by Lincoln Hall
Once inside, I called Dylan on the Iridium phone and wished him happy eighteenth birthday. Barbara had not returned from work. When I rang back again later, I spoke to no one, only Barbara’s message on the voicemail that finished with the words “We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”
I thought how nice it would be for all of us to be together, but the thought lasted only a minute.
I left them with a message, the short, sharp sentences of extreme altitude. “I’m feeling strong. The weather’s fantastic. We’ll be leaving at midnight. I love you all.”
From that moment on, my whole being was focused on climbing as far as I was able to climb, and then returning safely.
DESPITE HARRY’S WISH that we start up the fixed rope at eleven thirty, only he and Pemba were ready at that time. It was midnight when I clipped on to the rope, with Lakcha in front and Dorje and Dawa Tenzing behind. I felt clumsy and awkward in my big boots and oxygen mask, and with the hood of my down suit pulled around my face. The doziness, which had been my best attempt at sleep during the few hours I lay in the tent, had not worn off. The first fifty yards were tough, but soon I had warmed up and found my rhythm. By the time we had reached the first sections of steeper rock, I found myself really enjoying the challenge of climbing, with the best part of those first hours being the Exit Rocks, a steep cliff that led us to the Northeast Ridge.
By now we had mingled with members of the Project Himalaya expedition who had left camp before us. We had overtaken a few climbers as they rested at different spots. When they consolidated as a team on the narrow but flat crest of the ridge, Lakcha, Dawa Tenzing, Dorje, and I moved to the front. I thought Harry and his team were still somewhere ahead, but I had no idea if anyone else was up there with them.
The batteries in my headlamp were fading quickly, so I asked Lakcha to unzip the top pocket of my pack and take out the spare. I stopped next to a large boulder on the crest of the ridge, figuring this was something solid against which I could lean while Lakcha found my headlamp. I turned off the fading light and became aware of the beauty of the night. I felt much closer to the stars, although in the scale of the universe they were no closer at all. The darkness was intense, seeming to exaggerate the updraft of cold air from the Kangshung Face.
Unfortunately, at that moment other climbers caught up to us, and I realized that Lakcha was almost blocking the trail, as he looked for my headlamp. We squeezed against the boulder to let the climbers past.
One of them said, “Whatever it is you’re doing, would you do it somewhere else?”
There was nowhere else to stop on this narrow ridge, but I thought it an eloquent sentence in the circumstances. I later learned that Harry had been directly behind me, that these words had come into his mind as a favorite phrase of his. But he had not voiced this or any other phrase, had not removed his oxygen mask. I was discovering that life in the Death Zone was so far removed from the everyday world that telepathy had become an aberrant part of reality.
At last Lakcha handed me my headlamp and we were on our way, just ahead of a few more Project Himalaya climbers. My big worry on this final day to the summit had been that I would get trapped behind a line of many climbers waiting for someone to overcome an obstacle. This was a frequent problem at the Second Step, the hardest part of the climb. And yet here I was, already causing a traffic jam myself. But I had wasted only a few minutes, whereas sometimes climbers lined up for hours at the Second Step. The lines were nothing like Saturday morning at the supermarket. Here, on the roof of the world, four people spending half an hour at the Second Step was enough to ruin the summit chances of the people behind them, so tight are the safety margins on Everest. The maths was easy, even at this altitude.
I was now in the middle of the Project Himalaya team, which was no inconvenience to anyone, provided I kept moving. The height gain along this first section of the ridge was gradual, and when we reached a significant rise, we did not have to slow down because the fixed rope traversed the slope. A trail had been well trodden into the fragmented rock, following the natural strata. We made good speed—if speed can ever be the appropriate word close to 28,000 feet. My new headlamp was bright, but it still illuminated only a six-foot circle around me. I was moving well when suddenly I saw a body beside the trail. I immediately thought of “Green Boots” and David Sharp. Before the death of Igor Plyushkin, Alex had warned us that these would be the first bodies we would encounter.
