“And look what happened to Scott and his men,” I say.
We both start laughing. As if in response, the wind off the North Col roars more loudly. I feel as if our little two-man tent is going to shake itself to death despite—or perhaps because of—the spiderweb of tie-downs we’ve added outside.
There’s no more talk between us until I ask, “Do you think Reggie will be here with the Sherpas and extra loads by late morning?”
Jean-Claude’s silence goes on so long that I almost decide he’s fallen asleep. Then he says, “I doubt it, Jake. If the blizzard continues this cold and this hard, I think it would be foolhardy to try to come up those last three and a half miles of glacier. Remember, they don’t know that we have a damaged Primus. They assume that we are eating and drinking all right and…what is your American phrase that I like so much in Mark Twain? Ah, yes—hunkering down. Yes, just hunkering down here and waiting, as they are. My guess is that Lady Bromley-Montfort wisely retreated from Camp Two at the first signs of the blizzard hitting them. It’s a cold, windblown site at the best of times.”
He is right about that. Camp II is supposed to be pleasant because earlier expedition members said that, unlike Camps I and III, it’s positioned to catch any sunlight the Himalayan skies might offer. But in our time there, it has been cloudy, windswept, and bitterly cold. Its only advantage is its beautiful view of Mount Kellas, named after the physician who died during the 1921 reconnaissance expedition.
“With the fixed ropes we’ve set along the way,” I say hopefully, “they might come up from Camp One or even from Base Camp in a few hours.”
“I think not,” says Jean-Claude. “The snow was more than knee-deep when we broke trail this morning. Now those tracks are gone—swept away and filled in. I suspect that many of the fixed ropes will also be buried by morning. This is a hard snowstorm, my friend. If Reggie or the Deacon should try to come up, they and the porters would be…what is your word?…”
“Fucked?” I say.
“Non, postholing, at least all the way from Camp One, when they must leave the moraine and come onto the glacier. It is exhausting and terribly dangerous in a storm like this when one cannot see the trail or crevasses.”
“We left bamboo markers all along the way.”
“Many of which, we must assume,” says J.C., “will be buried or blown over by morning.” He switches to the Deacon’s slow, deep, educated British accent. “Another thing we have learned, my friends, is that at least every other bamboo marker or wooden rope guide must have a red flag on it.”
This time my head hurts too much to laugh. Also, I’m growing a bit frightened.
“What do we do if this storm keeps up all day tomorrow, Jean-Claude?”
“Experience tells us that we should stay here—hunkered down—until the storm finally passes,” he says over the gunshots of crackling canvas walls. “But I’m worried about the Sherpas who are missing sleeping bags. Already they do not look so well. I hope their friends can keep them warm enough tonight. But if this continues longer than another day, I think we should try to get down to Camp Two.”
“But as you said, it’s almost as windy and cold as this damned Camp Three.”
“But there should be at least six tents there by now, Jake. Odds are good that they will have left food supplies and at least one Primus and an Unna cooker with Meta solid fuel in a load stashed for a higher camp.”
“Ah, hell…all right,” I say.
I roll over, right into a frozen can of something. I also can feel every moraine rock beneath the tent, most of them pressing into my spine and kidneys. When we’d pitched the tent, there hadn’t been enough snow here in the spot furthest away from any avalanche danger to provide a comfortable, melt-your-body-form-into-it padding below the tent. Now the snow is mostly on top of the tent or drifted up to either side.
I’m just drifting between miserable, cold wakefulness and miserable cold sleep when Jean-Claude says, “Jake?”
“Yes?”
“I think we need to climb the ice wall straight up, not even go near the slope that avalanched in ’twenty-two. There’s too much new snow there. It’ll be harder, but I think we have to go straight up the nine-hundred-foot slope, setting fixed ropes as we go, and then climb the sheer blue-ice wall where Mallory’s chimney used to be.”
He must be joking, I think. Hallucinating out loud.
“Okay,” I say.
“Oui,” says J.C. “I was afraid you would want to go the old way.”
Jean-Claude starts to snore. I am asleep in ten seconds.
