The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  They took the next day to organize Advance Base Camp and prepare loads to carry up the mountain. They returned to the ridge on April 9 and dug their first snow cave. They soon hit ice that required long sessions of digging and chipping. They dropped back down to Advance Base that afternoon; the next morning they carried more loads up to their new cave. Chris and Peter returned to Advance Base to pick up still more supplies. Joe and Dick spent the night in the cave and made further progress on the route on April 11.

  The climbers reunited at the snow cave that evening. Chris puttered with the stove near the entrance while the four of them talked over their options and plans. They argued about tactics and chores: how close to the crest of the ridge to climb, when to retreat for a rest, who should brew tea. Chris was happy to be with the younger men—moved by their easy acceptance of him. He had known Peter for seven years now, and he’d become close to Joe on Kongur. He was impressed by Dick Renshaw’s quiet determination.

  The snow cave was warm; water trickled from the roof. The wind rose outside and the climbers enjoyed a sense of comfort and safety. They were cozy here. No news of the world could find them. They had almost no duties.

  They didn’t want to leave the cave in the morning but they made their way weak and miserable out into the cold. Peter led off and Chris followed, moving slowly, once more doubting his ability to keep up with his companions. Chris blurted his fears to Peter, talked of doing what he could in a supporting role. Peter as on Kongur the previous year told Chris to stuff it. There was lots of time; they all had these ups and downs; it was a long expedition.

  The world meanwhile had changed around them. The ridge curled behind them as they toiled up the slopes just below its crest. They were dimly aware of a sparkling montage of shapes, all part of a larger whiteness lit by what seemed an interior blue. The glittering waves of the glacier broke far below: distant breakers that seemed to rise and freeze out of a still deeper blue. They kicked steps in steep snow, moving unroped over seemingly endless and more or less frozen slopes, the snow pockmarked in places by the working of the sun. They fell into the grip of their weariness. Chris would take fifty steps and lean on his axe; he would take another fifty steps and rest again.

  The climbers’ fear blurred and receded only to surface at moments as if for reassurance that no new danger or catastrophe had arisen. There was nowhere in life that was right or comfortable. This beauty was not entirely faceable: it encompassed the vastness of eternity and the proximity of their deaths. This place offered a picture of where they were going and it could not be more inviting or more alien. Peter had a notion that they could keep climbing forever, that indeed they would do just that. They would continue to kick steps in half-frozen snow for an eternity of moments, each moment like this one, a welter of fatigue and fear and bliss.

  They hoped to dig another snow cave near the ridge’s first steep section. They had been climbing for almost six hours when they came upon a promising snow bank for their cave. They dumped their ropes and gear and descended to the cave at the start of the ridge. The climbers had no appetites; it was difficult to eat. Joe had a cough that was bringing up traces of blood. That night he suggested that the climbers should carry only light loads the next day to the site they had chosen for the second cave. This would leave them more energy for digging. Even Peter was tired; he was beginning to face the route’s difficulties and its length. He wondered if this ridge might impose some new limit on him. This possibility awoke his fear; if he retreated it pursued him, occupying the spaces he abandoned.

  The climbers returned to their high point on April 13. They dug in snow and frozen dirt for two hours and hit rock. They cursed at this but continued digging rather than start anew; a different place might be as bad or worse. They pried away rock and clods of frozen dirt but the work was slow.

  There was room for only two men to dig. Chris descended to Camp One. Peter followed him after a time, moving quickly down the steep snow. He was accustomed to such ground from his work as a teacher and guide in the Alps. And yet it crossed his mind that a fall here would kill him. He forced himself to attend to his movements, even as he pushed himself to move quickly enough to catch Chris. He’d promised Wendy that he would look after her husband on this trip. Peter was married himself now. The thought overtook him as if from behind. He felt suddenly older, and after a moment he found he had slowed almost to a halt. He gathered his wits and moved quickly again down the slope, seeing Chris in the near distance.

  The two of them reached the first snow cave together. Dick and Joe arrived some time later. The four climbers that night slept like animals in their den. Chris woke once in the night to the murky cold and a feeling that he had abandoned his life.

