Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  “Jesus, George,” Somes said. “Go outside and run around the tents.”

  “Don’t forget your crampons, though,” Teddy added.

  “Yeah, you might fall down the glacier.”

  “Tumble miles to your death.”

  “We should only be so lucky.”

  They were all laughing now, rocking back and forth, cabin fevered and giddy. Odell squeezed tears from his eyes. Sandy’s shoulders shook until the sound finally pushed out of him in gasps. George tossed someone’s blue jumper at Sandy. It fell across his face.

  “Bugger off,” George said, smiling, as he climbed out of the tent.

  Outside, the camp glowed in the late afternoon light. The sun had sunk below the rim of the peaks to the west of the camp, and the sky was a heavy dark blue, the stars already piercing through, illuminating the sharp angles of Lhotse’s nearby peak with tiny pinpoints of light. Everything was blue – the dusk-white of the snowfields, the indigo-bruised shadows of the rock face. Even the crumbling Yellow Band above him was blue in the twilight.

  He shivered, which surprised him; he’d thought he was past shivering. Still, it was refreshing to be out of the tent, to have a few moments alone.

  The storm had reshaped the camp, the landscape around it. There were new drifts and banks against the tents, scooped out gullies and channels. The snow still swirled in the occasional eddy, skittered loose under his feet. He kicked into it and walked across the camp, his hobnails scratching at the icy crust hidden beneath the layer of new snow.

  He stretched as he walked, thrusting his hands above his head, arching and flexing the long muscles in his back. He was creaky. His body was warring against him, not yet dying, but it would be soon. Somervell believed that past a certain height there’d be no more acclimatization, that they’d just start dying from lack of oxygen. He hoped Somes was wrong, but he was probably right. Maybe the oxygen would help some. Maybe it would make the difference.

  The wind had scrubbed clean portions of the old camp that had been buried when they’d arrived. Remnants of the previous expedition were now exposed – perfectly preserved carcasses of half-empty oxygen tanks, sloughed-off canvas skins of abandoned tents, a cache of bully beef tins, frozen solid, the filthy streak of shit and piss along the western edge of the old camp.

  Two years ago he’d kicked out that tent pole and the canvas had slumped across the snow. He would have stayed if he could. Even after the avalanche. Everyone else was done – Teddy, Somes. But the mountain had been mocking him. He hadn’t wanted to go home.

  He’d stood here, right here, after the avalanche. He could still hear it in his ears, the roaring rush of it. He remembered it vividly and felt, even now, the ground shift a little under him. They’d been moving well – himself, Somervell, Virgil, and the line of coolies behind – not that far above camp when the snow above them slipped and the whole side of the mountain crumpled and ripped apart as it gathered speed. There was a low rumble, louder than the incessant wind, than the chug of a steam train. And then it was on him. There was a brutal pull at his waist and he was off his feet, bullied by the wall of snow. He paddled, stroked, pulled as though swimming in a riptide. He was drowning.

  Below them was the drop off the Col. Almost three hundred feet straight down.

  The cold, the snow was all over him, filling his mouth, his ears. He could no longer hear the rumble of the falling snow, though he felt it in his chest, his organs. The snow was in every crease, finding its ways through zippers and seams; it was like a fist around his chest, what little air he had in his lungs was being squeezed out. For a moment he was back in France, earth tumbling around him, collapsing, blacking out the world. But he could taste the mountain on his tongue where the snow was forcing itself inside him.

  He swam against the snow, turned, was moving through the current of it. His body fought for the surface. The snow around him ground to a halt; his body was pinned, but loosely. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t open his eyes.

  He tried to churn his arms in the snow, which gave a bit. He gasped, tried not to inhale snow. Searched for air.

  He rocked his head back and forth, making a small space to breathe, to open his eyes. He gasped into the hollow, as if surfacing. Even the mountain’s thin air was a relief. It wasn’t the dark he expected – it was light, a wet blue, lighter above than below. He was close to the surface.

