Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  Without the anchoring of the tent it would be impossible to tell where he was, impossible to tell in what direction safety lay. Maybe Wilson hadn’t chosen to sit there and die after all. Maybe he couldn’t find his tent only a hundred feet away, through the snow and his own blinding headache. Sandy squinted in the direction he thought George and the others had taken the previous day. The snow had long erased all trace of them.

  George hadn’t even had the decency to tell him himself when they’d made the decision. It was Somervell who had climbed into the tent, pulling in a wedge of frigid air with him. Feeling ill, Sandy had bedded down right after dinner, not wanting to move or even think. Somes pulled out his stethoscope and made him sit up. He swallowed against the rising bile. It had to be bile, he hadn’t been able to eat much at dinner.

  “God. Not now. Please, Somes.”

  “It’s no use if I just check everyone when they’re feeling good, Sandy. But you do look seedy.”

  The stethoscope was cold and his heart contracted against the bite of it.

  He tried to slow his breathing. His heart. Everything came in thin, shallow gasps. Looking at his watch, Somes murmured something Sandy couldn’t make out.

  “Am I not doing well?”

  “No, Sandy, you’re doing fine. All of us feel terrible.” He could hear the truth of the statement in Somervell’s voice: it was raw, hoarse, hard to hear over the continual white noise of the mountain. “Can you do these for me?” Somes handed him a sheet of maths problems. He’d seen them before. Where had he seen them before? Somewhere warm, but he’d been out of breath then too. Out of breath, but feeling strong, clear headed.

  Of course. In Bombay, in Darjeeling, and on the trek too; he’d found the problems easy then, but here at ABC the numbers swam on the page. He narrowed his eyes to focus on them, willing them to stay still, and slowly worked them out. He had the sense they were the same problems from before, but he couldn’t remember the answers he had come up with so easily then. When he completed the test, he handed the sheet to Somervell, who wrote Sandy’s name and the camp number on it, then folded it away without checking it. Then he turned back to Sandy.

  “We’re going tomorrow,” Somes said.

  A surge of adrenaline cut through his thrumming head, his lethargy, and fluttered in his stomach. “When? Who?”

  “Two teams. Teddy and George,” Somes said. “And me with Odell.”

  He waited for Somervell to say his name, to tell him who he’d be climbing with. It took a minute before he realized Somes wasn’t going to say anything more. “Is it because of the tests? Did I do something wrong?”

  “We need you to run support,” Somervell said, avoiding the question. “Come up a day or two behind us. Make sure that Camp Four, on the Col, is ready for us when we come down. Or that you’re ready to push up if something goes wrong. If things get dicey.” Somes paused a moment and then added, as if in consolation, “It’s an important role, Sandy.” Somes coughed into his palm, winced, then looked into his hand before wiping it on his pants.

  He didn’t want to be consoled. What had been the point of all this if he wasn’t even going to get a shot at the summit? Now there would be only the painful monotony of the mountain. Melt snow. Steep tea. Fill canteens. Climb out through the waves of nausea into the snow to relieve himself and check on the others. None of it mattered. They were going on without him. “I should be going. I’m as strong as the rest of you.”

  “We’ll be taking Virgil and Lopsang. You’ll follow with whoever else you can rouse. There should be at least two porters that are in good enough shape to go higher. I’ll check them tonight. Let you know who to count on. Probably not that fellow Lapkha, he was flagging last trip up. He and everyone else should go back to Base Camp with Shebbeare. Hazard will tell them what to do from there. But we need to get people down if we can. We’ve been up here too long. That storm didn’t do us any favours. If this doesn’t work –”

  Somervell coughed and grimaced some more, took a long, slow sip from his canteen and then crawled into his sleeping bag, rolling onto his side to ease his cough. “If this attempt doesn’t work, we’ll have to go back down. All of us. We can’t stay at this altitude much longer. We’re falling apart.”

  That had been two days ago. Now it was just him and Shebbeare and a half-dozen porters. It wouldn’t be easy to rouse the porters and get them moving. Not in this blowing snow. If he could crawl back into his own sleeping bag and lie there, he would. But he had to go up. And Shebbeare had to go down. There weren’t enough supplies left at Camp III for them all to stay. And most of what remained he’d have to take with him to restock Camp IV for the climbers’ return. There was no margin for error. He had to get everyone moving.

