by Dan Simmons
How were we to know that another British expedition wouldn’t attempt Everest until 1933 and would find the ice axe I’d left but not go downhill a couple of hundred feet to search for Irvine himself?
“We have to climb or get around the First Step,” the Deacon was saying. “Put it between the Germans and ourselves. What do you think, Jake…you’re our rock man. Climb it or traverse around the base? If we climb, do we try the large boulders or try to work the rocks on the left side of the ridge, closer to the Kangshung Face?”
I shook myself out of my reverie and took the few steps to the south lip of the ridge. We’d grown as accustomed as one can to climbing with a constant 8,000-foot exposure while clambering around on the North Face, but at least down there we’d had the illusion of a gradual slope before everything went vertical. But from the south edge of this disturbingly narrow North East Ridge, it was a straight vertical drop of more than 10,000 feet to the shark-toothed jumble of the Kangshung Glacier below. Absolutely nothing between us and the glacier almost two miles below us but howling wind.
“Holy shit,” I heard myself say as I peered over the south edge.
“I agree completely,” said Jean-Claude. He was standing by my right shoulder. I didn’t want him behind me right then, jostling me. I stepped back, looked up the North East Ridge at the rocky obstacle of the First Step, and considered it for a long moment of silence broken only by the rising wind. There was an ominous, whirling white cap of cirrus cloud forming over Everest’s summit.
“If we were just free-climbing this First Step the way Mallory and Irvine probably did,” I said, my voice sounding much more authoritative than I really felt, “I’d say stay to the left near the Kangshung Face. Easier climbing. More handholds. But we have good ropes and J.C.’s jumars. With the others able to use the jumars, I think it would be easier for one climber to shed his rucksack and oxygen, climb those tougher boulders to the right—up and over the top—get a good belay stance there, and fix ropes along the way for the rest to jumar up.”
I was certain that the Deacon was going to ask me to do the climbing—I was their rock man after all, it was why they’d brought me along here to the top of the world—but what they didn’t know was that a sharp-clawed lobster had taken up residence in my lower throat and upper breathing tract and was moving around from time to time. Every time it did, it blocked my breathing almost completely.
“I’ll lead this pitch and lay the rope,” the Deacon said at once. “We’ll save Jake for the Second Step. That’s where the real climbing will be called for.”
I didn’t argue. We’d moved to the base of the stacked boulders at the south side of the First Step and were laying out ropes, the Deacon had removed his rucksack and mittens, when suddenly I said, “Wait! What about looking for Bromley’s body on this north side of the First Step? I thought that was the plan.”
Reggie gripped my upper arm. “We did that already, Jake. We found Sandy Irvine instead. It would take hours, days, to search all of those gulleys—and you can see that he’s not dangling from the south face of this ridge. Besides, I think Kami was right—whatever he saw…three figures and then just one…happened on this ridge between this First Step and the higher Second Step, near a boulder that looks like a mushroom. That’s where we’ll look now. After we get past this First Step.”
“Besides, Herr Sigl and his friends are coming too quickly for us to tarry here longer,” said the Deacon.
“But…,” I began and had to stop to cough a minute.
Reggie touched my back. “Pasang,” she called out to the silent Sherpa, “can you give our friend something for his terrible cough?”
“Not more codeine,” said Dr. Pasang. “It would have too much of a soporific effect at this altitude. But I have an ancient Hindu cough remedy in my bag if you’d like to try that.”
“All right,” I said and held out my mitten as Pasang dug around in his rucksack and then in his small medical bag.
Pasang dropped a small box of Smith Brothers Cough Drops into my palm—the new menthol kind that had come out only two or three years earlier.
Reggie looked over her shoulder as she belayed and actually laughed, but I just opened the package and put three of the drops in my mouth.
“I’m ready to climb,” said the Deacon, tying onto a rope and coiling more rope over his shoulder. “Who wants to belay?”
“I will,” said Reggie and J.C. at the same time. Both passed the rope over their shoulders, and Jean-Claude tied it off around the thinnest vertical boulder. Both said “On belay!” at the same instant.
The Deacon shook his end of the belay rope loose, giving himself slack, looked at the ugly heap of steep boulders a moment, and started climbing in that gangly, electrified-spider form of his. His style wasn’t pretty, but it certainly worked well on most rock. He played out the longer rope behind him as he climbed from handhold to toehold to precarious handhold, always moving upward with the spread-eagled speed that climbers used to stay attached to vertical rock if only through sheer fleeting friction.
I turned around and lifted my binoculars. Less than eight hundred yards behind us, the Germans moved onto the North East Ridge—up to our altitude, level with us. I watched as they paused a long moment to catch their breath, and then the tall leader with the rifle slung over his chest said something, gestured, and all five began slogging west toward us.
“Hurry!” I called up to the Deacon.
17.
Climbing the First Step, even with the use of the Deacon’s fixed lines, was exhausting—every action was exhausting up there above 28,000 feet—but after we’d crossed over the top, we felt better about being out of the line of sight of the five German climbers who were following us. Then, just after we’d retrieved and coiled our fixed lines from the First Step, Reggie had to tug down her mask and go and spoil my newfound sense of relief.
