“No,” says the Deacon with a tone of absolute finality. “The Great War was four years of trench warfare insanity. Tens of thousands of lives lost in a day for a few yards of ground gained…yards that would be lost the next day at an equal price. No, I’m talking about classical sieges from the Middle Ages on. The kind of siege of Cornwallis at Yorktown that your general, Jake…Washington…was taught by his French friend”—a nod at J.C.—“Lafayette. Surround the enemy where he can’t retreat—a peninsula worked fine as long as the French ships didn’t allow the Royal Navy to save Cornwallis and his men. Then bombard. Under bombardment, advance your trenches yard by yard, mile by mile, until you’re right up against the enemy’s defenses. Then a final quick assault and…victory.”
“But none of your English generals here on Everest,” says Jean-Claude, “have moved their trenches close enough to the summit for that successful final assault.”
The Deacon nods agreement, but I can tell he’s distracted. Perhaps by Reggie’s unwavering gaze. “The ’twenty-two and ’twenty-four expeditions both planned to establish a Camp Seven at around twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet, but neither achieved that goal. Mallory and Irvine and all the rest of us before them started our summit assault from Camp Six at about twenty-six thousand eight hundred feet.”
“That’s only five hundred feet difference,” says Reggie, moving her gaze down to the map of the Rongbuk Glacier and the mountain.
“Five hundred vertical feet can mean half a day’s worth of climbing at those altitudes.” The Deacon plays with his unlit pipe. “There’s no only to it.”
“Didn’t Norton and Mallory fail to establish a Camp Seven because the porters gave out?” I ask. I’ve heard and read all the reports. “Were just unable to carry tents higher?”
“In part,” says the Deacon. “But the sahib climbers also gave out, in terms of carrying loads, above Camp Six. And that includes Finch and me in ’twenty-two. Besides, Camp Seven was always the plan for a final assault without oxygen; when Mallory decided that he and Irvine would make an attempt with the O-two apparatus, the extra five hundred vertical feet didn’t seem to make that much difference.”
“But you think it did,” says Reggie.
“Yes.” If she’d been attempting irony, the Deacon’s tone suggests he hadn’t noticed it. He presses his pipe stem down on a point on the map above our inked-in Camp VI and below the juncture of the North Ridge with the long North East Ridge. “The problem isn’t just altitude up there—although that’s debilitating enough. The slabs are steeper as one approaches the North East Ridge, and there’s much less packable snow—very few places to carve out a platform for even one tent, and the climber doesn’t have enough energy to be moving stones to create a platform. But mostly it’s the wind up there. Camp Six is bad enough, but closer to the North East Ridge, that wind rolls over and down most of the time. It can carry away a climber, much less his tent.”
“You originally wanted a rapid alpine assault from Camp Five at twenty-five thousand three hundred feet or lower, Ree-shard,” says J.C. “The three of us climbers carrying just a rucksack, bread, water, chocolate, and perhaps a flag to plant on the summit.”
The Deacon smiles wryly.
“And maybe a bivouac sack,” I say. “For when we get caught by the sun setting while we’re descending the Second or First Step on the way down.”
“Aye, there’s the rub,” says the Deacon, audibly scratching his stubbled cheek. “No one’s ever survived a night bivouac at those altitudes. It’s hard enough to survive in a tent with a working Primus at Camps Four, Five, and Six. That’s why I’ve decided that we have to make the assault from Camp Seven, or, failing that, from a high Camp Six, as Mallory and Irvine did. But start earlier. Perhaps even at night as Reg…as Lady Bromley-Montfort has suggested. Those little headlamps work pretty well. But I haven’t worked out how we avoid freezing to death while attempting to climb before dawn—or after sunset, for that matter.”
“As far as surviving,” begins Reggie. “Excuse me a moment…” She leaves the tent and snow blows in. Pasang remains behind, retying the door cords.
The Deacon looks at us but we shrug. Perhaps he’s said something to upset her.
A few minutes later she’s back from her own tent, brushing snow out of her long black hair, her arms full of what we first think are extra Finch goose down duvet balloon jackets.
