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New York, 1999, uncorrected proof. Novel. 470 pp. Paperback. Fine. We are not alone… In a cave in the Himalayas, a guide discovers a
self-mutilated body with the warning – Satan exists. In the Kalahari
Desert, a nun unearths evidence of a proto-human species and a deity
called Older-than-Old. In Bosnia, something has been feeding upon the
dead in a mass grave. So begins mankind’s most shocking realization:
that the underworld is a vast geological labyrinth populated by another
race of beings. Some call them devils or demons. But they are real. They
are down there. And they are waiting for us to find them… About Jeff Long (the short version): Jeff
Long's writing career has been diverse: novelist, historian,
journalist, and screenwriter. His book awards include the Texas Literary
Award, the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Novel, the
British Boardman-Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, and the American
Alpine Club's Literary Award. Several of his books have been made into
films. His revisionist study of the Alamo, Duel of Eagles, sparked
intense controversy and acclaim. His novel The Descent was a New York
Times bestseller. As a veteran climber and traveler in the
Himalayas, he has climbed on Everest and Makalu several times, and
guided tour groups in Tibet. He first visited the Himalayas thirty-five
years ago. In 1977, he served three months in Nepalese jails on
smuggling charges. That experience led to articles about the CIA/Tibetan
guerrilla movement and the 1990 democratic revolution in Nepal. His
1992 novel The Ascent described both an Everest disaster and the larger
tragedy of genocide in Tibet. In 1996, he served as an OSCE
elections supervisor in Bosnia's first democratic elections, during
which time he interviewed Bosnians and American troops for the human
rights and foreign aid group, Witness, Inc., which he founded. He
currently lives in Boulder, Colorado. About Jeff Long (the long version): I
was an oil rig brat, born in Texas and bounced through Louisiana to New
Mexico and Oklahoma and, finally, thank God to Colorado. The roughnecks
taught me how to shoot beer bottles when I was seven. They made belts
out of rattlesnake skins. I saw ghosts in the desert at night. One
dusty afternoon my dad picked up a rock and gave it a crack with his
hammer. Like magic, a fossil fell open on his palm, a world hidden
inside the world. That was the start of my story telling. In high
school, the Christian Brothers taught me Dante, H.G. Wells, and even a
bit of Borges. They encouraged my bad poetry as if it had potential,
which it didn’t. In college I took up climbing and tried my hand at
short stories, and the climbing magazines were kind – or starved –
enough to publish a few. At 19 I quit school to find a job and fly to
Nepal, somehow convinced you could walk on to an Everest expedition like
it was a game of pick-up. I ended up in a remote monastery just long
enough to get a bellyful of worms, then retreated again to the comforts
of college. I skipped my graduation to join grown men on an
international expedition to Makalu, next to Everest. We missed the
summit by a few hundred feet, but I didn’t care. I came home with a
notebook full of raw times and far places. I was never much of a
climber. I just loved the company and landscape. At my own level of the
game, I took huge risks and chased some real monsters, went blind (a few
times) from the altitude, got frostbit, lost friends to lightning and
avalanches, and now and then actually felt God’s face in the stone. But
for me the climbing and expeditions, and the detours through revolution
and jails and landmine-ridden zones, were more about the pen than the
adrenaline. No matter how full my pack or how heavy the haul bag, I
always made room for the extra notebooks that fed my writing. In that
sense, mountaineering was just a sort of radical tourism. It was also my
entrée to publication. My first getting published was in a Sierra
Club imprint called Ascent, edited by Steck and Roper, two brilliant,
quirky climbers out of Berkeley. I had written a novella about three
young men trapped on an infinite wall. It was literary, psychedelic,
arcane, and a novella, too long for magazines, too short for a book… a
total misfit. Not that I was showing it to anyone. I was shy and twenty
and nobody. But then a friend walked it into the magazine without my
knowing, and it was accepted. I was exhilarated and thankful and
terrified. When the anthology came out a year later, I just about
fainted. There is nothing like that first time when your innermost
thoughts get set loose in public. Suddenly this paper child of yours
must fend for itself, no longer yours to shape and nurture, but now the
property of readers. The best you can do is walk on. Write more. Try and
do better next time. With adventure came misadventure. I got
arrested through a ninth-story window while climbing the TransAmerica
Building in San Francisco. My partner wanted to make a political
statement. I just wanted to tie a rubber chicken to the summit antennae.
A month after that I led another futile siege of Makalu.
