by Dan Simmons
“Mallory’s ice chimney is gone,” Jean-Claude says and hands me the small field glasses.
A year ago, Mallory had free-climbed those last 200 feet or so up through the ice chimney to the North Col, and it was in that crack in the vertical ice face that they’d dropped Sandy Irvine’s ingenious rope and wood ladder—the same one that Bruno Sigl had lied about his men using; the same one that Reggie had admitted to climbing with Pasang, despite the ladder’s frayed appearance, a year ago this coming August. The ladder had allowed the scores of porters on last year’s huge expedition to climb to the North Col without someone constantly cutting steps for them.
Now both ice chimney and ladder are gone, folded into the churnings of the ever-shifting ice wall and glacier. The last 200 vertical feet to the ledge on the North Col where both previous expeditions have set their tents is once again a slick, solid 90-degree ice wall. But the more than 800 feet of snow and ice below that look bad as well.
“The snowfields look deep headed up to the ice wall,” I say between ragged gulps for air. We’ve been climbing this last hard bit between Camps II and III without oxygen—the last such oxygen-tank-free climbing we’ll be doing if the Deacon sticks to his plan—and I understand why the Tiger Sherpas with us have all but collapsed where they sit, lying back against their loads, too tired to remove the bulging thirty- to forty-pound packs from their backs.
J.C. removes his Crooke’s-glass goggles and squints up at the wall.
“Don’t go snow-blind on me,” I say.
He shakes his head but continues studying the 1,000-foot snow and ice wall while holding his hand above his eyes and squinting. “More fresh snow there than on the glacier,” he says at last, pulling up his goggles. “It’s probably as bad as…”
Jean-Claude stops before finishing his thought, but I can read his mind well enough by now to hear the unspoken parts of that sentence: It’s probably as bad as the snow slope conditions in 1922 when the avalanche killed seven Sherpas. We won’t know that for sure until the Deacon finally gets up here to Camp III, but I suspect the worst.
“Let us get our friends back on their feet before we lie down beside them and we all take a cold final nap,” says Jean-Claude. He turns and starts coaxing the four exhausted Sherpas to their feet, the men sagging under their loads. “It is only a few hundred more yards and downhill from here,” he says to them in English, knowing that his Sherpa Norbu and my man Babu will translate for the other two.
As we stagger out onto the moraine from the forest of huge ice pinnacles at the base of the glacier, all of us wearing crampons today— 10-point for the Sherpas and full 12-point for J.C. and me—and keeping them on even though we’re now ready to cross moraine rocks, I point to the open spot just ahead of us and about 200 feet short of the campsite and say, “This must be about where Kami Chiring confronted Bruno Sigl a year ago.”
Jean-Claude only nods, and I sense how very tired he is.
The three miles of climbing between Rongbuk Base Camp and Camp I amounts to hiking uphill on lateral moraine beds and across fields of shallow ice between hundreds of the penitente ice pillars. The three uphill miles between Camp I and Camp II are a mixture of moraine and actual glacier crossing, but the majority of the way is along the Trough among and between the ice pinnacles at the bottom of the valley. But almost all of the almost five hard miles uphill from Camp II here to Camp III at the base of the wall is on the ever more steeply rising glacier.
And the glacier is filled with hundreds of crevasses covered over with new snow.
I’ve followed J.C. for two days now as he’s threaded our route through those invisible crevasses, leaving only our footsteps in the deep snow—much of the time Jean-Claude was breaking trail through snow up to his thighs or waist—but also marking that route with wands and fixed ropes for the steeper parts.
Both days have been sunny, and through my goggles the glacier snowfields are merely a maze of sastrugi drift-ripples and corresponding blue shadows everywhere. Some of those blue shadows are shadows. Many are crevasses under their thin coverings of snow—gaps that would drop a man (or woman) hundreds of feet into the heart of the glacier. Somehow Jean-Claude always seems to know which shadow means what.
Twice between Camps II and III we’ve had to detour around crevasses too extensive to flank. The first time, yesterday, J.C. finally found a snow bridge that he judged would hold our weight. Jean-Claude crossed first while I belayed, my ice axe sunk deep in the ice, and then we rigged two strong, waist-high guide ropes across along with jumars that would carabiner onto the Sherpas’ new climbing harnesses.
