Zombie-like figures occasionally shuffled out of the gloom, climbers searching for personal belongings that had been blown far and wide over the glacier.
The distant crackle of unseen walkie-talkies buzzed. Climbers were still on their expedition networks, talking to their Sherpa support, arranging for their higher camps to be dismantled and brought down the mountain.
Tashi went to some Tibetan porters that were sheltering in the wreckage of a nearby tent and begged some juniper wood. We roamed the glacier until we found a puja cairn which was still upright and she then burned the fragrant wood whilst chanting prayers. I prayed as well, in my own way, wishing that I could understand the local language.
Tashi stared at the mountain for a while. Her face was serene, totally calm. But her expression was also ruthlessly determined.
‘I’m going up to find my brother,’ she said. ‘Permit or no permit, I’m going up.’
I stared at her for long seconds. Her eyes were unblinking and filled with confidence. I already felt I knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t joke about this.
‘Do you want to come with me?’ she said. ‘I’ll be leaving first thing in the morning.’
My first reaction was no.
Of course I can’t come and climb Everest.
I haven’t got any gear. Haven’t had any training. My name doesn’t feature on any official permit. Oh, and I’m scared half to death of the mountain!
Is that enough? I asked myself. Or do I need a few more reasons?
‘I understand,’ Tashi assured me. ‘It’s not your problem after all.’
Her words cut into me. The rescue of her brother certainly should be my problem. Tashi had helped save Klaus’s life so I certainly owed her one. And I had seen that flash up at Camp 6 just as clearly as she had.
Was it cowardice?
Night fell. We watched the blue gas flame burning as the wind teased the exterior of our small shelter. I couldn’t resist finding out more about Tashi’s plans.
‘How long will you be up there?’
‘I don’t know. I guess two or three days to get to Camp 6, then I’ll have to see what happens.’
‘Where will you get the gear from, the oxygen and so on?’
‘I think those guys from the international team will lend me what I need.’
I thought about my friend Kami, wondering what he would advise me to do in this situation. I reached into the side pocket of my rucksack and retrieved the shrine bell.
The shrine bell. It felt so good to hold it in my hands, to remember the sacred trust that had been placed in me to become its guardian. I felt the carved wooden handle, always warm to the touch. I pressed it gently to my nose, smelling the sweet scent of incense – sandalwood and jasmine – that had been absorbed over countless ceremonies, countless rituals.
The bronze of the bell was touched with golden light from my head torch. The metal was scuffed, burnished by use over tens of years. It felt to me like it was infused with magic and prayers and the positivity of faith. I thought about how close this precious artefact had been to the summit – just a few tens of metres. Heartbreakingly close. How devastated Kami had been once that mission had failed.
Then the strange twists of fate that had shifted the responsibility to me. The request from the heart, from Kami’s girlfriend Shreeya, to one day finish the task. To get the shrine bell to the summit, to complete the quest.
Could I do it? I truly had no idea.
I packed the precious bell away and checked out the cooker. The pan of ice had melted down and it was time to drink.
As the small hours of the night dragged past my mind turned full circle. Thinking about Kami and the shrine bell had shifted my point of view. Was I crazy? An opportunity to get myself on to Everest for real had come up and I was dithering about it. What was wrong with me?
I began mulling over the permit situation, wondering if there was a way to duck the system. Under normal circumstances I knew it would have been impossible; the Chinese control over foreigners’ movements would never have allowed it. There were too many safeguards to make sure individuals couldn’t break free from the groups. The guides watched over everyone with an eagle eye. But our guide had evacuated to Lhasa with Klaus and the situation at Base Camp was one of total chaos. Hundreds of climbers were moving out; yak herders were working twenty-four hours a day, portering all the gear down the glacier.
The lower slopes of the mountain would be busy. Climbers would be rushing up and down to retrieve their gear from the lower camps. It was obvious none of the normal systems were functioning; the liaison officers had lost control.
Most of the soldiers had been called away to help clear landslides from the roads. The remaining guards were occupied full-time on other tasks to restore order after the avalanche. If I went off the radar for a week who would really notice? If ever there was a good moment to disappear in Tibet this was it. No one would even know I had vanished.
The crashing noise of distant rockfall woke us early the next day. The grey light of dawn was just filtering into the shelter.
‘I dreamed about Karma,’ Tashi said. ‘Dreamed he was alive, stuck in a cave.’
Tashi fired up the gas cooker and went out to replenish the ice bags as I laid out crackers, cheese and jam. The two of us forced down as much food as we could.
‘I’m coming with you,’ I told her.
Tashi’s smile was radiant. She threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug.
‘Of course you are,’ she said. ‘I knew it. Now let’s go and get the gear and see if we can rescue my brother.’
Tashi’s instinct was correct: once he understood our crazy mission the expedition leader from the international team had no hesitation in offering us the loan of ice axes, crampons and other hardware. He had spare wind suits, helmets and plastic boots as well.
‘We’ll be back next year anyway,’ he said. ‘So you can just leave them at the store place near the monastery when you’re done.’