  When Sandy climbed into the tent, Shebbeare was staring at the porter. What was his name? That should be one of Somervell’s bloody tests: name the porters at altitude. He was the smallest man on the team, but strong. He’d pushed up to the high camps as often as any of the others had. More than Sandy had.

  Lapkha. Lapkha Sherpa. That was it.

  “I don’t know what to do.” Shebbeare’s voice was thin, distant. He had to force himself to focus on Shebbeare’s words, leaning in closer to hear what he was saying. “I don’t know,” Shebbeare gasped, forcing dry air over drier vocal cords. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.” Shebbeare hadn’t taken his eyes off Lapkha, and for the first time Sandy turned to him too. Lapkha’s lips smacked against each other, dried white spittle gathering in the cracked skin. His tongue lolled out to lick them, thick and slow. But it was his eyes that were terrible.

  Lapkha’s eyes bulged like balloons out past his browbone, forcing his lids open. When he tried to blink, his eyelids only closed partway. He looked possessed.

  “Jesus.” Sandy recoiled, closing his own eyes and then opening them again. Lapkha’s eyes continued to bulge at him. “What do we do?” He struggled to sound calm. Tried to feel it in his roiling stomach.

  Lapkha muttered something, his voice a low, gurgled sound in his throat. Sandy reached out and touched Lapkha’s hand, hushing him, trying to calm him as he might a trapped animal. Lapkha stared past him, straining to blink, to pull his eyes back into his head.

  Shebbeare said nothing and Sandy wanted to shake him. Why wasn’t he helping? As he tried to consider their options there was a sharp ice pick of pain in his own head. He winced against it and remembered George telling him about the young porter. Virgil’s nephew, was it? About how his brain had haemorrhaged, bleeding out into his skull. “It’s the pressure, maybe,” Sandy said. Lapkha’s brain was probably swelling, pressing out against his skull, out into the thin air of the mountain. “I don’t know. It’s just a guess.” Getting the porter down, George had said, was what had saved his life. “Shebbeare, you’ll have to get him down to Base Camp.”

  “Me?”

  “You all have to go down. Those were the orders.”

  Beside them Lapkha lashed out, his hands flew around his head, fighting something off. Shebbeare pulled back farther from him.

  But how to get Lapkha down. He couldn’t walk, let alone climb. “I’ll find something to use to get him down.” He grabbed Shebbeare, shook him by the arm. “You stay here.”

  “No. Maybe you should,” Shebbeare began, but Sandy was already out of the tent, moving through the blurred white snow. He turned in place, squinting through the flurries. It was dying off. Maybe. He needed something to get Lapkha down. He couldn’t let the man die here.

  “Be calm.” He could hear his father’s voice. “In an accident, always be calm.” His father had been showing him his tools, his workshop. Sandy turned the wood plane in his hand. It didn’t look dangerous, but his father pointed at the sharp metal blade. “That’ll cut your finger right off,” his father said. “And if that ever happens, be calm. Be calm and think. You’re a smart lad. Stop the blood. Elevate it. It’s all science. You’ll work it out.”

  He hadn’t cut his hand on his father�
�s plane, hadn’t lost a finger or thumb. But there’d been other accidents. Like the time he’d tried to climb the wire fence near school. He’d been trying to catch up to Dick, of course. The wire had come untwisted at the top of the fence and his hand went down on it, the wire piercing through the base of his palm and back out just below his index finger. He’d stood, the toes of his shoes hooked into the fence, keeping his weight off his hand, and watched the well and drip of blood. There’d been no panic, just a gentle whoosh in his ears, in his stomach. His heart slowed and he was calm. All he had to do was work out how to get his hand off the fence. If he put any weight on it his hand would rip open. The only way was to move his hand up, slowly, off the wire. He’d lifted his arm straight up and then fallen back off the fence, pulled off his jumper, and tied the sleeves tight around his forearm, careful of the blood, before he made for home. His mother had been livid. “That’s my lad,” his father said. “A calm head’s worth more than an old jumper.”

