But with each stop we were a little higher. There was no denying the West Ridge had a first-class view: to our right all the mountains of Nepal, to our left all the mountains of Tibet, and you could throw in Sikkim and Bhutan for change. Mountains everywhere: and all of them below us. The only thing still above us was the pyramid of Everest’s final summit, standing brilliant white against a black-blue sky.
At each rest stop I found Kunga Norbu was humming a strange Buddhist chant; he was looking happier and happier in a subtle sort of way, while Freds’s grin got wider and wider. “Can you believe how perfect the day is? Beautiful, huh?”
“Uh huh.” It was nice, all right. But I was too tired to enjoy it. Some of their energy poured into me at each stop, and that was a good thing, because they were really going strong, and I needed the help.
Finally the ridge became snow-covered again, and we had to sit down and put our crampons back on. I found this usually simple process almost more than I could handle. My hands left pink afterimages in the air, and I hissed and grunted at each pull on the straps. When I finished and stood, I almost keeled over. The rocks swam, and even with my goggles on the snow was painfully white.
“Last bit,” Freds said as we looked up the slope. We crunched into it, and our crampons spiked down into firm snow. Kunga took off at an unbelievable pace. Freds and I marched up side by side, sharing a pace to take some of the mental effort out of it.
Freds wanted to talk, even though he had no breath to spare. “Old Dorjee Lama. Going to be. Mighty surprised. When they start rebuilding. Kum-Bum. Ha!”
I nodded as if I believed in the whole story. This was an exaggeration, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but to put one foot in front of the other, in blazing white snow.
I have read that Everest stands just at the edge of the possible, as far as climbing it without oxygen goes. The scientific team that concluded this, after a climb in which air and breath samples were taken, actually decided that theoretically it wasn’t possible at all. Sort of a bumblebee’s flight situation. One scientist speculated that if Everest were just a couple hundred feet taller, then it really couldn’t be done.
I believe that. Certainly the last few steps up that snow pyramid were the toughest I ever took. My breath heaved in and out of me in useless gasps, and I could hear the brain cells popping off by the thousands, snap crackle pop . We were nearing the peak, a triangular dome of pure snow; but I had to slow down.
Kunga forged on ahead of us, picking up speed in the last approach. Looking down at the snow, I lost sight of him. Then his boots came into my field of vision, and I realized we were there, just a couple steps below the top.
The actual summit was a ridged mound of snow about eight feet long and four feet wide. It wasn’t a pinnacle, but it wasn’t a broad hilltop either; you wouldn’t have wanted to hold a dance on it.
“Well,” I said. “Here we are.” I couldn’t get excited about it. “Too bad I didn’t bring a camera.” The truth was, I didn’t feel a thing.
Beside me Freds stirred. He tapped my arm, gestured up at Kunga Norbu. We were still below him, with our heads at about the level of his boots. He was humming, and had his arms extended up and out, as if conducting a symphony out to the east. I looked out in that direction. By this time it was late afternoon, and Everest’s shadow extended to the horizon, even above. There must have been ice particles in the air to the east, because all of a sudden above the darkness of Everest’s shadow I saw a big icebow. It was almost a complete circle of color, much more diaphanous than a rainbow, cut off at the bottom by the mountain’s triangular shadow.
Inside this round bow of faint color, on the top of the dark air of the shadow peak, there was a cross of light-haloed shadow. It was a Spectre of the Brocken phenomenon, caused when low sunlight throws the shadows of peaks and climbers onto moisture-filled air, creating a glory of light around the shadows. I had seen one before.
Then Kunga Norbu flicked his hands to the sides, and the whole vision disappeared, instantly.
“Whoah,” I said.
“Right on,” Freds murmured, and led me the last painful steps onto the peak itself, so that we stood beside Kunga Norbu. His head was thrown back, and on his face was a smile of pure, childlike bliss.