His offer of assistance went further.
‘We’ve got a stash of six oxygen bottles above the North Col,’ he told us. ‘We were going to go up and retrieve them but if you want to use the O2 we’ll just “forget” about them.’
He drew us a small diagram to show where the bottles were situated beneath a marked cairn on the ridge.
‘You should practise putting on the gear,’ the leader suggested. ‘You have to get the basic things right.’
The leader took us over to a quiet corner of the glacier and, for the next hour, we went through the routines of putting on the climbing gear over and over again. Tashi had done it all before but for me it was a vital session. I found fitting the crampons to my boots was the trickiest part. I repeated the process many times until I was confident I could get it right every time.
‘Now some jumar training,’ the leader told us.
He set up a short length of rope, showing us how to snap our jumar clamps on to it, practising the technique of moving up a fixed line.
‘It’s basically all easy stuff,’ he observed. ‘But you really have to know it.’
Tashi smiled proudly at me when we were done.
The session had boosted our confidence, but I could sense her growing impatience.
‘We need to move fast now’ Tashi said. She pointed to the sheer wall of intimidating ice that sat behind the camp. ‘The North Col is waiting.’
I scanned the rampart, noticing the deep crevasses that split the face. I knew from my reading that seven Sherpa climbers had been swept away and killed in an avalanche in that very place on one of the early British expeditions and it made me shiver to think of the risks.
At the top of the col was a huge overhanging cornice, a hanging glacier that looked precarious and poised to fall.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘Scary.’
‘We’ll take two litre bottles of water each.’ Tashi advised. It was already shaping up to be a warm day by Everest standards.
One hour later we began our trek through the camp, a sprawling area many hundreds of metres across.
‘We don’t want to get too close to people if we can help it,’ Tashi said.
The two of us weaved a route through the area, bypassing the tents as best we could. We were relieved to see that our presence attracted no attention; there were plenty of other climbers heading up towards the col that morning to retrieve their gear.
We fitted in fine.
I felt more confident with every step but I knew we could be challenged at any point. The earthquake had caused widespread chaos but there were still Chinese liaison officers around.
These were the people to avoid, I knew. A random permit inspection could cause the whole plan to collapse.
‘That’s Chen’s tent,’ Tashi muttered. We skirted round it, keeping our ski goggles on tight, pulling our face masks up high as if we were protecting ourselves from the sun.
We passed through the final tents and hit a rocky plain. The sun had crested the high ridge above us. A shimmering haze of heat was beginning to radiate off the dark rocks. From a distance it had looked like a five-minute walk to get across this area but forty minutes of hard walking got us halfway across with the temperature rising fast.
Conversation petered out as we climbed the rising slope. The thin air was already giving me a nagging headache but I didn’t want to admit it to Tashi when we’d only just begun. I knew that acclimatisation was going to be a problem for me; I hadn’t been at altitude for long enough for my blood to fully adapt. My red blood cell count would be high, but nowhere near as high as Tashi’s. It was one more thing to worry about.
‘Need to lose some layers,’ Tashi said. I agreed with her. I could feel trickles of sweat running down my spine. We stopped, taking off our outer Gore-Tex layers and drinking cool water from the bottles.
Half an hour of further slogging through the heat brought us to the base of the ice cliff. There were four or five climbers there, preparing to go up and fetch down gear. They said hi but didn’t try to talk further.
We shrugged off the rucksacks and pulled our equipment out. We helped each other to fit the gear, stepping into the harnesses and snapping the metal frames of the crampon spikes to our plastic boots.
‘Double the loops through the buckles.’ Tashi reminded me quietly. ‘Every detail helps to keep us alive.’
I was proud of how well we put on the kit. The test runs had given us vital practice and we certainly hadn’t looked incompetent or suspiciously slow.
We clipped our jumar clamps on to the line and began to move up. I couldn’t stop a huge smile running across my face as I realised I was truly on Everest. The big E! Climbing. Moving up the fixed lines.
What would my Nepalese friends Kami and Shreeya say if they could see me now? If they knew I had their sacred shrine bell with me, safe in my jacket pocket? It was an amazing feeling. I was on Kami’s mountain.
For real.
‘Not so fast,’ Tashi protested after fifteen minutes of quick progress. ‘You won’t keep that pace going.’
I realised she was right. Raw enthusiasm had led me to move too quickly. I was puffing and panting hard in the thin air.
I learned to move slower, swinging each leg up and kicking the front points of my crampons gently into the ice. Kicking too hard was another beginner’s mistake, I realised. All it achieved was bruised toes and a load of wasted energy.
Climbing the col was intensely thrilling but it was a bizarre feeling to look up the slope. The teetering towers of ice above us were so still, so quiet, it was hard to believe they could kill. They looked almost beautiful, sculpted by the wind into soaring columns, twisted by the glacial pull of gravity into fantastic shapes reminiscent of cathedral spires. It was tempting to think of them as benign, I thought, a photo opportunity, or merely something to be appreciated for its wild beauty and locked away in the memory.
