Kingdoms of Experience

by Andrew Greig

April 18 Mal, Chris, loads to C1, back. Urs, Andy to C2, stayed and improved snow hole. Liz, Andy G., loads to ice-bulge …

  I wake at 8.30 after a long night drifting in and out of sleep. Sun on the Pinnacles, ice inside the tent. Hear voices and stoves. Then I remember – I’m going on the hill today! The Bumblies’ day out …

  Leave around 11.30, roped with Liz. Still get a kick out of the glacier – soothing, other-worldly, serene. We actually gain on Mal and Chris. Feel good today, all doubts and hesitations gone. Yes, that slope looks big but it’s a perfect, calm, blue day, no objective danger at all. Just up to me.

  Clip jumar to sling and sling to harness. Clip jumar to fixed rope. Add a back-up krab just in case the jumar twists off the rope. Extra sling and krab to clip into snow-stake at change-overs. My first time jumaring so I’ll do it by the book as the Glenmore Cowboys tell it. Wait for Mal to get beyond first stake. Okay, let’s go …

  The ground is roughly 40° ice with snow patches. Need to place crampons firmly, axe not necessary. Push with the legs, pull on the jumar. Initial adrenalin settles down, find a rhythm. So much of it seems to be about rhythm in movement and breathing; no sudden effort. Minimum effort. Count steps up to 100, take a break, start again …

  On it goes, pure doing, little thinking, glancing up for the next snow-stake, at Mal above and Liz below. Methodical change-overs at snow stakes. The slope steepens as it swings over to the right. The rock rib comes nearer, the ice-bulge glitters. Take a break just below it to collect myself and finally look around. To my surprise, no drastic sense of exposure – a 50-foot vertical drop makes me feel much worse than 1,000-foot slope. The scale of this place sinks into me, standing on this vast, sparkling slope, watching spindrift boiling up the Kangshung Face and ripping off the crest of the Ridge above, while huge stately clouds steam over Nepal. Way below, the dots of ABC, and the East Rongbuk glacier like a white curving motorway. An intoxicating agoraphobia, I feel the boundaries of myself dissolve into this openness. Up here there are hours of lethargy, deprivation and struggle, then minutes of euphoria or peace that soar above them. This tiny summit on a great mountain of unpleasantness.

  Fuck me, I’m on Everest! I wave to Liz down below. She’s coming on very slowly, but coming. She waves back, wishing she’d trained more but sustained by the astonished awareness she’s probably the first British woman to climb on Everest. It’s a long way from the Insurance business …

  Right, let’s do this ice-bulge properly. Maybe 30 feet high, under 70°; straightforward compared to Scottish routes, but being at 22,000 feet makes nonsense of that. Take out my axe and front-point laboriously up … Pain, pain, no not pain just fighting against the body’s leaden drag. Sand in the legs, heaving chest, heart pounding and sick in the stomach. Nearly there … Mal’s sitting watching me, don’t fuck up … There.

  ‘Well done, youth,’ Mal says as I slump down beside him. ‘Pretty shitty, isn’t it?’ I agree, get my breath back, feel on top of the world. Long way down, must have been on the go for two hours now. I feel tired but not exhausted, in control. He suggests I leave my load here ‘in view of the time’ (3.30, actually been four hours, where did it go?), and the threatening weather now sweeping down the Ridge. The long couloir traverse to CB’s is still ahead, which could prove awkward in bad conditions. Andy Nisbet had already taken a flyer on it, penduluming across the slope on his back, attached only by a safety krab. Also Liz is way below, and he wants me to tell her to stash her load where she is and go down together.

  So, slightly disappointed, mildly relieved and well content, I set off down. Treat the ice-bulge as a proper abseil, facing in, then down to Liz. I give her Mal’s message, but she isn’t prepared to stop having pushed this far. She says she’s not exhausted, just painfully slow. I look at her, believe her, we grin at each other. ‘The Right Stuff, Liz,’ I joke. ‘I’ll wait for you at the bottom of the ropes.’

  ‘Thanks, I don’t want to give up.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. …’

  Using two krabs as a friction brake the way Sandy had shown me, I zip on down the ropes, still making myself do everything by the book at changeover points. Then sit for a cool hour at the bottom watching Liz struggle on to the foot of the ice-bulge, climb it, leave her load and follow on down.

