Finally, at around midmorning, a good thirty hours after I’d left Rongbuk, I got back to the advanced base camp and met up with Séb. I called home to say all was well and that we’d be leaving soon, but all I could think of was recovering my strength and trying the climb again in a few days’ time.
As I was coming down, since I was going slowly, and despite how tired I was, I had time to think. I was a little disappointed with myself. My performance hadn’t been as good as five days earlier, and the gastroenteritis had screwed me over. I wanted to do more, and felt like I could. And I began to think it would be good to know if I could climb again after a short time, just like I would in the Alps. When we spent a week in the mountains there, we parked the truck at the bottom of a valley and went out on some expedition every day after breakfast. Could I export that model to the highest peaks of the Himalayas? The only way to find out was to attempt another climb soon. My doubt was whether three days would be long enough for my body to recover from the immense effort it had performed.
THAT SAME DAY, WE TOOK DOWN THE TENTS WE’D PITCHED AT THE advanced base camp and went down to Rongbuk. Conversations at base camp are like those on Wall Street, except that there, instead of speculating about stocks and money, people talk about the weather forecast. One of the few advantages of sharing a space with a commercial expedition from time to time is that they have vast resources and, as a result, have access to the best forecasts. And they agreed that May 27 would be the best day of the season.
Séb and I rested for a couple of days and then it was time to go. We crossed the moraine again to the ABC. Since we didn’t have tents there, Monica, the doctor on the expedition with Adrian Ballinger and Cory Richards, who at that moment were climbing Everest without oxygen, invited us to sleep in their tent. I got a few hours’ rest, and before the break of dawn I set out again toward the summit.
I walked at a good pace and after a while had already reached the north ridge. Though the forecast had predicted a spectacular day, it had begun with a curtain of high clouds that prevented the sun’s heat from getting through, and at 7,000 meters I had to put on my down ski suit to keep warm. Despite my tiredness, I was feeling good and got to 8,300 meters in about seven hours. An hour longer than the acclimation day, but two less than five days ago. I passed a few people on their way down: a Japanese party, who’d done the summit with oxygen, and the German climber Ralf Dujmovits, who’d attempted it without oxygen and was complaining about the cold. I kept going and passed more climbers on their way down.
When I left the ridge, I was greeted by a strong wind, and since it was cold, I put on all the clothes I had. I left my now empty backpack tied to some rocks, and my poles as well, since with the cold and wind I needed to keep my hands low. Before reaching the second step, I ran into Adrian Ballinger, who had achieved his dream of climbing without oxygen. He was with Cory, and some guides and Sherpas. From that moment on, I was alone again on the mountain. The wind didn’t let up; on the contrary, gusts were lifting the snow and carrying it to the ridge. At some points I had to open a pretty deep path. My pace was slow, but I was feeling good, and I could handle the cold. My mind was dulled again by the altitude bubble, and I kept going almost robotically, step by step, until dusk. A splendid sunset awaited me at the foot of the pyramid, just 150 meters from the summit.
The wind was making the snow dance against a backdrop of shadows, a gift from the sun as it went down gently behind a sea of high clouds, preventing me from seeing the 8,000-meter peaks around me. The beauty took on a tinge of horror, since it was a prelude to spending another night up there. Every step was a struggle, and my mind wouldn’t stop telling me, Stop. Turn around. There’s no need to suffer this much. And I couldn’t find any reason to disagree. But since reason isn’t what leads us to climb mountains, I kept going. I counted up to twenty-five steps. I stopped. Twenty-five more. I stopped again to breathe hard, to try to fill my lungs with that thin air.
And that’s how I repeated my path from a few days before, until I saw the snowy ridge appear. A few meters more and I’ll be right next to the flags. And yes, there they were, this time lashed by a gale-force wind. The only thought that crossed my mind on the summit was to turn around and go down as quickly as possible. Anyway, up there, your emotions only lead you to make the wrong decision. Euphoria distracts you, and fear prevents you from seeing clearly. The wind was assaulting me and the snow was pounding my face. I began to retrace my path.
