by Dan Simmons
About two-thirds of the way up the icy wall, J.C. pauses, fumbles in his rucksack, and pulls out his oxygen tank. The Deacon and I exchange guilty glances; the plan had been for Jean-Claude to do this part of the climb with a new oxygen tank, opened to its full flow of 2.2 liters per minute. We’d all forgotten to make the exchange; even Jean-Claude in his eagerness to start the most dramatic part of our day’s climb had forgotten.
Now he removes his oxygen mask and free-hanging regulator with its various tubes and carefully sets them in his rucksack, even while pulling out the empty tank, pinning it against the ice wall with his body while using just his free right hand to unscrew the connections.
Shouting “Watch out below!” J.C. swings the empty tank one, two, three times and then hurls it to our right. We all watch, delighted and horrified at the same time, while the heavy oxygen tank bounces first off the ice wall itself and then off snow and ice for the full 1,000-foot drop to the glacier below. The noise it makes in its bouncing—especially its final ricochet off a snow-hidden boulder—is wonderful.
The Deacon pulls his own mask down. “Want to change leads?” he shouts upward.
On a windy day, I have no doubt that the shout would have been lost under wind roar, but today is almost perfectly still. I’m using the undershirt over my forearm to mop away sweat, even as we just stand here on the hillside below the vertical face, one arm around the fixed rope, both forward sets of crampon points and our left ice hammer holding us in place.
Jean-Claude grins, shakes his head, and looks up at the rest of the climb above him. Then he begins moving again, pausing more frequently now, moving a bit more slowly, but still climbing steadily.
Fifteen minutes more and we watch him thrust himself up, weight on his crampon points, and lean far over the lip of the North Col, sinking his right ice hammer deep into horizontal ice we can’t see. Then he’s gone.
A moment later, when he’s obviously tied in to some anchor he’s set on the surface of the Col, his head and shoulders reappear and a second rope begins snaking down.
“Send up the ladders!” shouts Jean-Claude.
We do, but not before all eight of us sitting and standing on the ice cliff below the last vertical wall send up a cheer for him.
The caving ladders are in 50-foot sections, and it takes all four of them to reach the lip of the Col. Not trusting just the attachments from one section to the next, J.C. comes down each 50-foot section and secures the next with short-cut strands of Miracle Rope, ice screws, and more pitons. It’s hard work, and J.C. is pouring perspiration as the last ladder is fixed in place. Then he’s at the bottom of the ice wall with us and we’re pounding him on the back and shoulders, voices hoarse in the high, thin air but filled with our congratulations.
The Deacon shows the Sherpas and the rest of us his total confidence in the rope ladders by unhooking from the common rope and clambering up, his crampons biting into the wooden rungs. One by one we follow, Reggie falling back to come up last behind the final Sherpa. I fall in behind my old friend Babu Rita, who clambers monkeylike up the rope-and-wood ladders, looking down and grinning at me until I become nervous for him. I want to shout up to him to remember the three-point rule—always keep three parts of you in touch with something solid while climbing (e.g., two feet, one hand; two hands, one foot; whatever)—but I’d have to remove my oxygen mask to make the shout and I’m still enjoying the benefits of English air. Babu completes his ascent without incident, and his hand is stretched out and waiting for me as we make the last, mildly nervous-making lurch up and over the lip of the North Col from the ladder. Babu grasps my hand and forearm in both of his strong hands and helps me to my knees and then up.
I move a few paces away from the top of the ladder and look at the dizzying sight.
We’ve climbed to the “Shelf,” where previous expeditions had set their tents—a sort of slumped area on the north side of the North Col where the upper ice ridge makes a nice protective wall. But where there had been room for dozens of tents in 1922, shrunken to a 30-foot-wide ice shelf good for only a thin row of tents in 1924, now the shelf is less than ten feet wide. Too exposed to the drop and too narrow now to serve as our Camp IV.
Still, it’s a good place to rest, and almost everyone is sitting slumped along the south wall of the shelf. I find my way down to the end of the line and slump along with them until Reggie comes up with the final three Sherpas. She warns them in Nepalese and Tibetan not to shed their loads yet—that they have to climb up and off this thin but sheltered shelf—and then she sits down next to me and tells me what she’s just told them.
