The Boys of Everest
Page 47
Chris for his part found that even descending was difficult; each step was a misery. His doubts had grown during the past two days. He didn’t think he could keep pace with the others. He reached the second cave after Joe and immediately burst into tears. The tears calmed him but the intensity of his disappointment shocked him. Joe finished making tea and offered Chris a cup and told him to forget it—he’d feel better in the morning.
The next day Chris was up and out first. Joe soon passed him but when Chris reached the crest of the ridge he turned to survey his own progress and saw Joe coming up behind him again. Joe had reached the third snow cave and come back to help Chris with his load but had somehow missed him. He had realized his mistake and was retracing his steps. They greeted each other and walked together up to the third cave. Peter and Dick had made it more spacious than the others—with room for gear and climbers and even a pair of alcoves for cooking.
Dick dropped down the ridge the next day to pick up rope at the second snow cave. He meant to return with the rope and then spend the afternoon carving out still more room in the third cave. The others meanwhile set out to make further progress on the ridge. The summit of Everest came into their view, a distant triangle behind the looming Pinnacles. The top of the mountain was in fact two miles away, an enormous distance to travel at these heights.
Peter reached the start of the First Pinnacle in two hours. Joe and Chris followed at a slower pace. Joe dumped his load at the base of the pinnacle and returned to camp. Chris held Peter’s rope while Peter set to work on the pinnacle itself, leading up snow to rock and then onto precarious mixed ground that offered no real protection. Peter ran out the entire rope but could find nowhere to build an anchor. Chris tied a second rope to the first, and Peter climbed still higher, knowing that a fall at this point would pull Chris from his stance. Chris shivered and stamped as Peter climbed on. Almost three hours passed before Peter at last hammered in a piton for an anchor. Chris climbed the fixed rope as Peter moved up easier ground, dragging another rope. Chris followed again. They carried on up the ridge, Peter still leading. He enjoyed this climbing; he was unafraid, eager to see what came next.
It grew late, and they turned to descend. Peter realized that he was now very tired. It had begun to snow. He had trouble keeping his feet as he followed Chris down the ridge. The two climbers eventually found themselves back in the third cave, coughing and retching; the smell of milk powder in the cave made them ill.
Dick and Joe took a turn in front the next day. Chris and Peter followed with rope and tents. Everyone moved very slowly now. Chris turned back at the foot of the First Pinnacle; he couldn’t force himself to undertake the long heave up the fixed rope. Dick reached the high point first, and he led the first pitch. He used both ice tools on the steep ground, kicking steps that collapsed into each other to dissolve into a shallow sea of powder snow. He moved sideways across a thin crust of ice. He worried that he might find himself on a cornice that could give way to send him swinging through space on the end of his rope.
He built an anchor. Joe followed on the fixed rope. Dick was preparing to put Joe on belay so that Joe could lead the next pitch when something odd happened. It felt at first like a sort of physical hallucination. Dick’s left arm and leg went numb. His left cheek and the left side of his tongue lost feeling a moment later. He told Joe what was happening to him. He spoke calmly: he might have been telling Joe that something tasted funny. Joe advised him to descend immediately. Peter was coming up the rope; he could belay Joe on the next pitch. Dick descended to the third snow cave. He found Chris there, making tea. Dick already felt better. He was almost embarrassed at making a fuss, though for a moment he’d been scared.
Joe meanwhile led up good snow to complete the second pitch of the day. He and Peter dropped the ropes and a tent and descended to the cave. No one knew what to make of Dick’s episode. They were all too addled and weary to pursue the matter or to make plans for the next day.
They moved very slowly in the morning. They needed to go down for a rest. Chris had begun to wonder whether he would have the strength to get this high on the route again. He left some of his camera equipment at the cave as an incentive to return.
The four climbers waded down the ridge once again. This time they were in new snow that seemed very unstable. Dick lost a crampon on a low-angle section. Chris stopped to push the crampon onto Dick’s boot and shoved with such force that both men fell and tumbled down the slope. The soft snow stopped them and they lay cold and wet, laughing at the lunacy of it—they might have died so stupidly. Peter watching them was obscurely moved; they had all of them let go of some inner compass.
They were all close to exhaustion when they staggered onto the glacier. They lurched across the open ground at a pace so slow that Charlie Clarke—he had come out from Advance Base to set up the camera and film their return—was amazed and then frightened for them.
He was still more worried when they told him of Dick’s episode. Charlie said he’d want to examine Dick at Base Camp but he knew from their descriptions that Dick had suffered a stroke. The only question was what to do about it. Charlie watched the others with concern that afternoon. Chris was very quiet. Peter was serious and tense. Joe was unusually relaxed, clearly enjoying his work on the film. It occurred to Charlie that Joe for all of his prickly reserve had a capacity for happiness, a cheerful streak.
The party descended to Base Camp on May 7. The glacier was melting; it was summer. Each man descended apart from the others, walking to the sound of running water. No one spoke of Dick’s situation. They reached Base Camp and Charlie took Dick off for his inspection. The others read mail and old magazines; they would talk seriously in the morning.
