by Dan Simmons
Pasang grins again. The Deacon makes a slightly sour face.
“We still have two full oxygen tanks left,” says the Deacon. “How about you two?”
“Two each,” I confirm.
As if reminded, the Deacon pulls his recently depleted tank out of his rucksack and disconnects it from the valves and rubber tubing. He starts to set it carefully between jagged rocks but Reggie stops him.
“Jake and I discovered something…fun…when we discarded our first tank yesterday evening,” she says.
The Deacon’s eyebrows rise slightly toward his miner’s lamp.
Reggie takes the tank from him, holds it high over her head with both gloved hands, and hurls it out and away from the North Face.
It hits about 60 feet down the slope, bounces another 50 or 60 feet before touching rock again, and keeps hurtling lower—a silver blur in the rich morning light—with echoing clangs that seem to go on forever. Then it disappears.
The Deacon shakes his head but grins. “If that lands on one of our Sherpa friends a mile below on the North Col, I’m not taking responsibility,” he says. “That reminds me. There’s that sheer drop-off on the Face not too far below the level of Camp Five straight below us—all the way over to the Grand Couloir. That sets…the lower boundary of our search area.”
“I’ll say what I said before,” Reggie says softly. “That’s still hundreds and hundreds of acres. Vertical acres.”
“Not quite vertical,” says the Deacon. “Thank heavens.” He reaches under his now unzipped down outer layer and pulls a folded sheet of paper from some pocket. As the Deacon unfurls it, I see a more formal version of a diagram he had drawn and which we’d discussed during the trek across Tibet and again at Base Camp.
Four horizontal lines in different-colored inks go zigzagging left to right and then back again across a sketch of the North Face of Everest stretching roughly between the North Shoulder, now to our east, and the Grand Couloir hundreds of yards to our west.
“Lady Bromley-Montfort,” the Deacon says formally, “you’ve been our prime climber so far, so if you’d be so kind as to continue on up about four hundred feet to the bottom of the Yellow Band above this basin and search from east to west along the ridge there below the Yellow Band gullies. I don’t believe…you’ll have to clamber up into any of the…gullies themselves. Just use your binoculars. The shelf up there sort of peters out just short of Norton’s Great Couloir, so please don’t go further than that. You can use the First Step on the ridge above as a guideline…just turn back before you get very far west beyond it.”
Reggie nods but says, “You’re not giving me the bottom of the Yellow Band because it’s the widest and safest and easiest ledge to traverse up here, are you?”
“On the contrary,” says the Deacon, his expression serious, “I’m giving it to you because that search route offers the longest fall. And also”—now his expression is mischievous rather than serious—“because it involves climbing and all the rest of us get to descend. Dr. Pasang?”
“Yes?” Pasang says. It’s the first word I’ve heard from him today. He sounds no more breathless than if we were chatting at sea level.
“Would you be so kind as to descend a couple of hundred yards to that ill-defined rock rib…” The Deacon pauses and points it out. The “rib” is so ill-defined that it takes us all minutes to see it properly, but my guess is that it’s the same traversable “horizontal ridge” that Norton and Somervell had returned from the Grand Couloir on when Norton set the world’s highest climbing record of 28,600 feet last year—known record, that is, since no one knows how high Mallory and Irvine had climbed before dying.
“Please take that as far as it stays solid to the west, then drop down a few hundred feet and follow the best line back east toward the North Ridge,” continues the Deacon. He looks up at the tall Sherpa. “You did this morning’s climb brilliantly without oxygen, Pasang, but you might want to go onto English air for parts of the search. Just to help you stay alert.”
“All right,” says Pasang. He’s shielding his eyes and looking down at the steep rooftop slabs far below that will be his broad search area.
“I’ll take this large area of the basin between Dr. Pasang’s so-called ill-defined rib to the level of Camp Five,” says the Deacon.
“That’s a large area, Richard,” says Reggie. “And very steep. Very exposed.”
He shrugs. “And I’ll be very careful. Don’t forget to keep your goggles on, my friends. Even if you’re just on dark rock, remember…”
“Colonel Norton,” I say.
