Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  High oxygen flow, a dribble of juice from the only unfrozen bottle Quinn and Dawa could muster between them, and a handful of ibuprofen seemed to perk the lad up a little.

  Quinn hoped it would be enough as he moved away to radio Sarron that they were about to head down.

  Hearing Quinn’s call sign, the Frenchman immediately responded with another tirade of insults.

  “Shut it,” Quinn spat back into the radio, his patience exhausted. Turning his back firmly on the boy, he added in a quieter voice, “I suggest, Sarron, that you save your crap for if we get down, and use your energy to focus on the word if. We are talking about the boy’s survival now, not his bloody fingers. You need to get to work on mobilizing all the help you can get for us from anyone you can find up at High Camp.”

  There was a long silence followed by a slow, precise reply. “Okay, Neil Quinn, so be it. I will do what I can for the sake of the boy, but understand me, and understand me well: if it is as you say then this is a disaster for me, and your problems will most definitely not be over even if you do make it down.”

  Quinn switched off the radio. He’d done what he could with Sarron.

  Standing there, he instead took stock of himself for the coming descent. He was cold, slightly too cold, in fact. Summit-tired also, that was inevitable, but reasonably fit and lucid now that he had his own oxygen system back. Sucking in some more deep breaths, Quinn tried to run some mental estimates on how much oxygen they had left between them on the summit and cached further down the ridge at Mushroom Rock. A precise answer eluded him—maybe not so lucid—but he thought it was enough.

  He looked out from the summit. The cloud that earlier had been hanging lower down the North Face had thinned. To his left, Changtse peak was now almost totally clear. Beyond it, he could see clearly down into the widening valleys of the Rongbuk Glaciers, highways of broken white ice and rocky brown moraine that curved away from the mountain like wide rivers of foamy, milky coffee. They were all good signs that the stable weather was going to hold. He looked back up and across to the huge mass of Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest mountain in the world and, still further, to a white bump on the curving horizon, Shishapangma, the highest mountain in Tibet. He had climbed both.

  Will I do so again or will this be the day when I don’t make it down?

  The unwanted question shocked him. Quickly turning away from the two mountains to put such doubts from his mind, his eyes trailed down the Northeast Ridge. As he did so, the cold made him shudder violently, or was it the thought of having to get the boy all the way back down that narrow path of loose rock, slick ice, and broken snow? It had never appeared more exposed or treacherous.

  Shit, this is going to be a difficult descent.

  From his vantage point high above, Quinn could easily pick out the biggest obstacles to their survival, the three places, or steps, where the layered slabs of the mountain broke free, jutting out from the line of the hill before stepping down abruptly.

  Each was a barrier to their safe return, particularly the second. Situated at just over 28,200 feet, the Second Step was the northern guardian of Everest’s summit, a place always in shadow, dark and therefore bitterly cold, riven with ice. It jutted out over the rocky North Face like a section of shattered roof, an explosion of exposed beams and loose tiles.

  The crux was near its top—a twenty-foot-high, nearly sheer face of rock split by a vertical crack that had become littered with a spaghetti of fixed ropes and an old ladder. For the Everest climber loaded with an oxygen system, vision obscured, hands muffled, feet numb, mind deadened by the extreme altitude and exertion, it was the most difficult moment of the entire north-side climb—a challenge to the fit and motivated on the way up, an accident waiting to happen for the exhausted and careless on the way down.

  Pushing thoughts of having to descend the Second Step out of his mind with a hasty we’ll-cross-it-when-we-come-to-it resolution, Quinn looked instead for Dawa, to tell him that it was time to go.

  The Sherpa was taking his own final moment on the summit. He stood out against the bright sky, the front of his old climbing jacket patched like New York asphalt with the sponsors’ badges from countless previous climbs, each paid for by some corporate desk jockey seeking to brand this man’s hard, dangerous career as somehow representative of his own. It wasn’t.

  Quinn watched as Dawa knelt to tie a string of prayer flags. When released, they immediately flicked out in a dancing trail of color, snapping and twisting in the air, flying out over the immense Kangshung face, energetically ignorant of the immense void below. The Sherpa then stood up and cast a hand to the wind, throwing rice to bring luck to their descent.

  Boy, are we going to need it.

  That rice would have been blessed by a Buddhist monk; maybe even by the Dalai Lama himself. With each cast, Dawa would be chanting, “Tse tso. Tse tso,” beseeching the Mother Goddess of the mountain for a long life still to come. He would then settle into the mantra, “Om mani padme hum,” for protection. Quinn often heard the Sherpas reciting it over and over again on the most difficult sections of the mountains. They would mumble it without pause, pushing its continuous sound up into their noses so that it sounded like the faint buzzing of bees.

  Seeing Quinn looking at him, Dawa signaled that he should go before pointing to himself and then across at Pemba, giving a thumbs-up sign to show they would be okay. Reassured, Quinn quickly turned his attention back to the kid. Starting his own less spiritual mantra of descent, he said to himself, “Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate,” as he pulled Nelson Tate Junior up onto his feet.

  To his relief, the boy remained standing.

  He checked the kid’s oxygen system once more before grabbing him by the shoulders and staring closely into his masked face.

