by Dan Simmons
“Here it is,” said Reggie, who’d continued looking through her dead cousin’s pockets after setting down the Very pistol with which she’d threatened to kill me.
She pulled out a folded piece of green silk that I first thought to be a fancy handkerchief—rather like the one that had been on George Mallory’s body—but, when unfolded by Reggie, turned out to be a three-foot-by-four-foot flag of a gryphon battling an eagle over a gold medieval-looking lance.
I’d last seen that flag—or a larger version of it—flying over the Bromley estate when we’d gone to visit Lady Bromley.
“Did your cousin seriously think that he and this…boy…might really summit Mount Everest?” asked the Deacon.
“Obviously their only choice was to keep climbing higher from their Nazi pursuers,” said Reggie, still rather tart in tone. “With Mallory and Irvine’s expedition’s fixed ropes and camps still intact, it gave them a chance. But the Germans turned out to be better climbers. Still…Percy approached everything he did with more than one hundred percent effort, so perhaps he could have summited this mountain from Mallory and Irvine’s highest camp had Sigl not caught up to them, although that hadn’t been Percy’s intention when he climbed away from the Germans.” She put the folded flag away somewhere in her own layers of clothing. “Now I will climb it for him.”
“No one’s going to climb anything if we don’t hurry,” called Jean-Claude over the wind roar.
While we’d been busy looking at pornography, chatting, deciding whether to kill one another, and so forth, J.C. had taken his binoculars from his rucksack and walked over to the snowy, treacherous south edge of the North East Ridge, looking down and back the way we’d come.
“Les boches are just now solving the Blind Step problem,” he called to us. “They will be here in thirty minutes or less, depending upon Herr Sigl’s climbing skills. I suggest that we finish our business here and leave soon.”
“Leave for where?” I said between terrible fits of coughing. I knew I had to get down, down to where the air was thick enough for me to breathe even with these shards of lobster shells and clacking claws in my throat.
The Deacon turned his head and looked to his right and up—and then up some more—at the looming and impossible Second Step less than a hundred meters away. Not that far above that impossible Second Step—or so it seemed—the summit of Mount Everest looked to be exhaling a twenty-mile-long howling tail of gale-driven spindrift.
19.
The second half of the distance between the First and Second Steps was as iffy and frightening as the first half.
A series of sharp and uneven upthrusts, slippery rocks, and snowy crests make the ridgeline itself impracticable, so the Deacon—who was leading on a rope that now included all of us—forged a trail in the snow about ten feet below that windy ridge above the North Face and Great Couloir on the East Rongbuk Glacier side. The exposure just kept getting more and more absurd, and when the Deacon would take a new step and the snow would slide inches or even feet under him before building up into an unstable platform just capable of stopping his slide, all of us held our breath. Not one of the four of us had a belay stance worth a tinker’s damn.
We didn’t look behind us for the five Germans, but we could feel them breathing down our cold necks. The last J.C. had seen with his glasses while the rest of us were preparing Percy and Kurt Meyer for “burial” was that the German lead climber—we still thought he was Bruno Sigl—had managed to get himself around the Blind Step and was fixing rope for his four climbing partners. Obviously Sigl was the strongest climber of the five Germans, and we were glad that the others were slowing him down slightly.
But not enough.
Then Jean-Claude came back to the group and we took a moment over the bodies of Meyer and Bromley.
Reggie said a brief prayer, and I was surprised to see the Deacon saying the words right along with her. Years later, I looked up the Anglican burial service and prayers and realized that Reggie had done some thoughtful editing, but evidently the Deacon had repeated the words so often over dead comrades on the battlefield that he could keep up with her ellipses and edits. Anyway, it sounded right—although a tad too long, I thought, what with the Germans coming up the North Face behind us—when we sat there with the two bodies laid out on the short rock spur above the north edge of the cliff. Reggie had taken out her own gold and green silk handkerchief, smaller than the flag Percival had been carrying, with the Bromley coat of arms on it, and had knotted it around her cousin’s face. Kurt Meyer’s face was covered with a clean white handkerchief from the Deacon’s pocket.