Winds and avalanches have swept the ice shelf free of all the previous expeditions’ tents and signs of occupation other than for one collapsed green tent—wind-torn to rags, one tentpole still sticking up at a wild angle—right at our feet. I poke at the green canvas with my crampons and say to Reggie and Jean-Claude, “Just think—Mallory may have slept in there.”
“Not bloody likely,” says Lady Bromley-Montfort. “That’s the tent that Pasang and I brought up and shared last August when we were stuck up here for a week.”
I’d shut off my oxygen flow and pulled the mask down to my chest, but now I wish I’d left it in place; it might have hidden this sudden, absurd blush. For a long moment we all just sit there staring out at the incredible view—most of the East Rongbuk Glacier winding away at our feet (we can see all the way back to Camp I from here) and the mass of Changtse seeming to hurl itself skyward to our left, the overhanging bulk of Everest’s shoulder and North East Ridge cutting the skyline into steep, serrated segments to our right.
Jean-Claude looks around at our sitting line of Sherpas and says, “Where is le Diacre?”
“Mr. Deacon?” says Reggie. “He went off with Nyima Tsering, Tenzing Bothia, and a stack of bamboo wands to find a better place for Camp Four.”
“What are we sitting here for?” I ask.
J.C. and I laboriously get to our feet, I turn my oxygen flow back on, and we walk on a narrow strip of ice separating the Sherpas’ outstretched legs and crampons from the 1,000-foot drop to the glacier to where we can follow the Deacon’s and his two Sherpas’ footsteps up and out of the shelf area, onto the North Col proper.
When we reach the level of the actual Col, Jean-Claude and I both have to stop and gape for a few seconds. The full North Face of Mount Everest is now revealed to us as if someone had drawn back a theater curtain. To our left, beyond the last giant snow seracs, the North Ridge rises from this saddle of the North Col in a 4,500-foot-high spur to where it meets the North East Ridge—what the Deacon still calls the North East Shoulder of Everest—at an altitude of 27,636 feet. From that juncture of the North Ridge and North East Ridge so far above us, it’s another mile’s trek along the ridgeline to the right to the actual summit of Everest. The North Face of the mountain, including Norton’s Great Couloir, looks absolutely vertical from this viewing spot, but I know that such looks are deceiving from the base of any mountain. That couloir might still be our best bet, especially if high winds keep us off the ridgelines.
Without fumbling for binoculars, J.C. and I can clearly see about two-thirds of the way up the North Ridge in front of us to a weakly pronounced recline, the point where the Deacon has been planning to set our Camp V. Below that area, the North Ridge is composed of an irregularly rounded rock buttress that soon blends into the humpbacked extension of snow and ice that connects to our low, snowy saddle here on the North Col.
It’s weird. We can easily see the spindrift blowing off the summit like a 20-mile-long white scarf set against the brilliantly blue sky, and more spindrift being lifted off the North East and upper North ridges as if by hurricane winds, but there’s hardly a breath of wind down here on the North Col. I remember the Deacon saying that when he, Mallory, and the others had first reached this spot in their 1921 reconnaissance mission, the winds everywhere atop the Col, except on the ice shelf behind us that’s now dwindled so much, had been too str
ong for a man to stand in for more than a few seconds. To stand where Jean-Claude and I were walking now would have been certain death. This, I thought, is the difference between climbing to the North Col in that narrow window of time between winter and the onset of the monsoon, and climbing during the monsoon season.
The cramponed boot prints of the Deacon and his two Sherpas are quite clear in the snow, and we follow them up and further west beyond the ice shelf. Behind us, Reggie has got Babu Rita and the three other Sherpas in motion, although they are plodding slowly under their loads here at 23,000 feet. Should any of the Sherpas get ill at this altitude, the plan is to give them oxygen; otherwise, only the four of us high-climbers are to use oxygen at North Col altitudes.
For some reason, I’m not prepared for all the yawning crevasses up here on the North Col. It makes perfect sense that they should be here; the ice of the North Col keeps breaking off and dropping onto the East Rongbuk Glacier proper far below. But I guess—despite reading and rereading all the earlier expeditions’ accounts and listening to the Deacon talk about how we’d have to pick our way through crevasses atop the North Col—for some reason I’d expected the Col to be more of a smooth surface.
