Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  He didn’t know what to say. Geoffrey tucked his hands under the blanket, tried not to scratch at the stump hidden underneath.

  George pulled his foot back from Sandy.

  “Then the coolie’s hands thawed,” he went on. “I don’t know which was worse. The freezing or the thawing.” Both were terrible reminders that the body was nothing but pulpy meat, easily ruptured, broken, frozen, thawed. That was the worst of it, knowing the myriad ways a body could be destroyed. “His hands turned black. Purple. Swelled up like balloons. And the smell, of rot. Like in the trenches. You weren’t in the trenches. You can’t imagine them, Sandy. You shouldn’t.” He gagged a little at the memory. The smell hadn’t gone away, not for months after he returned home. The stench was in his sinuses, in his clothes, his hair. When he turned his head, it was always there. Even now he could conjure the smell. “Be glad for that,” he continued. “It was constant, the stench, from all the bits of bodies we never found.”

  Sandy looked blanched – his scabbed skin pulled taut over his cheekbones. It had been so fair, Sandy’s skin. Not translucent, like Ruth’s, but more solidly pale. Not anymore. The mountain had ravaged him. He’d go home older. “It must have been agony to sit there and rot like that. He mewled. Constantly. At Base Camp, Bullock had to hold him down as they amputated his hands.”

  There was a long silence.

  “How high are we, George?” Sandy’s words were a slow staccato.

  It took him some time to answer. His mind flitted, thoughts tapped against his skull. He hadn’t felt this foggy when he was here with Odell. Maybe he’d been too high for too long. His altimeter was somewhere.

  “More than twenty-six thousand feet,” he guessed.

  He fumbled in his pocket, his fingers too numb to identify any of the objects inside by feel. He pulled things from his pockets he didn’t remember placing there, spread them across his sleeping bag – scraps of paper, petroleum jelly, a small knife. He found the altimeter, the small round face of it sharply white in the darkening tent. He held it in both hands to keep it steady and squinted at the numbers that circled the face. Held it until the wavering stopped. He closed his eyes.

  His father was speaking.

  “I’d ask you all to indulge me a moment,” his father said, “and add an extra prayer for the young men who are undertaking the expedition to Mount Everest, on our King’s behalf. May they not be foolhardy and may God keep them safe.”

  George dropped his head, embarrassed, and glanced sideways at Ruth sitting beside him, his mother and sister next to her. It was bad enough that his father continued to chastise him privately, accusing him of being self-indulgent – but now this? His father asking the congregation to pray for him?

  “Your mother told me everyone has been calling on them, sending their congratulations, and good hopes for your safety. Your success,” Ruth whispered.

  “Of course.”

  “He means well. You know he does, George.”

  “Just one moment more, please,” his father said now from the pulpit, “and then I’ll ask our choir to sing us out into this beautiful day. George? Will you come up here?”

  Ruth’s hand was at his back. He rose, walked towards his father on the dais. “For you,” his father said, holding out a small box. Everyone was clapping. The choir began to sing. Nearer, my God, to thee. His father would have picked the hymn. It was just another argument, an attempt at conversion, at salvation.

  “You’re looking for God, even if you won’t admit it.” That was what his father insisted, later that evening. “He is there. In the wilds. In the mountains. But He’s here, too.”

  “Moses went to a mountain,” George said, pointing his fork at his father. Jabbing at the air between them.

  “But he didn’t spend his life running off to them.” His father sliced at the roast on his plate, dipped his bread in gravy. It dribbled slightly on his beard. He wiped at it, smearing the gravy across his napkin. “Mountains won’t support your family, George. Neither will writing about them. The Mallorys have been rectors and reverends for centuries. You already have a calling.”

  “The mountains have been there longer even than Mallorys have been in the Church, and they’re calling.”

  “George, you aren’t going there to find God. If you were, you’d have found him already. God’s easy to find if you’re looking.”

  “No, you’re right, sir. God isn’t there. Everest is proof enough against God.”

  George inhaled deeply, opened his eyes. The dial on the altimeter was sharper.

  “Twenty-six thousand, nine hundred and, ummm … three?” He handed it off to Sandy, so he could see for himself.