Reggie bowed her head—goggles still in place—and intoned:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills; from whence cometh my help. My help cometh even from the Lord, who hath made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved; and he that keepeth thee will not sleep.
Behold, he that keepeth the glory of this high mountain world shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord himself is thy keeper; the Lord is thy defence upon thy right hand;
So that the sun shall not burn thee by day, neither the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil; yea, it is even he that shall keep thy souls.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in, from this time forth for evermore.
Thus unto Almighty God we commend the souls of our brothers here departed, our brothers of the rope and of high places—Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer—and we commit their bodies to the ground and air and ice; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through Percival’s trust in his Saviour Jesus Christ and through Kurt Meyer’s love of the Lord-God Jehovah, whose coming, in glorious majesty, shall judge the world when the earth and the sea and these high places shall give up their dead.
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.
“Amen,” the rest of us said, and then Jean-Claude, Pasang, and I pushed at the booted feet of the two men until they slid over the edge of the rock spur and spun silently downward into shattered oblivion somewhere on the Kangshung Glacier almost two miles below. None of us watched the bodies fall. Immediately we set to repacking our rucksacks. I saw Reggie put her envelope of photos into some pocket in her inner jacket—we’d distributed copies before the ad hoc funeral—and now I slid mine down in a safe place against the back of my pack. Then we retrieved our ice axes and started the trudge toward the Second Step.
The sun had been warm when we’d sat a moment on the east side—the leeward side—of Mushroom Rock, but as soon as we got down off the ridgeline to the North Face again for the traverse, the rising wind blowing over miles of vertical snow and ice leached the warmth right out of us. We had to keep moving or freeze.
No one spoke until we came back up onto the ridgeline proper right at the base of the Second Step. The thing was terrifying to look at, even without the sure knowledge that trigger-happy Germans would soon be popping up behind us and within easy rifle range.
“If you get us up there, Jake…,” the Deacon said when he’d tugged down his oxygen mask. “…No, I mean when you get us up there, the flat but boulder-strewn top of this Second Step will be a perfect defensive position for us, even for an army fitted out only with Very pistols.”
I looked up at the steep snow slope rising to the impossible heap of boulders ending in a sheer rock face. Tell the Deacon about the obstruction in your throat, your trouble breathing, insisted the oxygenated part of my dying brain. He’ll take the responsibility and try to free-climb this fucking thing himself. Or let Jean-Claude do it. Hell, Reggie and Pasang are better rock climbers right now than you are, Jake Perry.
I said, “Yeah, it’ll be a veritable Alamo up there.”
“What is this ‘Alamo’?” asked J.C. He seemed far too cheery for the circumstances.
I was coughing again, so
Reggie explained the history of the Alamo to him in three or four succinct sentences.
“It sounds like a glorious battle,” said J.C. after Reggie had just sketched the outline of the fight without revealing its ending. “What was its outcome?”
I sighed. “The Mexicans overran the place and slaughtered all the defenders,” I said between coughs. “Including my hero David Crockett and his pal Jim Bowie, the guy who invented the Bowie knife.”
“Ahhh,” said Jean-Claude and smiled. “Then thanks be to God that we shall be fighting mere Germans and not Mexicans.”
I was in the process of taking off my Shackleton jacket, goose down layers, and all outer mittens down to my thinnest silk gloves.
We’d crampon-climbed together as high as we could up the snow slope to the base of the rocky Second Step proper. The rock cliff looked to be about 90 feet high, its great slab sides absolutely unclimbable, but there was a crack—“joint” was the better word—in the rock a bit to the left of its central mass, and at the base of that narrow crack and 90-foot wall, J.C., the Deacon, Reggie, and I were all busy scouting a climbing route. I’d shoved my Crooke’s goggles up for a better view.