It’s not. I realize that we’re climbing again as I follow the three men’s boot prints along narrow ridges between deep crevasses, up and over one massive ice bridge that the Deacon’s just marked minutes before with red-flagged bamboo wands, around and through a series of giant tumbled seracs leading out to a broader, more crevasse-riddled rising slope, and finally to where we can see the Deacon, Nyima Tsering, and Tenzing Bothia setting up tents in the lee of some giant drifts and seracs near the south edge of the North Col, right below where the Col meets the rising ice and snow of the North Ridge spur.
My gaze keeps rising to the North Ridge and North Face of the mountain. I can clearly see the downward-tilting black granite slabs on both the ridge and face, some partially snow-covered, others glistening as if covered with ice. Most alpine climbers—myself included—dislike climbing on such downward-tilting rock slabs; it’s too much like attempting to climb slick, slippery, treacherous tiles on the steep roof slope of some Gothic church. Sometimes the slab tiles themselves will give way beneath you.
Because of the maze of crevasses, the route through them marked only with the few red-flagged bamboo wands, J.C. and I rope up with the three Sherpas and Reggie on a single line as we continue to plod uphill toward this new site for Camp IV.
When we come up to the Deacon and his two Sherpas, our guys dump their loads and collapse in the snow while those who’ve come before us finish their job of erecting one heavy Whymper tent and two lighter Meade tents. Still staying on the last of my oxygen, I empty my own rucksack of the one 10-pound Meade tent and three sleeping bags I’ve hauled up with me today.
We’ve brought lots of water, thermoses with warm drinks, and some light food stocks with us—mostly chocolate, raisins, and other high-energy snacks—but most of our load carrying today has centered on bringing the tents and sleeping bags needed for Camp IV and, with luck, Camp V. One of the Sherpas has brought up a Primus stove—for serious cooking—but each campsite has been under orders, after J.C.’s and my near debacle at Camp III, also to have at least two spirit stoves and, more important, multiple Unna cookers with their Meta solid fuel to burn. The Deacon isn’t taking the chance of other advanced camps not being able to melt snow for drinking water, tea (however tepid at these altitudes), and soup.
Reggie, after telling her Sherpas what to set up where, is standing next to the Deacon and looking rather dubiously at the giant seracs that hide the view of the North Ridge from us here. “Are you sure that this will block the worst of the wind?” she asks.
The Deacon shrugs. There’s a glint of real joy in his eyes that I’ve noticed on the Matterhorn and elsewhere when he’s enjoying climbing to a soul-deep extent. “In ’twenty-one and ’twenty-two, we always noticed less wind in the lee of large seracs here on the west end of the North Col,” he says. His oxygen mask is dangling unused on his chest. “And Teddy Norton told me that other than the ice shelf, this would have been his choice as a site for Camp Four last year.”
Reggie does not look totally convinced. I remind myself that she and Pasang were kept prisoner here on the North Col for a miserable, windy week, waiting at every moment for their tent—the green canvas rags and broken poles I’d noticed back on the shelf—to blow over the edge of the Col. The North Col has to be a source of anxiety to her.
“It will be convenient for climbing to the North Ridge,” she says at last. “And better for anyone descending late from Camp Five or higher than the old ice shelf camp was…too many crevasses to avoid in the dark.”
The Deacon nods. Reggie gives more instructions to the Sherpas in both English and Nepalese. She wants the openings of the tents to face toward the great sunrise-reflecting bulk of Changtse to the north.
As the Sherpas finish their work, the four of us find something to sit on. J.C. and the Deacon are sitting on rolled-up sleeping bags, eating chocolate and staring westward above the seracs to the visible sections of the North Ridge. I join them.
“Any further today?” I ask.
The Deacon shakes his head. “This is a good day’s work. We’ll go back to Camp Two, get a good night’s sleep, and try to get at least three ropes of Sherpas up here tomorrow with food and other supplies, including for the high camps. Hope the weather holds for the next three days.”
“You’re thinking of a summit bid for day after tomorrow?” Jean-Claude says to the Deacon. This would be four days earlier than our original May 17 goal.