  He had to work it out that way now. He couldn’t wait for Somervell to come back and examine the porter. The only thing that might work was to get the man down. It was clear that the altitude was affecting them all. “Be calm,” he repeated out loud. He murmured it over and over, until: canvas. They could use the canvas from one of the tents to move the porter. If they wrapped him in canvas and rope they could lower him down the mountain. It would work.

  He found an unused tent, half-buried in the snow, and retrieved some lengths of rope he had left over from the ladder he’d made. He urged himself to hurry but would find himself sitting still and stunned and wondering how long he’d been like that. Impossible to tell the time without the sun. It didn’t occur to him to look at his watch.

  On the way back to Shebbeare, Sandy stopped at the other tents. He couldn’t remember the Tibetan word for hurry. Why couldn’t he remember it? He spoke to them loudly.

  “Hurry. You go down. Now. Hurry.”

  From where they were slumped in their tent, the porters glared at him. Compared to Lapkha they all appeared fresh and capable. Good. They’d have to help Shebbeare transport Lapkha. “Down,” he said, pointing at the ground. They nodded, but didn’t move. Shebbeare would have to come speak to them.

  “I need you to get the other porters going,” Sandy said as he dropped the rolled canvas outside and climbed into the tent. Lapkha seemed to have calmed. The man was lying on his back. Good. It would make it easier to move him.

  “Too late,” Shebbeare said.

  “No. We just have to haul him out. We’ll wrap him up in canvas and then you can pull him or lower him down. Whatever it takes. Now.” His voice was still calm, but the feeling had left him.

  “It’s too late,” Shebbeare said again. When Sandy looked at Lapkha, his balloon eyes were still open and bulging. The whites red with blood.

  The canvas and rope came in useful after all. After Shebbeare and the other porters had started to descend, the remaining two, Tsutrum and Nawang, watched him wrap Lapkha in the canvas. They wouldn’t touch the porter’s body at first, but as soon as it was covered they helped Sandy lower the corpse into a nearby crevasse.

  The cold weight of Lapkha’s body had surprised him. As did how difficult it was to move him. It. Just days ago Lapkha had been carrying loads and slowing them down. Now he was gone.

  Sandy wished he could have sent Tsutrum and Nawang down to safety with Shebbeare. They’d been quiet since they moved Lapkha’s body, murmuring to each other while looking sidelong at him. Somes should have seen the man was sick. Should have done something before he’d headed up. What if the same thing happened to one of them? If Somes had been here, Lapkha might still be alive.

  Maybe they were right to blame him.

  He made the porters weak tea and soup, poured it into enamel bowls and made motions for them to eat. Once they were done they’d have to head up the Col. If he could go on by himself he would. But he had his instructions. He’d take good care of them, make sure they were all right. He motioned to his mouth again as he handed Tsutrum the bowl. Tsutrum nodded but looked away as he ate.

  THERE WAS A scrape of daylight left when the four of them arrived at what would be Camp VI, only fourteen hundred vertical feet up from Camp V. George collapsed in the snow, turned his back to the weight of the wind, and lowered his head into the hollow space between his legs and chest, searching for a still spot to breathe in. His body thrummed with exhaustion.

  They’d establish their last camp here, then tomorrow, he and Teddy would push for the summit. George searched for the towering peak of it, but couldn’t see it for the snow that was screaming skywards off the ridge above them, a curling wall of it, like the blown silk of Ruth’s wedding gown. He stared, hoping for a glimpse, until Teddy knocked him on the arm, held out his ice axe to him, and pointed with gloved hands at the snow.

  They had to get the tent up. Quickly. This high up the temperature plummeted to unbearable lows with the sun. The altitude, the lack of oxygen amplified the cold.

  He bent over the tight, dry snow, swung his axe into it. One knock per breath. The snow came apart in great blocks that they kicked and pushed down the slope. As the blocks fell they shattered into thousands of pieces, each grabbed by the wind and lifted up to join the curtain of snow falling above them.

