Al shouted through his mask, “Must be one of the Indians.”
We would have to step over his outstretched legs to continue along the Ridge.
The Sherpas stood side by side, seemingly rooted to the spot by the sight of the dead man. Their heads were bowed, as if in prayer; perhaps, it occurred to me later, they were praying.
I felt an almost irresistible urge to look at the dead climber’s face. What expression would be fixed on it in those final moments of life? Terror? A smile? (They say that those who die of acute mountain sickness have a delusion of well-being in the final stages.)
But his head was thrust far into the overhang, the neck bent so his face rested against the rock. All I could see was the edge of his oxygen mask. From the mask ran that precious, life-giving tube to the oxygen cylinder that was standing upright against a rock. It was an orange cylinder, a Russian one like our own.
I bent down, using my ice ax for support, to have a closer look at the gauge on the top of the cylinder. It read, of course, zero. Even if he had died before the cylinder ran out, it would have continued to spill its feeble trickle of oxygen into the atmosphere until it emptied.
He was wearing very few clothes, just a lightweight red fleece top, some blue Gore-Tex climbing trousers, and a pair of yellow plastic boots similar to our own. His rucksack lay nearby, flat and empty. I wondered about this mystery for a moment. What had happened to his high-altitude gear? His down suit? His Gore-Tex mitts? We knew the Indian team had been well equipped. That left only two possibilities: either he’d ripped them off in the final stages of delirium, or someone had stolen them from his corpse.
In a way I found the first scenario an easier one to imagine.
The tragedy of the Indian team was central to the film I was making. Seduced by Everest’s siren call, they had pushed themselves well beyond their limits of endurance and had failed to reserve enough strength to get down in the worsening conditions that preceded the big storm. Summit fever had killed them.
Yet, even though we had the video cameras with us to record the actuality of our climb, I could not bring myself to film the dead man lying so pathetically at our feet.
I knew that ITN and Channel 4 would want this most graphic illustration of Everest as killer but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even the victims of war eventually find a grave—even if they are shoved into it by a bulldozer. This Indian climber would remain exactly where he lay now, frozen for eternity. His grave was the bleakest imaginable, and to think that his family, his friends, would see the reality of that was too much to contemplate.
As we stepped over the legs of the corpse to continue along the Ridge, we crossed an invisible line in the snow—and an invisible line of commitment in our own minds. Altitude is an unseen killer. Human life, any life, does not belong in the Death Zone, and by stepping over the dead body we made the conscious decision to push farther into it. The dead body had been the starkest reminder we could have had that we were now reliant for our lives on our equipment, our own strength, and our luck.
There was the irresistible feeling that it was the Indian who was perfectly in tune with this place, and that we, being alive, were the invaders. All places above 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) belong to the dead because up there human life cannot be sustained. Wrapped up like a spaceman in my huge high-altitude suit, breathing through the mechanical hiss of the oxygen system, I felt for the first time in my life like an alien on my own planet.
Our assault on the Ridge continued.
By 7:00 A.M. we reached the First Step. It was both higher, at about twenty meters (sixty-five feet), and more of a climb than I had imagined. Overshadowed by the bigger cliff of the Second Step, it tends to get treated as an insignificant obstacle but, looking up at it with my ski goggles beginning to acquire a frozen internal layer, it looked daunting enough.
It was not possible to remove the crampons to cope with these changing conditions because unfixing and then refixing them would risk fingers to frostbite (it was about –35 degrees Fahrenheit at that point), and also waste too much time.
The three Sherpas went up first and I followed. For three meters (nine feet) or so, the route led up an ice-filled crack on the left side of the cliff. Next came a traverse across to a rocky ledge and then a precarious scramble up between two rounded boulders. I jammed the front metal points of my crampons into a tiny rock crack and pushed up, all my weight relying on the insignificant hold.
I paused for some moments to gather breath after the strenuous move, and then tackled the crux.
