by Dan Simmons
But we couldn’t rig a fixed rope here. It would only help those who were pursuing us. (And I confess to thinking—hoping—that perhaps one or more, or all, of the Germans would fall to their deaths on this terrible blind step.)
But no, if Reggie’s Sherpa friend Kami Chiring was telling the truth, the great German alpinist Bruno Sigl had already solved this problem once.
“Let me do all the belaying,” came the Deacon’s voice from out of sight around the column. J.C. and I understood, and Reggie did as well, I was sure. It meant that only the Deacon had the stance and backup to hold if someone slipped, and we were to stay the hell away from any belay attempt.
Reggie’s boots did slip, but she scrambled, the belay rope went tight from the Deacon’s end, and he all but pulled her around the rock and out of sight onto the ledge with him. Pasang went across like a great, splayed spider. Jean-Claude did the blind step with pure, sure speed and rock-slapping friction. I managed, coughing even as I scuttled.
Then we were on a real ledge on the other side, together again, and I saw the path up through the overhanging rocks that the Deacon had shouted to us about.
“Think it’s close enough to where the ridge widens out to Mushroom Rock?” asked Reggie.
“Yes,” was the Deacon’s only response. And then, all tied together for the first time—the Deacon using an actual, reliable figure-eight-on-a-bight knot when he tied in this time—we clambered upward toward the North East Ridge. One by one we kick-stepped our way up and then out onto the narrow ridgeline.
The sun was past the zenith. The wind was stronger and colder than before. The lenticular cap around the summit of Everest had become a large gray mass pressing down on the mountain at an angle; it reminded me of the jostled-sideways unraveling wool cap on Sandy Irvine’s corpse.
We were too busy celebrating the wonderful flatness of the bit of wider ridge here at the odd mushroom-shaped rock. I knew that kind of wind- and tectonic-shaped top-heavy rock spur was actually called a bollard. More important to us than the stupid rock formation, after the miles of wildly tilted and slippery slabs and boulders, this snowy but relatively flat area on either side of the Mushroom Rock—roughly eight feet wide by about twelve feet long—seemed like a great, flat, safe football field to all of us.
“Perfect place for a camp,” said the Deacon.
“You have to be kidding,” I said between gasping coughs, removing my oxygen mask at every paroxysm. “We’re above twenty-eight thousand feet here.” It was true that our hearts were swollen, our muscles were failing, our kidneys, stomachs, and other internal organs were not doing their jobs properly, our blood was too thick and ready to spawn embolisms, our red blood cells were doing without the oxygen they needed, and our brains were oxygen starved and running like an automobile with its last few dregs of gasoline in the tank. We were metaphorical inches from hypothermia—which has a wider range of terrible symptoms than merely going to sleep and freezing to death, not the least of which would be intemperate belligerence and a need to rip our clothes off as we froze—and literal inches from a 9,000-foot drop to our south side and a 10,000-foot drop a few more feet away to the north side.
But for the moment, we were very happy. There were no armed Germans in sight yet, and we’d reached our temporary objective.
And maybe the Deacon was right. This would be one hell of a Camp VII. With the use of O2 tanks, climbers could get a relatively good night’s sleep here—especially in Reggie’s solid, wind-proven Big Tent—get a very early start with Welsh miner headlamps glowing, and have only a two- or two-and-a-half-hour climb to the summit of the world.
Unless, of course, the winds came up during the night. Or the Germans shot us. Or we froze to death first.
It didn’t matter. We all collapsed on a solid little snow platform on the north side of Mushroom Rock, adjusted our oxygen flow to “High” for a five-minute O2 fix, and stared dully through our thick goggles. Only Reggie was active, and what she was doing made no sense to me at all.
At the north edge of this platform there was a tiny extrusion of rock protruding out into a snow cornice that had been building and accumulating there for years, if not decades. Even in our stupefied mental states, we all knew that this cornice was death—one step there and the weight of a man (or woman) would send one plummeting right through it and all the way down to the Kangshung Glacier on the south side of the ridge.