“Of course,” she said, “if Sigl really did confront Cousin Percy and Kurt Meyer here on this section of the North East Ridge, as Kami Chiring thought he saw him doing, then that means that Sigl has already climbed to this height. He probably holds the record—for anyone living, that is—for reaching a high point on Everest before this. He may know a faster way around this First Step.”
“How high did Colonel Norton get in his climb up the Great Couloir?” asked Jean-Claude. “I thought it was about even with our ridge here…twenty-eight thousand feet.”
“Norton turned around at twenty-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-six feet, his high point in the steep Couloir itself,” said the Deacon. “Somervell reached twenty-eight thousand feet, below and behind Teddy Norton, just making the traverse across the North Face without climbing much in the Couloir.”
“High-climb records won’t count for much if Sigl and the other Germans really do know a faster way around this First Step,” I gasped out over my mask.
The Deacon ignored me and pointed out over the steep, snow-blown, and rocky North Face. The Great Couloir looked like a vertical white scar on that dark face. “Norton and Somervell were out there, several hundred yards west of us and almost directly below the summit before they turned around. We’ll beat Norton’s record if we keep climbing along this ridge to the base of the Second Step…it’s up around twenty-eight thousand two hundred and eighty feet.”
“Just seven hundred feet below the summit,” whispered Jean-Claude, his words almost lost under the rising wind that was making us lean toward the west, every loose rag or tag end of our clothing flapping like wash on the line in a mild hurricane.
“Seven hundred feet,” agreed the Deacon. “But still quite a distance to our west and about three to five hours of ridge climbing from here. Come on. I see the Mushroom Rock, do you?”
We all peered into the wind and blowing snow—it hurt when it struck the few exposed parts of our faces. About halfway between this First Step and the much more imposing and terrifying huge Second Step was a low boulder that did indeed appear to be shaped like a mushroom.
The Deacon nodded and started the traverse by dropping down onto the North Face and trying to find footholds and a rough route westward. We were roped in two groups at this point—the Deacon, Reggie, and Pasang on the first rope. Jean-Claude and me on the second. Before we separated into two single-file groups for this tricky traverse, I shouted to Reggie, “What do we do to look for Lord Percival during this part?”
“Just try not to fall,” she shouted back. “It looks—at least through my field glasses—as if there’s a relatively flat spot there at Mushroom Rock. We’ll pause there and look around. My guess is that if Percy and Meyer actually fell from the North East Ridge, it was from there.”
And this is what we did—dropping down below the ridgeline and seeking out a traverse route there. The exposure along the crumbling rocks and bands of snow just yards north and below the razor-sharp ridgeline was terrifying—I could look straight down and see the tiniest specks that were the tents on the North Col some 5,000 feet lower, a full mile of empty air between them and me, although I couldn’t tell if they were our tents or the Germans’. I was certain that if we fell roped together, we’d just keep bouncing and being torn apart until those bits and pieces of us showered down all across the East Rongbuk Glacier somewhere east of the old Camp III.
It didn’t help our sense of too much exposure when three of the five of us ran out of air in our first oxygen tank and had to stop on uncertain footing in order to switch the valves over, get help pulling the empty tanks out of our rucksacks, and then get more help from the next person on the rope unhooking the fittings and tubes. Nor did it lessen my sense of insecurity on that slope when Reggie—quite deliberately—lobbed her silver metal tank as far out from the face as she could throw it underhand. It first struck some 200 feet below and kept clanking and bouncing its way on down the North Face long after we could no longer see it. The goddamned tank seemed to make falling noises for goddamned ever. I decided then that Lady Reggie Bromley-Montfort had somewhat of a sadistic streak in her.
J.C. and I tossed our tanks out as well, but it bothered me to watch mine keep falling and falling and falling, so I turned my face back into the snowy rock wall and set my leather-helmeted forehead against the cold rock. Jean-Claude and I helped each other make sure that our flow valves for the second of our three tanks were set at the lower flow rate of 1.5 liters per minute and that the regulator definitely was set to “On.” I needed oxygen along this stretch; I didn’t want to do anything stupid or to perform more clumsily than I absolutely had to. I was tempted to set the flow valve to 2.2 liters per minute, but I knew that I had to conserve what little English air was left.
What made this traverse so dangerous was the loose footing—the entire slope for 100 or 200 feet below the ridge on this north side was made up of small, downward-sloping, and wobbly slabs, a slippery mess of loose, sliding chips of stone, and entire gravel fields of what looked to be shale broken up by ages of extreme freeze and thaw. There were also apparently innocent patches of snow between boulders that were actually deep pits. “Tiger traps,” Reggie called them, and I presumed she’d had some experience with shooting or trapping tigers in her decade in India. But I doubt if the noble members of the Raj actually trapped the tigers in snow pits. One could drop chest-deep into such snow-filled pits, and it would be hellishly energy-expending and dangerous for his climbing mates to try to get him (or her) out.
The Deacon avoided the snow pits, probing ahead of him always with his long ice axe, using the same axe to point out the pits or especially slippery parts to the rest of us. So far, no one had fallen in or fallen off.
And then we came to a dead end.
