by Dan Simmons
“Self-arrest!” I bellow, cupping my hands to make a megaphone. “Self-arrest, Babu!”
He’s lost his ice axe, but he still has his hands—and when the mittens get pulled off, he should be able to dig his gloved fingers deep enough into the snow to slow his rate of descent. We’ve trained and rehearsed all the Sherpas in self-arrest techniques.
But Babu’s splayed body is spinning around in circles now, first head up, then down, hands and heels merely slapping at the ice-crusted snow. All this time he’s laughing even louder as he hurtles closer to us.
Fifty feet from the bottom of the slope, Babu goes over a hidden snow ramp. “Oopsies!” he cries in English as he flies eight feet into the air, still headfirst.
There’s a strange sound as he strikes what looks to be a large pillow of snow and he quits laughing. His splayed form spins a final three times and slides to a stop not 30 feet from us. J.C. and I are running now, postholing our way over to the suddenly silent Sherpa. I’m praying that he’s just had the wind knocked out of him.
Then we notice the long smear of red on the otherwise white snow. The “pillow” of snow Babu had hit, headfirst, is a snow-covered boulder.
Tuesday, May 12, 1925
Babu was unconscious when we evacuated him from Camp III last night, Monday night. The others had come out of their tents at the sound of our shouts—reacting first to his laughter, then to our calls for help—and we’d gathered and knelt around the still splayed, supine, and unconscious Babu Rita.
Reggie took one look at the knot and spreading bruise on the Sherpa’s temple, tossed the first-aid kit to the Deacon, pointed to two other Sherpas while giving orders in their Nepalese language, and then ran with them back to the tents to put together a stretcher out of spare tent canvas and poles. The Deacon crouched next to Babu, carefully lifting his heavily bleeding head. He quickly set two gauze pads against the freely bleeding areas on Babu’s scalp, then lashed them into place with quick loops of a gauze bandage. He cut the bandage with his pocketknife and knotted it with swift, sure movements.
“Will he be all right?” I asked. Everything about me, down to the lifeless tone of my voice, was signaling guilt and responsibility for my porter’s accident. Jean-Claude looked equally guilty.
“Head wounds are weird things,” said the Deacon. He’d been lifting Babu gently by the shoulders, gingerly touching the short man’s neck and back, down to his tailbone. “I don’t think there’s any spinal damage. We can move him. The best thing we can do is to get him down to Base Camp and to Dr. Pasang as quickly as we can.”
“Is it really safe to move him?” asked J.C., who’d long ago told me that Chamonix Guides were trained not to move a fall victim if there was any chance at all of spinal or serious neck injuries.
The Deacon nodded. “His neck isn’t broken, as far as I can tell by touch. His back feels all right. I think there will be less danger in moving him than in leaving him up here all night.”
Reggie and Nyima Tsering returned with the jury-rigged stretcher, its canvas doubled over and lashed tight to the two six-foot poles.
“We’ll need someone to carry him down,” said the Deacon. “Six men, I think. Four to carry and two more along to spell the others.”
“We’ll carry him,” Jean-Claude and I said in pathetic, guilty unison.
The Deacon nodded. “Pemba, Dorjay, Tenzing, Nyima, you four go down with the sahibs.”
Reggie quickly translated to the three Sherpas who spoke no English. I saw that she had also brought back from the tents two lanterns and two sets of the headlamps. She waited until we crouched next to the unconscious Babu and—on the count of three and with infinite gentleness—transferred him from the snow to the unfurled stretcher.
The snow remained caked with Babu’s blood, and his bandages were already bleeding through.
Silently, Reggie handed lanterns to Pemba and Dorjay and the headlamp rigs to J.C. and me. “Tejbir!” she called to the tallest of the watching Sherpas. I remembered that Tejbir Norgay spoke English. “You go ahead as runner as quickly as you can. Tell those in Camp Two and Camp One that we may need new volunteers to carry as we get to each camp. But don’t waste time at those camps—hurry straight on down to Base Camp and see if Dr. Pasang can come up and meet the stretcher bearers along the way. Tell Dr. Pasang exactly what Babu Rita’s head wounds are like and what caused them. There’s a third lantern outside the big tent here—pick it up as you go.”
