by Dan Simmons
All of us checked the tubes and valves of our oxygen sets as we stored them in the RBT—we fully planned to use those particular extra O2 sets on our summit bid when we returned to Camp V—and then we filled our rucksacks with the few things we were taking down. All four of us had our Very pistols, and everyone but me had three flares left. I was the only one hauling two O2 tanks in his rucksack—at the Deacon’s request.
“We don’t all have to go down,” I said when we were finally standing outside the tents in what was the perfect equivalent of a freezing London fog. “I can stay up here until the rest of you get things sorted out.”
“What would you do up here alone, Jake?” asked Jean-Claude.
“Bury Mallory.”
J.C. didn’t seem surprised by the answer. I knew he’d also felt bad about leaving the body there, exposed, on the slope where he’d died. But we both also knew that we’d done the right thing in following the Deacon’s orders to retreat to Camp V when we did. If we’d been caught out in yesterday evening’s wind and storm, there’d be more than one body to bury on the North Face of Everest this day.
“No, Jake,” said the Deacon. “Besides the fact that you probably wouldn’t even find George’s body in this cloud—especially given the fact that he’d be covered by fresh snow today—we need you to lead the descent to Camp Four.”
“Jean-Claude can lead,” I said. My last, lame protest.
“Jean-Claude will take over when we get to the snowfields and crevasses of the North Col,” said the Deacon with a climbing leader’s finality. “You lead us down the rock. You’re our rock man. That’s why we paid to bring you here to this mountain, my American friend.”
Instead of arguing, I turned my oxygen-tank regulator to the lower setting of 1.5 liters of flow, tugged my mask into place, and strapped it to my flying helmet—thinking of the similar bit of strap in George Mallory’s pocket as I did so—and shrugged into my heavy pack. I wasn’t carrying much besides the two oxygen tanks, my small Very pistol, the two remaining 12-gauge flare cartridges, and a chocolate bar.
Only the lead climber during the long descent was to be carrying and using the two oxygen bottles. We’d cached the other five full bottles left over from yesterday and their simple rigs there at Camp V, and between the Deacon on Sunday and J.C. on Monday, the Sherpas had portered up no fewer than six full backpacks of three tanks each, using none in their ascent. These were cached a little lower, at the level of the collapsed and rock-riddled tents, where we’d found Lobsang just last night. If we returned to these upper camps, those twenty-three tanks of English air should be more than enough to support both a search for Percy and a serious summit attempt for at least four of us. Perhaps even enough for summit attempts by two groups of three. That would be nice, I remember thinking, if we get six people on the summit.
Despite Lobsang’s obvious signs of terror, yeti weren’t even in my mind any longer.
“Two ropes going down today,” announced the Deacon without asking for our opinions or advice. “Jake will lead the first rope with Dr. Pasang following and Jean-Claude at anchor. Lady Bromley-Montfort will lead our second rope with Lobsang Sherpa coming next and me last. The fixed ropes may be partially buried, but Lobsang said that he’d found and pulled most of them free of the snow during his ascent last night, so that will help us in terms of time. Unless someone gets ill, no one will be using oxygen on the way down except Jake, who will pass it over to Jean-Claude when he takes the lead through the snowfields above Camp Four.”
J.C. started to protest that he wouldn’t need the oxygen, that he’d climbed most of the way to Camp V without it the day before, but the Deacon silenced all further talk simply by shaking his head once.
Before we all pulled balaclavas or heavy scarves over our faces, more or less effectively shutting off talk, Reggie said, “Lobsang is a bit non compos mentis. I wonder what we’ll find at Base Camp.”
“I suspect something real frightened the Sherpas, and they may have deserted the expedition,” said Dr. Pasang.
Lobsang Sherpa finally realized what we were talking about, although I was fairly sure that he hadn’t understood the Latin about his not being totally mentally capable. “No, no, no,” Lobsang Sherpa said in English. “Not frighten…not run off…all killed! Yetis killed them. All dead!”
“Were you there?” Pasang asked in English. “Did you see these yeti killing Sherpas?”
