North Face

by Matt Dickinson

  We rested, drinking a little tea from our flasks, then trekked along the ice ridge, weaving through the disassembled camps and searching for a hidden spot to pitch our tent.

  ‘It’s like a war zone,’ Tashi commented.

  Many of the climbers were exhausted, lying outside their tents. Some were bandaged up, returning with minor wounds from high camps after the earthquake. Others were tending their stoves as they prepared tea before heading off down the col.

  ‘How about here?’ I said. I had found a small area behind an ice ridge. It was just big enough to take a tent.

  ‘Let’s do it.’

  We would be nicely out of view.

  Using our ice axes, we scraped out a flat surface. The ice was as hard as rock and the task took twice as long as I had expected. We were sweating hard by the time the platform was ready.

  Then we erected the tent, threading the Kevlar poles that gave it shape and pinning it down with every single peg at our disposal.

  ‘Not bad!’ I was proud of what we had done. The tent looked solid.

  ‘Let’s eat before it gets dark,’ Tashi said. She gathered a plastic bag of ice to melt.

  I set up the cooking stove and spun a spark out of a lighter. The gas ignited with a satisfying hiss. I found a packet of pasta in my pack. Packets of tomato soup came from the depths of Tashi’s rucksack, along with a cooking pan and a hard piece of Tibetan cheese.

  When the water was boiling, we added the soup powder and threw in the pasta at the same time.

  ‘The wind has dropped away,’ Tashi said, ‘we can eat outside.’

  We left the tent, finding the col pretty much empty. Almost all of the teams were now retreating down the fixed lines towards base.

  ‘We’re just about the only ones here,’ Tashi said.

  It was a lonely feeling.

  We put down our foam mats and ate the food in the most spectacular place imaginable, perched on the very edge of the North Col, looking directly down on to the camp some six hundred metres below.

  ‘I keep thinking about Karma,’ Tashi said. ‘It feels wrong stopping like this.’

  ‘We’re going as fast as we can,’ I reassured her.

  Tashi nodded. She knew as well as I did how dangerous it would be to keep climbing without night stops. Altitude sickness would stop us dead in our tracks long before we got to where Karma might be found.

  We turned to look at the vast North face of Everest, tracking the sinuous line of the ridge then following the gullies and rock walls up … and up … into the rarefied heights of the summit pyramid where a billowing veil of snow crystals scudded into the late afternoon sky.

  ‘He’s being blasted by that wind,’ Tashi said. ‘They say it can be more than a hundred kilometres an hour at Camp 6.’

  I tried to imagine the power of such a force, wondering how Karma could survive it. Had he found shelter? Would his equipment be enough to keep him warm? Would a tent survive even a single night of such an onslaught? I had no idea.

  ‘Eat your food,’ Tashi said. ‘Before it freezes.’

  I stared at the plate of pasta, surprised and disappointed to find that I didn’t feel hungry at all. In fact the sight of the food made me feel a bit ill, another curious effect connected to the high altitude.

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ Tashi advised as she saw me pushing the pasta about the plate. ‘Treat it like fuel.’

  We sat for a while, eating a little, then Tashi spotted activity down at Base Camp.

  ‘There’s another expedition arriving down there,’ she said quietly.

  I saw the movement she was talking about. A line of about twenty tiny figures was crawling painfully slowly up the glacier into the Base Camp zone.

  ‘They look like soldiers,’ Tashi said hesitantly. There was no mistaking the tremor in her voice. ‘You can tell by the colour of their clothes.’

  I felt the hairs rising on the back of my neck. It was true the team were wearing military khaki and were now gathering close to Chen’s tent. Had the Base Camp commander somehow got wind of our illegal climb?

  ‘You don’t think they’re going to come up after us do you?’ Tashi said fearfully.

  ‘I doubt it,’ I replied. ‘It’s probably some sort of routine expedition.’

  A glacial silence embraced us as vivid fears kicked in. My words had sounded hollow. The prospect that a military team was pursuing us was a true nightmare. The plan to rescue Karma had always relied on speed and surprise. And secrecy. Now it looked like we had a team of soldiers to contend with. And they were just one climbing day behind us.

