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 elicit 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 packets of muesli, which I added to a mug of hot chocolate and ate warm. Then we heated up a couple of freeze-dried 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 argument 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 kilograms (thirteen pounds)—a very serious consideration given the physical demands of what lay ahead. We talked over 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 doing so.)
By 8:00 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.
His first words were in French but when he saw our blank faces he changed to English.
“I need some … have you a way to help … some oxygen and some gas … please.” His speech was slurred and barely understandable. He sounded like he was suffering from the onset of high-altitude sickness.
“Take it easy and calm down a bit. Now what’s the problem?” Al made some space for him to kneel in the front of the tent.
“My friend is dying. I want you to try and help me rescue him. We’re in that tent over there.” He pointed out into the night.
“You’re talking about Reinhard?”
“Yes. Reinhard. He’s dying. If we don’t get him down the mountain he’ll be dead. You have to help me.”
“What about the Norwegian doctor—Morton. Has he seen him?”
“He did. This afternoon.”
“And what did he say?”
“He has edema—on the lungs and cerebral.”
“Is he conscious?”
“He’s in a coma.”
“Well, if he’s in a coma he is going to die. There’s no way anyone can get him off the mountain. Have you got oxygen?”
“It’s finished. Can I take a bottle?”
“You can take as much as you need. Have you got a regulator?”
“Yes. But if we go now we can rescue him.”
“How?” Al was icy calm.
“I don’t know. We can carry him. I have to do something!” The Hungarian was distraught, and beginning to vent his frustration as anger at us.
“There’s nothing we can do. No matter how many people we had up here, we still couldn’t get him down to Five. Think about the rocks, how are you going to lower him down?”
The Hungarian went quiet. In his heart he knew that Al was right. Even if Reinhard had been conscious, a rescue would have been impossible. The fact that he was in a coma was as good as a death sentence here at 8,300 meters (27,230 feet).
“How much longer do you think he will live?”
“I don’t know. He’s hardly breathing.”
Al and I exchanged a glance. The same thought occurred to both of us at the same time: the Hungarian, determined to stay with his fellow climber right to the bitter end, was even now putting his own life in danger.
“Listen. Your friend is definitely going to die. You have to get off the mountain or you’ll die too. Do you understand?” Al was speaking forcefully now, driving the news as hard as he could into the Hungarian’s confused mind. He went quiet once more as this sank in.
“You’ll be dead by tomorrow night if you stay here. So take two oxygen bottles now, get through the night, and come back at first light to take another bottle to get you back down to Five. OK?”
The Hungarian nodded slowly.
“You’re doing as much as you can by staying with him. But he can’t be rescued. If you stay here now you’ll be putting other lives in danger. Are you still fit enough to get down tomorrow on your own?”
“Yes.” His reply was barely audible.
He picked up the two oxygen bottles and walked off into the night, the very picture of a broken man. I wondered what kind of hell he was returning to: within a few hours Reinhard would be dead by his side.
“You know the strangest thing?” A chilling memory had come back to me.
“What?”
“When you and Barney decided to turn Brian back on the Ridge you saw Reinhard and his mate carrying on and said he might die.”
“That’s true. I could see by the speed they were moving that they were heading for trouble.”
Then another memory hit me—a recollection of a discussion I had with Al before leaving for Kathmandu.
“And do you remember the conversation we had when you came round for the meal?” Al had visited us in Hertfordshire a few weeks before the expedition left. “You predicted this would happen. You said we’d get to Camp Six and find someone in exactly that state. In fact I think you specified it would be an Eastern European.”
“Yeah, I do remember.”
“Don’t you think that’s bizarre?”
Al thought for a moment. “Not really. There’s so many disorganized teams on Everest these days you’re more likely than not to find someone in trouble here.”
And with that we resumed the cooking and the subject was closed for discussion. But in my mind the extraordinary conversation we had just had with the Hungarian was churning away. Why didn’t I feel more compassion for him? Why hadn’t we at least offered to go and check on Reinhard just in case he had miraculously recovered?
The truth was that the mountain had dehumanized me and hardened my emotional response. The news about Reinhard’s impending death had neither surprised me nor shocked me. Instead it seemed normal. This is Camp Six—8,300 meters (27,230 feet), my mind was telling me, this is where people do die if something goes wrong. Reinhard was beyond help. We all were. To be prepared to go this high, we had all willingly made an unwritten pact with the mountain that says: “I’m putting myself in a position where I know I can die.” Given that level of personal commitment, perhaps it is not surprising that luxuries like pity and compassion are often left behind at Base Camp along with other unnecessary baggage. If we had brought those emotions with us, perhaps we would be needing them now—for ourselves.
I was beginning to understand what the Death Zone really means.
— 10 —
At 11:20 P.M. Al drifted off into a light sleep, his rhythmic breathing muffled by the oxygen mask. At midnight, summit day would begin.