“No, no,” admitted Lobsang. “I also be dead if there. But cook Semchumbi and head of pack animals Nawang Bura see bodies. Everybody at Base Camp dead. Very terrible. Blood and heads and arms and legs everywhere. Yeti kill them!”
The Deacon patted him on the back and helped him make the correct knot for tying on to the same rope with Reggie and himself. “We’ll know soon,” he said. “Lady Bromley-Montfort, let’s remember that Lobsang Sherpa is the only one here with no crampons. We must be especially careful going down.”
I pulled away my mask for just a moment. “I only hope I can find the right bamboo markers and fixed lines in this cloud-fog,” I said. No one responded, so I tugged the mask back into place.
J.C. said, “We don’t need to wear the damned goggles in this dim light and fog today, do we?”
“No,” said the Deacon. “We’ll pull the goggles back into place only if it begins brightening. It’s most important we watch our footing during the descent.”
J.C. and I made sure that Dr. Pasang was tied on properly—we were leaving only about 30 feet of rope between climbers, a short length, to be sure, and dangerous in the sense that a fall by anyone wouldn’t give the next person on the rope much time to set himself (or herself) for belay—but I agreed with the Deacon’s unspoken suggestion that the lines between each of us should be short enough that we could keep the climber behind or in front of us in sight most of the time, no matter what the wind and weather might be like.
“All right, Jake,” called the Deacon from the far rear. “Start us down, please.”
Using my ice axe to pick my way carefully across the down-tilting snow and ice slabs, I started weaving my way down around boulders, past the battered lower section of Camp V, and then east a dozen yards or so back toward the spine of the North Ridge and the treacherous staircase there.
3.
No Everest expedition before ours had ever laid as much fixed rope as we had—and ours was the Deacon’s dependable Miracle Rope blend to boot—so no expedition members had ever had such relative ease of descending from Camp V.
Or at least we should have had such relative ease. In truth, the clouds were so thick and the wind gusts—up to fifty miles per hour was my guess at the time—were so frighteningly powerful and sporadic that descending the ridge and ice slope and glacier of Mount Everest on that Tuesday, May 19, was a pure nightmare for me.
Some of the marker wands remained in place, but others had been blown away by the night’s gales or blown sideways and covered with snow. At a hundred places during the descent on the North Ridge spur down to the North Col, I had to make the call. Do I go straight ahead here, or right here down that familiar-looking gully, or left down that steeper part? I kept remembering those dead-end gullies that led off to the east during our climb to Camp V in daylight, each wrong turn ending in a precipitous 6,000-foot drop-off to the main Rongbuk Glacier.
So I rarely chose a route to the right when I could find no flagged bamboo wands marking it. But twice a wrong left turn made me lead everyone out onto the North Face of Everest, and there were hidden precipices and vertical ice traps there as well. Both times I gingerly traversed backward until we were on the spine of the North Ridge again, and then I led the way down until we came across the next fixed rope and we could be sure where we were.
When we were wading through snow up to our waists on a somewhat lesser slope, I decided that we must be in the North Ridge’s snowfields not too far above the North Col, and I called for a pause and for J.C. to come forward and take my place and my oxygen tank to lead us through the
crevasses.
“Remember, I want the rucksack back,” I said when I handed it over to him and before I slogged back to the rear of our three-person rope to tie in there. My flare pistol, cartridges, binoculars, empty water bottle, an extra sweater, and one half-eaten chocolate bar were still in the rucksack.
Jean-Claude’s descent was faster than mine had been; he found an iced-over crust area of the snowfield and almost glissaded us down despite our crampons. I realized then that after Babu’s death, I’d had enough of glissading for one expedition.
But a little more than two hours after setting out from Camp V, J.C. led us through the last few invisible crevasse fields to the small cluster of tents huddled in the shadow of the high seracs at the northeast corner of the North Col.
The entire camp was empty.
“Everyone scared,” said Lobsang Sherpa. “Last night I volunteer to go up. Tell you. Everyone else want to go down.”
“Why?” asked the Deacon. “If the yeti were supposed to be down below, wouldn’t everyone have felt safer staying at Camp Four?”
