Al gave the handset back to Lhakpa and unraveled the scarf from his neck. There was a muffled exclamation of delight from the Sherpas as they realized what he was going to do. Taking the length of white silk, Al tied it to the summit pole and let the ends fly free in the wind.
He said a brief prayer for peace as Brian had asked.
I held on the scarf for as long as I could, and then gave the camera to Al to film me as I had a few brief words with Brian on the radio. I thanked him for being the impetus behind the expedition—and the film. After all, it was Brian’s genuine passion for Everest that had brought us all here in the first place and I didn’t want him to think I had forgotten that.
The one shot we didn’t have was a wide establishing shot of us all on the summit. Al took the camera back ten meters (thirty-two feet) down the Ridge and framed it up. When the camera was running, we cheered and waved our ice axes in the air. And that was it. Job done.
“We’d better get out of here.”
Oxygen was now running low, we had been on the summit for far longer than any of us had anticipated. Almost fifty minutes had elapsed.
Hurriedly, we took our stills, mine with the plastic camera that was still happily clicking away. The temperature seemed to be dropping drastically, or perhaps that perception was just due to the amount of time we had spent motionless on the summit. My hands and feet were both freezing up and becoming numb. It was time to go.
Then I remembered the Christmas pudding—a gift cooked with love by my mother and which I had saved for this precise occasion. It took a few moments to find it at the bottom of the rucksack. The foil had ripped a little in transit, but it was otherwise in good condition. I peeled back the top section of wrapping and took a large bite.
It was as hard as granite, frozen solid. Furious at the thought that I had carried this half-kilogram load up the highest mountain in the world for nothing, I very nearly tossed it down the Kanshung Face in disgust.
But how would I explain that to my mother?
Risking serious damage to my upper and lower incisors, I managed to nibble off a symbolic raisin, then replaced the offending pudding back in the pack to be consumed at a later date.
Then, taking a long last look into Nepal, we began the journey back down to Camp Six.
For me, the descent was the most nerve-jangling part of the nightmare. Having had just five extremely cold and restless hours of sleep out of the last fifty (and no sleep at all in the last thirty), I found myself fighting an overwhelming fatigue. The demands of the climb were more physically draining by far than anything I had ever done, and the fact that we had had no fluid for the entire fourteen climbing hours of summit day meant that both Al and I were right on the edge of acute mountain sickness with chronic dehydration threatening pulmonary or cerebral edema; and for me some kind of frostbite was now virtually inevitable.
Down-climbing is always more dangerous than going up. The body is facing away from the Face, so that the chances of an accidental slip become much more likely than they are on the ascent. Shod in the infernal crampons, skittering and clattering across the loose, frozen slabby rock of the North Face, I several times felt myself close to plummeting down the 10,000-foot precipice.
As the hours went by, we negotiated the Third and Second Steps, passed the bodies of the Indian climbers, and then abseiled down the First Step. The traversing along crumbling ledges seemed to go on forever. The Face feels bloody big on the way up, but on the way down it is absolutely huge, impossibly so. Concentrating on getting the figure-eight descendeur into the rope and clipped onto my harness at one of the vertical rock climbs, I managed to lose my balance. I swung around in an arc and smashed my knee hard against the rock. For a couple of seconds I thought I was going to faint.
The three Sherpas watched from below, unable to help, as I dangled clumsily on the lifeline, swearing with the pain of the impact. My fall had been held by an ice stake driven into the snow above the cliff. I don’t know who put it there but whoever it was had done a good job. It took me several minutes to get myself disentangled and sorted out before I could continue the descent.
Rest stops became more frequent. Every time I sat down, my eyes would spontaneously close and my mind drift off into the beckoning darkness of sleep. Then the red warning light would snap on and I would force my body to rise and carry on. Increasingly my mind was wandering into strange corners of imagination, and I do not remember Al passing me on the Ridge and going ahead.
