The Everest Files

by Matt Dickinson

  ‘Let him come up first,’ Tenzing yelled down to the two Sherpa lads, ‘There’s some sunset shots they want to do back at Base Camp and we’re running late.’

  ‘OK,’ Nima agreed. Kami’s lips were chattering so hard he couldn’t have replied.

  George began the climb and Kami realised straight away that he wasn’t going to be fast. He lunged up in a clumsy style, pushing the jumar clamp up in small, inefficient bursts of energy.

  ‘He’s taking forever,’ Nima whispered. Kami felt the tip of his nose going completely numb.

  Half an hour went by. Another half an hour for the cold to penetrate a little deeper. Half an hour for fingertips and toes to succumb.

  Finally, George got close to the top; two pairs of hands reached over the lip of the crevasse and he was dragged out on his belly.

  ‘At last!’ Nima exclaimed. ‘Now hurry please! Send down the gear, we’re freezing down here!’

  A further unexplained delay occurred. Kami guessed they were filming something up top. The crevasse gave out a few more ghostly groans as the ice flexed – it really was getting Kami quite spooked. Then, finally, the gear was sent down to the two boys.

  ‘You want to go first?’ Kami asked his friend.

  ‘Of course I want to,’ Nima snapped, ‘but you go.’

  He handed the kit over. Kami stamped his feet on the ladder, trying to shock his toes back into life. Then he strapped on the chest harness and began to ascend the rope. He felt his hands begin to thaw out, the dull pain of the hot-aches causing him to swear beneath his breath.

  ‘Come on! We have to get out here!’ Nima urged him.

  As Kami ascended he noticed something curious; he could no longer hear the voices of the others up top. He figured they must be filming.

  Nima was now a tiny figure beneath him, little more than a dark shadow really at the bottom of the slot.

  ‘You OK?’ Kami called down.

  ‘No.’ Nima uttered.

  Kami summoned some more energy from somewhere and put on a burst of movement. He hauled himself up the small overhang, rolled onto the ice and rested for a few seconds as he looked around in surprise.

  There was no-one there at all. The whole team had hurried back down to Base Camp.

  It wasn’t what he expected. He had thought Tenzing would leave at least a couple of his men to help them. But no. There was no welcoming voice to greet him. No friendly hand to help him up.

  The sun had long since crashed below the ridge. He reckoned there was just an hour to dusk. He couldn’t even hear the voices of the descending team. The icefall felt desolate and threatening.

  ‘They’ve all gone,’ he yelled down the crevasse.

  ‘Whatever. Just send down the gear,’ Nima’s voice was curiously thin, and Kami thought he could detect a tinge of desperation in it.

  ‘OK.’

  He unclipped the jumar clamps and the chest harness, but his fingers were still partly frozen and he messed up.

  ‘Look out!’

  The two jumars slipped out of his grasp, bounced once, then slipped down the angled ice into the crevasse.

  ‘Catch them!’ he yelled.

  But it was already too late. It had all happened too fast. The gear had dropped in a flash, out of Nima’s reach, through the narrowest part of the fissure and into the dark interior of the glacier.

  ‘Was that what I think it was?’ Nima called up. There was a hollow ring of despair in his tone.

  ‘Yes, I … ’

  Nima bawled him out with a vicious string of swear words. He raged and cursed Kami in a way that he had never been cursed before. Kami listened, aghast. He had never felt so clumsy and hamfisted.

  ‘I’m so sorry … ’ he stammered.

  ‘Try and pull me up,’ Nima cried. He tried to climb hand over hand up the rope, his crampons kicking hopelessly into the steely ice wall. Kami clutched the rope and bent his entire force to the task, but was unable to pull his friend up even a single metre.

  Nima called for him to stop.

  ‘You’ll have to catch them up,’ he yelled. ‘Get some more jumars. Quickly, Kami. Quickly!’

  Kami yelled some words of encouragement to Nima and started to race down the icefall.

  He knew he was taking risks but what choice did he have? Every extra minute that Nima was imprisoned in that ice was a minute in hell.

