to see some more of the world. He accepted.

 "I climbed Mount Everest, and I want you to do the same," said the knight. "Try to join up with the territorial army after that. Although take care, mind, that you don't get tortured in a prison."

 "We owe you," said Aunty May. "You've a choice in how you would like to receive payment. You can take either the money or the tickets. You'll not see me after that." This was the start of a long road involving reservation fees, airplanes, orders and danger. 

  He first went to Otago and flew and manned some air force planes for a season. The work was maintenance, he tightened up petrol lines and checked that vents were clear. He took the co-pilots seat for a test flight of a small Russian Yak3 fighter plane. It’s simple and strong thrust elevated both his position and feelings. The Yak3 and several other classic types made up a fleet collection for the owners. Their company paid him wages for work in winter's frozen conditions.

 He took his holiday in Japan as soon as he could. The businessman had offered the trip while in Auckland but he met him at the Franklin Arm Airport. There was a private Lear jet there. They flew first class to Tokyo while sipping champagne. At Tokyo the man left him at a place which was not in the city but at a housing area next to a railway and a mountain. He said that he had some things to take care of and that Johnny would have to look after his own for a while. Johnny had no house to sleep in and did not want to trespass. He waited at the railway station next to a square concrete block building and a village. A group of young men and women gathered to say Konichiwa. He began translating the Gospel of Mark for them and they laughed. They shaved his head there to make him acceptable by the ritual.

 They demanded that he kneel at a specific place on the floor in a cubicle in the concrete building. Hands clasped together in front, back straight, and feet bent. They claimed that this was in preparation to meditate. His position was beneath a constant slow drip of water. This drip tapped him on the top part of the back of the head, and there he stayed captive. 

 He slept overnight on a trestle in the cubicle. The constant slow drip of water sounded on the wet floor as he lay supine all night. The ideals of religion broke under the rigors of torture. He could understand now how the Shogun had earned their reputation. The endurance of the sensation and the sound melted his idea of God. Repetition breaks and reforms the mind. It confirmed legends he had heard of the water torture wielded against people in prisons in the past. The next day the young villagers met him with breakfast brought on a plate. A simple recipe of bacon and eggs cooked in butter with maple sauce. He felt like he had never tasted it before.

 He was grateful, though sore. That day he walked through the forest on the side of the mountain and ended up coming to its summit. It was misty up there, and the mountain had a curved ridge at the peak which described a broad flattened U shape. He dubbed the mountain with a personal name.

 In years to come when he happened to return he went to the same mountainside. He saw forest clearance and a transformation of the land to a water station and an observatory. By a map of the area he saw that it had retained the same simple name which he as a boy had given it on his morning jaunt. At the age of seventeen, the first time he was there, he walked down again through the trees. The host in his black gown was at the railway station waiting for him. His face screwed in anger at the young man’s absence. While exploring, Johnny had kept him waiting. He explained that he had been for a walk to have a look around.  

 "Have a look around?" said the mogul. "I will have a look around your ass. Then I will pay you and let you go, because it is obvious that you cannot keep an arrangement." 

 He wrestled the veteran's trousers down and sodomized him. Then he put a thousand folding yen into his victim's hand. "That’s the way I like you young Westerners, in a toilet where you belong," he said.

 Johnny felt ashamed and angry. He took the money and caught the train across the districts of the city of Tokyo. The businessman rode away in a black chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

 Johnny leaned back on the plastic seat in the carriage. He saw crowded, stinking and noisy streets. Their residents had as much space for themselves as a dog would have for itself in a kennel. The air reeked of cigarettes and opium and grease. Skyscrapers were like the vertical walls of canyons and the life at the bottom was like a flood. The train emerged from central and the line ended at a sea side district. He alighted when he saw a painted temple.

 At a buffet restaurant he filled his belly on sushi and rice and beans for a good price. It was there he met a Western woman and her father. They said that they would rather not have to go to Japan for any reason but that business took them there each year. Together they admired the rock pool and bamboo in the ornamental garden by the temple.

 When they parted ways Johnny walked to the coast. Above a stone beach, noblemen’s wives rested and stared like statues. The colour and symmetry of their kimonos was a visual pair with the paint and regularity of the temple. But he had to go home so he walked into the peacekeepers office and explained his case. The human rights worker there granted him immunity. He received a letter and with it he caught the return train to the travel district. He purchased a ticket to Sydney. From there he boarded a freighter with a cabin ticket. He made his sleepy way back to Otago as a survivor of child trafficking.

 Now that he was living away from home, he could focus on the next offer. The knight had not so much requested as demanded this. Johnny felt as though he had no choice in the matter. He prepared his alpine clothes and equipment for a part in one of the ultimate follies.

 The knight had gone to great lengths to select a team of youngsters. He and his associates had made the arrangements necessary for a guided expedition. All Johnny knew when he left his room and went to the Franklin Arm Airport was that he was going to Asia. The highest mountain was somewhere in the back of his mind. He wanted to see it.

 The Air Force Hercules airplane had its engines on idle. Two officers in their blue uniforms stood talking to two of the airport staff. Six teenage children with backpack luggage waited with Johnny. Over the course of an hour six more arrived. Johnny had met only a couple of them but then only in passing and he did not know them well. He had a check for the passage price and he handed it to the pilots. A pilot instructed the hostesses to collect all the checks and cash from the passengers. A hostess went into the terminal building. She changed all the money into Indian Rupees and came back with a cash bag. She handed this to a pilot.

 A fifteen-minute wait. The pilots ordered the passengers to board. They walked in single file up the ramp at the back into the green hull of the plane. A soldier strapped bags into cargo nettings. They waited and received a lecture on safety instructions. The engines increased their internal spin rate in preparation for flight. Passengers and crew strapped themselves into the front control and rear passenger seats. Then the propellers screamed into activity and wheels turned. Propulsion directed the C-130 along the runway. In the pressurised cabin, Johnny could not detect its velocity. Increasing pace pushed them all back into their seats. With a great leap, the point of contact with the land vanished and the plane flew into God's air. Johnny experienced a maddening alteration to his perception. He realised that he was aloft on one of the greatest adventures of his life. The small lights of the town below them passed. They rose over mountain passes and fiords and through clouds which darkened and fell.  