Tejbir nodded once and jogged off the snow slope, snatched the lantern as he ran past on the rough, snow-covered moraine at the campsite, and within seconds had disappeared behind the ice pinnacles and was up and onto the glacier path.
Jean-Claude took the left front end of a pole and I grasped the right rear. Nyima Tsering grabbed the right front and Tenzing Bothia was at the rear with me. On the count of three again, we lifted the stretcher waist-high. Babu Rita seemed to weigh nothing at all.
“We’ll follow you down as soon as we get things sorted out here at Camp Three for tomorrow’s carries,” said the Deacon. “Tell Dr. Pasang that I’m bringing everyone down to Camp One or Base Camp.”
The trip back down the glacier was grueling, especially since it came at the end of our long climbing day. Before we’d climbed onto the glacier for our descent, Reggie had handed Pemba a full oxygen rig with three full tanks on the frame. The idea was that as we grew tired, we’d fall out and take some English air from two of the tanks, while Pemba or Dorjay filled in for us. Babu Rita would breathe from the third tank all the way down. It just added 22 pounds to the weight of the stretcher.
But neither Jean-Claude nor I dropped out during the four-hour descent through the camps, even while the Sherpas took turns relieving one another. Once or twice after a difficult bit—such as the detour down into the glacier and up and out its steep slopes again—Pemba held the oxygen mask up to J.C.’s face, then mine, and we drank in some rich English air and continued on. Babu Rita looked asleep behind his chamois-cloth mask.
Dr. Pasang met us at Camp I and had us set the stretcher on some crates while he did a preliminary assessment of Babu by lantern light.
“I believe your Mr. Deacon was correct about there being no immediately obvious neck or spinal injury,” said Pasang. “But we do need to get him down lower. Can you carry him again—as far as Base Camp—or shall I get fresh porters?”
Jean-Claude and I had no intention whatsoever of allowing anyone to take our respective corners of the stretcher. Of course, that attitude was absurd since it was as if we were punishing ourselves, but I thought then—and believe to this day—that we, especially I, deserved punishment. If we hadn’t acted like idiot schoolchildren—if I hadn’t started that behavior with my stupid, playground-level showing off, Babu Rita would have been eating dinner at Camp III right then and laughing with his Sherpa friends.
We reached Base Camp a little before eleven p.m. The infirmary tent had its side curtains raised, and the night was surprisingly warm for an altitude over 16,000 feet. There was no wind. Half a dozen kerosene lanterns hung hissing from the tent eaves, and I could see why Dr. Pasang would want to do any serious medical work here, where the air was relatively thicker and warmer and the light was much better than at any of the other camps.
The four Sherpas who’d come down with us went off to their tents, and J.C. and I collapsed on the floor of the medical tent while Pasang began his careful inspection of Babu Rita’s wound. My arms were so tired I felt that I’d never be able to lift them again.
After the thirty-minute examination, which included Dr. Pasang taking Babu’s blood pressure, pulse, and other vital signs before he cleaned the wounds and put on fresh bandages, not a word was said. Finally, when Pasang had put an oxygen mask in place over Babu’s face, turned it to full flow, pulled two blankets up to the Sherpa’s chin, and moved away one of the lanterns and both of the mirrors he’d been using, I said, “How bad is it, Dr. Pasang?”
“His respiration is very shallow, pulse
is weak, breathing labored,” said Pasang. “I’m ninety-five percent sure that Babu has a hematoma—a blood clot on the brain—where his head hit the boulder.”
“Can you do something for that?” asked Jean-Claude. I knew the guide had seen men die in the mountains from brain embolisms before this—some from injuries, some from high-altitude illness that triggered a blood clot in the lungs or brain. For me, it was only a phrase.
Dr. Pasang sighed. “The oxygen should help a little. In a regular hospital setting, I would do my best to identify the precise location of the clot or clots and then, if the patient did not awaken and the vital signs grew weaker, might perform a craniotomy. Here, in these conditions, the best I can do is an old-fashioned trephination.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
Pasang moved his large hand above the bandaged areas on Babu’s skull. “For a surgical craniotomy, I’d shave this part of Babu’s scalp and then make a surgical cut through the scalp—with no X-ray machine, I’d have to make my best guess where the blood clot is and where to cut. Then I’d drill a small hole in his skull and remove a piece of the skull…we call that a bone flap. Then I’d remove any skull fragments that are pressing against Babu’s brain and drain off the solidified and pooled blood. If his brain is swollen by the injury, I might leave the bone flap off—that would technically turn the operation into a craniectomy. If there’s no serious swelling, I’d use small metal plates or wires or sutures to put the bone flap back in place.”