Sometime later—we eventually figure it to be about three a.m.—I awake to icy pellets being flung into my face, even though I’ve crawled down deep within my bag. To that and to Jean-Claude screaming at me over an infinitely louder wind roar.
The wind has finally ripped open the entire seam along the north wall of our guaranteed windproof new Meade tent and torn the canvas there to rags. The full force of the storm is blowing in on us.
“Quickly!” shouts Jean-Claude. The hand torch is lit, showing a blinding wall of snow blasting between the two of us. J.C. is tugging on his boots and then grabbing his rucksack in one hand and his flashlight and lumpy, food-tin-filled sleeping bag in the other, shouting at me all the time.
Boots unlaced, face stinging with minus-forty-degree cold, forgetting to put on my various gloves and mittens, dragging my own lumpy-with-cans sleeping bag in one hand and the almost empty rucksack in the other, I stumble after him and out into the maelstrom.
If Reggie’s Big Tent has blown down, we’re all dead.
Thursday, May 7, 1925
It’s time to pack and go down,” says Jean-Claude as it begins to get light after two miserable, endless, restricted-to-the-tent days and two even more endless, wet, cold, sleepless nights at Camp III.
I lift my hands to where strips of my face are coming off and think, Maybe it’s past time we left.
We’d brought no mirrors in our personal kits. “Give it to me straight, Jean-Claude…leprosy?”
“Sunburn,” says J.C. “But you are a mess, my friend. Your sunburned skin is coming off in red and white strips, but your lips and the flesh underneath the peeling skin are almost blue—cyanotic, I think—from lack of oxygen.”
“Red, white, and blue,” I say. “God bless America.”
“Or Vive la France,” says Jean-Claude, but he does not laugh. I notice that he and three of the four Sherpas, all but Babu, also have a blue tinge to their lips, faces, and hands.
For breakfast, lunch, and dinner yesterday I’d tried to suck on a tin-shaped frozen wedge of potatoes and peas. It tasted of kerosene, as did everything else the Sherpas had carried in their mixed loads. I’d crawled outside to vomit again and have not tried to eat anything since then. (We had been able to thaw the tin of peaches enough that all six of us got one tiny, icy sip of the peach juice. The tantalizing hint of liquid was almost worse than having nothing at all to drink.)
I’m freezing. J.C. and I had assumed the first night that Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay would be able to wriggle into a sleeping bag with one of the other Sherpas—the bags were made for European-sized male bodies, not the diminutive Sherpas—but they weren’t able to manage it. These bags are sewn like a cocoon, not buttoned or zippered, so there is no way to open them up to spread one above and one below like eiderdown duvets. So that first night, Ang Chiri tried to sleep wearing just the wool outer clothing they’d chosen to keep on rather than wear the “Michelin” Finch goose down suits that J.C. and I had climbed into (and had been forced to shed our first hot day in the Trough and on the glacier where I received my terrible sunburn). The result was that Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay both had frostbitten toes and feet. J.C.’s English-speaking Sherpa, Norbu Chedi, had been gasping for air so hard both nights that he chose to sleep with his face outside the folds of his sleeping bag; the result is white patches of frostbitten cheeks for Norbu.
So last night Jean-Claude and I gave our Finch
down jackets and trousers to Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay, and I didn’t sleep a wink all night. Under the new down coat and trousers, I was wearing just a regular Mallory-style wool Norfolk jacket and sweater and wool knickers and socks, and now even the eiderdown sleeping bag couldn’t keep me warm. I would begin to doze off despite the physical misery, but then slam awake either from the intense chill or with a sense of someone strangling me. Or both.
It feels better to be moving now, dragging on my boots and packing the high felt Laplander “slippers” deep into my empty rucksack. But every move uses up my energy and makes me have to stop and gasp for breath. I see Jean-Claude taking the same pauses as he labors to tie his frozen bootlaces. The Sherpas are moving even more slowly and ponderously than J.C. and me.
But eventually we’re all packed, booted, cramponed, and layered—Jean-Claude and I have taken back our Finch outer clothing for the descent—and then J.C. makes me moan and the four Sherpas slump silently when he says, “We have to pack the tent and staves and ground cloths as well.”
