Kingdoms of Experience

by Andrew Greig

  ‘When I came out here,’ Andy says, beginning to be agitated, ‘I believed we had a 70 per cent chance of doing the Pinnacles, maybe 20 per cent of the Summit. Now I’ve revised that down to two per cent for either.’ He goes on to list the factors against us: weather, time and logistics. Originally ten lead climbers once seemed like a lot, but now there are never more than seven fit at one time, and nearly half of those will always be at BC or on the way to or from there. Those on the hill are badly and unequally paired. So often it seems people have gone high, split up, and consistently achieved less than planned and required. And returned wasted.

  ‘That’s just defeatism!’ Liz breaks in.

  ‘Realism,’ Andy insists, uneasy as the emotional temperature rises. ‘But I’m prepared to go up one more time and give it everything I’ve got – even if that’s not much … I seldom think I’m going to climb a route when I get to the bottom of it, but that doesn’t stop me getting to the top. That’s just the way I work.’

  ‘That’s ’cos you’re from Aberdeen!’ Sandy jokes. ‘Maybe that’s okay … But most of us folk have to believe we can and will do it, even if we’re proved wrong.’

  ‘So maybe you could keep your thoughts to yourself,’ concludes Liz.

  A long, awkward silence. Andy is clearly unconvinced, Liz and Sandy tense, Chris keeping his opinion to himself. Me, I’m worried. For the first time I’m having to consider that the Expedition will have no success at all. We always knew it was odds against, but I’d always unconsciously assumed success, partial or total. I think we all had. Sandy defines success as breaking new ground on the Pinnacles; from then on we’re winning. But now Andy, who is levelheaded and up to now one of our strong climbers is quite certain we won’t even get near that.

  Urs breaks the silence between us. ‘It is not a question of the man, or the tactics, or the courage … We are not heroes, I was very frightened …’ He waves towards Everest, swathed in cloud once again. ‘It is a question of the mountain and weather. The summit is chance … What is interesting are the moments while we try to get there.’

  And Sandy nods, in harmony with him once again.

  Our Base Camp discussions were more than academic. Luo was pressing for confirmation of our 31st May exit date, and it was beginning to look as if we’d need an extension if we were really going to climb this hill. As deputy leader at Base Camp Sandy had to let Luo know soon – his personal opinion was we should extend our time by a week. It would do no harm. It could make all the difference. So Chris left on the morning of the 18th, still gaunt and hoarse but not bronchial now, with a message to Mal suggesting that Sandy extend our time; we had to hear from him by the 20th …

  18 May. Mal and Tony are on their way to C4. Mal’s carrying out his decision to use a medium flow of oxygen in order to carry oxygen to C4 and still be in condition to start on the Pinnacles the next day. Worried by our lack of progress and the ever-increasing possibility of the monsoon, he’d decided to depart from the original plan of not using O2 at all before the Pinnacles. With our limited number of oxygen cylinders (mostly still at C3), this meant the summit was less likely though still possible: the emphasis had now been switched to the Pinnacles. If we could climb them the Expedition had achieved something significant.

  Using O2 seemed to balance out the extra weight of the cylinder. Mal finally arrived at C4 with half a cylinder left for use on fixing the 1st Pinnacle the next day. That would be the breakthrough that mattered; the team needed the morale-boost of fresh progress on the route.

  As the weather clagged in, Tony lost sight of Mal up ahead. A hard physical day for him, coughing a lot and weary. Several times the wind brought him to his knees, and he’d stay there gasping and blinded till the gust abated. Still, he consoled himself, you don’t expect to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed carrying a sack to nearly 8,000 metres for the first time. And he hadn’t yet had an acclimatization night of sleeping at C3. But he made it, then he and Mal put in three hours of work enlarging the snow-hole. At the end of that they had the best two-person cave on the route, which would be an important launching-pad for all future attempts from then on up, particularly given the unsatisfactory nature of the C3 tents.

  They brewed up and settled in for the night. Tony picked up Base Camp faintly on the radio for the first time, something about extending the departure date … Soon they would be approaching line-of-sight from BC, and direct communication would become possible again. That would be a big help in co-ordinating those still strong enough to climb high on the hill.

