The Descent [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

“An imaginative tour de force...equal parts Ray Bradbury and Robert Stone, Michael Crichton and T.C. Boyle. It is a rip-roaring good read. Jeff Long has written a remarkable novel...that somehow succeeds both as a sober-minded allegory and a nail-biting thriller.” —Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air

“Would give Stephen King and Dean Koontz the night sweats. A flat-out, gears-grinding, bumper-car ride into the pits of hell. Jeff Long has delivered what is bound to be this summer’s really hot read.” —Lorenzo Carcaterra, author of Sleepers and Apaches

“The Descent is simply the best horror novel since Ghost Story, and, on pure literary merit, it could even be called a masterpiece.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“A return to the fantastic epics readers associate with H.G. Wells or Jules Verne… [A] high-spirited tale of good versus evil, faith versus reason, and the power of the human heart to overcome even the darkest obstacles.” —Chicago Tribune

“As frightening and exhilarating as anything in heaven or hell...[and] impossible to set down. Part thriller, part horror story and part mystery...an all-engulfing reading experience.” —Denver Rocky Mountain News

“Perfect...right out of the stephen king mold, with a touch of Dante’s Inferno.” —Denver Post

“Deeply piercing terror. A sweeping, dark epic. Entertains the senses and challenges the mind [with] new levels of visual wonder.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Horrific...takes the reader into a Dantesque world, a journey to the center of the earth for the new millennium…Long deftly blends science, myth, and a superb imagination to provide an entrancingly dark novel...a novel for the thinking reader—bright and scintillating, illuminating the darkness it so smartly depicts.” —Baltimore Sun

“A dizzying synthesis of supernatural horror, lost-race fantasy and military SF...Like the subterranean trail blazed by its adventurers, the narrative twists, turns, dead-ends and backtracks. Brims with energy, ideas and excitement.” —Publishers Weekly

Jeff Long is a veteran climber and traveler in the Himalayas. He has worked as a journalist and an elections supervisor for Bosnia’s first democratic election. The Descent is his fourth novel. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Chapter 1: Ike

It is easy to go down into Hell . . . ; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air-there’s the rub. . . —Virgil, Aeneid