  The last uphill section to ABC was hard going. Jon’s ready with brews then food. Sandy’s arrived very cheery. Sit and listen to the crack, have a cigarette, feel wiped-out, whole.

  That evening, as Chris and Mal lay in their bags in CB’s snow cave, they jerked awake, hearing the sound of jumars being pushed up the rope, and footsteps. Suddenly the cave seemed full of ghosts. The jumars stopped just below the cave. They waited for the Karrimat blocking the entrance to be pulled aside. …

  No one entered. A long silence. Mal and Chris looked at each other. Neither of them was going out to investigate. Turn over and try to go to sleep. Don’t think about it.

  Urs and Andy also slept badly that night at Camp 2. The crevasse/ cave was a regular wind-tunnel; they wore thermal underwear, pile, down and their Libond suits inside their bags and still shivered much of the night. Andy admitted later that excitement probably also kept them awake, the prospect of breaking new ground tomorrow, their first chance to attempt some technical climbing at altitude. …

  April 19 ‘Heavy-duty pastry day,’ as Jon says. Biggest number on the hill yet.

  Jon, Sandy, Rick, loads to C2 and down.

  Mal, Chris, loads from C1 to C2, down.

  Allen, load alone to C2.

  Andy G., load to top of ice-bulge, down. ‘Dead on arrival – trying too hard.’

  Bob to BC.

  Andy and Urs, fixed 1st Rock Buttress. …

  This is the account of Andy and Urs’ day as I gleaned it from them on their return to ABC that evening. As they talked – Urs excited and voluble, Andy hesitant and self-effacing, sitting on his hands and talking through his beard – the long icicles hanging from their beards dripped on to the floor and froze again.

  Urs wakes at 6.15 and starts the laborious process of melting ice for the day’s first brews. It is bitterly cold. Two hours later they emerge from the cave, slowly pack their sacks with ropes and climbing gear. They sit outside making slings, waiting for the sun to rise and warm up their world. Here in the lee of the ridge it looks like a perfect day. The rope vibrates, five minutes later Chris Watts appears round the corner, carrying a massive load up from C1. Time to leave, Andy thinks, and leads up the last steep 100 feet to 7090. The wind is a shock, battering straight into their faces, so cold and spindrift laden as to be nearly impossible to peer into. Heads down, they taper their way carefully along the gently rising ridge. It’s straightforward yet always potentially tricky, angling down to their right. The rock slabs covered with loose snow are unpleasant so they try to keep to the snow alongside. A stumble or a slip here and they’d probably go all the way down. Essential to concentrate but hard to, with the gale blowing them this way and that. ‘Easy ground,’ Andy thinks, ‘but there’s really no such thing up here.’

  They carry on, peering round carefully when they reach the dip in the Ridge where Bonington’s 2nd snow cave had been. It would be a great boon for us to find it, but there’s no sign. They’ve been going for two hours now; it seems like an eternity and the day’s just begun. Urs’ feet have gone numb, ‘They were feeling awfully, so I dance for ten minutes. Then they are painfully, then OK.’ They decide they won’t try to do both rock buttresses today, so dump a bale of rope and some snow-stakes and carry on along the steepening slope towards the first Buttress.

  Finally they arrive, take a breather then rope up. Andy takes out his second ice-axe, as a gunfighter straps on two guns before walking out for the high-noon showdown. Technical climbing at last. He feels well and makes an effort to remain level-headed and treat this as another day’s climbing in the Cairngorms. It’s a very Cairngorm day in fact. Urs is rather more taken aback; he’s been high before, but doesn’t like this weather at all. As S
andy once remarked ‘Climbing in Scotland is great training, not because it’s good but because it’s terrible!’

  Andy bangs a peg into a crack for their initial belay – which promptly splits open. Rotten rock. He finally gets one in and sets off, Urs belaying him, diagonally right up a snowfield leading into the Buttress. The incline here is about 45° to 50° and the soft snow makes the going hard and insecure. He gets in a friend, then a snow-stake and feels better. It’s with a sense of surprise that he spots some frayed red climbing rope half-buried in the snow – he’d almost forgotten someone had been here before him. At the top of the snowfield he uses that rope as dubious further protection to make a move across on to rock and, hanging from one hand, puts in a peg. ‘Quite tricky, really,’ he admitted later, with an apologetic laugh. He shelters there as Urs jumars up to him, suddenly realizing he is heaving with exertion and sweating for the first time that day.