 The plane flew on in the dark of night with passengers and crew quiet. John fell asleep in his hard bucket seat. After ten hours of this the huge workhorse machine started descending. The pilots used their radio communications to arrange a landing at Singapore. It landed safe and quiet for a refuelling and a two-hour engine rest. They also collected four more aspiring climbers. Here the passengers were not allowed out of the plane. They stretched their limbs and refreshed by walking along the floor of the hull. By the time this was over they had all introduced themselves to each other and had started to bond in a team. They were all young, being beneath the age of twenty-three years. They were from diverse Kiwi backgrounds. Some farmers, some college students, and others were mountain guide staff. A few knew each other since before the flight. All felt intrigue at their journey into Asia and keenness to see and touch the mother of all mountains. The plane revved again and thrust forward and up for its last leg to India.

 John did not know where their next reconnoitre point was. They landed again at an airstrip in the mighty Himalayan foothills in Northern India. In a pink sky and hugged by the warm air they swapped craft and got into a smaller jet. This plane was to travel twice the route to Kathmandu. Being smaller than the air force transporter, it needed to do the route twice there and back again. Its assignment involved an excess of passengers and gear. An Indian pilot knew the route ahead. The two blue-uniformed pilots retired here and handed over their mission authority. Internal air pressure took less time to achieve in this smaller jet. It was quieter than the last vehicle which caused it to have a feeling of greater safety than the last. It was all ahead to the lost kingdom.

 The pilot achieved a reasonable landing on the treacherous airstrip. The landing strip at the Tenzing-Hillary Airport is dangerous. For this, it rates in the worlds' top ten. Only the Indian pilot could negotiate it, while the Kiwi pilots did not attempt. The runway perches at the top of a series of steep and far drops in the mountain sides. The approach to it requires a curve, there being no long straight approach. Instead there is a narrow dodge between mountains as the pilot aims his plane towards the runway. He must avoid mountainsides above the drastic valley below. Once he has attained a successful line the pilot must use acute visual skills to land on the strip. Yet he cannot land far beyond the first edge thus to make the aim safer. This is because the runway is short and the plane needs to take length to slow to a stop before it reaches the far end. So there is an acute assessment to make in the air as the plane comes down fast towards the airport. Only an experienced professional can do this without killing them all aboard. 

 At Kathmandu the air is thin. The expert pilot with the jet returned across the mountains to collect the second group. Meanwhile John and his companions had orders lie flat on simple cots from three whole days. They did this to acclimatize to the thin air. The body is a whole in its workings of lungs heart and brain and kidneys as they filter the blood. They must adjust to a lesser intake of oxygen in every breath. It can do this by increments and as long as there is no effort required. So while they gasped for breath and fainted, they lay down. Their cots were in a mud and brick hut with an open doorway in the centre of the town. It was next to the most holy artefact in the town, and that is the Buddha’s turning wheel shrine.

 The Buddha’s turning wheel shrine is the most important religious structure in Nepal. Standing in the centre of Kathmandu, it is a circular dome sixteen feet high. This stupa has spinning cylinders around the outside at shoulder height. These cylinders contain or represent scriptures about enlightenment and potential reincarnations. The act of walking around the stupa and turning the cylinders with one’s hand as you pass releases your karma. Thereby it generates better prospects for one's rebirth into the future.

 As Johnny and his companions lay down in the room next to this structure, the townsfolk would pass. They would rattle the cylinders by turning them as they passed. Of course he and the other Westerners, once they had regained some strength did the same. This introduced them to the mysteries of attitude and effort towards enlightenment. This pleased the resident lama in the market square there. People would approach them and touch their arms with the open palms of their hands. The attitude was pleasing, but the language was incomprehensible to either party. English does not translate well into Nepalese.

 The team acclimatized and enjoyed the hospitality for a week. Their meals were rice and mung beans mixed with hard dry bread. They rested and prayed. When resting they wrapped themselves in their coats and scarves and rugs to keep warm. They slept until they felt stronger. Their prayers involved walking around the central stupa and turning its wheels. 

 He could hardly believe that he would be challenging the earth's highest mountain. The spell of weakness did not compare well to a gruelling mountain climb. But truth is stranger than fiction.

 The time came to leave the cheerful kingdom capital. They kitted their bags. All their gear had to fit into backpacks. This included rope, breathing apparatus, foodstuffs with gas for cooking, pots and trays. Tents, sleeping bags, thin mattress rolls, medicine, shovels, extra clothing and lights. The most complex type of equipment was the climbing ascent metal gear and rope.

 They carried five two-hundred feet lengths of rope between twelve climbers. Each climber received their gear. A set of crampons, an ice axe, six karabiners, a harness, hammer, ten ice screws, six long slings, a descending clamp. With God’s luck all attached to the loops in their harnesses in the form of the Infant of Prague idol. They also carried red, green, blue and yellow coloured flags given to them by the lama. It was all almost too heavy and his legs felt like clay under the weight.

 Johnny hoped that high altitude affected gravity in his favour. If only it reduced the weight of all this equipment when raised onto his back. He had no such luck. 

 But there was some fortune. There were fewer tents, shovels, medicine kits and double body sleeping bags. This reduced the load amongst the number of persons. There were still extra oxygen bottles and mask devices to tie to straps on the outside of the backpacks. Even with the savings, the whole range of gear was a most unwelcome load. It was the kind of labour one wanted to sacrifice the weight of food for. To put that aside to make the load lighter, but without food they could not work.

 "Look on the bright side," they remarked, "As we go further by every day the food load will become lighter, and so will the gas." One thing that they could not afford to lose was each person’s thermal gloves and mittens. To climb without these things would result in the loss of the use of a hand or fingers. The chill of sub-zero temperature does not forgive.

 So out of the town locale they did tramp. They followed a rising trail through farmland and rice paddy and into the wild mountains. They walked like exiles.

 The first part of the walk was the most frustrating. They went higher and higher up mountainsides whose peaks were out of sight. They could see only the ridges of false summit as the hillsides curved way from sight. They meandered for three days through the agricultural district. Rice paddy and goat fodder changed to banks of ice and snow. When arriving at the ice trek for true, this led across a pass and into a glacial basin.