Now, I don’t know what really happened up there. Maybe I went faint and saw colors for a second, thought it was an icebow, and then blinked things clear. But I know that at that moment, looking at Kunga Norbu’s transfigured face, I was quite sure that I had seen him gain his freedom, and paint it out there in the sky. The task was fulfilled, the arms thrown wide with joy… I believed all of it. I swallowed, a sudden lump in my throat.
Now I felt it too; I felt where we were. We had climbed Chomolungma. We were standing on the peak of the world.
Freds heaved his breath in and out a few times. “Well!” he said, and shook mittened hands with Kunga and me. “We did it!” And then we pounded each other on the back until we almost knocked ourselves off the mountain.
XV
We hadn’t been up there long when I began to consider the problem of getting down. There wasn’t much left of the day, and we were a long way from anywhere homey. “What now?”
“I think we’d better go down to the South Summit and dig a snow cave for the night. That’s the closest place we can do it, and that’s what Haston and Scott did in ’75. It worked for them, and a couple other groups too.”
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Freds said something to Kunga, and we started down. Immediately I found that the Southeast Ridge was not as broad or as gradual as the West Ridge. In fact we were descending a kind of snow-covered knife edge, with ugly gray rocks sticking out of it. So this was the yak route! It was a tough hour’s work to get down to the South Summit, and the only thing that made it possible was the fact that we were going downhill all the way.
The South Summit is a big jog in the Southeast Ridge, which makes for a lump of a subsidiary peak, and a flat area. Here we had a broad sloping expanse of very deep, packed snow—perfect conditions for a snow cave.
Freds got his little aluminum shovel out of his pack and went to it, digging like a dog after a bone. I was content to sit and consult. Kunga Norbu stood staring around at the infinite expanse of peaks, looking a little dazed. Once or twice I summoned up the energy to spell Freds. After a body-sized entryway, we only wanted a cave big enough for the three of us to fit in. It looked a bit like a coffin for triplets.
The sun set, stars came out, the twilight turned midnight blue; then it was night. And seriously, seriously cold. Freds declared the cave ready and I crawled in after him and Kunga, feeling granules of snow crunch under me. We banged heads and got arranged on our butt pads so that we were sitting in a little circle, on a rough shelf above our entrance tunnel, in a roughly spherical chamber. By slouching I got an inch’s clearance above. “All right,” Freds said wearily. “Let’s party.” He took the stove from his pack, held it in his mittens for a while to warm the gas inside, then set it on the snow in the middle of the three of us, and lit it with his lighter. The blue glare was blinding, the roar deafening. We took off our mitts and cupped our hands so there was no gap between flame and flesh. Our cave began to warm up a little.
You may think it odd that a snow cave can warm up at all, but remember we are speaking relatively here. Outside it was dropping to about ten below zero, Fahrenheit. Add any kind of wind and at that altitude, where oxygen is so scarce, you’ll die. Inside the cave, however, there was no wind. Snow itself is not that cold, and it’s a great insulator: it will warm up, even begin to get slick on its surface, and that water also holds heat very well. Add a stove raging away, and three bodies struggling to pump out their 98.6, and even with a hole connecting you to the outside air, you can get the temperature well up into the thirties. That’s colder than a refrigerator, but compared to ten below it’s beach weather.
So we were happy in our little cave, at first. Freds scraped some of th
e wall into his pot and cooked some hot lemon drink. He offered me some almonds, but I had no appetite whatsoever; eating an almond was the same as eating a coffee table to me. We were all dying for drink, though, and we drank the lemon mix when it was boiling, which at this elevation was just about bath temperature. It tasted like heaven.
We kept melting snow and drinking it until the stove sputtered and ran out of fuel. Only a couple of hours had passed, at most. I sat there in the pitch-dark, feeling the temperature drop. My spirits dropped with it.
But Freds was by no means done with the party. His lighter scraped and by its light I saw him punch a hole in the wall and set a candle in it. He lit the candle, and its light reflected off the slick white sides of our home. He had a brief discussion with Kunga Norbu.