“That sounds sort of primitive,” I managed to say over the feeling of gorge rising in my throat.
Pasang shook his head. “That’s the modern version. In these conditions, and with the surgical tools I have with me, I’d have to do a trephination.”
“What’s that?”
Pasang seemed lost in thought. Finally, he said, “Trepanning’s been done since Neolithic days. It’s just drilling a hole in the patient’s skull to expose the dura mater, thus relieving the pressure on the brain that bleeding or a blood clot or skull fragments from the injury can cause. I did bring a trephine with me.” Pasang crossed to the small crate of his surgical supplies and lifted out an instrument.
“That’s just a hand drill,” I said.
The Sherpa doctor nodded. “As I say, they’ve used such trepanning instruments for centuries. It sometimes works.”
“How would you seal up a drill hole like that?” asked Jean-Claude. I could hear the revulsion in his voice as well.
Pasang shrugged. “Such a hole, by definition, will be larger than the bone flap entry, but I could use wire sutures to replace the disk of skull material, or even screw in something so prosaic as a coin the right size. The skull has no nerve endings, of course.”
“Are you going to do it?” I asked. “The trepanning, I mean.”
“Only if it’s absolutely necessary,” said Pasang. “Such a surgical procedure at this altitude—and under these unhygienic conditions—would be very, very dangerous. And because at least three points on his skull and scalp made contact with the boulder, I wouldn’t be sure where the blood clot may lie. I’d hate to have to drill three holes in Babu Rita’s skull and still not find the right place.”
“Pardonnez-moi,” said Jean-Claude and left the tent. I hadn’t known that my French friend was so squeamish.
“We’ll give Babu ten to twelve hours,” said Dr. Pasang. “If he comes out of this coma, then we’ll just take care of him until he can travel on a litter and then get him back to Darjeeling as quickly as possible.”
I thought of the five-week trek in. There were shorter routes over higher passes, directly into northern Sikkim, but the passes were very high and open only during brief parts of the summer season. Neither the long way through the filthy Tibetan hill towns nor the dramatic shortcuts over blizzard-threatened high passes seemed appropriate for a man suffering from brain injury or a recent trephination.
Jean-Claude returned with our two Base Camp sleeping bags. “May we sleep on the floor of the infirmary tonight, Dr. Pasang?” he said.
Pasang smiled. “We can do better than that. There are two empty camp beds in the rear curtained section here in the infirmary tent, near where Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay are sleeping. I’ll help you carry the beds out into this main area. You can stay near Babu Rita tonight.”
I sleep late—until after sunrise—and awaken with that terrible sense that something is wrong. I peek out of my sleeping bag and see that Babu Rita is sitting up, eyes open, and smiling broadly. Pasang stands nearby, his arms folded across his chest. I jostle J.C. awake in the cot next to mine.
“Oh, Sahib Jake and Sahib Jean-Claude,” cries Babu Rita. “Such fun before I never have had!”
I manage to return the Sherpa’s grin. J.C. just stares.
“I am so lucky that I am dying so close to the beloved Dzatrul Rinpoche,” continues Babu Rita, still grinning broadly. “I ask that you let His Holiness the abbot of Rongbuk decide what kind of funeral I should have.”
“No one’s going to be dying…,” I begin but stop when I see that Babu Rita has collapsed back on the high padded table where Pasang has watched over him through the night. The Sherpa porter’s eyes are still open, the grin still on his face. But I can see that he’s not breathing.
Dr. Pasang tries resuscitation for several endless minutes, but Babu Rita’s battered body and tremendous spirit do not respond. He is gone.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Pasang says at last. He closes Babu’s staring eyes.
I can’t help but look at Jean-Claude. I can see in his gaze that he agrees: we’ve killed this good man with our boyish nonsense and lack of common sense.