  A slow smile spread across Sandy’s face. It took him a while to speak, their conversation delayed as though by a great distance. “Incredible.” Sandy peered at the altimeter, turned it in his hands to see the engraving on the reverse. “George, may this raise you up, Rev. HLM.”

  He reached to take it back. “My father gave it to me in ’21. Before I first came here.”

  He slid it into his pocket.

  A little over two thousand feet to go.

  “I USED TO go to your father’s church sometimes,” Sandy said. His voice sounded strange – stripped down, weak. Everything was weak. But he wanted to talk, and so forced the sound out. “My father took me. Maybe I told you that?” Lengthy pauses dragged out between his sentences. Between his words. He was finding it harder and harder to tell what he was only thinking and what he was saying out loud. There was no way he’d pass any of Somervell’s memory tests now. He tried to add up numbers in his head, forgot which ones he’d picked. “Did I tell you?” he asked again.

  “No.”

  Sandy’s hands stroked the air near his face. It was agony. It felt as if the mountain had stripped the flesh from his cheeks. There couldn’t be any skin left. George reached across to him in the twilight, pushed Sandy’s hands away from his face, and smeared petroleum jelly carefully, gently on his skin. George traced the lines of his eyebrows, his cheekbones, his lips. The vulnerable spot at his temple. Sandy closed his eyes.

  “I remember he took me. My dad,” Sandy continued. “No, that’s not true,” he said after a minute. “I don’t remember. But my dad, he bragged about it. Even before I was set to come here. ‘Sandy and I went to George Mallory’s church,’ he told people. Then, when I was invited to come, he said we were clearly meant to be together.” He flushed a little. Why had he said that? “I remember the smell,” he rushed on. “All waxed wood and polish.”

  “He took me for an Easter sermon,” he told George. “The Harrowing.”

  “One of my father’s favourites.”

  “My dad smelled of sawdust. His pipe. There was a scar in the wood seat beside me. And a woman in front of me in a dark hat.”

  “My father,” George said, “used to conjure heaven and hell for the congregation. He told Trafford and me, live a good life and you’ll never be cold.”

  “I guess your father never thought any of us would be here.”

  “No.” After a moment George asked, “Did you see the mandalas at the monastery?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “They’re sand drawings that the monks make, on the floor. Intricate, tight. You’d know if you had.” George spoke into the air above them. “Teddy and I watched the monks for hours. There were four of them. Always four. And they sat at the cardinal points. Chanting and bending.” George pulled himself to sitting to demonstrate. He crouched over his hands, one tapping the other as though parsing out invisible specks. “He smelled like grass, the monk I crouched next too. Used a long red tube to place each grain. Red and white – paisley swirls on demon costumes.”

  “Demons?” There’d been so much talk of demons.

  “With white lines around their black eyes. Red haired and fanged on green and blue backgrounds. When you watched them they seemed to move on their own, make you dizzy. The monks sat there for days. Weeks. Tapping. It was devoti
on itself.” George looked up at him from where he was still hunched over his tapping hands. They shook now from the cold, glowed blue in the dim tent. “He called it samsara. And told us to come back.”

  “Who did?”

  George glanced at him, aggravated at having to repeat himself. “The monk.”

  Sandy nodded and George continued. “They called it the wheel of life.” George sat up straighter, reciting, his eyes closed. “The cause of all suffering is desire. Even if the only desire is not to suffer. But everything is moving. Everything changes, passes. Even suffering.”

  It was a philosophy Sandy could understand. In crew they talked about rowing through the pain, when every muscle burned. The race was finite, but the feeling of winning or losing wasn’t. “You have to push through it,” he’d explained to Dick. “If you give up, you’ll hate yourself much longer than your muscles will ache.” But he hadn’t thought about applying it to anything else. To life. He liked that idea. It was a sophisticated thought. He sat up straighter with it.

  What if, though? What if the monks were right and none of this was real? What if the tent, the mountain beneath him, was some kind of illusion, some kind of dream? It didn’t seem possible. Not with the pain, with the difficulty breathing. His body reminded him over and over again how real this place was. How much it wanted to be anywhere else.