The Sherpas were much faster than us now, and they reached Camp Six at least an hour before we did. The last section, down the evil gulleys of the Yellow Band, took me beyond the physical limits of my own endurance, I think it was gravity alone that was pulling me down. Al stayed with me more or less the whole way, waiting for me at the end of each rope-length.
The last 100 meters (328 feet) down to the sanctuary of Camp Six took me at least an hour to complete. Somewhere during the descent my oxygen cylinder had run out but I was too dazed to notice it.
By the time we got there, all the warning sirens in my body were wailing for attention. A pulsating throb inside my skull was beeping an emergency signal that told me that if I didn’t get some fluid inside me soon I was likely to lapse into unconsciousness and enter a coma. The problem was that my body was so absolutely shattered that I knew there was no way I would be able to coordinate myself to get the cooker going.
Simon had just arrived at the camp on his way up from Camp Five. He had no fluid on him and he looked extremely tired himself. He weakly shook Al’s hand, then sat down in a heap. I asked him if the Sherpas had prepared any tea but he didn’t know. Al shouted over to the Sherpa tent but there was no reply. Somehow I got my pack off and wormed my way into the squalid interior of the tent. Al wasn’t far behind. I can faintly remember babbling for fluid.
“You’ve got to help me, Al, I’m going down here. I can feel myself blacking out. You’ve got to get the fucking stove on, man, or I’m going to have a serious fucking problem.”
Al, himself dazed and moving in slow motion, began the everlasting process. I could feel the waves of black overwhelming me but I fought back as hard as I could to stay conscious. Then we heard footsteps outside the tent. It was Sundeep, also arrived up from Five, looking every bit as knackered as Simon, and swaying slightly as he leaned forward on his ice ax.
“Have you got any juice?” I asked him.
He pulled his oxygen mask aside and mumbled something. I saw the padded water bottle strapped to his belt and pointed to it. My brain had just enough power to utter one more sentence.
“I have to have some liquid, Sundeep. I won’t take it all but I need something or I’m going to collapse.”
That was what I was trying to say but all that came out was an unintelligible stream of gibberish. But Sundeep understood and passed the bottle in. I drank one-third of the contents, then passed it to Al who also drank.
Half an hour later we drank the first tepid cup of liquid from the melted pan of snow. That was when I finally let myself believe that I was going to survive.
— 12 —
At 2:30 the following morning, Simon, Sundeep, and two Sherpas set out for their own summit bid. The noise of their preparations woke me up but I was too fatigued to put my head out of the tent and wish them good luck. They climbed up the cliffs of the Yellow Band, making slower progress than we had the day before, and reached the Ridge one hour after sunrise. There, in a rising wind, they reluctantly conceded defeat. It was clear to them all that they would not make it to the summit.
Roger and Tore also did not realize their dream of making it to the top of Everest. Roger had turned back from a position just above Camp Five after realizing that, although he felt he could reach Camp Six, he was absolutely sure he would not get any higher. Tore, who had had a bad day climbing up to the Col on May 17, turned back in the high winds midway up the North Ridge on the following day.
Al and I left Camp Six in the early morning of May 20 for our t
en-hour descent to Advance Base Camp. As we passed Reinhard’s tent I suddenly realized that I had completely forgotten about the Austrian climber who now lay dead inside. I hurried past—if hurried is the right word to describe my hobbling progress—closing my mind to the awful temptation to look inside.
The next day, in a radio call, Reinhardt distraught wife asked Simon and Sundeep to bury her husband as best they could. Exhausted after their own aborted summit attempt, they did not have the strength to scrape even the slightest hollow in the iron-hard, frozen ground. With the help of Ang Chuldim, the best they could do was collapse the tent over the body, wrapping it like a shroud and placing a few rocks and empty oxygen cylinders on top. It took them several hours. Simon made a simple cross out of a couple of shattered tent poles he found lying around, and the three climbers stood with their heads bowed in the biting wind around the grave.
