The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  They had come here knowing that the mountain had buried Nick. And now they were doing something far more dangerous than anything Nick had done. Joe worried that he was piling up a debt that would come due and claim him; he could not believe that a debt of this magnitude would be forgiven. A mountain would decide the matter. He thought of school, the seminary—men and boys praying to a patchwork vision.

  They descended in cloud and falling snow. Nothing was familiar to them. They found the great gully they had crossed the previous afternoon. They crossed it again. Snow collapsed under their feet; some huge beast stirred in its sleep. Joe stayed in front looking to pick a way down. He was moving more strongly than the other two—he had lost their names for a moment. He stared through the mist and snow in hopes that a familiar rock or feature would appear. The ground here wasn’t steep.

  Peter and Dick moved ahead after a time, forcing their way through deep snow. Joe was tired now. He worried he would not be able to stay with them. He sat down in the snow. He heard the voices of the other two and crawled to them. Peter had found the campsite the party had occupied two nights before.

  They had descended a mere 900 feet in six hours. It was nine o’clock in the morning but they were finished for the day. They had brought their battered tent down with them and they pitched it now, coping with the torn fabric and bent poles. They were too tired to dig a platform; so the floor of the tent lay at an angle. The three climbers shivered in their sleeping bags; they were almost dead with fatigue. They had lost their spare gas cylinders and much of their food; now they used most of their remaining gas to light the stove and melt snow for drinks. They needed to drink more but they slipped into a collective daze and then drifted off to sleep. They came awake during the afternoon to recall the events of the previous night and then dozed again. They drifted, featherlike. They were slipping away, becoming ghosts who shimmered and disappeared and reformed without reference to time. They had no opinions and no knowledge. They forgot their predicament and even talked of coming back here, back up on the ridge.

  Joe at moments would awake to this nightmare. The snow was still falling but they had to leave in the morning. Their bodies would deteriorate quickly if they stayed high any longer, especially without fuel to melt snow. They spoke to Major Sarwat on the radio that afternoon. The transmission was fuzzy. Major Sarwat seemed to think the climbers were regrouping for another assault on the summit. Joe felt himself near tears; not even the major understood their predicament.

  They left in the morning without their tent. They were too tired to carry it. They hoped to reach the glacier before dark. Snow continued to fall. They came to a difficult section of rock. Peter went first. He picked his steps carefully, taking tension from the rope as he scraped snow from rock and struggled to keep his footing on the steep ground. The others followed. Snow covered everything. Their crampons skidded and caught on the rock that lay beneath it. The climbers used their hands for balance. Their gloves grew soaked and their fingers went numb. Dick was very worried about frostbite. The three climbers kept moving, miserable and frightened. Joe reminded himself that they had failed decisively—there would be no need to return to the route. They could go home if they could get down.

  It took six hours to descend another 800 feet. The light was fading. They were near the site of their fourth camp, but the snow had buried everything. They poked and dug until Dick uncovered a frozen piece of someone’s excrement. They found the tent and excavated it and huddled inside; they were not safe but they were for now free of the obligation to move.

  Joe made the evening radio call to the major, who had a surprise for them. Georges Bettembourg’s voice came on the air. The Frenchman was in the area to climb Broad Peak, and had come by to visit his friends. Georges was his usual self, cheerful and enthusiastic, carrying on in his ridiculous accent. The climbers on the ridge were very glad to hear his voice. They settled in for the night. They hoped to finish their descent to the glacier the next day.

  Joe took a sleeping pill. That night he dreamed of a battlefield. Tents and buildings collapsed; he could make out shapes of people inside the tents. He stood watching an American colonel. The colonel held a pistol to each head and calmly fired through the tent fabric.

  The climbers woke in the morning and continued down. They were now back on the crest of the ridge, safer ground but slower going than open slopes. They lowered themselves on fixed ropes—their own as well as ropes left by previous expeditions. Dick dislodged a block of snow that knocked Pete off his footing. Pete slithered 15 feet before an old rope caught him.

