by Lincoln Hall
Barbara then rang Louise Southerden, who was acting editor at Outdoor Australia during my absence, so that she could spread the word among my workmates. Her last call was to Greg Mortimer and his partner, Margaret Werner, at Aurora Expeditions. Greg picked up the phone and whooped with delight when he took in the news. He ran downstairs and excitedly told everyone in the office that I had summited Mount Everest. As my closest friend, and one who had been through the 1984 expedition with me, Greg understood more than anyone else the significance of my climb.
Barbara knew that those few calls would send the news rippling through different and sometimes overlapping networks, and although many of our friends and family members would have liked to have known immediately, Barbara did not feel like talking about it anymore. She only wanted to spread the news when she could add that I was safely back down at Base Camp.
IN TIBET, everyone had finished packing. Those with nothing else to do spent their time outside taking their last photographs of Base Camp and of their fellow climbers. Others, constantly hungry after the huge demands of the climb, were in the mess tent drinking cups of tea or coffee and attempting to get to the end of the seemingly endless supply of biscuits.
Maxim had passed on the news that Thomas had been forced to turn around 150 vertical feet below the summit. He was descending well, with Harry, Passang, and Pemba guiding him down.
Mike, Richard, and Christopher were occupied in their own ways, but for the next few hours each of them carried a walkie-talkie. They were relaxed and realized that it might be a while before they heard from me. It was a beautiful day, and they could see no reason why I would not be descending safely with my Sherpas as company.
THAT EVENING Simon Balderstone dropped off his son Fergie at football training, then went to a nearby café in the Sydney beachside suburb of Dee Why to work on a concept document for politician Peter Garrett. Before becoming involved in politics and indigenous issues, Simon had been a journalist for many years. His journalist mates knew he was chairman of the Australian Himalayan Foundation and realized that he was the best local source for information about David Sharp’s prolonged death on Everest, and so for a week now he had been fielding calls. The debate had moved away from David Sharp himself to Mark Inglis and the remarks attributed to him at the time when David was still alive. One such call came through from Sydney Morning Herald journalist Phil Cornford. Simon pointed out that inaccurate secondhand information from dubious websites had been picked up by the media and conveyed, thirdhand, as truth.
“There’s no proper research here, mate,” he said to Phil. “But I can tell you some breaking news I heard direct from Base Camp today. Lincoln Hall summited this morning.”
Six other Australians had reached the summit of Everest as well, but Simon just happened to have details about my climb. Phil took down the details, saying that he would include a couple of paragraphs about me. And so it was that the story of my seemingly successful ascent of Everest was launched by the media on the back of David Sharp’s demise.
OUR HOUSE IS ON the edge of a wilderness, which means there are many kinds of wildlife but no broadband Internet connections. Our phone line had been “split,” giving us one line for calls and another for the Internet. But when Barbara arrived home two hours after leaving school, one line was taken by Dylan’s computer and the other by Dorje’s, so she was unable to check the phone messages. She prepared dinner, and after the meal she shooed the boys off-line. The only message was from my sister Julia, demonstrating the network effect. Barbara returned the call, then she decided to ring our close friends Iain Finlay and Trish Clark, whom I had taken to Everest Base Camp in 1982. While Barbara spoke to Iain and Trish, a call-waiting tone announced that someone was ringing her, but she allowed it to go to the voicemail. Iain and Trish were a couple with an emotional take on life, so that when they were up, they were ecstatic—which was how they were when they received the news. Julia had been more cautious.
By the time Barbara had hung up the phone in Wentworth Falls it was after 7:30 P.M. Tibet operates on Beijing time, although Beijing is two thousand miles east of Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. Consequently, when it is 7:30 P.M. in Sydney, it is 3:15 P.M. in Nepal but 5:30 P.M. in Tibet. By that time in the afternoon on May 25, Advance Base Camp on the East Rongbuk Glacier would be in shadow, but high on the Northeast Ridge the sun would still be shining.
