The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  He dug himself out of the snow. He stood and pushed back up through snow to his original stance. He looked down across to where Quamajan still stood on the other side of the snow basin. The Hunza was looking down at his hands. He had burned them trying to hold the other end of Nick’s rope. Nick had gone with the avalance over the ice cliffs at the bottom of the basin, a drop of more than 5,000 feet.

  Joe and Peter had watched the slide from the fixed ropes above Camp Two. They had seen Doug start across the snow earlier. They hurried down and found him. Doug told them Nick was gone. Doug was still in tears when he turned on his radio and told Chris. Nick’s copped it. The whole bloody slope went . . . didn’t have a hope.

  Chris told Doug to come down with the others. He told him to be careful, but there was no danger now. The avalanche had swept the slope clean. The climbers descended the basin on firm, consolidated snow.

  CHRIS AND PETER shared a tent that night at Camp One. They talked about Nick—his jokes and his carousing, his stubborn intelligence—until Chris lapsed into silence. He had lost his closest friend. He had begun to grow old together with Nick and he realized now that he had expected much more of that. Wendy would have to tell Carolyn Estcourt who would tell her children, the little girl and the two boys.

  He could find no meaning in it. He tried to stop thinking of Nick. He thought of his own childhood—of how the mountains had looked to him in picture books. They had aroused in him notions of escape, of possibility. The pictures had suggested to him that things could be utterly different, that he could leave his story, reinvent it.

  He had sought in the mountains not merely a new identity but also a new way of being. He had wished to move among these places like a visitor, a fairy-tale child who escapes the streets and houses of the city for a wilderness of snow. He had managed something different. He sometimes felt himself bloom into fullness in the mountains, into a man he could admire and into a life he could love. The deaths of his friends and collaborators seemed a cruel confirmation of his notion—and a perverse fulfillment of his wish—that life might assume new aspects in these places.

  Such notions flickered and collided amid the grim scenery of his grief. He felt the hard ground under his tent. He felt empty and abandoned, furious and stricken, frightened, without resource. He wanted the night to end. He wished it might go on forever, to delay what was to come.

  What amazed him was the inexhaustible nature of his memory. He could skitter anywhere he liked, crossing continents of time to recover fields of blurry data. He was a boy in a library; he plucked books at random from the shelves to find that he had read them all. There was no comfort in his recollections, only this sense that he knew more than he could use. He’d traded or lost something precious, but he didn’t know what. This ignorance was disastrous. And it was shameful because he believed that he chose not to know. He saw himself as he was, shivering in his sleeping bag in this awful place, his back to Peter’s huddled figure. He was appalled.

  The climbers rose in the morning. Each saw his bewilderment reflected in the haggard faces of the others. Chris and Peter wanted to stay and try to finish the route. Doug and Joe wanted to go home. The four climbers agreed to discuss the matter down at Base Camp. They packed their gear and left Camp One under gray skies.

  Their way took them past the huge cone of debris that lay over Nick’s body. Chris thought of ants at the seashore. The climbers stopped and looked at the rubble as if courtesy required them to do so. Doug had worried that the birds would get at Nick but there was no chance of that. Still they lingered. No one else knew of this; no one else could look after the fact of Nick’s death.

  Chris called a meeting at Base Camp later that day. The remaining climbers gathered in a MacInnes Box, a relic of the Everest trip three years before. No one knew how to talk or behave. They spoke of other matters until Chris raised his voice to ask whether they should stay and try to finish the route.

  Doug said he thought it was wrong to continue here while families and friends in England coped with the news. He had no interest in continuing the climb. Jim Duff agreed with Doug. Tut said he was willing to stay on in support of the others if they decided to remain. He didn’t think they would; he couldn’t imagine himself or the others walking up and down past Nick’s body for the month it would take to finish the climb. Joe said he didn’t know what was right. Tony Riley wanted to complete his film, but that still left only two climbers—Chris and Peter—in favor of staying on. The group agreed to end the expedition.

