The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  There was no question of carrying loads today, however. The wind continued to hammer at Bonington’s tent and bombard the camp with dangerous flotsam. The weather at times was perfectly clear—the sky an amazing blue—so that the wind seemed to come out of nothing, which somehow seemed to imply that there might be no end to it. Chris as the hours passed felt that this wind had a purpose; it meant to sweep them from the mountain. And yet the wind seemed beautiful to him just because it was implacable; his own cunning and self-regard meant nothing to it. He could barely imagine a world where he could be warm, feel the sun on his shoulders and hands.

  There were moments of near-silence when he listened for the wind’s return. It would scream across the mountain, engulfing the tents, an invisible avalanche. He thought of the dead from previous expeditions to this peak: seven Sherpas avalanched in 1922; Mallory and Irvine walking into oblivion two years later; the others since. The bodies littered the mountain, impossible to find or recover; they lay out there in this wind or buried in the glacier—much as their various lives lay elsewhere, in tatters, all projects, connections and moments abandoned and scattered. He reviewed his own career to this point: his fatherless childhood; school and the army; Wendy and the children and their various households; friendships; his travels in mountains and elsewhere. He considered his losses, beginning with his father’s absence and later in some unspeakably cruel inversion of that absence, the death of his own son. And now this growing list of friends and collaborators lost to him. He could sometimes manage not to think of the ones who were dead—John Harlin or Ian Clough or Tom Patey—but he had no wish to forget them. Chris drank his tea. He read and listened and thought and waited for the wind to stop.

  Three days passed, and the wind continued; it grew stronger. Hamish came on the radio the night of October 19 to suggest that the team make a temporary retreat from the face, taking apart the tents and box shelters. Already, the wind and snow had destroyed or damaged nearly half of their shelters. Chris resisted Hamish’s plan; he worried that the expedition would never recover its momentum. The wind grew worse that night and he changed his mind—but in the morning he woke to perfect calm.

  He made the first carry to Camp Five that day, accompanied by two Sherpas. It was miserable plodding, their backs to the stupendous view. Chris stopped once and stared across to the summit of Nuptse, where he’d stood eleven years before. He’d been twenty-six years old.

  The wind returned that night but the day of fine weather had left Chris once again resolved that the climbers should maintain their foothold on the face. That way, they could make immediate progress during any further breaks in the weather. Chris himself needed a rest after four days above 24,500 feet. He asked Nick and Dave to occupy Camp Five and get started on the next section of the route.

  Nick and Dave planned to move up from Camp Four on October 26. They downed sleeping pills the night before, but were awakened several hours later when a rock careened into their MacInnes Box, half-collapsing it. They pulled on boots and worked frantically in the dark and wind—it was astonishingly cold—to repair the Box framework. They patched the damaged sections, propped up a corner with a shovel and sat inside brewing and drinking tea until the sun rose. They abandoned their camp, now a shambles, the MacInnes Boxes damaged and half-swamped by drifts of new snow. Nick and Dave descended through deep drifts, their hands and feet turning to blocks of wood. The wind kicked the new snow up into their faces; at one point they found themselves dodging a hail of windblown rocks.

  They were heading for Camp Two at the bottom of the face, but they couldn’t see it in the whiteout. They roamed about like blind men at the fringes of the Western Cwm. Nick began to calculate the chances of surviving a night out in these conditions—the odds were not good—but Chris and a pair of Sherpas loomed up out of the gloom to lead them to shelter. Nick felt an unfamiliar gratitude. It had not occurred to him that anyone would come for them.

  The wind had at last driven the expedition from the face. They would have to reclimb it, rebuilding Camps Four and Five. The route through the Icefall also was deteriorating, and deep snow made the going very difficult between the lower camps. They hadn’t begun the hardest climbing—the Rock Band and the ground that led beyond it to the top of the face. And they were running out of time; winter was coming.

