Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  “Thanks, Sandy.” Norton stepped past him, head down, plodding on. “He’s been dragging all day.”

  Sandy followed, dumped the load, and then sat the porter down on the camp chair he had vacated. Tsering was pale under his sunburned skin. Sandy stood over him. “You’re not all right,” he said too loudly, shaking his head.

  The porter nodded, pointed at his left foot. Sandy knelt down and took the cramponed boot in hand. Boot was being generous. The Sherpa’s footwear certainly wasn’t meant for climbing, trekking like this; the leather sole was thin, the upper already cracking. Tsering moaned as Sandy touched his foot. Sandy held up his palms, a calming gesture, and then moved back to the man’s foot. The crampons were tight. Maybe too tight. He unstrapped them and Tsering grimaced again. The foot was swollen, he could tell even through the leather of the boot. It was misshapen, like a rotten fruit.

  He pulled at the boot and Tsering screamed.

  “Dammit,” he cursed.

  “What is it?” Odell was over his shoulder, pulling off his gloves.

  “Frostbite?” Sandy guessed.

  “Damn.” Odell crouched down. “We’ll need to get the boot off. That’s why we don’t let them use the crampons. They don’t know how to use them properly. Now we’ve lost a porter and a pair of boots.”

  “Why didn’t someone check him?”

  “We can’t nanny them. Go find something to help.”

  By the time Sandy came back with scissors from his pack, Odell had enlisted another porter, who was crouched next to Tsering, talking to him in Tibetan.

  “I can take care of this until Somes gets back,” Sandy said. There wasn’t much to be done beyond getting the boot off and slowly warming the Sherpa’s foot. Other than that, they’d just have to wait and see.

  “Hold his foot,” Odell said, as he took the scissors. Sandy took hold of the porter’s leg, just above the ankle, and braced it for Odell as he slipped one of the blades into the soft leather of the boot. Tsering moaned and bit his lip as Odell began to cut. The anguished expression on the man’s face made Sandy nauseous.

  “If he’s in that much pain, it can’t be that bad,” Odell was saying. “If it was frozen solid he wouldn’t feel a bloody thing.”

  Sandy tried to think of what it would be like to have your feet frozen solid, or your hands, imagined the sound they might make knocked against each other. A dull thump. Dampened and slightly soft.

  Tsering’s wool sock stuck to his skin as Odell tore it from the swollen, blistered flesh. The exposed foot was white, like a fish belly. “We’ll have to warm him. Slowly.”

  “I know.”

  “Then we’ll have to get him back down as soon as we can. Someone will have to take him through the Icefall.” Odell looked up; the sun was already dropping to the high horizon. Tsering was breathing heavily through his clenched teeth. “Tomorrow, maybe. If the weather holds.”

  The sky was clear, the spindrift off the summit a white flag. There weren’t any signs of bad weather as far as he could see.

  “You don’t think it will?”

  “I don’t know. It’s so hard to tell here, but it’s awfully calm. That’s always cause for suspicion.” He returned the scissors to Sandy. “You get back to the tea. Make Tsering a beef one. I’ll get him settled. Hopefully one of the coolies can warm him up. Shouldn’t George and Somes be back soon?”

  Sandy pointed. He’d been watching the two spots moving down through the wide snow bowl of the Cwm for the past hour. George and Somes looked as if they were moving well. If they kept that pace they’d be back in another hour or so. Just as the sun was setting. He’d never have enough tea ready in time.

  “WELL, WE GOT up there,” George was saying. “Got the loads up. A couple of tents, but it took us longer than I’d have liked. There’s still too much work to do.”

  “And bloody hell,” Somes added, “the wind up there will cut you in two. It just comes screaming down the ridge. One moment you’re tucked in behind it, sheltered. The next it’s tearing you apart.”

  They were gathered in the larger of the tents, spacious enough for the five of them to sit close but not on top of each other. They’d eaten cocooned inside their sleeping bags, hats pulled over ears, fingerless gloves on their hands.