Even though my body craved it, for me there was no question of sleep. Like a child lying wide-eyed in bed on Christmas Eve, expectation ran like a shot of adrenaline through my body. I pulled the frozen fabric of the down sleeping bag as tight as I could around my head and lay perfectly still.
Staring into the dark confines of the tent, supersensitive to the ghosts of wind playing around us, I found myself entering a state of Zen-like calm. During the long-haired phase of my teens, fueled by a dangerous overconsumption of Carlos Castaneda and Aldous Huxley, I had often tried to meditate my way
into an altered state of consciousness. How I had tried!
In a candlelit bedroom filled with the aromatic smoke of joss sticks and the trance-inducing pentatonic synthesizer chords of the psychedelic band Gong, I sat in a half-lotus position and waited to lock onto the astral plane. But no matter how long I spent in the ticket queue, my journey to Ixtlan never began. Perhaps the gray suburbs of London are not the best starting place when you’re heading for Nirvana.
Now, zipped into that tiny plastic capsule 8,300 meters (27,230 feet) above the rest of the world, I slipped effortlessly into a state of euphoric trance. The cramped Quasar mountain tent suddenly took on the dimensions of a cathedral, its domed roof becoming a series of soaring arches suspended hundreds of feet in the air. The soothing hiss of the oxygen feeding into my mask took on a musical quality, like panpipes, and the wind became a whispering voice murmuring encouraging words for the day to come.
The music faded and was replaced by the thudding beat of blood-rush echoing in the back of my skull. The fantasy changed. I imagined myself diving into the sea and letting my lungs fill with water.
Then I snapped back to consciousness with a horrible gasp, gulping frantically for air. That was why the music had faded: the oxygen cylinder was out of air. Confused and disoriented, I had trouble finding my headlamp and then struggled to unscrew the frozen regulator valve on the dead tank.
The interior of the tent was now encrusted with a thin hoarfrost of frozen vapor. With every movement, irritating showers of tiny crystals fell, freezing any exposed skin.
Replacing the valve onto a fresh oxygen bottle, I set the gauge on one liter a minute and slumped exhausted back into the sleeping bag. Now the waking trance was anything but euphoric; the sweet dreams went distinctly sour. I suddenly remembered that not ten meters (thirty-two feet) from our tent the Austrian, Reinhard, was dying, beyond help.
Camp Six, which had seemed such a welcome refuge when we’d arrived some hours before, now became a place of overwhelming fear and anxiety. The fact that there was nothing we could do for Reinhard put everything into perspective; the mountain was in control. Altitude, with all its deadly effects, was snuffing the life out of a strong, healthy mountaineer, as if he were a sickly child. In the face of this invisible force, our own enterprise felt fragile and doomed to fail.
For the remaining twenty minutes before midnight I lay in a state of cold fear, praying that the weather would hold, that my body would be capable of meeting the challenge ahead, and—most important of all—that I would not make a mistake. My lack of confidence in my own mountaineering abilities had dogged me from the start of the expedition. Now the fear of a trip, of a sudden fall, of fumbling a piece of protection as I’d done with the figure eight on the Col; those were mistakes that I had gotten away with in the early stages of the climb. On summit day, even the slightest mistake would be a potential killer.
Mallory and Irvine probably died that way.
Midnight. Al’s digital watch beeped a feeble alarm and I could hear muffled shouts from the Sherpas’ tent. Al roused himself from sleep and we set about the tiresome task of lighting the gas cookers.
The cigarette lighters were now even more reluctant to ignite than at Camp Five. It took forty or fifty strokes with my thumb to coax a flame out of the frozen gas. By the time I succeeded, blood was flowing freely from my thumb’s cracked skin.
The gas cooker burned fiercely for a few seconds, then spluttered out.
“Bastard!” I was beginning to loathe the cookers.
Al patiently took over with the cigarette lighter and managed to relight it. This had been a regular pattern since Camp Five. The intense cold and thin air made the propane burners extremely fickle. They frequently flared out for no apparent reason, filling the tent with nauseating gas until they could be relit.
Once warmed up, the gas seemed to flow better, and after ten minutes of frustration, we had both cookers happily burning. Al busied himself cutting up blocks of snow into pieces small enough to fit into the pans while I tried to make some order out of my side of the tent.
Al, canny as ever, had bagged himself the flatter, uphill sleeping platform, leaving me to compete for space with the pile of equipment. Thanks to the precarious angle, leaning sharply down the snowfield, the interior, and my side in particular, had become a jumbled mess.
Used oxygen cylinders, food rations, and climbing equipment formed a chaotic heap on the downward slope. The side wall of the tent was sagging alarmingly under the weight of the gear, and I imagined that the slightest tear could split the fabric like the belly of a whale, emptying the contents and me onto the ice slide outside, where a one-way trip down the North Face would rapidly ensue.