  Chris had second thoughts—he called another meeting that afternoon—but the rest of them had already moved on. They were thinking of the return to England. The team agreed that Chris and Doug would leave in the morning. The two of them would tell the local authorities of Nick’s death, and send porters back from Skardu to collect the expedition gear. Chris and Doug would fly on to Islamabad, where they could at last telephone Wendy with the news. She would try to reach Carolyn Estcourt before the news got into the press.

  Chris and Doug set out in the morning with Quamajan. They moved quickly, covering ground and taking satisfaction in the work. Here the two Englishmen weren’t at odds. They were walkers bearing sad news. Their collaboration was coming to an end of sorts. Doug had limited patience for Chris and his style of leadership; he preferred to mount his own trips and run them as he saw fit. Those trips were smaller but that was how Doug liked it—and that was where climbing was going. You didn’t need Chris now; you didn’t need a lot of money or hundreds of porters. You could just ring up some friends and go.

  It was a relief to Doug and Chris both that they didn’t need each other any more. They suddenly understood themselves to be friends, as if they hadn’t quite seen that until now. One day they crossed a river together. The water was very cold—exhilarating. Chris when he climbed the opposite bank looked over at Doug’s tall figure, and was comforted by the sight of him. His love and gratitude toward Doug seemed to arise from and nurture his growing understanding that Nick was lost to them.

  They reached Skardu in five days. They reported Nick’s death to the District Commissioner, who treated them with great tact and found them seats on a plane to Islamabad the next day. Chris telephoned Wendy from the embassy there. He listened to the buzzing on the other end of the line before she picked up. She had called him just months ago with the news about Dougal. Wendy picked up and he heard her voice but he couldn’t speak.

  TOM ESTCOURT WAS seven years old when he woke up one morning and decided he didn’t want to go to school. He went looking for his mother to tell her he didn’t feel well. She wasn’t in her bedroom and on his way downstairs he met his brother Daniel coming up. Daniel was nine. He was crying. He saw Tom and told him: Dad’s dead.

  Their mother was downstairs. She was crying too, sitting on a beanbag chair they kept in a corner.

  Tom remembered leaving his father at the airport. That had been a bad day, too. Tom had cried in the car on the way home but he’d been singing as well. He remembered the words: Don’t cry, don’t cry, there’s a silver lining in the sky.

  PETER AND JOE and Tut and Jim waited two weeks for the porters. Joe thought with growing dread of the return to England. He remembered Ruth Erb—the widow whose husband he and Peter had buried in a crevasse with three other climbers after Changabang. He remembered how she had lingered in the mountains, reluctant to return to her friends and family, as if she feared their faces would confirm her loss.

  The porters came. It took eight days to walk out to Skardu. The rivers were swollen and crossing them was dangerous. Islamabad was only another hour by plane, but no plane came. A plane would take off in Islamabad each day and the wind would rise and the plane would turn around. They’d been waiting for a week when it came. Tut and Jim managed to get seats. Joe and Peter waited three days for another flight. They talked of returning to K2. They’d failed to climb the West Ridge or even to come to grips with the mountain. Already it felt to both of them as if they’d never been the
re; as if they’d never touched or even seen K2 at all.

  Nick had been dead for a month.

  19

  CHRIS RETURNED TO Great Britain bearing his burden of grief and guilt and also a sense that he had not returned whole, that he had left something of his past on the peak. He had pronounced the snow basin safe. He saw it in memory, easy ground.

  The deaths had begun to blur. There were so many of them; the dead threatened to fade into the enormous backdrop of the mountains that had killed them. He couldn’t carry them with him; he had to turn at least partly away from them to function. His friends continued to die—it was if he had set in motion some machine; it lurched on, doing its work in this mindless and horribly damaging way.