The Himalayas,
Tibet Autonomous Region
1988

In the beginning was the word.
Or words.
Whatever these were.
They kept their lights turned off. The exhausted trekkers huddled in the
dark cave and faced the peculiar writing. Scrawled with a twig, possibly,
dipped in liquid radium or some other radioactive paint, the fluorescent
pictographs floated in the black recesses. Ike let them savor the
distraction. None of them seemed quite ready to focus on the storm beating
against the mountainside outside.
With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind and their yak
herders in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food, Ike was relieved
to have shelter of any kind. He was still pretending for them that this was
part of their trip. In fact they were off the map. He'd never heard
of this hole-in-the-wall hideout. Nor seen glow-in-the-dark caveman graffiti.
"Runes," gushed a knowing female voice. "Sacred runes left by a wandering monk."
The alien calligraphy glowed with soft violet light in the cave's cold
bowels. The luminous hieroglyphics reminded Ike of his old dorm wall with
its black-light posters. All he needed was a lash of Hendrix plundering
Dylan's anthem, say, and a whiff of plump Hawaiian red sinsemilla. Anything
to vanquish the howl of awful wind. Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat
did growl. . . .
"Those are no runes," said a man. "It's Bonpo." A Brooklyn beat, the accent
meant Owen. Ike had nine clients here, only two of them male. They were
easy to keep straight.
"Bonpo!" one of the women barked at Owen. The coven seemed to take
collective delight in savaging Owen and Bernard, the other man. Ike had
been spared so far. They treated him as a harmless Himalayan hillbilly.
Fine with him.
"But the Bonpo were pre-Buddhist," the woman expounded.
The women were mostly Buddhist students from a New Age university. These
things mattered very much to them.
Their goal was-or had been-Mount Kailash, the pyramidal giant just east of
the Indian border. "A Canterbury Tale for the World Pilgrim" was how he'd
advertised the trip. A kor-a Tibetan walkabout-to and around the holiest
mountain in the world. Eight thousand per head, incense included. The
problem was, somewhere along the trail he'd managed to misplace the
mountain. It galled him. They were lost. Beginning at dawn today, the sky
had changed from blue to milky gray. The herders had quietly bolted with
the yaks. He had yet to announce that their tents and food were history.
The first sloppy snowflakes had started kissing their Gore-Tex hoods just
an hour ago, and Ike had taken this cave for shelter. It was a good call.
He was the only one who knew it, but they were now about to get sodomized
by an old-fashioned Himalayan tempest.
Ike felt his jacket being tugged to one side, and knew it would be Kora,
wanting a private word. "How bad is it?" she whispered. Depending on the
hour and day, Kora was his lover, base-camp shotgun, or business associate.
Of late, it was a challenge estimating which came first for her, the
business of adventure or the adventure of business. Either way, their
little trekking company was no longer charming to her.
Ike saw no reason to front-load it with negatives. "We've got a great
cave," he said.
"Gee."
"We're still in the black, head-count-wise."
"The itinerary's in ruins. We were behind as it was."
"We're fine. We'll take it out of the Siddhartha's Birthplace segment." He
kept the worry out of his voice, but for once his sixth sense, or whatever
it was, had come up short, and that bothered him. "Besides, getting a
little lost will give them bragging rights."
"They don't want bragging rights. They want schedule. You don't know these
people. They're not your friends. We'll get sued if they don't make their
Thai Air flight on the nineteenth."
"These are the mountains," said Ike. "They'll understand." People forgot.
Up here, it was a mistake to take even your next breath for granted.
"No, Ike. They won't understand. They have real jobs. Real obligations.
Families." That was the rub. Again. Kora wanted more from life. She wanted
more from her pathless Pathfinder.
"I'm doing the best I can," Ike said.
Outside, the storm went on horsewhipping the cave mouth. Barely May, it
wasn't supposed to be this way. There should have been plenty of time to
get his bunch to, around, and back from Kailash. The bane of mountaineers,
the monsoon normally didn't spill across the mountains this far north. But
as a former Everester himself, Ike should have known better than to believe
in rain shadows or in schedules. Or in luck. They were in for it this time.
The snow would seal their pass shut until late August. That meant he was
going to have to buy space on a Chinese truck and shuttle them home via
Lhasa—and that came out of his land costs. He tried calculating in his
head, but their quarrel overcame him.
"You do know what I mean by Bonpo," a woman said. Nineteen days into the
trip, and Ike still couldn't link their spirit nicknames with the names in
their passports. One woman, was it Ethel or Winifred, now preferred Green
Tara, mother deity of Tibet. A pert Doris Day look-alike swore she was
special friends with the Dalai Lama. For weeks now Ike had been listening
to them celebrate the life of cavewomen. Well, he thought, here's your
cave, ladies. Slum away.
They were sure his name—Dwight David Crockett—was an invention like their
own. Nothing could convince them he wasn't one of them, a dabbler in past
lives. One evening around a campfire in northern Nepal, he'd regaled them
with tales of Andrew Jackson, pirates on the Mississippi, and his own
legendary death at the Alamo. He'd meant it as a joke, but only Kora got
it.
"You should know perfectly well," the woman went on, "there was no written
language in Tibet before the late fifth century."
"No written language that we know about," Owen said.
"Next you'll be saying this is Yeti language."
It had been like this for days. You'd think they'd run out of air. But the
higher they went, the more they argued.
"This is what we get for pandering to civilians," Kora muttered to Ike.
Civilians was her catch-all: eco-tourists, pantheist charlatans, trust
funders, the overeducated. She was a street girl at heart.
"They're not so bad," he said. "They're just looking for a way into Oz,
same as us."
"Civilians."
Ike sighed. At times like this, he questioned his self-imposed exile.
Living apart from the world was not easy. There was a price to be paid for
choosing the less-traveled road. Little things, bigger ones. He was no longer that rosy-cheeked lad
who had come with the Peace Corps. He still had the cheekbones and cowled
brow and careless mane. But a dermatologist on one of his treks had advised
him to stay out of the high-altitude sun before his face turned to boot
leather. Ike had never considered himself God's gift to women, but he saw
no reason to trash what looks he still had. He'd lost two of his back
molars to Nepal's dearth of dentists, and another tooth to a falling rock
on the backside of Everest. And not so long ago, in his Johnnie Walker
Black and Camels days, he'd taken to serious self-abuse, even flirting with
the lethal west face of Makalu. He'd quit the smoke and booze cold when
some British nurse told him his...