by Dan Simmons
The first day Reggie and Pasang erected this igloo-tent on our trek, the Deacon sourly announced that the contraption looked like a Christmas plum pudding minus its sprig of holly.
But, as it turns out, the Big Tent will be warmer and more windproof than any of our Whymper or Meade-pattern tents. I will make a note of this during our first days at Base Camp: future expeditions should bring smaller versions of the hemispherical tent, perhaps four hinged and curved struts rather than eight, for the most dangerous camps—IV, V, and VI, even VII if such a higher camp is ever pitched—up on the mountain where tent platforms have to be hacked out of snow and ice or laboriously created by moving stones. Not only would such a round footprint be smaller on the mountain, but the howling winds today will flow over and around the Big Tent, while our A-tents are already flapping with a noise like multiple rifle shots.
“What’s the weather like?” I sleepily ask J.C. as I accept my first cup of hot coffee from him.
“Look,” says my friend.
Taking care not to spill my coffee, I crouch next to the tightly ribbon-tied tent opening and peer out.
It is an absolute whiteout of a blizzard. I can’t see the other tents pitched nearby, not even the central Big Tent.
“Oh, damn,” I whisper. I’d thought it cold in our tent, but the high winds blowing in chill me through two layers of long underwear and the third layer I’d slept in. “Did the Deacon make it back from his reconnoiter toward Camp One last night?”
How ironic and sad would it be if our experienced climbing leader had been caught by the storm and died on his first night out from Base Camp.
J.C. nods and sips his coffee. “He came back about midnight, shortly before the heavy snow and higher winds started up. His face mask was covered with ice, and, according to Tenzing Bothia, Ree-shard was very hungry.”
“So am I,” I say as I finish the coffee. The nausea and headache are still there, but I’m convinced that I’ll feel better if I eat something. “I’ll finish dressing, and what do you say we see if we can make it over to the Big Tent for breakfast?”
It was April 18 during our trek in to Everest when the bandits struck.
We were more than halfway through our five-week trek. We had spent two nights camping near the larger Tibetan town of Tinki Dzong and had just decided not to divert down the Yaru Chu Valley on the chance of getting a glimpse of Everest—the weather was terrible, constant clouds, sleet, snow, and wind. We were on the main trade route trail approaching the 16,900-foot pass of Tinki La, when suddenly horsemen clattered downhill and surrounded our group, herding the Sherpas and trailing mules up to the front with us.
There were about sixty men on horseback, all wearing elaborate leather, wild furs, and long-flapped hats. Their faces and eyes and skin color were more Asian-looking than the villagers we’d seen during our two and a half weeks in Tibet. Most of these bandits wore mustaches or wispy beards, and the leader was a big man, barrel-chested, ham-fisted, with cheeks as hairy as his hat. They all carried rifles, ranging from what looked to be muskets from the last century to ancient Indian Army breechloaders to modern Enfields from the Great War. I knew that Reggie and Pasang had each brought a rifle in a scabbard—for hunting—and I’d accidentally glimpsed the Deacon packing what must have been his Webley service revolver in his rucksack in Liverpool, but none of these three made any move to go for their weapons as the bandits galloped, trampled, and swooped around us, herding us together like sheep.
Many of our Sherpas—especially the non-Tigers—looked frightened. Pasang looked disdainful. The mules made an uproar at this interruption of their daily routine and then quieted. My little white Tibetan pony tried to bolt, but I planted my feet, grabbed its saddle, and half-lifted it off the ground until it calmed down.
The bandits’ larger Mongolian ponies were shaggy, but their manes and tails were elaborately braided, and they were closer in size to a real European horse than to our ridiculous ponies.
When the red dust settled, we were surrounded in two groups: the majority of the bandits encircling the Sherpa porters and ponies, and the leader with about a dozen armed men surrounding Reggie, the Deacon, J.C., Pasang, and me. The many rifles weren’t exactly pointed at us, but they weren’t pointed away from us either. All I could think of as I looked at these men was that we’d somehow traveled centuries into the past and come across Genghis Khan and part of his Horde.