Simon said a brief, dignified prayer for Reinhard that moved them all to tears. Then, with hands and feet already dangerously frozen, they began their descent to the Col, which they reached on the evening of May 21. They made it safely down to Advance Base the following day.
Simon remained at Advance Base Camp to supervise the clearing of the mountain while the rest of us descended to Base Camp and began to pack. By May 24, all tents and refuse had been removed by the Sherpas from camps Four and Five, and a train of yaks carried the gear back down to the Rongbuk Glacier.
Three days later we left in a convoy of jeeps for Nepal, each of us wrapped up in our own thoughts as the vehicles sped down the dusty track past the Rongbuk Monastery. At the top of the Pang La Pass the vehicles paused and we climbed out and looked back at Everest for the last time. The plume was running, just as it had been when we saw the mountain from the same position on our way into Base Camp. Standing apart from the others I found myself searching for words to offer a mountain that I was pretty sure I would never set eyes on again.
In the end, a whispered “Thank you” was all I could manage before we climbed back into the Toyotas and set off across the rolling Tibetan Plateau.
Kathmandu was a shock after the arid months in Tibet. The teeming traffic and crowded alleyways of Tamel seemed impossibly colorful and exploding with life compared to the monochrome, brutal mountain environment we had come to accept as home.
Craving fats and protein, I immediately set about trying to restore some of the eleven kilograms (twenty-four pounds) I had lost. In our first day back in Kathmandu I ate several fried breakfasts, pancakes and cream, chocolate cakes, banana cakes, fruit and ice cream, and a huge sizzling steak and chips. That night I was voluptuously sick for my gluttony. Kees was worse; his eating session put him in bed for three days with a gastric fever, which was a bit rough with his wedding just a week away.
For the first time we had a chance to see how sharply the world’s press had focused on the Everest disaster. Isolated from all but radio reports on the mountain, we had seen none of the sensational newspaper and magazine articles that had followed the event. Now in the bookshops of Kathmandu we found out just how big an impact the storm and the fatalities had made. The front covers of Time and Newsweek were both devoted to the disaster and friends and family faxed us other articles from the United Kingdom.
The reports differed hugely in the quality of research that had gone into them, and certain aspects of the stories—enduring controversies both from the south and north sides—did not always tally with our own opinions or what we had seen on the mountain.
The tragedy of the Indian climbers and the perceived failure of the Japanese team to attempt a rescue was one example.
The widely accepted story had it that the lowest of the dead Indian climbers was found just 100 meters (328 feet) from safety above the top camp. This information—also used by Richard Cowper in his Financial Times article of May 18 entitled “The Climbers Left to Die in the Storms of Everest”—filtered down from climbers at the high camp on the northern side in the days following the storm. The fact that Cowper ran the information is not a negative reflection on him in any way—he was writing in good faith, using the best information he could get his hands on at the time.
Nevertheless, the “100 meters” figure added fuel to the fire—and made the Japanese actions seem even more heartless. If the Indian climber had been 100 meters from safety, then the Japanese failure to rescue him on May 11 was completely indefensible. The figure makes it sound like he was almost within reach.
In fact, having seen the precise position of the lowest of the Indian bodies (i.e., the one nearest to Camp Six), I can attest that the figure of 100 meters is way off the mark. As Al, the Sherpas, and myself found, the climber was on the Ridge, at least 300 vertical meters (984 feet) above Camp Six—and perhaps as far as 500 meters (1,640 feet) in actual climbing distance from safety. It had taken us at least four and a half hours of hard, continuous climbing from Camp Six to get to the position of the Indian body.
But even those figures do not reveal the true nature of the Indian’s position. To have gotten him down to Camp Six, any rescuers would have had to negotiate his semiconscious body down the Yellow Band, the massive strata of rock that creates the barrier of crumbling cliffs we had climbed through the night.
The terrain is extremely steep, with several small cliffs that have to be down-climbed with extreme care even by a fit climber. There are few if any secure belay points in the rotten rock, and the snow gulleys—the natural cracks and fissures—that are used for the descent are barely narrow enough to allow a standing climber to pass, let alone big enough for a comatose body to be lowered down.