“You three have laughed at me bringing my treadle sewing machine on the trek,” she says. And before we can speak, she insists, “No, I’ve heard you complaining. Half a mule’s total load, you said. And I heard you sniggering in the evenings along the trek when I was in my Big Tent sewing and you heard the treadle going.”
None of us can deny that.
“Here’s what I was working on,” she says and hands out the bulky but light items.
Three pairs of sewn and hemmed goose down trousers. So that’s why she took our measurements back at the plantation, I think.
“I believe that Mr. Finch solved half of the problem,” she says. “There’s still too much body heat lost through the silk and cotton and wool of the climber’s underwear and trousers. I’ve made enough of these for all of us, Pasang, and eight of the Tiger Sherpas. I can’t promise that it will allow any of us to survive a night bivouac above twenty-eight thousand feet, but it gives us a fighting chance to keep moving before dawn and after sunset.”
“They’ll rip and tear,” says the Deacon. J.C. and I are busy shedding our boots and squirming into our new goose down trousers.
“They’re made of the same balloon cloth that Finch used on the parkas,” says Reggie. “Besides, I have a waxed-cotton outer shell for all the trousers. Not heavy. Tougher than the anoraks you wear over the Finch duvets. Notice that all of your trousers, inner and outer, have buttons for braces and a button fly. That last was extra work, I tell you.”
I blush at this.
“I’m also using the last of the balloon fabric to make buttoned-on goose-down-filled hoods for our Finch duvet jackets,” says Reggie. “And I must say that using that sewing machine treadle at this altitude is hard work.”
The Deacon clamps down on his cold pipe and scowls. “Where on earth did you get balloon fabric?”
“I sacrificed the plantation’s hot-air balloon,” says Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort.
Jean-Claude and I spend twenty minutes or so parading around Base Camp through the blowing snow and minus-fifteen-degree temperatures while wearing our three layers of mittens, Finch coat, Reggie trousers, Shackleton windproof anoraks, Reggie’s just-finished button-on goose down hoods, and our tough duck trouser shells. With our three layers of glove-mittens and our leather and wool aviator caps pulled down under our new hoods, balaclavas and goggles on, it’s a strange feeling to be so warm in such terrible conditions.
Reggie comes out in her full gear. She no longer looks like a woman, I think. In truth, she no longer looks quite human.
“I feel like the Michelin Man,” says Jean-Claude, laughing through the mouth flap in the wool-lined balaclava covering his face. Reggie and I also laugh. I’d seen the Michelin Man on posters and billboards, a pudgy shape made all out of tires advertising the brand, that had been on show in Paris since 1898.
“Add the oxygen gear,” says Reggie, “and we’ll feel like men from Mars.”
“We shall be men from Mars,” says J.C., laughing again.
It strikes me then that we might well feel very removed from the human act of climbing—of interacting with rock, snow, and the world—in the days and weeks to come.
The Deacon emerges from his tent. He has his long ice axe and is wearing his Finch duvet, full mittens, and headgear, but from the waist down he is still all stout English woolen knickers, puttees, and leather boots.
“Since we’re all outside anyway and the day’s promising to clear,” he says, “what do you say to the four of us hauling some Whymper tents up to Camp One and then taking a look at the glacier abo
ve there? We won’t need crampons or the short axes.”
“No Tigers?” says Reggie.
The Deacon shakes his head. “Let’s make this first recon a sahib-only outing.”
We go back to fetch our larger rucksacks, some ropes, and long ice axes. The Deacon supervises loading each of us with about forty or fifty pounds of tent parts, stakes, more ropes, loose oxygen tanks, Primus stoves, and some canned food; even Reggie gets her full load. Pasang—wearing only the cotton robes and scarves he had on in the Big Tent—stands outside with his arms crossed and a powerful scowl of disapproval on his face as the four of us sahibs lean into the wind and snow to stagger around our rocky ridge-barrier and then up the boulder-and-ice-strewn valley of the Rongbuk Glacier.
Saturday, May 2, 1925
It says something about the altitude and cold—and perhaps about the poor condition I’m in—that it takes a little under two hours for us to haul our loads three miles up the glacier bed to the site of Camp I.