The move required a delicate balancing act that I could have achieved easily at sea level. Up here in clothes that reduced all sense of being in touch with the rock, and with the added exposure of an 8,000-foot fall directly down the North Face as a penalty for a mistake, it felt epic enough.
I snapped my jumar clamp as high as I could on the best-looking of the many ropes that were hanging beguilingly around the crux. It gave a sense of security to protect a fall but that was a psychological advantage rather than a real one. In fact, a fall would leave the unlucky climber swinging helplessly in open space underneath the overhanging section of the cliff. Assuming the rope held.
Moving out into the exposed position, I stuck a leg around the smooth edge of the Ridge and planted it onto the foothold that, fortunately, waited on the other side. I had to sense its security rather than see it—the leg was out of my field of vision.
My left hand instinctively snaked up to try and find a handhold above. A tentative pull on a possible hold merely made it give way, and I threw the cigarette-pack-sized piece of rock down the North Face beneath me.
Not many people can imagine that Everest is a crumbling wreck of a mountain. It looks as if it should be made of granite, but in fact it is friable limestone, the worst of rocks to climb at any altitude.
Locking my fist onto a ledge above my head, I took a deep breath and shifted my entire weight onto the out-of-vision foot. Then I swung over and around the rock, to the safety of the other side.
Lhakpa was waiting there. He put his thumbs up and I replied with the same. Another obstacle over. Another step closer to the summit.
— 11 —
Now the wind was definitely picking up and we were still only halfway along the Ridge. We began to push harder. The plume of ice crystals from the Kanshung Face was now billowing up more strongly on our left, a sign we could not afford to ignore. Whenever we stopped to regain our breath, I looked away to the north, the direction a storm would come from. Plenty of clouds were moving rapidly toward us but nothing so far looked too threatening.
I had been so wrapped up in the climb, I had completely forgotten my stills camera. The tiny Olympus had a brand-new lithium battery and a full roll of film. Squinting through the eyepiece, I took two pictures of the terrain ahead and one shot of Al. Then we pressed on.
At several points, the route took us right onto the very knife-edge crest of the Ridge itself. Then we would time the dash along the ice to miss the blasts of wind. I had never been able to imagine how climbers could be blown off a ridge. Now, I was acutely aware of that possibility. One of the theoretical ends for Mallory and Irvine had them plummeting off the Ridge and down the Kanshung Face—perhaps their bodies, or their ghosts, were close by.
One particularly hair-raising section of the Ridge, only a few meters long, involved stepping down onto what seemed to be a corniced section of crumbling ice cross-sectioned by a crevasse. The Sherpas, lighter and more agile than we were, ran across easily. I took each step with my heart in my mouth, expecting at any moment that the cornice would give way and leave me dangling over the Kanshung Face.
The ice held.
By 8:30 A.M. we reached the Second Step. This step is another cliff, steeper and more than twice the height of the first. There is no way around it, it has to be tackled head-on.
Back in the 1980s, a Chinese expedition had fixed a lightweight climbing ladder to the most severe part of the cliff. It had been dest
royed in a recent storm and the Indian climbers and their Sherpas had fixed another in its place. I had been greatly reassured by the notion of the ladder. Anyone could climb a ladder, couldn’t they? In my mind it had lessened the severity of the Second Step.
In fact the ladder, which I had always thought of as a friendly aid, was about to prove a significant problem in its own right.
At the foot of the Second Step two unexpected things happened: the first was my discovery that both my liter bottles of juice, boiled down from snow so painfully slowly at Camp Six the previous night, were frozen solid. Even the bottle I had kept next to my skin inside the front of my down suit was a solid mass of ice. At the time it seemed like an inconvenience. Later on during the day I was to realize in the starkest way possible the seriousness of that event.
Al checked his bottles too. They were also frozen solid. Now neither of us would have a single drop of moisture through the whole day. Many experienced high-altitude mountaineers would have turned back at that point.
The other unexpected thing was that Al leaned toward me to speak.
