The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  They packed their sleeping bags and abandoned the tent. They stood outside in the tearing wind and collapsed its framework. Peter used a knife to rip the fabric, and the three climbers stooped to retrieve the rest of their gear through the hole. The wind took the empty tent. They climbed back up to the notch in the crest of the ridge and then onto the snow and scree of the vast field they’d named the Great Terrace.

  They moved swiftly through the darkness, their minds and senses dulled by the cold and the wind’s brutal thrashing. They reached the fixed ropes at the top of the Castle and descended the buttress. The darkness faded into light but the wind continued as they slid down their series of ropes, taking care in their hurry not to neglect some crucial task; they all knew of climbers who had died from such mistakes in far easier circumstances than these.

  They piled into their snow cave at eight o’clock in the morning. After a time they were settled enough to take stock of their condition. They were all very tired. Doug had frostbite on one of his hands. Peter’s big toes and his nose were affected. Georges’s eyes hurt; he was in the early stages of snow-blindness.

  The climbers left the cave and carried on down the snow slopes to the North Col and then down the wall beneath it. They yearned for the grass and running water of Base Camp. They longed especially to be free of the wind. Peter looked up as they crossed the glacier to Camp Two. Clouds raced past at such speed that the mountain seemed to rotate into them. Kangchenjunga rode in the sky, spinning in his vision like a toy.

  JOE HAD SPENT the days since his descent recovering at Base Camp, worrying about the others and wondering if they would reach the summit without him. He had watched clouds race across the sky and he knew no tent could stand up to such wind. His friends would be dead if they couldn’t get to a snow cave.

  He was sick of this—the competition and the dread. He had muddy thoughts about why he persisted: it made no real sense to him. He had made five expeditions to the Himalayas in five years. Nothing much changed; only his need to climb these mountains grew stronger. He sometimes believed that he was performing penance for sins of sloth committed in some previous life. His confusion itself felt blameworthy to him. He did not understand how he came to this—how ordinary desires fell away, leaving this need to climb.

  The previous day he had walked back up to Camp Two with Ang Phurba. They meant to climb the wall today and try to catch the others. Joe had slept late this morning and now Ang Phurba roused him to tell him that his three friends had returned.

  Joe emerged from his tent and saw them. They weren’t carrying much; that meant they had left the gear behind on the peak. They hadn’t reached the summit; he hadn’t missed his chance to climb the mountain with them. His joy at this was tempered by fear and also by regret that he had missed whatever they had endured on the ridge during the storm.

  The four climbers and the Sherpa made their way down the glacier to Base Camp. Doug and Peter and Georges had been on the mountain for more than a week. They were nearly exhausted, but they had explored most of the North Ridge. Peter in particular was confident that he could climb Kangchenjunga. His worries had fallen away during the storm. The nature of climbing made sense to him for the moment. The uncertainty and confusion that often beset him gave way to this calm.

  Georges and Doug felt something similar, but they woke at Base Camp the next morning feeling haggard and uncertain. Doug told the others he felt like going home. He was good for at most one more go at the mountain. Peter felt differently—he wanted something to set against the failure on K2. He told Doug he feared that they might never again be so close to success on such a route on such a mountain.

  The climbers gave themselves three days to rest. They did this partly in hopes that the mail runner would arrive during that time. They pined for connection to a world that at times seemed frighteningly distant, almost abstract. Doug mused aloud that they should wait for the runner in case one or more of them did not return from this last summit attempt; their families would be glad to know the climbers had read these last letters.

  They sat through a perfect day—the first potential summit day, twenty-four hours without high winds. The mail runner arrived on May 8, their third day at Base Camp. They retreated to their tents with the month-old letters and read them with a private and animal greed. Each word suggested to its reader that the rest of the world existed, that the reader was known to those places, that he was perhaps more than he felt himself to be amid this landscape. They welcomed this suggestion even as they recoiled from it.