  “Look at me,” Quinn commanded. “Now’s the time. We are going down. You can do this. You are going to get down. It isn’t a summit until you get back down, do you understand me? Just concentrate. Concentrate on every step. I’ll be close to you all the way. Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate. Have you got it?”

  The kid nodded weakly.

  “I said, ‘Have you got it?’”

  “Yes,” came the faint reply.

  “Good.”

  Quinn bent down to retrieve his ice axe, pushed deep into the snow at the spot where he first tended to the boy, the kid’s empty oxygen cylinder still pinned underneath its pick.

  A tug on his arm suddenly stopped him.

  He turned back up to see the kid slapping at the zip of his own breast pocket with his mittened hand.

  What the hell is it now?

  Quinn freed the pocket’s zip of ice and reached a gloved hand inside to find what felt like a wide-studded strap.

  Tugging it out, he saw that it was a collar—a thick, studded, leather dog collar.

  The kid looked up into Quinn’s face and said, “For Buddy … for the summit … I promised.”

  “Christ, there’s no time for any more of this crap,” Quinn replied, shaking his head and glancing up at the heavens as if making a direct appeal to Him for help. A glimmer of optimism returned in the thought that the kid was at least functioning enough to remember his promise. It told Quinn to humor him.

  Maybe it will inspire him to get down, Quinn told himself as he moved as quickly as he could back up toward the summit pile to hang the collar over an aluminium snow-stake jutting from the snow. Looping it over the metal spike, Quinn noticed it already bore the pale blue rosary beads of a previous summiteer. Even though the new pairing seemed faintly sacrilegious, he pointed to the kid where the collar was now and then downward, urging him to really get going this time.

  Nelson Tate Junior slowly turned down the slope.

  Quinn followed.

  The kid made it about ten steps before he crumpled into the snow.

  Quinn pulled him back up.

&nbs
p; After fifteen more steps, he stopped again and just sat.

  Quinn dragged him to his feet once more, this time starting to bully him. “Stay on your feet, whatever you do. Move slowly if you have to, but don’t fucking stop. Don’t sit either. Every time you have to get back up, it’ll tire you more than if you just kept going. Think of your family. Think of your bloody dog. Think of anything you fucking want to get off this hill, but do not think about stopping unless I tell you to. You have got to keep moving or …” He stopped himself short from finishing the sentence with, “you will die.”

  While he berated him, Quinn pulled a coil of purple rope out of his pack and tied it between their waist harnesses. He looped as much excess rope as possible over a shoulder and then tied that off too, in order to keep the kid on the tightest rein possible. Holding him on such a short rope would at least give Quinn some control over the boy’s movements.

  The combination of the talk and the rope seemed to work.

  The boy stayed on his feet as he shakily descended the remainder of the final snow crest. From there they slowly made their way down and around the exposed thirty-five-degree rock traverse that led down to the next steep snow section.

  As they stepped heavily from the rocks back onto the snow, Quinn remembered with a jolt like an electric shock that he had left his ice axe on the summit.

  Fucking dog collar.

  There was no going back for the axe. He immediately tried to radio Dawa, hoping he could still bring it, but there was no reply.

  His next hope was to God that he wasn’t going to need that axe, but he already knew that, sooner or later, he would.

  8

  Despite a few knocks, Neil Quinn and Nelson Tate Junior descended the Third Step in reasonable shape. The smallest of the three, it was only about thirty feet high, more of a scramble down over jagged rocks than an actual drop.

  The rock-strewn plateau beyond was wider, easier going at the expense of being much more exposed to the wind. Quinn pushed them both on, over the uneven gravel and stones, his eyes fixed on the swaying yellow form stumbling ahead of him on its umbilical cord of purple rope. The kid’s sharp crampons, in their wayward struggles to find grip on the rocks of the Third Step, had caught and ripped the gaiters on his boots, the metal teeth slicing into the legs of the down suit beneath. With each heavy step, Quinn watched as feathers curled from the tears like toothpaste before fluffing out to be torn away by the wind. Above, he could see the boy’s hands hanging heavily to his sides, fingers frozen and useless. He was probably going to lose most of them.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  Putting aside thoughts of the inevitable mess that was going to cause, Quinn concentrated instead on the approaching Second Step. This time he had no choice but to think about how they were going to down-climb it.

  On the way up, Dawa and Lhakpa had fixed it with a new length of yellow nylon rope. Normally on descent, it would just be a case of clipping onto that line and slowly rappelling down, using the rungs of the old ladder that lined part of the route as steps. It required good hand control to manipulate the metal descender on the rope, leg strength to make good each step, and an ability to concentrate on the job at hand despite hanging over a ten-thousand-foot drop. It didn’t take the blast of fierce wind that slammed the kid to his knees once more to prove to Quinn that Nelson Tate Junior no longer had any of these abilities.

  Struggling to pull the boy onto his feet, Quinn looked back up the hill for help, searching for any sign of Dawa and Pemba. There was none. Dawa’s radio was still silent. Perhaps Pemba was struggling once again. Perhaps the batteries of the radio were dead. Whatever the problem, it was too cold to wait, especially with the kid already suffering frostbite.