 Now he had warmed to the exercise and felt lighter and more limber and had eased to the weight of the load he carried. Here they tied the metal spiked crampons onto their boots. They moved on slower in less visibility through cloud to the pass. John was at the head of the group when they came to the top of the ascent. A level plain dropped downwards to the glacier basin. A guide was there somewhere in the white wasteland waiting to meet them.

 John was first to meet him. He was a tall man standing alone on a snow field in the fog. He wrapped head and neck in a scarf and hat and he had been listening through an ear horn phone to the kid’s approach. This horn phone was a simple curved tube which required no extra source of energy to work it. Holding it up to his ear, the man could hear noises from afar as the tube amplified them.

 "Hello," he said. "I knew you were coming. I’d been listening to you. My name’s Bill. Bill Scout. Where are the others? The weather’s calm. It’s good for a successful attempt. We’re in a weather window which might last for the next three weeks. God has been kind. How are you feeling? We’ll wait here for everyone and then climb. It’s a way to first base. Conserve your energy mate." 

 In pairs sixteen climbers gathered around the place where the guide waited. The place was not marked or significant, it was a nondescript level of snow. They began to walk up the snowbound glacier. This was a simple enough exercise due to the coverage. The winter snow falls had compacted into and covered over many of the crevasses. The weather window they had met was in the Nepalese early summer which affords three weeks of calm. It comes after spring avalanche collapses of gathered shelves and walls of snow and ice. 

 The group toiled on up the white ramp of the glacier. They reached a place where it diverged into a steeper slope on the mountain’s south face. At some points they could jump or tool across a crevasse, or walk over it on a snow bridge. If it was too large then they placed the guide's ladder across its gaping top. They were like miniatures in a colossal landscape.

 A snow bridge forms over a gap when a snowfall joins and forms a structure like a plug. The combined snow has a crystalline friction. They are generally strong enough to carry weight. This allows a group of people to walk straight across them. Previous parties of climbers had passed under Bill Scout's guidance. They had screwed and lashed long horizontal ladders over near and far vertical edges. Snow bridges had collapsed during the recent spring thaw. The grown children and their team leader clambered over these load-bearing structures. Together they made a very good pace up the glacier and to the steep climb of the mountainside itself.

 The leader directed them to a ledge on an ice wall where they could place first camp. This rest he found welcoming as it came after three days and two nights of tramping and toiling. All previous sleeping points had been set down for shorter times of rest than at this ledge. They used shovels to flatten an area and ramp its edges. Four coloured red and blue tents fit onto it. The senior guide used his own tube-shaped yellow tent to recline in. 

 A first gas bottle provided a meal of potato and beef with extra chamomile tea. The time allocated here for sleep was generous. Ten hours went by as if Johnny did not even notice it passing until in the early dawn glow a sound rang out. The empty bottle had doubled as a gong. They reassembled, pulled cold boots onto feet and rolled bags away. They packed down the tents and cutlery for the coming day.

 The ascent up the mountain's south face is difficult. It is icy and steep and vertiginous with many small divergences in its route. Many times during the ascent the climbers in his team knew fear in individual and shared amounts.

 Complex exchanges of safety gear from one hand to the other as clips hooked. Ice axes and crampons were thrust and swung into the wall. Gain a tense hold in a chipped hole, hammers rung loud and dull on pitons one at a time at the top of the team.

 Minutes taken waiting for leaders to fasten sling to piton to rope. Slow, one by one each climbing partner inched their way upwards. Advice and orders given, taken and received in the first half of the day broke down to simpering shouts at its end. Three stops made for muesli bars and cocoa to keep stamina.

 The rear climber cleaned all the gear off the face. After everyone else had passed the fastening points this gear was slung back up to those at the lead to use again. All the way to second base they crimped in one day which lasted for thirteen hours of exertion. The cloud covered them all by height in area. So there was nothing to see beyond the fingers and feet of their companions. Still Johnny could imagine, in the silence and obscurity, Sisyphus laughing.

 The guide divided second camp for rest into two levels. Here the lot of them could only fit on the mountainside if they occupied two areas nine meters apart. Sleep involved the risk of a plunge off these small ledges and into the heights below them. But sleep they did if only for a brief time before rising again to eat and talk. 

 The sound of speech was quieter here than in the low lands. Being thin, the air carried voices with less amplitude. To hear the other, one must listen with a simple unpretentious attitude. This increased his awareness of presence, as though a meditation progressed.  

  They remarked through oxygen masks how lucky they were. Their individual selection for a part in this expedition was a surprise and a privilege. But speech is costly at high altitude, it saps strength. Their conversation soon simplified to hand gestures and eye contact only.

 Electric headlamps attached to their helmets lent them vision. They continued their punishing crimp and haul upwards to the level col at the top of the face. There was a difficult turn in the route on a seventy-degree incline. Lead gear placed first going in one direction and then demanding a sharp turn. It was here that a girl could not perform the necessary adjustments, and slid away. 

 Johnny’s heart was in his mouth. He saw that she had lost her traction and fallen. Gravity took her to the end of the rope. Attachments pulled on their tension. The girl's screams matched spoken demands from above. It took minutes for the scared lady to climb back up to the line. She moved ahead of the person in front of her so to make her place safer. Invoking the names of Krsna, she exhausted her emotions in the effort. She kicked back in, and the ice held this time.

 The effort required in the extreme climate had exhausted and drained her emotions. This same exhaustion happened to more than only her in the team. It affected seven of the young people on the mountain. It is such an exhaustion that causes the person to become lethargic and confused. Combined with the fear, they were in no shape to attempt to climb or make decisions. They found it too difficult.

 Before that occurs, it is better to foresee it by recognizing the first signs. It can lead to a frightening and threatening situation. But still Scout had to persist to bring them up to a safer point. At the level point which is the col the lead sent eight people down the way they had come. This is how the climbing team of sixteen plus a guide became a party of eight plus the guide.

 They slept for another brief time at the col and then at first light left their tents where they were. They pressed on for another concerted effort towards the south peak of the mountain. The terrain was hard ice formations and allowed little grip. They kicked crampons in three times at each step. The weather allowed an ascent to the peak.