  Allen Spent a fair night at C3 with Jon and Rick. However, had a gripping crap as I had to dash outside in unfastened outer boots … It’s probably as dangerous as anything on this trip, standing on a snowy ledge with my down suit round my ankles trying not to mess myself or fall down the Kangshung Face – an ignominious end!

  Set off before the others and carried a load to C3. Made fair time and met them as I was going down. Wished them luck, collected my gear at C2 and headed down the ropes for a solitary trudge over the glacier. Off down to BC tomorrow …

  Sarah Didn’t sleep at all last night, it was also very cold. Set off not feeling brilliant – legs felt like lead. Once I got on to the fixed ropes didn’t feel so bad, but all the way I kept thinking what is the point of this slog. (It’s boring just going on the fixed ropes.) I kept warily looking at the clouds, hoping it wouldn’t snow.

  In fact it was quite easy convincing myself to go back:

  – avalanche conditions on the traverse (heavy fresh snow night before)

  – no one coming up after me or coming down

  – if I go down I don’t have to spend another night in the tent on the Raphu La

  – I chickened out.

  Started snowing heavily and wetly in the afternoon – bad sign. Monsoon?

  Sandy Myself getting really annoyed at this gross negativity. Who really cares if we get the summit, the Pinnacles, compared with ‘Star Wars’, nuclear fall-out, etc.? I discuss all this with A.G.; it’s good we do – saves a falling out, a break in friendship. But futility … negativity … pheasa-mism – me I cannot even spell the word I have such little regard for it and the persons who accept and live with such backward-looking thoughts. Once you set your hand to the plough, don’t look back …

  But I find myself locked up inside my head, millions of ideas, not for sharing …

  Meanwhile head says well, when I die (like pronto, kid), I guess somebody will scribble my obituary … OK, no fucker will print it … big deal.

  But soon to go to ABC. There’ll be a swap-around of tents, there’ll be ideas spread and arguments … the end of an expedition or the summit … This and more will accumulate into friction … but then again friction is what drives trains along their tracks!

  Why am I so OUTSIDE? Thoughts turning, like car wheels slipping and spinning in the snow, occasionally gripping and throwing up crazy thoughts. Head sore … stress perchance. Folks go to ABC tomorrow – so pleased, time to be by myself. I need that more and more – but I really wish I did not … Company I want, sure need … to talk … but can’t here. So little in common, but all these people are my friends, therefore if I cannot relate to them … then who can I relate to … me at fault? Me different … I’m busy today asking why.

  When a stone falls from a mountain on to a glacier, sure we can predict that eventually the stone will come out on to the moraine bank someplace … but we cannot predict what precise route that stone will take. We’re born, we’ll die; between that, what?

  I sometimes think somebody’s already arranged it.

  Passing through, kid, that’s all … A stitch in time. Everest here for years and years, we passing through. What’ll we make of it? What will the media make of it? Me sleep now. Soon with luck I’ll be on the Pinnacles.

  Jon and Rick moved up to C3 and stayed there overnight, ready to follow Mal and Tony on the ‘rolling maul’ assault on the Pinnacles.

  Below them, Nick and Bob had made their
way through threatening weather to C2. Bob was cheered to feel much better than he had last time, but both of them were concerned by the black clouds that were gathering, quite unlike anything we’d seen yet, and the air was odd, still and mild. Snow began to fall heavily in the afternoon.

  So that evening on Everest all the Bases were loaded, with pairs at each of the top three camps. We were as ready as we’d ever be to go for it. So much depended on what the weather would pitch at us tomorrow.

  Mal Whew, writing diaries at 7,850 metres is weird. Tony not in good shape, very bad with throat, etc., but hanging in there. We are brewing continuously, my turn to cook which is shit. No UFO’s yet! Living here is very different from below – still did expect it to be a bit awkward – stoves hardly go – mind you, neither do Tony or myself! A bit damp from digging snow-hole so we are coldish, however should be OK to continue tomorrow …

  1Terry’s daughter, Amy Everest, was born on the other side of the world precisely during the ten minutes he spent on his summit.