  Morning was cold and clear—a fine day for climbing. They set out to carry one more load up to the second cave and enlarge the cave further. After that they would descend to Advance Base Camp for a rest. Chris found that he could barely lift his feet in the snow. He turned back after a time, fighting a sense of failure and hating his weakness, filled with remorse at abandoning his load in the snow, at leaving the others to finish the work.

  The others took two hours to reach the site of the second snow cave. They chopped and dug through the afternoon. Peter noted matter-of-factly that he was suffering hallucinations—nothing dramatic, just oddities of thought or vision. Yellow curtains parted as he chopped and the sun’s rays hit a bedpost or a painted bookshelf. It worried him that his feet were cold. Snow fell as the climbers worked. They left the cave and began their descent. The steps they had kicked in the morning had begun to blur and fill. They plunged their axe shafts into the snow, aware of the potential consequences of a slip on this steep ground. They stopped to brew tea at the first snow cave and then carried on down to the glacier and a proper rest.

  Charlie and Adrian had come up to Advance Base Camp with the yak herders and their animals. They brought mail. Chris was crushed to find nothing from Wendy. Charlie and Adrian stayed for two days to pamper the climbers, feeding them soup and fresh bread. The climbers meanwhile studied the Northeast Ridge through a telescope, focusing much of their attention on a pair of buttresses above the second snow cave. A snow gully seemed to offer a path through the first buttress, but the second one showed no apparent weakness.

  The climbers packed gear and food on April 17. They rose late the next day and climbed to the first snow cave. They ferried more gear to the second cave on April 19, and spent the night there. The cave was still too cramped for four men and their gear. Dick and Joe set to work the next morning to enlarge the shelter while Peter and Chris ventured further up the ridge.

  They moved up firm snow, and then over low-angle rock slabs to another snowfield that grew steeper as they climbed. They stopped to rope up at an islet of rock, standing on it like seabirds. There were no cracks for pitons so they buried a flat piece of metal—a dead man—in the hard snow for an anchor. Peter led into the gully that split the first buttress. He climbed slowly now, relying on the front-points of his crampons. Chris sat on the rock, holding Peter’s rope and watching him move higher; seen from below he resembled a man slowly climbing an invisible ladder. The ice at Peter’s feet glinted and shimmered, the light reflecting from the ice to fade into the reds and blues of the Asian sky.

  Chris looked about him, taking in the view. He could see the North Col, now far below, and he could gaze across to the purplish brown of the Tibetan hills. Huge peaks lay scattered at random—some close enough to invite a wary nausea at their bulk, others far enough away to blend into a memory, seeming almost to belong among the ghosts of mountains from his past. It was as though mountains from his past had achieved a kind of mass that attracted and merged with aspects of his present. They would not fade entirely; they haunted him in this gentle way. He wondered idly what a woman would make of this view. He glanced up at Peter’s lean figure, pressed to the snow as he reached high with his axe. He thought of his own mother’s legs, her white feet on a kitchen floor of for
ty years ago. He was surprised to encounter her memory now.

  Peter ran out most of the rope. He reached rock again and placed a piton. He fixed the rope to the piton and shouted down. Chris clipped his ascender to the rope—it would hold him in case of a slip in the steep snow—and followed. Chris reached Peter and led past him, still mostly on snow. He climbed 50 meters in an hour, moving slowly, taking time to judge the snow’s condition. He came to a ledge of bare rock and found a crack and tapped in a knife-blade piton for an anchor. Peter followed quickly and led through in his turn. The ground grew less steep. They reached the top of the first buttress, which ended just below the crest of the Northeast Ridge.

  It occurred to Chris that he’d never roped up with Peter before. He mentioned this and Peter corrected him. They had climbed together near Bonington’s home before the Everest trip in 1975. The intervening time seemed very long. Mick Burke had been alive seven years ago; so had Dougal Haston and Nick Estcourt and others now gone.