I tried to rearrange the heavier objects at the foot of the tent where they would be out of the way. Then I set about extracting the vital pieces of gear that would be needed for the day ahead: the lithium batteries for the video camera, the red wind suit, the outer shells of my plastic boots. Highlighted by the beam of the headlamp I saw the food packets that each of us had prepared with such optimism back at Base Camp seven weeks before.
Written in blue marker pen were the names of the owners: Tore, Simon, Sundeep, Barney, Brian. I ripped open Brian’s pack and extracted the precious pouch of muesli. My appetite had become super-selective and this was one of the few foods I could face.
It took over an hour to melt the compacted snow down to boiling water. We shared a pack of pistachio nuts and drank mugs of tea and hot chocolate before loading the pans with more snow for another meltdown—our drinking supply for the climb.
Gagged by the oxygen masks, we had little urge to talk but concentrated on the vital task of forcing as much food and liquid down as we could.
Al’s long years of Himalayan expeditions had taught him the enviable knack of pissing into a pee bottle while lying on his side. Lacking the confidence to risk a sleeping bag full of urine by getting this wrong, I relied on the surer but less energy-efficient technique of crouching on my knees to perform the act.
The minutes ticked by, and with them came another dreaded bodily demand.
“I need a crap.”
“Me too.” Al was in the same state.
The prospect of putting on the boots and going out into the freezing night wind was extremely depressing. Just the thought was exhausting and demoralizing.
“Better do it,” Al advised. “Nothing else for it. No point in taking any excess baggage up. Besides, if you’re shitting yourself now, imagine what you’ll be like on the Second Step.”
As an avid consumer of Himalayan climbing books, I had always been mystified by the high-altitude mountaineer’s obsession with bodily functions. What, I had wondered, was the problem?
It took nearly fifteen minutes to prepare ourselves to exit the tent. Taking our oxygen cylinders with us was not a realistic option. Moving carefully to avoid the cookers, I crawled out the front of the tent. Doing so, I nudged an empty cylinder that had been propped outside. It fell onto the ice slope and accelerated away quickly. There was a clanking sound as it hit rocks once—twice—and then cartwheeled out of sight down the North Face to land on the glacier some six thousand feet below.
Mistake.
Stumbling across the ice slope, I realized that what I was doing was extremely stupid. I should have crampons and an ice ax. One slip and I would follow the oxygen cylinder down the Face. With a shudder I remembered that this was exactly how one of the Taiwanese climbers had fallen on the southern side just days before.
I found a narrow ledge and managed to pull down the down suit and thermal underclothes. Calf and thigh muscles protesting, I squatted for what seemed like an eternity, puffing and panting for air. A few meters away, Al was doing the same. There is no such thing as embarrassment at 8,300 meters (27,230 feet).
At the Col and above I found myself experiencing acute pain when going to the toilet. This time was by far the worst, bringing tears to my eyes. My whole system was completely dried up, and it felt
like I was splitting inside.
“I’m having a baby here, Al.”
An answering grunt came in reply.
With the pain came blood—quite a substantial amount. I closed my mind to the implications of this, putting it down to that well-known climber’s affliction, piles, even though I was pretty sure I didn’t have them.
Collapsing back into the tent I strapped on the oxygen mask and gulped hungrily at the clean-tasting air. In the warmth of the sleeping bags I thrust my hands under my armpits to defrost, another surprisingly painful process.
Al came in. “You all right?”
“Fine,” I replied, not wanting to let on how I really felt. Close to vomiting, with a skull-splitting headache, I now knew why a visit to the toilet above 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) inspires such dread among mountaineers.
Al added some more snow blocks to the pans of water and then curled up in his bag to try and regain some precious warmth. I could just make out his muffled words:
“My feet are frozen.”
Outside, I could hear the three Sherpas preparing their equipment. Gyaltsen made his way across the snowfield and shouted into the tent.
“Two o’clock. You ready?”
“We need another brew,” Al replied. “Let’s leave in half an hour.”
The two other Sherpas, Lhakpa and Mingma, came across to join Gyaltsen outside our tent. They began to sort out the oxygen cylinders that were stacked neatly there in a pile.
“There’s no way we’re leaving with fingers or toes frozen,” Al told me. “They have to be perfectly warm when we set off or we’ll end up losing them.”
I took my feet out of their inner boots and massaged them back to life. The smaller toes felt curiously waxy to the touch, as if the skin was thicker than it should be.
By 2:30 A.M., fortified by a last cup of hot chocolate and a few lumps of chocolate, we were outside the tent with crampons and neoprene gaiters fitted. Over the “Michelin Man” down suits we wore red wind suits with our harnesses fastened over the whole ensemble. Movement was severely restricted by the thickness of this specialist clothing and I had to get Al to tighten my harness buckle up so it fit snugly around my waist.
The Other Side of Everest Page 22