A Change in Altitude Read Free Page B

various fabrics and dishware. She looked around her at the room: the windows were casements, like those in Margaret’s cottage, but there the resemblance between the two buildings ended. The furniture in the drawing room had carved legs and ornate surfaces, mass as well as decoration.
    “Who’s the other couple?” Margaret asked.
    “On the climb? Saartje and Willem van Buskirk. I didn’t tell you?” Diana seemed puzzled at this omission.
    “He’s part of the Hilton Group,” Arthur said. No mention was made of what Saartje did. “We’ll have them over this week for a planning session. You’ll like them. No-nonsense. Very down-to-earth. I should think Willem has done Mount Kenya before.”
    “I don’t remember that,” Diana said.
    “He used to climb in Switzerland before they went out to Bombay.”
    Diana nodded, and Margaret worried about the pace of the climb if one of their party was experienced.
    “In addition to the hypoxia,” Arthur continued, “almost everyone gets AMS of some form or another. Acute mountain sickness. Headache. Fatigue. Vomiting. Dizziness.”
    “This is supposed to be fun?” Margaret asked.
    “I’m telling you all this because we’re going to have to diagnose each other,” Arthur said, a touch sternly. “Watch for signs.”
    Margaret nodded, suitably chastened.
    “The huts fit between ten and thirty,” Arthur went on. “One usually sleeps on cots. There are latrines, if you want to call them that. Not a trip for the squeamish.”
    “The Kikuyu think the mountain is sacred,” Patrick offered, and Margaret was glad for the respite from the images of misery. “Their god Ngai is said to reside there. They call the mountain Kirinyaga.”
    *   *   *
    Margaret had been taking a photograph of a physician, a man who had recently set up a series of free clinics for babies and toddlers to receive vaccinations and medical care in Roxbury, Boston’s poorest neighborhood, not least because it was almost entirely black. Her paper, a Boston alternative weekly, had given Margaret the assignment that morning. She was having trouble presenting the doctor in a flattering pose: his glasses were magnifying lenses, and the overhead hospital light was too bright. Finally getting enough shots to ensure at least one her editor could use, Margaret realized that there was another doctor standing in the doorway, watching the shoot. When Margaret asked her subject where she might get a Tab and a sandwich, the man in the doorway answered first. “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll take you to the cafeteria. I’m headed that way myself.”
    Margaret packed up her equipment while the two physicians conferred about a matter she wasn’t privy to. Then she followed the second doctor out the door and along a hospital corridor. “Patrick,” the man said, turning and putting out his hand.
    “Margaret,” she said.
    Patrick told Margaret over tuna on rye that he was completing a fellowship in equatorial medicine. He’d become interested in tropical diseases in medical school and had visited Africa twice. She thought he was a beautiful man, and she was fascinated by the unusual planes of his long face. Perhaps, she thought, she had fallen in love with those planes before she’d fallen in love with the man. Before coming to Africa, Margaret had photographed his face at least a hundred times. At first, Patrick was intrigued, then merely patient, and then mildly annoyed, as one might be with a child who wants to play the same game again and again.
    When Patrick asked Margaret if she wanted to go to Kenya with him, she said yes with enthusiasm. Her job at the alternative paper wasn’t progressing, and she was tired of photographing congressional meetings and folksingers in Cambridge coffeehouses. Patrick had attached himself to Nairobi Hospital, which he could use as a resource for as long as he wanted in exchange for conducting free clinics around the country when asked to do so.
    Margaret and