by Lincoln Hall
The revelation sparked a rescue mission, the first expression of which was the arrival of the two tired and unhappy Sherpas, one of whom was carrying my pack, now empty except for an ice axe, a full oxygen cylinder, regulator, and mask.
Of course, there were no fjords. The only waterways here had been frozen rivers of ice for millennia. Andrew and Myles had not set off to climb to the summit but had begun the long descent of the mountain as soon as they saw the two Sherpas climbing up to us. The Sherpas had never intended to climb to Everest’s summit that day. Instead, there was the grueling task of bringing me down the mountain. The baton had been passed.
PART THREE
RUNNING ON EMPTY
Twenty
THE DEVIL’S SPADE
AS SOON AS I BEGAN to descend with the Sherpas I was pulled sharply back into the reality of climbing at 28,000 feet. Because I had been on the crest of the ridge all night and had climbed this section in virtual darkness on the way up, I was unaware of the narrowness of the route across the sloping North Face. Immediately, I understood why my Sherpa companions of the summit day had been unable to bring me any farther down.
At this point of the climb, the Northeast Ridge forms a rocky spine, and where that backbone meets the top of the North Face, there is a system of narrow ledges that requires careful negotiation, especially when a climber is in a weakened state. I was able to walk and to clip my carabiner past the anchors, but it was difficult with my frostbitten fingers. During my time at Mushroom Rock I had become aware of my frostbite, but treating it was a task for another time. What I really needed to do was descend as quickly as possible so that my fingers could be thawed out properly. The cold was the cause, of course, but the mechanism of damage was the fluid in my tissue expanding as it froze. That expansion caused the cells to explode, and if that tissue was thawed and then became refrozen, the damage would be much worse. I had now descended less than 1,000 feet from the summit, although the horizontal distance had been twice that far. With another 7,000 feet of altitude descent to Advance Base Camp, I needed to manage my frostbite carefully; if I didn’t, I could lose all my fingers.
And while I could clip my carabiner past the anchor points, it was a slow process, so the young Sherpa in front of me began doing it for me most of the time. Although we were cutting across the top of the face, we were losing height as well, which was good news. What did disturb me was how far we had to descend, and I was already exhausted. At least my mind was processing this information properly, rather than feeding me some crazy hallucination instead. I knew now it was going to be a very long day.
Suddenly, the network of narrow ledges that we had been following came to an abrupt end. Ahead of us was a vertical drop.
“First step,” said the older Sherpa, who was behind me.
I did not understand what he meant, but he gestured at the drop-off and repeated the words.
“First Step.”
This time I got it. We had arrived at the top of the cliff called the First Step. As we were descending, for us it was the last of the three famous steps. On the way up, I had found the First Step to be encouragingly easy. In normal circumstances this would be a simple rappel, but in my weakened condition, the prospect frightened me. Boats and airplanes were long gone. I was completely aware of where I was and what I had to do. But because I was exhausted, it was not only in my physical movements that I had to summon strength; I could not let my mind waste any energy either. Any memories I had of what had happened over the last few days were not accessible to me, but that was not important because my only concern was the descent. When resting at Mushroom Rock, my mind had the time and space to wonder about what the view would have been like on the other side of the “aircraft.” But here I focused on rappeling over the First Step.
Immediate action was called for—I was alert enough to recognize that. I was not going to get any stronger, so the sooner I completed the rappel the better. The young Sherpa attached his descender to the rope and then dropped over the edge. The kind of descender we were using was standard for almost everyone on the mountain. It was known as a figure-8 because the alloy device was shaped like the numeral. There were two ways to attach the descender to my harness. If I wanted to travel fast, I threaded the rope through the larger metal circle, and if I wanted to go slowly, I threaded it through the smaller circle. Once the descender was clipped to my harness, I could not swap from fast mode to slow mode without unclipping the descender and the rope from my harness. This would be a dangerous maneuver because during the swap-over I would not be attached to the rope at all. On this expedition to Everest, every time I had used my descender to rappel, I had used the fast option, mainly because my thick Black Diamond gauntlets provided extra braking power if I needed it. Using the larger circle, I attached my descender, leaned out over the edge, and began to rappel.
The Sherpa had stopped six feet below me, but when I saw the steepness of the drop below him, I knew I was in trouble. I pulled up immediately, just above him, with my head now just below the level of the lip. The older Sherpa squatted above, watching and waiting for his turn.
The problem I now faced was my frostbitten fingers. The cliff beneath me was steep, so all my body weight would be on the rope. Frostbitten flesh has none of the resilience of healthy flesh. If I continued the rappel, with the minimal protection of the thin gloves, the rope running through my fingers would destroy the frozen flesh, giving them no hope of recovery. The damage to my hands would also make it much harder and more dangerous for me to complete a descent that we had barely begun.
I needed to swap my descender from the fast option to the slow one, and the sensible way to do this was to haul myself up the ledge, which I could easily reach. It would be a huge effort.
As I started to move up, both Sherpas asked me what I was doing. I briefly explained my problem.