“Open up my pack,” he said. “Put the oxygen up to four liters a minute.”
He turned his back to me. Taking off my overmitts, and going down to the finger gloves, I undid the clips closing his pack and found the oxygen regulator valve inside. It was a difficult, fiddly job in the close confines of the rucksack. I clicked the regulator around to read four and closed the pack.
Now Al was pumping twice as much oxygen into his system as my rate of two liters a minute. I could understand his desire for more gas to tackle the Second Step but, even so, his request surprised me. We both knew the risks of pumping up the oxygen too high. It runs out twice as fast and, with your body tuned in to operate at a higher level, you come down with a bigger crash when it ends.
“OK. It’s on four,” I shouted to him. For a fleeting moment I thought I sensed something more than just tiredness in the way Al was moving. Was he having a harder time than he was revealing?
It was a measure of our increasing disorientation that neither of us thought at that stage of dumping the two liters of frozen liquid. Now we were climbing with two kilograms (four and a half pounds) of superfluous weight on our backs up the hardest rock-climbing section of the North Face route.
The first six meters (nineteen feet) or so were simple enough. A tight squeeze through a chimney filled with ice led onto an easier graded ledge with a snowbank against the cliff. I used the jumar clamp to help my ascent, sliding the device up as high as my arms would stretch, then pulling up where it gripped against the rope. Someone had rigged a virtually new, 9-millimeter rope on this lower part and that helped considerably.
The crampons scratched and bit into the rock steps like the claws of a cat trying, and failing, to climb a tree. Then came a big step up. I tensioned my foot against a ripple of protruding rock to my right, and, cursing the crampons to hell, just managed to ease my body up onto the ledge that led to the ladder.
I paused for a long moment to catch my breath. The beat of my heart was sending a pounding rush of blood through my head. I was aware of my pulse rate being higher than I have ever sensed it before. My breathing was wild and virtually out of control. For one panic-stricken moment I thought my oxygen had failed. Then I realized I could still hear the reassuring hiss of the gas and told myself to calm down.
I was standing more or less exactly in the place where Mallory and Irvine were last seen alive, spotted by telescope from the North Col camp. Their 1924 climb had been the hardest, and perhaps the greatest, of the prewar efforts on Everest.
There had been no ladder for them on the Second Step. If they tried it, one of them may well have fallen, taking his partner with him to certain death. The horror of imagining that final moment had always eluded me until now. Now I had no trouble in imagining a fatal fall from this spot. It was the most exposed and dangerous part of the climb.
My friend the ladder was the next obstacle. I put a hand on it and felt it sway and flap against the sheer Face it was attached to. I had always imagined it would be solid. I began to climb.
The first problem was caused by the crampons. The metal spikes snagged against the rungs or grated against the rock, preventing me from getting a proper footing on the ladder. Unable to look down, blinkered by the goggles into a front-only view, I had to sense as best I could when my feet were in the right place.
My breathing rate went up again, the greater volume of escaping moisture running up through gaps in the mask and freezing inside my goggles. Halfway up the ladder I was almost blinded by this, and I ripped the goggles up onto my head in order to see. We were all aware of the dangers of snow blindness but I felt I could take the risk for the next few crucial minutes.
The ladder had a distinct, drunken lean to the left. This, coupled with the fact that it was swaying alarmingly on the ragbag selection of pitons and ropes that held it, made it extremely physically demanding to cling to.
My Gore-Tex overmitts were hopelessly clumsy in this situation. I could barely cup them tight enough to cling to the rungs. But, having started with them on, I could hardly remove them now, and any lesser protection would almost certainly result in frostbite from contact with the frozen metal of the ladder.
The “friendly” ladder was anything but. I resolved to move quickly to get off it, and off the Second Step, as soon as I could.