  Somervell had come in late after checking on Tsering. “You two did well with him, no damage in the cutting at all,” he said to Sandy and Odell. “He might lose a toe, but if he keeps his foot warm he should keep everything else.”

  “His crampon was too tight,” Sandy said. “He didn’t have enough circulation.”

  “How many times do we have to tell them?” Teddy cut in. “Now we’re down another man. We’re two days behind schedule because of the cache left down at Camp Two. George, you need to establish Camp Five tomorrow. That’s all there is for it.”

  “I know,” George said, slumping after the lousy night on the Col.

  “Speaking of,” Sandy began, “I have something that might be of some help. I made a ladder, for the top of the Col.”

  “A ladder?” Teddy sounded incredulous.

  “Yes. A rope ladder. One person can climb up with it, get it in place, then everyone else can climb it.”

  George nodded. “Could be a good idea, Teddy. We need to save all the time we can up there.”

  “But we’ll be down another load,” Odell said. “And we’re already down a porter.”

  “George is right,” Teddy said. “We’ll have to take extra care. Make sure we get those next loads up as quickly as we can. But we’ll give the ladder a try. We need to get the camp up. That has to be the first priority.”

  George woke with his feet numb from a small drift of snow that had gathered in the tent near them. The flap had come undone in the night and the canvas rumbled and snapped, almost tore apart as the wind ripped at the material. The roar of it was deafening, but they weren’t snowbound. Not yet. The tent was tossing too much for that. A hefty gust picked the whole thing off the ground and then dropped it hard back down to the scree. Next to him, Odell grunted. He hoped the guy wires would hold.

  George sat up, hunched under the angle of canvas. A rain of rime from his condensed breath fell on him. “Odell?” His throat hurt and he couldn’t hear his own voice for the sound of the wind, the whipping canvas, the pressure in his ears. “Odell?” He kicked at the shape in the sleeping bag, which grunted, moaned again.

  He pulled a jumper around his shoulders, tugged his leather hat down around his ears and hunched further into his sleeping bag. The wind whistled. He tightened his scarf and exhaled into it, where his breath condensed and froze again in an instant. They would be pinned down for the whole day. This was more than another one of the mountain’s almost daily skirmishes. It was really bearing down. It would mean a day’s rest, but it also meant another day’s delay. And they were already behind. Loads were still too low down on the mountain. They needed to establish the upper camps. They didn’t have much longer before the monsoon began its sweep across the continent. Two weeks, at most, and then the clear break that always proceeded the heavy snowfall. If they were lucky.

  But the idea of just staying put in his sleeping bag – not moving – was appealing. His whole body ached. Everyone could take care of themselves. If they stayed put in their tents they’d be fine. The coolies could make do. They stole food all the time anyway, even if they thought the English didn’t notice. Besides, they were used to this. The weather, if not the altitude. He thought about checking on the injured porter, but even if he dragged himself out into the snow now, Somervell would still need to see to the man. That was his responsibility. He was the doctor.

  It would be so easy. To just give in to the torpidity. To just sit here and be rocked by the snapping, rolling tent. But the delay would make his head ache, his cough worse. With every delay the summit receded just a little farther. Dammit. He couldn’t afford this.

  He roused himself and coughed again with the effort, phlegm on his scarf. The muscles that
wrapped around his ribs wrenched painfully. He fumbled into his boots, huffing with the effort, with the cold. He didn’t bother to tie them, his fingers stiff and clumsy in mismatched gloves. On the way out he kicked Odell again. Harder, maybe, than was necessary.

  ——

  “How many hands is that you’ve lost, George?” Teddy tallied numbers in the air, licking at the lead of an imaginary pencil. “You must owe me your first-born by now.”

  “Maybe if you’d quit looking over my shoulder at my cards.” George tried to sit up straighter.