Thursday, May 14, 1925
The last two days have been perfect summiting days. Mount Everest has stopped “smoking” for the first extended period since we’ve come in sight of it. Even winds along the North East Ridge have appeared to die down to a point where no spindrift is rising. The temperature on the North Col this day is in the seventies. High winds the previous week have blown much of the snow off the ridge rocks, and even the Great Couloir appears to have contracted in size.
But none of us are on the mountain today. All of us—all the Sherpas, Dr. Pasang, Lady Bromley-Montfort, the Deacon, J.C., and I—are trudging the eleven miles up the valley to the Rongbuk Monastery from Base Camp for a blessing ceremony from Dzatrul Rinpoche.
The Deacon’s anger at this self-inflicted loss of the two best climbing days of the month—perhaps of the year—shows itself through thin, pale lips and his expression of rigid control. Jean-Claude and I both are waiting for the Deacon to turn that fierce anger on us.
The Sherpas look and sound happy, as if it’s a holiday from school for them. None had seemed especially saddened by Babu Rita’s sudden death. I ask Pasang about this and the sirdar-medic says, “They feel that if it was Babu Rita’s destiny to die on the mountain, then his death on the mountain was inevitable and there is no special reason to mourn it. Today is a new day.”
I shake my head at this. “Then why are they so eager to get this blessing from the monastery’s holy man, Dzatrul Rinpoche? If everything’s predestined for them anyway, what difference will the abbot’s blessing make?”
Pasang smiles his small smile. “Do not ask me, Mr. Perry, to make sense of the internal contradictions that are so common in all religions.”
Yesterday we’d wrapped Babu’s body in the cleanest and whitest tent fabric we could find, the Base Camp Sherpas had put the body on a litter and strapped that litter to the back of a yak, and six of the Sherpas, led by Dr. Pasang, had ridden ponies up the valley to the monastery, escorting Babu’s corpse.
Unsure of what to do or if we’d be invited to the funeral ceremony that Dzatrul Rinpoche, at Babu Rita’s last request, might choose for him, Jean-Claude and I took loads of food and oxygen—and J.C.’s mysterious “bicycle” bundle—and carried them the eleven miles up the Trough and East Rongbuk Glacier to Camp III. Learning that Reggie and the Deacon were still on
or above Camp IV on the North Col—we’d gotten word to the Deacon about Babu’s death, of course, but he’d sent back a note saying that since we weren’t going to be responsible for Babu’s burial service, he’d stay at the high camps—J.C. and I reduced our loads a bit (Jean-Claude carrying little more than his clumsy “mystery bicycle” in his oversized-load bag) and followed the fixed ropes and caving ladders up to the North Col. Feeling guilty about many things, we decided—without discussing it—not to use oxygen during this ice-wall climb, but to save it for others in the days to come. Two Sherpas followed us up.
J.C. kept the two Sherpas with him at the lip of the ice shelf and said, “Go ahead to Camp Four…I’m going to set up my bicycle here with Dorjay’s and Namgya’s help. I’ll join you when we’re finished here.”
When I’d crossed the white-burning expanse of the North Col to Camp IV, I learned from Reggie that the Deacon and four Sherpas, including Tenzing Bothia and Tejbir Norgay, had just returned to the North Col after climbing the first section of the North Ridge and pitching two tents at the chosen Camp V site, just where the North Ridge leveled out ever so slightly at an altitude of a little more than 25,000 feet.
His face burned almost black by the high-altitude ultraviolet rays of the sun, the Deacon grinned at us and said, “If this calm holds, we can make the summit bid from Camp Five tomorrow.”
Reggie—who’d just come up an hour earlier with more loads carried by four Sherpas from Camp III—looked doubtful. The North Col behind her and to every side of us was a blaze of heat and white light. I made sure to keep my goggles of darkened Crooke’s glass on.
The Deacon was ravenously devouring lunch—heated potato soup, tongue, rich chocolates, cocoa—when he suggested we retreat to Camp III this afternoon, come back up to IV the next day, and push on to spend Thursday night at Camp V. From that high camp, if the weather remained anywhere near as calm as it was this Wednesday, we could leave in the middle of the night for the summit attempt on Friday, May 15.