“Yes,” says the Deacon. “We’ll use one tank of oxygen apiece and try to keep the second tank in reserve for tonight, but we should be back at Camp Five together by two p.m. I don’t think any of us had adequate rest last night, and I…don’t want…any more altitude health problems if we can help it.” He looks at me. “Your cough is getting worse, Jake.”
I shake my head irritably. “It’ll go away when I go back on bottled air.” I know it won’t—my throat still feels like I’ve got a chicken bone caught in it—but I don’t want to argue or whine.
The Deacon nods, obviously not convinced, and opens his pack. “I have something for each of you,” he says and pulls out what look to be three short, wide-barreled black metal pistols.
“Dueling pistols?” says Reggie, knowing better. I’m the only one who laughs, and that soon turns into my hacking cough.
“I did not know that Very signal pistol came in such a small size,” says Pasang. The Deacon is setting out colored Very shells, each not much bigger than a shotgun shell—both shells and pistols much smaller than any nautical or military Very gear I’ve ever seen. I’d seen the Deacon write the word on a list in London. I hadn’t known why at the time, and he spelled it “Verey” for some reason (evidently it was an English thing), but I’d always seen such pistols spelled “Very,” after the name of the fellow who first designed the flare guns.
“My Webley and Scott Mark Three flare pistol in the War was a blunderbuss of a thing,” the Deacon is saying. “Big brass flared barrel. Fired a one-inch-caliber flare—the kind of one-inch-bore Very pistol you’ve probably seen, Jake. But some German boffin designed these smaller twelve-gauge Verys for night patrol work. We captured a few.” He pulls his larger British-made Very pistol out of his pack to show us the comparison. It and its flare cartridges are easily twice the size of the smaller German ones laid out on the rock before us. Even in smaller size, the flare pistols have that ugly, black metal, totally functional German look to them.
“So,” I say, feeling sarcastic this fine morning at 27,000 feet on the North Face of Mount Everest, “the army just let you walk off with three of the smaller German ones and your larger British Very pistol? How generous!”
“I admit I did walk off with the big one,” says the Deacon. “No one thought to ask for it back and I didn’t remind them. A lot of that was going on during the demobilization. The smaller ones for you—and I gave Jean-Claude his yesterday—I purchased via mail order from the Erma-Erfurt Company before they went out of business.”
“How do we use them?” asks Reggie, all business now. She’s picked up one of the pistols and—showing her familiarity with firearms—has broken open the breach to make sure it isn’t loaded. She fingers the smaller, color-coded 12-gauge shells lying atop the flat rock next to the Deacon’s hand.
“You see, the flares come in three colors—red, green, and what we called ‘white star’ during the War,” continues the Deacon. I have to admit that he doesn’t sound like he’s lecturing: just explaining something to friends. “I suggest that we use green to signal that we’ve found something and that the others should come to you. Red to signal that you’re in distress in some way and need help. White to signal that everyone should return to Camp Five.”
“So if I fall off the mountain,” I say, still feeling a little lightheaded and silly, forgetting completely for the moment the grim purpose of our search, “
I should fire a red flare on the way down?”
The other three look at me as if I’ve grown a second head.
“Couldn’t hurt, Jake,” the Deacon says at last. “You’re lowest—closest to the drop-off.”
Then we’re all busy for a moment, pulling on our rucksacks and setting the Very pistols and their cartridges in the outside pockets, reachable without having to remove the packs, but safely away from our oxygen tanks.
“About searching in the area so low on the Face,” says Reggie when we’re all loaded up and standing. “Do you really think that Percival could have fallen that far from the North East Ridge or from the Face just off the North Ridge?”
The Deacon doesn’t shrug, but there’s the sound of a shrug in his soft tones. “Once a body begins falling on a slope this steep, Reggie…it tends to continue falling for a long way. If the fall started with a snow avalanche the way Sigl says it did, then Percy’s and Meyer’s bodies would have picked up vertical velocity right from the beginning of the fall.”
“So their corpses probably wouldn’t be here on the Face still at all,” says Reggie.