  What particularly worried Quinn was that he had no confidence the boy could work a descender down that length of fixed line. Any slip would be fatal. His only option was to hold the boy on the end of the purple rope and lower him from an anchor until he reached the small ledge that jutted out below the rock wall. Once there, the kid could wait while Quinn followed him down. It was not elegant, but at the very least it would give him some control over where the boy was going. He knew he was pushing his luck, but he had little alternative; it was time to improvise.

  Carefully Quinn helped the boy down over the dangerous, broken rock slabs that led to the top of the Second Step before stopping him at the edge. There, clipping the kid tightly to the yellow rope and making him sit, Quinn pushed himself out to look down the upper part of the cliff to check the line down. The world below fell away, a never-ending plunge down the scaly black-and-white slope to the glacier far, far below. It took what remained of his breath with it.

  Turning back into the hill, Quinn focused on fixing a secure anchor from which to suspend the boy. To one side he saw an old metal piton firmly driven into the rock. The rough-hewn nail was as black as the ages-old rock that held it, as if it too had been there forever. He hooked a carabiner into the eye of the piton. However hard he pulled, it refused to move. It was solid.

  While Quinn assembled the rope’s anchor, the kid lay slumped on the ground beside him. The Englishman began to bully him with the details of how he was going to get down, shouting at the boy about how this was it, the only real obstacle now between him and his home, his parents, his dog, and this time he said it—the rest of his life.

  When everything was ready and Quinn signaled that he could go, the kid weakly got to his knees and then his feet.

  Swaying, he slowly turned around to look back at Quinn, leaning out on the rope until it tensioned.

  “Concentrate, okay?”

  With a nod, Nelson Tate Junior began to step blindly back, slowly vanishing from sight over the edge.

  Gusts of wind ripped at Quinn, drilling the cold into his core as he waited above the sheer rock, gently paying out the rope.

  Time passed.

  When Quinn felt a light tugging on the rope, he knew that the boy was maneuvering himself onto the top of the ladder.

  Slowly, he let more of the purple rope slip through the locking device secured into the old piton so the boy could keep descending.

  It’s working.

  Quinn willed the kid on, telling him to go, repeating the word between every labored breath.

  “Go. Go. GO!”

  About halfway down, Nelson Tate Junior caught his right crampon on some old rope that was wound around the ladder.

  He tried to kick his foot free.

  Once.

  Twice.

  On the third kick, the sudden momentum of the crampon’s release caused the kid to lose his balance.

  Toppling to the side, he swung out and to the right of the ladder, crashing hard into the side of the mountain and dislodging a fall of snow and loose rock.

  Quinn saw none of it but felt it all.

  The purple rope slammed downward, ripping through his mittens until jamming in the viselike grip of the belay anchor.

  All he could do was lean back against the side of the mountain and hold the stretching rope with all his remaining strength, heart pulsing in his throat as if tugged up into it by the purple cord.

  Quinn tried to see what was happening, but he couldn’t move forward enough to see down to the suspended boy. He shouted out to him, screaming at him to answer, to tell him what was happening, but there were no sounds in reply, only the rasp of his own frantic breathing shooting backward and forward like a hacksaw through metal.

  An eternity passed in minutes.

  Quinn began deliberately sucking in more air, preparing himself to move so he could help the kid.

  But, to his surprise, just as he readied himself to get up, the tension on the rope relaxed a little.

  It felt as if the boy was pulling himself back onto the ladder.

  The rope tensioned once more.

  The boy was actually continuing to desc
end.

  Quinn couldn’t believe it.

  He paid out more rope until it stopped again.

  This time Quinn felt a faint yet distinct series of pulls that told him that the kid must have made it to the small snow slope that lay at the bottom of the rock face.

  Double-checking that he was clipped into the yellow fixed rope that ran down over the step, Quinn unhooked the purple rope from the security of the old metal piton and moved to the edge of the step.

  Directly below him the boy was indeed standing on the ledge, leaning in against the sheer rock, waiting.

  Quinn started to make his own way down, gathering in the purple rope as he went.

  When he too reached the ladder, snow and rocks, loose from where the kid had swung against them, started to fall to the side of him.

  Each time, Quinn instinctively huddled against the metal frame, pushing his face into its worn rungs, close enough to see the scratches and scrapes from the hundreds of pairs of sharp crampons that had worked their way up and down it over the years. When the falls stopped he slowly continued, focusing everything he had on getting to the bottom of that rock face.

  Finally sensing he was near, Quinn began to prepare for the uneven step down off the ladder.

  A sharp skidding noise from above caused him to momentarily look up.

  Then there was nothing.

  When Neil Quinn came to consciousness, he was lying facedown on the sloping snow ledge.

  His goggles and oxygen mask were pushed from his face, his mouth and nostrils plugged with freezing snow.

  Raising his head, an unlikely warmth leaked down his forehead.

  Blood?

  It began to run into his right eye.

  His brain began to pound.

  How long have I been out? Seconds? Minutes?

  Weakly lifting his spinning head, he wiped his face and pushed his oxygen mask back up over his mouth.