by Lincoln Hall
Perhaps one difference was that I had learned never to give up. During my second season among the daunting peaks of New Zealand’s Southern Alps, when I had just turned twenty-one, my partner Matt Madin and I had climbed Silberhorn, an impressive but straightforward peak near Mount Cook. We gained confidence from the ease of our success on Silberhorn and decided to traverse south along the crest of the range to the summit of Mount Dampier, the country’s third-highest peak. All went well at first, but soon the going became tougher.
Hours passed as we struggled up ice that was harder and steeper than either of us had encountered on any mountain during our short mountaineering careers. We had learned to climb in the Australian bushland on granite, which offered the security of superb friction. By comparison, Dampier’s ice was hard, slippery, and dangerous. We thought escape would be easier if we continued upward to Dampier’s summit and then down the other side, but we experienced no joy upon reaching the summit. The descent to the south was just as hard.
The sun was setting by the time we found a low point in the ridge from where we could descend. We dropped down onto the shady side of the ridge above the Linda Glacier. Instantly we were cold, and hurried to find a safe route down the hard snow of the steep face. At least we had left the ice behind. Darkness came all too quickly, and we still had not found a way down. Every time we descended, the slope below us steepened, and as we peered downward with our headlamps, every option looked like suicide. We were exhausted, with our spirits beaten from constantly climbing in a state of intense fear.
Throughout the night we searched for a way down until finally I felt I could go no further. I sat on a ledge that I had dug in the snow with my ice axe and decided that I would die there. I no longer had the strength to climb up to the crest and reclimb the frightening ridge above it. I accepted that this was my last resting point, that I would freeze to this spot.
It was Matt’s turn to scout for a route down, and from near the end of our 165-foot rope I heard him call out.
“I think we can get down here!”
There was an energy in his voice that I had not heard for hours, so I stood up and carefully climbed across to him. The combined power of our two fading headlamps showed that, yes, the face was still steep below us but with a huge mound of avalanche debris piled up against it that lessened the angle and completely filled the huge crevasse that ran the length of the snow-face. An hour later we had descended the avalanche debris and were headed down the Linda Glacier toward Plateau Hut. Twenty-six hours of nonstop climbing had passed between our departure from the hut and our return to it.
Mountain climbers who discover the ways of mountaineering by themselves, rather than by taking guided climbs, find themselves in extreme situations. It is through those narrow escapes from death that climbers learn their limits. At 4:00 A.M. on Mount Dampier’s East Face, I had given myself up for dead. It was a serious misjudgment that could have cost us our lives, if Matt had listened to me. The lesson I learned that night was that as long as you can keep moving, you should do so, because you will never know exactly how much you still have left to give.
On several occasions since that night, I have had to dig deeper into myself than I did on Dampier, every time extending my boundaries. We all have survival instincts, but I believe that when those instincts have been tested to the edge there is a resonance within a hidden level of consciousness which allows the energy you need to be pulled from somewhere. On Everest, as nowhere else, I had been determined to survive. Hallucinations were dancing through my mind, but beneath them was a commitment to come home. Perhaps in my case that commitment extended beyond death.
The natural forces on Everest can destroy every last shred of life, and I was lucky to have been spared that maelstrom. The elements could have been much crueler to me on the night that spanned May 25 and 26. Even so, how could I be alive? I can’t answer this to my satisfaction, and I don’t expect to until I have recovered properly and have had time to explore what happened. In the meantime, I rely on Tibetan Buddhism, where there is an understanding that there are eight levels of death. Judging from the criteria, I passed through the first two of these.
THERE IS A CYNICAL belief among the less informed that consciousness is an entity that is either present or absent and is therefore impossible to manage. Psychologists know that mental activities can take place at a subconscious level, without our awareness. Tibetan Buddhists understand that the subconscious mind has many levels, all of which can be explored through meditation.
Meditation is commonly thought of as a form of relaxation, a calming of the mind, but that is only the beginning. Meditation is the essence of Tibetan Buddhism. It is like exercise, in that you can take a walk in the park or you can be an Olympic gymnast. It can calm your mind, improve your sleep, or disempower your anger. You can also utilize meditation to explore the very nature of your mind. The high lamas of Tibetan Buddhism use meditation to examine the nature of reality. Although a long-time student of Tibetan Buddhism, I remain at the stage of learning to understand my mind. There are many Buddhist meditative practices that can be taught only by a lama initiated into a particular rite, but through that rite, students can experience different levels of consciousness. These are windows into a different aspect of reality.
On Mount Everest in 2006 I chose to meditate at high altitude, generally when I woke in the middle of the night and did not feel like reading. These midnight meditations were times of stillness and may have helped build the framework that kept me alive.
Meditation and hallucination are, effectively, opposites. Meditation is a stilling of the mind where thoughts no longer have control, while hallucination is the mind desperately scrambling for a foothold in a brain that is no longer doing its job properly.