  The Last Days

  19TH MAY – 3RD JUNE

  ‘The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’

  The 19th of May, Pinnacle Day. Something odd has happened to the weather. There’s a luminous haze in the air, it is almost sultry. And no wind at all, no spindrift on Everest – which is very white this morning after overnight snow. Andy Nisbet joins me, his wild hair and beard looking like an orange Elizabethan ruff.

  ‘What do you reckon, Andy?’

  ‘It could be the monsoon coming early … On the other hand, it could finally be the calm climbing weather we’re supposed to get before the monsoon.’

  He’s looking a lot better today. ‘Pessimistic’ he might be, but he’s preparing to go back to ABC tomorrow. However, Urs seems to have lost all heart in the venture; this worries Andy, who doesn’t want to be left alone on the hill again.

  Sandy emerges from the Mess Tent and stands beside us. No need to tell him what we’re discussing: it’s Pinnacle Day and something odd is happening to the weather.

  Mal and Tony start their day at 6.30 by scraping snow into the billy, warming the lighter and setting the stove going. They lie in their pits as it burns fitfully, stirring only to add more snow to the sinking mush in the pot. Outside, a few desultory flakes of snow begin to fall.

  When they finally emerge from the snow-hole, heavy black clouds are massing over the North Col. It is snowing steadily now and the air feels much less dry than usual. The wind is beginning to gust. Tony makes a face, Mal shrugs. The former takes a load of climbing gear – pitons, krabs, slings, nuts – for use on Pinn 1, while Mal takes on two O2 cylinders plus a bale of fixing rope. It’s a very big load for a man hoping to climb later in the day, but once again he’s using one of the oxygen cylinders. A nod and they move off along the gradually steepening incline, which eventually will merge into the 1st Pinnacle, now invisible.

  Bloody typical – Pinnacle Day and now it’s started snowing and blowing down here at BC. The hill’s disappeared completely. God knows what’s happening up there, but it can’t be good. The few of us left here sit chatting in the Mess Tent, Urs shows us some stretching exercises, but our minds aren’t really on it. We keep looking up the valley where Everest used to be. Even Sandy says, ‘Pretty depressing, isn’t it?’ However, open discussion of our chances is now banned, so we try to keep our thoughts to ourselves. Liz is determinedly bright; in an unspoken, mutual understanding Sandy and I spend a lot of the day talking about anything with her, anything to distract her mind from the knowledge that Mal’s somewhere on or about the 1st Pinnacle in dirty weather, and both his safety and the success of this Expedition are very much on the line.

  More trekkers have arrived, pointing and exclaiming and asking if we’ve been to the summit yet. Jack and Luo are playing bridge with Andy and Danny, a pleasant change from listening to Danny learning the guitar. I pack to go up to ABC, wanting to be in on the final denouement whatever it may be – and write a bunch of postcards saying we’ll probably be home a week late. We’re just waiting, powerless to influence events.

  Jon has had a bad night at C3, and watches Rick pull away ahead of him. Over 7,300 metres his body is telling him it’s had enough, there are no resources left to call on. As the snow thickens around him, he clips into the fixed ropes on the 1st Buttress and begins to push upward, without much conviction, coughing steadily.

  Mal1 We were numb. Not cold numb, although there was that at times, just battered numb – numb from eight weeks of strain, from scything wind cutting at the flesh, from swirling, pirouetting columns of spindrift driving and dancing around us, from sustained effort and load-carrying, from eating, drinking and living high on the North-East Ridge.

  I plodded on, lost in a world of spindrift, casually watching as Tony was again hurled to his knees; everything on automatic, both sides of my brain arguing, bullying and reasoning … I’m hurting, but who wouldn’t … after all I am carrying an enormous load … at this sort of altitude I deserve to hurt. Anyway I’m managing 50 paces between rests even though the wind’s blowing out Tony’s tracks and the bastard snow is falling as it has been for weeks and I’m over 8,000 metres and stunningly tired, it’s bound to hurt, what a wimp, ignore it and keep going …

  Well really am OK but my lungs are heaving and thighs burning but what the hell this is EVEREST and we’re higher than the South Col and life is tough … I wish my goggles wouldn’t keep steaming up and freezing and I wish I felt better, I’m more tired than ever before and why did I try oxygen to carry an extra load when I was doing great before without?’