  Would Nima get frostbite down there? Hypothermia? Could he even freeze to death? Kami pushed himself to move faster and faster, sliding down the vertical ladders, crashing into the soft snow at the base, rushing across the crevasse bridges without even tying on.

  He was pushing his body too hard. A sort of oxygen deficit began to set in; he felt giddy, sick with a toxic concoction of hypoxia and fear. He experienced an urgent need to stop and defecate but that was out of the question.

  The awful moment went round and round in his head. How had he ever been so stupid? So ham fisted. Dropping those jumars over the edge revealed what he really was; a hopeless beginner, the worst type of amateur.

  He stopped for a beat, let out a cry: ‘Tenzing! Stop!’

  A fractured echo bounced back mockingly from the west flank. No response. He began to move again. Following the wands. Jumping the smaller slots. Taking chances that the snow bridges would hold. Feeling the treacherous bounce of the ladders as the depths yawned beneath.

  Every time he rounded a serac he expected to see the retreating figures of the expedition. But they had half an hour’s head start on him and were moving fast. The maze was empty and time was racing with unreasonable speed.

  Then he saw them. Just a few hundred metres from the rocky edge of the glacier.

  ‘Hey!’ Kami screamed. He put so much force into the yell he thought his tonsils might get blasted out of his throat.

  Tenzing turned. He waited as Kami caught up. The team gathered round as he gasped out the story.

  Then Kami felt his vision narrow in the most disturbing way. Flashing shapes were gathering in at the edges of his world. The glacier was actually turning black. Someone offered him a water bottle but he couldn’t co-ordinate his arm to reach up and grab it.

  Kami fainted there and then, flat out on the ice.

  He awoke the next morning at Base Camp, lying on top of a sleeping bag, still dressed in his mountain gear. It took his mind a few moments to focus, then images came to him; blacking out in the icefall, the stumbling descent to Base Camp, Sasha and the boss supporting him. His arms around their shoulders.

  Nima. He sat up abruptly. Had they managed to extract him from the crevasse? Where was he now?

  Kami unzipped the tent and found Jamling outside.

  ‘Is he OK?’ he asked.

  Jamling spat out a gobbet of tobacco juice.

  ‘More or less,’ he said laconically.

  Kami slipped on his boots and headed for the mess tent.

  Lopsang was frying up Spam fritters in a pan, the smell of the sizzling meat reminding Kami that he hadn’t eaten since the previous morning. He bolted down three plates while Tenzing filled him in on the rescue.

  ‘We got back up there as fast as we could,’ Tenzing said, ‘but he was frozen half to death. He couldn’t use his hands at all so we had to strap him to the ladder and haul him up like that.’

  Kami tried to imagine the scene, a wave of shame and guilt engulfing him. Then he tried to figure how long Nima had been there alone. It must have been two hours. Maybe three. He shuddered at the thought of it.

  ‘He was talking with the fairies by that point,’ Tenzing continued, ‘Hypothermia had got him. We sledged him down the icefall, then warmed him up here for a couple of hours. Then I had a couple of guys walk him through the night down to Pheriche.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘At the clinic. One of his hands is frostbitten.’
>
  ‘I want to see him,’ Kami told Tenzing, ‘Can you give me a couple of days off?’

  Tenzing considered the request for a few seconds.

  ‘It’s going to be tricky … ’ He replied. ‘Nima’s obviously off the expedition now so we’re down a man. The boss is getting more and more stressed and we’ve got more than fifty loads to shift through the icefall in the next few days. I can’t really let you go.’

  ‘I’ll do double carries when I get back,’ Kami promised, ‘Give me twenty-four hours off. Please.’

  ‘OK. I guess … but if you take longer I’ll have to find someone else to take your place.’

  Kami felt a bit sick as he heard that. He knew there were plenty of strong lads just like him, waiting – jobless – down at Gorak Shep and Lobuche, ready to step into his shoes. But the need to see Nima was more than he could resist.

  ‘I’ll be back very fast,’ he promised. Then he ran to his tent to prepare a small pack with some gear.