Charlie meanwhile told Dick that he’d had a small stroke—it wasn’t uncommon at these heights. It might be very dangerous to return to the ridge. Dick spent the night mulling it over and decided that he was fine; he’d go on with the climb. But Charlie found him first thing in the morning and told him that he couldn’t go back up—he’d be risking the others’ lives, too, if he got sick up there. Charlie sent Dick off to take a walk and went to inform the others.
Chris took in the news and immediately made his own announcement: he wouldn’t be coming back up on the mountain, either. Peter and Joe argued the point until Chris lost his temper; he came very near tears again as he told them that they must listen to him—he was forty-seven years old; he’d reached his physical limit; he was out of control on the mountain; he couldn’t possibly keep up with them on the ridge. Joe and Peter stopped insisting; they knew he was right.
Dick turned up later in the morning. He’d shaved and he looked very young, a bit lost. He grew briefly tearful when Chris offered his sympathy. Dick had decided to leave the expedition. There was nothing for him to do here. He wanted to get home to his wife and to their son, the child born two years ago just after Dick’s return from K2. Dick would stick around for a few days so that Charlie could keep him under observation; after that, he would return alone to Hong Kong and then home.
Joe found Charlie that afternoon and asked him to look at his stool; there was blood in it, and he had a persistent ache in his gut. Charlie wondered if Joe had an ulcer. It was also possible that he had swallowed the blood. He was coughing incessantly, and his throat was raw and bleeding. All of the climbers had sore throats from gasping for breath in the thin, dry air on the ridge. They huddled in the evenings over a makeshift humidifier, towels draped over their heads.
Their little expedition had settled into a grim guerilla warfare, reflected in the look of their Base Camp—the squalid mess shelter and scattering of tents amid rocks and shadow. The valley was barren, a frigid quarry at the end of the world. The climbers looked forward to the nights, when they could forget their surroundings. They would gather in the tiny mess shelter and talk. They were lonely; they all missed their homes. Peter had received a letter from Hilary; she had survived an avalanche during a day of ski mountaineering near Le
ysin. She would need to sit and tell him about it—he would need to hear her—when he returned.
Chris during the next days felt relief at his retreat from what had come to seem the impossible task of climbing the Northeast Ridge. He had in mind for himself a more realistic challenge, one that would allow him to make a further contribution without requiring his presence on the ridge itself. The pinnacles ended just where the North Ridge joined the Northeast Ridge for the finish of the old North Col route. Chris proposed to mount a climb with Charlie and Adrian to the North Col, at the bottom of the North Ridge. The three of them could establish a camp at the col so that Pete and Joe could drop down the North Ridge once they’d climbed the pinnacles. That way they wouldn’t need to retreat back up and over the pinnacles—a staggering prospect—to get off the mountain.
Chris was afraid for them. It had begun to seem that the climbers had all underestimated their chosen route; perhaps it had been a version of madness to come here this way, only four of them to take on Everest’s last great challenge.
Joe was feeling better after a couple of days of rest. He concluded that the blood in his stool had originated in his throat. He took Peter aside to say that he was coming back up the ridge; they would finish it together.
Dick took a stroll one afternoon to take photographs. He walked some three miles, mostly downhill, feeling fit. He turned back and began to climb—and immediately sat down; his vision had gone blurry and he couldn’t catch his breath. He rested for a time and then struggled slowly and painfully up to Base Camp to tell Charlie, who diagnosed another stroke. Dick had to get to a lower altitude immediately. He couldn’t travel alone; Charlie would have to escort him back to civilization. The two of them left Base Camp on the morning of May 10. Charlie promised to return as soon as Dick was safely on a plane to Hong Kong.
The others felt this departure as they might have felt the shadow of a cloud. It was too bad but their minds and bodies were otherwise engaged. Joe and Peter spent the following days in conference. They studied pictures of the route and tried to estimate distances between its various features. At times they imagined finishing the ridge but they put aside this fantasy as artificial, a distraction.
Joe turned thirty-four on May 12. The remnants of the expedition celebrated his birthday that evening. The party was a farewell party, too. The climbers would leave for Advance Base in the morning. The cook made a cake. Joe relaxed a bit; he was funny, more like he was sometimes at home. Adrian was nervous about climbing with Chris to the North Col. Peter teased him, telling him to cheer up; he pointed out that Adrian’s hitherto undistinguished climbing career was taking off—he’d soon be one of the first Englishmen since the war to reach Everest’s North Col.
Chris watching his companions felt happiness seep into his body; it mixed with his anxiety to make him lightheaded even before they opened champagne. The champagne made a mess; most of it flew from the bottle—it was the thin air. Someone took a photograph of Peter and Chris, faces momentarily unlined and forgetful, wreathed in smiles and lit by shock at the explosion of liquid and sound. Someone opened another bottle; this time they caught the champagne in a plastic bucket.