Reaching the top rung, I assessed the next move. It was a hard one: a tension traverse using only the strength of the arms. The objective was to swing up onto the ledge that marked the end of the Second Step. To do it, I would have to cling onto a collection of rotting ropes tied to a sling of dubious origin. Then, with no foothold, I would have to tension as many spikes of my crampons as I could push onto the Face, and then in one fluid motion swing chimpanzee-like up to the right.
Down at Base Camp I had talked about filming this stage of the climb when Brian got there. Six weeks later this now seemed a supreme joke. Firstly, there was never any chance of Brian getting here; secondly, the thought of filming in this most deadly of places was the last thing on my mind. This was a survival exercise pure and simple.
Trying the move, I realized that there was a critical moment of commitment when my body would be neither supported by the ladder, nor safely on the ledge. To complete the climb of the Second Step, I would be, albeit for a split second, hanging over the North Face by the strength of my arms alone.
I tried it—and failed. Clinging to the ladder, I retreated several rungs down to get some rest while my breathing rate subsided. Without sufficient oxygen powering the muscle tissue in my arms, they were tiring extremely quickly. Instinctively I felt I would have one or perhaps two more tries in me before I weakened to the point where I would have to retreat.
It was several minutes before my runaway breathing came down to a controllable rate. I tried the move again, and this time succeeded. With both arms fading fast, I pulled up onto the ledge and then stumbled the few meters of rocky slope to the top.
From this new vantage point on the Ridge, the summit pyramid was for the first time fully in view. The four of us waited for Al to come up the Second Step and then continued.
For the next hour we continued to make good time, climbing up gradually on the mixed ground of snow and rock. I paused several times to take photographs but by the fifth or sixth shot the camera began to behave strangely, winding on erratically and failing to close the automatic lens cover. On the seventh shot the Olympus ground to a halt and gave up completely in the subzero temperatures. That left me with no SLR camera, as my Nikon F3 had similarly succumbed to the cold down at Camp Four.
Cursing this piece of bad luck, I unzipped my down suit and put the camera against my thermal layer beneath the fleece, in the hope that my body warmth might revive it (it never did). Then I took out that eight-dollar plastic “fun camera” I had bought in Kathmandu, and realized that this recreational toy was now my only means of taking stills. On the cardboard cover
was a picture of a bronzed woman in her bikini playing with a beach ball. Feeling utterly ridiculous, I stared through the “viewfinder” (basically just a hole in the plastic) and clicked the first of the twelve shots available.
The camera breakdown brought back the old nightmare: would the video cameras work in the –40-degree winds? The thought of them giving up now was too much to contemplate.
Once or twice I looked back down the Ridge we had come up. The figure of Al, bright red in his wind suit, was dropping further behind. Somewhere in my oxygen-starved brain a few connections were still working. Al had not asked me to click his regulator back down to two liters.
He was still climbing on four liters a minute, and he was dropping farther and farther behind. On two occasions we waited for Al to catch up, and then we reached the Third Step, where we stopped for a rest.
The Third Step is not nearly as demanding as the previous two, but it comes higher into the climb. Beyond it is the steep avalanche-prone ice field of the final summit pyramid, the rock traverse, and then the summit ridge.
Grateful for the rest, I took off my pack and sat down, my heels digging into the ice to prevent a slide. Sensing the pressing need to drink, I pulled out the water bottle from where I had left it inside my down suit, half expecting it to have magically defrosted. Of course it was still frozen; what else could I expect in these temperatures?
Realizing finally, and much too late, how stupid I had been, I took both bottles of ice and put them at the foot of the Third Step next to some abandoned oxygen cylinders. Two kilograms less weight to carry.
Al was resting farther down the Ridge where it had flattened out into a broad expanse. I pulled out my camera and took a shot of him lying down on his back. Not far away was the second of the Indian bodies, lying with his face toward us and with no sign of pain or distress on his frozen features. Unlike the first of the bodies, which had shocked me when we came across it, I now felt no sense of surprise at the presence of the corpse—a sure indicator that my mind was occupied with other thoughts.
The Other Side of Everest Page 24