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Brotherhood of the Rape* : K2 ravished too

Rupak Bhattacharya | Aug 10 , 2022

Friends, adventurers, mountaineers, **
Lend me your axe.
I come to bury adventure, not to praise it.
The evil that adventure does lives after it,
The good is oft interred with its bones.

So let it be with K2.

The (ig)noble discoverers, adventurers, mountaineers hath told you that K2 was the second highest, the “mountaineers mountain”, revered as the toughest in the 8K pantheon, the “, .. savage mountain that tries to kill you “.

If it were so, it was a grievous fault.
And grievously hath K2 answered it,
As you stand witness to it being ravished.

Here, under leave of the “client climbers“,
For they are all honourable men and women,
Come I to speak at Adventure’s funeral.

You mock them, you scoff at them.
But they hath brought many dollars
to fill the Sherpa coffers;
So they may ever be well fed,
their children be warm in schools,
Away from the icy toil of a rocky life.

Though you laugh at them and call them clients,
The rich ransom bargained for a spurious adventure,
Doth serve a honourable cause.
Yet you mock them, and justly call them a client.

Did you not mourn when Mallory or Irvine or Peter or Joe disappeared?
What cause withheld you then to raise a hand, nay even a finger, when hundreds lined up, nose to butt, on Everest.

Did you not grieve when Art Gilkey disappeared in 1953?
What cause withholds you then to mourn now, as adventure gets gang-raped again this summer.

You all did love adventure once, not without cause;
What cause withholds you then to mourn for it?

O judgement! thou art fled to Gore Texed Sheep, and men have lost their reason.
Bear with me. My heart lies in the crevasse with Art Gilkey, and I must pause till it comes back to me.