Green Boots was the name given to a now-anonymous Indian climber who had died on the mountain in 1996. He had died with the top end of his body under a low rocky overhang and only his legs and lower body protruding. I was so startled by the body that I did not even take in David Sharp as a separate entity, until the wave of emotion had subsided and I realized that his body must have been there, too. Seeing Igor’s grave the day before was the first time I had encountered a body on a mountain. All my other dangerous climbs had been on untrodden ground or challenging routes. In New Zealand I had climbed routes where people had died, but the bodies had always been removed.
It was strange to be marching past dead people in the dark, strange enough to make me believe in ghosts. Soon we reached the base of the First Step, junior cousin to the infamous Second Step and the first of the three cliffs that form steps in the ridge, visible from afar on the Northeast Ridge skyline. Several climbers were resting at the base of the First Step, partly because at this point there was enough space to do so but presumably also because this was the first of the acknowledged difficulties of the final climb to the summit.
Lakcha and I kept moving. I could feel a growing tension at the prospect of tackling the First Step, but it proved to be a simple rock-scramble, just on a larger scale than the other obstacles we had surmounted. At the top of the Step, I caught up with three figures, one of whom was Harry. I knew it was him because he flashed his light on me and waved me to sit down. We sat beside each other for a few minutes, saying nothing because of our oxygen masks. Lakcha sat with us. After doing nothing for a few minutes, I began to feel the cold. I felt encouraged by the fact that I did not need to rest.
“What’s happening?” I asked Harry.
“Nothing,” he replied, lifting the edge of his mask. “We’re just waiting for Thomas and Pemba.”
So, if Thomas and Pemba were not here, who were these other two people? It didn’t really matter. We were all here for the same purpose.
“You might as well push on,” added Harry. “You’re going faster than us.”
“Great. We’ll do that.”
Lakcha and I set off immediately, with Dorje and Dawa Tenzing behind us at a slightly slower pace. The ridge had leveled off, but as we reached steeper ground, the trail again followed the rock-strata across the slope. We passed three more climbers sitting on a ledge, and I wondered how many were still ahead of us.
After a few steps I realized why they had stopped. The fault line that exposed the outward-sloping ledge suddenly disappeared. I was not overly concerned because the fixed rope continued across the rock-face. The familiar blue rope was anchored at the blank section, so that when I clipped my carabiner past it, I was in a safer position to clamber across to where the narrow ledge continued. The step across proved to be much easier than it appeared in the darkness. Lakcha had climbed up a few feet to another ledge system, which we followed around to a shallow amphitheater. I immediately noticed someone sitting up against the cliff off to the side, but with all of us wearing oxygen masks, there was no conversation. I shone my headlamp up the rock buttress beyond the amphitheater. Suddenly I realized from ropes hanging vertically down the cliff that we had reached the Second Step, and that no one was climbing it.
Lakcha wasted no time in moving across to the ropes. It was a slight step up into an alcove, which narrowed as it rose upward. This kind of feature is not welcomed by climbers because the holds invariably face downward, rendering them useless. Several ropes were in place, as different climbing parties sought the best option for
scaling the obstacle. I stepped back while Lakcha quickly climbed up and disappeared from view. Then it was my turn, but I did not manage it well. I am a flexible climber, so I decided to bridge the gap with my legs, but I neglected to factor in the limiting effects of my down suit, the tight leg loops of my harness, and the weight of my cumbersome mountaineering boots. When I swung my right foot across, it only scraped the far wall and, for the first time on the climb, I fell. My weight was caught by my ascender-clamp locking on to the fixed rope. I was ten feet above the ledge, with my heart thumping.
Thankfully, the darkness hid the enormous drop beneath me. I was able to haul myself up to a level where my feet were on a narrow flat ledge, and while I was able to balance there, the handholds were very insecure. By moving up, I had shifted my weight to my feet. I reached down to waist level to slide my ascender up above me so that the rope could again take my weight. Unfortunately, the ascender was jammed—when I had fallen and swung to the right, one of the spare ropes had been caught by the clamp. I could no longer move the ascender in either direction. Had I been in a less precarious situation, I would have abandoned the ascender and climbed onward without the rope, but that was much too dangerous to contemplate. Otherwise, I could disconnect myself from the ascender, which was shaped for right-hand use and replace it with my left-hand unit. However, my left-hand ascender was at Base Camp. I slid my wind-protective goggles to my forehead in order to assess the problem—my main concern was that the rope which bore my weight might be damaged.
