Jean-Claude and I decide that we’re going to do a carry to the highest camp we can reach today, despite the relatively late hour for departing from Base Camp. I think we both need some high, clean climbing and carrying to get rid of the terrible taste of that dawn’s “sky burial.” I know I do.
While many of the oxygen rigs have already been transported higher by Sherpas, J.C. and I test the tank integrity of two such backpack-frame rigs—almost no leakage in any of the six tanks—and we shrug into the harnesses to haul the O2 sets up as high as we can get by nightfall.
With the Irvine-Finch-modified oxygen rigs on our backs—we won’t be breathing any of the English air today, so the masks and valves are tucked into the metal frame there—we’re hauling close to the Deacon’s guideline carry-load total of 25 pounds, but we also have to haul some personal stuff up with us if we’re going to be staying at any of the high camps—perhaps stay there until the summit bid itself. So we grab two off-the-shoulder, hang-in-front “carry bags”—actually gas mask containers (minus the masks) from the Great War which the Deacon had purchased both cheap and by the dozens. They’re perfect for cramming in our personal effects of some extra clothing, shaving kit—which I haven’t used for a week, since I hate shaving in cold water—camera gear, toilet paper, and all the rest. It’s probable that there are extra sleeping bags waiting at the high camps, but J.C. and I aren’t going to take any chances: we roll the bags tight, put on their protective waterproof covers, and tie them onto the outer metal bars of the oxygen rig frames.
We have our assortment of odd-sized ice axes (keeping only the long axes out and unlashed) as well as two of J.C.’s jumars, we’ve strapped on our 12-point crampons (despite the fact that most of the way to Camp II is on moraine rock), and it’s cold enough and snowy enough today that we’re wearing our Finch duvet jackets and Reggie eiderdown pants under our outer Shackleton anoraks and snow pants.
We shake hands with Pasang when we leave, and then we’re walking up the stony valley between walls of dirty moraine ice and the occasional ice pinnacle. The weather remains lousy, and visibility is down to about 15 feet. The wind is even stronger here than out in the Rongbuk Valley, and while the falling snow doesn’t seem to be accumulating much, hard pellets of the stuff sting our faces like buckshot.
Tied together by 40 feet of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope, more rope slung over our shoulders, with me in the lead, Jean-Claude and I head up the twelve-mile valley and glacier to the North Col.
J.C. and I exchange only a few necessary words during our long trek up the Trough, then the glacier above Camp II. We’re each lost in our own thoughts.
I’m thinking about death in the mountains. Beyond my real sense of guilt at Babu’s useless death during our clowning around, I’m remembering other mountain deaths and my reaction. I’m not totally new to sudden death on a mountain.
I’ve mentioned before that the Harvard Mountaineering Club didn’t formally come into existence until last year, 1924, but when I attended Harvard from 1919 to 1923, there were a few of us—the Harvard Four, as we were known in climbing circles—who spent every vacation and spare moment climbing in the nearby Quincy Quarries in the spring and autumn and in the New Hampshire mountains during the winter.
Instructor Henry S. Hall, who would found the formal club in ’24, was our informal leader, and our ad hoc climbing group met in his home. The other two members of our little group were Terris Carter (same year as me) and Ad Bates, a year behind us and a tough little mongrel of a climber, all knees and elbows and flying heels, but strangely skillful.
Professor Hall, with his older and more experienced mountaineering pals, specialized in climbing in the Canadian Rockies and, on rare occasions, in Alaska. During a school break in the early autumn of my junior year, the four of us were climbing on Mount Temple in Alberta, doing the East Ridge—which today would be classified IV 5.7 or so—when Ad slipped, snapped the 60-foot rope connecting him to Terris and me, and fell to his death. We hadn’t been set for belay, and Ad’s fall was so sudden and so vertical that if the rope hadn’t snapped, Terris and I would almost certainly have gone over the north face to fall with him.
We mourned Ad’s death, of course, in the way that only the young can mourn the death of someone their own age. I’d tried to talk to Ad’s parents when they came to Harvard to pick up his things, but all I could do was sob. I started missing classes when school resumed, just sitting in my room and brooding. I was sure I’d never climb again.