Reggie stepped forward and began talking to the leader in rapid Tibetan—or some dialect of Tibetan. It didn’t sound quite like the Tibetan she’d used when talking to the djongpen headmen and villagers in Yatung, Phari, Kampa Dzong, and the many smaller villages we’d passed, bargained with for food, or camped near.
The bandit leader showed strong white teeth and said something that made his fellow bandits laugh. Reggie laughed with them, so I had to assume the comment wasn’t at her expense. (At J.C.’s, the Deacon’s, and mine, perhaps.) I didn’t care as long as the bandits didn’t shoot us—but even as I cravenly thought those words, I realized that when these bandits carried away our mules with all our gear and oxygen tanks and tents and food and Reggie’s and Lady Bromley’s money, our expedition would be over for good.
The bandit leader barked something, still grinning like a madman, and Reggie translated: “Khan says that it’s a bad year to go to Cho-mo-lung-ma. All the demons are awake and angry, he says.”
“Khan?” I repeated stupidly. Perhaps we had gone through some sort of hole in time. For whatever reason, it didn’t seem that odd to have Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes descending upon us.
“Jimmy Khan,” said Reggie. She said something to the oddly named leader, turned, went back to the mule that Pasang always kept tethered right behind her white pony, and returned with two small packing boxes. After bowing slightly and saying something with a smile, she offered the first box to Khan.
He took a curved blade not much shorter than a full scimitar from his leather belt and pried the box open. Inside, cradled in straw, was another, smaller box, this one made of polished mahogany. Khan tossed aside the packing crate, and several of his men—all smelling to high heaven of horses, human sweat, smoke, dung, and horse sweat—crowded their mounts closer so that they could see.
Khan sheathed his knife and pulled two chrome-plated, ivory-handled American western-type revolvers from the mahogany box. Boxes of cartridges were inlaid in red velvet. The other bandits gave up a collective “Ahhhhhrrrhhh”—half admiration, half anger or jealousy, it sounded like—and Khan snarled something at them. They fell silent. The other group of bandits surrounding our clumped-together Sherpas were watching carefully.
Reggie said something in this Tibetan dialect and offered Khan the second, larger box. Again he ripped open the carton and this time he held up a box and shouted at his men.
In the crate were stacked box after box of the distinctive Rowntree’s English chocolate samplers. Khan started tossing the boxes to his men. Suddenly the majority of the bandits shouted and fired off their rifles, and our Sherpas had to hold on to the ponies and mules for dear life. I lifted my panicked pony’s front hooves off the ground again.
Khan opened the first box, lifted an oval chocolate delicately out of its paper wrapper—his filthy fingers almost the color of the chocolate—and daintily tasted it.
“Chocolate over almond,” he said in English. “Very very good.”
“I hope you will all enjoy them,” said Reggie, also speaking English now.
“Be careful of the demons and yeti,” said Jimmy Khan. He fired his rifle, spurred his shaggy horse, and the Mongol Horde disappeared in a red dust cloud back toward the northeast whence they’d come.
“Old friend?” asked the Deacon as we managed to re-form our long line and begin the trek toward the Tinki La again.
“Sometimes business associate,” said Reggie. Her face was red with the dust that had been kicked up by the horses. I realized that we were all dust-covered and that the layer of dust on us was quickly turnin
g to red mud in the freezing drizzle.
“Jimmy Khan?” I heard myself asking. “How on earth did he end up with that first name?”
“He was named after his father,” Reggie said and tugged at her stubborn pony’s reins to lead it up the first steep part of the trail toward the 16,900-foot-high pass called Tinki La.
For the first three days we’re pinned down at Base Camp. The Deacon is going nuts. I’m going nuts in my own way—worried to death that the altitude keeps giving me headaches, causing me to vomit at least once a day, stealing my appetite, and keeping me awake at night. Even rolling over—on the rocks under the tent floor, each one of which my body has memorized by the second night—sends me gasping up out of my light doze, laboring to breathe. It’s ridiculous. Base Camp is at a mere 16,500 feet of altitude. The real climbing doesn’t begin until we’re above the North Col, almost half again as high as this low base. Sixteen thousand five hundred feet isn’t that much higher than the alpine summits I’ve frolicked on in the past year, I keep telling myself. Why the trouble here and not there?
