Allie Cone and Pemba’s oxygen-free Everest ascent

Alleluia Cone and Pemba’s oxygen-free Everest ascent is presented through Alleluia’s recollection to a classroom of girls. A physically demanding climb becomes a moment of shared exaltation and apparent vision, interrupted by a gunshot-like report neither climber can account for. Its significance lies as much in what Alleluia cannot explain as in what she claims to have seen: the mountain offers an experience that seems to confirm her beliefs, but its strange interruption prevents certainty.

The story Alleluia is asked to tell

The ascent reaches the reader as a story Alleluia tells after her climbing days have ended. The class has been listening to her speak about phantoms, but the girls want the mountain itself: her account of reaching its summit. Their insistence shapes the episode as a recollection performed for an audience. Alleluia does not merely report that she climbed; she guides her listeners through the decision, the climb, the vision, and the descent, then brings the account to an abrupt stop.

Her remembered ascent is set against a present in which the adventure has left her with worsening foot pain. Earlier, she had concealed that pain from her fellow mountaineers because the lure of Everest was too powerful to resist. She had also described the struggle of pursuing what she wanted so intensely. That bodily cost shadows the summit story: the mountain’s apparent transcendence does not erase the effort and vulnerability required to reach it.

The decision to climb without oxygen

Alleluia says she was climbing in the second pair with Pemba, who, like her, had never before reached the summit. The weather was exceptionally clear, and she believed the first pair must already have arrived. Although she had not planned to climb without oxygen, she saw that Pemba intended to do so and decided to follow. Her choice was sudden and, by her own account, unprofessional: she wanted to sit on the mountain as a human being, rather than as a breathing machine.

Pemba tried to dissuade her, but Alleluia started upward. As they passed climbers coming down, those climbers were so absorbed in their own exaltation that they did not notice her lack of oxygen equipment. Their warning to look out for angels begins as a remark made during the descent; it takes on a different force when Alleluia later sees angels herself. The episode leaves open whether this is coincidence, a consequence of altitude, or something beyond either climber’s ordinary understanding.

Shared vision and sudden interruption

Pemba settles into a breathing rhythm, and Alleluia falls into step with it, matching her breathing to his. As they climb, she feels lifted and sees Pemba grinning too. What might look like a grimace of pain is, in her telling, shared joy. The ascent thus becomes a physical experience held in common: Pemba’s pace and breathing pattern shape Alleluia’s movement, while their matching expressions suggest that the intensity of the climb reaches both of them.

At the summit, Alleluia says, the experience opens into a vision. She believes in the universe’s sound, in the possibility of lifting a veil and seeing God, and in the divine significance of the Himalayas below her. Pemba calls her attention to the height as she approaches the top. She recalls floating over the final overhang into a place where the ground fell away on every side, then seeing rainbows in the sky, radiance descending from the sun, and angels. Pemba sees them as well. They kneel, apparently absorbed in the vision, until Alleluia hears a loud, sharp report.

The sound breaks the experience. Alleluia calls out to Pemba until he, too, comes out of it, and the two begin descending as the weather changes rapidly and a blizzard approaches. They make it to the meeting point and join the other two climbers in a small tent at Camp Six, 27,000 feet above sea level. The danger has changed from the summit’s apparent spiritual openness to the practical urgency of getting down. The four spend the night in the tent, each with an Everest to climb again in memory.

The unexplained report and the story’s ending

In the tent, Alleluia asks whether anyone fired a gun. The others dismiss the possibility: they say there is no gun on the mountain, and that firing one at that altitude would be foolish. She accepts that their reasoning is sound but remains certain that she heard the report, followed by an echo. The sound is the event’s unresolved hinge. It ends the shared vision and prompts the descent, yet it cannot be fitted into the climbers’ account of what could have happened there.

Alleluia finishes the story abruptly and prepares to leave, leaning on a silver-headed cane. When the girls press her for an explanation, she appears suddenly much older than her thirty-three years and can offer only the possibility that the sound was Maurice Wilson’s ghost. The suggestion connects the climb’s unexplained moment to the phantoms that had already occupied the classroom’s attention, but Alleluia presents it as speculation, not a solution. Her account closes with the mystery intact: the angels may have been shared, the gunshot may have been heard, and neither experience yields a settled explanation.