The problem—as life-and-death challenges are so cutely called in mountain-climbing circles—was just too damned hard to solve. Especially at this impossible altitude. And especially for a man with broken glass in his throat. This entire Second Step consisted of amalgams of rock that wore away much more slowly than the shale and other stone beneath it.
The first ten yards or so of the 90 feet of cliff would probably go, because there were various tumbled boulders, rock extrusions, and smaller cracks on the lower third of this six-mile-high impossibility. A groove between the largest of those boulders and the cliff face angling east from it might work, with perfect rock climbing and a serious expenditure of energy, but I’d have to step out and balance atop that damned boulder before attempting the second pitch of the three-section climb.
This first pitch between the boulders and the cliff face and then smack dab atop the boulders onto the steep snowfield would have been a challenging but fun afternoon’s scramble in Wales near Pen-y-Pass. I couldn’t imagine the amount of energy it was going to require at 28,246 feet.
But I kept looking—trying to figure the best route. If there was a “best route.” Neither premier rock climber next to me, not Jean-Claude, not the Deacon, said a word to interrupt my thinking. In truth, probably neither of them had so workable a route either.
From somewhere atop that big boulder some 30 feet and change up the cliff, there would be a high, risky step onto a steep snow band or—more appropriately—steep cone of snow, on which I’d have to traverse steeply uphill and back to the central crack where the cliff here met the face at almost a right angle. God knows whether that cone-shaped snow patch would stay on the cliff or avalanche off with me on it. Then, if I made it back to a point higher on the central crack, I’d have to learn how to levitate like a Buddhist holy man to get to the base of the final and most impossible third of the climb.
The “crack” looked to be a fissure never wide enough for my body to wedge in sideways and in most places not much wider than the flat of my hand. Another crack, much smaller, ran in tree-shaped fracture lines upwards at odd, probably unusable angles from the snowy jump-off point.
This last, vertical pitch of the climb was the killer—almost certainly in the literal sense.
Those last 20 feet or so would be listed in the “Extremely Difficult” category in any country’s or continent’s method of rating climbs—what we today in the spring of 1991 as I write this would label a 5.9 or 5.10 climb—a pitch requiring not only great expertise but absolute commitment even to attempt. Absolute commitment or a simple death wish.
And that near-impossible difficulty rating was for sea-level climbing. How would it be rated here at more than 28,200 feet above sea level?
How could I say to the Deacon and Jean-Claude and Reggie and Pasang the simple sentence “I can’t do this”? Not just because I was getting about a third the amount of air I should be getting through my frozen and clogged and pain-wracked throat and frozen upper respiratory system, but because I couldn’t do the fucking last 20 feet of this sort of pitch problem on a summer day in Massachusetts if the face were ten feet off the ground with mattresses spread around beneath me, much less here, more than 8,000 vertical feet above the East Rongbuk Glacier.
No one could do it. At that moment I was certain that George Leigh Mallory couldn’t have done it and didn’t do it. I was certain that Mallory and Irvine must have taken one close-up look and turned around here at the Second Step. Whatever delay had made it necessary for them to scramble down through the rock ledges below the Yellow Band down there after sunset, I was absolutely sure at that moment that it had not included time they’d taken to climb and then later down-climb this Second Step.
It was impossible.
“How do you see it, mon ami?” Jean-Claude asked.
I coughed and cleared my throat. “Start at the top of the snow pyramid,” I began, “about six to ten feet away from the face and big crack. Free-climb those boulders to that central boulder and up, chimney if I have to, and then take one goddamn big step onto that steep snowfield. Then try to traverse back to the central crack, use it and those fractures to get up to the vertical part, and then…well, I’ll figure it out when I get to that point.”
This sounds more solid and linear than it was delivered. I’d had to stop three times to cough, bending over for the last gut-ripping spasms.