The snow was letting up as we climbed, and I’m surprised to find only an inch or two on the moraine rocks beneath our boots, just enough to make footing treacherous. For this first stage of our “siege” of Everest—based more on South Polar expeditions’ cache-dump attempts than on our original plan for a quick alpine ascent, is my silent opinion—we don’t have to climb onto the glacier proper, but we do waste time winding our way through a bewildering series of 50- to 70-foot-high ice pinnacles that are called penitentes: they do look rather like giant religious pilgrims in white robes. In addition to the pinnacles that have turned the rocky moraine trough into an obstacle course, there are also innumerable ice-melt pools, frozen over but frequently so thinly frozen that we’d break through and soak our boots if we tried to cross the slippery surfaces.
This seems to make no sense, given the far-below-zero temperatures we’ve been suffering since we arrived at the mouth of the Rongbuk Glacier valley, but it is a part of the weirdness of Mount Everest and its environs; in places where the ridge walls and even ice walls shield the valley from the coldest winds, the early May sunlight can heat up sheltered places fifty degrees and more above the temperatures at Base Camp. The worst will be on the glacier itself, but on this first day we stay off the glacier, trudging along the rocky moraine bottom that previous expeditions have called the Trough.
My rucksack is heavier than any load I’ve carried for some time, and as we trudge uphill, I stay 50 feet behind the Deacon and Reggie so they won’t hear my labored breathing and occasional retching. But through my discomfort, I realize now why Mallory and Bullock missed this approach to the North Col for so many weeks and months during the late summer and early autumn of 1921. They found that the main avenue of the primary Rongbuk Glacier headed up to Lho La below the West Ridge of Everest and was impassable in its higher reaches. The broad Kharra Glacier comes down from the North East and North faces of the mountain, but careers off almost due east to the Lhakpa La Pass, where the Deacon had finally dragged Mallory and where the team had finally seen the true way to the North Col—this East Rongbuk Glacier.
But the East Rongbuk Glacier is a tricky, sneaky thing, converging with the main Rongbuk Glacier valley way down at Base Camp but snaking to the east, then northeast, and then sharply northwest—parallel to the Kharra Glacier—from Camp I to the North Col. The 1921 expedition had tried following ridges to the North Face, but the most promising ridge, one that led along the eastern side of the main Rongbuk Glacier, had led them to a dead end at what they called the North Peak—the mountain we now call Changtse.
In the monsoon mess of late summer 1921, Mallory and Bullock simply couldn’t believe that such a major glacier could give birth to such a miserable little trickle of a stream—the one that flows past our Base Camp now—and they kept circling back and forth along the northern approaches, swinging ever further west and east and then west again, looking for the kind of roaring stream or small river worthy of a glacier that ran all the way to the North Face or North Col.
It doesn’t exist. Our little trickle-stream at Base Camp, as the Deacon had guessed in 1921 (and for which correct guess—plus the recon to Lhakpa La, where they’d found the yeti footprints in the new snow as well as the glimpse of the proper route—I believe Mallory never fully forgave him), is all that the East Rongbuk Glacier is giving up.
We’d have been wasting more time today, since so many of the corridors through the five-story-tall penitentes lead to glacier walls or moraine-ridge dead ends, but the Deacon had brought bamboo wands with him during his recon on our first night at Base Camp, and the irregular line of these in the patches of snow keeps us on the right path. Since we’re not yet on the glacier or any real slope with crevasses, we’re not roped up, of course, but we settle into a single file with the Deacon leading, Reggie behind him, J.C. walking easily behind Reggie, and me bringing up a very distant rear. There are times when I lose them amongst the ice pinnacles, and only the bamboo wands and faint footsteps in the thin scrim of ice and snow show me which way to turn.
Finally we reach the site of Camp I, and the four of us dump our loads and sit panting with our backs against boulders. It is the same site that expeditions have used going back to 1921, and it shows the same tawdry signs of use as Base Camp, but it is also situated in the sunlight right where a wide rivulet of fresh water runs out of a moraine ridge of rock. The previous expeditions have built no sangas here—those low rock walls for extra wind protection within which you pitch a tent or tarp—but the multiple tent sites, places where rocks have been moved and the ground made as smooth as possible, are obvious.