  With all five of them now gathered in the largest tent, they were able to fend off the cold, taking shifts sitting near the barely closed flap. They were relatively warm, easy, lounging against one another, leaning on elbows.

  “Let’s play something else.” George put down his cards and lit a cigarette before handing his lighter on to Somervell.

  “We’ve already played whist, rummy. What else is there?” Odell sounded hoarse. They all did. It was easier to hear each other talk now that the wind had let up some after the long hours they’d spent sitting there. At one-hour intervals George fumbled from the tent into the buffeting wind and snow to check on the coolies. To get away.

  Somervell tended the small cooker in the corner. He’d coaxed it all day, methodically melting snow for tea, water to make their weak lunch of bully beef, tinned berries, and chocolate, which Sandy had hidden away in his pack.

  “Careful you don’t use all the fuel up, Somes,” Teddy warned.

  “There’s plenty.”

  “We don’t know how long we’ll be here.”

  Somes turned down the flame a little.

  They didn’t talk directly about the mountain, about the delay.

  “No point really,” Teddy said. “Not until we know how long we’ll be pinned down. We can hold out a good while yet. A good few days. We’ll make a plan when we can make a plan.”

  George drifted in and out of the conversations, in and out of half-sleep.

  Somervell talked about his family, his daughter’s upcoming wedding, his new position at the hospital in London. Teddy about heading back to the military Staff College at Quetta to welcome in the latest batch of recruits. “Don’t want them getting too lax before I get to them,” he said, laughing.

  “Tsering’s foot should be fine,” Somes said when he came back from checking on him, “but I’d really like to get him down tomorrow at the latest.”

  George lolled in the late afternoon, exhausted and bored. Through the dull silence, he stared lifelessly at nothing. Odell held a notebook in his hands, open to a sketch he had been drawing of a plant he had seen weeks ago. The lines were shaky and weak. He talked about rocks and animals, about the vast diversity of the subcontinent. He droned on about insects and flowers, about a recently translated work he’d read by Alfred Wegner, who proposed something called “continental drift” that could explain why the Yellow Band looked for all the world like deposits of seabeds. Odell might as well have been speaking to himself.

  Sandy sat silent. Like an acolyte. Still and quiet. Not how George was used to seeing the boy. He was reminded of the lamas meditating far below them at the Rongbuk Monastery, the ones who took food to the old monk in his stone cave. The anchorite who hadn’t left his dark cell since retreating into it twenty-three years ago. He had lived there since before Sandy was born. Amazing. The lama had walked into the cave as a young man and given up everything. He meditated while others sealed up the mouth of the cave and left only the smallest opening through which to pass a daily ration of rice, of water, for the anchorite to pass out his buckets of waste. George couldn’t imagine a world that narrow. Nothing but his own thoughts. No one to speak to. Or touch. Twenty-three years of silence.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes. Everest enforced this, this isolation and enclosed intimacy, both at once. They were gathered together here, separate from everyone else in the world. They were crammed together in this tent, but the roaring wind, the thin air kept them speechless for long stretches of time. He climbed into the cave of his head and sat silent in a stupor, leaned against Teddy and Sandy for warmth.

  He envied the anchorite, his choosing to be still. Choosing to stay. He wished he could make that choice.

  He wished for that kind of commitment.

  His father had always known that making George sit still was the worst punishment he could inflict.

  “Copy these out. Neatly.” His father believed in medieval punishment. He handed George a draft of his Sunday sermon to be copied out: eight pages, each covered in his father’s tight writing. “And don’t just copy them out. Make sure you understand what they say. We’ll be discussing it before supper.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Trafford rarely got these punishments, but then Trafford rarely did anything that required them. Even when his brother was caught out doing something wrong, Trafford would be sent outside to tend the grounds, to pile leaves. Trafford was never made to sit still inside while the world went by without him. Maybe it was because, unlike him, his brother was happy to sit still with their father in the study anyway. Sitting still, thought George, was for old men. He’d have plenty of time for that later.