  ‘Hey,’ Tenzing called out, ‘I’m sorry we left you like that. That was my mistake. I should have told a couple of guys to wait, made sure you got out OK.’

  ‘OK,’ Kami replied. ‘I appreciate that.’

  Tenzing’s apology was a consolation of sorts. It gave Kami a way to rationalise what had happened. Yes, it had been his fault entirely that the gear had been dropped. But the whole reason it happened was that his own hands were frozen from waiting while George got his shots.

  But such mind games were futile. He still blamed himself and he found the incident churned over and over in his head for the entire twenty-kilometre trek down the Khumbu glacier to Pheriche.

  He did the march in six hours. When he arrived he asked around for the clinic, introduced himself to one of the nurses and waited nervously to be shown into Nima’s room.

  Then she came back and told him, ‘I’m afraid he doesn’t want to see you.’

  Kami was crushed by this.

  His instinct was to rush into the room anyway but he figured that might only make things worse. Instead he sat in the reception area of the clinic and wrote a note for Nima. He pleaded for forgiveness and begged for a chance to make amends.

  The nurse agreed to take it but she came back three minutes later and it was ripped to pieces.

  ‘I think you should go,’ she told him, ‘It’s only making him stressed to know you are here.’

  Kami waited for a couple more hours but, finally, he gave it up. He had to get back to the expedition and he knew he couldn’t force Nima to see him if he didn’t want to.

  He wrote Nima a final note and told the nurse he was leaving. But, just as he was passing the side of the clinic he saw movement.

  A pale face stared out at him. Dark, accusing eyes framed in the splintering wooden frame of the window.

  As Kami watched, mesmerised, Nima slowly brought his hand up to the glass. The fingers were absolutely black, horribly swollen.

  He looked at Kami in a venomous way for a few seconds then drew the curtain back across the window.

  Kami suddenly got the most terrible premonition that he would never see his friend again.

  Chapter 8

  Two days later Kami was back into the icefall. Once again it was a dawn departure. Once again he was with Jamling, and this time the danger zone seemed like familiar ground. The problem was the load; a huge great bundle of spindly aluminium struts and poles which would form a mess tent higher in the Cwm. No matter how he tied them up together, the individual poles kept slipping out of the bunch in the most irritating and dangerous way.

  On the longer crevasse crossings he had a new fear to contend with; if one of the poles tumbled into the depths he would be in deep trouble with Tenzing.

  ‘Better you than me,’ Jamling said as he watched Kami’s struggle. His own load was a lot friendlier – a generator to power Alex Brennan’s satphone at Camp Two – and was ‘light’ by Sherpa standards, at a mere twenty-two kilogrammes.

  There was more traffic in the icefall this time. They had to queue to get onto some of the ladder crossings, waiting for nervous Western climbers to cross the wobbling bridges.

  ‘This is dangerous,’ Jamling observed as they joined yet another line, ‘every moment we hang around in this place is another moment to get hurt.’

  Gradually they found ways to overtake the slower-moving climbers, pushing to the front of the pack and making it through the last of the crevasses by midday.

  Kami felt his mood lighten as he saw the tents of Camp One. This time he would be staying there, and going higher the next day.

  But as they approached the Camp, a serac peeled away from the cliff above with an impressive WHUMPH. The debris gathered pace with terrifying speed as it cascaded down the face and to Kami’s inexperienced eyes it seemed they would surely be engulfed.

  ‘That’s OK,’ Jamling reassured him, ‘No need to run. Just powder.’

  The two of them stood their ground as the leading edge of the avalanche billowed across the glacier towards them. There was a moment when Kami felt that Jamling must surely be mistaken, that the cloud would contain pulverising blocks of snow and ice.

  But his judgement had been spot on and the true force of the avalanche had been dissipated at the foot of the face. Now it was ice crystals and nothing more. The world went white for a few minutes as the pulverised ice swirled around them. Then it gradually settled, leaving just a milky haze in the air.

  Kami dozed in his tent through the afternoon and at supper time he put his boots back on and hurried through sleeting snow to join the others.