“No. You must go down,” said the older Sherpa.
“I can’t go down until I change my descender. Mero haat hiung-le kao. Tolu janne ani egdam kartara. My hands have been eaten by the snow. It is too dangerous for me to go down.”
They dismissed my explanation.
I tried again. “I come up only to fix my descender. Then I go down.”
“No, you must go down now.”
“Not until I can fix my descender.”
“We must hurry. You must go down.”
It was a stalemate. They would not let me climb up and I refused to go down. Without the argument, I would have been past the obstacle in five minutes, maybe ten, given my weakened condition and damaged hands.
I explained that I had been climbing for thirty-five years, since before either of them had been born. I had taught hundreds of people to climb and to rappel. I had climbed mountains that no one else had climbed. I knew what I was doing. I needed to move up just for a few minutes, then I would go down.
That speech only made them angry.
The elder Sherpa mocked me and laughed. The younger one started to shout at me. His English was poor and he was in a rage because he obviously felt I had belittled him. But desperate situations require desperate measures. Unfortunately, my desperate measures had only made things worse.
The young Sherpa held my rope tight so that I could not move up at all. His mate laughed at the scene.
I was getting worse than nowhere. I had to remain calm and look for the way out. Then I saw it—to my right was a second rope, a white one, which I could clip my harness to while I swapped my descender. That way I would not have to go up at all.
The Sherpa above saw me reach for the rope. He instantly whipped out a knife and with one savage slice he cut it clean in two. The piece I was holding dropped down onto my hand. He smiled at me triumphantly.
I was absolutely astounded.
At that moment Roby, the Italian, appeared, and he was stunned to encounter the roadblock on the ropes.
“Go down!” he shouted.
“I have to change my descender,” I replied vehemently, but my v
oice was so hoarse that he may not have heard me. “And this Sherpa has just cut the rope!”
Roby glared at the three of us.
“I have climbed Everest without oxygen! I must get down or I will die!” And with that remark, he grabbed a bunch of old ropes and swung down past us, hand over hand.
The young Sherpa was holding the blue rope so tight that there was no way I was going to be able to remove the descender from it and make the vital adjustment. What was so frustrating was that the procedure was normally so simple.
I was not going to give in and sacrifice my hands. I realized there was another way to protect myself.
To the young Sherpa, I said, “I will go down, but I will go down first.”
He grimaced in refusal.
“You want me to go down?” I said. “Then let me go down first.”
“Okay,” said the Sherpa above me.
Now the young Sherpa did what I had wanted to do—he unclipped his descender and put it back on the rope above me. Because he had no need to moderate his speed, he did not adjust it. I realized that he had decided to disagree with everything I said. But I did not want him to sabotage my rappel, which he could have done had he still been beneath me. I readied myself to rappel, and as I began, I pulled the rope across underneath me so that I was slowed by the extra friction as the rope slid across my backside. The technique went a long way to reducing the strain and damage to my hands.
When the young Sherpa saw what I was doing, he immediately rappeled down after me, shouting, “No! No! Stop! Stop!” He was objecting because I was not following the one-method-only procedure he had been taught.
I did not stop until I reached the bottom of the steep section. I had achieved my goal—I had protected my hands—and, as far as I was concerned, our dispute was over. The young Sherpa obviously did not think so, but his companion showed no signs of his feelings.
I had taken my oxygen mask off during our dispute, which must have lasted half an hour, and I could now feel the effects of oxygen deprivation. I took my ice axe from my pack to use as a walking stick and donned my oxygen mask. The adrenaline produced during our altercation had left me feeling drained. My rule at high altitude has always been never to get flustered, but this time I had blown it.
A significant amount of snow had fallen overnight. The fixed rope remained obvious, however, and there was a line of footsteps left by Dan’s team and the Italians from when they had climbed up. Despite the tracks, the deep snow made the going awkward. For what looked like several hundred feet the track was virtually level, cutting across the North Face. I felt impossibly weak and I could walk only very slowly. Every twenty or so steps I had to stop and lean on my ice axe to rest.
Immediately the young Sherpa began to hassle me.
“Fast!” he urged. “Go fast!”
Of course I was going as fast as I could. The fourth or fifth time that I rested on my axe he came and snatched it from me.
“Now you just walk. No rest.”
I objected but to no avail. The Sherpa behind me laughed. I attempted to follow the tracks, but with nothing to help me balance I kept falling onto the snow. When I landed in a drift of deep snow from which it was difficult to extract myself, neither of them would help me up. They smiled and watched me flounder.
I struggled to my feet and begged for my ice axe back. This seemed to be what they wanted, to have me begging. I begged readily—I didn’t care, I just wanted my ice axe returned. But the young Sherpa kept it.
“Go,” he said, waving the axe in the direction ahead.
I staggered onward but grew weaker with every step. In the hope of breathing more oxygen, I held my mask to my face with my hands.
“Fast, go fast,” he said.
I kept walking and I kept falling in the snow, but I could not go any faster. Then he raised my ice axe as if to strike me.