  How could he mourn properly? If he gave his attention to one death, he neglected the others—and also the living, including Wendy and the two boys. It was better to trail his dead behind him, at a reasonable distance. But they were like a pack of children, needing him, unable to care for themselves. He sometimes felt something similar about the survivors—the other climbers, the families. They looked to him for something. They didn’t seem to blame him, not entirely; still, he felt he’d incurred some obligation to them all—the living as well as their dead—and he had no clear sense of how to meet it.

  He didn’t know how the others managed these losses. They talked sometimes of feeling invincible after a death. Some of the married climbers would return from a disastrous expedition and fall into bed with women who were not their wives, conducting brief but intense affairs that made their family lives miserable for a time and left them hollow and ashamed. Bonington in the aftermath of a loss clung to his marriage and his family life. He fended off his grief in other ways—even as he wept for his lost friends the next journey would take its earliest shape, a sleek and glittering form that darted from tree to tree as if in a forest of secrets.

  He went to see Nick’s widow, Carolyn Estcourt. Jim Curran—a climber and filmaker who also had been friendly with Nick—came along in support. The three of them met at a restaurant and got tearfully drunk. Curran took appalled notice of the strangers who interrupted to ask for Chris’s autograph. Chris looked deathly ill but he was almost absurdly gracious, signing and taking time to exchange a few words with each new intruder. He seemed unable to defend himself. Or perhaps it was a relief to turn momentarily away from the two friends who looked to him in their loss.

  The next night an abcess on Chris’s chest burst—he had developed a serious infection, a lingering souvenir of his injuries on the Ogre the previous year. Surgeons removed part of a rib a week later. Chris took the summer to recover, pondering his immediate future. His circle of climbers was dwindling, and its surviving members had their own ambitions. Chris for the moment was too weary, too heartbroken, too encumbered to follow them, let alone lead.

  It had been fifteen years since he’d climbed the Eiger’s North Face with Ian Clough. Chris had since done what he’d meant to do; he had made a career of climbing. Along the way, he’d lost more than seemed possible. There were the dead—even apart from his own child, Conrad, there were all of the climbers: John Harlin, Ian Clough, Tom Patey, Tony Tighe, the Sherpa Mingma, Mick Burke, Dougal Haston, Nick Estcourt. Climbing also had damaged or destroyed his friendships with Don Whillans and Martin Boysen.

  He couldn’t weigh such losses against the moments he’d gained, the happiness that at moments appeared like some oblivious guest, brushing past his objections and leaving him giddy, slightly lost. But there were other factors to consider, other connections to protect. His two surviving children were growing up. Daniel was eleven; Rupert was nine. They were frightened and angry. They had known Nick as a friend to the family and a support to their father. They’d admired and loved Nick Estcourt as they had known and loved Mick Burke before him. The string of deaths proved that their father himself was not safe—that he was willing to risk their happiness as well as his own.

  Chris signed a contract to write a book about other adventurers—polar explorers and astronauts and sailors as well as climbers. That would keep him busy for a year or so. And he had an eye on China. There was talk that the country would open its borders to western climbers. China held a galaxy of peaks, mountain upon mountain unexplored and unclimbed—but the borders remained closed for now. And if they did open, it wouldn’t be like before. He was finished with big expeditions—too many people on the mountain, too much to lose.

  THE OTHERS CARRIED on. They had mountains to climb, careers and reputations to make. Doug Scott and Joe Tasker had been back from K2 for only three months when they left for an alpine-style attempt on Nuptse, Everest’s huge neighbor. They were turned back by heavy snow low on the mountain—a failure hard to bear on the heels of the K2 debacle.

  They hoped for something better on Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest peak at 8,586 meters (28,169 feet), situated at the eastern end of the Himalayas. Doug Scott and Peter Boardman had made plans to attempt the mountain in the spring of 1979. Joe had agreed to go with them. They would climb without supplemental oxygen—bringing only a small amount for emergencies—and with just one or two porters in support. They’d invited Tut Braithwaite as a fourth climber, but he’d refused; he was still suffering from the aftermath of the chest infection he’d contracted on K2. Joe suggested a replacement: Georges Bettembourg, a Frenchman whose achievements included an alpine-style ascent of Broad Peak (8,047 meters; 26,401 feet) in the Karakoram.