The second crevasse had no snow bridges, and trying to detour around it either way just led us into endless fields of more hidden crevasses. Finally I belayed J.C.—while the Sherpas belayed me—with an extra ice axe laid across the lip of the crevasse so the rope would not cut into the snow. Jean-Claude used his new, short ice axes and 12-point crampons to descend 60 or 70 feet into the terrible crack until he reached a point where the walls were close enough together that he could take one huge step (for a short man) and slam his right ice hammer and right crampon front blades into the opposing ice wall. Then he swung his left arm and leg across a widening abyss that dropped into absolute darkness, kicked both crampon fronts into the blue ice wall, and began climbing with his short axes smacking into ice, each one higher than the other, up the opposite wall.
Once J.C. climbed out and was standing on the other side of the crevasse, I threw a coil of strong rope across and then two of the long ice axes, which he used to anchor the ropes. Then I used two axes and several long ice screws to anchor the ropes on our side of the crevasse. J.C. was wearing one of the climbing harnesses that none of us had tried on the mountain yet, and now he clipped carabiners from the harness onto one of his jumar thingies, lifted his cramponed boots up and over the rope, and just scooted hand over hand, butt first, back toward us along the doubled rope across the bottomless drop as if he were a child on a playground.
“The Sherpas can’t do that with their loads,” I gasped out when he unclipped from the ropes and moved away from the treacherous edge.
Jean-Claude shook his head. He’d been doing all the climbing and work, and I was still the one gasping and panting. “We have our fine fellows dump their loads here for now and we go back to Camp Two. Reggie should have had her team of nine porters bring up the ladders to Two by now. We lash two of the ten-foot ladders together, provide guide ropes as we did on the snow bridge, and…voilà!”
“Voilà,” I repeated with less enthusiasm. It had been a long, hard, dangerous climb up the glacier to this point, we were less than two-thirds of the almost five miles to Camp III, and now we had to head back down to Camp II to start hauling up ladders and more rope. The Sherpas with us were grinning. They’d had enough of hauling loads for one day and were more than happy to dump their heavy loads and walk unencumbered back down the safely wand-marked glacier.
The Deacon had warned us that this was how all the previous expeditions’ planning and schedules, including Mallory’s the year before, ended up in disarray, with loads being dumped up and down the entire eleven-mile Trough and glacier trek up to Camp III and the North Col. All the military planning in the world, he said, can’t overcome the inherent chaos of crevasses and sheer human exhaustion.
“We need more wands anyway,” J.C. said. It was true. There were so many crevasses that Jean-Claude’s route up the glacier twisted this way and then that, rarely a simple straightforward route along the three and a half miles or so we’d covered. We’d underestimated the number of bamboo wands we’d need to mark the route accurately enough for porters following—especially in a snowstorm.
But by early afternoon of this Tuesday, the fifth of May, we have our loads safely delivered to Camp III. Crossing 15 feet or more of the lashed-together wooden ladders above the endless crevasse drop with only the waist-high guide ropes to steady us on our crampons had been an experience I didn’t look forward to having a
gain (though I knew I would have to, many times). We’ve erected J.C.’s and my small Meade tents and Reggie’s hemispherical Big Tent in anticipation of the scheduled rush of men and matériel to come. For tonight, the four Sherpas can sleep in it.
The plan is for us to spend this one night here, waiting for Reggie’s Tiger Team Two with nine Sherpas and their loads, scheduled to arrive before noon tomorrow, and then some of us are to continue waiting—and acclimating—at Camp III until the Deacon comes up the next day, Thursday, May 7, with Tiger Team Three. Only then, according to the plan, and perhaps with even one more day of acclimation for some of us, can anyone attempt to tackle the 1,000-foot slope and wall up to the North Col. Mostly, I think to myself, because the Deacon doesn’t want anyone to climb onto the North Col until he’s present and—presumably—leading the climb.
The real headache hits me before darkness fully falls on this Tuesday night.
I’ve had a headache since we reached Base Camp far below, but suddenly it feels as if someone is driving an ice screw into my skull every thirty seconds or so. My vision flutters, dances with black dots, and begins to constrict into a tunnel. I’ve never had a migraine headache in my life—only two or three serious headaches of any sort that I remember—but this is terrible.