“Okay,” he said to me at the end of it, breath cascading whitely into the air. “Kunga is going to do some tumo now.”
“Tumo?”
“Means, the art of warming oneself without fire up in the snows.”
That caught my interest. “Another lama talent?”
“You bet. It comes in handy for naked hermits in the winter.”
“I can see that. Tell him to lay it on us.”
With some crashing about Kunga got in the lotus position, an impressive feat with his big snow boots still on.
He took his mitts off, and we did the same. Then he began breathing in a regular, deep rhythm, staring at nothing. This went on for almost half an hour, and I was beginning to think we would all freeze before he warmed up, when he held his hands out toward Freds and me. We took them in our own.
They were as hot as if he had a terrible fever. Fearfully I reached up to touch his face—it was warm, but nothing like his hands. “My Lord,” I said.
“We can help him now,” Freds said softly. “You have to concentrate, harness the energy that’s always inside you. Every breath out you push away pride, anger, hatred, envy, sloth, stupidity. Every breath in, you take in Buddha’s spirit, the five wisdoms, everything good. When you’ve gotten clear and calm, imagine a golden lotus in your belly button… Okay? In that lotus you imagine the syllable ram, which means fire. Then you have to see a little seed of flame, the size of a goat dropping, appearing in the ram. Every breath after that is like a bellows, fanning that flame, which travels through the tsas in the body, the mystic nerves. Imagine this process in five stages. First, the uma tsa is seen as a hair of fire, up your spine more or less… Two, the nerve is as big around as your little finger… Three, it’s the size of an arm… Four, the body becomes the tsa itself and is perceived as a tube of fire… Five, the tsa engulfs the world, and you’re just one flame in a sea of fire.”
“My Lord.”
We sat there holding Kunga Norbu’s fiery hands, and I imagined myself a tube of fire: and the warmth poured into me—up my arms, through my torso—it even thawed my frozen butt, and my feet. I stared at Kunga Norbu, and he stared right through the wall of our cave to eternity, or wherever, his eyes glowing faintly in the candlelight. It was weird.
I don’t know how long this went on—it seemed endless, although I suppose it was no more than an hour or so. But then it broke off—Kunga’s hand cooled, and so did the rest of us. He blinked several times and shook his head. He spoke to Freds.
“Well,” Freds said. “That’s about as long as he can hold it, these days.”
“What?”
“Well…” He clucked his tongue regretfully. “It’s like this. Tulkus tend to lose their powers, over the course of several incarnations. It’s like they lose something in the process, every time, like when you keep making a tape from copies or whatever. There’s a name for it.”
“Transmission error,” I said.
“Right. Well, it gets them too. In fact you run into a lot of tulkus in Tibet who are complete morons. Kunga is better than that, but he is a bit like Paul Revere. A little light in the belfry, you know. A great lama, and a super guy, but not tremendously powerful at any of the mystic disciplines, anymore.”
“Too bad.”
“I know.”
I recalled Kunga’s fiery hands, their heat pronging into me. “So… he really is a tulku, isn’t he.”
“Oh yeah! Of course! And now he’s free of old Dorjee Lama, too—a lama in his own right, and nobody’s disciple. It must be a great feeling.”
“I bet. So how does it work, again, exactly?”
“Becoming a tulku?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s a matter of concentrating your mental powers. Tibetans believe that none of this is supernatural, but just a focusing of natural powers that we all have. Tulkus have gotten their psychic energies incredibly focused, and when you’re at that stage, you can leave your body whenever you want. Why if Kunga wanted to, he could die in about ten seconds.”
“Useful.”
“Yeah. So when they decide to go, they hop off into the Bardo. The Bardo is the other world, the world of spirit, and it’s a confusing place—talk about hallucinations! First a light like God’s camera flash goes off in your face. Then it’s just a bunch of colored paths, apparitions, everything. When Kunga describes it it’s really scary. Now if you’re just an ordinary spirit, then you can get disoriented, and be reborn as a slug or a game show host or anything . But if you stay focused, you’re reborn in the body you choose, and you go on from there.”