Time was ticking away, and Lakcha would be wondering what had happened to me. Thinking about Lakcha brought Dorje and Dawa Tenzing to mind, so I removed my mask and called out to them before realizing that they were just below me and ready to come up the ropes. I turned back to the jammed ascender and, in the light from my headlamp, concluded that the rope was perfectly safe. I grabbed the errant rope and jerked it strongly. With the first jerk, it came free and the problem was solved. Still, I was aware that mental processes could be suspect at 28,500 feet, so I reassessed the damage and came to the same conclusion. Only then, with Dawa Tenzing almost at the level of my feet, did I continue up the rope.
I was still panting heavily from the adrenaline surge, so it was an effort to drag myself over the lip of the cliff and onto a steep snowy ledge. It was now an easy matter to climb up the soft snow to a pair of ladders lashed to the cliff. It seemed incongruous to have a ladder as the key to climbing Mount Everest, but no one even questioned it. The shorter of the two had been placed at the upper section of the Second Step in 1975 when a Chinese expedition made the second ascent of the mountain from the north. The first ascent of this twenty-foot-high obstacle by a Chinese climber, in 1960, had taken three hours at the cost of severe frostbite. In 1975 the Chinese had also fastened a tripod to the summit, but it was blasted away by the jet-stream winds within a year. The second and longer ladder had been donated by a client of Russell Brice so that climbing the upper step would become less time-consuming and, therefore, safer. I was thankful for its presence, as I had heard many stories about the Chinese ladder being just that much too short for an easy exit to the ledge above.
The ledge proved to be small, but once I had my ascender attached to the upper rope, I could see the difficulties were over. I looked down to check the positions of Dorje and Dawa Tenzing. Dorje was almost at the top of the ladder, with Dawa Tenzing waiting at its base. A final steep but straightforward snow slope led to the crest of the ridge, where Lakcha was anxiously waiting.
Paradoxically, the crest of the ridge felt much more exposed and, hence, more dangerous because there was no longer a cliff-face in front of me. Nothingness dropped away on both sides. The edge of the darkness was softening, but there was not yet a hint of light. The way was open, the deadly specter of the Second Step replaced by Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the Earth.
Thirteen
THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
BEYOND THE SECOND STEP I had the feeling of walking in the sky. A sudden breeze confirmed we had reached the crest of the main ridge. I could sense the space around me and wondered what could be seen when there was light. I stopped and put a gloved hand over the beam of my headlamp. In the darkness the ring of mountains surrounding Everest was only an amorphous presence below a sky still full of stars. I wanted to see those invisible mountains, just as I had wanted a visual register of the landmarks we had passed. The Exit Cracks, the First Step, Mushroom Rock, and the Second Step were names familiar to me, but my images of them had just been distorted views captured briefly in the narrow beam of my headlamp. A mountaineering instinct deep within linked my safety to my knowing the mountain intimately—the backbone of its ridges, the cold flesh of its snows, the surrounding landscape. I was impatient for dawn and the sights that would come with it.
I dropped my hand from the headlamp and the beam lit my way. Lakcha had drawn ahead, but after my short rest, it did not take long for me to catch up to him. Dorje and Dawa Tenzing were following but at a slower pace because they were breathing a lower flow-rate of oxygen from their tanks. Both had summited Everest in previous years and knew what they were doing. The gradient became gentle again and we seemed to be making good time.
I began to sense that the heavens were losing their blackness. Since leaving Camp Three, everything I had seen of the way ahead had been limited to whatever had been contained within my headlamp’s moving circle of light. When I tilted my head too far to the left or right, the beam vanished into the sky; it did the same when I tilted the beam upward to where I knew the summit must be. But now there was some texture in the darkness surrounding the cast of my headlamp. Within minutes, vague shapes were appearing ahead of me. Most obvious was a dramatic increase of steepness where the Northeast Ridge melded into the heart of the mountain. It was impossible to judge the distance in the fading darkness, but I guessed that the summit pyramid, formed by the convergence of the Northeast Ridge, the West Ridge, and the Southeast Ridge, was only a few hundred feet away.