Not bothering to layer into my goose down or outer jackets or to pull on my gloves or overmittens, I crawl on all fours out of the flapping tent, turn away from where we’d staked out the other, larger tent, and vomit behind the closest boulder. The headache makes me continue to dry retch even after my stomach is empty. Within seconds, my hands are freezing.
Dimly, distantly, I realize three things: first, the wind has come up so strongly that the small Meade tent J.C. and I have been crouching in is flapping and banging like wash hung out to dry in a hurricane (I’d thought the noise was only in my throbbing skull); second, that along with the wind have come deeply freezing temperatures and a blizzard so intense that I can barely see the Big Tent eight feet away; third and finally, that Jean-Claude has pulled on his Finch duvet jacket and, leaning out of our tent’s opening, is screaming for me to come back inside.
“Vomit in here, Jake, for the love of Christ!” he is shouting. “We’ll toss the basin out. If you stay out there another minute you’ll be fighting frostbite for a month!”
I can barely hear him over the gale-force winds and the flapping of canvas. If my head weren’t pounding with pain and my insides weren’t busy turning themselves inside out, I would have found his invitation amusing. But rather than be amused now, I am almost too exhausted to crawl back into the wind-pounded tent we’re sharing. I can no longer see Reggie’s Big Tent with the four Sherpas huddling in it only eight or nine feet away, but I can hear its canvas fighting the wind. Between that tent and ours, it sounds like two infantry battalions exchanging fire. Then I’m back inside and J.C. is rubbing my frozen hands and helping me crawl back into my sleeping bag.
My teeth are chattering too hard for me to speak, but after a minute I get it out—“I’m d-d-d-dying and…wha…w…we’re…n…not even…o…on…the fucking mountain y-y-yet.”
Jean-Claude starts laughing. “I don’t believe you are dying, mon ami. You just have a healthy dose of this altitude sickness that I, too, have been fighting.”
I shake my head, try to speak, stutter, and finally get the word out. “Edema.”
I wouldn’t be the first man attempting Everest to die of a pulmonary or brain edema on the way up. I can imagine nothing else that would cause this level of headache pain and nausea.
J.C. sobers up at once, brings the electric torch out of his rucksack, and passes the light in front of my eyes several times.
“I think not,” he says at last. “I believe it is altitude sickness, Jake. Combined with the terrible sunburn you received in the Trough and on the glacier. But we shall get some hot soup and tea into you and see how you feel.”
Except we can’t heat any soup. The Primus stove—the larger type we’d brought up to cook for up to six people—simply will not light.
“Merde,” whispers J.C. “A few minutes more, my friend.” He begins expertly to disassemble the complex mechanism, blowing into tiny valves, checking small pieces, using the flashlight to look down narrow cylinder parts as my father used to peer down the gun barrel after cleaning his rifle.
“All pieces are present and accounted for and looking proper,” he announces at last. He reassembles the Primus as rapidly as a U.S. Marine would reassemble his rifle after fieldstripping it.
The damned thing still won’t light.
“Bad fuel?” I manage to suggest. I’ve curled up in my sleeping bag so my voice is muffled by folds of canvas and down. Even watching J.C. do such fine work with his bare hands in this terrible cold has made my head hurt worse. I desperately do not want to have to crawl outside to vomit again—not as long as I can lie absolutely still and just roll up and down these waves of headache pain and stomach cramps like a small dinghy on hurricane-driven waves.
“We used almost all the water in our bottles and canteens during the long trek up from Camp Two,” Jean-Claude says. “We can go days without warm food, but if we can’t melt snow for hot tea and drinking water, we may be in some trouble if we’re stuck here for several days.” He’s pulling on his outer layers.
“What do you mean stuck here for several days?” I manage to say through the frost-rimmed opening in my sleeping bag. “Reggie and her Tiger Team will be arriving tomorrow before noon and the Deacon and his Sherpas before nightfall. This place is going to look like Grand Central Station by this time tomorrow—we’ll have food and fuel and Primuses enough for an army.”