 Johnny had carried a unique device with him. It was a small video camera which weighed four kilograms. He had bought new in Queenstown before he had flown away with the air force. When they were at the top he switched it on and documented the achievement. This footage became the substance of the claim to a minor record after he returned to his home country.

 At the top he had to change oxygen cylinders. The bottle he was breathing from through his mask had run empty. He had one in reserve to screw in to the valve socket for his air. To do this, he detached the used with an intent to screw in the new. At the time when his mouth-pipe had no cylinder on it, he breathed. The wind from his lungs rushed out in a cascade into the low pressure atmosphere. His mind became very dull and his vision became blank. A young woman attached the second bottle for him while he was standing at a staggering lean. He breathed in again and his senses returned and he steadied his legs.

 The view from the peak was not tremendous and as awe-inspiring as some of the famed pictures seen of this. Books and videos show superb photos of climbers standing at the top of the world. They display ranges of immense mountains at thrilling heights over yawning valleys. This is not what the young Kiwis saw or captured by camera.

 A still white cloud had immersed them throughout the climb. It clung to them like a shroud and obscured any far vision. It afforded them to see little but for the ice in front of their hands and feet. The closest arms and legs of their fellow climbers had been their distance measures. So this is what the camera recorded, and that is what the critics saw when the replay video returned home.

 He raised his short ice axe in an arc swinging from a hand and said his name. The achievement was a great, unreal suffering. The lack of sensation there was worse than being aboard a submarine. Still, the national television station took his footage. It became the subject of a ‘Life, Be in It’ advertisement. Whenever he saw it he felt a thrill for a rare achievement, yet something else. At the same time there was the knowledge of slander, torture and exploitation. If he was a volunteer, then he would deserve recognition. He had a notion of unresolvable anger. 

 There was another thing with the video. It was special-effects capable.  It put onto the images on the cassette tape at the top right in every frame a red lettered label 'SP FX'. This caused debate amongst the doubters who saw it on whether he had reached any peak or been to Everest at all. Sceptics told him many times to his face that he had not done it. People derided him in social circles. An erosion of defamation had begun. 

 Although there was a reasonable side to this. Since the camera was a SP FX camera, the refute was only logical. It was the only camera light enough which he could afford to buy. The red label may as well have read 'fake', this would have meant the same thing to those who saw it. He could have as much manufactured the footage in a studio as go there and climb up the mountain.

 At that time and place, no such attacks had begun. It was not the constant discrediting of his actions which bothered him there. The climbers and he were standing on Everest's second peak. They had to deal with immediate problems. The altitude at twenty-eight thousand seven hundred and four feet complicates things. The equipment and balance and the chill weather, how these three things affected them. It involved the nine people on the summit in survival. Coupled with feelings of elation and fear, they were otherwise alone. Yet since nobody except them knew that they were there at that time, nobody could complain.

 It was only when the news got out to this miserable world so full of vicarious people that the criticism begun. It seemed that everybody could have a go at him. From radio disk jockeys to stay at home mammas to angry politicians. World record or no world record, they all felt as though they must deny the facts of this climb.

 This group mentality of predator and prey added defamation. Even after he had staked everything on the team efforts, they painted him seen as an immoral liar. This mentality is in herding, in bashing, hysteria and unanimous blame. They crucified Jesus in a similar manner.

 A Swiss climbers team had visited the peak before the Kiwis. They left a set of skis with bindings and poles buried in the snow. These aided the descent. Although most of them followed the same route together, Johnny had other ideas. On camera, he dropped off a two-thousand-foot high overhang of ice. He landed on the snow and slowed then traversed. To get to the north base camp he must traverse Lhotse alone.

 This was no small thing to achieve and it posed a serious logistic risk. There followed the necessary traverse of Lhotse is another one of the world’s greatest mountains and one in the series of peaks in the Everest massif. It is also the steepest. The advantage of calm weather was lasting according to predictions.  He crossed it alone with a compass and an altimeter to guide him.

 His traverse was necessary. He had abandoned the guide and the team at the south col. He did this because he had not seen yet all the features of this great mountain range. 

 The whole operation took him six days to complete. He became lost three times. He retraced his steps sixteen times. He did this to become oriented again but also to avoid precipitous cliffs of ice. He travelled parallel style on the skis. He passed over immense white fields of old crystal blown and packed by the ages’ winds. Ice encrusted into cliffs and cornices of mystical proportions. 

 It was obvious that the mountain had been there forever. Alone he crossed deadly overhanging ice walls. He trekked above and across risky looking avalanche faces. He slept in his tent and bag and drank lukewarm water boiled up on his primus and mixed with chamomile tea and honey. He burnt up in leg grind all the carbohydrates that a little muesli provided him.

 He kept close to twenty-one thousand feet height and plotted his course. He changed direction around and across to southern and to the eastern and then about to the northern. Creaking ice and gushing wind broke the profound silence. On the eighth day he fell into a state of slumber that entailed a discussion with a young man with ragged black hair.

 He saw directions explained to him by this character. A rimed ice formation nestled high up beneath an overhang. "The guides think they’re people," had said the unusual stranger. When Johnny approached the formation it did seem to be old standing remains. They were all encrusted over and obscured by wind pack. Three previous adventurers had not survived their expedition. The permanent winter had mummified them in ice.

 He realized that he could be the next person to receive this fate, and skied away from the gorgons. Turning downhill, he put distance between him and this premonitory vision. As he turned he knew that he must come back to his senses. To do this he employed the only and closest source of morale that he had, and that was his voice. So away he went swearing at the top of his voice.

 He intended each curse to bring his own senses and wits back around. It substituted the absence of conversation he had experienced in his vigil sojourn. He shouted into the dumb wilderness and the distances swallowed his voice. 

 It was then that he encountered three actual other mountaineers. They trekked uphill in black overalls. They were on the same wide ridge which Johnny was descending. One expressed relief while three expressed surprise upon the meeting. The party had left the north base camp less than a day ago and was set to climb the mountain they were on. They expressed some hope at the accomplishment. The trio advised the loner that his destination was after their trail.

 So the way ahead became a reverse follow of the party’s tracks. Johnny rounded about a rocky ridge in the mist and came to another descent. He then walked unencumbered and unannounced into the jumbled tent and trash village. The north base of Everest camp sprawled like a poor disaster. 

