With very little daylight remaining, Al then took the camera outside and filmed the view across towards Pumori.
‘Get a panning shot of the platform,’ I yelled ‘and make sure you can see all the shit and the ripped up tents.’
‘Yeah.’
As the light fell, I began to search the rucksack for my headtorch. A first and second rummage failed to find it so I emptied every single item out on to the floor of the tent. No sign. I shifted position, and checked underneath and inside the sleeping bag. Still no sign of the torch. Then I checked every corner of the tent, inside my discarded clothing, and Al checked his side of the tent. Nothing.
I just couldn’t understand it. I was absolutely certain that I had packed the torch in the rucksack mat morning. I definitely remembered checking the two spare bulbs and batteries that were taped to it. But now it seemed to have vanished.
The seriousness of this was far greater than the inconvenience of having no torch inside the tent for the night hours. It ruled out my summit bid completely. Five or six hours of the summit day climb would be through darkness, and without a headtorch I was going nowhere.
I searched the pack again and again, increasingly desperate. Inwardly I cursed myself for this mistake. There would be no spares up here, and trying to borrow one from another expedition would merely put them in the same predicament. How could I have been so careless?
‘Maybe it fell out of the pack at one of the filming stops.’ Al was sounding sympathetic, but I knew he had every right to be angry. My stupidity could adversely affect his own summit bid as well.
I thought through the day. There had been one stop, in the rock section, when I had dug deep into the pack for a battery. Maybe the headtorch had fallen out then.
‘The six o’clock radio call’s coming up. I’ll ask Simon if they’ve found it in your tent down at the Col.’ Al picked up the walkie-talkie and radioed down.
As he talked to Simon, I chewed over the hard reality of the situation. Even if they found my torch, it could not get up to me until the ‘B’ team arrived the following afternoon. Then, unless I could make it through the night to six, there would be too little tent space for us all at five. I would have to go down. A wave of unbearable self-pity swept over me. To lose all this from one tiny mistake? I hated myself for being so fucking sloppy. Where was that torch?
Team ‘B’ had made it safely to the Col and were resting when we called. Simon was pleased to hear that camp five was in good shape but a search of the tent I had left that morning revealed no sign of the headtorch.
Al clicked off the radio.
‘That’s a bummer.’
‘It has to be here.’
I began another search of the tent, shifting every single item down to the end and then sorting through the pile as methodically as I could in the cramped conditions. Nothing.
Then I noticed that the side wall of the tent was folded over. I ran my hand underneath the flap of fabric and brought out the torch. How I had missed it in the earlier searches was beyond belief. I can only assume that my brain was still running at half speed from the oxygen depletion of the climb.
‘Panic over.’ Al lit the stove for another brew.
‘Thank God.’ I was hugely relieved. My chance for the summit had just been reinstated.
We radioed down to Simon again to tell him the torch had been found, then spent the rest of the evening brewing tea and hot chocolate. By 9 p.m. we were preparing to bed down.
Sleeping in the mask was hard to get used to. The Russian apparatus was as uncomfortable as it was ugly, with the restraining straps always digging into some part of the face. The exhaust system was inefficient too, so that small pools of icy liquid collected periodically inside the flange of the mouthpiece. Shifting from side to side in the search for a comfortable sleeping position delivered a quantity of disgusting frigid spittle down our necks.
But no matter how difficult it was to sleep in the mask, the prospect of trying to sleep without it was worse. I passed a restless night, waking to readjust the mask every time it began to slip, and checking the cylinder was still delivering the flow.
The wind also conspired to make sleep elusive, dropping away to a whisper and then sweeping back against the walls of the tents with a huge crack as a new surge of energy ran across the Ridge.
At 5 a.m., I heard the Sherpas moving around outside, collecting snow for their morning tea. By 6 we had our own gas cookers burning. At first light, Al was already poking his head out of the tent to check on the weather.
‘How’s it look?’