  Joe and Dick took over the climbing the next day. They found an easy way through the second buttress—mixed ground at low angles, some loose rock but no other difficulties. The mountain’s snowfields and gullies and slabs were becoming real to the climbers. These features emerged one by one from the vastness of Everest so that it became possible to love and fear the mountain in its particulars. The blackness of the mountain became apparent in a particular rock’s blackness, bright against the snow. The snow thawed and froze; clouds appeared and vanished. All around them was the evidence of change. The rock absorbed the light and grew warm in the afternoons. The rock would become dust and blow away, take flight to form the beaches of Africa or Thailand—even as the sands of other deserts arrived here, brought by the interminable wind.

  Chris and Peter followed Joe and Dick through the second buttress, carrying heavy loads on the newly fixed ropes. Peter in particular was struck by how the ground changed from day to day as they crossed and recrossed it. Nothing stayed the same even for a matter of hours and yet there was no apparent agent for all of this change. He felt that he could spend his life as a witness here. It was like staring at something—anything—for hours, and getting glimmers of some spectacle, vast but empty, unfolding in stillness. The sights here struck him as postscripts to his father’s death and to his own marriage. Those occurrences had hinted at this—at the profound instability of experience, of matter itself. He had refused to face it. He had instead come here as if to seek audience with some unseen interlocutor who—it struck him now—had nothing to add.

  He looked up and across the North Col to a sea of peaks. He saw more than he could believe or accept, and he knew that from here the views would become increasingly difficult to encompass. He must travel light; he must stop thinking and wishing. He didn’t believe he could do it; his preparation was inadequate. He knew he was stronger than the others; he would end up alone on this ridge unless someone surprised him. He thought of Joe and his years in the seminary and allowed himself the hope that Joe would finish it with him.

  Chris lagged behind, but the others arrived almost together at a shoulder above the second buttress. The climbers were near the magic 8,000-meter mark, higher than all but fourteen of the world’s summits. It was snowing heavily. Peter wanted to press on but Joe was tired. The three climbers descended, passing Chris on his way up into the rising storm.

  Chris dumped his load hastily at the high point and turned to follow the others. He was vaguely frightened, worried about losing his way. He was relieved to come upon his three young comrades at the top of the fixed ropes. They were milling about, fussing with the anchor, frightened and upset. Peter had come close to killing himself. He’d leaned back on the rope, and the anchor—a single piton—had pulled. He’d somehow managed to keep his balance; failing that he’d have fallen a vast distance. It was very like his accident the previous year on Kongur—the time he’d been hit by the rock and had nearly gone off the end of the rappel rope. He’d been lucky then, too.

  The others watched as Peter once again clipped into the rope and leaned back. The new anchor held. He reached the bottom of the pitch. His companions followed him. The party now had to cross a series of snow-covered rock slabs. Peter wanted a rope here but Joe ignored him and walked across without a belay. Peter shouted at him but then gave up and followed. His fear made him awkward. He looked for Joe, meaning to berate him, but felt himself grow calm. He saw this scene—the four of them in scattered poses here—as in a painting or a film, and in a flash of clarity he saw that it was thrilling, all of this. He felt an unreasoning love for his three friends.

  The four climbers descended to the second snow cave. Everyone was quiet as they settled in for their rest but in the morning they were eager to talk. Peter accused Joe and Dick of showing a dangerous lack of motivation, of push. He believed they were leaving too much to him; it was like Kongur again. The others listened calmly. There was talk of descending to Advance Base Camp for a rest. Dick argued that they should stay high for now. They talked all morning and arrived at a plan that suited Chris. They would retreat all the way down to Base Camp for a real rest. They would then send two climbers with a tent back up to the high point just below 8,000 meters. Those two climbers could spend a day or two digging a snow cave while the other two ferried loads to stock the new camp.

  It was snowing again in the morning as the four climbers began their descent. The new snow made the slopes dangerous. Joe and Dick roped up. Chris and Peter had left their rope at the high point. All four climbers moved with care, afraid that their movements might dislodge a slab of unconsolidated snow. The snowstorm gained strength as they descended the ridge. Dick led them from wand to wand for a time, but then lost the way; he took them in circles until someone spotted another wand. They stumbled into Advance Base Camp, completely used up and looking forward to seeing Charlie and Adrian—their friends would fuss over them and make tea—but Charlie and Adrian weren’t there. They had gone down to Base Camp. They had left behind the mail, including three letters from Wendy for Chris. The climbers settled in happily to read and drink and talk and eat.

