I dreamed I was visiting Everest. There was a train up to the top. It stopped at Base Camp, Stone Camp, and the abandoned power plant perched on a stream near the summit.The view was pretty amazing from up there, but the building was just a damp, old concrete block of a place. Off to the south side of the mountain was a much nicer building: the temple of Ulan Batoor. It's spire was a high, slightly bulging cone with stone traceries running in tiers around its circumference, from base to tip. The whole thing was covered in green moss, and was very picturesque against the snows of the higher peaks.
To come down from the temple to the coast, you could walk along more paths, or you could ride a T-lift. I chose the lift, but I must not have tucked my camera snuggly enough in my pocket, because when the lift sped around a turn, flinging all of us like a roller coaster ride, my camera went flying to the rocks below. I was so sad, because, while I hadn't taken many pictures of Everest yet, since I wanted to get an overview before I started shooting, there were a lot of photos from earlier in the trip that I hadn't saved to my computer yet.
I decided to walk back up to where the lift track bent around overhead and see if I could find my camera and at least salvage the SD card. As I began hiking up the path, I noticed several groups of people coming down, and I wondered if maybe someone had found my camera and would be bringing it down to show around. Sure enough, as I passed a couple of guys, I caught the flash of red metal in one of their hands, and asked them if that was a camera they'd found, and told them it was mine. I had a momentary fear they'd ask me for some proof of that, but they handed it over without question. I did check to see if I could see any recent photos, and sure enough, I was able to power it up and it was, indeed, my camera.
But even though it turned on, it didn't work quite right. It was zoomed way in, and wouldn't zoom back out, and while I could scroll (zoomed in) among photos I'd taken, and see through the view finder, I could no longer actually take pictures, no matter how hard I pressed the button. So I decided I needed to continue on up to the temple and see if they sold cameras in the gift shop.
The gift shop was tucked into one wing of the enormous temple, all cold gray stone beneath its blanket of moss. Pressed up against one window, amid a ceiling high pile of rubbish, I could see a decaying torso of a man with a narrow face, short, medium-brown hair, and blue eyes filming over. He looked familiar, and I thought it might have been the clerk from the gift shop up at the peak. Other than that, I didn't think much of it.
Inside the walls were whitewashed and the floor was brown tile and the gift shop shelves were pretty bare. But they did have a modest selection of cameras. One was the size and shape of a mid-line DSLR, and I thought maybe this was my chance to upgrade from my point-and-shoot, but when the clerk handed it to me, I swear it weighed fifteen or twenty pounds. I said it was way too heavy, and my friend Kerri pointed out that it was much bigger than what I was used to, so of course it would feel heavy. So I handed it to her, and she said, oh, no, no way, I was right.
The next selection was right in my price range, but I wasn't sure. It was one of those skinny, flat, rectangular cameras like the one I had when I was little, and it took real film and flash cubes, and I wasn't really interested in going back to that era, after getting used to digital. I finally decided on a small, copper colored point-and-shoot that had most of the features I was used to, though since it was so cheap, I didn't have high hopes for its durability or reliability. Still, I really needed something to get me through the trip.
As I was ringing up, the brown-haired, blue-eyed clerk came in and began talking to the Chinese clerk who was checking me out. It was the same guy I'd seen rotting as a torso in the window, and he didn't look all that great ambulatory, either. I decided that the temple, and maybe the whole Everest complex, was being taken over by zombies, and me and my friends should quietly make our way out of there and get home as fast as we could. The big black dog in the corner seemed to think that was an excellent idea, and he'd rather like to come home with us. Then I woke up.
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