The Deacon doesn’t answer, but we can all hear the silent Probably not. That sudden drop-off some 2,000 feet below us, the more-than-8,000-vertical-foot fall, is terrible even to think of.
“But I don’t think Bruno Sigl told us the truth about an avalanche being the cause of your cousin’s and that Meyer fellow’s death,” the Deacon adds. It’s the first time I’ve heard him that decisive on the subject.
“But if Percy and Meyer fell off the other side, the south side, of the North East Ridge above us…,” begins Reggie.
“We won’t find them,” the Deacon says with a flat finality. “More than twelve thousand feet almost straight down to the Kangshung Glacier. Even if we climb this mountain along the…North East Ridge…the way Mallory said he was going to…there’ll be very little reason to look off the south side. We couldn’t make out bodies—or parts of bodies—from that altitude. Especially after a year of snowfall down there. And I’m not going anywhere near the inevitable snow cornice up there.”
“What about me?” I ask.
“What about you?” says the Deacon.
“The actual parameters of my search area.”
“Oh,” says the Deacon and points to the line of blue ink farthest down on the search-grid map. “I gave you the most dangerous bit, Jake. This lowest area just above the drop-off. I wouldn’t think that you’d have to go too far below the level of Camp Five—not right down to the drop-off lip itself—since any human body that had fallen that far from the North East Ridge would be in small pieces. Or at least terribly mangled. Food for the goraks…the high-altitude ravens that fly even this high. Oh, I apologize, Lady Bromley-Montfort.”
“For what?” Reggie asks coolly.
“For being so stupidly insensitive,” says the Deacon. He looks down.
“I’ve seen corpses in the mountains before, Mr. Deacon,” says Reggie. “And I’m well aware not only of what a long fall does to the human body but that even at these altitudes, some scavenger will have gotten at Meyer’s and my cousin’s bodies if they’re still somewhere on the mountain.”
“Still,” says the Deacon, almost certainly still being insensitive in his clumsy effort to ameliorate the harshness of his earlier comment, “the North Face at this altitude is a high desert. Even after only one year, there should be some mummification.”
I feel that I have to change the subject toward something more pleasant. Craning to look up at the tall Sherpa, I say, “Dr. Pasang, I’m surprised you were able to come climbing away from your patients. How is Tenzing Bothia?”
“He died,” says Pasang. “A pulmonary embolism—a blood clot caused by altitude that had moved and blocked the main artery to his lung. There was nothing I could have done to save him even if I’d been in the tent with him on the North Col that night. He died as he was being evacuated to Base Camp from Camp One.”
“Jesus,” I whisper to myself.
Reggie looks visibly shaken. “Amen,” she says.
Monday, May 18, 1925
Since the Deacon is descending about half the catchment basin with me here on the North Face below the Yellow Band in order to reach his search area, he suggests we rope up for the part we’ll be descending together. I quickly agree.
I’m reminded again that many more climbers die descending mountains than trying to ascend them. As I’d also been reminded on the Matterhorn, when descending, one is facing outward rather than leaning into the mountain, so on steep but not vertical slopes a climber tends not to use his hands on descents when he might on the climb up, and you’re already going in gravity’s direction, no matter how slowly and carefully you try to move downward. This steep slab and snow slope stretching out below the “ill-defined rock rib” that the Deacon has asked Pasang to check isn’t as steep as the part of the Matterhorn where four of Edward Whymper’s comrades slipped and fell to their deaths on his triumphal first climb, but this damned down-sloping granite is still slick and dangerous—and much more difficult out here on the North Face than descending the better-defined and rather less dramatic pitch of the North Ridge.
We’ve traversed back to the east, toward the North Ridge, and I realize that the Deacon really wants to keep doing the east-west, back-east, west-again search patterns that he’d drawn for us.
We reach the steep pitch near our ridgeline furthest east. Our solo tent constituting Camp VI is invisible in the boulders above us, but we can clearly see the tents of Camp V (three now, the Deacon and Pasang having pitched Reggie’s Big Tent on a boulder about 80 feet above the other two the night before) hundreds of feet lower on the North Ridge. This is where the Deacon will start his search zone. We unrope, and I loop my part of the line and set it into my rucksack, being careful not to tangle it with the oxygen hoses. We’ve been on English air since starting our descent, and now the Deacon lowers his mask and lifts his goggles.