I nodded dully. I was tired, and cold, and the lack of oxygen was making me stupid and spacy; I couldn’t make any sense of Freds’s explanations, although it may be that that would have happened anywhere.
We sat there. Kunga hummed to himself. It got colder.
The candle guttered, then went out.
It was dark. It continued to get colder.
After a while there was nothing but the darkness, our breathing, and the cold. I couldn’t feel my butt or my legs below the knee. I knew I was waiting for something, but I had forgotten what it was. Freds stirred, started speaking Tibetan with Kunga. They seemed a long way away. They spoke to people I couldn’t see. For a while Freds jostled about, punching the sides of the cave. Kunga shouted out hoarsely, things like “Hak!” and “Phut!”
“What are you doing?” I roused myself to say.
“We’re fighting off demons,” Freds explained.
I was ready to conclude, by watching my companions, that lack of oxygen drove one nuts; but given who they were, I had to suspend judgement. It might not have been the oxygen.
Some indeterminate time later Freds started shoveling snow out the tunnel. “Casting out demons?” I inquired.
“No, trying to get warm. Want to try it?”
I didn’t have the energy to move.
Then he shook me from side to side, switched to English, told me stories. Story after story, in a dry, hoarse, frog’s voice. I didn’t understand any of them. I had to concentrate on fighting the cold. On breathing. Freds became agitated, he told me a story of Kunga’s, something about running across Tibet with a friend, a lung-gom-pa test of some kind, and the friend was wearing chains to keep from floating away entirely. Then something about running into a young husband at night, dropping the chains in a campfire… “The porters knew about lung-gom, and the next morning they must have tried to explain it to the British. Can you imagine it? Porters trying to explain these chains come out of nowhere… explaining they were used by people running across Tibet, to keep from going orbital? Man, those Brits must’ve thought they were invading Oz. Don’t you think so? Hey, George? George?… George?”
XVI
But finally the night passed, and I was still there.
We crawled out of our cave in the predawn light, and stamped our feet until some sensation came back into them, feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. “Good morning!” Kunga Norbu said to me politely. He was right about that. There were high cirrus clouds going pink above us, and an ocean of blue cloud far below in Nepal, with all the higher white peaks poking out of it like islands, and slowly turning pink themselves. I’ve never
seen a more otherworldly sight; it was as if we had climbed out of our cave onto the side of another planet.
“Maybe we should just shoot down to the South Col and join those Indian Army guys,” Freds croaked. “I don’t much feel like going back up to the peak to get to the West Ridge.”
“You aren’t kidding,” I said.
So down the Southeast Ridge we went.
Now Peter Habeler, Messner’s partner on the first oxygenless ascent of Everest in 1979, plunged down this ridge from the summit to the South Col in one hour. He was worried about brain damage; my feeling is that the speed of his descent is evidence it had already occurred. We went as fast as we could, which was pretty alarmingly fast, and it still took us almost three hours. One step after another, down a steep snowy ridge. I refused to look at the severe drops to right and left. The clouds below were swelling up like the tide in the Bay of Fundy; our good weather was about to end.
I felt completely disconnected from my body, I just watched it do its thing. Below Freds kept singing, “ ‘I get up, I get dow-wow-wown,’ ” from the song “Close to the Edge.” We came to a big snow-filled gully and glissaded down it carelessly, sliding twenty or thirty feet with each dreamy step. All three of us were staggering by this point. Cloud poured up the Western Cwm, and mist magically appeared all around us, but we were just above the South Col by this time, and it didn’t matter. I saw there was a camp in the col, and breathed a sigh of relief. We would have been goners without it.
The Indians were still securing their tents as we walked up. A week’s perfect weather, and they had just gotten into the South Col. Very slow, I thought as we approached. Siege-style assault, logistical pyramid, play it safe—slow as building the other kind of pyramid.
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