“Yes, go fast or I hit you.”
“No, not that,” I pleaded. “You need to help me, then I can go faster.”
He gave no answer but turned on his radio and talked into it rapidly, smirking and glancing at me as he spoke. It was easy to see that he was bad-mouthing me. That was fine if it kept him from attacking me with my ice axe.
I was falling over more frequently, and I began to wonder if soon I would not be able to get up. I could not bear to think about what might happen then.
I begged them to let me walk in between them, one Sherpa in front, one Sherpa behind, with each of them keeping tension in the rope so that I could use it to balance.
“This way I can go faster . . .” I began again.
The young Sherpa interrupted immediately, saying, “No kissy-missy, sweetheart deals. Just go.”
The two problems I faced were poor balance and the weakness of my legs. The only way I could stay upright for more than a dozen steps was to walk more slowly. By concentrating on each step individually, I could ease my weight onto my leg, which allowed me time to bring my leg muscles into play and to be conscious of my balance. With that leg stable, I could repeat the process. Decades of trekking and climbing with heavy packs had given me very strong legs, which operated as if on autopilot. I used to enjoy running down steep, rugged trails, jumping between levels, watching my feet put themselves where they wanted to go, with me only consciously intervening to avoid a slippery surface, or when instant damage control was needed. But now, with my mental functions impaired by exhaustion and hypoxia, each step through the shallow snow felt like walking on a balance beam.
I trudged onward in this fashion, with my left hand holding my oxygen mask to my face and my right hand free on the uphill side so that I could protect myself when I stumbled. Mercifully, the terrain was level. I would not have been able to take an upward step.
This slower mode of walking was effective, but it riled the young Sherpa. I tried to explain, but he would not listen, and I suspected that he spoke more English than he understood and in these circumstances it made him feel inadequate.
I turned to speak to the older Sherpa. “If I can go slowly, then I can keep going. But if I try to go fast, I fall over. Too much time wasted.”
“No kissy-missy, sweetheart deals,” pronounced the younger Sherpa.
That phrase again. Where did he pick it up? What did that mean? Deals? What kind of deals?
“Go quickly or I hit you.”
Then a cold chill came over me, different from the cold of the snow I had been floundering in. From the recesses of my mind came the warning that Sue Fear had given me about banditry at high altitude. Suddenly I was very, very scared.
The shock drained me and I crumpled to my knees.
He raised the ice axe and swung it at me.
“No! No!” I cried and threw my forearm up to block the blow, but it never came.
“Go!” he said.
I struggled to my feet and staggered forward. I forgot about controlling my legs and my balance, so after only a few steps I stumbled again and collapsed in the snow.
“Go,” he said again, threateningly, as if he were training a dog.
“I can’t. I have to rest.”
“No rest,” he shouted, “or I hit you!”
I shook my head, then he raised the axe as if to strike, but I was too exhausted to lift my arm in defense. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swing at me. This time he followed through and struck me hard across the back of my ribs. I stared in horror as he swung the axe again, aiming at my head. I threw my arm up, and the metal shaft slammed into my upper arm. Instantly, I rolled out of the way.
“Now you go!”
Slowly I stood up, my heart thumping. He was a madman. The blows had been delivered without restraint. If I had not blocked his second swing, it would have whacked my skull and cheek with sufficient force to knock me out. And had I been knocked unconscious in my weakened state, I would surely now be dead.
He stared hard at me, with no regret apparent in his expression.
I was physically drained, but my survival instinct ha
d snapped into action and with it came mental energy. I would have to play my cards very carefully, except that he and his partner held all the aces, all the trumps. It would have to be a lay-down misère.
The young Sherpa took a step toward me, lowering his voice as he said, “You tell no one. You see what happens. You don’t want trouble.”
I watched him carefully and said, “No, I don’t want trouble.”
That would be my key.
“You need to walk fast.”
“I will walk as fast as I can. I do not want trouble.”
The incident had brought clarity to my mind or as much clarity as was possible at this height. I needed to make progress. I needed to avoid angering my tormentor, and I needed to get among some other people as soon as I could.
During this whole episode, the older Sherpa had said virtually nothing, which was far from unusual at these heights, where every breath mattered and speech was a waste of oxygen. His silence was not surprising, but his lack of interest in the tyranny of his young friend could only be seen as complicity. I knew I could not seek from him the voice of reason.
My pace slowed as my body metabolized the oxygen that had accumulated in my muscles while we had “rested.” I was still holding my oxygen mask to my face with my frostbitten fingers in their clumsy lightweight mitts because I was unable to fasten the elastic strap.
The young man came toward me and gestured at my oxygen mask. “You love that mask. Maybe I take it from you and you walk quickly.” He pretended to grab for it and, as he had wished, I jerked away from him. “Too much time with your oxygen.”
Then he weighed the ice axe in his hand and said, “Anyone coming, you say nothing, or I hit you many times.”
My heart sank. A few hits would be enough to stop me from saying anything ever again. I kept walking, then I realized that the threat had real meaning.