  They peered through cloud into the valley. It looked far away—but now in the growing dark they came upon their friends Gohar and Ali. The two Hunza had come as high as they could; they stood shivering in their light garments on a ledge at the start of the technical climbing.

  Joe was the last to reach level ground. He lost his footing; Gohar rushed forward to receive him. Ali joined them and the two Hunza encircled Joe with their arms. Joe felt their concern for him as a kind of shock and he felt himself surrender to the notion that they were his protectors. He wept at this welcome.

  The two Hunza carried the climbers’ packs the last 300 feet to the glacier. They had erected tents. Ali made supper for everyone. The climbers ate and thanked him and found their sleeping bags.

  Gohar brought them tea in the morning. Ali had found a very small flower in the otherwise barren litter of the glacier. He picked the flower and offered it to the three young Englishmen. The little party crossed the glacier together. The climbers limped along, giddy without their packs; the Hunza carried everything.

  The sky had cleared when they reached Base Camp. Georges had waited and he smiled broadly as he ran toward them. Joe once again found himself in tears, glad for the sunglasses that hid his weeping from the others. He carried on into camp where Major Sarwat, clean and trim, hurried across to shake his hand and the hands of the other two—the major so blind to their egotism and to their earlier condescension, so delighted, so happy to have his boys back that Joe was happy and ashamed. Tears rose yet again to his eyes. He could not stop this weeping—he had not understood.

  THEY RESTED. IT was Ramadan. Major Sarwat was a good Muslim. He fasted during the daylight hours: he would sit with the others at lunch and eat nothing. Joe had come to respect and admire the major and rely upon his presence; it was as if the major could protect him.

  Time had become a vast ocean; Joe felt his life restored to him. He drifted, turning his thoughts away from the ordeal. His tears continued to come: when he was busy sorting through gear or talking with the others; when he was eating or reading. He would turn his head and there it would be, this mix of sadness and relief and love. His heart had a crack in it like a crack in a vase full of water. He felt it dry up in his chest during the afternoons but it filled up again at night. He awoke each morning to the same sense of bleeding—of a loss that was daily renewed. The mountain country was exquisitely beautiful but its desolation frightened him. He wrote to Maria in England. He told her that he and Peter and Dick were thinking of going back on the mountain.

  They didn’t talk about it during those first days. It was mid-July, past time to leave. Peter had guiding commitments in Switzerland. Dick’s first child was due in August. Joe needed to get back to his climbing shop, Magic Mountain. A friend was running the shop for him but the friend had other obligations. The three climbers had lost weight. They were skittish and weepy—all of them, not only Joe. Three days passed before someone spoke of returning to the ridge.

  They had sent for porters, who would arrive at the end of July. There was not much to feed them so the climbers would have to pack up and leave as soon as the porters arrived—but there was still time. The climbers’ bodies had adapted to the altitude during their weeks of moving up and down the mountain. They had placed fixed ropes on the difficult sections. They believed they could get to the summit in five days.

  They left camp on the fifth day after the
ir return. They took three days to reach Camp Three. Here it snowed again. They spent four nights at Camp Three waiting for the storm to end. Their food reserves dwindled. Dick—the most ascetic of them—had done nearly all of the packing at Base Camp while Joe read and Peter wrote in his journal.

  They woke on July 28 to better weather and climbed to the broad gully and crossed it. The gully was safe now: avalanche or wind had swept away most of the new snow. The climbers camped on the final ridge below the summit. High winds confined them to their tents the next day. They were hungry now. They had been climbing for eight days on five days’ worth of rations. They woke at two o’clock in the morning on the ninth day knowing that if the weather were good they would finish climbing the mountain.

  They looked out of the tent. It was snowing. The night clouds grew thicker as they peered into the dark. They made tea and packed. They left camp when the sun rose. They moved carefully down and down, light-headed with hunger and loss and relief. They reached the bottom of the route at nine o’clock in the morning. Gohar and Ali had once again come up to meet them. Joe turned away from them to look up at the mountain but it was lost in cloud.