  The most interesting section lies ahead, in the narrow gully that splits the face of the Buttress. The first 20 feet are soft snow, being in the lee of the wind. His axe shafts sink right in, his legs too as he forces his way up, running on adrenalin now. This initial bulge rates as ‘a wee bit hairy’ on the Nisbet scale. Then the slope lies back a little and the snow improves. Halfway up he spots an old peg in the left wall, tests it … sound. He thankfully uses it as a running belay, then bridges up a groove between the snow and the rock.

  ‘Rock and snow, it felt quite familiar … Hairy because of panting and weakness. … I felt isolated, really alone, like I was the only person on Everest – really exhilarating!’ he concluded with a rare burst of enthusiasm. ‘It was definitely climbing and not plodding.’

  The gully curves left and comes out near the top of the Buttress. No good anchor there, so Andy traverses right, across to some bands of loose rock. He has seen another old peg, thinks ‘Great, an anchor!’ but wisely tests it and it comes away in his hand. ‘So I put it back in, and added a friend. Then more bulges, so I kept going and finally put in a peg which was very bad and a nut which was quite good, then tied off the rope.’

  He is now at the top of the first Buttress, back into the gale. It looks like easy ground ahead to the second Buttress. But that is enough for one day, time to go home. ‘When I stopped I felt really good, on a high. … Felt really optimistic that I could go to 8,000 metres without oxygen. Really chuffed. I’d been maybe one and a half hours on the gully, but really I haven’t a clue. My only thought now, as usual, was to get back down as quickly as possible.’

  So he abseils back down to Urs, and together they set off back along the Ridge to 7090, then on to the fixed ropes. ‘Needed them, had to really concentrate just to get down. I felt my legs would buckle if I stumbled.’

  There was a very positive atmosphere in the ABC Mess Tent that night. Everyone had had a hard day, general exhaustion all round, but we felt the Expedition was moving forward. Load-carrying is grim and demoralizing, and a surge forward is a great morale-booster all round. Particularly for Andy, who’d finally broken any remaining physiological and psychological barriers he had about altitude. The only set-back was the failure to find Bonington’s 2nd snow cave, and the lack of obvious other sites to dig one. That would be the next task. Chris and Mal brought us down to earth by pointing out we still had some 30 loads to get up to C2, which meant a hell of a lot of work before we could go forward in strength. There was no point in pushing the route out a long way ahead of our supplies. Mal stressed that we really needed all the oxygen, tentage, gas, cooking gear, food and climbing gear at the foot of the Pinnacles by early May – and that was only three weeks away. Put that way, we were on course, but only just.

  But my enduring image of the day, possibly the whole trip, was not of Andy’s adventures. I’d overestimated my stamina and set out again for CB’s; I felt fine at first, but suddenly below the ice-bulge I was running on empty, my body choking and spluttering, losing power. I struggled on to the top of the ice-bulge and I knew I’d had it for the day.

  Back at the bottom of the fixed ropes I slumped down, for the first time really beginning to appreciate what the lads had been up to. The Sultans of Pain, that’s what they were. Though stronger and fitter than I, they’re not supermen, they suffer and struggle just the same. … And yet they drive themselves on. Sultans of Pain. … If they were supermen they wouldn’t be half so impressive. It’s because they’re all heart and flesh and blood that they impress and move me so much.

  I watched with fascination the tiny red dot that was Allen Fyffe inching with appalling slowness across the couloir above CB’s with a load of oxygen. He was stopping more and more often, his suffering evident across the distance between us. Once he stopped moving for a full ten minutes. Was he going to accept the inevitable and come down? My heart lurched as the tiny figure turned forward again and put one foot in front of the other, then the next. … At this rate he had another two hours of punishment coming to him. I thought: if we succeed on this route, it’ll be because of that kind of self-overcoming, the irrational refusal to pack it in. And even if we don’t succeed, something quietly magnificent is happening here. I’m seeing the will push the body to its final limits.

  And I remembered sitting with Mal in South Queensferry watching Steve Cram win his gold medal. As Cram kicked off the final bend and went for the line, Mal had tears in his eyes. Nothing to do with patriotism; it was the will’s transcendence that moved him so.