  We would have to move faster than ever.

  I forced the food down, finding some comfort in the warmth it gave me. We went back to the tent and zipped up our sleeping bags. No conversation passed between us other than a brief good night. The sight of the army guys had freaked us both out.

  I was dead tired but I lay awake for hours, thinking about how crazy this rescue mission really was. Was that military team really going to climb up after us? Would we arrive to Camp 6 to find Tashi’s brother dead? A headache began to pulse in the back of my skull.

  The wind started to howl at high altitude. Somewhere above us Everest’s famous plume was beginning to run. The almost musical tone of it lulled me into an uneasy sleep.

  Tashi was awake at dawn.

  ‘Wake up!’ she urged. She shook my shoulder until I emerged, reluctantly, from the cosy embrace of my sleeping bag.

  Tashi packed snow and ice into the cooking pot. The tent was soon filled with the reassuring roar of the propane cooker. We added instant porridge to the cups, along with several spoons of sugar and a handful of raisins. The oats were warm and filling, but I felt a dull pain in my throat every time I swallowed and my head was still throbbing like crazy.

  ‘Think I need to take a couple of these,’ I told Tashi.

  I popped two paracetamols from their pack.

  ‘It’s the altitude,’ she told me.

  I swallowed the painkillers and we dressed in our mountain gear. Out on the col, a few Sherpas had just arrived from Camp 5. They must have climbed down in the night.

  They greeted us with friendly calls as they trekked past to the top of the fixed ropes. Their loads were massive. Each of them had a rucksack twice the size of ours. One turned back.

  ‘You guys know the mountain is closed, right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sure,’ Tashi replied.

  ‘Just checking.’

  He gave us a curious look, then turned and joined his friends.

  ‘Let’s pack up the tent and go,’ Tashi said. ‘The clock is ticking every moment.’

  We hurriedly packed up the sleeping bags and cooking gear. Twenty minutes later, the tent securely folded away in our rucksacks, we stepped over a series of narrow crevasses which marked the edge of the col and made it to the first of the fixed ropes on the ridge.

  Step. Slide the jumar clamp up the rope. Kick in. Repeat. Rest. Breathe. Suck the painfully thin air into hungry lungs. Repeat. Step. Slide the jumar clamp up the rope. Kick in. Repeat.

  We stopped frequently, drawing in air and looking nervously back towards the col. Were the military team coming up? We desperately needed to know, but for the first couple of hours we simply couldn’t tell; the angle of the ridge blocked the view. As we gained height, however, the perspective opened up.

  ‘Oh no!’ Tashi was the first to see them.

  The mystery team was halfway to the col.

  ‘They must have left really early,’ Tashi said heavily. ‘And they’re moving fast.’

  I nodded, trying to make a mental calculation of how many hours behind us they were.

  Six? Eight? It was feeling too close for comfort.

  ‘This is such a disaster,’ Tashi said despondently. ‘Even if we get up to the Camp 6 zone bef
ore they catch us, they’ll get us on the way down.’

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ I urged her. ‘We just keep going as fast as we can and that’s it.’

  Tashi rummaged in the side pocket of her pack, pulling out a packet of dried apricots. The fruit was frozen solid but it hardly seemed to matter, the sweet tang of it on the tongue was enough to restore our spirits and give a vital spike of energy.

  We clipped back on to the line and resumed the climb. I felt my pulse rate quickly rise as my body warmed to the activity.

  For a while everything felt OK. Then the headache kicked in harder and I started to feel sick.

  ‘You alright?’ Tashi asked.

  I bent over my ice axe. My legs were feeling as heavy as lead.

  ‘Sure … ’

  I didn’t want to tell her how bad I was feeling.

  The weather was changing too; the crystal blue skies of early morning had given way to ugly grey clouds. The sun had vanished in a sulk and a boisterous wind was playing along the ridgeline.

  An hour went past. Tashi tapped my arm.

  ‘Someone’s lost a pack,’ she said. ‘Up ahead.’