 The camp occupants saw him walk out of the white wasteland of the other mountainside. He saw a relative security in this mimicry of civilisation. They did not know who he was or where he was from and why he was there and they did not know whether he was human or not. When he came closer to them they saw that he was a man. He entered the area where tents had been set up and three men had assembled.

 The three were older than him and told him to go away. A woman called to him from a distance to do the same. A man entered a tent and came out of it holding a rifle. Johnny told them that he had a booking. They told him that he hadn’t and told him to leave. He refused to go anywhere else.

 He said that if they shot him they would only have an injured and dying man on their hands. He reminded them of a crime called murder. They discussed the possibilities of shooting him to injure. They said that they would leave him in his tent alone to survive. He told them that if they did that he would die and it would still be a murder.

 It was then that a woman came close to the challengers and claimed human rights for the new young stranger. She told the maniac with a rifle to put it away.

 With the nod from his companion, the man with the rifle went back to his tent. The woman who had asserted human rights instructed. She told Johnny to assemble his tent at a distance away from the rest of the mess. She asked him if he had oxygen and he said yes. She asked him what he was there to do and he said "climb". She asked him where he had come from and he told her.

 "The Siachen glacier and the south col. I have climbed the south peak and traversed Lhotse. I come here alone across that next mountain and I am tired. I was in a team of children guided by Bill Scout and stayed for the climbing. I had permission to come here by the first man to climb before leaving New Zealand. I have to find something, something big, an animal. No-one has seen it since the nineteen fifties and the knight searched for it in the sixties. He didn’t find it and he has sent me. Can I stay?"

 "It sounds as though that madman's a slaver. No-one here has ever heard of him. Since you're a child, you can stay at a distance. Bear in mind, if you can, that everyone considers you an insane trespasser. We have one rule around here, and that's 'Not My Nation'," she said.

 "Some climbers say that those animals are all figments of the imagination. When individuals' hypothermia causes personal vision. Some of the native local Nepalese and Tibetans believe that they are real and dangerous. Check around the tents around the camps at the empty bottle storage piles. There are sometimes noises of beings at night. stealing things. There's nobody here who needs to steal, but what’s the point. It's unusable trash."

 "I'm a professor and more interested in extra-terrestrials than yetis. We're trying to find a friendly civilisation, and those animals are dangerous. If you want to get ripped apart, then look for them. It's simple. One woman in my lifetime said that she had seen one when she investigated the noises. But you can't meet her now because she's gone. And they proved that it was an hallucination caused by snow. You ought to try research the history of this area during the war. There were no persons here, only those things. Limb from limb, kid," she said.

 "That's all interesting but not particularly practical. It helps even so," he said. He needed the advice of the locals. He had already learned some basic Nepalese and Tibetan languages. He'd had lessons in his home country.

 There were twenty-six people in the camp when he had arrived. While he stayed another thirty-three persons trekked in from along the glacier. The sixty persons who were there included a team of sixteen Sherpa. These people had the ultimate authority in the camp and on any of the climbs. Consideration and advice by the Sherpa effected any judgments and decisions undertaken. An expedition could proceed only when they approve it.

 Four Sherpa had watched the approach and entrance of Johnny into the camp. They were aware of his presence and intentions. A few words with them in their language exchanged a conversation. They demanded proof that the first climber had sent him. Johnny provided a spoken reference of the madman. The four Sherpa decided that he could do no harm if he stayed in the camp.

 They prescribed him a place in a team of an ascent of the Khumbu ice fall. They would arrange a later journey to find the yetis. Johnny’s career had taken a staggering leap forward in field anthropology.

 The ascent went well. He climbed the three-mile high cracked and jumbled vertical ice wall in a team of six. It ends in a rest at the south col. He felt once there that he had returned to a significant point in his life time adventure. He could now say that he had solo traversed the mountain called Lhotse. He had pioneered an atypical route. He was the youngest in the team. Ten days ago he had become the youngest of those who have summited ever on the south peak. His athletic seventeen-year-old body was match fit and he had the better part of his whole life ahead of him.

 Even so, the strangest outcomes of his life story had yet to unveil. Though with the anonymity of such secret achievements in the naval service. And by the remote pursuits he had accomplished in the Himalayas.

 The ascent of the jumbled ice cliff went well and it was exciting. They did it for fun. After this they visited the monastery at Thyanboche. They entered and waited together. They endured a hermit recluse inside the building. They stayed for a little time. 

 The monastery is a lodge of one level and it is dark inside. There are no windows and only one door. It has cots and oil burning cooker and a lavatory made of kerosene tin inside. Blankets cover the walls so to keep heat. Its years of occupancy have left a greasy stain throughout.  It is cool inside the monastery. Their words left thin rims of ice on the scarves around their mouths as they talked. Here a gathering sat and conversed about each other’s life time plans ahead. The world was beneath them and they prayed for insight and guidance in the years ahead.

 The few boiled a large wok full of fried rice and beans and shared with their companions in preparation. They voted to leave the shelter and venture out again. The mythical animal had eluded the attentions of the world so far. From there they were to go to another range with a team of scouts to find the beast. The Sherpa assembled a team. 

 They left the Changtse bazaar and trekked away. Down the valley and past three minor ranges with five mountains of terrain towards Tibet. The purpose was to find the monsters in their habitat. A camp established up on the side of a mountain and John continued past this and to the ridge at the peak. He had radio contact support from the team in the camp. By this time the weather had become sleet driven on by high wind and visibility was poor.

 Directed by instruction guided to him by radio. He found a large rectangular concrete plinth which had a steel fitting fastened into it. The plinth was on the ridge top and at the top entrance of a rock canyon which split the mountain in two. Johnny clipped a karabiner to the steel fitting and attached a sling to this. He threaded his rope through that. He put the rope through the huit on his harness and descended by abseiling alone into the canyon.

 He noticed the dim midday light in the blizzard outside dulled to a calm gloom. Rough natural rock walls surrounded his route down. The rope was one hundred and sixty meters long. Doubled up it could carry him eighty meters downwards before he had to land on the rock and grip it. Twice he hammered in pitons and tied slings. The slings joined them with a karabiner to form an anchor point for the next section of the descent. After three lengths of the rope descent he reached the uneven floor of the canyon. Which split the mountain in two and he was within a forgotten deathly womb of mother earth.