As I climbed down, the storm swelled and became increasingly violent. Though it wasn’t extreme, the snow was intense. The wind stirred everything up, and in the dark of the night, I had to pay close attention not to stray from the path. I felt like I was floating, as if my steps were a long way away. I felt my tiredness and saw my actions as if in a dream. It was as if my body and mind had divorced and each had gone its own way.
I climbed down the Three Steps without any trouble and gradually headed down the mixed slopes to leave the northeast ridge in the direction of the north one. I wasn’t aware, but it had been hours since I’d had anything to eat or drink. I’d focused all my energy on the mountain and hadn’t thought about anything else.
When I left the rocky channels beneath the ridge, I was having trouble thinking clearly. The simplest calculations required a gargantuan effort. Adding and subtracting had become more challenging than solving a complex equation, and I strained to keep my brain active, since it seemed about to shut down. I knew I’d left my backpack somewhere around there on my way up, but I couldn’t find an image of the specific place in my memory. Where the hell is it? Think, Kilian, think. Let’s see if you already passed it. Hey, look, there it is! I knelt down to pick up my backpack, and that’s the last thing I remembered.
BUT WHERE AM I? WHERE THE HELL AM I? SUDDENLY, I REGAINED consciousness. And I saw myself walking along some shelves on a fairly steep wall that I’d never seen before. How did I get here? Where’s the ridge? Everything around me was black, and the light from my headlamp only showed me the shapes of the rocks in front of me. All I could see was a wall of snow and ice, until darkness swallowed everything up. I had a fleeting memory. Oof, I know. That’s where we crossed last year to leave the wall . . . where the avalanche fell on me! But how the fuck did I get here? What the hell am I doing on the northeast face of the mountain? I was completely disoriented and couldn’t reconstruct the route I had taken to get here after picking up my backpack. I was drawing a blank. I didn’t know how long I’d been out of it, or what path I had taken during that parenthesis. I’ll figure it out later. Right now I need to get out of here and find my way.
When I realized I was on the northeast face, I thought the best thing I could do was to cross toward the left without losing altitude, until I found the ridge again. Then I realized that someone was following about 30 or 40 meters behind me. They were moving slowly and were too far away for me to identify them. The silhouette was clear, and though at that moment I didn’t know why, I knew I had to get away from there. In a strange way, I thought that person was responsible for my detour and the fact that I’d ended up there. Why are they so slow? They were barely moving, pressing forward only a bit. Come on, hurry up. I want to get back to the camp! Although I knew it was a hallucination from the beginning, I had to fight with myself the whole time not to forget that. They followed me as I hewed to the left, increasingly desperate to get onto the ridge, but they didn’t appear.
The first spur I came across should have alerted me, since it was much steeper and rockier than I remembered, but I was sure this was a result of the difference between spring and summer. When I reached the second spur, I realized I wasn’t where I thought I was. Right now I should be above the channel I took last year to go up, and I should reach the ridge. This should be the ridge! But why is there nothing here? Where’s the goddamned ridge? The wall of rock went on, getting steeper and steeper, more and more distant in my memory, until I finally I had to admit it. I wasn’t on the northeast face. In fact, I had no fuc
king clue where I was. The person following me disappeared right away. My brain, still tired and cloudy, demanded attention and asked me to think clearly once I’d recognized my disorientation.