“I agree on the route,” said the Deacon. “But do you feel up to doing this, Jake? Your cough is terrible and getting worse by the minute. I’d be happy to give it a go.”
I felt myself shaking my head. I’m not sure to this day whether I was saying No, I bloody damned well don’t feel like doing this impossible free climb and dying this way or whether I was insisting that I give the climb our first shot.
My friends interpreted it the second way.
I was down to Norfolk jacket, wool trousers, and my thin silk gloves now. Everything else had been crammed and lashed down into my rucksack. Absurdly, I’d pulled my thick wool cap so low down over my leather motorcycle helmet that it covered the goggles I’d pushed up on my forehead. During this climb—this climb of all climbs—I had to be able to look down and see my feet. My oxygen mask and goggles restricted my vision and made me feel too removed from this cold, windy top of the world. So no rucksack or oxygen or gas mask carryall or ice axe was coming with me. There would be nothing on my back to pull me off balance. I was keeping the crampons on because I’d learned to trust climbing with them on rock, but nothing else to get between the rock and my feel for the rock; nothing, that is, other than my illness and exhaustion and almost debilitating fear.
“You know,” I said almost conversationally to the Deacon and Reggie, my casualness broken only by my wheezing and coughing, “I did think of a way we might get out of all this with no more loss of life on either side.”
Both the Deacon and Reggie cocked an eyebrow and both waited.
“Let me go out with a white flag when Sigl and his boys show up,” I said between coughs, “and I’ll give them the photographs—maybe even the negatives, too.”
“Comment?” said Jean-Claude. He sounded shocked and disappointed.
“But we’d give them four of the envelopes and hide the fifth one somewhere here in these cracks and boulders,” I hurried to say…as much as one could hurry with so little oxygen getting to one’s aching lungs. “Keep one set for ourselves, you see.”
“And you’d give the Germans the negatives?” asked Reggie. I couldn’t interpret her expression.
I shrugged, which was easier to do with my outer layers off. But I was getting cold very quickly now.
“I know enough about photography to know that you can make a sort of new negative from actual prints…a ‘dupe,’ I think they call it,” I said as if it were not a matter of great interest or import f
or me, just a passing thought. “That way, Sigl and his goons might consider their mission fulfilled and we’d be left alive with all seven of the photos to share with…well, with whoever your mystery man is, the fellow who loves checks and gold. There’d be no reason for the Germans to kill us if they get what they want…what they came for two years in a row.”
The Deacon shook his head—sadly, I thought. “They’d kill us anyway, Jake. Even if they thought they had all the photographs, which they wouldn’t risk in the first place. Remember, they’ve killed almost all of our Sherpas this week as well as murdering Lord Percival Bromley and an Austrian boy last year. They couldn’t leave us alive to tell about all this.”
“And les boches don’t need a reason to kill people,” said Jean-Claude. “It is their nature.”
I nodded as if I’d worked all that out on my own. And I would have…eventually…at least the Deacon’s part. My mind was still on the cracks, fissures, boulders, snowfields, and sheer face looming almost ten stories above me at the moment. And it didn’t like being there.
“But our using those photos…” I felt I had to say this, even if they were my last words in this life. Now I looked at all four of my companions as I spoke. “Even if it was to win a war or help preserve a peace…and all that’s just conjecture right now…using those photographs, that kind of thing, to blackmail someone…it wouldn’t…I mean, it couldn’t be…honorable.”
Only the wind through the rocks and cliff wall spoke for a minute.
The Deacon said, “If Germans like Herr Sigl and his friends get in power, Jake, there will be another war. Count on it. And in the end, there’s nothing honorable in war. Nothing. Trust me on this one truth. The only shreds of honor that can be salvaged when war looms is either avoiding the fight completely, which men smarter than you and me suggest that these dirty, tawdry photographs might possibly do, or—when the real fight comes—behaving the best one can, even while you’re afraid every waking second, and while doing everything one can to keep one’s men alive.”