  He struggled against the wet cold where the snow had melted against his waning body heat. His skin, his fingers were already numbing. He pressed his arms down and arched for air. First his head, then his torso breached the surface as he sputtered snow and water from his lips and gulped at the air. He could feel the weight of the snow around him, now that he was almost free of it, could feel it clinging, sucking at him.

  When he’d pulled himself free, he lay there, feeling the burn of cold and sun on him. His bare, cold hand, flung on the snow, looked dead. He’d lost his goggles, his hat. The light hurt. Then the tug at his waist. There were others on the rope. It disappeared into the snow beneath him. He kicked free and started to dig.

  He dug out the rope until he found Somervell, a foot below the surface of the snow, breathing, but barely. His lips already discoloured. But he was unhurt. He pulled the other climber free. They were yards from the precipice of the Col. And for a moment they’d been relieved. They were alive. Disaster diverted, adrenaline rushed to his limbs, warming him.

  The mountain had been preternaturally quiet just then. The rumble of the avalanche had faded. There was no sound. Just their rough breathing. Even the wind had gone quiet.

  Then they’d heard the voices – muffled yelling, like his children playing in the back garden, Clare and Berry calling to him. He turned towards them.

  And the sounds resolved themselves. Into panicked yells, sharp in his ears. There had been others, on another rope, carrying supplies. He staggered to his feet.

  At the edge of the cliff there were two blurs of panicked movement, dark smudges on the horizon of snow. They gestured down, over the Col to the base of the cliff.

  He stumbled towards them over the fresh, tossed snow. With no crust to hold him up, he floundered and stumbled.

  The men on the rope had gone over. He knew it before he reached the lip of the precipice. He waded towards Virgil. Somervell followed slowly behind him.

  Automatically he pulled Virgil and the other coolie, Tranang, back from the edge. They were still in danger and he didn’t want them to fall too. He stepped to the edge, feeling for it to give, and looked down.

  At the bottom was nothing but tumbled blocks of snow and ice, troubled but silent. Seven bodies down there and not an Englishman among them. “One of us should have been down there,” he’d told Somervell.

  “This was a mistake,” Somes said, shaking his head.

  Even then he was being set up to take the blame. In that first moment Somervell was already working out his own innocence.

  Then Teddy had ended it. “We’re going home. Now.”

  “We can’t. Not yet. I need to have one more shot at it, Teddy. Please. One more. We have to. I have to.”

  “It’s the monsoon.” Teddy was apologetic, but firm. “It’s pushing in the snow and storms. We’ve missed our window. Seven men are dead, George. I shouldn’t have let you go today. I’m certainly not letting you go tomorrow.”

  At least Teddy had tried to shoulder some of the blame.

  Time here was meaningless. Days bled into one another, were differentiated only by certainties of weather, a specific conversation, an accident or death. He couldn’t remember the order of events or days. The altitude, the repetitiveness, the emphasis on pure physical survival dulled his memory to a shiny reflective surface. There was no perspective. No means of measurement, no tick of a clock.

  He tried to keep track of details in his journal – clean notes of times, events, meals that were eaten. All of it in an unrecognizable shorthand, a map of occurrences so that someday he might make sense of it, create a na
rrative with an acceptable ending.

  Nearby there was another camp. Another body. He’d find it again, maybe take Sandy. That death wasn’t his fault.

  Glancing around, he made a mental note to have someone scavenge the camp’s remains in the morning, see if there was anything worth salvaging. He knew he’d forget otherwise.

  He hoped he’d remember tomorrow. That was all he could bring himself to hope for.

  “I UNDERSTAND HOW you feel,” Sandy said. “I’ve never been much good at keeping still, either.” His breath puffed in the dark. His throat hurt. He and George had been talking in a Morse code of short sentences, long pauses. “My mother once tied me to my chair at supper. She’d always threatened to.” He paused longer than he meant to. It hurt to think of his mother. He hadn’t had a letter from her since he’d left. “If you go,” she’d said, “I won’t forgive you. But I’ll pray for you.” He hadn’t really believed her. “I deserved it,” he said to George now.