Then came a crack. The sound of splintering ice. A shuddering of the face beneath our feet.
‘Watch out!’ Tashi screamed.
A series of blocks came tumbling down the slope, spinning fast towards the valley floor. They weren’t too big, just chunks really, but it was a sign of how unstable the hanging glaciers of the col could be. A shimmering cascade of ice powder hissed past us.
I picked up a piece of the debris that had come to rest nearby. It was only the size of a watermelon but it felt heavy and dangerous in my hand.
‘Feel that!’ I tossed the chunk to Tashi.
‘Wow!’ Tashi tested the weight of it. ‘I’m glad we’ve got the helmets.’
The helmets, yes, I thought. But no helmet in the world could protect us from one of those ice towers if the whole thing gave way. It would be like being buried beneath a collapsed apartment block.
‘The gods are looking down,’ Tashi said, ‘they will protect us.’
I smiled. I was learning about Tashi’s faith: always there, giving her strength in every situation and I wished I felt the same.
From time to time, strange sounds came from deep beneath the face.
Halfway up the ice cliff I felt a pressure headache kicking in. The altitude was beginning to bite.
‘I need to rest,’ I told Tashi.
I flopped down on the snow, my body pulling at the safety line as I turned to see how much height we had gained.
The camp was now pleasingly far below our position, dozens of expeditions laid out across the valley floor on the widest part of the glacier. Most of them were packing up after the closure announcement and I felt a pang of regret as I saw the long line of climbers trekking down towards the Rongbuk monastery. Those climbers could have helped us, could have given us backup, but they were all going home. It reminded me of just how crazy our rescue attempt really was.
We were moving away from safety, on an illegal expedition. With no support. On a mountain that would soon be deserted. It was an intimidating thought, and not for the first time I wondered if the whole mission was utter madness. There were a thousand ways we could fail.
Then I thought of what this rescue meant to Tashi, and I felt my determination return. I couldn’t let her down, not now I understood the deep reasons for Karma’s Everest climb. We would just have to try our best.
Chapter 9
‘Let’s drink,’ Tashi said. We passed the flask of warm tea between us, letting our bodies recover a bit.
While we rested, a Japanese climber wearing a massive rucksack came down the ropes and plopped down next to us. He looked worn out, and happily accepted Tashi’s offer of a sip of tea.
We sat for a while, looking out over the valley, enjoying the majestic sweep of the East Rongbuk glacier as it snaked away towards Base Camp.
‘You guys going up to clear a camp?’ he asked.
‘Uh-huh,’ I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t question why we were going UP with such big packs.
‘Which team are you with?’
I felt Tashi’s eyes lock on to me in a silent warning.
‘We’re on a shared permit,’ I told him. ‘It’s an international team.’
This was the cover story we had agreed on. ‘Shared permit’ teams were often just loose collectives of climbers with no real leader. Keep it vague was our plan.
The man nodded. ‘Did you lose anyone in the earthquake?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘We were lucky.’
The climber scrutinised us closely for a few seconds.
‘You’re both pretty young aren’t you? How old are you?’
‘Loads of people have said that,’ Tashi said nervously. ‘Let’s just say we’re a bit older than we look.’
The comment hung in the air as the Japanese guy con
sidered it. He stared at Tashi, obviously waiting for her to say more. Tashi blushed red but kept her mouth shut. The Japanese climber shrugged.
‘OK. Well good luck anyway!’
He clipped on to the line and started to descend.
‘We should cover up more,’ Tashi said. ‘If he noticed how young we are, then everyone will.’
‘You’re right,’ I agreed.
We joined the fixed line once more, gaining a further two hundred vertical metres over the course of the next couple of hours. The climbing was tough work, but that wasn’t the only challenge now we were on the real flanks of Everest; the reflected sunlight off the face was brutal. Both of us were burned on the cheeks and nose before we realised it.
‘We need to get the glacier cream on earlier,’ Tashi observed.
In our eagerness to leave we had simply forgotten to put on the protection. Now we took out the tube of cream and slathered it on to every inch of exposed flesh.
The last three rope lengths to the col led us on to the steepest ice yet; it wasn’t far off vertical. I used the front points of my crampons, thrusting the ice axe in as deep as it would go. The ice anchors wobbled alarmingly. Touching them revealed how insecure they really were. I doubted they would hold the weight of a real fall. It felt like they would rip right out with the least provocation.
It was a massive relief to reach the lip of the col. I hauled myself up the final section of fixed rope with weary determination, clipping myself off the line as I reached flat terrain. I sat down heavily, taking in the view that now opened up.
The North Col was narrower than I had expected, a ridge of ice about three hundred metres long and, in some places, as little as ten metres wide. Fissures and crevasses meant that there were only a few areas where tents could be put safely.
From below we hadn’t been able to see much. Now we saw that there were still a few clusters of tents dotted along the ridgeline, colourful splashes of yellow and red domes set against the brilliant white of the background ice. Climbers, mostly Sherpas, were dismantling the tents and packing up gear. The evacuation was well under way.
North Face Page 11