  ‘How about some Sherpa music?’ Sasha requested.

  ‘A pleasure!’ Jamling exclaimed. A silver mouth organ slipped into his hand and he began to play.

  Kami listened in surprise as Jamling did his stuff. He had never thought of his mentor as an artistic man but he really played with skill, coaxing haunting Tibetan folk songs out of the little instrument.

  Kami found himself thinking about Shreeya and feeling mightily homesick. If only she could see him now, he thought, how proud would she be?

  Sitting at Camp One with the real Everest climbers. One of the team.

  Kami had to share a tent with Lopsang that night. The cook snored like a pig, exhaling sour alcohol fumes that filled the little tent. Kami drowsed in a kind of stupor, but he couldn’t really have called it sleep.

  Tenzing shook the tent at dawn and it was full tilt into the new day, any fatigue forgotten with the busy rounds of breakfast, packing and departure.

  Kami was carrying the heaviest load yet; a full pack of filming batteries, food rations, and a tripod head in a flight case that had to weigh ten kilos on its own.

  ‘You’re OK with all that gear, right?’ Alex asked him as the Sherpas filed past the Westerners’ mess tent.

  ‘Very good, sir,’ Kami replied, flashing him a radiant smile that gave no hint of the pain his body was experiencing.

  Two hours of hard drill followed. They weaved a route through the sentinel crevasses that guarded the Cwm, then crossed over towards the southern side of the valley where the route was less prone to avalanche. Kami felt his muscles gradually warm to the task, the spectacular weight of the pack causing a slick patch of sweat in the centre of his back.

  Halfway through that day’s climb they came across the first of the many dead bodies that are littered about Everest’s slopes.

  It was a shock to Kami. A gaping skull. A skeletal claw of a hand. A wind suit bleached by ultra violet assault. Clinging fragments of flesh bearing the beak marks of scavenging birds.

  ‘Do you know who he was?’ Kami asked.

  Jamling nodded sadly, ‘he was a friend.’

  Jamling placed a small pile of dried flower petals on the corpse.

  ‘Why doesn’t somebody take the body back to Base Camp?’ Kami asked.
/>   ‘Superstition,’ Jamling replied, ‘would you want to touch it?’

  Kami shivered at the thought. He understood perfectly what Jamling meant. The idea of touching a dead body was taboo to most Sherpa people and, besides, to extract the body from the ice would be a gruesome task, a question of chipping out bones, ripping out flesh.

  At that moment the Western climbing team caught them up.

  ‘Oh my goodness.’ Sasha put her hand to her mouth in shock as she saw the mutilated remains. ‘That is a terrible sight.’

  ‘We need this for the film,’ the boss said dispassionately. George nodded his agreement and they began to prep the film gear.

  Jamling and Kami exchanged a glance.

  ‘They should not be filming him,’ Jamling muttered.

  Kami nodded his agreement.

  ‘Maybe you should tell them he was your friend?’ Kami whispered.

  ‘I don’t know … ’ Jamling was reluctant to interrupt the filming.

  Kami watched as Alex kneeled next to the corpse and began a piece to camera.

  ‘This is just one of the many dozens of dead bodies we are likely to encounter here on the slopes of Everest … There’s no telling who this man was, or how he died, but … ’

  Kami felt terrible for Jamling. It was totally insensitive to film the remains of his friend in this way. Finally, he plucked up his courage.

  ‘Erm, sir. I think Jamling would like to say something,’ he blurted out.

  ‘Cut!’ The sound recordist glared at Kami.

  ‘Don’t interrupt while we’re doing a shot,’ Brennan snapped.

  ‘We’ll have to do it again,’ George said angrily.

  ‘Don’t you think we should listen to what they have to say?’ Sasha asked Brennan.

  ‘Alright,’ he conceded reluctantly, ‘Tell me the problem Jamling.’

  But Jamling just froze. He couldn’t think of the words to say. And Kami didn’t want to further antagonise the boss.

  ‘Let’s go again,’ George said, ‘I’m getting cold here.’

  They shot the rest of the sequence, packed up the gear and moved on.