  What’s bothering Tony is visibility and the possibility of avalanche: there’s far too little of the first and too much of the second. He’s groping along in a restricted world on the way from nowhere to nowhere. Fresh snow is massing in the sloping bays he’s trying to cross. It’s like wading through glue, only this glue could break away at any time from the hard crust beneath. Classic avalanche conditions. He finds a rock that gives at least the illusion of safety and slumps down. Climbing the 1st Pinnacle is out of the question today, so why go any further? They’ve still to get back to C4 … He looks back and Mal, who’s been close behind him all the way, has disappeared. Oh no! He waits. And waits. Would he have heard Mal shout? Then he sees the head emerging from a dip, but something’s surely gone wrong because Mal is swaying, scarcely moving forward at all …

  Mal Tony crouched on a rock 40 yards away, a small spark of life where none should exist. The spindrift swirled and battered, whirling over the Ridge, pluming up 200 feet before hurling itself upon us … Reaching the lee of the rock and contacting Tony, another human in this madness, becomes all-important. A shattering pain suddenly erupts in my lower chest – a muscle rip in my diaphragm, can’t inflate my lungs! A moment of panic subdued by years of training. No matter what, I must try, try to live, to descend or even to die, but I must try. I must try because this is the big one, the master problem that perhaps I’ve been seeking for years, unwittingly … Think of Pete Thexton on Broad Peak with a collapsed diaphragm, going blind and dying … Again I buzz with panic, fight the mental battle for control, the first of many I know before today or I expire …

  He covers the last few yards to Tony on hands and knees. Something is seriously wrong. He pulls off the oxygen mask and only then realizes that no gas is coming through. They struggle to unscrew the regulator from a thread caked in ice, and then find the valve is totally frozen and blocked. Exactly the same had happened to Dougal Haston when he set off with Doug Scott for the summit on the South-West Face route – the same sense of suddenly feeling he had run into a brick wall, the same delayed recognition of what was happening. Little wonder Mal damaged himself; he’d been carrying 56 lb, getting no oxygen and sucking what little atmosphere there was up here in through the corner of the face mask. How long had he been doing this? And now his lungs feel like wet spon
ges, his chest has ceased working properly; he knows inside himself that he is maybe going blind and is certainly slowly dying.

  ‘You go on if you want to – I’m going down,’ Tony says. He’s had enough, there’s no chance of the Pinnacles today.

  Mal nods. The game is definitely over for him. It’s going to take everything he’s got to get out of this one. He gets shakily to his feet. His mind is in control, or at least he thinks it is, but his body won’t do what it is told. He watches it with dispassionate concern, as though from a great distance, as it tries to perform for him.

  Mal We dump our loads, mark the spot and turn downhill. Some of this Ridge is flat and some up and the majority down but it’s still an effort and nearly 3,500 feet before I can reach the top of the fixed ropes and slide … I can only manage two or three steps at a time and waste tons of energy in concentration so as not to trip or fall because that’s bad style and dangerous. It all seems too much effort. Tony goes ahead to C4 to pack his gear and mine because I don’t think I can get off this mountain in one day and so having my sleeping bag might be a good idea …

  I manage three steps downhill or one uphill, with massive rasping pants in between. It makes for slow progress. My name is Malcolm Roy Duff and I live at 14 Hopetown Road …

  The nasty snowstep above the 2nd Buttress, I am mighty pleased that Allen had fixed it the previous day because it’s hard and dangerous. Clip in and slide down …

  Mixed ground leading to the fixed line down the 2nd Buttress. Tony’s clipped in and disappeared into the spindrift. I am confused, miss a wand and end up too low … this is easy stuff to fall from and my balance is all wrong and what a bloody awful waste of energy getting back up again.