by Dan Simmons
“Les boches probably do not know that Ree-shard had only two cartridges in Herr Bachner’s Luger,” said Jean-Claude. “The gunfire probably surprised them, no?”
“All the more reason for them to climb at night,” I said. I kept alternating hits on the English air tank with sips of water from one of the thermoses. After my first battle, modest as it was, I felt…strange. I hadn’t known that after a battle a man could feel both elated and strangely depressed and deflated at the same time. But I was aware of my strongest reaction: I was just damned glad to be alive.
“But they’d have to use electric torches strung around their necks for the hard parts of that climb,” said the Deacon. His voice was almost as husky as mine. “If I were still waiting with eight rounds left in the magazine of Karl Bachner’s Luger, that would be bad news for eight of them.”
“You’re that good a pistol shot?” asked Reggie. “Shooting straight down into the darkness, at only a flickering chest lamp, while you’re hanging out over the edge of the abyss in the cold?”
“Yes, I am,” said the Deacon.
I saw a strange smile pass between them. Something was being said, or acknowledged, that I wasn’t privy to. I felt a stab of jealousy and then mentally kicked myself in the ass.
“So are we sticking to the plan?” asked J.C.
“We are…unless anyone objects,” said the Deacon.
No one objected.
“The rucksacks and extra gear for above are all ready, correct?”
“Correct,” said Reggie.
“Then we’ll get the loads and head for Camp Five now,” said the Deacon.
I held my hand up like a student asking permission to go to the lavatory. “It’s not dark yet. The German down there who’s been firing your ’scoped Lee-Enfield has shown some talent. Won’t he pick us off one by one when we get to the snowfield on the North Ridge and become visible to anyone out on the glacier?”
The Deacon looked at the summit and ridges of Everest blocking the sunset—the Yellow Band and highest boulders and the North Ridge glowing brightly, the rest of the mountain and all of our North Col now in shadow.
“It will be almost dark by the time we’re on the North Ridge snow slopes,” he said softly. “We won’t be roped up. As we discussed this morning, we’ll be moving erratically—different paces—zigzagging up the slopes until we get to the fixed ropes, using no lights, not even our headlamps.”
“What about when we’re on the fixed ropes?” I said. “We’ll have to use the headlamps then—it will be too dark to climb and check our footing without them. Won’t we still be in range of the German sniper on the glacier?”
“Extreme range, yes,” said the Deacon. “But we’re not going to use our headlamps when we’re on the tough pitches where the fixed ropes are waiting, Jake. We’re going to use starlight and body memory and J.C.’s jumars.”
“Great,” I said.
“It will be great, mon ami,” said Jean-Claude. “Except for your constant cough, we all seem to feel well. We’ve acclimated—at least for this part of the climb. And climbing Mount Everest by starlight has to be the apogee of any climber’s lifetime.”
“So long as it isn’t the end of that lifetime,” I managed between coughs.
“I shall give you a little more of the anti-cough mixture, Mr. Perry,” said Dr. Pasang. “But not too much. We don’t want you getting sleepy and careless from the codeine. Luckily, I also have a pill that can help you stay awake.”
“We all may need that pill before the night’s over,” said the Deacon.
“And we’re climbing all the way to Camp Five in the dark?” I asked, feeling how tired I was from the day of constant coughing mixed with adrenaline rushes.
“No, Jake, my dear,” said Reggie, taking my gloved hand in hers. “Remember? We’ll pause to brew up and collapse the Big Tent at Camp Five, but we’re going all the way to Camp Six before dawn.”
Now I remembered the whole plan. Holy shit and fuck me, I almost said. But because there was a lady present and because I was a Harvard graduate and a gentleman—but mostly because it was 1925—I didn’t say it aloud.
Leaning against one another for support, keeping our heads low, we slouched our way toward Camp IV and our waiting loads and an absolutely unprecedented climb.
12.