Lobsang shook his head almost violently. “Yeti climb,” he said. “They live up on Col in caves. They very angry at us.”
The Deacon didn’t bother to parse logic with the terrified Sherpa—I would at least have asked him why angry yetis would have started their depredations at Base Camp if they were angry at their homes on the North Col being invaded—but instead of discussing mythical monsters, we looked in the various tents for food and water. There were no water bottles or thermoses of drinks left behind—and the damned Sherpas who’d promised to stay waiting for us here at Camp IV two days earlier had taken the extra sleeping bags, Primuses, and Unna cookers with them as well—but Reggie found three overlooked Meta sticks, and we lit them and held blackened pots of fresh snow over the open fires at least to get meltwater. Then Pasang found two semi-frozen cans of spaghetti under a tangle of abandoned clothing in one of the Whymper tents, and the Deacon ferreted out a tin of ham and lima beans. We poured the mess into the last pot to cook over the waning fire.
All of us were tired and starved and dehydrated. And my coughing now that I was off oxygen was almost nonstop, the sensation that I’d swallowed a small chicken bone even more pronounced. But although Lobsang Sherpa was obviously terrified at the thought of staying at Camp IV a moment longer, and the rest of us were exhausted and had no appetite, it was imperative that we eat and drink something before heading down the ice cliff. We welcomed the tea and forced the food down.
With six of J.C.’s jumars available and so much fixed rope in place, the serious climbers among us could have rappelled down the ice face and most of the steep 800-foot slope beneath that face, but we set our pace to Lobsang’s skills and scuttled down the long caver’s ladder, still using the jumars and friction knots on the fixed ropes but as grips and brakes rather than aids to full-rappel rapid descents. It was still a relatively rapid and efficient descent, despite the increasing fogginess of clouds rising from the East Rongbuk Glacier valley.
“Is this the monsoon, Ree-shard?” asked Jean-Claude as our two strings of roped climbers bounced backward down the fixed ropes through ever-thickening cloud-fog.
“No, I don’t believe so,” said the Deacon. “The clouds are building in the south, but the wind’s still blowing from the north-northwest.”
J.C. nodded and saved his breath for rappelling down; he had Lobsang Sherpa more or less tied to his front, and the weary Sherpa would let out a cry at each backward bounce.
We found fourteen Sherpas—who, with Lobsang Sherpa, made up half the total complement we’d set out with—huddling at Camp III. There weren’t enough tents there to shelter fifteen Sherpas, so sitting men were virtually piled atop sitting men in the Whympers and Meades in ways that would have been truly comic had not their faces reflected so much terror. Others sat outside around a roaring campfire.
“Where the hell did you get fuel for a big fire?” the Deacon asked the first Sherpa he encountered who could speak some English—Semchumbi, the cook, who was supposed to stay at Base Camp or Camp I.
Semchumbi didn’t answer, but Reggie pointed to a pile of kindling to one side of the bonfire. The Sherpas had used an axe to smash up every packing crate we’d hauled to Camp III in preparation for high carries.
“Oh, that’s bloody great,” said the Deacon. “Just bloody great.” He took Semchumbi firmly by the shoulder. “Is this fire supposed to keep away yetis?”
Semchumbi nodded violently and, his English evidently forgotten, kept repeating, “Nitikanji…Nitikanji…”
“What does that mean?” the Deacon demanded of Dr. Pasang.
“Snow men,” said Pasang. “Same as yeti, which comes from ya te, which means ‘man of high places’—also, as you know, called Metohkangmi.”
“Snowmen,” said the Deacon in disgust. “Did anyone actually see these…snowmen?”
All fifteen of the Sherpas babbled at once, but Reggie and Pasang pointed out the only man who’d seen the actual monsters—Nawang Bura, who’d been in charge of all the pack animals during the trek in and who’d stayed at Base Camp the last three weeks to watch over the ponies and yaks we’d kept with us.
I knew that Nawang Bura spoke some English, but as with Semchumbi, he seemed to have lost it in his terror.