‘Mixed. There’s a lot of cloud about.’
‘Can we get up to six?’
‘It’s the wind that’ll stop us if anything. We’ll just have to see how it goes.’
Our preparations were carried out slowly and methodically, checking off each bit of gear as it went back into the rucksack. It is surprising how much mess a two-man tent can get into, and the last thing we could afford was to leave a vital piece of equipment behind. I made a special mental note to check the torch was in place. Then, critically aware of how even the smallest piece of missing equipment could bring us to a grinding halt, I checked it again.
Al gave the tent a last-minute tidy.
‘No point in leaving it in a mess for the others.’
Then we rigged the oxygen cylinders in our packs and left for camp six, climbing with oxygen for the first time.
*
The first obstacle was a steep snowpatch directly behind the tent platform. Even with the trickle of oxygen flowing into the mask, this was a strenuous burst of activity to come so early in the day, frontpointing with the crampon spikes and pushing the ice-axe deep into the snow pack for stability.
Panting for breath at the top of the snowpatch, I checked the visual indicator on the oxygen line to confirm it was working. I was not at all convinced I was getting any air. But inside the clear plastic section of the tube, the indicator was clearly activated.
I had imagined that climbing with the supplementary oxygen would be like climbing at sea level, but this was another miscalculation. The gas definitely helped, but I still felt dizzy and breathless after any sudden moves.
It would have been useful to get into a plodding rhythm but one factor ruled this out: the wind. Within thirty minutes of leaving the tent we were lashed by the strongest winds we had yet experienced. As the North Ridge narrowed, sometimes becoming quite exposed with very long drops down to the East Rongbuk, we were increasingly brought to a complete halt to avoid being bowled over the edge. The power of the blasts was both terrifying and impressive. On two occasions I was physically hurled off my feet, to crash on to my knees among the rocks, both hands clinging tightly to any holds I could find.
After an hour of this battering, the first doubts were playing through my head. How much longer could we continue in these conditions? A morbid fear struck me that Al, seeing me struggle, would decide the wind was too much and call the attempt off. Every time he stopped to clear his goggles or take a rest, he looked out towards the west – the direction the wind came from – appraising the situation. There was plenty of scattered cloud cover, but as yet there was no evidence of a large mass which could indicate a storm. We climbed on.
I was so wrapped up in the process of staying upright that I failed to notice the climber coming down until he was right upon us. It was John, the leader of the Norwegian expedition, on his way down from a disastrous stay at camp six. He was moving awkwardly, clutching his chest and grimacing with pain each time he coughed.
‘What happened?’ Al asked him.
‘It’s my throat. I’ve spent the whole night coughing and I think I’ve broken a rib.’ Even as he spoke, a massive coughing fit overtook him, bending him double in agony. He looked utterly bereft. We all knew he was on his third attempt to climb Everest.
‘What about the rest of your team?’
‘They left camp six this morning … but the winds …’ He turned his face up to th
e Ridge, where scudding clouds were racing past. He shrugged.
‘How about the Austrian? Have you got any news on him?’
‘Not good. He’s in a coma. Cerebral and pulmomary oedema.’
‘Shit.’ We had heard that Reinhard was in trouble at camp six but this was exceptionally bad news.
We stood silently for a few moments as John’s information seeped in.
‘Anyhow. Good luck.’ He picked up his ice-axe and continued his lonely trek down the mountain, the sound of his coughing quickly swallowed up in the wind.
By late morning we were approaching the point where the route leaves the North Ridge and begins to traverse across and up the North Face itself. Here we had to take special care not to miss the right line, as numerous old fixed ropes travel directly up the North Ridge. By the time we discovered the mistake we could be a long way off track and facing a lengthy detour to get to camp six.
Al made the decision on which route to take, and we began to traverse diagonally up a series of snowfields interspersed by bands of crumbling rock. In the post-monsoon period this part of the Face is a lethal avalanche slope, but in the pre-monsoon the snow is compacted and stable. The snow was a welcome change from the problems of picking a way up through the rock.