With the possible exception of my solo night climb of the Mount Erebus volcano in Antarctica some years later, in the 1930s, I’ve never had a more beautiful and enjoyable climb than that night’s climb in May of 1925 up Everest’s North Ridge from Camp IV at 23,000 feet to our Camp VI at 27,000 feet. It was perhaps the most perfect mixture I’ve ever experienced of the physical joy of climbing in a staggeringly beautiful starlit setting with the psychological joy of climbing with friends I loved.
Of course, later, I wondered if the combination of codeine and Benzedrine that Dr. Pasang had ladled into me had anything to do with the profoundly good feeling I was enjoying. I was dimly aware that my throat still felt as though I’d swallowed a jagged metal object about the size of my hand, but since the coughing had been alleviated to the point where I could use an oxygen mask again easily, that strange sensation was no longer so urgently bothersome.
We climbed unroped, spreading out during the initial snow-on-rock stretch of the ridge just above the North Col, then back in line—but still with our headlamps and electric torches dark—and using our jumars to clamp onto the many fixed ropes we’d set in place during all the steep parts of the tilted-slab sections of the climb.
Rather than taking turns leading, as a team would when breaking through deep snow, we took turns bringing up the rear, since the last person had the fatiguing job of pulling each length of fixed rope free from its eyeleted stakes, coiling it, and hauling it over his or her shoulder until the next length needed to be undone.
“Ah…,” said Jean-Claude during one of our pauses to change anchor climber, “…I understand the need to…ah…deny our fixed ropes to les boches who will be climbing in pursuit…but will not the lack of any fixed rope make our own descent a tad difficult?”
“We’ll discuss that when we take a five-minute break at Camp Five before pushing on,” said the Deacon. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t had his oxygen mask up or flow valve open during the entire climb so far. We were hauling so many oxygen rigs up with us, I didn’t understand why he might be hoarding O2 now.
We pushed on. None of us were using our bottled air now, although we had extra rigs and bottles cached at both Camps V and VI. We seemed, by silent agreement, to be saving it for…something.
Twice we heard the distant echo of a rifle shot from the valley far below, but neither time did I hear a ricochet on the rocks around us or that somewhat disturbing new sound of steel-jacketed bees buzzing past me. Even with the telescopic sight that the Deacon had thoughtfully put on his Lee-Enfield for the Germans to use against us, finding dark-gray-suited human figures—we’d swapped our Finch duvets for our dun Shackleton jackets as an outer layer once again, along with our canvas wind trousers over the down leggings—against rock and dirty snow at night evidently was, as the Deacon had said, a near impossibility from one vertical mile below. Hitting us with aimed rifle fire from that distance, the Deacon reassured us, was a less likely threat to us than lightning, being run over by a lorry, rockfall, or avalanche. (But since the last two were real threats to us, even at that moment, I might have done a little more worrying, had I not been in a state of pharmaceutical near bliss.)
We paused at Camp V for five minutes of the promised rest and high-flow O2, but then spent another fifteen minutes or so there taking down Reggie’s Big Tent and parceling out the staves and canvas and rain fly and ground cloth into our various rucksacks. There were more oxygen rigs there than we could carry, so we spent even more time laboriously hauling them fifty yards or so out onto the rock and scree field of the North Face, where we hid them behind a large triangular boulder. The somewhat distinctive shape of that boulder would be our only g
uide if we needed to find that English air on our way down—assuming any of us came down alive—since we could hardly mark the cache with our wands or flags for the Germans to find and use.
We also left most of the heavy, coiled fixed rope we’d retrieved there with the oxygen rigs. Each of us carried about 150 feet of coiled Miracle Rope over our shoulders or in our rucksack—even though we still had no plans to rope up during this part of the climb—and we just had to hope that this would be enough if a particularly difficult stretch presented itself.
We were all panting and gasping after we’d packed away all the parts of Reggie’s Big Tent—and renewing our own rucksack-carried oxygen bottles after storing the extra and partially empty tanks on the North Face and traversing back to the North Ridge—when I finally asked the question I’d been waiting to ask. “What about the lack of fixed ropes coming down?” I asked the Deacon. “Are we going to retrieve them from the pyramid rock out there and from wherever we stash the next ones above and reset them on the way down? We’ll probably be very tired.”