Reggie listened to the short, heavy man’s explosion of syllables and then interpreted for us: “Nawang Bura Sherpa says that he is the only man who escaped Base Camp alive. The Nitikanji came in last night just after dusk. Tall creatures with terrible faces, fangs, long claws, long arms, and heavy gray fur everywhere on them. Nawang Bura was just returning from Camp One when he saw them slaughtering everyone at Base Camp, so he turned and ran and escaped and survived, and came all the way up here to Camp Three with the few other Sherpas who’d been at Camp One and Camp Two. No one wanted to stay in the valley with the Metohkangmi when the creatures were so angry and hungry.”
“Hungry?” I said. “Is Nawang Bura saying that the yeti were killing and eating Sherpas down at Base Camp?”
Reggie passed the question along to the chief muleteer, Nawang Bura responded with a speech that went on for more than thirty seconds, and Reggie translated. “Yes,” she said.
“How many at Base Camp?” asked the Deacon.
Nawang Bura and a dozen other men answered at once.
“Seven,” said Reggie. “Seven yeti.”
“No, I didn’t mean yeti, damn it all. I meant how many Sherpas were at Base Camp? Are still there?”
Reggie spoke in Nepalese, a dozen or more men spoke at once in answer.
“Twelve Sherpas,” she said. “Semchumbi said that some ran north during the slaughter, away from the mountain, toward Rongbuk Monastery, but he saw more yeti kill them before they reached the plain beyond the river.”
“So,” said the Deacon, “seven yeti supposedly killing a dozen strong Sherpas.”
“Excuse me,” said Dr. Pasang. “Two of the Sherpas there—Lhakpa Yishay and Ang Chiri—were not so strong. They were kept at Base Camp until they recovered from the amputation of toes and fingers.”
“Seven yeti supposedly killing ten strong Sherpas and two recovering ones, then,” said the Deacon. “Did anyone think to bring up any of the three rifles that were at Base Camp?”
I had to think a second before remembering how many rifles the expedition had. Reggie had brought one for hunting, as had Pasang and the Deacon. All three rifles, after our arrival, had been kept in padlocked crates in a special sealed tent. It took permission of a sahib even for the cook to use one for hunting.
“Well, we do have this weapon,” said the Deacon and removed a huge pistol—not a Very pistol, but a real pistol—from his rucksack.
He snapped open the so-called Break-Top Revolver, showed all of us that it was empty of cartridges, and let each of us hoist it.
It was a heavy revolver, a Webley Mark VI. There was a stout leather lanyard—oiled almost black by grease and sweat and smoke—tied on
to the metal loop at the bottom of the handgrip.
“It takes .455-caliber cartridges,” the Deacon said, showing us a box of the large, heavy cartridges, and then took the revolver back and proceeded to load all six chambers.
“Thank God we have a weapon with us,” said Reggie.
“Is it the pistol you used in the War?” I asked.
“I bought it before going to war and used it all four years. Now I only wish we’d brought the rifles up to Camp Three or Four. That was stupid of me to leave them all at Base Camp.”
I hadn’t paid much attention to the three rifles, even when Reggie or Pasang went out hunting with one. I assumed they were regular hunting rifles, although I remembered now that one of them—perhaps the Deacon’s—had boasted a telescopic sight mounted on it.
The Sherpas were babbling at Reggie again, but I could tell by the way Semchumbi hung his head that no Sherpas had thought to break into the “sahibs’ tent” and crates to get the rifles during the “yeti attack.”
“That’s all right,” said the Deacon. “No matter. We’ll get some extra tents from Camp Two to shelter the fourteen Sherpas up here, and then the five of us will go down to Base Camp and fetch the rifles. Which of you Sherpas wants to come with us to Camp Two?”
Dr. Pasang repeated the Deacon’s question in Nepalese. None of the Sherpas volunteered.
“Fine,” said the Deacon. “So I’ll choose you, you, you, you, you, and you…” He pointed out six of the Sherpas, including both Nawang Bura and Semchumbi. “You’ll come down to Camp Two with us, help us break down some tents, and haul them back up here to Camp Three.”