But Reggie was crawling on her belly toward that stone lip and treacherous snow cornice.
J.C. was the first to realize that we were about to lose our female climbing partner. He pulled down his mask and shouted, “Reggie, don’t! What are you doing? Stop!”
She glanced back over her shoulder at us. She’d tugged up her goggles, but otherwise her face—or the few square inches around her eyes that I could see of her face—didn’t look all that insane. Of course, hypothermia sufferers rarely do when they go into their death antics.
“See that bite taken out of the cornice?” she asked. Her voice did sound a little excited and breathless, but not necessarily irrational.
We looked and then we did see it—about six feet to the left of her rocky diving board to hell.
“So what?” I said. “Come back here, Reggie. Please. Just crawl back.”
“Oh, shut up, Jake,” she said over the wind whistle and low howl. She pointed to the “bite” she’d mentioned. There was about a five-foot-wide arc missing in the otherwise wind-formed and geometrically ruled snow-and-ice cornice.
“Lady Bromley-Montfort is saying that someone could have fallen through there,” Pasang said in his not unpleasant Oxbridge singsong. “Perhaps a year ago.”
“If someone had fallen a year ago,” I said between heavy coughs, “that cornice would have rebuilt itself.”
“Not necessarily,” said the Deacon. “Go ahead, Reggie. Be careful.”
She wiggled her way further out onto the tiny spur of rock—I certainly wouldn’t have trusted my weight to that wee bit of stone overhanging such a fall—and then she pulled her binoculars from where she’d hung them against her back. Looking straight down, she slowly swept the glasses back and forth twice and then froze.
“There they are,” she said.
“Who?” I cried. My first thought was that the Germans were sneaking up on us from the vertical south side of the ridgeline.
“Meyer and Cousin Percival,” said Reggie, her voice flat.
“Certainly you can’t see all the way down to the glacier with those field glasses,” said Jean-Claude.
Reggie sighed, shook her head, and shouted over the rising wind. “They didn’t fall that far and they’re still roped together. The rope caught on a crag projecting out about a hundred feet below this ridge. Meyer’s body is hanging head down on the left side of the crag. Percy’s body is hanging free, turning in the wind, head up, on the west side of the crag.”
“How could Mallory clothesline rope stay intact in such a fall, against sharp rock, for a full year, at this altitude?” whispered Jean-Claude.
Reggie couldn’t have heard him over the wind, but the Deacon did. “Who knows?” he said. Then, loud enough for all of us to hear—“What we have to do now is to figure out a way to get both of them up here before that old rope finally snaps.”
I thought of the Germans with guns in hot pursuit…or perhaps “cold pursuit” would be a better term. Had they reached the First Step yet? The Blind Step rock on the traverse? No matter, they were behind us, and the Deacon had said that Bruno Sigl would never give up. And the Nazi had both a Luger and the Deacon’s sniper rifle. And other armed fascists had been climbing with him.
I decided not to mention the Germans right then. Or to think about them.
“Uncoil the ropes,” said the Deacon. “Reggie, stay where you are. We’ll come to you. Somebody has to be lowered down to get ropes around each of the dead men.”
“I’ll do it,” J.C. said at once. “I’m the lightest.”
The Deacon nodded.
>
I thought, Thank God it won’t be me, and then was immediately ashamed.
The Deacon and Pasang standing, J.C. and I crawling on all fours, we all moved toward Reggie and the north lip of the North East Ridge.
18.
Working out the rope, knots, harness, carabiner, and belay logistics for attempting to recover the two dangling bodies was a tad complicated—at least for weary, oxygen-starved minds laboring to be minimally coherent above 28,000 feet.
First we anchored four ropes to the bollard of Mushroom Rock, whose stone “stem” looked solid enough to tie off several grand pianos with no strain. One of the ropes went to Reggie, who—at Pasang’s and the Deacon’s insistence—had to carabiner-clip her waist harness onto an anchored rope. But watching her lying on the spur of rock, her head and shoulders far out over the breathtaking drop, was still unnerving.