The wind dropped off rapidly from midday onwards and cloud swept up once more as it had done the previous day. Soon we were climbing in the same murky white-out we had encountered on the route to camp five.
To distract my mind from the effort needed for each step, my old mantra came back: ‘every metre up is a metre less to go’. The words, recycled time after time, had a hypnotic effect, lulling my brain into a near trance as the day wore on. At the top of each snowfield I would stop and try to assess how many vertical metres it had won us. Because we were traversing, the height gain per hour was less than on the Ridge. Thirty minutes of hard progress might equal as little as fifteen or twenty vertical metres.
The steepness of the Face meant we could see no sign of camp six, and for much of the time the summit was also out of view. On the occasions when we were able to see the summit pyramid, my only thought was how distant it still seemed. The traverse was demonstrating in the plainest way possible the sheer immensity of the Face. Hours were passing and the summit was still kilometres of climbing away … and almost a vertical kilometre above us.
Somewhere during that long afternoon we passed the 8,000-metre mark. We were now firmly in the Death Zone, the place named by the Swiss physician in 1952 who described it thus:
Survival is the only term suitable for describing the behaviour of a man in that mortal zone which begins at about 25,500 feet. Life there is impossible and it requires the whole of a man’s will to maintain himself there for a few days. Life hangs by a thread, to such a point that the organism, exhausted by the ascent, can pass in a few hours from a somnolent state to a white death. This depends first on the age of the subject, and then on his reserves of energy. It is now no longer a question of adaptation, but only of the number of days or hours allotted to the strongest persons.
Now the clock was ticking away. We had to move fast but the conditions remained uncertain.
By mid-afternoon a light fall of snow was dusting the North Face and the cloud had thickened above us to become a total cover. With it, my optimism plummeted rapidly. All our good progress would be for nothing if the cloud brought a heavier fall of snow.
But the snowfall vanished as rapidly as it had arrived and with it went the cloud. With just a short distance to go, the skies were clear and blue and the cloud had dropped to the level of the Col.
The problem of the previous day, when my body had switched off as soon as we reached the lowest tents, was uppermost in my mind as we came to the first tents of camp six. I was terrified of hitting another ‘flat spot’ and, even though I was physically exhausted by the day’s efforts, I prepared myself mentally for the extra stage which would take us to our own tent.
I needn’t have worried. The tent pitches of camp six are spread over a large area, but the vertical gain between the top and the bottom tents is not as great as at five. We reached our tents thirty minutes later.
The Sherpas had reached the camp two hours earlier and were already occupying one of the two tents which had been erected during the previous weeks. Like camp five, a stack of oxygen cylinders was arranged here in a neat pile.
Deeply relieved to have made it, I drank my last dribble of juice from the water bottle, took off my pack and lay down to rest. It took me quite a long time to get my breathing rate down, and even longer before my mind was alert enough to notice the incredible location we had reached.
Camp six, at 8,300 metres, is the highest camp in the world and it feels it. The extra 600 metres of elevation gave it a far loftier view than camp five, to the extent that it was possible to look right down the entire length of the Rongbuk glacier during the moments when the cloud wasn’t obscuring it. If it hadn’t been for a layer of haze sitting to the north we might even have been able to see the monastery.
The perspective on the Col was also far more impressive than from five. Because we had traversed quite a distance across the Face, we were now looking down at the western side of the wall, with the avalanche-swept South-Western Face of Changtse behind.
Somewhere at the bottom of that face was the Catalan camp. We had heard little of the Catalans beyond the news that one of their team members had returned to Kathmandu with a suspected heart condition. From our vantage point we could see the hanging glaciers of the western side were far more threatening than those on the east. Furthermore, their route was sitting in the full force of the prevailing westerly wind, whereas our route on the eastern side was to some extent protected.
