The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  The climbers were forming attachments that tugged at them as they made their plans. Doug and his wife Jan were raising two small children. Peter had made plans to marry Hilary. Dick Renshaw and his wife were expecting their first child in August. Dick called Joe in the spring to ask if the climbers would be back in time for the birth; Joe said he thought they would.

  Joe had become deeply involved with a young woman named Maria Coffey, the willowy, dark-eyed sister of another climber. They’d met at a party at a climber’s house in Wales, a few months after his return from Kangchenjunga. Maria was thoughtful and intelligent, with roots like Joe’s—working class, Irish Catholic. She knew many of Joe’s climbing friends. She had known and liked Nick Estcourt, and remained friendly with his widow, Carolyn.

  Joe and Maria became lovers six weeks before Joe was scheduled to leave for the second K2 expedition. They talked about the first one, two years before. Maria was horrified to learn that Joe had been willing to continue that climb after Nick’s death. Joe maintained that she had no right to judge him on this matter, but she held her ground. The idea of his return to the mountain that had killed Nick and shattered his family bewildered her. It was all the more difficult knowing that her relationship with Joe wasn’t settled. Joe was coming off of another romance; he’d told Maria that they would have to wait and see what happened upon his return from K2.

  Joe and Peter and Dick left England on schedule at the end of April. Joe’s friend, the filmmaker Allen Jewhurst, traveled out with them; he wanted to accompany the climbers on the approach to the mountain. The party flew to Karachi and then sat on their gear in the back of a truck for three days as the vehicle bounced its way across the Sind Desert to Islamabad. Here they collected Doug—just down from Nuptse—and met their liaison officer, one Major Sarwat of the Pakistan army. The major was a devout Muslim and a very correct man, determined to abide by the conventions governing his role. He was also touchingly earnest in his desire to be of use to the expedition. Joe thought him humorless and prickly, and worried that he would cause trouble.

  The party had assembled at the Islamabad airport for their flight to Skardu when two Hunza men approached them. The pair introduced themselves as Gohar and Ali. They wished to accompany the expedition to the mountain. Gohar was a striking figure, well over six feet tall. He wanted to work as a high-altitude porter; he claimed to be the cousin of one of the porters on the 1978 K2 expedition. Ali asked for a position as cook.

  The climbers were reluctant to hire the two men without certifiable references but the pair managed to talk their way onto the crowded plane. Peter gave in to an impulse to include them on the team. Gohar would perform camp chores and carry loads on the lower sections of the route. Ali would cook.

  The climbers hired porters in Skardu and set out for the mountain. They traveled nine days to the Baltoro Glacier, and then three days up the glacier itself. There was a short delay when the porters complained that the expedition had not supplied enough socks or sunglasses. Otherwise, the march went smoothly until the second day on the glacier, when Gohar fell into a crevasse.

  He fell 20 feet and lodged in a funnel of ice, where the crevasse narrowed before opening out into the abyss. Dick Renshaw climbed down to Gohar, and the porters hauled the two of them out. Gohar wasn’t badly injured but his accident revived the porters’ fear of glacier travel. It was snowing, so the porters in their ragged clothing were cold as well as frightened. They made another day’s march to the end of the Baltoro at the base of K2 but they refused to carry further. The final stage of the approach to Base Camp required crossing the Savoia Glacier. A porter had died on the Savoia the previous year.

  The porters would not be cajoled or bribed. The climbers would have to ferry their own gear to the foot of the West Ridge. This setback delayed the start of their climbing by more than a week. Bad weather slowed them further.

  They had planned to climb the mountain capsule style. That meant they would fix a rope to stock the first camp, then pull that rope up to stock the second camp—and so on, up the entire route. This was a compromise between an outright siege—which would require maintaining a line of fixed ropes all the way up and down the route—and a purely alpine-style approach.