“Why?” I ask plaintively. Reggie’s experimental Big Tent has survived the two days and nights of hurricane winds, but the damned thing is heavy. I’d carried only parts of it uphill and the weight had been oppressive. Now, I thought, everything depended upon our getting down to Camp II or lower quickly. Leave the damned tent where it is for the next Tiger Team, is what I think but do not say aloud.
“We may need it for shelter on the glacier,” Jean-Claude explains.
I stifle the urge to moan again. The idea of bivouacking anywhere on the open glacier seems like death to me. But if for some reason we do have to bivouac…
I realize that J.C. is right and I say to Babu Rita, “All right, you heard the man. You and Ang Chiri begin taking down the staves. Norbu, you and Lhakpa get outside and pull up all of the stakes and untie all the tie-downs. Don’t cut them unless you have to and then only right next to the tie-down knot—and leave all the ropes attached.”
If we have to pitch this tent on the glacier, I don’t think we’ll have the energy to attach new ropes. And there won’t be these friendly rocks and boulders around.
It’s strange to be standing outside and wearing a pack load again. The winds haven’t abated, and the blizzard is coming down as heavily as it has the past two days and nights, but Jean-Claude’s handy combination aneroid barometer and thermometer tells us that the low pressure is climbing along with the temperature, which is up to a balmy ten degrees Fahrenheit.
“Good for the crampons on the glacier snow,” J.C. says into my ear under the wind roar and buffet.
Nothing is good.
J.C. and I are both surprised that there’s only about two feet of new powder on the glacier rather than the four or five feet the intensity of the three-day storm made us fear, but the crust is not frozen solid enough to keep us from crashing through up to our knees or waist every dozen steps or so. And none of us ever seem to fall through at the same time. We descend the glacier like six blind men with palsy.
We’ve decided to rope up, all together, using the Deacon’s hideously expensive Miracle Rope that was his personal invention (at Lady Bromley’s expense) for this expedition. For things like casual guiding ropes on the glacier, on the way up we’d strung the alpine-standard three-eighths-inch cotton rope—what I think of as “the Mallory-Irvine rope,” since they were last seen using it on this very mountain—but for vertical fixed ropes and for roping up in dicey situations, the Deacon insisted on this new blend of cotton, manila, hemp, and other material for his rope. It made the rope thicker and heavier—five-eighths of an inch rather than the three-eighths that had been standard for so many years in alpine climbing—and thus heavier to haul and harder to knot quickly, but his Alpine Club contacts led the Deacon to a commercial rope-testing facility in Birmingham: the three-eighths-inch standard cotton rope, even when new and unfrayed in any way, would snap at 500 pounds of pressure. This sounds like a lot, but when a normal-sized male is free-falling, say, while leading on a 30-foot belay, his mass plus velocity after falling 60 feet will almost always snap the standard three-eighths-inch cotton rope. “I think we use the damned stuff more as sympathetic magic rather than as a real safety precaution,” the Deacon said.
That low tensile strength was also the reason, the Deacon had pointed out to us the previous winter when he’d had us testing his new rope in Wales, why so many climbers—in the Himalayas now as well as in the Alps—lost their lives while descending steep slopes again rather than rappelling down with any real assurance of safety. The Deacon’s new Mixed Fibre Rope, as he liked to call it, had tested out to more than 1,100 pounds’ strain before snapping. Not yet satisfactory to the Deacon—he envisioned what would later become the 5,000-test-pound average nylon-blend rope of the future, without knowing how it could be manufactured with the materials of 1924–25—but decidedly better than the three-eighths-inch cotton “clothesline rope” (as the Deacon called it) that Mallory and Irvine had tied onto on their last day.
But even with the new, improved rope, J.C. and I have had to sort out the order in which we should all descend the mountain. Obviously Jean-Claude should go first, but then who? Of the other five of us, Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay can barely stand and stagger along on their frostbitten and swollen feet—neither had been able to tie the laces to his own boots, and J.C. and I had attached their crampons—so neither can be expected to hold a belay if Jean-Claude were suddenly to disappear into a hidden crevasse. And neither I nor the Deacon’s new Miracle Rope could be expected to hold the weight of three free-falling men on belay, no matter how quickly I could get my long ice axe into the glacier snow.
