by Dan Simmons
“Wind?” I say. There’s not a breath of it down here at Base Camp.
The Deacon shifts to one side and extends his left arm as if introducing someone. “See how she smokes,” he says.
J.C. and I had been marveling at the blue sky and blindingly white snow on the North Face of Everest, but now we notice just how high the winds must be at altitude. The spindrift from the summits and North Ridge disappear beyond our field of vision to the left.
“Incredible,” I say. “Is the Trough this bloody hot?”
“Twenty degrees hotter,” says the Deacon with a grin. “My thermometer registered over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit among the penitentes between Camp Two and Camp One. Even hotter up on the glacier. We’ve been giving the porters plenty of rest time and water, and still they stumble into Camp III too exhausted to stand or to eat.”
“How heavy are the loads, Ree-shard?”
“None more than twenty-five pounds between Camps Two and Three. Most around twenty.”
“Many trips up and down needed, then,” says Jean-Claude.
The Deacon merely nods absently.
“How are our four guys this morning?” I ask, realizing that I should have asked after our Sherpas first thing.
“Babu Rita and Norbu Chedi are carrying again already,” says the Deacon. “Lhakpa’s feet are black, but Dr. Pasang says perhaps he won’t lose his toes. Ang Chiri, on the other hand—well, Pasang says it’s sayonara to at least all of Ang’s toes and probably two or three fingers.”
I’m shocked to hear this. Ang’s feet had been swollen and hard-frozen white when we’d helped him squeeze those malformed feet into his boots at Camp III on Thursday morning, and I know that Dr. Pasang spent a lot of time with both Sherpas when we were all in the infirmary tent yesterday, but I had no idea that it would come to amputations.
“Some of the other Sherpas are already preparing Ang’s new ‘sahib boots’ with wedges at the end to make up for his soon-to-be-missing toes,” says the Deacon. “Ang’s morale is wonderful. Pasang will probably remove the toes and fingers—Ang’s three fingers look especially bad, as brown and shrunken and wizened as an Egyptian mummy’s—by Wednesday. Ang insists that he’ll be carrying again by next weekend.”
A sober silence follows this announcement. Finally Jean-Claude says, “Are you sure you don’t want us to come up to Camp Three today, Ree-shard? Jake and I feel well enough to climb, and we can haul some loads from here.”
The Deacon shakes his head. “I don’t want you hauling loads even tomorrow when you come up. It’s going to take an extraordinary amount of energy to get up that hill to the North Col…the snow is waist-deep on much of the slope, and you saw the blue-ice wall where Mallory’s beloved chimney used to be. Reggie and I are both leaving the trailbreaking on Monday morning to you two lads. We’ll be poking along behind, rigging the fixed ropes and cavers’ ladders.”
“Don’t forget my bicycle,” J.C. says.
The Deacon nods. “You can bring your bicycle up with your personal kit tomorrow,” he says. “Nothing heavier.”
Jean-Claude’s “bicycle”—its bicycle seat, pedals, and handlebars only rarely glimpsed when the mule or yak loads were being repacked—has been a source of some teasing and some real curiosity during the entire five weeks of our approach to Everest. I know that it’s not actually a bicycle—there’s been no glimpse of bicycle tires or wheels, and several people swear to have spotted strange folding metal flanges attached to the bicycle frame—but only J.C. and the Deacon seem to know what the damned thing really is.
“I only hope that this beautiful weather holds,” says Jean-Claude. “Minus this terrible heat, of course.”
“I’m sure that air temperature in the sun—out of the wind, at least—is well over one hundred degrees on the sunny parts of the North Col today,” says the Deacon.
“Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Camp Three,” I say, “it was thirty below and we were all certain that the monsoon had arrived.”
“Not yet,” says the Deacon. “Not yet.” He slaps his wool-covered thighs and stands from his long crouch. “I’m going to look in on Ang and Lhakpa again, chat with Dr. Pasang for a moment, and take a few of these boys uphill with me. We’ll be carrying loads to Camp Three until well after sunset this evening.”
“Ree-shard,” says J.C. “Did you not forget to ask us something?”
The Deacon grins. “Well, gentlemen,” he says. “What lessons have we all learned from your little carry-to-Camp-Three adventure?”