That’s when Professor Hall came to see me. He told me either to get back to my classes or drop out of school. He said I was just wasting my parents’ money the way it was. As to climbing, Hall told me that he’d be taking student climbers to Mount Washington as soon as the first snow fell and that I should make up my mind whether to continue climbing—he thought that I had some skill at it—or run away from it now. “But dying’s part of this sport,” Professor Hall told me. “That’s a hard fact—unfair—but it’s a fact. When a friend or partner on the rope dies, if you’re going to continue to be a climber, Jake, you have to learn how to say ‘Fuck it’ and move on.”
I’d never heard a teacher or professor use that word before and it hit me hard. So did the lesson he was imparting to me.
But over my last few years of climbing, I’ve learned—at least partially—how to say “Fuck it” and move on. During my months in the Alps with the Deacon and J.C., we’d been involved in no fewer than five attempted rescue missions, three of which ended in tragedy for someone. It’s true that I didn’t know any of the dead climbers well, but I did get to know the terrible damage an alpine fall will do to the human body: fractured, splayed limbs, clothes torn off by jagged rocks on the way down, blood everywhere, crushed skulls or heads missing altogether. Death by falling from a great height is never a dignified thing.
Babu Rita hadn’t fallen from any height; he’d just followed two idiots in glissading down a slope that one could find with a toboggan run in any snowy American city’s municipal park. Only toboggan runs don’t usually have boulders concealed under the snow.
“Fuck it,” I hear myself whisper. “Move on.”
The wind howls between the ice pinnacles of the Trough, and once up on the glacier, we have to dig out fixed ropes for security between crevasses, but the flagged bamboo poles show us the way.
We get to Camp III before daylight starts to fade, but Reggie and the Deacon aren’t there. There are now six tents at Camp III—two of them oversized Whympers—but we find eight Sherpas curled up and sleeping in the smaller Meade tents. Pemba moans that none of them feel well: all have been struck by “mountain lassitude”—our word for altitude sickness in 1925. Those not in sleeping bags are wrapped in heavy layers of blankets. Pemba says that Lady Memsahib and Deacon Sahib are up at Camp IV on the North Col with Tejbir Norgay and Tenzing Bothia. The winds up there, says Pemba, are very terrible.
Jean-Claude and I step back out of the odiferous Meade tent and confer. It’s late in the day, and it will be dark by the time we reach Camp IV. But we’ve brought our Welsh miner headlamps, I have an extra hand torch in my gas mask bag, and we both feel strong and impatient.
The hardest part of the climb, oddly enough, is the postholing from Camp III to the base of the slope and then trudging up the two hundred yards or so to the steep part where the first fixed ropes begin. The heavy snow and dimming day hide the boulder that killed Babu, but I can’t help imagining a layer of frozen blood under the new-fallen snow, like strawberry jam spread thin beneath white bread. When we reach the steeper fixed-rope part of the route, we have to use our ice axes to dig through the new snow until we can find the fixed rope and tug it up and out. Then we dig through our canvas bags and don our headlamp rigs and take out the ascender device that Jean-Claude named “jumar” after a dog he had as a kid. Or so he’s said.
As J.C. double-checks to make sure I’ve clipped the jumar onto the Deacon Miracle Rope properly, I say, “Did you really invent this doodad?”
My friend grins. “I did, but in collaboration with my father, who was helping a young French gentleman named Henri Brenot, who wanted some sort of mechanism for climbing free-hanging ropes in caves. Since it was just for one person, my father didn’t think to patent it, nor did Brenot, who called his larger cave rope-ascender devices singes—monkeys—so I decided to modify it, make it smaller and safer with stronger, lighter metal, added the curved handle and its handle guard, which we can fit our mittens into, and designed a sturdier cam to lock on to the rope without fear of slipping or shredding the line, and…voilà!”
“But ‘Jumar’ was really your dog’s name?”
Jean-Claude only grins more broadly and begins mechanically ascending—I’ve already begun thinking of it as “jumaring”—up the fixed rope.