Fifteen
FADING LIGHT
TIME SOMEHOW FEELS DIFFERENT on the summit of Mount Everest. As the air thins almost to nothing, time seems to thin as well. Watches and multifunction altimeters tick over at the same rate, but time remains only loosely connected to its measurement. Sure, the process is the same—when I stepped onto the summit and checked my watch, it read 9:00 A.M.; when I was ready to leave, it read 9:20. Yet I knew about the slippery quality of time at extreme altitude. The beauty can be so mesmerizing that huge chunks of time—perhaps half an hour or more—can pass themselves off as five minutes. When beauty of all kinds is absent, the bone-numbing cold of a mountain’s highest slopes can convert a five-minute block into an hour of suffering. When disaster looms, time becomes immeasurable.
At this point, I spoke to Alex, letting him know that we had summited and were about to head down. I knew all about the urgency of descent. It was a very long way down to the North Col, which is where I would feel safe. I knew that on this route there were time-wasting bottlenecks where less competent climbers would struggle with minor obstacles the rest of us found easy. It was the danger of those human traffic jams that made me decide to head down as soon as I saw the other team of climbers ascending. The longer you spend up high, the more likely you are to stay up there forever.
Moving as quickly and as carefully as I could, I led the way. It was a huge relief to be descending, no longer working against gravity. For the nine hours since midnight, in this outer-worldly place where the air was so thin, gravity should have allowed us some kind of break. But the world only works like that in dreams.
The downward path was easier, yet nothing could hide my tiredness. Each of the last three days above the North Col had demanded a huge output of effort. During that time I had barely slept. I had no appetite for food and could not stomach the amount of fluid I needed to drink. With the summit in the bag, the impetus of striving for the mountain’s intangible Holy Grail was lost. Survival was now the driving force, but strangely, survival was not as powerful a motivator as summit fever, the force that keeps climbers struggling upward against all odds.
The long, routine, fixed-rope descent ahead of us provided me with a sense of security, but in reality there were many places along the rope where a fall would be deadly. I was aware of the dangers but still expected to make good time because most of the terrain was straightforward.
The strategy of coming down the final ice traverse before any more climbers headed up toward the summit meant we avoided the first possible bottleneck. As we reached the broad, flat area at the end of the ice ridge, the other climbers followed our upward tracks. The change in direction at this one-way passage was as smooth as if controlled by traffic lights. No words were exchanged, only a feeble wave at most. In this most inhospitable place every nonessential action was avoided. We had stepped aside and now busied ourselves with a few quick tasks—each taking a drink, Dawa Tenzing snapping a photo of me with my small Olympus, Lakcha replacing my almost empty oxygen bottle with a full one from his pack.
We then clipped on to the rope and began the steeper descent of the rock-face. We chose to climb down the broken rock rather than rappel because it took less energy. The climbing was straightforward and secure, thanks to good handholds and ledges big enough for an entire boot. At one point I misjudged the distance to a ledge and overstepped it, falling two feet to the next ledge. At that moment more climbers appeared, intent upon climbing up past us. I stepped down onto a rock shelf, where there was more space. As the climbers moved across in front of me, I looked down at the two bodies that lay not far below amon
g the ruins of their tent, the same two that had shocked me an hour earlier. Absolutely nothing could be done, but I was triggered into moving again to get away from these dangerous heights as quickly as I could.
We followed a sequence of ledges, descending gradually until we reached a long ledge that took us to the edge of the snow. A well-trodden path led us across the snow, below the vertical rock buttress, and out onto the exposed slope of the snow triangle that I had scrutinized so attentively through Alex’s telescope from Advance Base Camp. I was pleased to reach the first anchor-point on the snow triangle because from here the fixed rope led directly down the forty-degree slope all the way to the Third Step. We would be able to lose height quickly because the slope promised easy rappeling.