After Jean-Claude and I laugh, but before we can speak, the Deacon waves one hand and strides back toward the infirmary tent.
Monday, May 11, 1925
It is a perfect day for an attempt to summit Mount Everest.
Unfortunately, we are just beginning our assault on the mountain’s flanks, trying to reach the North Col and establish a foothold there before the end of the day. We leave Camp III a little after 7:00 a.m. Tied in to our first rope are just Jean-Claude, then me, then the Deacon, then the Deacon’s strongest-climbing personal Tiger Sherpa, Nyima Tsering. The second rope is led by Reggie, followed by my smiling Sherpa Babu Rita and three more Tiger Sherpas after him, the string anchored by the Deacon’s big man, Tenzing Bothia. Pasang is still at Base Camp watching over Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay.
It turns out that the Deacon hasn’t been quite as lazy over the weekend as he’d promised us. With soft snow, just the trek from Camp III to the base of the huge slope could have taken two totally exhausting hours or more of wallowing through waist-deep snow. But the Deacon, Reggie, and some of the Sherpas broke trail yesterday in the heat, so we are at the base of the actual slope and ready to climb within thirty minutes.
Our hope of all hopes over the past few days has been that the sun would melt the outer inches of snow during the day and the freezing-cold nights above Camp III would harden that surface snow to something like the consistency of ice for our new 12-point crampons. Now is the test…and J.C. and I are soberly aware that we’re no longer horsing around in Wales, pretending to be real Himalayan mountaineers. Jean-Claude’s newly designed crampons, ice hammers, jumars, and other devices—not to mention the Deacon’s Miracle Rope, which we’ll be betting our lives on each time we set up a rappel rather than chop steps for a descent—will either work and save us days of repeated effort, or prove to be a costly, perhaps fatal mistake. One fact looms large: achieving the North Col soon is absolutely essential if we are to come close to meeting the Deacon’s summiting date of May 17.
The first 300 feet or so of elevation consists of little more than a steep slope. Mallory and the others before him—including the Deacon—had spent entire days using their ice axes to hack footholds into the icy snow crust for the porters. Even then, the steps would soon fill with spindrift and new snowfall and would require more days of “maintenance” hacking—heavy work above 21,000 feet. And to minimize the exertion of the porters, the climbers had hacked the steps back and forth across the face of the snow slope in easy switchbacks.
Not today.
Jean-Claude is as good as his word and forges a crampon-kicked path straight up the 1,000-foot incline, keeping the line a hundred yards or so to the right of where the seven Sherpas had died in the avalanche in 1922. Even this close to the bottom, we’re putting in fixed ropes—the lighter three-eighths-inch cotton “Mallory rope” for this more casual incline at the base of the steeper slope—and every 50 feet or so Jean-Claude pauses as I use a wooden mallet to pound in tall, sharpened wooden stakes with eyelets atop them. We’re all carrying heavy coils of rope (with more in the rucksacks), and the thinner cotton rope goes quickly.
Even though “breaking trail” with 12-point crampons is infinitely easier than wallowing waist-deep in snow and hacking out steps, I can soon hear Jean-Claude’s heavy breathing. All of us fall into the rhythm of three paces, pause, gasp, then three more steps up.
“It’s time to go to the gas,” cries the Deacon the next time both ropes pause i
n our long vertical line.
This is the Deacon’s Rule—above 22,000 feet, all possible summit climbers will go to oxygen tanks. Rather than have us all climb with a full O2 rig, J.C. has separated out one tank of English air for each rucksack carried by us four sahibs, and one tank each for Tenzing Bothia, Nyima Tsering, and the other three Tigers climbing with us. Those full sets we’ll save for assaults above the North Col.
“I don’t really need the English air yet,” calls up Reggie.
“I’m still all right,” calls down J.C. from his perch above us.
The Deacon shakes his head. “Feel free to set the valves at their lowest flow, but we go on oxygen from this point on while doing heavy climbing.”