 He was standing on slabs of broken rock which could be leapt across them from one to another as a path. When he had been on the last length of his descent he had passed a decayed anchor assemblage. Someone had put it there and used it and left it behind years ago. So he was not the first adventurer to have passed this way. The cave had not been before unvisited. 

 He jumped and walked along the path of rock until daylight reached through the cracks. It enlightened the scene and as he came out of the gloom of shadow he saw the creatures. They were nine feet tall and stood on two legs and covered with a mat of dirty grey hair. Shaped like half man half ape with feet and hands and faces. The hair on their hides was long and stringy and formed hanging wisps from their backs and chests and limbs. Their feet had thick leather soles and had five toes each with grey cuticles. Their hands had long fingers with three joints and a thumb each and on them the cuticles formed claws.

 The faces on them were like those of a simian with jaws and lips and noses. Two eyes each and beneath the mat of hair on their heads were two ears. He walked through the place where six of them also walked.

 The creatures milled about within the canyons rock block walls. A low rock work wall stood around the habitat. Whether hewn by human hand or ape or both he could not discern. Coloured nylon strings tied to the gaps between the blocks. Empty cans and metal bottles hanging from them. The yetis hit these and rattled them to make noise of a rhythmical and tonal nature.

 The creatures while doing this also grunted. They made small cooing sounds from their mouths. These noises formed the basis of a primitive music.

 John's equipment had a cassette tape recorder with a microphone. He placed this on the ground and in it captured the sounds which the animals made. For forty-five minutes he crouched next to the creatures. While they intoned this unusual behaviour.

 When he returned home he gave the cassette tape to a radio network station. His recording of the yeti orchestra was sometimes replayed to a listening audience. It was first received as an interesting and original composition. When he told the broadcaster that animals made the music, a scientist accused him of fraud. The scientist tested Johnny's musical skill. The test resulted that he could not repeat the musical form in the recording. The recording became a genuine artefact in anthropomorphic science. 

 The beasts appear to be half man and half ape. They live in the alpine wastes of the world’s largest mountain range. They might be a remnant left behind by a previous scientific age of man. Whom learned how to blend and combine the genes of two species into the life of one creature.

 Now that he had taken this recording he left the cave when the beasts started to become agitated. The monsters had smelled him. A leading animal took a swipe at him with the claws of his left hand and ripped John’s jacket fabric. That was when the closest of them had reacted to the smell of his ablutions and taken to him with a claw. So he packed up and left the area as fast as he could do. It seemed that the creatures were quite short sighted and had not been aware that he was there.

 Away he ran with all the gear collected from the survey. He was in Tibet now and had no bearings of location or method of choice in his direction of movement.

 The cavern in the split mountain was the start of a one-way route. He had begun five mountains away from the changste bazaar. He was on another side of the split mountain and his starting place was not retrievable. Climbing back over it to re-join his fellow climbers was not a sensible option to attempt. He had too little lead gear on his pack and had no climbing partner to assist him.

 He had left the rope and karabiners and prussic and all but for one long sling on the wall. They now hung idle unseen on the walls of the internal cavern above the yeti habitat. His backpack contained a cooking stand with gas, a pot, three water bottles, a sleeping bag and some fruit. The saving grace was that he still possessed the compass which had guided him from the monastery. It was this tool that he put his hopes into. He plotted by guesswork his way out of the vast wilderness he was in. He hoped to find signs of civilization. 

 There existed of a trail he followed that led away from the habitat. The Sherpa had warned about this trail though when he was at Everest. He was inside another nation now. It had its own customs and ways, yet primitive and brutal it may sound. They had warned about the likelihood of ending up in a pot. That is, made into a shared dinner by the local dwellers in this land.

 The trail was bare of trash. He had become used to viewing discarded items made of metal or plastic or fabric fibres. This had been the case ever since entering the valley by the khangste ice wall.  Even inside the habitat there had been plenty of discarded and salvaged items. Previous visitors on past mountaineering excursions had left them behind. Tied rope and ripped sling and trousers to empty battered bottles and canisters. The monsters had made musical instruments from them. This trail had none of these things. By their very absence it was foreboding and silent. There was scarce of any sign of previous human habitation. He began to worry for his safety.

 Half a day’s walking on the trail ended in fright for the little adventurer. He found a grotto of sand under a large overhanging rock and rested his sore legs. The sand had footprints on it from bipedal creatures either man or half man. It was wet. He considered eating or obtaining water when a great scream sounded out. It came from amongst the rocks in the land behind him where he had walked.

 The cry was groaning and bellowed and when Johnny looked back he saw the same lead yeti who had scratched him. It stood with arms held high above its head and mouth agape showing its great fangs. The thing had trailed him there to that place where he rested. As the Sherpa had warned, he had become hunted prey. He tightened a harness strap on his bag and ran on painful legs away from the grotto. He followed the trail into a no man’s land of broken gneiss and grey lichen.

 As he ran and scrambled. The sounds of falling rock from his boots echoed back to him off even the low features of the terrain. He could not know whether man hunted him or if he was hallucinating. The urgent breath and cracks of hard impact came back to him. They followed him from directions before and behind. He never knew whether that day he had become a tribesman’s dinner or the victim of a simian massacre.

 He ran and as he did so saw in his panic a man cloaked standing at a distance watching him pass. He shouted to this figure a note of defence and warning, saying that he was innocent and prepared to fight. The reply came in another language and its meaning came to the effect that he was not yet dead.

 Johnny ran on for the rest of the cursed day until daylight became dim and he slowed for the lack of light. Yet into the night he scrambled and stopped his rush only when he sensed that he had come to a top of a drop off of rock. It formed a cliff of unknown height in the black cold dark of another land. He was not located by any friendly person and did not know where he had arrived at.

 In fear he unrolled his down sleeping bag and crawled into it. 

 Human voices reached his ear in the night. He closed his eyes and covered his head until a grim grey rain fell on him at a pale early dawn. He never saw the speakers in the night. He did not know if he came to a Tibetan camp or a breakdown of mental capacities in his solitude.