Peter and Joe walked up to Advance Base Camp the next morning. Chris and Adrian walked with them. They all knew this ground well now. They were well acclimatized, and they reached Advance Base Camp that afternoon. Its desolation, its ravaged atmosphere, struck them anew. Peter and Joe decided to take a rest day. They spent most of May 14 in their tents—writing, reading and sleeping. It was good to be inside; the wind blew hard and it snowed. Peter allowed himself to imagine five days of sun, maybe enough to do the route and get down.
They planned to reach the second snow cave the first day and continue to the third snow cave the following day. The third day they would traverse the pinnacles to reach the junction of the Northeast and North ridges. That would leave them in position to reach the summit on the fourth or fifth day. After that they could reverse their route or come down the North Ridge to meet Chris and Adrian at the North Col. It was a long time to spend at such a height, but they thought it might be just possible.
The climbers all rose early on May 15. The wind rose in the morning but the sky was clear. Chris and Adrian made breakfast. Peter and Joe stuffed last-minute odds and ends into their packs. They put on crampons and roped up, leaving their good-byes until last. They agreed again to make radio contact that evening. No one said anything to call attention to the magnitude of the two climbers’ task. Everyone pretended that this was ordinary—and in a way it was. This was how they climbed mountains now.
Peter and Joe turned to leave. The wind picked up snow and blew it past their departing figures. They felt their friends’ eyes upon them. It was a relief—it always was—to start walking, to forget the others, to feel the ground change under their feet as the ridge rose up to meet them.
CHRIS HAD HIS own project—getting up to the North Col—and he turned to it with a kind of relief. Chris and Adrian left camp soon after Peter and Joe. Adrian’s inexperience on technical ground was a problem. The two climbers were brought up short by a wall of steep ice, and retreated to Advance Base Camp. They got out the radio that evening and reached Peter and Joe, who had arrived at the second snow cave in good time. Chris and Peter agreed that the two parties would make contact again the next evening.
Chris and Adrian set out in the morning to make another stab at finding a route to the North Col. Chris gave Adrian a scare, leading him across a slope shadowed by a huge and unstable-looking ice tower. Adrian was game, though; he was moving more strongly than Chris, and he led the easy ground, breaking trail through sections of deep snow. Chris led the steeper pitches. The two of them reached a point near the North Col late in the day; they made radio contact with Peter just after 6:30 that evening. Peter and Joe had reached the third snow cave. They would go for the pinnacles the next day.
Chris and Adrian planned to rest the following day at Advance Base Camp. They would try to reach the North Col the day after that—May 18—and would wait there for Peter and Joe. Chris told Peter his plan. They scheduled further radio contacts for three o’clock and six o’clock the following day.
Chris and Adrian set off to descend to Advance Base Camp. They were tired, and the ground was steep. Adrian lost his footing and slid several feet in the snow before the rope between them came taut. Chris held him, but they were tense and afraid as they continued. They moved more and more slowly. They were too tired to cook when they reached camp. They found their tents and went to sleep.
Chris woke in the morning to a day without clouds or wind. He found his way out to the mess tent around ten o’clock and peered through the telescope at the route. He began his survey of the Northeast Ridge in the vicinity of the third snow cave. He saw nothing there, and so followed the ridge along to the bottom of the First Pinnacle, then up past the expedition’s previous high point.
There they were. They were far along the First Pinnacle. They had made an early start or climbed quickly—perhaps both. Their figures were small but sharply defined in the dry air. Chris could see them perfectly. He made out the arms and legs in their orange wind-suits. Two tiny figures; they put him in mind of plastic soldiers he’d brought home for Rupert and Daniel. The sight of Joe and Peter moving together on the enormous ridge made him want their lives. He loved what they were doing and he loved them for doing it.
Chris and Adrian watched the two figures for the rest of the day. The figures moved slowly now. The ground was new to them and apparently difficult and they must be tired. They were climbing at a height of more than 8,200 meters—higher than all but five of the world’s summits. Chris tried and failed to make radio contact with them at three o’clock. He could still see them on the ridge, moving toward the Second Pinnacle. There was a peculiar discomfort in watching them. He might have been with them had he been stronger. His relief at being finished with the route had evaporated. He wanted to be with Joe and Peter, to know what they knew.
Chris considered the circumstances. Joe and Peter had been climbing all day. They needed a place to spend the night. They would have to dig a snow cave or carve out a ledge for their tent. Either task might prove difficult if the snow on both sides of the ridge was very steep or too soft. The mountain became a black wall set against the deep blue of the night. Chris imagined Joe and Peter in a cave on the east side of the ridge, above the Kangshung Face.
PETER AND JOE had intended to cross the pinnacles in a day. They wondered now how they had imagined this to be possible. This was their third day on the ridge; they had been climbing for fourteen hours today and now they moved very slowly.
They stopped at the base of the Second Pinnacle. There was no snow for a cave. They scraped out a platform for their tent in the dark and spent the night wrapped in their sleeping bags. It was very cold, but there was not much wind. Joe had mostly left off worrying and remembering, but now he thought about his mother and his father. He mentioned this to Peter, who didn’t reply; perhaps he was asleep. Joe woke some time later and lay listening to the silence.