The line of fixed rope had been running ten feet below the ridge but now began to slant upward. Thirty feet ahead of me, Lakcha was approaching the crest. Against the gunmetal-gray sky to the north, I could distinguish Changtse and the indistinct mass of Gyachung Kang and Cho Oyu. These sights were familiar to me from 1984, as well as from the last two days. Now I was eager to reach the ridge and see the view to the south, across the Kangshung Face and east to the Makalu massif—country I had never seen from the west. I hurried, although of course the view was not going to disappear. When I reached the crest, I could tell that dawn was not long away. I was impatient to look down on Makalu, where seven years earlier storms had shrugged me off its slopes, but the granite pyramid was part of the darkness. A colorless sky silhouetted Kanchenjunga, over fifty miles away on the eastern horizon. The light was coming quickly now, and I could see that gray cottonwool clouds filled all the glaciers and valleys, lifting the giant peaks free from the earth. The Makalu massif took shape, but the main peak was as yet indistinguishable.
As Lakcha and I approached the Third Step, the sky continued to lighten. Sue Fear had told me that the step was straightforward, that the snow slope above was long and tiring but only because of the altitude. She had added that the summit itself lay back beyond the snow slope and was reached by an awkward, circuitous traverse across the top of the North Face. All I could see beyond the step as we drew close to it was the line of blue fixed rope disappearing up the snow slope.
The ridge became very narrow, which put us at the lip of the Kangshung Face. There were a couple of rocks to be stepped around, which required focused attention. While Lakcha dealt with the obstacle, I looked down and across to Makalu, its majestic shape now apparent. To me, 28,765-foot-high Makalu is the most beautiful mountain in the world, a feeling that dates from when, as a young mountaineer, I first saw its dramatic profile in the pink light of sunset. Its magic has never faded for me.
As I looked down on Makalu from Everest, I felt a different kind of
joy. Being above the world’s fifth-highest peak gave me no sense of conquest. Rather, there was a sense of fulfillment now that I could see for myself the classic Everest-climbers’ view of Makalu, an image already sharp in my mind from photos taken by others during the last stages of Everest’s Southeast Ridge route. Although I was high on the North Ridge, the view of Makalu was very much the same. The message that came to me from this glorious sight was that I would climb Mount Everest.
The summit was less than 500 feet above me, and I knew in my heart that nothing would stop me reaching it. Another two or three hours of lung-busting climbing and I would be there. I was already a thousand feet higher than I had been on the North Face in 1984, and my determination to succeed, should the chance ever come my way, had strengthened with each of the twenty-two years that had passed. I was in good shape, with adequate oxygen, perfect weather, and the company and support of three great Sherpas whom I had come to know and trust.
As I took in the view and its implications, my thoughts delayed me. Lakcha continued toward the Third Step. I glanced down the ridge and saw that Dorje was only thirty feet below me. Dawa Tenzing was another hundred feet behind. I raised my hand, my thumb up in encouragement— the only kind of communication possible when wearing an oxygen mask. Then I turned and stepped over the rocks blocking the ridge.
It was only a few minutes to the low cliff of shattered rock that formed the Third Step. With less snow, it may have been more difficult, but today it looked straightforward. Lakcha sat down as I approached and pulled a thermos from an outside pocket on his pack. Suddenly, it seemed like a very good idea to take the weight off my feet. Without removing my pack, I sat on a rock and leaned back in the snow. I unzipped the front of my down suit and pulled my water bottle from one of the large inside pockets. I was pleased that my Black Diamond high-altitude gloves had kept my hands warm enough through the night. The weather was definitely on our side. There was scarcely a breeze, but I was beginning to feel cold, even though I had been inactive for only a few minutes. I wondered if I was cold because I had taken off my oxygen mask to take a few sips of water. Dorje arrived and flopped down into the snow, and a few minutes later Dawa Tenzing did the same. I zipped up my down jacket and tightened its hood around my face. Whether it was inactivity or the few minutes without oxygen, I was ready to get going. As soon as Lakcha stood up, I was behind him, and we turned to face our next obstacle.