I was fine, physically speaking. I didn’t fear for my life. I was very tired, yes, extremely tired, but I could feel my body resisting and knew it would still be hard to completely wear it out. It could keep going for as many hours as necessary. The real problem was that I didn’t know where I was. I had no idea. I kept going down, trying to find some sign that might give me a clue. I even tried to remember the photos of the mountain I’d studied. It wasn’t extreme, but the slope was similar to the south face of Mont Blanc, like the Peuterey Ridge or the Innominata. The terrain was rocky and made up of large sheets of smooth stone, with fairly wide shelves carved into it. Sometimes I was too lazy to climb, so I let myself slide down the sheets, my crampons scraping over the rock until they got stuck. The rock quality was terrible; it wasn’t solid. Sometimes it broke when I supported my hands and feet on it, and other times the slope was so steep that I had to take off my mittens and climb down with thin gloves to be able to feel the rock. I kept going down for 100 meters or so, but the slope didn’t end, and I didn’t recognize anything that could show me the way.
I reached a small rocky channel, a narrow dihedron, and thought maybe I could go down there quickly and jump over some sheets of rock until I reached a small balcony. At my feet, there was only a void. To my left and right, the wall was almost vertical. I sat down, pressing my body as close to the wall as I could to keep away from the drop, sheltering from the snow that fell from the rock embedded in the mountain above me. Wait, Kilian, before you keep going without knowing where, think a little. If you go down, will you find the glacier where the advanced base camp is located? But if I’m not on the northeast face and I keep going down, what will I find? And what if I have to come back up? Oof. My thoughts were still too clumsy, heavy, distant, and imprecise. And what if all this isn’t real, if it’s a dream, or a nightmare, and I’ve really been sleeping for hours in the tent back at camp? Maybe . . . I don’t remember how I got here and I’m dreaming . . . Well, what a shitty dream! I want to wake up already! I want to be back at camp! Maybe if I jump into the void right now, the fright will wake me, like in the movies. But this isn’t a dream . . . My mind was slow and befuddled. The curtain covering my brain wouldn’t let me think clearly. What do I do? What do I do? Think, think . . . Let’s see. I’m tired, I’ve had hallucinations, I can’t think straight. It’s the middle of the night and I have no fucking clue where I am. At least I’m feeling okay and I’m strong. Now the priority is not to do anything stupid.
I decided to stay there, since it was somewhat sheltered, and wait for the sun to come up. In daylight, I’d be able to figure out where I was and decide which way I needed to go. I hugged my knees and closed my eyes to rest, until I fell into a light sleep.
I soon woke up and noticed immediately that my brain had recovered its normal speed and clarity. I thanked it. No, I hadn’t been dreaming. I was still on the small platform in the middle of the wall. The first thing I did was look at my watch. How could I be so stupid not to think of that before? It was almost two in the morning and I was at an altitude of 8,000 meters. The GPS! Look at the GPS! Suddenly I remembered I had activated my GPS, and I checked the navigation curve on my watch. I saw a line that went down straight and then suddenly veered to the left at a ninety-degree angle, and continued in that direction for what must have been the equivalent of a kilometer. Of course, I’m on the north face! My brain kicked into gear, gathered the information stored in my memory, reviewed the photos of the mountain I’d been scanning mentally for months. I must be on the stone walls around the Norton Couloir. If I can figure out a way to get down to 7,600, that’s where the snow crossing that Messner followed is, and I’ll be able to get back to the ridge without any trouble.
I was greeted by a feeling of relief. Finally, I had no doubt where I was. The situation was still precarious, because I was in a steep and not very stable spot with brittle rock, and it was still a long way back to the ridge. When we climb a mountain, we entrust our body to it, until we reach the bottom and it becomes ours again. I climbed a few meters to make it back over the embedded rock until I found some ground where I was more comfortable and began to cross it, heading down toward the right. The sheets of rock, a few spurs, snow channels, and strips of stone guided me in the darkness until I reached the north ridge again.
At least I was in control of my own movements. During the night, it had been as if someone inside me had taken over and made the general decisions without consulting me, ignoring me as if I were a nobody. And for some unknown reason, that person had decided they wanted to go to the north face. Well, congratulations.
