by Dan Simmons
He begins his crawl out onto the now steeply inclined ladder. I brace myself for the sudden belay shock of his fall.
Jean-Claude has only one free hand with which to grip the ladder in front of him, since he’s using the short ice hammer that has been lashed onto his rucksack to bang snow and ice off the rungs and ladder rims ahead of him as he crawls. He’s left on his full rucksack load; he and I hadn’t even needed to speak out loud before both deciding that—if the ladder holds—we want the Sherpas also to cross with their loads still on their backs. It would just take too damned long in this freezing world of continually falling temperatures and whirling spindrift to send the loads across by hand. So it will be all or nothing.
At one point, when J.C. is about halfway across, his feet and backside higher than his head as he crawls downhill, the ladder drops another six inches or so in its snowy niche across the crevasse, and I brace again for the full, spine-jarring shock of his drop.
It does not come. The new ledge of snow and ice on the far side stays solid long enough for Jean-Claude to finish his crawl. Amazingly, he stays out on the ladder while he bangs some ice screws into the blue-ice wall of the little debris chute he’s crawling toward. He takes two precut six-foot strands of the Deacon’s rope and ties the ends onto the stakes and then wraps the other ends around each side of the ladder until the lines are taut.
It’s not much protection, but it’s a start.
Now I can barely see Jean-Claude through the heavy snowfall, but I can hear him panting heavily as he pulls his own long ice axe off his rucksack and sinks it into the snow and ice about ten meters beyond the crevasse. He ties longer strands to this new ice anchor and—incredibly—crawls back out onto the ladder to lash these new support lines onto the middle section of the ladder. I toss him two more lines that we’ve tied around our own ice anchors, and he moves forward to tie them onto this end of the ladder. Then, rather than stand up on our side of the crevasse, he laboriously backs his way across the steeply inclined ladder again, crampons first.
Standing in the debris chute, he uses his ice hammer and mittened hands to sweep away some of the snow debris so that it will be easier for the porters to stand upright and walk the eight vertical feet up the rough ramp to the glacier proper.
Then he throws his own belay line and the last coil of Miracle Rope across the crevasse to me and backs away to loop his ends around his ice axe anchor before he takes up his belay stance. Just watching my friend exert himself like this above 20,000 feet has made me gasp for breath.
“All right,” I say with as much authority as I can muster. “Lhakpa first. Babu, you keep the other two on belay while I tie my belay rope and Sahib Clairoux’s onto Lhakpa. And please instruct Lhakpa and the others to approach the ladder on their hands and knees—with pack loads remaining on, if you please—and to move slowly. Tell them that there’s no danger. Even if the ladder were to give way, which it won’t with its new tie-downs, Sahib Clairoux and I both will have you on belay. All right…Lhakpa first…”
For a moment the terrified Sherpa won’t come forward, and I’m sure that we’ll have a mutiny on our hands.
But in the end, after much gesticulating from me and shouting in Nepalese from Babu Rita, Lhakpa crawls forward an inch at a time, out onto the ladder, trying to keep his knees on the ladders’ still icy rims, moving only one mittened hand at a time. It takes forever, but finally Lhakpa is across and being untied by Jean-Claude. The frostbitten Sherpa is laughing and giggling like a child over there.
Four more of us, I think wearily. But I smile and beckon the hobbling Ang Chiri to drop to all fours and come crawling forward to be tied in on both our ropes.
About a century later, when all of the Sherpas are across and tied in to their own climbing line again, I wrestle with all my might to dig up the three ice axes I’ve driven in and then hurl them across the crevasse. J.C. retrieves all three.
I’ll have only Jean-Claude on belay for me, but the second line he tosses me will run to where his own axe is still being used as an ice anchor. I tie a loose strand of the Miracle Rope around me, to make a Prusik sling for my feet should the ladder give way under me. It’s infinitely better for the climber fallen into a crevasse to Prusik-knot his way up and out under his own power—creating little climbing stirrups with the knotted loops—than to have the man or men on the other side try to use brute force to haul him up.