I didn’t envy the Catalans their task. Their chances of getting anywhere on the mountain were hampered by the western route to the Col and they had virtually no Sherpa support. By contrast we were in a very privileged position, with significant amounts of oxygen and food waiting for us here at camp six.
The two tents were set fifteen metres apart, with the Sherpa tent at the top of a snowfield and ours positioned on a very narrow platform midway down. Both had an awkward lean down the slope, being perched on areas which were not strictly big enough for the floor area of the nylon base. A cat’s cradle of guy ropes pinned the tents down to snow stakes and nearby rocks to prevent storm damage.
Gyaltsen came over from the Sherpa tent to speak to Al.
At base camp I had noticed he was always on the move, with a spring in his step. Here he was walking in slow motion, and obviously very tired.
‘What time do you want to leave tonight?’
Al pulled his oxygen mask aside to reply.
‘Wake up midnight. Leave by two.’
‘Fine.’
Gyaltsen showed us where the cooking gas cylinders had been cached in the snow and then plodded back up the snowfield to join Mingma and Lhakpa in their cramped dome tent.
Al and I sat, too tired to talk, watching the clouds gathering over the Rongbuk. To our right, on one of the rock areas, the ten or so dome tents of other expeditions were gathered. Looking over, there was no sign of life.
A nagging voice in my head was telling me we should get some shots of camp six before the cloud came up and obscured the view. When I asked him, Al dragged himself to his feet to do this without a complaint – which, if he was feeling as utterly drained as I was, showed an impressive level of commitment.
While Al was shooting, it was as much as I could manage to unstrap my crampons, pull off the snow gaiters and crawl into the tent. As soon as I was lying down, both legs suddenly locked again into the spasms of cramp which I had now virtually come to expect at the end of each climbing session. The culprit was my hamstring – the largest muscle in the human body, which runs down the back of the leg from the buttocks to the ankle. Both hamstrings locked rigid until I managed to push back my toes and ease the pain.
In addition to the filming, Al cut some snow blocks for
melting and arranged a small platform of flat rocks in the foyer of the tent for the gas cookers to stand on. After a few false starts with the burner, we had the first precious pans of snow melting slowly away shortly before dark.
The tent interior was stuffed with coils of rope and the prepacked food bags we had selected back at base camp. Ripping my own pack open, I could only wonder at the choice of foods I had made all those weeks before. The tin of tuna salad I had so confidently packed was now enough to make my stomach churn. Just looking at the picture of the fish on the label was enough to bring me out in a wave of nausea. Fish and altitude do not mix very well.
We ripped open Brian’s, Al’s and Barney’s food parcels and found better fare. Best of all were the sachets of muesli, which I added to a mug of hot chocolate and ate warm. Then we heated up a couple of wayfarer meals and forced them down, taking breaths from the oxygen masks between mouthfuls.
Sunset must have been an incredible sight, but all I saw of it was a glimmer of red light reflected in the metal of an oxygen cylinder outside the tent. I was determined to conserve every single scrap of energy and getting out of the tent to take a still photograph was not a priority no matter how splendid it was.
Our main discussion was about the oxygen. With three members of our own team now definitely out of the equation, there was the possibility that we could take an extra cylinder each for the summit push. The pro was that we would be able to set the cylinders on a higher flow with the obvious advantages that would bring. The con was the weight, an extra six kilogrammes – a very serious consideration given the physical demands of what lay ahead. We talked round the issues and decided we would postpone a decision until we packed to leave in a few hours time. (In fact when it came to it Al decided he would take an extra cylinder and I decided against it.)
By 8 p.m., we were into the third round of melting snow, when footsteps approached from outside. A figure crouched down at the entrance to the tent, red-eyed and desperate. It was the Hungarian climber who, with Reinhard Wlasich, the Austrian, had been attempting the North Face without oxygen.
Death Zone Page 20