  The climbers walked back up to Camp Two the next morning. They spent the rest of the day resting and writing letters. Nima Tenzing would carry the letters down to Base Camp the next day. Ang Phurba planned to stay with the climbers and carry a load as far as Camp Three at the col. The climbers had assembled ten days worth of supplies for this second summit attempt.

  They climbed to the North Col on May 10. They meant to climb the next day to the snow cave at the base of the Castle. There seemed little prospect of shelter higher on the route; this meant they might need to climb and descend 4,000 feet on summit day. The climb at times seemed like a debt they should pay or try to pay. There was at such moments little pleasure in it; it was a necessity or perhaps a duty.

  They rose early on May 11, and climbed to the snow cave. Their legs were heavy; they took a long time. The cave had settled in on itself, so they had to dig out more room. Georges had suggested that they rest in the afternoon and set out for the summit that evening. The idea seemed laughable now. The climbers resolved to take a rest day, though they knew it would be difficult if not impossible to recover strength at this altitude. Doug reminded them all that the rest day—May 12—was Joe’s birthday. Joe had forgotten.

  The day came and passed. The four climbers lay in the sun in the morning before the sky filled and snow began to fall. One climber or another left the cave to check the sky every few hours during the evening and into the next morning. They saw clouds each time and more snow. They resolved to take another rest day—but as the new day wore on their impatience surfaced and they decided they’d had enough waiting. They set out for the summit late on the afternoon of May 13 amid wind and cloud. They knew this was unwise. Each climber took comfort in the fact that the others were making the same choice.

  They were on top of the Castle by eight o’clock. The moon appeared briefly and disappeared again as they set out across the snow and scree fields of the Great Terrace. Peter and Doug fell behind Joe and Georges but after a time came upon them behind a boulder, melting snow for a drink. The altitude had addled everyone. Peter was convinced for a moment that there should be more climbers—he almost asked where the rest of them had gone.

  They carried on for a time, struggling to maintain their bearings in the dark and the wind. Joe and Doug stopped and began to dig in a shallow bank of hard snow. Georges had gone ahead. Peter followed him higher to look for a better place to dig. He caught up with Georges, and they found a snow hole at the base of a low rise of rock, which the climbers had named the Croissant. Peter used his axe to carve out more room. Georges meanwhile was determined to press on for the summit. His idea was that they could stop at this snow hole on their way down. Pete followed him out of the shallow cave and they set out. The other two climbers were nowhere to be seen.

  Peter and Georges lost the route in the dark. They came to a steep rock barrier. The wind was worse. Peter retreated onto an unstable patch of snow. His anxiety grew. He told Georges that he thought it was time to retreat.

  Georges was reluctant to lose the height they had gained. He maintained they were no more than a few hundred meters below the summit. They waited for light—it was by now almost morning—but when dawn came the two climbers saw that the clouds were heavy and thick again. Georges at last agreed to retreat. The two climbers descended to their snow hole at the base of the Croissant.

  Doug and Joe had spent an uncomfortable and anxious night in their snowbank, wondering what had become of
their companions. They rose early and set out and came upon Peter and Georges soon after dawn. The four climbers took stock of their situation. They were all desperately weary. The slopes where they stood were still socked in by cloud. They decided to descend.

  They staggered off across the Great Terrace and once again worked their way down the fixed ropes to the snow cave below the Castle. They spent the rest of the day—May 14—in their sleeping bags, listening to the wind and feeling themselves grow weaker. Georges’s impetuous dash for the top had exhausted him. He was determined to descend all the way to Base Camp. The others talked of retreating as far as the North Col to pick up more food; they could then come back up for another try. That plan would mean retracing their steps on the ridge yet again—when what they wanted was to be done with this mountain.

  They went to sleep without deciding on a course of action. They awoke to clear and windless skies on May 15. Doug announced that he was not going down. He would make another attempt on the summit from here. Joe and Peter said they would join him. Georges would not. The Frenchman packed and departed for Base Camp as the others prepared to set out for the summit once more.