I make the mistake of staring down into the swirling blue-to-black depths of the crevasse as I shuffle across the ladder. The drop beneath the shaky, ice-rimmed, tilted ladder looks to be, quite literally, bottomless. The downward-forward incline seems steeper when one is on the ladder. I feel blood rushing to my head.
Then I’m across and eager arms are helping me to my feet. Tying on to the main rope again, I look back at the spiderwebbed, jury-rigged mess of a ladder-bridge we’ve all just crawled across and I laugh, just as Lhakpa Yishay had earlier, with a weary sense of sheer elation at the mere fact of being alive.
It’s getting late in the afternoon and we have far to go. Jean-Claude takes the lead, I tie in to the line in third place behind Babu Rita, where I’d been before, and we resume the slow descent of the glacier in the snowstorm. I can tell that Ang Chiri and Lhakpa are stumbling along with no sensation in their frostbitten feet at all; they might as well be walking on wooden stumps.
Somehow, I will never understand how, J.C. keeps us to our route. As we get a bit lower, moving between the towering and oppressive ice pinnacles again, there’s less new powder, and we see more of the bamboo wands appearing like quick, careless ink scratches on a perfectly white sheet of paper. There is no separation between snow and sky this gray afternoon, and the giant seracs appear suddenly before and beside us like white-shrouded ghost-giants.
Then we reach the last obstacle between us and Camp II and fresh water to drink and warmed soup and real food to eat—the final crevasse less than half a mile above the camp, the crevasse with the wide and thick snow bridge and our rope guy lines to clamp on to for a sense of security as we cross.
Both guy lines are in place, although slumping from the weight of ice on them. The snow bridge is completely gone, tumbled into the broad crevasse.
Jean-Claude and I huddle and compare watches. It’s after 4:30 p.m. The glacier will be in full shadow from Everest’s ridges, and it will be growing dark in forty-five minutes or less. The snow and temperature continue to fall. In coming up, we’d gone both right and left for more than half a mile in each direction before deciding that the snow bridge was the best way to get across. There will be no bamboo wands to guide us between snow-covered crevasses if we try that kind of traverse again. We’ll have to wait for morning and—if God be pleased with us—better weather.
We look each other in the eye and Jean-Claude says loudly to Babu and Norbu, “We dump our loads here, about thirty feet away from the crevasse. And we will set up the tent here.” He drives his ice axe into the snow about ten meters back from the lip of the crevasse.
The porters pause, stunned at the thought of spending another night on the glacier.
“Quickly! Vite! Before darkness falls and the higher winds return!” J.C. claps his mittened hands so hard that the echo returns to us as loud as a gunshot.
The noise brings the Sherpas out of their shock, and we all work as well as we can to unload both ground cloths, set up the tent, and drive in as many jury-rigged stakes and ice screws as we can. I realize that if the winds come as they did the last two nights, odds are poor that our tent—and we—will survive. I can imagine Reggie’s Big Tent with all six of us huddled in it tonight, fingers trying to self-arrest through the ground cloth, as the hurricane winds just slide us, tent and all, across the ice like a hockey puck, until we go hurtling into this no-bottom crevasse.
Within an hour we’re inside the tent and huddled together for warmth. We make no attempt to eat anything. Our thirst is terrible beyond any words I have to describe it. All six of us are coughing that high-alt
itude cough that sounds so terrible—“like a barking jackal,” J.C. has called it. The second time he uses the phrase, I ask my friend directly if he’s ever actually heard a jackal bark. “All last night, Jake,” is his reply.
Jean-Claude and I have given Ang and Lhakpa our eiderdown sleeping bags this night while we sleep in our Finch duvet coats and Reggie goose down trousers, thin blankets pulled over us. I use my boots in a weatherproof sack as a pillow.
Both J.C. and I are exhausted, but we’re too cold and anxious even to pretend to sleep. We try to huddle closer, but the other’s shaking and chattering teeth just seem to make it worse for each of us. Perhaps our bodies have just quit putting out any heat.
That would mean that you’re both dead, Jake. I don’t like the tone of my own voice in my head. It sounds like it’s given up.
“In the m-m-morning,” whispers Jean-Claude as full darkness falls and the winds grow stronger, “I’ll cross on one of the fixed ropes, ankles and hands, and g-g-get down to Camp Two and bring everyone back with me early with ladders and food and hot b-b-beverages.”