  The wind stopped on October 27. Chris—now operating from Camp Two just below the face—made plans for the next attempt. He asked Mick and Doug to move up the mountain while the other climbers labored to restore the lower sections of the route. Chris himself accompanied a group of four Sherpas down to collect food and mail from a party making its way up from Camp One. The four Sherpas roped up, but Chris didn’t bother; he simply followed their tracks, moving alone across the enormous amphitheater of the Western Cwm. He stepped out of the Sherpas’ path to take a picture of them and disappeared.

  He fell a body-length and stopped. He dangled over a chasm in the glacier; his legs and midsection hung in the black air. He didn’t dare to move—he might disturb the glacier’s purchase on his upper torso. He shouted, and felt himself slip deeper into the gap. He understood that he would disappear into the mountain. He shouted again, but faintly this time—he couldn’t afford to deflate his lungs. It occurred to Chris that his body heat would soon cause the hole in the snow to grow wider. He was already cold, and this sign of nature’s stark impatience terrified him.

  The Sherpas edged closer and tossed rope across to Bonington; they moved cautiously to drag him back to their path across the glacier. Chris gathered himself—life had reclaimed him so smoothly that he felt deflated, even felt a twinge of odd resentment—and eventually dug out his camera to photograph the hole his body had made in the roof of the crevasse. He felt that he was taking a picture of his grave—he had nowhere to put this image. He stood unaware of his own trembling. His dead companions came to mind; were they in that black hell? No—it was empty; his ghosts were with him, shadows of shadows. He turned his mind away from death; it was like moving a chair from a window.

  Chris and his group continued down to meet the Sherpas who were bringing up food and mail. Chris collected the mail and turned around to follow the track back up to Camp Two. He stopped after a time and sat down in the snow to read his own letters. The sight of Wendy’s handwriting made him deeply homesick; tears came to his eyes as he read.

  He reached Camp Two before lunch and spent the rest of the day turning over his most recent plans for getting climbers up and down the peak before the wind returned. He had originally given Dave and Nick the task of pushing the route from Camp Five to Camp Six, leaving Doug Scott and Mick Burke to climb the Rock Band. But Dave and Nick had been busy low on the mountain; they were all the way down at Camp One. Doug and Mick were on their way up to Camp Four—why not let them push on and make the route to Camp Six, leaving the Rock Band to Dave and Nick?

  It made obvious sense—but Chris was determined to stick to his original plan. He wanted Dave and Nick to move up the mountain now and remake the route between Camp Four and Camp Five, then climb high enough to establish Camp Six at the base of the Rock Band. Doug and Mick would step in at that point to climb the Rock Band itself.

  Chris announced his intention to stick with the old plan during the morning radio call on November 1. Nick was furious; Chris seemed to be going out of his way to deprive him of plum assignments. Chris was conciliatory, but he held his ground. He knew Nick would come around, and he thought Doug and Mick had more of the drive needed to get up the Rock Band; meanwhile, they would chip away at the route below it while Dave and Mick moved up the route to take over.

  Doug and Mick and four Sherpas reached Camp Four late on the afternoon of November 1. The party set to work clearing up the mess left by the storm. The MacInnes Boxes were filled with blown snow that had set into a kind of friable stone. The frames of two shelters had crumpled, and boxes of gear and food were buried under more stonelike snow.

  The sky grew dim and the temperature fe
ll as the two climbers labored to clear a space to sleep and cook. They wandered about on the frozen snow, clipped to safety lines and clutching shovels and pots and packages; anything dropped would skitter across the snow to shoot down the steep slopes of the Southwest Face. The climbers’ hands and feet grew numb. It was ten o’clock before they had cleared space in two boxes and made supper.

  Doug and two of the Sherpas made a carry to Camp Five the next morning. Mick and the remaining Sherpas stayed behind to finish sorting out the wreckage of Camp Four. Doug and Mick moved up to Camp Five the next day, November 3. They felt winter’s approach; it came at them like some vast and invisible enemy. They felt themselves shrink before it.

  Camp Five was a snow-covered ledge in the sky. Mick dug a tent platform. Doug took photographs. He was tired. He stepped back to frame a shot and slipped on the hard snow, and then he was sliding in his slick one-piece suit. He knew without thinking that the snow slope ran 50 feet to a fall of some 2,000 feet. He knew he must roll onto his belly and bury the pick of his ice axe in the snow—if he delayed, his momentum would carry him past the point where stopping was possible even in theory.