In short, I do not believe that a rescue attempt was ever a real possibility even if a stretcher had been available (it wasn’t), and it is my opinion that any climber chancing upon the stricken Indians in the position and condition they were in on the mountain would have immediately concluded, as the Japanese did, that they were beyond rescue.
Why the Japanese climbers did not seek to alleviate the last hours of suffering for the Indians by giving them fluid or oxygen is a separate question and one which only they can answer.
The other debate that our team, like every other, endlessly discussed among ourselves was also the subject of intense speculation in the media: why did Rob Hall and Scott Fischer summit so late when they were both known to favor the “turn-around” tactic of setting a time when team members would be turned back regardless of where they were? What were the turn-around times and why didn’t the two teams stick by them?
In his book Into Thin Air, journalist Jon Krakauer (a member of Hall’s team) writes:
At Base Camp before our summit bid, Hall had contemplated two possible turn-around times—either 1:00 P.M. or 2:00 P.M. He never declared which of these times we were to abide by, how-ever—which was curious, considering how much he’d talked about the importance of designating a hard deadline and sticking to it no matter what. We were simply left with a vaguely articulated understanding that Hall would withhold making a final decision until summit day, after assessing the weather and other factors, and would then personally take responsibility for turning everyone around at the proper hour.
Fischer’s group was also not made aware in advance of a specific turnaround time that would be applied, although, again, both 1:00 P.M. and 2:00 P.M. had been mentioned. In fact, come summit day, both guides were relying on their own experience to decide on the point at which their groups should go no further. This would depend on a complicated set of factors, including the speed of the group and the condition of the weather.
On May 10, by 2:00 P.M., just six of the climbers had made it to the summit, so why weren’t the remainder told to retreat? Perhaps one answer is that most of them were extremely close to the summit at that precise point, close enough to arrive there in a line of eight climbers from 2:10 onward. It was over the deadline, yes, but perhaps at the moment the deadline had expired, the main group had been less than fifty meters (164 feet) from the summit and within sight of it. In that situation,
it is extremely unlikely that any of the clients would have obeyed the orders of their leaders to retreat, effectively negating the whole point of the turn-around—which requires total discipline by the leader. To turn someone around at the bottom of the Hillary Step is one thing, but to try and turn them around as they climbed the final summit ridge would be nigh on inconceivable.
The flaw was that while most of the climbers were on the summit on or before 2:30 P.M., two key climbers were not. As the main body of climbers began their descent, Doug Hansen—Hall’s client—and Scott Fischer, who was having an extremely hard time on his ascent, were both still battling up. Fischer summitted at 3:40 P.M. and left fifteen minutes later.
Why did Fischer continue to climb up? He’d been to the summit before, of course, and all of his clients had summitted and gone down. But Fischer knew that Rob Hall and Lopsang, Fischer’s right-hand man and strongest Sherpa, were both on the summit waiting. That knowledge, along with his high level of personal motivation, must have encouraged him to continue. To have turned around himself just under the nose of his friend and competitor would have been a difficult thing to live with. They were both members of the mountaineering elite, and it can be imagined that Fischer would have lost a lot of face if—for whatever reason—he hadn’t followed his clients up.
For Hall, too, the presence of Lopsang and Fischer must have been an additional inducement to let Hansen continue. With three (normally) strong guides in place, Hall must have reckoned they would have a fighting chance of getting Hansen down. Three of the strongest guides in the world had lulled themselves into a false sense of security. But by the time Hansen arrived, the exhausted Fischer and Lopsang had already gone.
Rob Hall waited until 4:00 P.M. for Doug Hansen to reach the summit, a full two hours after his latest announced turn-around time. Why did he allow himself to be trapped into what was (with the benefit of hindsight) clearly a dangerously late summit scenario?
The Other Side of Everest Page 26