  They woke the next morning to sunshine, but when they looked up they saw more new snow on the mountain. They had been right to come down. They packed to make the long walk down to Base Camp. Chris left first. He walked alone across the glacier for a time and then disappeared as suddenly as if seized by some invisible predator; he had plunged feet first into a crevasse. The breath left his body as he lurched to a stop, caught by his armpits so that his torso and legs dangled like an insect’s above the void. He was just able to drag himself out. He scrambled across to the safety of bare rock, aware but not aware that he had come very close to dying. He put aside the implications of this latest brush with death; he needed his strength for the climb itself.

  Mr. Chen and his interpreter Mr. Yu came out from the huddle of tents at Base Camp to greet the climbers and to shake their hands. Charlie and Adrian had gone off to climb a small peak in the neighborhood; they were spending the night at the ruins of the Rongbuk Monastery. A truck arrived at Base Camp in the afternoon; it carried a party of Americans who meant to ski around Everest. The two parties mingled, exchanging news and speaking of mutual acquaintances, making mountaineering gossip.

  The Americans left and the British climbers settled in for their rest. Peter found himself unable to read or to think beyond the difficulties that awaited him and his friends. He was increasingly aware of the order of their task—there was so far to go on the ridge—and he was saving himself for the job. He had no patience for anything else, for distractions; he had no interest in food or photography or chatter. He knew—he remembered the second time on K2—the climbers might simply run out of strength before they could get up the route. This possibility disturbed him. He was comforted by his belief that the others could be trusted to behave well upon their return to the ridge.

  The climbers had been reading and hearing scraps of news about the Falklands War. They found themselves s
peaking in military metaphors. They were in some ways no different than soldiers, believing that they were willing to die in pursuit of some purpose they could not properly define. This seemed absurd and even dishonorable in light of the commitments they had made, promises whose fulfillment required them to remain among the useful living. The news of the war upset them obscurely. It seemed a waste, a dangerous sideshow—but then what was this?

  Peter wrote in his journals. They seemed to promise a future self to read them. Dick carved a swan from a piece of mahogany he’d brought from home. Joe worked on notes for the expedition film and took long naps. Chris read and slept. He would close his eyes and be gone and wake in a dazzled puzzlement, amazed to return to this place.

  They stayed at Base Camp for three days. A low ridge hid Everest from them. This ridge had once held a cairn to commemorate the loss of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine but the cairn seemed to be gone now. The climbers could imagine at moments that the mountain wasn’t there.

  23

  THEY TOOK A day—April 29—to walk back up to Advance Base Camp. They set out for the ridge the next morning. Charlie and Adrian came along to help carry the big 16mm camera; they would turn back at the start of the route, after Joe filmed some climbing shots. The wind blew strongly; at times the climbers were forced to crouch low and clutch their axes. Chris was still very tired. The rest at Base Camp seemed to have done him almost no good.

  They spent the night in the first snow cave. They climbed to the second cave on May 1. Here they drew straws for the next day’s pairings and assignments. Peter and Dick won the role of climbing to the shoulder just below 8,000 meters and staying on to dig a third cave there. Joe and Chris would carry gear up to the shoulder as well, then drop down to spend the night at the second cave and bring up more supplies the next day.

  The four men climbed the fixed ropes on the first and second buttresses. The wind picked up in the afternoon, and clouds rose to envelop them. Peter reached new ground and moved on alone, eager to see what was next. He peered around corners and eventually identified a safe route across to the start of the First Pinnacle. He turned back and met Joe coming up. The two of them found a site for the third cave. It was just over the crest of the ridge, at the top of the Kangshung Face. Chris arrived and dropped his gear. He and Joe left to descend to the second snow cave, leaving Peter to start digging a third cave. Dick arrived last. He had run out of steam near the top of the second buttress. He put it down to a bad day—the sort of day even the strongest climber might experience up here.