With the belay rope tied off on the bollard and two ice axes near the lip of the cornice keeping the ropes from cutting through the snow and ice at the edge—Pasang was holding two more ropes with the proper lariat loop and knots already tied in—the Deacon and I slowly belayed Jean-Claude over the edge of the long drop. Reggie was our eyes.
“All right…slowly…good…good…slowly…good…he’s about fifteen feet above the spur and the bodies now…good…slow…stop…no a little more…there!”
I was glad I couldn’t see my French friend dangling there next to that rotten-tooth rock spur almost ten stories below with the ancient frayed three-eighths-inch rope caught over it, the rotting cotton line holding two dead bodies slowly twisting in the incessant winds.
“He’s gesturing that he wants to tie Percival on first,” said Reggie. “He needs about six feet of slack and the second rope.”
Pasang blithely walked right up to the edge of the rock spur next to Reggie and dropped the rope needed for tying onto the body. Then he calmly walked back and handed it to me. The plan was for the Deacon to continue belaying J.C., for me to pull up Bromley’s body once J.C. cut him loose from the old rope, and for Pasang to pull up Meyer’s corpse once it was secured. If it was ever secured.
But first Jean-Claude had to get the two extra ropes over the corpses’ heads and shoulders and knotted and firmly secured under their arms.
“Jean-Claude has his feet on the crag and is leaning out almost horizontally to pull in Percy’s body,” reported Reggie.
Even just hearing that description made me a little queasy. We’d learned to trust the Deacon’s Miracle Rope on this expedition—mostly in the heavy loads it had hauled up without snapping while we were using J.C.’s bicycle-pulley device—but no one’s life had depended upon the rope in the way J.C.’s did now. All four of us mountaineers—including Reggie (but not Pasang, whose mountain skills seemed to come naturally)—had come of age in an era when ropes, like Mallory’s and Irvine’s, broke more often than not when any serious load or drop pressure was applied.
“Keep lowering…,” said Reggie, talking to me now because I was to the Deacon’s right and letting out the first 100-foot-long rope that Pasang had handed me, one with a pre-made lasso at its end. “All right, he’s got it…another four or five feet of slack, please, Jake…all right he’s trying to get the loop over Percy and under his arms…Percy’s arms won’t move.”
“Rigor mortis?” I whispered to Pasang, who was standing nearby with the second long strand of rope.
“No, that was over a year ago,” Pasang said softly so that Reggie wouldn’t hear the words above the wind. “Lord Percival has just been frozen solid for a long time.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling very sorry I’d asked.
“He’s got the loop over but is having trouble getting the slipknot pulled tight,” said Reggie.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Deacon’s face covered with sweat. His belay rope to Jean-Claude was tied off to Mushroom Rock, but the Deacon was carrying all the weight over his shoulder and once around his waist. He’d taken all the layers off his hands except for the thin silk gloves that made up the bottom layer, and now I could see blood soaking through the silk.
I admit that I was nervous. The phrase “dead weight” takes on a terrible reality when one actually has to lift a dead person. Nothing on earth seems quite so…heavy.
“All right, Jake…he has Percy’s body tied on…,” said Reggie.
I started to pull on the rope but Reggie shouted “Stop!”
I’d forgotten that J.C. had to finish securing Meyer’s corpse to the new rope belayed by Pasang and only then cut the old rope that had held both bodies hanging there for almost a full year. We’d lose more than the corpses if those four ropes got tangled or crossed, or snapped.
“Jean-Claude’s feet came off the crag,” reported Reggie. “He’s swinging free, trying to get his boots back on the rock.”
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the feeling of swinging freely, on a single rope held by a single man, over a drop of that magnitude.
The Deacon grunted, more from the exertion of the belay, I realized, than in acknowledgment of Reggie’s report. The tug from J.C.’s fall from the crag when I made him lose his footing with my premature pulling on Percy’s rope had been fast, hard, and harsh against the Deacon’s hands, shoulder, and middle.
“All right, his boots are touching rock again,” reported Reggie.
Sweat dripped from the Deacon’s stubbled chin. We’d all been off oxygen for quite a while now. Our rucksacks were stacked against the south side of Mushroom Rock.