You usually spent less than an hour on those summits, idiot, my rational self explains. You’re trying to live here.
I don’t really want to hear from my damned rational self these miserable three days. I also do my best to hide my condition from the others, but J.C. shares the Whymper tent with me and has heard me vomiting, has heard me gasping in the night, and has seen me on top of my sleeping bag panting on all fours like a sick dog. The others must notice my lassitude when we share meals and planning sessions in Reggie’s Big Tent, but no one says anything. As far as I can tell, neither Reggie nor the Deacon is bothered by the altitude, and Jean-Claude was over his light symptoms on the second day here at Base Camp.
Despite the terrible cold, wind, and weather, we don’t spend all of our first days at Base Camp cowering in our tents. The first full day there, despite the blizzard and temperatures twenty below zero Fahrenheit, saw us staggering around in the whiteout, unpacking and sorting all the gear. The mules were sent back to Chōdzong with a few Sherpas since there was no grass here for them, and the yaks were tethered in a sheltered spot a half mile closer to the river north of us, where the poor hairy beasts could paw through the drifting snow on the riverbanks for what little forage they could find.
A large Whymper tent has been set aside as J.C.’s workshop, where he checks the oxygen tanks, their frames, the Primus stoves, and our other equipment. He has a better set of tools than poor Sandy Irvine had a year ago, for all of Irvine’s excellent fixes and repairs and jury-rigging of ladders and O2 sets, but the current tool kit is still relatively primitive. Jean-Claude can solder but not weld; take cameras, watches, stoves, lanterns, crampons, and other things apart and reassemble them with the right tools, but has a minimum of spare parts for replacement; he can bang metal back into shape but not forge new pieces if something is damaged seriously enough to warrant it.
Luckily, after two days of testing, J.C. informs us that only fourteen of our hundred oxygen tanks have lost pressure, and nine of them only partially, as opposed, the Deacon tells us, to more than thirty out of a total of ninety of the oxygen canisters in Norton, Mallory, and Irvine’s expedition the year before. Their thirty tanks had leaked so much by the time they got to Shekar Dzong and took inventory, the tanks were essentially worthless. Sandy Irvine’s redesign to the Mark V oxygen system during his trek in last year, combined with further improvements, especially in gaskets and valves and flow meters, via the talents of George Finch, Jean-Claude, and J.C.’s blacksmith-turned-industrialist-steel-manufacturer father, have evidently done the trick. If we fail on this expedition—fail even in our limited goal of finding Lord Percival Bromley’s remains on the lower half of the mountain—it shouldn’t be for lack of what the Sherpas call “English air.”
As I say, we aren’t idle. On the second day, after our yak and mule loads have laboriously been repacked into porter loads, other crates set out to stay here in Base Camp or set aside to be cached at Camps I, II, or III, we four sahibs and Pasang meet alone in Reggie’s Big Tent to finalize our strategy.
“Our date for summiting remains May seventeenth,” says the Deacon as the four of us crouch over the topographic and hand-drawn maps laid out on the circular floor of Reggie’s tent. A hanging lantern hisses above us. Pasang stands in the shadows, guarding the laced-up entrance from any random intruders.
“What’s your date for finding Cousin Percy?” Reggie asks.
The Deacon taps his cold pipe against his teeth—the air is already too thick in here and redolent of wet wool for him to add smoke—and says, “I’ve built in search days from each camp along the way, Lady Bromley-Montfort.”
“But your goal is still to summit Everest,” she says.
“Yes.” The Deacon clears his throat. “But we can spend time after the summit parties succeed—until the monsoon really hits—to continue the search for Lord Percival’s remains, if necessary.”