A year ago, it would have taken Mallory or Irvine or Norton or any of the others four or five hours to get up this ice wall to the North Col, especially in a swirling snowstorm such as J.C. and I have just climbed through. Mallory would have spent much of his time on the ice face bent almost double, dutifully and exhaustingly using an ice axe to chip new steps out of the snow and ice. J.C. and I kicked in the front spurs of our new 12-point crampons and jumared up in less than forty-five minutes—and that included a time-out halfway up to hang from the rope and eat bars of chocolate. We did use our long ice axes, but only to stab into snow with our left hands for balance on the way up or to bat away the ice and snow covering the next few yards of fixed rope above us.
The traverse from the ice shelf across the North Col to Camp IV at the northwest corner under the tall seracs should have been worrisome in so serious a storm, but the Deacon and others have done such an excellent job of setting out permanent bamboo wands and red pennants that even in high winds and the near whiteout, it’s as easy as walking along a well-marked eight-foot-wide highway between invisible 100-foot drops into crevasses.
Camp IV now consists of one medium-sized Whymper tent, brought up in separate loads, as well as the RBT—Reggie’s Big Tent—and two smaller Meade tents in which the Deacon planned to store loads for higher carries. When some of this stuff goes up to Camps V and VI, the Meade tents as well as the Whymper tent here will host Sherpas on their way up or down in the theoretical supply line.
The Deacon and Tejbir Norgay look up in surprise as we come through the Whymper tent door, shaking snow off our outer layer into the small vestibule before joining them. I imagine we’re a sight in our high-cinched eiderdown hoods, full-face leather flying helmets, glowing headlamps, iced-over goggles, and snow-rimmed Shackleton anorak shoulders. The two men obviously aren’t expecting company as they huddle over an Unna cooker, the Meta fuel boiling up a big pot of something—at the pathetically low temperature it takes to boil things at 23,500 feet. Water boils at somewhere around 170 degrees Fahrenheit at this altitude, as opposed to 212 degrees at sea level. Although 170 degrees may sound hot, by the time the cold air hits it, our “boiled” liquids are down to around body temperature.
When we reveal our faces, the Deacon says, “Just in time for dinner, gentlemen. Beef stew. And we’ve made plenty.”
J.C. and I are surprisingly ravenous. Evidently the nausea we shared after the morning’s sky burial has worked itself out during our hours of trekking and climbing.
I’ve expected a rebuke from the Deacon regarding Babu Rita’s death, but it never comes—not even a pointed question as to whether we enjoyed the sky burial or had an interesting time with the Breakers of the Dead. I know that the Deacon himself has attended such terrible rites, but he makes no mention of it, ironic or otherwise. My guess is that he sympathizes with our reaction to the horrors we’ve seen. I know that Richard Davis Deacon also liked Babu very much.
“What is the climbing plan, Ree-shard?” asks J.C. when we’ve finished the last of the stew and reheated biscuits and are sipping our tepid coffee.
“In the morning, unless the weather gets actively worse, we’ll try the North Ridge to Camp Five,” he says. “I managed to get the two Meades up there a few days ago…we can only hope they haven’t blown away or been carried all the way down to the glacier by an avalanche.” He points to where J.C. and I have dumped our oxygen rigs in the corner of the tent. “Did you use any of that on the way up?”
We shake our heads.
“Good,” says the Deacon. “But we have extra sets cached here at Camp Four, and I recommend that you have one tank between you during the night…use the double-breathing hookup. If you get cold or really start feeling bad, a little oxygen at the one-point-five-liter flow rate will help out. We’ll all need some sleep if we’re going to climb in the morning. Speaking of which, did you bring extra batteries for those miner lamps?”
I nod.
“Good,” he says again. “When I say ‘in the morning,’ I mean around three-thirty or four a.m.”
I’m tempted to say So you’re following Reggie’s advice after all, but I decide against it and ask only, “Where are Reggie and Tenzing Bothia?”
“In the RBT,” says the Deacon. Suddenly he grins. “Lady Bromley-Montfort challenged me at Camp Three this morning when she overheard me talking about the RBT with a couple of the Sherpas there. She demanded to know what this ‘RBT’ she’s been hearing from various men stood for. When I told her ‘Reggie’s Big Tent’ and apologized for the familiarity with her name, she just said ‘Oh’ and blushed like mad. I have to wonder what she thought we were talking about.”