  He had no ice axe. He had put away the axe and had taken his gloves off to handle the camera and now he clawed at the snow with bare fingers. He could kick with his crampons but the points were likely to catch in the hard snow, send him cartwheeling over the cliff. He kicked anyway and he continued to claw at the hard snow but he was still sliding and he imagined what came next: spinning and twisting and the rushing view—a glass barrel over a waterfall. He felt no dread but rather a strange clarity; he continued to work the fall, and a change in the angle of the slope slowed him and he stopped. He was two or three seconds above the drop that now as he lay breathing, contemplating his escape, appeared in a corner of his mind as the mouth of a whale. He lay there thinking that he should be falling now. Another moment passed and he thought without joy or satisfaction, only a dull surprise: Now I should be dead. . . .

  He stood with infinite care and found his footing; a slip could still kill him. He had the impulse to take another photograph: this one looking down to Camp Four past the slopes that appeared to him now as the beautiful web of a spider. He turned and kicked his way back up the way he had come. It was odd without his axe. He moved deliberately but without fear. He felt his boot punch through the crust at each kick, and trusted each boot to hold his weight as he raised the other to kick again. He kicked perhaps twenty or thirty steps in the snow; it was enough to build a rhythm like the one that had carried him up this face and up other mountains. The rhythmic kicking restored him to his life, brought him back into his body. Mick, busy at camp chores, had missed the whole incident. He came into view as Doug climbed.

  Doug told Mick what had happened, and the telling of it in the murky, fading light reminded them both of how far they were from any safe place. Such reminders were constant now; the climbers sometimes felt like storybook characters that would not leave a house that promised to harm them. They had come to a place that belonged to winter; it had the spooky, vacant feel of a bone yard. They were amid spirits; crystals formed and clotted and disintegrated. Doug took three sleeping pills that night. The climbers woke to the shadows of a beautiful morning, very cold. The sun didn’t reach their tents until two o’clock. They stayed in their sleeping bags, too exhausted to move.

  Chris, still keeping an eye on things from down at Camp Two, had hoped that Doug and Mick would make progress that day in the huge snow gully that led to the Rock Band. He grew frustrated as the day wore on with no sign of climbers above Camp Five; by day’s end he had changed his plans again. Dave Bathgate and Nick Estcourt were on their way up to Camp Five to join Doug and Mick. Chris decided that he would put all four climbers to work making the route to Camp Six. He could then push Hamish and Dougal through to tackle the Rock Band—thus snatching that prize from Doug and Mick after all.

  Dave and Nick reached Camp Five that evening. Nick teamed up with Doug the next day to fix rope above Camp Five. Mick went along to film them; Dave Bathgate stayed behind to put the camp in order. Nick took the lead first. He soon ran into difficult climbing. His oxygen mask and cylinder disrupted his balance. He scraped and teetered up over crumbling rock and hard snow to a ledge where he established an anchor. Doug led through and ran the rope out to the foot of the Rock Band, at 26,700 feet.

  Nick struggled up after him. He wanted to touch the rock that had beckoned to them for so long. The temperature was well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. There was no wind; even so Nick’s fingers lost feeling. Doug had descended already; he and Mick were heading down the mountain for a rest at Camp Two. Nick turned and descended to join Dave.

  Nick and Dave spent two days fixing more rope above Camp Five. Their route ran across the bottom of the Rock Band to the base of another snow gully, where they intended to establish Camp Six. The gully seemed to offer a way through the lower section of the Rock Band—kicking steps up through the snow would be far more feasible at this altitude than trying to climb the rock itself.

  Nick approached the foot of the snow gully late on November 6. Dave had turned back earlier in the day—problems with his oxygen set. Nick’s companion now was a high-altitude porter named Pertemba. The last reel of rope came taut 40 feet short of the gully. Nick stopped to put in an anchor. He took off his rucksack to work and dropped it in the snow; he watched dully as it tipped sideways and tumbled down the slopes he had just climbed. It was the kind of mistake they were all making now. Dave had dropped his own pack just the day before.