 It was the start of a twelve day long lost period. He tried to find his way out of the wilderness. He was careful to not twist an ankle or starve and dry. His previous efforts were easy by comparison with this wandering. If he had seen a man and heard voices of persons in the night, he was not willing to meet them or let them see him again. He was not from their code. He was an outsider in their land.  He wished for invisibility.

 He ate all the fruit from his backpack and walked downhill. He was now not on any trail but had found a small river which instinct told him to follow and keep to along the way. For eleven nights he walked and rested and panicked alone. Mountains were still visible and he wanted nothing of them.

 When he came out of the lonesome dying state he was in he had not eaten for six days. He followed any path which led downhill and looked for signs of a saving. He had passed foot prints in the dirt that he walked and continued along to the way from where they had come. For two stressful days he searched for the footprints and followed them. He was shaking and his ears rang with soft high pitched noise. His eyesight began to fade.

 Upon the time when he heard other voices and recognized them as those of people. He called out across the barren strewn rocks. He picked up pebbles and struck them against larger blocks to make a more penetrating noise. A well fed rescue party of strong and healthy ones saw him and rushed to his aid. Three said, “Oh my god look at that", "How long has he been there?", "He needs help.” John fell into the arms of a man who assisted him into a heat bag and stretcher.

 The English language bulletin of the Bombay Times reported on the rescue of a missing man. The man had been above twenty-three thousand feet altitude for weeks. The front page print had a photograph of him and his rescuer. It showed him supported and walked to the stretcher. The headline read 'Lost in the Death Zone for Fifty-Four Days.' It read, ‘A man staggered and required help to walk. Members of the volunteer Fire Service discovered him. He had become lost after a children’s holiday in the Himalayan mountain range. He had a cassette tape in south Tibet. He was comprehensible and in a stable condition'. In a single turn of events Johnny’s life was to never look normal again.

 He had left school and floated and flown across the world. He was witness to something so rare and unknown that he would never think along common lines again. He had gone beyond the limits to survive something which people do not or would not even get into such a situation.

 Military recruitment was common for many young men and women in that decade. His experiences confirmed faith for him. Yet they also asserted the base criminal nature of mankind in doing so. When he retold his experiences to others he was so disbelieved that the effort was worthless.

 Now that he was safe again the rescue team had to get him back to India where he had started. The rescuers carried him to a road. An Army jeep arrived and he got into it free of bag and stretcher. There started a ten-day journey back to a relative home. Propped up against a passenger seat, Johnny rode with the driver. Three other passengers were with them. They drove across ranges and valleys which only his imagination can now recall. Vistas and weathers opened and passed above the open topped vehicle.

 Names and conversations voiced in an unfamiliar language. The sounds were as strange to him as the territory he had crossed. Their laughter and gestures cheered him up. His heart warmed to the brotherliness he felt in that wagon. A smile crossed his face within a day. He laughed until the jeep finally drove across a dusty plain into Benares-Varanasi.

 Benares-Varanasi is an ancient city of religious proportions. Its buildings are broad stone structures with ornate decoration. Six thousand years ago a foundation was at the half way point of the flow of the great river Ganges. The river passes from mountains to sea. It serves as a central worship place for Hindus. It has steps which lead down into the river where thousands bathe in its reeking brown waters.

 The driver of the jeep took Jonathon to a place away from the river and its steps. It was a place which was important for him to go to. It was a bland and unimaginative building built of polished concrete. The door in was a gated trapezoid aperture and there are no windows.

 “This is the Indian Mountaineers’ Association,” the driver Ali said. “You have to explain yourself here. Go in,” he said with a smile which flashed gold teeth. Then he held out a hand. “But first pay me.”

 Johnny did not want the trouble and pain of facing a platoon of army privates who would make him earn the money. Because of this he repaid Ali all but three of the thirty rupee coins he had. His fellow passengers had paid him these coins for singing songs. He had spoken about his home country along the long drive through the mountains. The three passengers had tipped him a raconteurs' fee. They had all got out of the jeep a long way back to go to their farms and families.

 John stood outside of the light vehicle and shook Ali's hands. Johnny held both Ali’s hands and listened to his blessings in farewell. Ali wished him luck and good fortune. He recommended that if his first woman was no good to him then he should find another. If the next was the same, then find another again. And so on until after that until who knows. Then he restarted the clatter ignition and turned and sped away into the sacred city.

 When John checked his pockets to find whether they were empty he looked down and saw the ground. It was flat acres of dried cow dung. He turned to the building and walked to the door and thumped on it with his fist and waited. He called out to no-one and shuffled back and forth from one foot to another on the field of dried dung.

 After an hour and a half, the inner locks in the building knocked. The door opened and revealed a dim cool entrance space. Johnny strode in and met a small Indian man seated on a stool behind an oak desk there.

“Who is this man who is making so much noise?” the small man said. Johnny said he was a seventeen-year-old Kiwi who had been in the mountains.

 “And what mountains are they?” asked the man.

 “The Himalayas,” said Johnny with an air of self-effacing pride.

 “So what,” the man replied. “You’re the tenth visitor this year who has told me he has been there and I don’t care less. Stop treading on Vishnu’s head.”

 It didn't seem in keeping for the keeper of the headquarters. This was the centre of a national network, wasn't it? The man seemed to have a rather detached and scornful attitude towards his visitor. Instead of receiving any accolades Johnny was being reprimanded for a Hindu sacrilege.

 There followed a silence between the two men. The small man put on a pair of square-rimmed spectacles and stared at his hands for ten minutes. Johnny stood clutching his knapsack.

 The man said, “Hand me your passport.” Johnny did not want to and shook his head in fear of theft of this valuable item. To him this was a strange land where he had no support contacts. “Come do it,” the man said, “We have to know who you are that has committed such a disgrace.”

 From an inner pocket of his knapsack John picked out the still wet document. He passed it to the interviewer who took it. He stood up and walked around a corner and out of sight within the building. Another half hour passed. Then the keeper of the office came back with not only the passport but also other items. He had a paper book and pencil and a large suitcase. He dragged this by both hands across the floor. He dropped the case next to the desk and sat on the stool again and opened the book.