At that second a gust that must exceed a hundred miles per hour hits the north side of the tent, slides under the ground cloth, and is about to lift us into the air and carry us away when Jean-Claude throws himself spread-eagled across the tent floor. After half a moment when it seems undecided whether we are going to become airborne or not, we bounce once, hard, in the same spot, while the tent walls start whipping back and forth and cracking like renewed volleys of rifle fire. I guess that a couple of our carefully rigged tie-downs have ruptured or stakes have pulled out. Or perhaps the wind has just blown away the half-ton boulders we’d tied guy ropes onto for extra security.
“Perhaps they will not be arriving tomorrow after all,” Jean-Claude says loudly enough to be heard over the volley fire. “But we will need a way to melt snow for tea and drinking water before then. And we need to check on the Sherpas next door.”
It looks from the outside as if Reggie’s hemispherical Big Tent is handling the wind better than our A-shaped Whymper tent, but once we’re inside, we immediately see that the four Sherpa inmates in the Big Tent aren’t doing so well. Jean-Claude and I have brought some frozen tins of food as well as dragging the dead Primus along in the vague hope that one of the Sherpas will be able to repair it. Snow blows in behind us as we enter, and we hurry to lace the entrance back up.
The only light in the tent comes from the stubby little open-flame ghee-butter candle of the sort that Hindus use for their religious services. Ghee is clarified butter, and the stench from the tiny candle adds to my already adequate nausea. The four Sherpas look pathetic; Babu Rita, Norbu Chedi, Ang Chiri, and Lhakpa Yishay are all huddled together in a wet goose down Finch-jacket heap in the center of the tent space. Two of them have crawled half into their down sleeping bags—also damp—but the other two don’t even have their bags with them. There’s no gear or food from their loads in the tent—not even an extra blanket—and all four men, earlier thought to be some of our sure-to-be-named Tiger Sherpas, look at us the way the terminally lost look at possible rescuers.
“Where are your other two sleeping bags?” demands J.C.
“Lhakpa lightened the load in his pack at Camp Two,” says Norbu Chedi, his teeth chattering. “He left his and my bags and the extra ground cloth behind…by accident, Sahib.”
“Merde!” says Jean-Claude. “Sleeping ba
gs were the lightest things in your loads. Do you have any water?”
“No, Sahib,” says my personal Sherpa, Babu Rita. “We drank it all from our bottles during the climb to this camp. We were hoping that you had already melted us some.”
J.C. plunks the recalcitrant Primus down in the middle of our crowded little huddle and explains the problem. Babu and Norbu translate for Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay.
“Where’s the food?” asks Jean-Claude. “The soup and the food tins?”
“We could not get to the pack loads,” says Norbu. “Buried too deep in snow.”
“Nonsense,” snaps J.C. “We dumped those loads just a few yards from here only hours ago. We need to go out now and bring in the food and packs, see what there is for us to use. Was there a second Primus packed, by any chance?”
“No,” Babu says in a hopeless tone. “But I carried many cans of Primus fuel up the glacier.”
Jean-Claude shakes his head. I would do the same but my head hurts too much. The small cans of kerosene are useless unless we can get the Primus working. “Get your gloves, mittens, and Shackleton overjackets on,” orders J.C. “It’s snowing too hard—and getting too dark—to sort through the loads out there, so we’re going to pull the packs and load bags into the tent.”
It is getting dark outside, and the blizzard still restricts our vision to only a couple of yards. I’m wondering whether we should have roped up for this effort when Jean-Claude shouts over the howling wind for Babu and Ang to hang on to each other and me, and for Norbu and Lhakpa to keep a grip on each other and him. We stagger and feel our way the few yards from the Big Tent to the general vicinity of where we think the Sherpas dumped their packs. J.C.’s rucksack and load bags, as well as mine, are weighted down by rocks right at the entrance to our tent. Of course they’re empty, since, with the exception of a few food tins, we hauled the two heavy tents, tent staves and poles, and the nonworking Primus stove up in our loads. So our lives now depend on what we find in the Sherpas’ loads. Camp III is supposed to be sheltered—compared to Camp IV up on the North Col, much less compared to any camps exposed up on the North or North East ridges higher up—but the wind whipping down the 1,000-foot slope of ice and snow is so strong that it literally knocks me over. Babu Rita and Ang Chiri dutifully fall into the snow with me. On all fours, I flail around trying to find their rucksacks and pack loads amidst the drifts, snow-covered boulders, and the growing heaps of snow on this side of the tents.