“Take care down there, Jake. No slips today.” A strong breeze has come up during our descent and the wind almost steals his words, but I’m watching his lips through my thick goggles. I simply nod and move off downhill. My search area begins at almost the same level as the three tents at Camp V, but further to the west on the North Ridge.
When I get to what I think is my designated altitude, I turn back toward the Grand Couloir and begin a careful traverse, my long ice axe usually in my left, uphill hand and always finding a grip for it before taking my next step. It’s hard searching for a dead body when one is always watching one’s feet and preparing for the next step.
I’ve put my crampons back on—even though the straps cut off circulation enough that my feet do get colder faster—and in the last two days of climbing I’ve noticed that it feels almost natural to have rocks and scree under the crampons rather than pushing up against the hobnailed soles of my boots. There are enough patches of snow and ice still on the North Face that the crampons come in handy every few yards.
Occasionally I stop, bend, lean on my ice axe, and crane my neck to look uphill to see if my friends are all right. Because of the distance and rocky-snowy background clutter, it takes a minute or two to see any of the three figures moving back and forth across their search areas; Reggie, the furthest away, stands out most clearly against the Yellow Band, that 700-foot-high band of what the geologist Odell had called, in his report to the Alpine Club, “a Middle Cambrian diopside-epidote-bearing marble, which weathers a distinctive yellowish brown.” Translated into English, that means that layer upon layer of little sea creatures, fossilized and locked in marble, were stacked here sometime in the Middle Cambrian period when the Himalayan Range was at the bottom of some ancient ocean. Even I—a C student in geology at my university—can understand that this was one hell of a long time ago. Now I see Reggie moving along that ridgeline just beneath the Yellow Band far above, stopping diligently from time to time to use her binoculars to peer up into the maze of gullies above her. Thos
e gullies create mazes not far below the actual North East Ridge—our (and Mallory and Irvine’s) theoretical highway to the summit—and are a logical place to find Bromley’s and Kurt Meyer’s bodies if they fell off the ridge to this, the north side. I’ll feel bad if she’s the one to find her cousin’s corpse.
Or maybe Reggie, just like me, is simply using the binocular stops as an excuse to breathe. Even with the oxygen apparatus, these traverses are exhausting. I’m suddenly very glad that the Deacon has insisted that the search—including the walk back to Camp VI, or Camp V if we need the extra room—is to go on no longer than the contents of one oxygen tank, about four and a half hours. I feel like I could sleep for a week, but know that I won’t be able to do so in the cold, rocky angles of Camp V or VI, especially VI. Nor, for that matter, will I get any real rest anywhere up here above 8,000 meters. Fatigue on Mount Everest, I’m beginning to realize, is a cumulative thing. It just keeps building until it kills you or until you get the hell off the mountain.
I begin walking again, then suddenly realize that I’m getting too close to the Grand Couloir. I’m far west of where the First Step rises so far above me on the North East Ridge and almost have reached a point below the terrible Second Step. That’s the end of my search zone. Any further in this direction and I’ll be wading in the deep snows and steep exposures of Norton’s Couloir. I turn and angle downward as I zigzag back toward the east and the North Ridge, where the tilted tents wait.
The drop-off 100 or so feet below me now is a constant sense of menace at the back of my mind. One slip and I’ll be over the edge in a few flapping, screaming, helpless seconds. I’m sorry now that I made that stupid joke about shooting off a red flare as I fell; the fall to the glacier below would be the worst and last conscious moments of my life. I can think of few deaths more terrible.
What does one think about when falling thousands of feet through the air?
I try to banish that question by assuming that I will strike a rock and be safely unconscious before catapulting off the lip of this cliff to my death so much further below. That cheers me up a bit. But I don’t really believe it. Part of my altitude-stupid brain tries to calculate the actual arithmetic of how many minutes and seconds I’ll be conscious during the free fall.