Afterward I stayed in Kathmandu and landed a job teaching mountaineering
to the Nepalese army. My plan was to stay a year, join an expedition to
another mountain, and learn Nepali. Instead, within a month, I was
arrested on smuggling charges and sentenced to five years in prison. Through
three different jails I shared quarters with political prisoners who
had been tortured, lepers who were dying, and Tibetan guerrillas who had
been secretly trained by the CIA in Colorado. Nepal’s supreme court got
involved with my case, and then the US State Department. After only
three months I was freed, and promptly banished from the kingdom. The
prodigal son finally came home, broke, skinny, disgraced, and ready to
write. Before I could lay into the pen, though, I had to pay the rent,
which meant finding a job. With a degree in philosophy and anthropology,
I was eminently qualified for manual labor. Over the next few summers I
worked as a stonemason and taught climbing. Winters I hibernated,
stretching my money, living in a chicken coop for $25 a month, and
eating Campbell’s Chunky soup from the can. Slowly my typewriter began
to bear fruit. Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone publisher, started
up a regional publication called Rocky Mountain Magazine. This marked a
huge step up for writers – in both venue and wages – throughout the
West. The money was never enough to quit your day job, but it
represented a chance to try for the big league. Rocky Mountain
Magazine published both my fiction and non-fiction. They commissioned me
to track down the story of a self-styled mountain man who had killed
two Idaho game wardens, and that turned out to be my big break. Rocky
Mountain Magazine happened to be the in-flight magazine for Aspen
Airlines. A New York agent on her way to Aspen saw my article. Out of the blue I got a call asking if I’d be interested in writing a book about the incident. I
had the great fortune to get tapped by one of New York’s finest
editors, Jim Landis, at William Morrow publishing house. Under him my
Old-West-meets-New-West article about the Nevada buckaroo morphed into a
true crime book, Outlaw, and a television movie. An article about
the hardcore climbing scene in Yosemite (commissioned by Playboy, and
then killed) turned into my first novel, Angels of Light. Circling
back to my birthplace, I wrote Duel of Eagles, a non-fiction history of
the Alamo battle, and a historical novel about Sam Houston, Empire of
Bones. The books earned me both literary awards and death threats, the
latter usually phoned in long distance from honky tonks with cowboy music
in the background. In 1990 I returned to Nepal with a BBC film
crew going to Everest…just in time for a revolution to close down
Kathmandu. (Strangely, and wonderfully, a number of the political
prisoners I had met in jail thirteen years earlier were the leaders of
the democracy movement.) After weeks of blackouts, martial law,
and a climactic bloodbath, the king stepped aside for the modern era.
Our little expedition finally broke free of the city and drove north
through the Himalayas to the Big White Whale. I turned the mountain into
a novel, The Ascent, about a deadly storm near the summit and a little
Tibetan monk, doomed like Tibet. On my way to Tibet in 1992, I
stopped off in Cambodia to visit a friend working with the United
Nations. The first democratic election was unfolding, and the Khmer
Rouge were actively trying to spoil it. When we paid a visit to Angkor
Wat, the ruins were all ours, deserted except for a few monks, nuns and
jungle children. As we explored the ruins, careful to stay on footpaths
freshly cleared of landmines, the jungle echoed with gunfire. Road
travel was banned for UN personnel, but unfortunately I wasn’t with the
UN. On the longest ride in my life – from Sisophon to Siem Reap – my
taxi driver ran two Khmer Rouge roadblocks at 100 kph, frantically
pointing at me by way of explanation. Rifles and rocket grenades aimed
at our windows, but the taxi was faster. It was the first time I wet my
pants since first grade. In 1996 Melissa invited me to serve as an
election supervisor for Bosnia’s first democratic elections.
Ordinarily, I would have jumped with both feet. But I had a daughter who
was just starting to walk, and Bosnia was full of unknowns. In the end
my wife Barbara and I decided that the principle was worth the risk, and
I went. Like Cambodia, Bosnia was a land filled with ghosts and
landmines. Unlike Cambodia, which had been overseen by ineffective UN
troops, Bosnia was locked down cold. The Bosnian-Serb mischief-makers
dared not lift a finger. The elections came off without a hitch. At the
end of six weeks I returned home, where my daughter expressed her
displeasure with my absence by throwing her pasta wheels at me and
following me everywhere for a month. People ask where I get my
ideas. Chaos theory may explain some of it. One morning I looked at the
shelf and saw The Ascent upside down, which led me to The Descent, a
novel that begins in Tibet and Bosnia, and follows an expedition as it
plunges into a geological hell. In turn, that manhunt for the historical
Satan led to Year Zero and a manhunt for the historical Jesus. Then
9/11 struck, and with war in the air I wrote The Reckoning, a ghost
story about the undead Vietnam War set in an ancient city in Cambodia.
One ghost story led to another, and The Wall materialized, a tale about
an aging climber revisiting old vertical haunts. (Not that I’m getting
any older, of course.) My next two novels are in the works. Best of all, my ten-year-old daughter is beginning to write books. These
days my office walls are papered with maps, old and new, familiar and
alien (the ocean floor, the back of the moon.) I study them, less to
find some city or island, or to chart the extremes, but to try and
figure out whose stories the mapmakers were trying to tell. Every one of
us contains worlds in search of a navigator. At one time or another, we
all get lost and then go on to find our path. Some use maps, some use
words, some their bare hands. In that way, I like to believe, we make
ourselves from the wilderness.
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