  THEY BEGAN CLIMBING at 8:30 in the morning. Joe took the lead briefly, but he was too tired to break trail through the new snow. Doug took over and led the others to the Castle and then up the fixed ropes.

  The windless day was a surprise, almost a shock; it was as if the landscape itself had altered in the night. They crossed the Great Terrace. Doug took the trouble to build a rock cairn that would help them to find their way down in a storm. They climbed six hours to the snow hole Peter and Georges had dug. They hacked at its walls until there was room for three men to lie down in a row. They cooked dinner—freeze-dried turkey—and took sleeping pills and settled in to rest.

  There was still no wind. The sounds of their voices when they spoke were unfamiliar to them in the quiet. The intimacy of the cave felt oppressive. They were aware of their flesh, clumsy and impermanent. They had come to this odd place to discover that nothing was what it seemed. They thought of the people who lived in the world as the dead might think of their survivors: dear but alien and largely ignorant.

  Joe thought of the tramps and the garbage men he’d known in Manchester. He had become like them. He and his companions had stripped themselves of all but essentials. This condition was a type of poverty and as such a version of liberation. Joe was shivering—he didn’t know whether from fatigue or excitement or the cold. He wondered dimly if perhaps they had gone too far. Doug’s fingers, slightly frostbitten during the retreat from the first summit attempt, were very painful. He mentioned the pain and Joe gave him some pills. Peter was asleep. Joe considered his friend’s face in repose. Peter looked calm but very tired.

  Doug and then Joe fell asleep. The three climbers woke to another windless morning. They set out at eight o’clock and climbed out of shadows and into the sun almost immediately. They moved quickly toward rocks at the start of the feature they knew as the Ramp. They stopped climbing so that Doug could take off his boots and warm his feet. They resumed climbing. Peter led for a time and then Joe. The climbers labored up through snow, resting every twenty steps or so. They had never been this high without breathing bottled oxygen. All three were moving surprisingly well. They aimed for the Pinnacles, a cluster of towers that marked the convergence of Kangchenjunga’s West and North Ridges. The Pinnacles were another 500 feet—the summit wasn’t far from there.

  They felt their hearts rise. The other peaks in the region were spread beneath them. The topography had a simplicity that swept away their fears and regrets. Doug’s feet were cold again. They stopped and Doug once again took off his boots. Joe unzipped the front of his snowsuit and Doug put his feet against Joe’s stomach until he felt the blood in them again.

  Peter took the lead once more, moving up unstable slabs of snow. He crossed to a section of black rock that required careful climbing. He was in shadow now but moving toward sunlight and what seemed to him a roofless city, pillars of cloud supporting the sky. This notion asserted itself in the context of nightmarish physical effort; each step was very difficult.

  The sun tinted the Tibetan hills a pinkish orange. Kangchenjunga’s summit block, a low brown triangle, offered no acknowledgment of their achievement or their presence; it wanted nothing of them. The three climbers came to the place where the mountain’s North Ridge ended, merging with the West Ridge. Joe Brown and George Band had come up from the west to stand on this spot in 1955, almost a quarter-century before. The air was still. The ground here was easy. They were safe for the moment, but sunset would come in three hours.

  They set off up the final stretch of the West Ridge toward the summit. Doug ranged far ahead of Joe and Peter. He would stop to wait for them and to confirm that they wished to continue in the dwindling daylight and then he would again race ahead. He disappeared around a corner only to pop up once more on top of a huge block. He shouted down that the summit was 10 feet away. Joe and Peter hurried to join him.

  The evening remained windless. The three of them kept their distance from the very top; they would honor the taboo against standing upon the mountain’s highest point. Doug took photographs. He seemed reluctant to leave, but the climbers couldn’t linger. The snow went red around them as they hurried down. They took care with each step—a climber who slipped here would die. Dark clouds, lit from below by blue and orange light, moved across the sky; someone took another picture as the evening subsided into night. And now at last the wind returned, blowing the snow before it. The climbers put on headlamps and continued down. They crowded into their cave at nine o’clock. They had climbed Kangchenjunga and they were safe for the night.