  He tried to lighten his tone. Odell might still be awake in the tent. Odell had met his mum, had tried to convince her that his going to Everest was a good idea. He didn’t want Odell to think it hadn’t worked. “I was forever getting up and running off to do something, finish something. Me and my brilliant ideas. Always wanted to show my da’ something. Never her. Then one supper she did it. She tied me to my chair. With garden twine. It wouldn’t have held.” Thinking of her he smiled, tearing the scabs on his lips. He licked at them, which only made them sting more.

  “Are you two going to keep talking?” Odell’s voice cut the darkness in the tent.

  Somervell and Norton had retired hours ago. Only he and George had remained, curled near each other, talking in the gloom. They stopped, and silence filled the black space of the tent. After a moment George spoke. “Odell, why don’t you take Sandy’s tent? I can’t sleep anyway. Too much sitting. Being cooped up. Better Sandy and I keep each other company than keeping you awake.”

  Odell huffed loudly. In the quiet of the passed storm it was clearly aggressive. His sleeping bag rustled, snapped in the cold. He fumbled for his boots.

  “If I slide into a crevasse, George, you are dead.”

  “Maurice Wilson,” George said. “He was here before us. I found his body in ’22.” George lay next to him, head to foot, his body radiating a small heat.

  “Who was he?” Sandy asked. “A climber?”

  In a thin voice that sounded as though it came from a great distance, George explained that Wilson had been a soldier wounded at the Somme. “I was never wounded. Never,” George continued. “Why not? Everyone around me. Everyone but me. Wiped out.”

  Wilson was wounded and invalided out to a hospital in London, where he came down with tuberculosis. George’s voice was low, hoarse. It slipped through the air between them, a tenuous rope holding them to each other. Sandy felt tethered, as if he were floating just above the mountain.

  “Imagine, surviving that battle, that war, and then almost dying from some damned disease. He refused their treatment. Said he found God in the trenches. I don’t know how; most of us lost Him there. But he thought if God wanted him to go, then he’d go. And if not, then he’d survive.

  “He prayed. Meditated. He got better. He thought it was the praying. The meditating. Maybe it was. Or maybe he just recovered.”

  Sandy closed his eyes. The weight of sleep pulled at him. He was tumbling. Falling down the mountain. He jerked awake. George was still talking beside him. Had he missed something? How long had he been asleep?

  “Wilson thought he had a calling – to get people to pray, to believe. The doctors said it was battle fatigue.”

  “He had to make people believe him,” Sandy said. “In God.”

  “Exactly.” He felt George nod in the darkness. “And he thought of Everest. As close as you can get to heaven. Decided he would get to the top.”

  “But you said he wasn’t a climber.”

  “He wasn’t.” There were long pauses between George’s words, between thoughts. Sandy repeated the words to himself, puzzled them out. “He’d do it with belief. Fasting. Meditation. If he got to the top they’d have to believe him. Divine intervention. He was doing God’s work. That’s what he actually said. ‘It’s the job I’ve been given to do.’ He didn’t have anything we have. No permissions. No guide.”

  Sandy tried to picture coming here by himself. Without George, Odell, Somervell. It seemed impossible. He wondered if George had imagined it all, if he was just toying with him. Maybe the altitude was getting to him too.

  “How did he get here?” he asked.

  “Bought a Gipsy Moth,” George said. “Called it the Ever Wrest.”

  “Good name.”

  The government had tried to stop him, but somehow Wilson made it to Darjeeling and hired two Sherpas to guide him. Then he walked to the mountain, dressed as a monk, with just one tent and what they could scavenge and beg. “He made it at least as far as the North Col,” George said, “at least once.”

  Sandy whistled low, the sound thin. It had taken an army to get them to the Col.

  “His last camp wasn’t far from here. That’s where he prayed. Fasted.”