  It didn’t work. The team made slow progress. Doug proposed that they finish the route alpine-style, but Dick refused. They might be trapped by a storm high on the peak, and he didn’t want to risk frostbite to his hands, already damaged on Dunagiri. Pete and Joe agreed with Dick; Doug’s suggestion was too dangerous. The group reached another compromise. They would abandon the West Ridge for the second time in three years. They would try an alpine-style ascent of the Abruzzi Ridge—the line taken by both successful expeditions to the peak. Those expeditions had both employed siege tactics, so an alpine-style ascent of the ridge would be a significant achievement.

  Their first attempt on the Abruzzi ended at 19,000 feet. A storm held them tent-bound there for three days. They retreated to Base Camp when the storm ended. Doug was overdue in England. He decided to leave the mountain. The others were determined to stay for another attempt.

  They drew upon their respective recollections—of Everest and Kangchenjunga; of Dunagiri and Changabang; of Gauri Sankar and K2 itself—to make this decision to stay. They had learned that if they could manage to carry on long enough they could climb these routes; it was simply a matter of beginning and then continuing to work until it was done. Something might eventually stop them but for now there was nothing. They were tired but they were not exhausted. They had come to a point that all three of them recognized: nothing at home seemed to matter as much as staying to finish the climb. They knew this notion to be a hallucination but they gave themselves to it. They knew that accepting this lie was part of their work and the work seemed necessary to them.

  The three climbers saw Doug off and settled in for a few days at Base Camp with Gohar and Ali and Major Sarwat. The two Hunza men were cheerful and efficient. The major had taken to heart the expedition’s goal. He spoke encouraging words to the climbers. He oversaw Base Camp, making small improvements. He tinkered at building a stove. He kept himself clean and dapper even as the climbers became increasingly disheveled—their bodies and faces filthy, their clothing falling to rags, their eyes vacant or fierce by turns.

  THE THREE CLIMBERS returned to the mountain on July 2. They moved slowly. They had been here for six weeks. Their strength was fading, but they did not expect to encounter much difficult climbing on the upper sections of the Abruzzi. Joe and Peter figured the three of them could climb the route in less than a week. They carried on their backs everything they needed for the attempt—there would be no porters, no lugging of gear between camps.

  They found the climbing harder than they had expected—nothing extreme, but consistently challenging. The weather broke again. They sat out the worst of it and climbed when they could, often moving in high wind and heavy snowfall. They spent four nights at 23,000 feet, making twice-daily radio contact with Major Sarwat. The major passed along regional weather reports that rarely seemed to apply to the mountain.

  They set out again when the weather improved. They had camped below the Black Pyramid, a steep section of dark rock that reared up hundreds of feet to the start of an ice field. The rock had few cracks or features, so it was difficult to climb and to protect. They managed it, leaving fixed rope in place for their retreat. Dick then led the others up the ice, which proved dangerously brittle; it splintered when he struck it with his axe. Joe saw evidence of previous expeditions—frayed ropes, bits of gear and cloth. He could not imagine how the climbers of an earlier generation had managed this section.

  The climbers carried fragments of stories. An American climber and three Sherpas had disappeared high on this route in 1939. Another American had died during a rescue attempt in 1953. Joe and Peter felt as they had on the glacier beneath Kangchenjunga the previous year—not haunted by past climbers and their stories, but possessed by a sense that no time had passed si
nce those early disasters, or rather by a notion that time had collapsed into itself, muddying the laws of sequence and of narrative. It was as if the three of them had fallen from some map of the past and into the actual territory of it—as if the past were ongoing.

  They made a fourth camp at 24,700 feet on a shelf on the ridge. Dick had never been this high. They were moving well given the altitude. They could look down 9,000 feet to the Godwin Austen Glacier. Base Camp was invisible in the distant glacier’s immensity. They felt themselves to be voyagers from an already remote outpost. The climbers had come to a place that puzzled more than frightened them. The four men who had disappeared here in 1939 had broken their orbit and sailed into space.