WITH DAYLIGHT CAME THE COMFORT OF THE NORTH RIDGE, BLANKETED in almost a meter of recently fallen snow. Savoring the feeling of being back up there in summer, with all the fresh snow, and no one else on the mountain, I slid down on my ass until I heard the murmur of voices at the camp. As I slid down the last snowy slopes, I saw someone approaching the foot of the glacier. It was Séb. He offered me a drink of water, and I took a sip that brought me back to life.
When we got to the camp, I ate a little, though my stomach was still shut off, and without wasting any time, we said goodbye to Adrian, Cory, and Monica, grateful that they had let me sleep in their tent. We jogged the 20 kilometers of the moraine back to Rongbuk for the last time, arriving just in time to pack up. The next morning a car would be waiting to take us to Lhasa to catch a plane. We were going home.
Epilogue: The Welcome
The ferry closed its doors and began to plough through the water. I bought a waffle in the cafeteria and went out on deck. The fresh air and humidity contrasted with the dry atmosphere of the Himalayas. I ran my index finger over my sunburned lips and looked at my almost black hands, wrinkled from dryness. But when I looked up, I forgot the high mountains. The breeze and the smell of the sea brought me back to the Norwegian fjords.
The boat was quickly approaching land, but the half-hour journey seemed to go on forever. Before we docked, I had already slung my backpack over my shoulder, and when the ramp began to lower, I saw Emelie waiting for me, with the car engine on. We kissed in silence and then set off. We said everything without opening our mouths to speak.
I left my backpack in the house and took off the sweaty clothes I’d worn for the two-day journey from the dusty camp, and then we put on our sneakers and went out for a run. We ran side by side without speaking for a good while, savoring the sound of the wind and the synchronized rhythm of our breath. As the kilometers went by, our words began to seek a path and find their way. And little by little, the conversation left memories behind and settled back into the day-to-day. It was as if we’d returned to that morning I went out to run up one of the surrounding peaks.
“This Saturday there’s a race in Geiranger and I was thinking of going. You want to come?” Emelie.
“Yeah, it could be good to get back into the competition rhythm.” Me.
We ran for a couple of hours through the fog, the wet grass, and the snow still covering the peaks. When we got home, I found my luggage still waiting to be unpacked. I began to empty it out into two separate piles: dirty clothes and equipment to put away. I soon left it half done, picked up the clothes I’d taken out and put them into the washing machine. There were still some things left to take out of my backpack. I always leave some reserves in there so I’m ready to take off again.
Summer was knocking at the door; the snow on the peaks was disappearing swiftly, and the flowers were taking their turn to begin to bloom. In a just a few weeks the landscape would change so much that no one would remember that those meadows of such intense and varied colors, and so bursting with life, had been shrouded in white.
In my mind, my memories of Everest were also melting quickly, like snow that vanishes from the surface and infuses the earth with fresh life in its new
state. And this forgetting made my learning flourish, and my excitement began to stir again. I was already looking forward to the race the following weekend, to new expeditions, to new ideas that would make new attempts possible . . .
Some of my friends, who know me well, are surprised when they come to visit, not to see trophies on display on the shelves, full of books and maps. But I’m afraid to end up as a prisoner of my past. Maybe that’s why I’ve never kept any trophy from the races I’ve won. Sometimes my grandfather wants them, sometimes I give them to a kid beaming with excitement who’s followed a race. Or to the owner of a hotel we stayed in, or to a sponsor. Some end up disassembled in a recycling bin, or sometimes I’ve used them to scrape the wax off my skis, or as a vegetable chopping board. Is it fear of being stuck in the past that drives me, or vanity? Maybe what makes me feel so vain is just my discomfort with accepting recognition.
“One day you’ll regret not having enjoyed everything you’re achieving.” Emelie acts like she’s telling me off.
One thing I know is that I’ve had a great time, an excellent time, both in planning and undertaking the expedition. But success has shown me that in the end it wasn’t so hard. And the only point of it is to make me think about how to go further.
Above the Clouds Page 18