I feign reluctance, but in truth the headache I’d gotten rid of yesterday is trying to creep back in—the pain throbbing to my pulse as I gasp for breath during each short rest break—and I’m relieved when, with the mask covering my face below my goggles, I hear the soft hiss of air. The flow valve can be set to 1.5 liters of air per minute—the lowest setting—or 2.2 liters per minute. I choose the lower rate of flow.
Within a minute, I feel as if someone has given me a shot of pure adrenaline. J.C. doubles his climbing speed even as the snow slope becomes much steeper and more treacherous and a gap begins to open between the four of us on the first rope and Reggie and her four Sherpas. Babu Rita and the other three porters are carrying and climbing stolidly enough, but they soon can’t match the pace of those of us on oxygen.
We run out of the Mallory-type clothesline rope precisely where we’d planned to, and the Deacon signals for us to switch over to his heavier Miracle Rope. The slope is steep enough now that we could rappel down it—if we learn to trust the new rope for such previously unheard-of long rappels—and we begin feeding it out minus the eyelet stakes.
At our next pause around 11:00 a.m., as we wait for Reggie and her Tiger Team to catch up, I realize that we’re more than 600 feet up the 1,000-foot snow and ice wall. The exposure is severe—the Camp III tents look very small and distant from here—but the combination of fixed rope anchored by ice screws at intervals and the almost unbelievable grip of our 12-point crampons and short ice hammers gives us a sense of real security.
It’s during this rest about 200 feet below the beginning of the sheer ice wall that the Deacon gestures for J.C. and me to trade places. Jean-Claude signs that he still has plenty of energy to spare, but the Deacon merely repeats his hand commands. For a minute both J.C. and I are untied and unbelayed as we trade places in the vertical line. In the lead now, I switch my oxygen tank regulator from the 1.5-liter minimum flow to the 2.2-liter-per-minute full flow rate. There should be enough to get me to the North Col all right, but I’ll be lowering that flow before too long. I’m sure that the Deacon will want Jean-Claude to take the lead on the vertical face of blue ice looming above us.
I admit that my thrill at finally taking the lead on this expedition is mixed with some disappointment that I won’t be the first to climb an ice wall at this altitude with nothing more than 12-point crampons and a short ice hammer in each hand. J.C. had enjoyed that honor.
As we stay stuck to the steep wall below the vertical section, even though I’ve stripped off all goose down garments and stowed them in my rucksack and have been climbing with only a wool shirt and cotton undershirt on, I’m all but drenched with sweat. The entire upper basin of the East Rongbuk Glacier and the North Col have been in direct sunlight now for some time; the Camp III area more than 60 stories beneath us is a glaring basin of bright light.
Reggie and her Tigers—I can see Babu Rita’s white grin from 50 feet away—catch up, a heavy coil of Miracle Rope is passed up to me, and after we’ve all had another minute or two of rest, I tighten my oxygen mask and start my own crampon-and-ice-hammer ascent.
Fifteen minutes into this I realize that I’ve never felt stronger on a mountain. My headache is gone. My arms and legs are suffused with a new energy even while my spirit is filled with a renewed sense of confidence.
This new type of ice climbing which J.C. says he’s stolen from the top German climbers is fun. I pause every 30 feet or so to set out and anchor the next strand of fixed rope—now dangling almost vertically past us—but I no longer need the rests to gasp for air after only four or five kicked-in steps. I feel as if I could climb like this all day and all night.
For the first time I’m beginning to believe that our little band might have a real chance at summiting Mount Everest. I know that the Deacon has been considering moving out onto the North Face from Camp V or VI, duplicating Colonel Norton’s 1924 attempt on the Great Couloir—traverse off the ridge to the right above the Yellow Band until reaching the scar of snow that stretches straight up to the snowfield below the Summit Pyramid—and if the quality of the frozen snow in that couloir is anything like that of the North Col face here, such a plan would seem to make sense. Climbing on oxygen, leaving the tent before sunrise—trusting our Finch-and-Reggie down clothing to keep us alive in the unrelenting cold—we could easily make the summit and be back before sunset if the climbing were as straightforward 12-point crampon and ice hammer work as today’s has been.