I have to think about this for a minute before a possibility strikes me…“Reggie’s Big…,” and then it’s my turn to blush. I pour more coffee to hide my embarrassment.
The wind claws at the walls of the Whymper, but there’s no sense of imminent collapse as there’d been a week ago at Camp III. And even if this tent were to tear free, we have the two unused Meades and Reggie’s Big…Tent…as lifeboats in the storm.
Unless, of course, we don’t have time to get out of the tent when its tie-downs and stakes pull free in the gale. In that case we’ll just all try to claw through canvas as the Whymper slides over the edge into a bottomless crevasse or a thousand vertical feet down onto the glacier proper.
We’re settling into our sleeping bags and still sipping the last of our coffee when I take out the book I’d packed up with me. It’s the popular wartime anthology of English verse The Spirit of Man, and I begin reading a Tennyson poem aloud to everyone when the Deacon suddenly says, “Excuse me, Jake. May I see that book?”
“Of course.” I stop reading and hand it to him.
The Deacon stands, still in boots, tugs on his down jacket, furls up his sleeping bag, grabs his personal rucksack, and goes out the tent door into the maelstrom.
Confused, smiling to myself thinking it’s some joke—perhaps having to do with toilet paper, although we’ve all brought some with us—I stick my head and shoulders out of the Whymper tent just long enough to see the Deacon hurling The Spirit of Man into one of the deeper crevasses. Then he disappears through the swirling snow toward one of the gear-crowded Meade tents.
I close the tent flap and turn toward J.C. and Tejbir. Both men look as startled and confused as I feel.
I’m shaking my head, trying to think of something to say, wondering if the altitude has driven our older English friend temporarily mad, when the flaps are suddenly unlaced and Reggie steps through. She’s not wearing her down outer layers but is carrying them and her eiderdown sleeping bag and inflatable sleeping cushion.
“May I come in?” she asks after she’s already inside and re-lashing the door shut behind her.
“Please…yes…please do…of course,” J.C. and I are babbling. Tejbir continues staring and I remember that his grasp of English tends to slip when he’s upset or confused.
We make room as Reggie lays out her sleeping pad and bag, takes off her unlaced boots, and slithers down into her bag while still sitting up. She speaks to Tejbir in rapid-fire Nepalese and the Sherpa nods, gets into his boots, folds his sleeping bag, grabs his
rucksack, and goes out into the storm.
“I just suggested to Tejbir that since I’d be sleeping in this tent tonight—if it’s all right with you fellows—Tenzing Bothia might be lonely in my dome tent. Tejbir took the hint. This will give us more room to spread out.”
Sleeping in here tonight, I think giddily. Then I realize the absurdity of my Victorian-era shock. Besides the mummy-style sleeping bags themselves, all three of us are still dressed in multiple layers of cotton, wool, and goose down. I’m reminded of a tale I’d heard in England about Sir Robert Falcon Scott at the South Pole. Evidently Scott was rather stuffy about rank and social class—he’s said to have hung a blanket between the enlisted men’s and the officers’ parts of the single room in the large shack they built near the coast—but during the early part of his push to the Pole, while there were others there who would return to the shack and survive the experience, someone deferentially asked Scott why he took more time than the others when he stepped out into the terrible cold at night to attend to the call of nature. “Basically,” Scott is reported to have said, “it’s the problem of getting two inches of business out of seven inches of clothing.”
In other words, Lady Bromley-Montfort was safe with us tonight. Of course, she would have been even if we’d all been sleeping naked.
“I was out going to the loo when I saw Mr. Deacon throw a book over the side of the cliff and then take himself off to make room in the Meade tent we half-filled with provisions for the upper camps,” she says.
This gives me pause. Going to the loo? For urinating in storms like this, we male climbers don’t leave the tent—we’re not as particular about such things as Scott was—but merely use what we politely call “a piss bottle.” We covertly—or not so covertly—dump it outside when conditions improve, but I’ve never thought about the problems a woman climber might have with even the simpler form of…“going to the loo.” I find myself wondering if she teeters on the edge of crevasses, and I also worry about her getting frostbite.