But sometimes promises are broken. My harness was working itself loose, a problem that had developed through the night and now became inconvenient. My thick gauntlets made the job of tightening the straps difficult, but I managed some improvement. I clipped a carabiner on to the rope and set off. The relief I had been feeling at the prospect of easier terrain now seemed to transform into a huge sense of lethargy. I descended 150 feet with my arm wrapped round the rope to provide friction. At the next anchor-point I felt sleepy but recognized the need to descend the rope in a more secure fashion. I attached my descender to the rope to guarantee more controllable friction and, in this way, managed to rappel the next section of the line. But then I needed to collapse in the snow.
Lakcha urged me to hurry, and I expect I did my best to do so. It was at this moment that the slippery, erratic nature of time at altitude manifested. I had been acutely aware of the need for speed, and yet two hours quickly escaped me.
My awareness of time clicked in again when I was near the bottom of the Third Step. No longer could the Sherpas push and pull me down the mountain—which must have been what happened during those hours—because the terrain suddenly became more demanding. Fortunately, I responded almost instinctively to the different terrain, and the response was one of fear. This was enough to trigger me into pulling myself together, for this short section at least. I had no way of judging the difficulty of the drop, as the slope plunged away very steeply beneath the rocky section. Any mistake would have horrible consequences.
The only person I was aware of was Dawa Tenzing, who stood four feet above me on the rope. With his descender in place, he was ready to rappel, but because I was beneath him, I needed to go first. The steep section called for fifteen feet of full-body-weight rappeling, which in itself was not a problem. The problem was that Dawa Tenzing was also a few feet to my left. If I threaded my descender on to the fixed rope and put my full weight on it, Dawa Tenzing would be pulled off balance. The angle of the rope above him and its slackness meant that he would tumble down on top of me, knocking me off the edge before he could arrest his uncontrolled rappel.
I explained this inevitable dynamic to him and suggested that he unclip his descender so I could use the rope without pulling him down as well. He looked at me blankly, obviously unwilling to unclip from the rope that was his only lifeline. Again I explained the dangerous outcome if I were to put my weight on the rope while he was still attached to it. Yet he refused to unclip. I suggested that I detach from the rope and let him rappel first, but he objected to this idea even more vehemently. I suggested that he take two steps to the right so that he would be directly above me and hence would not be pulled off balance when I rappeled. Again he refused. Any of these options would have made for a safe and smooth descent.
Yet Dawa Tenzing could not or would not be convinced. Alex and his team had obviously trained their Sherpas to follow a set of “standard operating procedures,” not one of which dealt with our current circumstances. As a last resort, I told Dawa Tenzing that I would unclip and climb down unroped.
“You must not!” he said. “You must not!”
“Don’t worry. It’s only a short way, then I’ll clip back on.”
Again he insisted that I stay on the rope, but his unwillingness to consider the options had left me with no choice, so I unclipped my ascender.
Although I told Dawa Tenzing not to worry, I was certainly scared as I lowered myself over the lip. The drop was nothing more than some angular boulders stacked on top of each other. Because the biggest boulder was uppermost and overhung the others, I was unable to see what lay below. I stretched my legs downward and felt for footholds with my feet, but I could not judge how large or solid they were. My hands felt as if they were going to peel away from the holds due to lack of strength, so I moved quickly. I found a good handhold to my right, a rock ledge for my left foot and another for my right, then I was down.
I was unaware that minutes previously Dawa Tenzing had witnessed me emerging from a delirious state. He must have been startled when I proceeded to give him immediate and lucid instructions to perform what he considered to be dangerous actions.
I called for him to descend, and he quickly rappeled down. Straightaway I clipped on to the rope. Any grave concerns he may have had about my mental state were no longer relevant, as we were both past the obstacle and safely attached to the rope. The short rocky section ahead looked ridiculously easy from below and had posed no great obstacle during the ascent. Had I turned my mind to my own welfare, I would have realized I was not seeing the world through my usual eyes.