  The three living climbers knew that another two days—perhaps three—would see them to the top of the mountain. Then they would have to try to get down. The good weather persisted for another day. They climbed without oxygen and they suffered greatly from the altitude now. There was nothing to be done about it. They moved up easy snow, skirting a cornice to reach a short section of ice that surprised them; it was very steep. Peter led the ice. The climbers arrived at a shoulder that rose easily to the base of the huge summit pyramid.

  They made their fifth camp here, below the pyramid. They gazed up and picked out a way to the top. The route led up to rock and across to a gully of snow, then up the gully to a final ice cliff and easy ground. For now they looked across to Broad Peak and down upon the rest of the surrounding mountains. The climbers were not terribly far from the summit; it seemed for the moment as though they could turn around and go down now and it would hardly matter. This was just another vantage point, another place from which to view parts of the planet. The sky looked like the beginnings of space to them. They were very high. They knew themselves to be inhabitants of one planet among many—the earth was not the center of things.

  They slept heavily and woke in the morning to snow and high winds. They had been on the route for ten days. Their reserves of food were running low and they worried about altitude sickness; if they stayed here too long they might become too weak to move. They would become names in stories.

  They could not climb in these conditions. They considered retreat. The snow piled up outside of their tent as they talked. The major radioed a forecast of clouds but no wind or snow the next day—July 12—with clear skies for July 13. They resolved to carry on. It was still snowing when they awoke the next morning but they set off in hopes that conditions would improve. The ridge narrowed as they climbed and soon they were moving carefully across steep snow, afraid of triggering a slide that would sweep them from the mountain. They reached the gully. It was 400 feet wide—an obvious funnel for avalanches from the ice cliff above it. Joe imagined a vast white wave heaving out of the mist and breaking upon them. Any avalanche here would carry them for a time and fling them into space.

  The snow in the gully was deep. They moved as quickly as they could, gasping in the thin air but afraid to stop for a rest. Each climber felt a superstitious need to show his attachment to life. It might help to move as quickly as they could: some powerful witness might take note of their efforts, might be moved to intervene on their behalf. The climbers’ fantasies distracted them from the knowledge that pressed at them here—that death was real and that they were not prepared for it.

  They crossed to rock at the far side of the gully. The snow came down harder now. They climbed higher, searching for a place to pitch their single tent. They sought protection from the avalanches that would come; the mountain would shrug off much of the new snow during the night. Peter found himself back in snow that came to his thighs. Dick and Joe trailed after him but it was hard to keep up. They were vastly tired. The climbers came upon a rock ledge below a wall. The risk of avalanche seemed less grave here than on the slopes that surrounded them—slopes that at moments seemed alive, as if the climbers waded through a sea of snakes that slithered and hissed at their boots.

  They pitched their tents and melted snow for tea. It wasn’t enough, but they were tired. They quit while they were still thirsty. Peter and Dick lay down in their sleeping bags with their heads at the tent’s narrow entrance. Joe lay with his head at the back of the tent. The snow continued to accumulate on their shelter. Joe felt the snow fill the gap between his side of the tent and the rock outside. He worried that the snow would smother him in his sleep. The others were anxious, too.

  The three of them talked about their situation. They were 1,500 feet below the summit. They hoped to reach it in the morning. But this snow might make it impossible to climb or retreat in the morning. They might be stuck here while the altitude continued to wear at their bodies. Their talk died and they lay still. They felt themselves at the very border of some mystery. Sounds seemed to drift in from a world remote from even this remote place. They did not take sleeping pills. They might need to come awake quickly.