Pasang had started lowering the third rope—the rope and lasso for Kurt Meyer—even before Reggie called him forward to do so. When 50 feet or so were played out, he ducked on all fours under my taut rope and then under the Deacon’s line to J.C. so that he’d be to the far left of our line of three busy belayers.
“A little more…a little more…slowly now…,” Reggie was reciting. “There, he has it. Give him another five feet or so of slack, Pasang.”
Pasang calmly did so.
“Darn…,” said Reggie. “He can’t reach Meyer from his half-perch on the crag. He’s going to have to swing out to grab him.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered. Anything can and usually does go wrong when there are multiple ropes dangling in such a confined area.
“Do you need help?” I whispered to the Deacon, who was bracing his boot soles—he’d removed his crampons for this—hard against a little ridge of rock about five feet north of the Mushroom Rock.
He shook his head and beads of sweat flew west in the rising wind.
“He’s swinging…he’s swinging again…he missed,” reported Reggie. “Now he’s pushing off almost horizontally from the crag to try again.”
“Jesus,” I whispered again. I think it was a prayer this time. I realized that I’d come to trust the Deacon’s Miracle Rope in most basic rappel and belay situations, but if the frayed old rope parted before Jean-Claude got the loop tight around Meyer’s body—and if J.C. then tried to hold on to the corpse, as I was sure he would—the weight of the two men, one living and one dead, suddenly would be on the single line that the Deacon was belaying. Even though the end of that rope was tied off to the Mushroom Rock, I doubted if it could hold the doubled weight.
J.C.’s belay rope grew tauter than ever, the line cutting through the edge of the cornice and pressing down hard on our double-ice-axe setup. We’d run multiple lines from those axes to other anchors, and two back to the much-encircled Mushroom Rock bollard.
The Deacon grunted and held J.C.’s swinging weight. The silk of his gloved hands was dyed red now.
“Meyer’s upside down,” reported Reggie. “Jean-Claude is working to spin him around right-side up.”
How can even the Deacon’s Miracle Rope keep from snapping under this pressure? I thought again. Well, we’d see in the next minute or two. In the meantime, I kept a steady but not lifting pressure on the rope running down to Lord Percival Bromley, the man who could have been the sixth Marquess of Lexeter if he’d survi
ved.
“He’s got him!” cried Reggie. “He’s tying the loop off under Meyer’s arms. Now Jean-Claude’s swinging back to the crag.”
The Deacon grunted slightly. The blended rope was stretched so taut that it looked as if he was trying to land a giant marlin with only his bloody hands, arched back, and braced body.
“Jake, Pasang, get ready,” called Reggie. “Jean-Claude is going to cut the old rope now. He has his penknife open.”
I’d found a low boulder-ridge on which to brace my boots—I’d kept my crampons on since I didn’t know if I’d have the dexterity to strap them on again—and now I leaned back, bracing myself for the pull and dead weight to come.
The rope grew taut…but there was very little pull and almost no sense of weight. Had goraks hollowed Bromley’s corpse out the way they’d eaten into George Mallory’s abdominal cavity through the poor corpse’s exposed rectum? Jesus Christ, for Reggie’s sake, I hoped that wasn’t the case.
“Pull!” cried Reggie—needlessly, I thought, since both Pasang and I were pulling in our loads hand over hand. Only the Deacon remained on passive, strained belay. We’d decided before J.C. went over the cliff that we’d get the bodies up before pulling in our living friend—just to keep the various ropes free from tangling, for one reason; to keep J.C. and his belay line free of a free-falling corpse for another reason.
Bromley reached the cornice, and naturally his corpse hung up under the overhang of ice and snow.
“Give me a second,” said Reggie and leaned most of her weight out on the rotten, treacherous, already once-broken cornice, fishing around with her extended ice axe the way a captain’s mate would use a gaff to reach under a boat to bring in a big fish.
She hooked the rope. Percy’s head and shoulders bobbed up into sight, and I pulled for everything I was worth.