  Joe and Pete talked quietly. Doug fussed with the stove. There was still the descent to the North Col and then to the glacier and across to Base Camp; after that their lives awaited them. They had been afraid to die on the mountain; now they feared a return to a world where such matters were misunderstood, where people thought that dying mattered more than it did. They were afraid to leave behind the clarity of intention that had possessed them here. They were afraid not to know what to do. They felt uplifted and unworthy at once—they were drunk with confusion and joy and anxiety. They had come here and retrieved something. They worried that they couldn’t protect it, that they hadn’t changed, that they would forget.

  The morning was difficult. They were tired and it made them frightened. They spread out during the descent but every so often they bunched up again to cope with the dizziness that overtook them now. They were terribly thirsty. They stopped to brew tea at the big snow cave below the Castle. They drank the tea quickly and continued down. The wind made them cold. They reached the North Col and assembled bundles of gear. Their legs threatened to give way beneath their bodies as they heaved at the bundles, pushing them over the cliff to careen down the wall to the glacier.

  The wall of ice below the col was melting. It was miserable, clumsy, wet work getting down the fixed ropes. The climbers were not so afraid now but they felt that it would be squalid—embarrassing—to die now. They reached the bottom of the wall and walked through heavy wet snow that came almost to their waists. They tried to crawl on the snow, dragging their packs behind them and sinking into the stuff, chafing their faces in it. It was maddening, ridiculous. Joe looked up and saw Nima Tenzing and Ang Phurba; the Sherpas had come up the glacier to meet the climbers.

  There was a brief reunion—smiles, happy banter—and the Sherpas continued on past to collect some of the gear that lay scattered at the base of the wall. It was snowing. The climbers descended to Camp Two and soon the Sherpas arrived to cook for them and give them the news from the radio. Climbers had made the first ascent of Gauri Sankar—a famously difficult mountain on the Tibet-Nepal border. A Sherpa named Ang Phu, who had climbed with Peter and Doug on Everest four years before, had died on Everest’s West Ridge. They were too weary to make anything of this news. They needed to sleep. The snow had stopped f
alling. There was a new moon—the third since they had come here.

  THEY WALKED DOWN the glacier to Base Camp the next day. Doug went ahead; he seemed happiest alone in pursuit of his destination—his new task. Joe and Peter walked together. They talked quietly, taking in the thicker air. Georges came out to meet the two of them. He brought fruit juice and he embraced them both in turn, cheerful and—Peter was glad to see—seemingly at peace with his decision to retreat.

  The climbers shared a bottle of whisky in the sunshine. The grass was an extraordinary green. The girl Dawa had come up to Base Camp with a friend; they brought wood and eggs to sell. Peter found it difficult to meet Dawa’s smile.

  Joe Tasker and Peter Boardman

  CHRIS BONINGTON, CHRIS BONINGTON PICTURE LIBRARY

  He took a walk the next morning after breakfast. He came upon a herd of blue sheep—bharal. He walked behind the herd for a time. He had climbed almost 2000 feet when the sheep at last scattered. Peter stood for a moment before turning back. He thought of Kangchenjunga. His mind’s eye lit upon moments already half forgotten.

  The climbers left Base Camp the next day. It was May 20. They reached the edge of a forest in the afternoon. They left the glacier and entered the woods and it was like stepping into a new story. They felt the quiet that occurs only among trees—a quiet flecked with birdsong and insect sounds and the rustle of leaves. This new quiet entranced them. They stopped to rest and lay on the ground near a stream. They listened to water running over rocks. Peter had felt a sense of déjà vu at certain times on the mountain and he felt it again here. He was a ghost already, haunting places he remembered as a ghost remembers—without access to the body and what it knew. There was only this echo, painful and sweet.