“Damnation,” I heard the Deacon say softly from 40 feet in front of me. Like everything else up here, words were blown from west to east.
It wasn’t exactly a boulder blocking our way, but rather a long, smooth extension of granite that ran from the razor ridge above to a point about 20 feet below our current traverse route. But I saw at once that there’d be no easy going under or over or around this obstacle. Above us, the mass of smooth rock turned into an airy arête—a high, brittle, serrated pinnacle that was the North Ridge for those few fatal yards. No one would be free-climbing that today. At least not by starting from this point on the North Face.
Our traverse line at this level below the ridge offered the best solution to solving this smooth-bulge problem, but as best solutions often go in mountain-climbing problems, this one stank to high heaven.
It was a blind step…a blind leap…the kind of move a climber has to make in the Alps, perhaps 20,000 feet lower than where we were at that moment, when he just pushes out around a smooth slab, hoping that the friction of his spread-eagled self against the steep rock will keep him from falling for the three or four seconds he needs to get his foot to the other side—a side still invisible because of the curve of the damned rock. So the climber just has to pray that there will be a foothold or fingerhold there on that other side. Sometimes there is. Too often—as the number of deaths of alpine climbers showed each year—there isn’t.
Doing this kind of blind step in the Alps was dangerous, but many of the falls there were manageable if one’s partner had a good, solid belay stance.
None of the five of us on this steep, slippery traverse slope had a belay stance worth a plugged nickel. All four others could be belaying the Deacon—or whichever one of us was stupid enough to try this blind step—and a fall would almost certainly mean that all five would be pulled off the rock of the North Face. There were a few stubby rock protrusions at our feet or above our heads, but none big enough and solid enough to provide a tie-off belay—and even with Deacon’s Miracle Rope, the odds seemed overwhelming that the rope would snap with such a sharp belay point anyway.
“Okay,” I called from the rear. “What next? We go back to the First Step to think about this awhile? Throw rocks at the Germans?”
“To hell with going back,” called the Deacon.
He untied from the rope he shared with Reggie and Pasang, and then peeled out of his Shackleton jacket and Finch duvet, then put the gabardine Shackleton anorak back on. He stuffed the jacket and his two layers of mittens into his rucksack, which he removed and carefully handed to Reggie to prop between her body and the cliff wall. Then he looked down at his goose down trousers and stiff mountain boots and I knew he was considering removing his 12-point crampons. In the end, he chose to keep them on.
He then took the climbing rope back and tied it around his waist. I thought that perhaps only J.C. and I noticed that the knot he used was made to look like a simple overhand loop knot but was really a slipknot, certain to come undone from the Deacon without any tension or tug on the belayer if he fell. I understood and said nothing; Jean-Claude said nothing. Perhaps it was at that moment that I fully realized how brave a man Richard Davis Deacon really was.
Reggie cried, “No! Let us try to belay! Please, Richard!”
The Deacon didn’t even look at her. “There’s no belay stance anywhere along this line I took,” he said, already staring at the smooth rock of the blind step he had to take. I could sense him going over his moves in his mind, mentally rehearsing what his body had to do physically in a few seconds.
“All right,” he said and extended his right leg as far as it would go and hopped out onto the smooth stone of the abutment column.
He began to slide at once, and rather than follow the human instinct to claw for a handhold—of which there was none at all—the Deacon spread his palms, the wool of his gloves pressing hard against the stone, his anorak and belly and groin and balloon-fabric outer trousers pressing against the smooth rock face. He slowed, then almost stopped. The Deacon was connected to the mountain now only by the slightest hint of surface friction. I knew from experience that it was no
t enough friction to keep him from sliding and falling.
And he was falling. His sickening downward slide toward the overhang slowed almost to a stop and then began—inexorably—again.
The Deacon didn’t wait. Friction and speed were his only weapons, and of the two of them, speed was the more important. He scrabbled to his right as he slid, his body still spread-eagled, his palms and cheek and belly and thighs and crampon points pressing and scraping against rock, keeping himself from peeling off with all the pressure his tired body could exert, and when he’d slid to the far side of the arched seven-foot column, he pushed off the other side of the bulge just as if he were sure that there was a ledge or foothold or handhold waiting for him there.
Of course, he couldn’t see that any of these things were there around the blind step of the rock column. It might be another no-holds smooth rock column for all he knew.
The Deacon disappeared, and there was no sound or visible motion for a long moment. But the rope hadn’t played out, the lying knot he’d tied around himself to no purpose hadn’t given way. Yet. Most important, there was no scream yet from a human body hurtling down through 8,000 feet of empty air.
I found myself wondering if the Deacon would scream when he fell.
Finally, the steady voice came from somewhere on the other side of the rock bulge—“Wonderful ledge over here. Perfect belay stance with tie-offs on the rock. And I see where we can easily climb up toward the Mushroom Rock.”
We let out a collective breath, but no one said anything. Somewhere in the back of my weary mind was the question of all questions—What about when we have to come back this way? Normally a climber would use one or more fixed ropes in a situation like this; if one were an iron-mongering German climber, perhaps he would find the tiniest crack to drive in pitons for footholds.