The steep snow slope below the rock was no longer frightening. I could see the fixed rope lying on the snow at my feet and leading across to the gentler slope of the main ridge, a half-dozen strides away. But as I looked in that direction, I was stunned to see that Pemba had appeared, as if out of nowhere. He was at my level, with no oxygen mask, holding on to the fixed rope.
I removed my mask as I approached him. “Are Harry and Thomas behind you?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “because Thomas is dead.”
I was standing right next to him, so there was no mistaking his words. I was stunned motionless for a moment, then I hugged him and began to sob on his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
But it was not okay. Pemba spoke good English, but he did not have the words for this. He did not want me to grieve so openly. He wanted me to be strong.
From that moment I don’t remember what took place. I was running low on energy at all levels, and I certainly did not have the emotional energy to deal with Thomas’s death. Lethargy overcame me again, and again I had no awareness of the passage of time. And while I was mentallyabsent from whatever was going on, Pemba, Lakcha, Dorje, and Dawa Tenzing dragged me down the slope. From my own experience of rescuing climbers suffering from cerebral edema, I can imagine what a delirious, unaccommodating person I must have been—staggering a few steps, collapsing in the snow, muttering nonsense, refusing to cooperate.
Shortly before four o’clock, the five of us reached the top of the Second Step. Seven hours of descending had brought me only 500 vertical feet below the summit, with half of that distance gained thanks to the unceasing efforts of the Sherpas. There were other Sherpas present at the top of the step, but I remembered none of them. Perhaps they were from another expedition; perhaps they were simply unrecognizable in their down suits and oxygen masks. My harness had worked itself loose again, and Lakcha helped me tighten it. I was rigged ready to go, but I slumped onto the slope to rest.
Immediately Lakcha said, “No, you’ve got to go! You’ve got to go!” He kept saying it, so with his help I hauled myself to my knees and then to my feet. The cliff was vertical, which meant there was no room for mistakes. I checked my harness, my descender, and the rope—everything was in order. At least I could manage that much. Then I started to rappel.
The drop-off begins with a short snow slope. Almost immediately, I was going faster than expected, so I brought myself to a stop. At the lip of the cliff, where the snow slope finished, I faced the choice of climbing down the ladder or rappeling the cliff. I balanced on the top rung of the ladder, and for an indefinite time I contemplated the cho
ices. Perhaps it was my inability to choose that jammed both the workings of my brain and my ability to relate to time. Apparently, I rappeled down the ladder, a third, more time-consuming option, but one that sidestepped the need for me to make a choice.
Later that afternoon I was woken by a voice speaking English. I had spoken very little English since passing Harry and Thomas just above the First Step at about 4:00 A.M. When I’d needed to speak since then, it had been in my broken Nepali. My mind began trying to identify this out-of-place voice.
Suddenly, I realized it was Peter Adamson. I was always ready to listen to what Peter had to say, so I forced myself to wake up more fully. I was lying on my side, wedged into a cleft in the rock and attached to a rappel rope. The rope took enough of my weight to stop me from slipping out of the flared cleft. Peter was out of sight, but his voice came from a rope that dangled down from higher up. My good mate Peter was someone who always knew what to do when in a fix. In fact, the aim of his company, Adventure West, was to show people how to find win-win answers to lose-lose situations.
Others might say that I was currently facing a lose-lose situation, but Peter was here and he always found a solution. I could not have asked for a better person to help me. None of the options looked good, but at least I now knew that I was on the side of a cliff in Australia. More precisely, I was on a volcanic pinnacle rising out of a patch of Queensland tropical rainforest, surrounded by sugarcane plantations on the coast north of Mackay. I had been here many times before with Peter, and it was very likely that Tenzing Sherpa was with him as well. I had done more rappeling and climbing with Tenzing than with any other Sherpa, our adventures split between the Himalaya and Peter’s human resource development courses.
Someone was speaking in Nepali, but it was not Tenzing. Peter was calling me insistently. I was in a tough spot, but at least I was in the shade and out of the hot North Queensland sun.