  I saw a tatty mess of colour on the slope.

  ‘Maybe they dropped it,’ I suggested.

  We got closer. Something white was gleaming from the midst of the faded reds and yellows. I began to think it might not be a lost pack at all.

  ‘Oh!’ Tashi exclaimed. ‘It’s a body.’

  My mind took a second or two to process her comment. Not until I was standing right over the corpse could I really see it for what it was. A fallen climber. His bones picked clean by ravens. The bleached white object we had seen was the man’s skull.

  The body really was like something out of a sick horror film. The mouth was gaping wide in a perpetual scream. The teeth were shattered. One arm was thrown up in a gesture of seeming despair. Or was it an attempt to summon help? The right leg was bent back beneath the body. The left leg, most disturbingly, seemed to be missing.

  I felt bile rising in my throat. My head swam as a dizzy wave of horror engulfed me. What had happened to the soft tissues? The flesh? Had the ravens stripped these bones? Or had the body simply rotted away?

  I retched up the apricots.

  ‘Your lips are blue,’ Tashi said. She put her arm around me.

  ‘Yeah? Just a bit hypoxic … I guess.’

  Tashi muttered a prayer.

  We turned away from the skeleton, aware that something had changed. The dead climber had seemed like a gatekeeper, I thought. A guardian of the Death Zone, the highest reaches of the mountain where the combined effects of altitude and freezing wind become so extreme.

  We struggled up the next fixed rope. I began to see stars in front of my vision.

  ‘Take a drink,’ Tashi said. ‘I think you’re getting dehydrated.’

  I took a swig of liquid from my bottle, the super-chilled orange soothing the pain in my throat.

  ‘We’re only halfway up the ridge,’ Tashi remarked.

  I looked up, my heart sinking as I realised she was right. There was still a punishing distance to go before we reached the rocky ground at the top end of the snow slope. Many, many rope lengths stretching up as far as the eye could see.

  ‘How about the soldiers?’ I asked.

  We stared down at the ice cliff of the col. The army team were eating up the challenge, coming up to the last third of the climb.

  ‘Looking as strong as ever,’ Tashi said glumly.

  A coughing fit overcame me. My lungs felt raw and overstressed. The lack of oxygen was really beginning to strike. I had always known I was pushing it with the acclimatisation. I coughed again, my ribs aching with the spasms. Now I was getting really scared. High-altitude sickness could be a killer.

  I unclipped my waist strap and shrugged off the rucksack, grateful to be free of the weight. The straps had been biting into my flesh for many hours.

  I crashed down on to my side, feeling like I would black out at any moment.

  ‘How much longer until we can pitch the tent? Maybe an hour?’ I mumbled.

  Tashi gave me a sympathetic look. ‘Looks more like two hours to me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I shivered. Resting for a few minutes had allowed the sweat on my back to congeal into chilling crystals of ice. I flexed my toes in my boots, felt them horribly cold and stiff. Frostbite could strike at any moment, I knew. Being able to spot the first sign of freezing fingers and toes was a crucial part of staying alive.

  ‘I’m not sure I can keep going,’ I said. ‘I’m just not acclimatised enough.’

  Tashi suddenly became animated. She took off her rucksack and clipped it to the line.

  ‘That oxygen stash is not far above us,’ she said. ‘I’ll fetch a bottle and we’ll see if that helps.’

  ‘OK,’ I nodded. ‘Great idea.’

  She flashed me a quick smile and stepped up the slope. Her climb rate was fast compared to mine and she was soon high above me and going strong.

  I stared out at the mountain view for a while then remembered my magical talisman, the shrine bell in my pocket. I took the tiny bell out, thinking of my Nepalese friend Kami as I did so. This had been his lucky charm. His spiritual inspiration to punch through the pain barriers on his own Everest climb the previous year. Now I’d hit my own pain barrier. Could the shrine bell help me?

  I turned the little object in my gloved hands, sensing the familiar flow of strange spiritual power I felt every time I held it. Did this gift really have magic qualities? Kami’s girlfriend Shreeya had certainly thought so.