“We’ll set up the Whymper tent and one smaller one, eat lunch, and head back,” says the Deacon.
“What was all this about, Mr. Deacon?” asks Reggie.
I’m still gasping for breath hard enough that I couldn’t join in this dialogue if I wanted to. I don’t want to. Jean-Claude seems to be breathing easily, his elbows on his knees as he uses his knife to cut up an apple he’s eating, but he also shows no interest in jumping into this discussion.
“All what, Lady Bromley-Montfort?” says the Deacon, eyes wide with feigned innocence.
“Our doing this useless hauling of these heavy loads to Camp One,” snaps Reggie. “Norton and Geoffrey Bruce last year had the porters do all the hauling to Camps One, Two, and Three, while the British climbers remained at Base Camp and saved their energy for the North Col and above.”
“Didn’t you and Pasang haul your own gear to this point last August?” asks the Deacon.
“Yes, but we had half a dozen Sherpas to help. And Pasang and I were carrying only light tents which we brought along with us to each camp…that and a minimum of food.”
The Deacon drinks from his canteen and says nothing.
“Was this some sort of test?” presses Reggie. “A cheap test of Jake and Jean-Claude and me, as if we hadn’t just trekked in more than three hundred fifty miles over passes up to nineteen thousand feet? Testing whether we can haul forty-plus-pound loads up the valley?”
The Deacon shrugs.
Reggie calmly takes a heavy can of peaches out of her overloaded rucksack and throws it at the Deacon’s head. He ducks, but just in time. The can of peaches bounces off a boulder but does not explode.
Jean-Claude laughs heartily.
The Deacon just points over Reggie’s and J.C.’s heads and says, “Look.”
Not only has the snow stopped, but the clouds have parted to the south. The high reaches of Everest may still be nine dangerous miles away up the glacier and Col and almost two vertical miles above us, but the Himalayan air is so clean and clear that it looks as if we could reach out and touch the visible First and Second Steps, run our finger down Norton’s Couloir, and press our palm down on the snowy spike of summit.
No one says anything. Then Reggie dumps the contents of her overstuffed rucksack out on the ground, stands, says, “You can set up the tents and stack your food tins here, Mister Deacon. I’m going back to Base Camp to g
et the loads apportioned for the Sherpas for tomorrow’s double carry.”
Then J.C. dumps his pack out, tent fabric flapping in what’s left of the wind—little more than a breeze now. “I’m going back to Base Camp to finish instructing the Sherpas on crampon and jumar technique.” He disappears downhill behind penitentes some minutes behind Reggie, although he seems to be making no obvious effort to catch up to her.
I continue to sit, my pack propped next to me.
“Go ahead and dump it and go, Jake,” the Deacon says. He lights his pipe. “Reggie was absolutely right. It was a sort of test, and it was wrong of me to have put the three of you through it.”
It’s one of the few times I’ve heard him call her “Reggie.”
“I don’t have anything pressing to do at Base Camp,” I say. I admit that I’m irritated not only at his testing us during our first days at this altitude, but also for smoking that goddamned pipe when I can’t get a full breath of air in my lungs. “I’ll help you set up the two tents,” I hear myself say.
The Deacon shrugs again but slowly gets to his feet, his gaze still fixed on the ever more visible massif that is Mount Everest.
Trying not to wheeze too loudly, I dig through the heaps of stuff for the Whymper tent’s larger ground cloth.
Tuesday, May 5, 1925
We reach the site for Camp III around noon, and as we emerge from the forest of ice pinnacles in the Trough below the glacier and get our first real look at the sight and the North Col beyond and above it, I say, “Dear God, what a terrible place.” It’s made more terrible by a rough pyramid of rocks set closer to the great snow and ice wall leading up to the North Col—a monument to the seven dead porters from the 1922 avalanche, I realize—and made even more pathetic by the seven empty oxygen tanks stacked next to the rock pyramid.
I have no way of knowing that Camp III will someday be a haven of thicker air and respite from impossible hardships for all of us, but in the meantime will become a terrible test of my endurance.