  Beside him, Sandy could feel George move as he lifted his arm and pointed into the darkness, could see the darker blur of him on the backlit canvas. George pulled his arm back into his sleeping bag. Sandy waited. He could hear George’s breath rattle in his throat, dry and ragged.

  “He just sat there,” George continued. “Cross-legged. Prayed and meditated until he died. Not a hundred feet from supplies, food. His tent.

  “He’s still out there. Frozen solid. His clothes are gone. Shredded by the wind. Torn apart. One of those great bloody birds has ripped a hole in his cheek. He’s like a marble statue. A Buddha.”

  George was quiet now.

  Sandy imagined the body tight and solid, head bent in supplication. “That’s Somervell’s divine intervention, I suppose,” he said. He wondered about being alone out there in the cold. Just him and God. “I’d like to see him.”

  “Hmmmmm.” George was drifting, barely awake. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  The next morning Sandy kicked into George’s footprints, pushing through new snow, powdery, like confectioner’s sugar. His breath was heavy already, his pulse raced, thudded at his throat where his muffler choked him. He didn’t have to stop every few feet to catch his breath anymore and there was some relief in that, some pride, but George still moved faster ahead of him. He pressed to catch up. Felt the rhythm in his head again. Climb high, sleep low. Climb high. Sleep low. Climb. High. Sleep. Low. Each word a step, a breath.

  George had woken him early, pulled him from the tent before the rest were up. There wasn’t much time for this. He would be taking Tsering down later, while George would be pushing back up the Col.

  After the storm the light was high and bright even through his goggles. The sun would be painful today. It hadn’t been up long enough yet to turn the snow basin of the Cwm into a heat-box, but it would by afternoon, and his face was already burned and torn. After the confines of the tent, though, the tight, cool air was refreshing.

  He felt his limbs loosening, warming. He was enjoying this – the sweep of mountains around them, the brilliance of the sky. The total silence after yesterday’s wind. There was only the sound of his breath. The swish of his boots through the new snow, the crunch of ice below. He thought maybe now he understood why George loved mountains. He would go to more of them, he decided. Everything seemed impossibly perfect and far away. There was just him. And George. And the mountain. He felt the confidence of early morning. They could conquer this thing. They would.

  He stopped behind George, who cast about, searching for something. Everest changed all the time, shifted constantly, the drifts and stones of it moving and swirling. He was learning to read his position from the angles of distant ridges, solid lines, like Pumori in front of them. George waved to him over his shoulder and moved down the slope.

  T
here was a splash of colour, washed out, red and blue against the grey and white of the mountain.

  Wilson’s body sat just as George had described, cross-legged and patient, facing the summit. His body and face relaxed, frozen in position. His skin marble white, bleached and burnished to porcelain refinement by the sun, the wind, the arid desert conditions of the mountain. A mummy. Wilson’s stomach had been hollowed out by the goraks, the huge, oversized ravens that floated over the lower camps, and his clothing, in tatters, flapped in the brief breaths of wind. The hands in his lap covered the groin, but Sandy could imagine the small, shrivelled organ frozen there.

  George stood watching as Sandy dropped to his knees, gasping into Wilson’s frozen face. Wilson’s eyes were open, milky, iced over.

  The boy. Wilson. Sandy hadn’t expected to see so much death. In Spitsbergen there hadn’t been any deaths.

  He reached out to touch Wilson’s placid face, his movements slow, measured. He stopped, touched the air around him instead. He didn’t want to wake him. He’d never imagined something so blatant as this, this kind of giving up, giving in, to death.

  He gazed up at George, who was staring away, at the ribbon of spindrift that stretched out from the summit. A brushstroke of white on the blue sky.

  “He looks so … calm.”

  George nodded, pointed. “His tent was just there.”

  There was a scrap of material, a stretch of green cloth maybe a hundred feet away from where they were. The storm must have uncovered it. “There was food,” George said. “Water. Some shelter.”

  “And he just sat here and died?”

  “He wrote in his diary, This will be the last effort, and I feel successful. Off again, gorgeous day.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?”