  So it was with me. Those brutal days on Everest, filled with banal bodily weakness and pain, linger still as curiously spiritual events, in the image of Allen Fyffe relentlessly forcing his suffering body towards Camp 2, step by step.

  A rest-day followed. Urs, Andy and Allen went down to BC. I considered going down too, feeling burned-out after a week at ABC and also because there would likely be mail waiting. Yet I found myself surprisingly indifferent to the prospect of letters, which so dominate one’s mind at Base. ABC was rough, but at least one felt involved there and lived very much in the present, however demanding it was.

  I had a long talk with Mal about how he felt things were going at this halfway stage in the Expedition. His assessment was we were very slightly ahead of the game, due to hard work and the recent spell of good or at least climbable weather. ‘But we must be in for some nasty surprises. Sooner or later this hill is going to show its teeth.’

  Carrying loads to Camp 3 and above the altitude was going to become decisive. Everyone would be operating above their previous height limits. Above 7,500 metres one is into the ‘Death Zone’, the area where on most great peaks one would expect to spend only a day or two – going for the summit. We had to carry loads several times to the base of the Pinnacles at 8,000 metres before we could even start getting into the crux of the route and some real technical climbing. The siting of Camp 3 and load-carrying were the central issues now. There were still some 18 carries to do to Camp 2, and then 20 to Camp 3, somewhere beyond the Rock Buttresses. Or was that too far; would we have to somehow make a Camp 3 on this side of the Buttresses, and have yet another camp beyond them, near the Pinnacles? A large proportion of those loads would be the oxygen which we’d committed ourselves to bringing in order to have a real chance of making the summit. Mal was worried that tired climbers might think ‘sod the oxygen’ and decide just to push on as far as possible. It was just possible that we might climb the Pinnacles that way – Rick, Tony and Sandy believed it could be done – but if we abandoned the oxygen we almost certainly abandoned any real chances of going on to the summit.

  Everyone wanted to break new ground, to get to 8,000 metres without oxygen, to get in among the Pinnacles. As always on a big trip there was a tension between personal ambition, the husbanding of one’s own resources, and commitment to working for the good of the Expedition. Ideally, both come together when a pair finally set off for the summit. If they make it, then all the others’ selfless work is justified, as is the summit pair’s ambition. But if they don’t, ‘well you’ve a lot of pissed-o
ff knackered people.’

  The lack of communication with BC was likely to become an increasing problem. Not only in case of emergency but also for maximum efficiency. Today was a case in point – the weather was ideal for climbing, but no one at all was in a state to climb, having either just arrived or just come off the hill.

  Something was obviously seriously wrong with Bob; his lips were still blue, his right eye blurry and his chest pains bad as ever. Sandy was still suffering headaches most mornings and having to go cautiously. Nick was hammered with dysentery; Chris wasn’t complaining but clearly suffering. Jon spent most of the night coughing (‘What, me? Can’t have been me, mate…’) Mal felt only natural competitiveness was keeping him with Rick. Rick was OK, but had been husbanding himself. Allen – the old man had probably carried more than anyone and clearly needed a break now.

  ‘It’s been too easy so far,’ he concluded. Easy, I thought, this is easy? These lads are suffering! ‘It’s going to get a lot worse, you’ll start to see it. But, sure, I’m quietly optimistic – but that’s just the way that I am! We’ll just let it roll for a few days.’

  Andy April 2 Mal and I both slept badly. Diarrhoea in my case, a curious, numbing jaw-ache in his. In the morning I felt drained and decided to go down. I was just getting weaker and was obviously not going to make CB’s let alone 7090 this time up. Mal forced himself to set off with Chris, Sandy, Rick and Jon to carry crucial loads to C2, but. …

  Mal Bad toothache for some reason, got worse as I went across the glacier. Dropped my load at fixed rope and doubled back to Base. Hope it’s easy to cure and not some weird jaw infection. I’m a bit worried as it seems to have affected the edge of my tongue also. Now listening to Bob Marley and the Wailers, which seems appropriate!

  The other lads completed their carry with extra-large loads (Rick struggling with two oxygen cylinders, a load that the few who tried it found to be at their limit). They all got to Camp 2, brewed and descended to ABC to find Mal packing to go down. That was a blow, but Mal’s jaw had got worse all day and he needed Urs to sort it out. It was not apparent at the time but this was a decisive moment in the Expedition.