  He leaned over his father’s desk and wrote out the words. He jiggled his legs, swung his feet. His handwriting trailed off into blots and smudges. It would never do. If he took this to his father now, he would only make him start again from the beginning. He’d likely give him extra work just for good measure.

  He hated it even more for the fact that Trafford never took his side. Despite being the older brother, the first-born, George was always in his shadow.

  “He never does it to you,” he complained to Trafford.

  “I’ve had mine, George.”

  “Not hardly.”

  “You’re impetuous. He wants to calm you.”

  “You don’t even know what that means. And calming is for girls. Calming is for old men. And goody-goodies.”

  “That’s not fair, George. He only needs you to listen. Only slow down and listen to him. If you did, then maybe he wouldn’t have to be so hard on you.”

  “I do listen, I just don’t like what he has to say.”

  “You can’t just always listen to yourself. Sometimes other people do actually know what’s best.”

  He crumpled up the pages and started again. Everything would have to be perfect. He forced his legs to stay still and copied the lines.

  His father’s study was dark. Reverend Mallory hated the distractions of the outside world, and so the windows were shuttered against the churchyard, against the flowers that bloomed just outside the windows. “It keeps the mind clear,” his father said.

  It made George angry. He hated the dark room, knowing that there was a world outside that he wasn’t allowed to be a part of. How could his father not love it, want to keep it out? It made no sense to him.

  He went to the window and opened it, and stood there dazed by the light. Until his father cuffed him on the back of his head, he might as well have been out in the world.

  Now he fidgeted in the cramped space of the tent; his hip ached from sitting cross-legged, hunched on the cold tarp.

  “What do you want most?” Odell asked. “Right now.”

  It was a game they played, conjuring the luxuries of home.

  “A hot bath.”

  “Perfect, yes.”

  “My wife to draw it,” George added.

  There was laughing, in gusts, with the wind.

  “Hot tea.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “Hot soup.”

  “Hot anything.” Sandy poured insinuation into the words. They paused and the silence hung in the air, blown about by the wind. He was surprised by Sandy’s joke, enjoyed the blush that spread up Sandy’s cheek. He could imagine the heat there. The moment ended and laughter exploded again.

  “A flush toilet,” he said.

  “Clean clothes.”

  Their voices rushed together.
/>
  Somes said, “A soft bed to sleep in.”

  “Any bed to sleep in.”

  “New books to read,” from Teddy.

  “Fresh food.”

  “God, yes,” agreed Somes. “Anything green and crisp.”

  “The summit,” he said.

  That stopped them. Maybe he shouldn’t have said it. Maybe they needed a break from it. But the summit was there, behind every word and thought, even if they didn’t say it out loud.

  “The summit,” Teddy repeated quietly. He might have been the only one who heard him.

  “I should go check on Tsering.” Somervell put his hand on George’s shoulder as he passed, squeezed it a little.

  He lay back, stared at the roof of the tent and imagined the shape of the mountain leaning down on him. It was what they all wanted.

  Most days it’s sitting and waiting. That’s what he had told Ruth.

  “That’s what you said about the trenches in the war,” she said, rolling her eyes slightly. But it was indulgent, a look she gave him when he repeated a story she’d heard before, or told her something that she had originally told him, as though it was his own thought. There was a swell of something in his throat. He swallowed against it. “You tell me that so I won’t worry.”

  She was right. It was something he told her so she wouldn’t worry, but it was also true. The waiting was interminable. He used to hope for something to happen and then curse himself for the hope. But even in the sitting still there was danger. During the war. On Everest. At any moment the world could fall down on him. The dirt of exploded trenches. The tumbled avalanche of snow.

  “Does it work?”

  He’d only just returned from his second trip to Everest, in ’22. Less than a year after his first. How did she put up with it? All this picking her up and putting her down. In the past few years he’d spent more time with Everest – travelling to or from the mountain, planning for it, thinking about it – than he had with his wife. What kind of a husband did that make him?