Hallucination was my friend on the mountain. Cerebral edema had me in its grasp and was guiding my behavior, but my subconscious mind was still active. It was my subconscious that threw up solutions to the gaps in my conscious perception. When my sense of balance was compromised, my subconscious offered me a solution by putting me on a boat. The physical reality of being perched on a narrow ridge of the world’s highest mountain—and of knowing that my balance was out of order—would have been too scary to contemplate. My misperception did not lessen the danger, but it may have prevented me from panicking. As the morning sun warmed me and Dan’s oxygen set resuscitated thousands of brain cells, my subconscious offered me the concept of an airplane because this adequately explained why I was at the cruising level of a jet.
However, not all of the interpretations offered by my subconscious were comforting. It seemed that once my mind was tuned to fear or danger, there were two directions it could take. One of these was the lifesaving reversion to an alert state; the other was a sinking into paranoia. I had experienced alertness when climbing down unroped from the Third Step, and again when the two Sherpas whom Alex had directed to escort me down the mountain refused to let me adopt a safer method of rappeling. The fear of damaging my hands to the point where they could no longer be of use had sparked that particular return to clarity.
But paranoia had kicked in after the Sherpa beat me with my ice axe. I became convinced that the pair of them wanted to rob me and were prepared to kill me to achieve that goal. There was some logic to support that belief—neither of them helped me to my feet at any of the many times I fell down; nor would they listen to my opinions about how best to negotiate obstacles. My paranoia may have been irrational, but my fear was certainly justified. The blows delivered by the young Sherpa were witnessed by the Italian Marco Astori, who descended the First Step after the three of us. In Kathmandu, Barbara photographed the bruises and Mike filmed them by chance during my question-and-answer session with the Sherpas at the Radisson.
It is possible that Alex asked the two Sherpas to do whatever it took to bring me down, although he would have been horrified to think that they would hurt me. Their intimidation certainly motivated me to keep moving when I thought I couldn�
��t. The unfortunate irony was that, had they let me walk between them with the rope pulled tight, as I had suggested, we would have made much faster progress.
Perhaps the Sherpas themselves were not functioning normally. Certainly they did not behave in the considerate and professional manner of every other Sherpa I have worked with over almost thirty years. Ang Karma was shocked when I showed him my bruises. All he could say was that not all Sherpas were good Sherpas.
However, after my meeting at the Radisson’s rooftop bar with all the Sherpas who had been with me on the mountain, I realized that this horrible event could not be adequately explained by the simple matter of branding the two Sherpas who bullied and threatened me as bad Sherpas. In my worst throes of cerebral edema, when Lakcha, Dorje, Dawa Tenzing, and Pemba struggled desperately to drag me down from just below Everest’s summit, I behaved irrationally and struggled against their efforts to save my life. And while the two bullying Sherpas were deliberate in their abusive actions and seemed to take pleasure from tormenting me, who am I to judge their actions when my own had been so reprehensible only twenty-four hours earlier? The best course of action was to regard everything as water under the bridge, all resentment and confusion washed away. And while I am still shocked at what happened, I now think of the incident dispassionately, and number it as one of many close scrapes with death during those unbelievable two days.
WHILE I WAS ON the mountain, my hallucinations had seemed to be either comforting or menacing, but I came to realize later that there had been a third category. Everyday consciousness identifies only life or death—not the passage in between—which means the only way to process the event of dying is through an altered state of consciousness.
My experience with the cloak took on new meaning after a Buddhist healer referred me to “The Song of the Pearl.” The story dates back to the writings of Thomas, an apostle of Jesus. It describes a journey, a quest, and, most important, a cloak. At the completion of the quest the traveler is welcomed home and enfolded by a luxurious cloak, “the splendid robe of glory.” Even in my altered state of consciousness, death remained too abstract to be directly embraced or rejected, so its all-encompassing finality was represented by the cloak. My interpretation of this is that I had been drawn into the first and second levels of death, as described in the Tibetan texts, and that the scene on the Polish hill took place at a level of consciousness where my mind could still intercede. From here I was able to turn back from my spiral through the levels of death. By returning the cloak I had chosen to continue to battle for my life.
ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN at altitudes above 27,000 feet knows how desperate it is to survive at those heights. By normal standards, climbing at extreme altitudes is very slow, even when using an oxygen apparatus, so invariably climbers set out for the summit of Mount Everest in the middle of the night. Vision is limited by the bulky oxygen mask and by the narrow beam of a headlamp. Speech is also difficult because of the masks, and in any case, every breath is too valuable to be wasted on words. There is a fear of the unknown in a strange place where anonymity is the norm. Figures by the path are either resting or resting in peace; often it is impossible to tell which. Sometimes the figures are not sure themselves, and their slide from life to death can pass virtually unnoticed.
My name has become irrevocably linked to that of David Sharp because, ten days apart, both of us were thought to be dead but then shown to be alive. The big difference was that when the sun rose and warmed me, I was given drinks and oxygen by Dan Mazur and his team, and from that point I was able to walk. When the sun rose on David Sharp, it did little more than show just how close to death he was. Efforts to help him were made by several people, and some sat with him in tears, each of them realizing that his death was inevitable. With the difficult terrain, the capabilities of the climbers on the mountain, and the states they themselves were in, rescue was impossible.