“Sounds…okay,” I manage between teeth chattering. Then, “Or I could try it tonight, Jean-Claude. Take the hand torch with me and…”
“No,” whispers my friend. “I d-d-don’t believe the rope will h-h-hold your wuh-weight. I’m lighter. Too t-t-tired to b-belay tonight. In the m-morning.”
We curl closer, close our eyes, and pretend to sleep. The wind has grown in ferocity so the machine-gun battle sounds of the canvas slapping have returned with a vengeance. I imagine that I can feel the entire tent sliding south toward the crevasse, but I’m too exhausted and dehydrated to do anything about it and just remain curled where I am, the other bodies pressing close.
Jean-Claude’s slow breathing has the bad habit of just stopping for what seems like minutes on end—no sound, no inhaling or exhaling—until I shake him back into a semblance of breathing again. This goes on deep into the black night. It gives me a good reason for staying awake in the cold darkness. Every time I shake him back into life, he whispers, “Merci, Jake,” and then passes into his irregular, semiconscious breathing again. It’s like a deathbed watch with a dying man.
Suddenly I sit straight up in the darkness. Something terrible must have happened. I can hear J.C.’s and the other men’s gasping breaths, including my own, in the near-absolute darkness, but there’s something essential missing.
The wind has stopped. The noise is gone for the first time in more than forty-eight hours.
Jean-Claude is sitting up next to me, and we shake each other’s shoulders in some sort of mute celebration or simple hysteria. I fumble around until I find the boxy flashlight, turn its light onto my watch. Three-twenty a.m.
“I should try the rope now,” rasps J.C. “I won’t have the strength to cross come sunrise.”
Before I can answer, there come a scrabbling and tearing at our tent door—which we’ve learned to leave partially unlashed since totally closing off the tent adds to our inability to breathe—and I begin hallucinating bright lights shining in on us. Norbu Chedi’s cheeks are frostbitten pure white and black in the sudden glare of brilliance. Something large and powerful is clawing to get in.
The Deacon’s and Lady Bromley-Montfort’s heads poke into the tent. I can see the flashlights in their mittened hands and more lights behind them—lanterns, several of them. The two are also wearing Reggie’s Welsh miner headgear, and those lights also illuminate the tawdry, ice-dusted interior of our tent and our staring faces.
“How?” I manage to say.
The Deacon grins. “We were ready to set out as soon as the blizzard died down. I have to admit that these miner’s lamps work passably well…”
“Better than passably,” interrupts Reggie.
“But how did you cross…,” begins Jean-Claude.
“The glacier’s been busy,” says the Deacon. “About six hundred meters—a quarter of a mile—to the west, both sides collapsed a debris field to the shallow bottom there. About a hundred and fifty feet down and then back up, but ramps, really. No terribly serious climbing involved. We left some fixed ropes. Make room, gentlemen, we’re coming in.”
Besides the Deacon and Reggie crowding in to fill our tent to overflowing, Pasang comes in on his knees. He removes a medical bag from his rucksack.
The Sherpas outside crouch by the doorway, their own headlamps burning, at least three lanterns casting a wide light on their grins as they pass in thermoses of warm Bovril, tea, and soup. A larger thermos holds only water, and each of us takes a turn drinking deeply.
Dr. Pasang is already inspecting Norbu’s face, Lhakpa’s and Ang’s frostbitten feet. “These two will require carrying on Tejbir’s and Nyima Tsering’s backs,” says Pasang. He begins rubbing smelly whale oil on the two men’s bare, blackened feet and on Norbu’s face.
“We’re going now?” I manage to say. I’m not sure I can stand, but already the water has revived something that had been close to being extinguished in me.
“Now’s as good a time as any,” says the Deacon. “There’s a Sherpa to help each of you. We also have headlamps for all of you. Even with the—what’s your American word, Jake?—even with the detour down to the new route across the crevasse, we’ll be back to Camp Two in forty-five minutes or less. We’ve marked the way with wands.”
“Come, Jake, I’ll help you to your feet,” says Reggie and puts my arm over her shoulder. She lifts my two-hundred-plus pounds as if I were a child and all but carries me out into the night.