  They carved out a narrow platform that was just wide enough for their tent. By the time he urged Virgil into the flapping canvas to ground the tent, the sky was a deepening purple. Only the light reflecting off the white snow illuminated them. The wind was constant, a roaring white noise, more inside his head than outside it. He thought he might be going mad. “Lie down,” he yelled over the pain in his throat and Virgil climbed into the roiling tent, threw his weight onto it. As if in retaliation, the wind lifted the entire tent, coolie and all, high into the air before slamming it back against the mountain. There was a yell from Virgil that cut through the wind in his ears. He hoped Virgil was just scared and not hurt.

  George and Teddy and Lopsang scrambled to pull out the guy lines from the tent, then loop and tie them around nearby boulders. The ropes, coated with ice, were whipping and dangerous. When one of them knocked across his frozen hand, George cursed. His hand felt as if it might shatter. In the gathering night they tied off the first tent. They should have erected a second, but it was too dark and they were exhausted. He leaned over the buckling canvas, which still tossed itself into the air and looked as if it might well tumble down the slope.

  “Virgil, lift.”

  Virgil put in the first pole, giving the tent some shape, and then the second. George waved Teddy and Lopsang in, handed them their snow-covered packs, then went in behind them. The tent settled somewhat with their cumulative weight. Though the sides of the tent continued to snap and ruffle, it held close to the ground, save for the occasional slight tossing that reminded George of being at sea.

  “The other one?” Virgil asked after a long while.

  “No.” George could barely talk for the dry scraping in his throat, and when he coughed or breathed deeply, his muscles squeezed and spasmed around his ribs in clenched pains. He pressed his hand to his side, coughed again into his other hand. No blood. That was something, at least.

  “We all?” Virgil said, pointing at the ground. George nodded. They would all sleep in the one tent. They’d make do. It might actually help to keep them warm. Virgil grimaced, translated the plan to Lopsang.

  He imagined the sound of their strained breathing under the wind, the snapping tent. It would be a bad night. They sat in the pitch of the tent, hunched, each of them holding on to his pack as if it were a life vest, a buoy, holding them up. He should find a torch, a lamp, a cooker. They needed food and water. And it would take more than an hour to melt enough snow for each of them. He’d finished what had been in his canteen long ago. It felt like forever.

  He couldn’t bring himself to move. Couldn’t will it. But couldn’t seem to will Teddy to do so either.

  Under the sound of the abating wind
was a low moan. It came from Virgil.

  Without his torch he couldn’t see what was wrong with the porter and didn’t want to ask. Maybe it was all in his head. He listened to the wounded sound and wondered if Teddy could hear it. Wondered if Teddy cared.

  He had to do something. Get snow melting, get sleeping rolls unpacked. The thin shelter of the tent alone wouldn’t be enough to keep them alive overnight. Not here.

  He fumbled at his pack to find the cooker.

  There was no sleep. Not even the hint of it flirting at the edges of his consciousness. Just the mountain all over him, the press of the summit above, the rough of frozen, uneven snow below him, poking into his kidneys.

  He tried not to move. His skin ached, his joints. Even the marrow in his bones hurt. Beside him Teddy hacked and tossed, not sleeping either. The wind crashed over him like waves and he thought about being at the seashore with Ruth. Their honeymoon. Her body beside him. He ran his fingers along the curve of her waist, her hip, his hand hovering just above her skin, the hair standing straight up in goose pimples, the heat radiating damply off her.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he told her. “Telling that story at dinner. It was just for fun.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Clearly it does.” She was right, though, he shouldn’t have told it. He’d loved their honeymoon, in fact, loved that for seven days they had only each other for company. That it was just the two of them in a tent together. If they’d gone to the Alps, or back to Venice, they couldn’t have just lain together for days on end, talking silly talk about children’s names and the colour of linens. But he couldn’t have said that in front of Virginia and James. They’d have thought him soft or, worse, sentimental. He knew James would declare there was nothing more dreadfully boring in the world than curling up in a tent and reading together. They wouldn’t have understood what was so marvellous about Ruth, wouldn’t have seen her goodness. He only wanted them to admire her as he did.