He smiles but does not reply.
It is Reggie who speaks. Her voice is determined. “You forget, we have to look for Bromley.”
“I did not forget, Madame,” says J.C. “I merely assumed that such a search will be part of our climb.”
Into the moment of somewhat awkward silence that follows, I say, “What about the crevasses up here on the North Col? Shouldn’t we check them out for…for…Bromley?”
“Kami Chiring reported seeing three figures far up on the North East Ridge,” says Reggie. “Then only one figure. I suspect we shall have to go that far before seeing any possible sign of my lost cousin. I know that there was no sign of anything between here and Mallory’s Camp Five last August. Also, Pasang and I lowered lanterns into all the crevasses that were here last summer. Nothing. Obviously we do not need to search new crevasses.”
“So all we have to do today,” I say, “is finish our lunch, finish setting up Camp Four, and head downhill for a good night’s sleep at Camp Two.”
“That’s all,” says the Deacon, and I’m not surprised at the slight tone of irony in his voice.
The Deacon leads us down. The descent takes less than an hour and would have been even faster than that if the Sherpas could have rappelled down the way J.C. and I did for entire sections, testing the Miracle Rope. Above us at the westernmost reach of the North Col, we’d left six heavily anchored tents—two Whympers and four Meade tents—buttoned up and provisioned with sleeping bags, blankets, various types of cookers, Meta solid fuel, and kerosene cached outside.
Jean-Claude and I had volunteered to come down last so that we could test the rappel strength of the fixed ropes (although we cheated a bit by taking turns belaying while the other climber rappelled), and a rappel from that kind of exposed altitude is always a thrill. J.C. and I had expected an easier climb this day, but neither of us had imagined having so much fun.
Finally, when we come off the fixed ropes of the lower slope—the last 200 feet or so down to the level of Camp III didn’t need fixed ropes, we’d decided that morning, since it’s a relatively gradual snow slope—we find Babu Rita standing there waiting for us in the growing evening shadows, stamping his booted feet to stay warm. He’s removed his crampons (the only remaining problem with them and our new rigid boots is that the crampon straps still tend to cut off circulation, which leads to cold feet de
spite the extra layers of felt we’d put in the newly designed “stiff” boots), and now J.C. and I do the same.
“Very good day, yes, Sahibs Jake and Jean-Claude?” asks Babu, grinning from ear to ear.
“A very good day it’s been, Babu Rita,” I say. All three of us start down in the sunken footsteps in the snow, but then, on a whim, I say, “Would you like to see how real climbers go down a slope like this, Babu?”
“Oh, yes, Sahib Jake!”
Making sure that my crampons are secured safely outside my rucksack in a spot where they won’t stab me if I fall or have to go to self-arrest, I hop up out of the trough made by the party’s earlier ploddings, keep my long ice axe out, and begin glissading down the long snow slope, my hobnailed boots kicking up a rooster tail behind me, guiding myself with the pick end of the long axe.
“Race you!” cries J.C. and jumps onto the snow surface firming in the shadows. “Stay here, Babu. Look out, Jake!”
Jean-Claude glissades faster than I do and is soon trying to pass me. Damn Chamonix Guides! We slalom our way lower, swerving to miss the few boulders near the base of the slope, and J.C. comes across the imaginary finish line on the flats at least 15 feet ahead of me.
Laughing, stamping our cold feet here at the edge of the moraine, we turn to watch Babu Rita posthole his way down the trough path of deep footsteps.
“I, too, also!” cries the short Sherpa, and he steps out of the footsteps onto the snow crust, sets his ice axe behind him like a tiller, and starts imitating our glissade.
“No, don’t!” cries Jean-Claude, but it’s too late. Babu is glissading quickly down the slope and laughing like a madman.
Then he pushes too hard on the pick or adze of his ice axe, a common beginner’s mistake in glissading—the guiding point must touch the snow ever so lightly—the pick embeds itself deep into the snow, Babu is jerked around violently, and then he’s on his back, arms spread wide, picking up speed as he hurtles down the slope on his back, his rucksack spilling personal items as he slides. If anything, he’s laughing even harder now.