  “This feels bloody real, George,” he said, trying to smile. He reached up and brushed the skin on his nose and the pain shot through him, radiating along his skin so that it was as if his whole body were a gaping wound. No, this certainly wasn’t an illusion. But he did believe it would pass. There was a time when he wasn’t in pain. There would be again.

  Everything would pass.

  George was fidgeting with his belongings, pulling things from his pack, a journal, a silk handkerchief, matches, a folded bundle of what looked like brightly coloured rags. He carried so much with him. George licked at the tip of his pencil, bent over the open book in his hand as if to write something, but he didn’t.

  Maybe he should write to someone too, Sandy thought. He’d write to Dick. Or his mum.

  “My mum,” he said, “stopped talking to me. Before I left. She wouldn’t even say goodbye.” His voice kept catching in his throat. He worried he might cry, but he kept talking. George was staring at him now. “She lit a candle in her window. She keeps it lit, day and night. She told Evie she’d keep it there until I walked back in the door.”

  She must still love him. Must have forgiven him.

  “She’s scared, is all,” Sandy continued. “Scared I might not come back. I never thought about that before. What will she do if I don’t come back?” He looked down. There were words scrawled on the paper in his lap. He couldn’t make them out. Somes had told him he’d have to make a decision. What price was he willing to pay?

  “I don’t want to die here, George. I can’t do that to my mum.”

  “You’ll be fine, Sandy. Just do as I tell you. You’ll be safe. You believe me, right?”

  He nodded at George. “Of course.” His voice caught again in his throat. He cleared it, said “of course” again.

  George pushed the canteen at him. Sandy swirled the water in his mouth, imagined the dry ridges of his tongue, his cheeks, and the water filling them.

  George spoke again. “Do you believe Somes, Sandy? About the avalanche?”

  He tried to remember what Somervell had said. That was so long ago. Before the drowned boy. Before Lapkha.

  “He thinks I’m reckless,” George said, “because of Bowling Green. Have you been? The little green outcropping at Pen-y-Pass?” Sandy nodded, even though he didn’t know it. “We go at Easter. Even Ruth used to come. But not anymore. Not since the children. But Easter. And Christmas. You could come. Someday soon.”

  “We were climbing,” George went on. “Will and I. And Geoffrey. Back before he lost his leg. We stopped and had lunch on the Green. We’d taken this long, circuitous route to get up there. There was a more direct route I wanted to take, but Will and Geoffrey said no. Said it wasn’t climbable. When we were done with lunch I left my pipe at the Green. On purpose. I’ve never told anyone that, Sandy. Never. When we got to the bottom I said I’d forgotten it, that I had to go back for it. Sentimental value.”

  “Did someone give it to you?” he asked. “Someone you loved?” He had a locket of Evie’s he’d brought with him. And an earring from Marjory. She had pinned it inside his jacket herself. He’d forgotten about it. He felt for it now, but it was gone.

  George shook his head at him. “They said I couldn’t go back for it, it would take too long.” George leaned into him, as though conspiring, dropped his voice even lower. Sandy leaned towards him. “But I told them there was another route and I put up the climb. It was straight and tough. The hardest climb I’d done ’til then. Gorgeous. They named the route after me.”

  George leaned back, smiled slow and long, nodding.

  “Somes was there. At the lodge. When we got back. And when Geoffrey told him what I’d done, he said it was reckless. He and the guide both. The next morning I saw George Mallory is a young man who will not be alive for long written in the guest-book.” George fell silent and the smile drifted away.

  Sandy was shivering. His sleeping bag had slumped down around his waist. He pulled it up, burrowed down into it.

  “But I’ve survived everything,” George said. “I keep surviving.”

  “You’re lucky, I guess.”

  George nodded, pulled his pack around and laid his head on it.

  GEORGE COULDN’T SLEEP. It was all he wanted. Sleep. A brief respite. He was exhausted, whittled down to only bone and narrow muscle, a filament of will. Sandy hadn’t spoken for what seemed like hours, though it might have been only minutes. His own consciousness was coming in flickers, in and out, a shoal of river fish. He was numbed, stupefied in the thin air.