The stars are very bright. There is no hint of snow or cloud, other than the spindrift I can see hurling itself from the summits and ridges of Everest, a mere three miles and 10,000 feet above us.
Jean-Claude also looks up at Everest and blazing star fields as he’s helped out of the tent. “Nous y reviendrons,” he says to the mountain.
I may be wrong, but I think I’ve picked up enough French to translate that as “We shall return.”
Saturday, May 9, 1925
It’s unspeakably hot.
There’s not a breath of air in the two-man Meade tent that Jean-Claude and I slept in last night after being released from the Base Camp “infirmary,” and although the canvas doors to the tent are tied back and wide open, lying in here is like being buried in the Sahara in a shroud smelling of overheated canvas.
J.C. and I have stripped to our underwear but are still sweating profusely, and now we see the Deacon striding toward us across the uneven moraine-rock field.
Yesterday morning, Friday before dawn, when the Deacon, Reggie, Pasang, and the others had come to our rescue, they’d brought us down to Camp II, where both J.C. and I continued to drink cup after cup of cold water.
I’d assumed that they’d leave J.C. and me at Camp II while they helped carry Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay down to Base Camp to have Pasang deal with their frostbite in the medical tent “infirmary” he’d set up there, but the Deacon insisted that all of us—including Norbu Chedi, with his frostbitten cheeks now liberally smeared with whale oil and axle grease—go all the way back down to Base Camp. After drinking so much water and then some hot soup, Jean-Claude and I were perfectly able to hike down the Trough with Pasang and half a dozen other Sherpas, but Ang Chiri needed to be carried on a jury-rigged stretcher, and Lhakpa Yishay hobbled down with a Sherpa friend supporting him on either side. It was testimony to the severity of our earlier dehydration that, even after gulping down so many cups of water, neither of us had to stop to pee during the descent.
The air at Base Camp—at only 16,500 feet—seemed rich and thick enough to swim in after two days and nights at Camp III’s altitude of 21,500 feet. Besides that, Dr. Pasang had “prescribed” that all six of us take some “English air” from one of the oxygen rigs being carried up to Camp III by porters. After dismissing Jean-Claude and me from the infirmary on Friday afternoon, he’d sent one bottle rigged to two mask sets—the regulator timed to dispense only one liter of oxygen per hour—and t
old us in no uncertain terms to use it during the night whenever we woke gasping for air or feeling cold.
With the English air to help us, J.C. and I had slept for thirteen hours.
The Deacon crouches next to where Jean-Claude and I sprawl half outside the tent, lying on our sleeping bags in the hot sunlight. The Deacon is down to his shirtsleeves, although he continues to wear his thick wool knickers and high puttees.
“Well, how are my last two hospital patients?” he asks.
J.C. and I both insist that we’re feeling excellent—great sleep, wonderful appetite at breakfast this morning, no signs of frostbite or the “mountain lassitude” remaining—and we’re telling the truth. We say that we’re ready to head back up the Trough and glacier to Camp III right now, immediately.
“Glad you’re feeling better,” says the Deacon, “but no hurry to come up to Camp III. Rest another day. One thing that Lady Bromley-Montfort and I heartily agree upon is the idea of climbing high, sleeping low. Especially after the winds and cold you chaps put up with for three nights.”
“You’ve climbed the ice wall to the North Col without us,” says Jean-Claude, and his voice sounds both disappointed and accusatory.
“Not at all,” says the Deacon. “We spent yesterday and this morning continuing to make the trail up to Camp Three safer and supervising the Sherpas as they haul more loads up there. Reg…Lady Bromley-Montfort is at Camp Two now, and we’ll be working on shuttling things all the rest of the day. Tomorrow, she and I thought we’d acclimate some more at Camp III, and if you fellows come up by late tomorrow afternoon, we’ll give that ice wall to the North Col a try on Monday morning.” He pats Jean-Claude’s arm. “You’re our official snow-and-ice man, old sport. I promised you that we wouldn’t take on the North Col until you were ready. Besides, the wind’s too high on the Col today. Perhaps it will die down tomorrow and the next day.”