“That’s one answer,” said the Deacon between hits from his own oxygen tank. He was finally using English air like all the rest of us except for Pasang. “If the Germans give up—or if we can kill them all somehow—and if we come back down this way.”
“How else could we get back down?” asked Jean-Claude. “The North East Ridge back toward Lhakpa La is impossible, Ree-shard. It is a sheer knife ridge studded with cornices, arêtes, pinnacles, and thousand-foot drops. Descent to the Kangshung Glacier beyond the North Ridge is a ten-thousand-foot vertical impossibility. So what other ways down—besides falling—might you be considering?”
The Deacon was leaning on his big ice axe, his massive load looming over his head. He gave J.C. a wolf’s grin. “I was considering a traverse,” he said. Only the absence of any real wind this amazing night allowed us to talk using normal tones.
“A traverse,” said Jean-Claude and looked out at the face, up at the summit, back to the face where the Grand Couloir gleamed in the starlight. “Not to Norton’s Grand Couloir and down, I trust,” he said. “It becomes a sheer drop a few hundred feet below here, but the avalanches would carry us away long before that. No traverse on or across the North Face can get us down, Ree-shard.”
“True,” said the Deacon. “But what about a traverse from the North Summit across to the South Summit and then down to the South Col, to what Mallory named the Western Cwm?”
There was a moment of silence at that suggestion, but I could see Reggie’s teeth gleaming in the starlight. Between the Deacon and Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort, it was suddenly as if we were being led up the tallest mountain in the world by two hungry wolves.
“That’s…nuts,” I said at last. “We have not a single clue as to what the ridge is like between the North Summit and the South Summit…or even from the First Step to the North Summit on this side, for that matter. Even if we were somehow to reach the highest summit of Everest and make that traverse to the South Summit, which I doubt is possible in itself, the descent from the South Summit to the South Col is probably doubly impossible. No one’s ever seen that bit of ridge, much less attempted it…ascending or descending.”
“This is true, my friends,” Jean-Claude said solemnly.
“Let’s talk about it more when we get to Camp Six,” said the Deacon.
“I see little lights down where Camp Three used to be,” said Reggie.
“Les boches are going to start chipping steps in the wall to the North Col in the dark and will climb towards dawn,” said J.C.
I wanted to continue the conversation about this impossible traverse over the two summits of Everest, but there was no time for that. We hitched up our rucksacks, left the tumbled Meade tent and the torn-to-rags Meade tent where they lay in the snow, and began trudging up the steep ridge slope again. Luckily for all of us, the fixed ropes began again less than 200 feet above Camp V. With the Deacon falling back to last place to retrieve and coil ropes as we climbed, doing the really heavy work, the rest of us clamped our jumar devices onto the thick ropes and began sliding our way up, the entire line of us stopping every fourth step to gasp for more air.
We were all using what the Deacon had taught us as the “Mallory technique”: take in as deep a breath as you can—even while knowing it’s not enough in the thin pressure at this above-8,000-meter altitude—and use it for those four steps before stopping, panting, and repeating the process.
And so the five of us kept climbing toward the dawn.
13.
The single two-man Meade tent that Reggie had set up as our Camp VI was invisible during the climb and much further out on the North Face than I remembered, but Reggie led us right to it. There were some spare oxygen tanks and a small cache of food we’d left there before fanning out to look for bodies on the North Face that seemingly long-ago Monday, as well as our two sleeping bags from Sunday night. We were now hauling water, tea, coffee, and other tepid liquids with us after the boiling of snow we’d done at Camp V before departing the North Col.