So we’ve compromised, with J.C. going first, then Babu Rita—the healthiest of the Sherpas this awful day—and then me (in the slight hope I might belay two men), and then Ang and Lhakpa staggering along, holding each other up, and finally with Norbu Chedi, frostbitten cheeks and all, as our anchorman. Theoretically I could belay Ang and Lhakpa if one or both of them fell into a crevasse behind me.
It is understood, at least by Jean-Claude and me, that if it reaches the point where Norbu Chedi has to belay all or most of us, we are dead men anyway.
So we follow J.C. up and away from our quickly disappearing wreckage of Camp III, back onto the East Rongbuk Glacier, and then down the glacier’s surprisingly steep slopes. How, in this never-ending blizzard, Jean-Claude can find his way and avoid the hundreds of crevasses he’d pointed out during the climb up in sunlight two days ago I’ll never know. Most of our route-marking bamboo wands either have blown away or are covered with snow, but occasionally J.C. reaches down and tugs one up, reassuring all of us that we are on the right track.
And although I believe in nothing supernatural, I will always—after this day—ascribe a weird but real sixth sense to Jean-Claude Clairoux in his ability to sense the presence of crevasses that would have been invisible even on a sunny, shadow-assisted day, much less in this blinding blizzard. Several times he holds up his arm telling us to stop where we are, and then he turns around and retraces his quickly disappearing steps in the snow, leading us back up and then around and then down past crevasses that sometimes become slightly visible to the rest of us in the passing, but more often than not remain unseen and unsensed by anyone other than Jean-Claude.
So, after the agonizingly slow hours of dressing, tying our bootlaces, getting our crampons on, and packing up the tent in different loads (J.C. hauling most of it), we suffer four more hours descending the glacier in this stop-and-start way before we get to the ladder-crossed crevasse that had been less than an hour short of Camp III on our way up on Tuesday.
Jean-Claude holds up his snow-covered arm and we stop, then approach slowly.
The combined 15-foot span of the two roped-together ladders has slipped out of place.
“Merde,” says J.C.
“Yeah.”
It’s still snowing so hard that we have trouble seeing the far side of the slumped span of the ladder
only 15 feet away, but after a few minutes the flurries clear just long enough for us to assess the problem.
There’s been a subsidence on the far, southern lip of the crevasse, as if a column of ice supporting the far side has shifted downward six feet or so. One of our Miracle Rope guy lines is missing, and the other one—the one to our left as we look south—is slumping under its weight of snow and ice in a way that suggests that the eyelet stake and ice screws holding it on that side have come loose. We’d left two climbing rigs for the heavily laden porters who were to follow us up on Wednesday to put on for security—clipping the carabiner on the harness into one of the guy lines—to use as they crossed the rickety ladder, but the harnesses are now lost, either buried under the new snow or fallen into the widened crevasse.
We untie from our common rope, and Babu Rita ties back in as lead man of the four connected Sherpas. I tie on to Jean-Claude, who sinks to his hands and knees to crawl closer to the ladder and the edge of the crevasse.
I borrow Ang Chiri’s and Norbu Chedi’s long ice axes, and J.C. and I drive them as deep into the snow and solid ice as we can, running about 30 feet of free Miracle Rope to Jean-Claude so that the axes will be the primary anchor system should he fall. I gesture for Ang and Norbu to come around to the crevasse side of the ice axe anchors and to lean their weight on them. Borrowing Lhakpa Yishay’s long ice axe, I lay it along the edge of the crevasse, anchoring its curved pick deep into the ice; if J.C. falls, I want both the anchor rope and my belay rope to be running over the smooth wood of the ice axe shaft rather than cutting into the lip of the crevasse. Babu Rita retains his ice axe to sink behind us and has run a loop of rope around it should a hole open up under Ang, Norbu, and Lhakpa. He’s their belay man now.
Then I sink the steel point of my own ice axe as deep into the snow and ice as I can—there’s too much powder snow to make it feel truly secure—and back away from the edge as I play out the 30 feet of rope I’ve left between J.C. and me.