 There followed a set of questions about which mountain he had tried to climb and where. John replied to each question in turn that he had attempted Everest and attained the top of the south peak. He replied that he had traversed Lhotse solo. After that that he had climbed the khangste wall and rested at the monastery. Then scaled the split mountain three ranges away from the changtse bazaar. He had seen some strange animals and become lost in Tibet.

 The small man commented to everything Johnny said. He commented that no-one lives to tell the tale. He commented that he had attempted suicide and gone insane. He proposed that he must have visited a zoo. He made an accusation that he was a trespasser with illegal ideas about another religion. He wrote in his book during the interview. Then he said, “Who sent you here?”

 Johnny replied, “Ali, and before him the first man to climb the mountain.”

 The man’s eyes flashed white through his spectacles and he spat onto the desk. “Clean that,’ he said and wrote his last comment in his book and closed it. Johnny took a dirty white handkerchief from his pocket. He apologized for the man and wiped the spittle off the surface of the desk. Then the man, who had not provided any name, told Johnny to take the suitcase. That in it was climbing equipment for his next expedition. Then he told him to meet his friends at the Ghats on the Ganges River shore.

 Johnny saw an opportunity in what the man had offered and held the heavy suitcase. Then he asked for his passport back and the man demanded a payment for it. Johnny put the last three rupees onto the desk counter. This reclaimed his document from the officer. Turning, he hauled the case and knapsack and pride out the same door he had entered by. He was once again in the warm pink Indian daylight.

 He had departed his home country in the first month of the southern winter. He had arrived in Nepal after the spring avalanches. The first three calm weeks of the northern hemisphere summer had begun. Now in central India the air was calm and warm and agreeable. The sky loomed above him like a forgiving, watchful presence. The land was flat and brown and dirty. He lugged his bags the three miles in to town where the sacred city went about its holy duties around him. 

 The madness of religion was at the stone buildings which front onto the river. It confronted him and immersed him. Devotees chanted and meditated on their mats. They stood and raised their arms and sang. Copious amounts of incense burned in the still open air. People bathed in the turgid brown water. Johnny saw in it a cycle of supplication and offering and resignation.

 The most devout men had grown their hair to waist length in dreadlocks. They dabbed mud paint on their foreheads in Sanskrit patterns. Johnny stood and watched and walked through them until he a tall skinny man approached him. He demanded from him in gestures a similar resignation. John bowed and kneeled and the man made a sign of acquiescence with his hands. Without a statement of it, the sadhu spared the youngster's life. He nominated for him a later death and faster rebirth. The man walked on with his followers. The young stranger searched for his intended contacts amongst the scene.

 He found them sitting in a small alcove in the four mile long building. There were four of them and they had the suitcase which he had carried from the office. He recognized Ian Macmillan from the staff of patrolmen of the ski field where he had work at Wanaka back home. Ian was a part of the escapade to South America which they were all about to embark on. He became a reliable man and watchful care taker of the youngster in the short time they knew each other. He was a bit like a giant of a task master to him with a mind for organization.

 He was with another younger man who wore a wide grin and had a wild blue light in his creased eyes. Two women sat with them. One toted on a hand rolled cigarette and the other checked her watch. The five remarked on the timely meeting. The four who were sitting there had taken the suitcase. Johnny had left it in the alcove before looking around the Ghats. Ian told him that he had been acting weird. Johnny took offense at this and then all agreed that they should remain there.

 An airplane was going to leave from New Delhi in six days’ time and they had tickets for its flight passage. The fast train would carry them there in three days' time. This allowed them three present days to enjoy India’s most holy city. Ian said that they should all stay where they were and hide. Johnny and the other young man both expressed need to experience their surroundings. The two women were in favour of pursuing their own private enterprises together. They reconvened as a group at the alcove each night until the train departed. Four agreed to explore Varanasi in two separate groups. Ian would take shelter from the foreign culture there alone. The suitcase, crammed full of retired climbing apparatus, was a dead weight.

 After a passing three days of fasting then praying and dining on saffron rice and peas. Swimming in the river around cremated corpses that floated along the channel. The group of five reconvened and had their luggage carried to a rickshaw. A donkey towed them to the train station.

 They boarded the train amidst shouts and cries of excitement. Fear of becoming abandoned raised their voices. In one crowded carriage they huddled on their bags. Nobodies amongst the legs of be robed passengers. There was no spare space to even be able to shift a hand to scratch. The companions could almost see each other between the people. So they called phrases aloud to each other.

 They disguised their voices with imposture accents. They repeated the few phrases that they could remember from the local language. They revisited most recent conversations they had had with the residents there. In this way they avoided the disgrace of using English as a language in front of the people of the country they were in. Yet still to keep coordinate with each other throughout the journey. Many amusing nonsense quotes voiced and some that made sense. 

 The train approached New Delhi at a slow pace. It had rattled through the countryside at a fast speed but once it was in the city it broke for safety’s sakes. Johnny and his blue-eyed companion stared out the carriage window in awe. They saw the many thousand tents and sheds of humanities dwellings pass. He could imagine all the combined efforts and joys and sorrows of its residents. Like he had been on the train in Africa, here he was another face of those in a multitude in the diverse world. Its people remained tolerant and ignorant of the details of those that come and go. Situations pass them by like fish in a school or insects in a swarm of life.

 Once clambering out of the train nursing cramps and pains all down legs and backs. The five travellers set out for the neighbouring airport. Rolled out their sleeping mats and rested for the eight hours intervening. They were thankful for the rest. The trains arrival was early for the time the plane was due to leave. Like a great impersonal force this Airline Argentina 747 was going to remove them from the crowd. To toss them across this small world with its oceans and islands and heights to another place. The five slept by the boots of security guards’ feet caught between cultures in the heat. 

 From the air they saw the expanse of the fertilized subcontinent. Farms and cities reclined beneath the plane. The long flight into clouds above the Bay of Bengal. The geographies of Thailand and Malaysia and Indonesia passed. Then the cruise at high altitude across the wide blue Pacific. Into a short night they flew and out of it again and traveled with the spin of the earth. As it approached the next continent the passengers closed their window covers. The blinds concealed a secret land. In this way the American security forces in their air force jets could side on to the 747. To communicate checks and permissions for it to approach South American territory.