  ‘It must go to the summit,’ she had told me. ‘That is where it belongs.’

  I fell into a hazy kind of daydream, sitting there at seven and a half thousand metres, thinking of how Kami had been paralysed in an avalanche, how his spirit had never been crushed. How he could still smile and joke, the joy of life still beating inside him as strong as ever.

  I felt better just thinking of him.

  Tashi arrived soon after, slumping down on to the ice next to me with a sigh of relief. I helped to free her from her load, and the two of us sat, side by side, staring at the jagged peaks clustered to the south. Then our eyes fell, inevitably, to the col. Still the soldiers came up the lines. Like robots. Never slowing. Just a handful of rope lengths from the lip of the ridge.

  ‘OK,’ Tashi said. She pulled an oxygen cylinder and mask from her pack. ‘Let’s get you sorted out.’

  We screwed the air line on to the regulator valve. Air hissed as it zipped along the tube. I pressed the mask against my face and Tashi clipped the strap at the back of my head.

  ‘Wow!’ I grinned.

  The O2 had a powerful effect. I could feel the cool oxygen entering my lungs, altering the chemistry of my body with immediate benefits.

  ‘The nausea … ’ I said in wonder. ‘I can feel it getting better already… ’

  Tashi grinned with pleasure. Her mad dash up the ridge had been a brilliant idea.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I hugged her close, the oxygen mask banging awkwardly against her cheek so we both laughed.

  I picked up Tashi’s rucksack and helped her into it. Then she returned the favour, the dead weight sending hot daggers of pain into my already blistered shoulders.

  Tashi led the way.

  The oxygen helped me to pick up my work rate, giving my weary legs a bit more power. I still felt stiff though, and seriously tired. Tashi just kept on going, never complaining at all, her rasping breaths coming in rhythmic bursts as she muttered a Tibetan mantra to keep her spirits up.

  My lungs felt better after a while. And the coughing eased off.

  One hour passed. Four or five rope lengths ticked off. I felt optimistic I could make it to the camp zone but the thing about the soldiers played constantly on my mind. It
was the feeling of being hunted. We were prey. If they caught us what would happen?

  Twenty steps. Rest. Twenty steps. Rest. I looked at the grey mass of dangerous-looking clouds that had arrived with the afternoon. Distant rolls of thunder were warning of greater turbulence to come.

  By 5.30 p.m. even with the extra oxygen every step was feeling like a test, run by some sadistic examiner. The muscles in my chest throbbed with the effort of sucking in air.

  I stopped, staring up at the North Face, towering imperiously above us. The sheer size of it, and its obvious complexity, sent me into a black depression. As for Camp 6, a further thousand metres above our position, there was no visible clue that it had ever even existed. It really did look like the whole thing had been swept away.

  I pulled my fleece hat tight against my ears, shucked up the hood of my wind jacket to protect my neck.

  We made it to the Camp 5 zone with just half an hour of daylight remaining.

  ‘You think we can jam the tent into this space?’ I asked Tashi. We were standing above a scrap of flat terrain that looked no bigger than a tea towel.

  ‘Maybe,’ Tashi said.

  It really was an awful place to camp but there seemed to be no other choice.

  We unpacked the tent and erected it on the tiny platform despite the fact we couldn’t get a single tent peg into the rocky surface. I got Tashi to squirm inside to stop the dome blowing away as I roamed around the slopes looking for loose rocks.

  Once we were both inside we lit the stove, warming our fingers and toes back to life as the gas and our body heat slowly raised the temperature almost to freezing point.

  We cooked pasta and sauce and drank about a litre of tea each.

  Just before going to sleep I went out to fill the bag with more ice. Standing by our tent I stared down at the col and saw that the army team were pitching their camp there.

  ‘They made it to the col,’ I told Tashi. ‘More’s the pity.’

  ‘You don’t think they could do a double day tomorrow do you?’ Tashi wondered. ‘They’d catch us as we arrive at Camp 6 if they can.’

  I didn’t reply. Nothing felt very certain any more.