  The expedition departed K2 the next day. The three climbers walked down the path in a dream. Joe believed that the mountain had emptied him of shame and regret; he was a man without a past. He had had no wish to return to life as it was lived by men.

  Maria met him in the crowd at Heathrow. She took him home. She held him in bed that night and her hands felt the bones where the flesh of his buttocks had been.

  HE HAD BEEN home a month when the two of them took a cottage in the Lake District for a weekend. Joe slept twelve hours that first night in the country. One afternoon he drove with Maria to a village. He wanted to visit the parents of one of the four climbers he and Pete had buried after Changabang. Joe had kept in touch with the couple. He told Maria in the car that he hoped someone would do the same for his own parents if it came to that.

  The middle-aged people were pleased to see the young couple. They brought out tea and cake and asked Joe about his plans. He told them and they said they hoped he would be careful.

  PART FOUR

  Ghosts

  Over all the mountains is peace. . . .

  Only wait—soon

  You too shall find rest

  —J.W. VON GOETHE

  Everest, Northeast Ridge.

  CHRIS BONINGTON, CHRIS BONINGTON PICTURE LIBRARY

  21

  CHRIS BONINGTON AND a chatty, bespectacled young climber by the name of Al Rouse woke up on a remote mountain col in Western China on the morning of June 19, 1980. The two men were members of the first European climbing expedition to visit China since the Communist takeover in 1949. They planned to spend the day making the first ascent of a 6,200-meter peak. They had decided to call the mountain Sarakyaguqi, after the closest village.

  They kicked steps in firm snow for 750 meters up the peak’s North Ridge. They climbed in a bitingly cold wind under a severe blue sky. It took four hours to reach the summit. They peered west into a rising haze across a sea of virgin peaks and identified the shadow of K2; it broke the skyline like a headstone. Peter and Joe and the others were there; they might be on the summit now.

  The peaks here offered spectacular opportunities for mountaineers, but Chris and Al had a relatively modest agenda. They were part of a small British team invited by the Chinese to make a reconnaissance of a largely unknown peak called Kongur (7,719 meters; 25,325 feet).

  Al Rouse was new to Bonington’s circle, but he was a contemporary—and sometime rival—of Joe Tasker and Peter Boardman. Al had begun making difficult rock climbs in his early teens. He had moved on to big mountains in the company of peers such as Brian Hall, Rab Carrington and Roger Baxter-Jones. He had joined with those three to make a splash in climbing circles two years earlier, with an alpine-style ascent of Jannu (7,710 meters; 25,295 feet), a peak just west of Kangchenjunga in Nepal. Rouse and Hall had followed that up by joining Doug Scott and Georges Bettembourg to climb the North Face of Nuptse (7,861 meters; 25,790 feet) in 1979.

  Al was very smart—he’d studied mathematics at Cambridge—and notoriously argumentative. His personal life was chaotic. He and his climbing friends shared cheap flats that deteriorated into crash pads; they traded girlfriends; they scrounged for cash and spent it on booze and hash and cigarettes—but their loose ways were deceiving.

  Rouse and his peers were very young, but they were serious men. They were passionately committed to a strict climbing ethic, which rejected anything suggesting a siege-style approach to climbing a mountain. Al wasn’t entirely impressed by Bonington’s achievements on Annapurna and Everest. Still, Al wanted to be famous himself—he made no bones about that. He understood that Chris was an important figure, and a useful person to know—the sort of man who could get you invited to climb in China. He liked and admired Chris, and was flattered by the older man’s interest in him.

  It was also true that Chris had taken to the new way of doing things. He had climbed with small teams in recent years, on the Ogre and K2 and elsewhere. His desire to run big expeditions had died along with so many of the friends he’d recruited to take part in them. The fixed ropes and the oxygen offered a margin of safety if a climber were injured or the weather went bad, but the same accoutrements meant putting more people at risk for longer periods of time. It was just too dangerous, all those men ferrying endless amounts of gear through icefalls and across glaciers and avalanche slopes. It was more fun to climb big mountains the way Chris and Don and the rest had climbed their great routes in the Alps two decades before.