Reggie smiles and shakes her head. “I know the condition of the men who’ve achieved the high-altitude records here and not summited. Bruce with heart problems and traumatic shock and frostbite after his oxygen set quit working. Morshead, Norton, and Somervell too weak to descend safely in ’twenty-two and falling toward the overhang, saved only by tangled ropes and Mallory’s impossible belay of all three. High-climbing porters dead from brain embolisms and broken legs, others sent home due to terrible frostbite. Norton’s sixty hours of screaming in pain from snow blindness last year…”
The Deacon waves away her objections. “No one says the mountain’s not going to take a toll on us. We may all perish. But odds are good that even if we summit by seventeen May, some or all of us should be in good enough shape to direct the Tiger Sherpas in the search for Percy. We have advantages that none of the previous expeditions had.”
“Pray tell,” says Reggie. I can see Jean-Claude’s curious interest, and I admit that my own is fairly keen as well.
“First of all, the oxygen sets,” says the Deacon.
“Two of the three previous British expeditions used similar oxygen apparatus,” says Reggie. Her voice is calm.
The Deacon nods. “They did, but with apparatus not nearly as good. And not as many tanks. George Finch is sure that the problem was that most of the previous climbers, including me, used too little, too late. The altitude sickness begins eating away at our energy and reserves even here at Base Camp. You and I are acclimated, Lady Bromley-Montfort, but you can see the effect that just seventeen thousand feet has on some of the Sherpas and…others.”
His glance my way is just a flick of the eyes.
“Above the North Col,” he continues, “especially above eight thousand meters, our bodies and brains begin dying. Not just becoming fatigued and tired, but literally dying. Previous expeditions tended to dole out the oxygen tanks, even to porters, only when they were well above the North Col. And then almost always only when climbing. I plan for us to go on oxygen from Camp Three and beyond—including the Tiger Sherpas when needed—even when stuck in the tents. Even when sleeping.”
“Pasang and I spent two weeks on the North Col and climbed above it without oxygen,” says Reggie.
“And were you miserable the entire time?” asks the Deacon.
She looks down. “Yes.”
“Did you sleep well…or at all some nights?”
“No.”
“Did you have any appetite even when you still had food reserves?”
“No.”
“Did you rouse yourselves enough every day—after a while at that altitude—to get snow and to fire up the Primus when you needed to melt it for soup or drinking water?”
“No.”
“Were both of you dehydrated, sick with headache, and vomiting after a few days?”
“Yes.” Reggie sighs. “That comes with being on Mount Everest, does it not?”
The Deacon shakes his head. “It comes from our bodies beginning to die on Mount Everest near and
above eight thousand meters. Oxygen from the tanks—just breathing a few liters at night while we sleep—can’t stop that slow dying, but it can slow it down a bit. Give us a few more days at altitude in which we can think clearly and function properly.”
“So we’re definitely going to use English air all the way up after the North Col, Ree-shard?” asks Jean-Claude.
“Yes. And on the North Col when we have to. I don’t like being stupid, my friends—and this mountain makes everyone stupid. And often causes hallucinations as well. At least above Camp Three at the base of the Ice Fall. In ’twenty-two, I climbed for two days with a fourth man on our rope…a man who didn’t exist. The use of oxygen, even at a low flow rate, day and night, will reduce that fatal stupidity a bit. Enough, I hope, to give us the edge for reaching the summit and for finding Bromley’s remains.”
I can tell that Reggie is not totally convinced, but what choice does she have? She’s always known that the Deacon’s—and Jean-Claude’s and my—primary goal is to reach the summit (although in the past two days of illness, I’ve been very discouraged about the odds of reaching that goal). She just has to believe that we’ll do our best in searching for Percy on the way up and back down—if there is a “back down.”
On the morning of the fourth day, as the snowstorm finally shows signs of relenting, we reconvene in the Big Tent and go over the Deacon’s strategy. “There’s a reason that all the English expeditions have been led by military men,” the Deacon is saying as we huddle over the map of the mountain. His gaze rests more on Reggie’s face than on J.C.’s or mine, and I understand he’s making a final effort at persuasion. “This way of attacking the mountain—carrying to Camp One, then Camp Two, and so forth up to Camp Six or Seven before attempting the summit—is classic military siege strategy.”
“Such as the sieges in the Great War?” asks Reggie.