  Peter was just back from New Guinea, where he’d climbed the remote Carstensz Pyramid with his girlfriend, Hilary Collins. He’d met Hilary at a party the winter after his return from climbing Everest; that was three years ago, in 1976. Peter had been newly famous, fending off his guilt over Mick Burke and preparing for the Changabang expedition with Joe. Hilary had been teaching school in Derbyshire; she’d invited him to give a slide show at the school upon his return from Changabang that spring.

  They’d fallen in love very quickly. They shared a wish to understand the world and their place in it; they were the kind of young people who look for meaning in their lives without cynicism or even much self-consciousness. They went climbing sometimes—Hilary was a climber, too—and they talked, often staying up late together to review what they had seen or learned or felt during their hours apart.

  Hilary had accepted a teaching job in Switzerland while Peter was on Changabang. She left England after his return, but they settled down together in 1977, when Peter came to take over Dougal Haston’s climbing school in Leysin—much as Dougal had taken the job after death of John Harlin. Peter often took Hilary along when he guided clients on routes near the school. The couple made occasional trips together, traveling to Africa and Asia to explore and climb. They wrote each other long letters when Peter went off on expeditions, but the letters weren’t sufficient. The two of them would put certain of their respective experiences aside to sift through together when Peter returned. It was as if they had not fully lived their time apart; they must relive it together.

  The failure on K2 had stayed with Peter and with Joe and Doug. The three friends badly wanted to succeed on Kangchenjunga, but they had set themselves an immense challenge. Climbers had reached the mountain’s summit only twice—first in 1955 (that was Joe Brown’s first Himalayan expedition), and again in 1977 by Indian climbers. The successful expeditions had been large-scale affairs, making heavy use of supplemental oxygen.

  Recent climbs on other mountains offered hope that a small party could succeed on such a big peak. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler had climbed Everest without oxygen the previous year, but they had relied on help from large support teams, and they had climbed the peak by way of the relatively easy Southeast Ridge. The three British climbers and their French companion would have minimal support on Kangchenjunga—and they had their eyes on a new route, the mountain’s North Ridge.

  There were other reasons to worry about the feasibility of their plans. Kangchenjunga was a dangerous peak even by Himalayan standards
. The approach alone held potential horrors; it would take them across terrain frequently swept by enormous avalanches. The first expedition to approach Kangchenjunga—in 1905—had lost three porters and a climber to an avalanche low on the peak. Another avalanche had killed a Sherpa in 1930, during the third attempt on the mountain.

  The mountain occupied a remote corner of the Himalayan range. It stood on the border of Northeast Nepal and the region of Sikkim, recently annexed by India. The climbers flew out to Kathmandu in March of 1979. They met up in Dharan with the Sherpa Ang Phurba; he had climbed on Everest with Doug and Peter in 1975, and on Nuptse with Doug and Joe in 1978. Ang Phurba would oversee the forty-eight porters who would carry the expedition’s supplies to the mountain.

  The party began their approach on March 18. They gained a high ridge and followed it for four days, meandering in small groups past farms and villages. Peter thought of his Hilary and the distance between them. He was walking into solitude. The climbers saw the mountains through clouds—there was the multipeaked bulk of Kangchenjunga, seventy-five miles distant but unmistakable through the haze.

  Peter knew something of the mountain’s history. The Tibetans had named it Kangchenjunga—Five Treasure Houses of the Great Snows—after its five distinct peaks. The men who had climbed the mountain in 1955 and the members of the second ascent party in 1977 had refrained from stepping on its highest point. They deemed this a courtesy due to the spirit that animated the peak—and to the local people, who believed that an ascent of Kangchenjunga would lead to floods, landslides and other misfortune.