Alleluia Cone’s visions

Alleluia Cone’s visions bind Everest to London and the waking world to an apparently impossible one. A city of ice appears during her descent from the mountain; later, miniature mountain-shaped icebergs pass along the River Thames. The experiences are not simply private wonders: they deepen her attachment to Everest, enter her intimate life with Gibreel Farishta, and intensify his fear that dreams are breaking into waking reality. Their cause remains unresolved, even as the visions acquire consequences in memory, belief, and physical health.

The ice city and her father’s idea of reality

While descending from Everest, Alleluia sees a glittering city of immense, needle-like ice formations west of Camp Six, beyond the Rock Band and below Cho Oyu. For a moment, she associates it with Shangri-La, but what she sees is not a green refuge: it is a cold metropolis. Sherpa Pemba calls her attention back to the descent. When she looks again, the city has disappeared.

The apparition carries her across time to a memory of her father, Otto Cone, speaking to her when she was fourteen. In his Bayswater study, surrounded by dark wooden furniture and heavy curtains, he had warned her against imagining that the world was homogeneous or that its contradictions could be reconciled into a single harmonious whole. He insisted that ghosts, Nazis, and saints could all be alive at the same time, and that happiness and inferno could occupy neighboring places. The ice city does not prove his philosophy, but it gives it an image: a reality that appears briefly, resists ordinary categories, and vanishes when attention turns back to the familiar landscape.

Otto’s outlook was shaped in part by his life as a Polish émigré and survivor of a wartime prison camp, a history that remained largely unspoken during Alleluia’s childhood. Her mother, Alicja Cone, later said that Otto had wanted to behave as though the past had not happened, while remembering him as both difficult and good. The city’s emergence in Alleluia’s memory of her father therefore places the vision within a family history marked by a painful past that was not readily discussed. His sense of incompatible realities offers her a way to believe that the apparition need not be dismissed simply because it does not fit the everyday world.

The mountains return in London

Alleluia later tells Gibreel about the Everest visions, then adds that they did not occur only on the mountain. After returning to London, she walked beside the River Thames in the early morning, with snow and mist obscuring the scene. Ten icebergs moved upriver in single file. At close range, their shapes resolved into miniature likenesses of the ten highest mountains in the world, arranged in ascending order, with Everest at the rear. She tried to understand how they could pass beneath the bridges. The mist thickened; when it cleared, the icebergs were gone.

She nevertheless maintains to Gibreel that she saw them, naming Nanga Parbat, Dhaulagiri, and Xixabangma Feng among the forms she recognized. He does not challenge her account. His acceptance makes the disclosure an act of trust, but not a resolution: neither character supplies an ordinary explanation for the procession. The images also extend the mountain’s presence beyond its geographical location. Alleluia’s London is briefly transformed into a stage for the peaks she has encountered, while the icebergs suggest a passage between the forms of water and land that the narrative associates with her fascination with Everest.

That fascination already fills her apartment with representations of the Himalayas, made from materials including cork, plastic, tile, stone, acrylic, and brick. One small model is sculpted from ice and kept in her freezer. A newer wooden Everest, given by the Sherpas of Namche Bazar, bears the route to the summit, including the icefall and Hillary Step. Pemba had carved it himself and scratched a message on its base warning her not to try again. The models are not themselves visions, but they show how the mountain has followed her home in reproducible forms even as the apparitions bring its presence into London’s landscape.

Disclosure, secrecy, and Gibreel’s fear

Alleluia shares the visions with Gibreel after he has told her that he fell from the sky and survived. She accepts his account, drawing on her father’s faith in life’s contradictory possibilities and on what the mountain has taught her. Her willingness to believe him helps create the conditions for her own disclosure: she tells him about the apparitions she has never told another living person. Gibreel answers that he believes her, without demanding proof.

The exchange does not make them fully open with one another. Alleluia keeps secret both her fear that she must placate Everest and her concealed wish to attempt a solo ascent, despite her flat feet making serious mountaineering unsuitable. She also withholds that she has seen Maurice Wilson’s ghost since coming back to London: he appears among the rooftops, beckoning. Gibreel, for his part, does not tell her that he is being pursued by the spectre of Rekha Merchant. Each carries a dangerous ghost beyond the confidence they have established between them.

Gibreel’s outwardly calm response to Alleluia’s account masks agitation. He takes the visions as further evidence, for him, that the boundary between dreams and waking life is failing and that the two realms may join. That conclusion belongs to Gibreel’s fearful interpretation, not to a confirmed explanation of what Alleluia sees. The pair’s different responses sharpen the uncertainty: she treats wonders as possible within a contradictory universe, while he fears their implications.

The visions’ lasting cost

Alleluia’s encounter with Everest does not end with her return. She believes that another visit to the mountain could be fatal, yet the prohibition deepens rather than extinguishes her desire to return. She conceals the ambition that resembles Maurice Wilson’s unrealized solo ascent, and she keeps his rooftop appearances from Gibreel. The visions thus accompany a conflict between the danger she recognizes and the attraction she cannot relinquish.

She also experiences unpredictable lapses of memory after the ascent. At a fishmonger’s, she forgets the word for fish; in her bathroom, she cannot initially identify the purpose of a toothbrush; on waking beside Gibreel, she nearly fails to recognize him before the memory returns. She hopes the lapses are temporary. The account links them to the strain of climbing at extreme altitude, but does not establish that the visions cause them. Her survival alongside Pemba, despite predictions that climbers at such heights would suffer lasting damage, leaves the mountain’s effects uncertain rather than neatly resolved.

The visions’ significance lies in that unresolved crossing. An ice city vanishes on Everest; a procession of peaks appears and disappears on the Thames; a ghost remains hidden in Alleluia’s account even as she confides other apparitions. Through these recurrences, the novel gives Otto’s belief in a world of incompatible realities concrete narrative form. The marvels can be read as visions belonging to Alleluia, yet neither she nor Gibreel can securely confine them to private imagination.