  Joe drifted into a sleep like a tide that every so often cast him up. He half woke several times—each time to a sense that he had fallen asleep in a tunnel or cave; or else on an unfamiliar beach or road—and then he woke fully to darkness and squalor. The tent had collapsed as if to merge with the mountain; a river of snow flowed over the climbers. They were buried in it; they were like the villagers who died in mudslides. Joe tried to heave himself upright. He could almost move his head and shoulders—but snow hammered at his neck and forced him back; here was some astonishing powerful brute without mercy or malice. He knew death was upon him and he had no description for it. He shouted for Peter and then for Dick but now he felt Pete’s foot pressed against his own elbow. The foot didn’t move. The snow pounded at Joe’s head. He wondered if the pounding would tear the tent from its position. A bag of three bodies would slide down the mountain to tumble and smash for 10,000 feet, the corpses sliding across one another in a bloody, splintered jumble to end as a mindless pile, rags and innards from a butcher’s bin. Joe stood aloof from the possibility. It struck him as sordid. He was grieved that no one would find them or know what had happened. There would be guessing and questions; the remnants of the dead climbers would lie undiscovered. He was aghast at his own incompetence—his inability to meet this dire outcome in some satisfactory way.

  Nothing happened for a time. It was dark in the tent. He thought of a river near his home, the river now nameless to him. He slipped in and under and swam along the bottom. He touched mud and debris. He couldn’t see and the darkness seemed to reflect his mind; it derived from his mind rather than from his circumstances, which he suddenly recalled. He was sheathed in this tent, buried under snow in this vast mountain night. He went back to sleep.

  AND WOKE AGAIN. The snow had set around him; he couldn’t move his body. The slide had stopped. He couldn’t draw a deep breath. The weight on his chest prevented it. It was still very dark. His fear awoke, shards of light through a web.

  He remembered a small knife in the pocket of his wind suit. He could move one arm and he used it to find the knife. He tried to open the blade and nearly dropped the thing; at this a wave of terror nearly swamped him. He waited and the fear subsided. He forced himself to move his hand again. He moved it very deliberately. He opened the blade. He stabbed at the tent where the fabric pressed against his face. The quality of the air changed. He was able to wonder what might happen now—whether he could get out and what he would find if he dug up the others.

  But they were digging for him. Joe heard voices and felt the weight on his chest give way. The voices grew louder and now he could reply. Peter and Dick finished digging him out. Joe sat up in the tent and began to pass out gloves and flashlights. Peter told him to stay in the tent and gather what gear he could find. Peter and Dick cleared snow from the ledge and worked the tent back onto solid ground. The avalanche had moved the shelter so that Dick had hung over the abyss, suspended by the tent fabric.

  Joe found boots and inner boots and handed them out to the others, who pulled them on over wet socks. He was sitting up now. He looked around for more g
ear and here was the sound of hissing snow. He took more blows to his head and pressed himself into the bank of snow at his back and felt the slide bury him. He imagined the others swept into the void; this time there would be no one to dig him out. The slide stopped. A vision of death by suffocation rose up to appall him. He felt unbearably alone with this prospect. He shouted for the others.

  Tears rose in his eyes when they shouted back. Peter had tied himself to the anchor after the first slide. He’d managed to throw his arms around Dick to keep him from going over the edge in the snow that ran through their camp like a river in flood. Peter and Dick dug Joe out for a second time. The climbers moved quickly to depart. There was no question of continuing up the mountain now. Their task was to get down. They must descend 9,000 feet, wading across open slopes of deep new snow where any step might trigger an avalanche. They had worn their clothes to sleep and so it was a matter of boots and gloves and stuffing food and gear into their packs. They needed to be gone from this place but they had to wait for the light even while new snow continued to build on the slopes above and below them. They were too afraid to set off across freshly loaded slopes in the dark.

  Dawn came. Joe led them down. He kept to rock as much as he could. His crampons caught and skittered. The climbers were roped together and Joe knew that if he fell here he would kill everyone; he knew the others knew it too. He stepped back off the rock and into snow that came up over his knees. He pushed through the snow with a childish sense that this was unfair; they should not have to do this. He felt bitterness rise in his chest even as he prayed that the snow would hold the climbers’ weight and that they would be spared more slides from higher up the mountain. The danger of avalanche grew more severe as they descended. Joe was aware that he might be stepping in snow that would later find and bury him. There was also the chance that a patch of snow would break away under his feet. Dick and Peter might be able to hold him but probably not.