“Looks very comfortable,” the Deacon said as he stared at the tiny tent pitched atop one boulder at a 40-degree up-angle and almost absurdly wedged between two other large boulders. Much of this part of the climb on the North Ridge, not far below the Yellow Band, had been through rock gullies and mazes of larger boulders. But Reggie had decided to pitch our Camp VI four days ago—eternities ago—at this site hundreds of feet off the ridgeline. There hadn’t been any near-flat places on the ridge, either, even if the high winds there had allowed us to consider it.
The pre-dawn indirect sunlight was slowly brightening the entire sky behind the North East Ridge—which was not so far above us now—and it wouldn’t be long until direct sunlight struck Everest’s summit just a mile or so west and some 2,000 feet above us.
We took our rucksacks off for the first time since Camp V and collapsed onto them, each of us taking care not to let either the pack or ourselves go tumbling down the steep-roof-slate slabs of the face. We were all very tired, and I felt both the codeine and Benzedrine wearing off. The coughing had returned with a vengeance.
Only J.C. was currently carrying his binoculars outside his many layers, so I took turns looking through his glasses for the men who wanted to kill us today. We scoped what we could see of the North Col and of the North Ridge up to the slight glimmer of collapsed but still visible green tent that was Camp V. I couldn’t see any figures moving anywhere.
“Maybe they gave up and went home,” I said between gut-wrenching coughs.
Reggie shook her head and pointed, her arm extended almost straight down. “They’re just leaving Camp Four, Jake. I see five men.”
“I also see five,” said the Deacon. “One of them seems to be carrying a pack and my rifle slung over his shoulder. There’s a chance that could be Sigl, unless he brought a more experienced sniper with him…which is a real possibility.”
“Merde,” whispered Jean-Claude.
“I agree completely,” I said. I realized that the Deacon was no longer training his glasses below, but had turned them and was studying something beyond the North Summit—the highest and true summit of Everest. “Looking for that mythical traverse?” I said, regretting my sarcasm as soon as I’d aired it.
“Yes,” said the Deacon. “Ken Owings said that there’s a very nasty step in the ridgeline between the two summits—he could see it from as far away as Thyangboche in the Khumbu Valley, where he lives. It’s a damned rock step, like our supposedly unclimbable Second Step here on the North East Ridge above us, but Ken says that this rocky step between the summits is about forty to fifty feet high from the downhill side.”
“That would be unclimbable at such an altitude, Ree-shard,” J.C. said.
“Perhaps,” said the Deacon. “But we don’t have to climb it, Jean-Claude. If we get past this summit, we’ll be heading down. We just have to rappel down the damn step and then down-climb to the South Summit and
lower.”
No one said anything, but I suspect the other three were thinking what I was: I didn’t have the energy to climb another single step, much less a mile of the North East Ridge and two major steps—the Second Step above and to the right of us supposedly the “impossible” one—much less the steep Summit Pyramid and actual corniced summit. It simply wasn’t going to happen.
“Do we have to worry anytime soon about Sigl or whoever’s carrying your rifle taking potshots at us?” I asked, if only to change the subject.
“I think the chap carrying my rifle will be careful about when and where he shoots at us,” said the Deacon.
“That’s reassuring,” I said. “Why should he be?”
“Because he’s looking for the same thing we are,” said the Deacon.
“Escape from crazy Nazis?” I said.
The Deacon shook his head. “Whatever Meyer and Bromley had with them. I believe that Bruno Sigl made the mistake one year ago of shooting either Meyer or Bromley or both—I’m sorry, Reggie, but I do think that’s the case—at a place where the bodies fell or avalanched beyond Sigl’s ability to reach them.”
“I agree,” said Reggie. “That fits with what Kami Chiring saw last year from near Camp Three using the Germans’ binoculars. He thought he saw three figures up on the North East Ridge…then, suddenly, only one. And he heard what could have been the echo of pistol shots.”
“So that’s where we search,” said the Deacon. “Along the ridgeline. The North East Ridge—where few people save for Mallory and Irvine have ever gone.”
“And, if you are correct in your theory, mon ami,” said J.C., “Sigl and Reggie’s cousin Percival and this young Meyer fellow.”