As The Mountain Melts

The mountain was melting. It had been for years, but during the last five the rising heat had increased the snow melt exponentially. What had once been one of the coldest places in the world was now lukewarm many days. It was the same everywhere, ice that had once sunk giant ships and fostered the travel of polar bears was barely equivalent to ice cubes in the drink that was the rising ocean. 

I hated this. Like many, I had wondered what it would be like to witness the end of the world, usually while reading dystopian novels or apocalypse centered tv shows. I had never imagined that it would actually happen during my lifetime. Yet, the world was now ending around me, the impossibly fast and incomprehensible decline of an entire planet, brought about over the span of the last couple hundred years of it’s eons of existence. It had started slow, presentations on the walls of my elementary school classrooms, international agreements that I watched grow and dissolve around me. Then the summers got hotter, scorching most days and snow stopped falling in the winter. The freezing snow days of my youth when me and my brother used to build fortresses of snow were long gone. Now I was lucky to see a snowfall a year, if that. And the snow never stuck around for long anymore. 

The melting snow revealed the secrets of millennia past, of people alive when the world had been at its coldest, the polar opposite to now. Some days it seemed like Mother Earth released her fury with the ice melt, long forgotten diseases emerging to devour the population, while whole countries and cities were consumed by the ever teeming ocean. The Earth itself was furious, demanding justice for the atrocities committed against it. Even once peaceful meadows felt ominous, dark clouds of pollution hovering over the delicate flowers, plants scratching and scraping against tender skin as you walked.  

The other thing that the melt released? Bodies. Long forgotten explorers and natives buried in ice began to emerge. When I first heard of this it seemed surreal. I knew there were bodies buried in the mountains, all over the world but I had long since accepted that they would stay there, tribute to their travels and the Earth's claim to their lives. Few had been uncovered. 

I knew of one; Juanita, Lady of Ampato, an Incan child sacrificed to the gods. I had visited her at a museum in Perú as a child. It was strange to see the body of a girl not much older than I was, face and hair preserved to the point that I could create a picture of the way she had looked in my head. Smiling, and bright, and rosy cheeked, looking towards her family. She was sacred. 

The bodies are still sacred now, as they come down the mountain, but it’s a different kind of sacred. Children, ancient sacrifices, were given to appease gods, save their people. They were often treated with kindness and honored. Many of those appearing from this mountain died of their own volition and hubris. They were not guided towards the mountain top, towards their gods, they pulled themselves up frozen rocks and ground in the hope of prestige and honor, a rightfully inflated ego. Many did not make it. 

That’s not to say I don’t have respect for them or the circumstances of their deaths. It’s only that I cannot identify with their recklessness in the name of personal fame or accomplishment. Though I might not agree with why they died, I still respect them. The dead are the dead, and should always be treated as such, with careful love and gentle sadness and reverent respect. 

There’s a certain horror in the way these bodies are being uncovered as well. For years they rested on the mountain that they worked so hard to climb, and now they were tumbling down in rivers of icy mud. There are so many stories that used to reside on this mountain next to their bodies, now never to be uncovered. If I had ever imagined these bodies being recovered, it was over decades, their lives and journeys pieced together bit by bit. I had hoped that their return could be better than their departure. 

Some of their stories were known. They were nearly always horrific. Some had been passed by other explorers who had to choose between attempting to rescue them at risk of their own lives or continuing on their own journey. I could never imagine the desperation those people must have felt to return home, and how crushed they must have been once they realized that they had no chance. Sometimes people stayed with them until they died, but many left them behind as well, lest they themselves perish to the elements. Some of the other bodies were of people who had emerged victorious, having reached the summit, only to fall on their way down or discover that they had not correctly calculated the time they had left to safely return. 

Some simply went to sleep. The cold does that, makes you sleepy when it’s too late. At times I think that with the receding cold the bodies will just wake up again, become the people they once were. They won’t. One man who died this way served as a marker on the trail for others, his green boots guiding the way and reminding them of the risk. I wondered whether we would even know him if he joined the others falling down the mountain, or if the torrent would wash away the only identifier we had for him. 

I was horrified that this was how we got them back, but grateful too. Not many get to witness this sort of return. We had set up a camp near the base of the mountain where we would arrange bodies retrieved from higher up for transport. Their legacy was that of scientific discovery now, if any of us made it long enough to research them. It was with this knowledge that I faced the mountain top, as the rumble of newly formed rivers of mud and ice melt streamed towards us. 

The bodies were raining down.