I pause in such thinking before my dreams outrun reality’s headlights. Even now, part of me knows that nothing really will “come easily” on Mount Everest. I’ve learned from listening to the Deacon and through reading and listening to others—as well as through our hard experience at Camp III—that everything this mountain gives, she plucks away just as quickly and certainly. Perhaps the Great Couloir will be part of our plans, but I remind myself that no part of this ascent will turn out, in the long run, to be “easy.”
Suddenly we’re at the vertical ice. I pause again, breathing heavily but not gasping into my mask, allow the Deacon just below me to bang in the ice screws for the last section of fixed Miracle Rope, and—trusting my crampon points and the sunken adzes of the two ice hammers far more than I would have thought possible before today—lean far back to stare up at the gleaming wall of ice that is the North Col’s last full barrier before we beat her.
It seems impossible. To my right a few yards, I can see various cracks and tumbled ice boulders—all that is left of the ice chimney that George Mallory had free-climbed a year ago. I’d seen one photograph of that climb and heard Deacon’s description of it—Mallory’s moves being one part spider to two parts gymnast, his fast, vertical scuttle impossible to imitate even by the expert climbers coming up behind him. That’s where Sandy Irvine’s rope ladder had come in so useful to the porters and later climbers. We’d brought rope and wood caver’s ladders for just that purpose, but the plan was to lower them from the top of the North Col ledge, not fix them as we ascend.
I give the Deacon a thumbs-up—I can still take the lead onto the vertical ice if he wants—but he shakes his head and looks up and beyond me at J.C., who is directly above both of us now on the extremely steep slope. One gloved palm up—the Deacon is questioning whether Jean-Claude has enough energy for this final assault. I know that the Deacon himself will lead this 200-foot vertical pitch if Jean-Claude can’t. It’s the main reason that the Deacon hasn’t yet taken the lead on this morning’s climb.
J.C. gives a thumbs-up—his oxygen mask, goggles, and leather flying helmet hide his expression and features—and passes his rope and other loads down to Nyima Tsering next in line.
Once again he and I trade places, but much more gingerly this time since a slip here would lead to an almost certainly fatal fall. These ice hammers are wonderful for such frozen-crust and real-ice climbing, but none of us has adequately practiced self-arrest with them.
Then we’re both tied in again, and I let out a breath I haven’t even noticed that I’d been holding. This reminds me to dial my O2 flow back to the lowest 1.5-liter level.
The Sherpas behind Reggie, except for the always grinning Babu Rita, look exhausted and anxious. They all wear our experimental climbing harnesses, and Reggie has helped them each clip a carabine
r onto the fixed rope, but I notice that each Sherpa (again except for the trusting Babu Rita) is also hanging on to that rope more tightly than is really good for our group’s sense of security.
Suddenly Reggie unties from the Sherpa rope and quickly ties a 30-foot strand of Miracle Rope onto Tenzing Bothia’s harness. Thus freed, she moves up and down the line, using her long ice axe to dig more substantial cups in the snow for each of the porters. She then shows them how, by shifting hands without totally relinquishing their reassuring grip on the fixed rope, they can slowly turn around and lower their behinds into the cup-shaped depressions, all while keeping their regular 10-point crampons embedded in the frozen snow beneath them. Watching them take their assigned seats in the snow on that near-vertical hillside, I’m glad that we’ve brought underwear for the Tiger Sherpas as well as thick woolen trousers with a covering of Shackleton gabardine. Babu Rita giggles and laughs at the beauty of the views.
Now it’s time for the ultimate test of Jean-Claude’s new climbing apparatus and techniques.
My neck hurts from craning and I find that I’m leaning ever further backward, trusting, perhaps, too much to my crampon points and ice hammer adzes. But it’s hard not to watch Jean-Claude in this, his tour de force.
As he’d done on much safer ice in Wales, J.C. kick-scrambles his way up the sheer wall of ice like some gecko on a dak bungalow wall. For the first 50 feet or so he’s still tied on our rope—both the Deacon and I with our full-length sunken ice axes braced for belay—but at the end of that extra-long rope length, he drives in an ice piton, unties from our belay, and ties in his Miracle Rope for protection. He’ll do this every 50 feet or so on the 200-foot climb, since if he falls it will be vertical free fall, and not even the Deacon’s Miracle Rope could hold his weight without snapping after a 400-foot vertical fall.