  The tent was dark now. The lantern had gone out. It was welcome, the darkness. They couldn’t see each other. Couldn’t see the summit. Nothing existed in the darkness.

  Everyone else was below them. At Camp V, Odell would be staring upwards for a light, the dull smudge of a lantern in the night. Odell and Virgil. He would leave a note for Odell. Tell him when to watch for them. Tell him when they’d be back.

  Farther down, at Camp IV – Teddy and Somervell. Both of them broken and ready for home.

  Noel across the Col, in his Eagle’s Nest. He would watch the skyline tomorrow. George had written him to say he’d go up skyline. The ridge was the surest way. He would have to remember to turn and wave to Noel, to his camera.

  Everyone was below them. Waiting.

  “Somes will be writing the dispatches for the Times about now,” George said.

  “What dispatches?”

  “It should be Teddy who does it, but he won’t be able to. Not with his snowblindness. Together they’ll prepare telegrams for the possible outcomes. There will be two of them. One that says we succeeded. That we’ve returned triumphant from the summit. And one that concedes defeat, says we’re coming home.”

  He didn’t tell Sandy there should be a third one. One that said that the final summit team was lost and all hope was gone. Teddy wouldn’t write that one. He wouldn’t want to tempt fate.

  “They’ll be written in code,” he said. “So no one will know what happened until the Times decodes the message.”

  It had grown even colder. His muscles ached from constant shivering. Jesus Christ, he cursed under his breath. Beside him Sandy’s breath was laboured. A long exhale followed by a jerk, a coughed gulp of air, his body shaking. Sandy pressed against him in the cramped space, trying to keep warm. They were utterly alone in the world.

  It hardly seemed possible that it was just yesterday he’d said his goodbyes to Somes and Teddy. Or just this morning that they’d left Odell and Virgil behind.

  He was surprised when Virgil sought him out before he left. “Sahib?”

  “What is it, Virgil?” He ha
dn’t meant to sound so short. Virgil had been a solid companion, but he felt betrayed by what Virgil had done at the monastery, going to Teddy behind his back, warning him away from the mountain.

  “You not go.”

  “Virgil, we’ve been over this before.” He bent to fiddle with the straps of his pack. He just wanted to be gone. He was going to climb this bloody mountain and be done with it. “I thought you wanted this too. I guess I was wrong.”

  “Go home to family.” Virgil pointed first at himself and then at George.

  “I’ll go back to them when this is done.”

  Virgil nodded, started to step away. George watched his shadow on the snow, saw Virgil shift and then move back, the silhouette of his arm reaching towards him. He looked up. “I don’t need any good luck totems.”

  “Not good luck. For hope.” Virgil held out folded, bright-coloured flags. A tied packet of rice flour.

  “You keep it. You pray.”

  “No. You, Sahib Sandy, leave at the summit. When you reach.” When. Virgil had said when. “For her. Not you.”

  “Do you really think this will make a difference? That this will be enough if Chomolungma doesn’t want us there?”

  “Maybe you give to her, she let you pass. Maybe not. I hope.” Virgil smiled at him, his face crinkling with it. “I pray.”

  George rolled over now, his back to Sandy. Unbearable cold crept in through the tent flap, up through the ground and the bedroll beneath him. Behind him, Sandy choked and gasped, waking himself with a violent jolt. His convulsions jostled George, sending a sharp wave of pain from his head to his kidneys. He gritted his teeth, tried to catch his own breath, and turned around to face Sandy.

  There was panic in Sandy’s gasping. His eyes were open, unseeing, bulging as his jaw worked around his stuttered breath, his arms flailing against George. He was clawing at him, climbing him.

  For a brief instant the boy was Gaddes looking up at him from the bottom of the crater, through the heavy green of the gas. Gaddes ripped off his faulty mask and pleaded with him with a gaping mouth, gulping down great lungfuls of gas. Trying to breathe. He clawed at the sliding mud walls, at his own throat, leaving streaks of blood and dirt there. In his own mask, George’s breath was deafening. Eventually Gaddes stopped struggling and collapsed again to the bottom of the crater, his body shaking in violent tremors, until those stopped too.