The media soon learned that forty people had walked past David Sharp in the earliest hours of May 15, as he lay alive but unmoving on the trail, and that he was dead by May 16. There was an outcry against the heartless ambition of climbers who would tag the top of Everest at any cost, including the price of the life of another. David himself was criticized, from afar, while he was dead or dying, for wanting to tackle the mountain on his own terms, in a simple, unencumbered way.
My own survival led people to think that David Sharp’s death could have been avoided, but there were many differences between our two situations. The view of the press was simplistic: I was rescued, therefore I survived; but David Sharp was not rescued, therefore he died.
In fact, my rescue took place above 28,000 feet, when Lakcha, Dorje, Dawa Tenzing, and Pemba brought me down from near the summit to Mushroom Rock. These men gave me the opportunity to survive. That opportunity was then extended by Dan, Andrew, Myles, and Jangbu, who stopped to help me and gave up their summit chances. The subsequent “rescue” by the two Sherpas was beyond the control of Dan and his team, and proved to be more dangerous than no rescue at all.
As anyone who has floundered in deep water would agree, when you yourself are close to drowning, it’s near impossible to save someone so exhausted and full of water that they can no longer float. In the case of David Sharp, there was no mountaineering equivalent of a surf lifesaving team. The most popular alpine climbing destinations in the world have trained rescue squads, but in the high Himalaya—the world’s most dangerous mountains—there is none.
David’s death was certainly a tragedy. Years ago I spent hours next to an injured climber, waiting for a chopper to arrive and airlift him from the base of the cliff. The man was in a coma, and I was unable to do anything for him; nor could the climbers with me. At least we were living presences by his side. Had I been able to sit for that same number of hours with David Sharp high on Everest, I might well have died myself—that is how marginal life is up there. Above 27,000 feet you can easily die when doing nothing, which is why some call it the death zone.
There was what I would call immoral, sensationalist reporting about the death of David Sharp, and scapegoats were found and lynched in newsprint and newsreel. Even my own situation, with its happy ending, was manipulated for dramatic effect to make better television. One of the problems was that the mainstream media took most of their information from a few Web reports from climbers at Base Camp who had little concern about the accuracy of their words. What they said was treated as fact and interpreted by the press as it wished. This hype meant that the press expected my story to showcase conflict between me and Alex, and me and the Sherpas who could not revive me. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In Kathmandu an Australian television crew interviewed me and Barbara for a segment to be broadcast on the Channel 7 show Today Tonight. At the time of the interview, I had thought that everything had gone well, with the drama of my exploits requiring no embellishment.
One of the questions Today Tonight had asked was: “Did you know that Alex told the Sherpas to leave you for dead?”
“Yes,” I had replied, without any indication of distress or disapproval.
However, the editor or segment producer had spliced in a different answer, one that I had given to a completely different question, presumably because they wanted some extra drama.
The first I knew of this was back in Australia, when Barbara, Dylan, Dorje, and I were watching a videotape of what had gone to air. There was footage of climbers in the mess tent at Base Camp listening to a radio conversation between Alex and the Sherpas.
It began with Alex saying, “But now Lincoln is very bad. If possible, send one Sherpa up to help Lincoln. He is near dead also.”
Next came voiceover from the interviewer, with footage of Alex at his telescope peering at the mountain.
“This, we are reliably informed, is the voice of expedition leader Alex Abramov from Everest Base Camp, instructing the Sherpas to leave Lincoln and return.”
I was now on camera being interviewed with a surprised exp
ression. Hesitantly, I said, “Okay . . . That is news to me. . . .”
Again there was voiceover from the interviewer: “This is the first time Lincoln has been made aware of Abramov’s orders.”
But I knew from Alex that I had been declared dead. My comment had concerned another issue altogether, and I immediately told my family as much. The question to which I had actually responded, with obvious surprise, had been: “Did you know that Alex told the Sherpas to cover you with stones?” This was a totally different issue, and I had been stunned to learn that my death had been so definitive that a burial of sorts had been arranged.
“You know the man well,” said the interviewer. “You must be pretty disappointed in hearing him say that. You’re sitting here alive and well, admittedly with a bit of frostbite.”
“Look . . .” I began.
But the interviewer threw words at me.
“Shocked? Angered? Offended?”
“I guess I’m a little bewildered,” I said, meaning that I was bewildered to learn that a pile of stones was to have been my grave. “I need to talk to Alex about that.”
“I would think so!” pronounced the interviewer, and the audience would have thought that I was bewildered because I had been left for dead.
At the time of the interview, Alex had not yet told me about the burial plan, which in the end had turned out not to be feasible or indeed necessary.
Obviously, the truth was not being allowed to interfere with a good story. They already had the good story, so I assumed that they had wanted to convey a sense of conflict between Alex and me or that he had attempted to keep the truth from me—neither of which had any basis in fact.