  Nick cursed himself and now he noticed the lateness of the hour; the sun was slipping behind the mountains to the west. The temperature fell sharply. A stiff wind arrived with the day’s departure as if operating on a schedule, taking up its shift. Nick and Pertemba turned and started down. The wind rose steadily until it had the force and substance of a torrent. Nick could not see, and he repeatedly lost his footing as he staggered down through the snow. Pertemba was climbing without bottled oxygen—the Sherpas often did without it—and he moved very slowly as the two men struggled back across the traverse at the base of the Rock Band.

  The cold made them clumsy. Nick fumbled with the carabiners that attached him to the fixed ropes. A slip would result in a long pendulum-like fall. Rescuers would not reach them in these conditions. They would die as Harsh Bahuguna, the unfortunate Indian climber, had died on this mountain the previous year.

  They couldn’t even help each other. Pertemba fell behind. Nick carried on alone, hating the dark and this horrendous wind, and came upon Camp Five in the pitch black. He fell into one of the shelters and lay shaking, his face a mask of ice so that his tears of relief and remorse melted tracks on his bearded face.

  Dave Bathgate had spent the past hour clinging to the shelter’s framework to steady and support it. He made tea. Nick drank some and then tried to thaw his frostbitten hands in warm water—it was very painful—and eventually crawled outside into the wind and across to the other MacInnes Box. He was immensely relieved to come upon Pertemba there; Nick had been terribly ashamed of leaving him. They talked for a long time.

  Nick and Dave descended the route the next morning. Chris meanwhile was on his way up to help establish Camp Six. He spent the night at Camp Four, and climbed to Camp Five with Sherpa Ang Phurba on November 10. They got a late start the next day. The fixed ropes brought them to Nick’s high point, at the gully that made a gash in the lower reaches of the Rock Band.

  Chris stared up into the gully, and what he saw took him aback. The gully was no easy snow plod but rather a tunnel of rock steps and overhangs. He turned his attention to a more immediate worry: finding a site for Camp Six. He found a spot with room for tents or MacInnes Boxes, on a shelf just below the Rock Band. There was no real shelter from the wind, but the site would get sun in the morning. The view was staggering. Chris looked down upon vast ranges. He grew cold in the stillness; after a moment or two the sight disoriented him: he felt he might
tumble up into the sky. A sweet clarity arose like a wind off the sea; it swept his mind clean of regret and of thought for the future.

  He descended to Camp Five. There was no wind this evening. He rummaged in a stack of oxygen bottles, moving awkwardly in his down suit and heavy boots and gloves, and dislodged three cylinders. The cylinders careened down the slopes. Ang Pherba looked very grave; Graham Tiso was directly below them at Camp Four. Chris was appalled; his clumsiness might have killed Graham. There was no way of knowing until the radio call that evening.

  Graham was not at Camp Four. He’d been hit in the head by a stone earlier in the day. The stone had ripped through his tent wall and opened his forehead, knocking him unconscious. He’d come awake covered with blood and had made his way down to Camp Two for stitches. Graham would be fine, but his absence meant one less climber to help maintain the flow of supplies on the face.

  The wind returned the next day. Mick Burke came on the radio in the morning to remind Chris that the high camps were low on oxygen cylinders. Chris spent the rest of the day in his tent at Camp Five, working on logistics. Ang Phurba made a solo carry to Camp Six. He returned exhausted; he would need to descend to the lower camps the next morning.

  Chris remained in Camp Five for a second day—it was too cold to venture out—but the next morning he made one more carry, climbing alone to Camp Six. He knew that he would not be this high on the face again—but for now he was the highest climber on the peak, perhaps in the world. The day waned and the wind gained strength, and he began to worry. His oxygen tank had stopped working and he was very tired. He had been too high for too long.

  He struggled across and down to Camp Five. He was almost weeping with exhaustion as he tottered the last few steps into the campsite, where he came upon four of his friends busy about their tasks. Dougal and Hamish had arrived to begin work on the Rock Band. Mick and Doug were digging a snow hole; they had come up to carry loads in support of the leaders.