  This trip to Kongur didn’t really count. It was a mere reconnaissance, undertaken to explore approaches to the mountain—an echo of the British establishment’s first trip to Everest almost sixty years before. Like that earlier expedition, this venture was a sizable affair. It included a cadre of scientists to document the local flora and fauna and study the altitude’s effects on the climbers. Charlie Clarke, who had served as medical man on Bonington’s 1975 Everest expedition was a member of the scientific team. There were also Chinese interpreters and guides to help them find their way across China.

  The climbing team itself was tiny. It included only Bonington and Rouse and Michael Ward. Ward, approaching sixty, had served as expedition doctor on the team that made Everest’s first ascent in 1953. He’d lately been instrumental in convincing the Chinese to grant British climbers access to China and permission to explore Kongur itself.

  Chris and Al planned to return the following year—the spring of 1981—to make a proper attempt on Kongur’s summit. Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker would come with them. Chris would lead the climbing team. Michael Ward would return as leader of the overall expedition. Charlie Clarke would return as a member of the Base Camp team. Chris and Wendy had become close to Charlie and his wife Ruth Seifert. Ruth was a psychiatrist, an attractive, warmhearted, outrageously outspoken woman who had become close to many of Charlie’s climber friends. The couple’s London home served as a kind of London Base Camp for climbers on their way to and from Asia and elsewhere; it was a spacious, cheerful townhouse overrun by dogs, children and a stream of scruffy houseguests who lugged gear-stuffed duffle bags.

  Chris, Al and Mike had spent the first weeks of the Kongur reconnaissance investigating the approaches to the mountain. They had ranged through unexplored country, crossing glaciers and climbing subsidiary peaks. The ascent of Sarakyaguqi was Al’s last real climb on the trip—he wrenched his ankle quite badly on the way down.

  Chris and Michael Ward continued to explore. They eventually concluded that next year’s expedition should approach Kongur from the west. The mountain sprawled across the landscape, huge but rather squat. Al thought it looked easy, and said so. Chris wasn’t so sure. Kongur was very high and it was very big. They had not managed to get a good view of the ground near the summit.

  THEY SPENT TWO months in China, and arrived back in England on August 1. Chris s
pent much of the following winter organizing the return trip, which was to include a total of ten men. The team would include the four climbers as well as five scientists, counting Michael Ward and Charlie Clarke. The tenth slot went to Jim Curran, who was to film the expedition.

  Curran, thirty-seven, had directed several previous climbing films, including a film of Joe Brown’s successful expedition to Trango Tower. He’d become friendly with Chris during the past several years, often roping up with him to snatch a climb when Chris lectured near Curran’s Bristol home. Jim also was a friend of Don Whillans, and was very close to Al Rouse. Jim and Al routinely climbed or drank together. Al often confided his personal problems—which usually involved climbing politics or romantic entanglements—to the older man.

  Jim was a good climber, but not in Al’s league. His real strengths—apart from his filmmaking—included his ability to stay friendly with the various factions that tended to form on expeditions. He was enormously charming—tough-minded but witty and self-deprecating—and he posed little threat to the leading climbers’ status or ambitions.

  The second Kongur expedition was to depart England in the spring of 1981. Joe Tasker and Al meanwhile planned to attempt the first winter ascent of Everest as members of an eight-man climbing team. The Everest expedition spent most of December and all of January trying to make a route up the West Ridge of the peak. The climbers suffered greatly from the cold and from illness. Joe and another climber, Aid Burgess, established Camp Three—a snowcave at around 7,000 meters—and wanted to press on. Joe was bitterly disappointed when the remaining climbers, sick and exhausted, refused to come up behind them in support.

  Joe and Al returned to England barely two months before the Kongur expedition was to depart. Joe spent the intervening time hustling to lectures, going to parties with Maria and working on a book about the Everest trip; he managed to finish the book before it was time to leave for Kongur. He was tired and still very thin—so was Al Rouse—when the expedition members flew to Hong Kong on May 13.