Now Laure’s English is not very good, as you may have noticed. But after all we were in his country speaking my language—and for him English came after Sherpa, Nepali, and some Japanese and German, and how many languages do you speak?

Besides, I find I always get the gist of what Laure says, which is not something you can always say of all our fellow native speakers. So I cried out, “No! Arnold is following them?”

“Yes,” Laure said. “Very bad. Freds say come please get.”

“Arnold hired their Sherpas?”

Laure nodded. “Sherpas finish porter, Arnold hire.”

“Damn him! We’ll have to climb up there and get him!”

“Yes. Very bad.”

“Will you come with me?”

“Whatever you like.”

I hustled to our tents to get together my climbing gear, and tell Heather what had happened. “How did he get up there?” she asked. “I thought he was with you all day.”

“He told me he was going with you! He probably followed you guys all the way up, and kept on going. Don’t worry about it, it’s not your fault. Take the group back to Namche starting tomorrow, and we’ll catch up with you.” She nodded, looking worried.

Laure and I took off. Even going at Laure’s pace we didn’t reach Freds’s base camp until the moon had risen.

Their camp was now only a single tent in a bunch of trampled snow, just under the steep headwall of the Khumbu Valley—the ridge that divided Nepal from Tibet. We zipped open the tent and woke Freds and Kunga Norbu.

“All right!” Freds said. “I’m glad you’re here! Real glad!”

“Give me the story,” I said.

“Well, that Arnold snuck up here, apparently.”

“That’s right.”

“And our Sherpas were done and we had paid them, and I guess he hired them on the spot. They have a bunch of climbing gear, and we left fixed ropes up to the Lho La, so up they came. I tell you I was pretty blown away when they showed up in the pass! The Brits got furious and told Arnold to go back down, but he refused and, well, how do you make someone do something they don’t want to up there? If you punch him out he’s likely to have trouble getting down! So Kunga and I came back to get you and found Laure at Base Camp, and he said he’d get you while we held the fort.”