First, Reggie and I will get out our little list of necessaries—there’s already an Unna cooker here, so we’ll save ours for the higher camp tomorrow—and crawl into or onto our sleeping bags, luxuriating in the false sense of warmth under the sun-warmed tent canvas. Too exhausted to do anything constructive, we’ll just lie in our respective bags and stupors for forty-five minutes to an hour, perhaps taking the rare shot of English air to offset the headaches already roiling in our skulls like the shifting cloud mass in the East Rongbuk Glacier valley so far below.
Then one of us—I hope to God it’s Reggie—will find the energy to crawl, with frequent rests and more frequent groans, out of her bag, out of her daytime tent, and across the terribly steep slope to the nearest patch of clean snow—about ten paces from this tent, only about four paces from the hanging-over-nothing tent above us to the left—and will use the last of her energy to fill two big aluminum pots with snow.
Then we’ll take turns groaning and moaning as we work together to light the damned Meta burner and to open some tins and bags of food—not a small accomplishment at this altitude—taking two hours to prepare a dinner we don’t want: pemmican, perhaps, or some bully beef (which the Deacon must be fond of, since he packed so much of it), and then “boil” some lukewarm tea with lots of sugar and condensed milk.
I gag just thinking about it. Perhaps I’ll just sleep all day and night instead. We still have water in our thermoses. That will do me until tomorrow. Or forever. Whichever comes first.
So I’m amazed—beyond amazed—when Reggie says, “What do you say…to going…up to…Camp Six?”
“Today?” I manage in little more than a squeak.
She nods, pulls a delicate lady’s watch from somewhere under her unzipped Finch duvet, and says, “It’s not quite noon. The Deacon says…they climbed from Camp Five…to Camp Six…in just under…four and a half hours. We can be there long before….dark.”
For a moment I’m certain that this is sheer bravado, that Reggie can’t be serious, but then I look at her sunburned face and beautiful eyes above the tugged-down oxygen mask and beneath the raised goggles and realize that she’s totally serious.
“They made that climb…starting…in the morning,” I say. “When they were rested.”
Reggie shakes her head, and I see curls of her blue-black hair trying to escape the wool cap she wears under the goose down hood. “You don’t really rest…up this high. Just…hurt. Lie…awake. We might as well do it…seventeen hundred feet…higher…tonight. Start hunting for…Percy…in the morning. Come downhill.”
“The Deacon and J.C. will expect us to be here…at…Camp Five,” I manage.
Reggie shrugs. “I’ll write them a note.” She takes a small leather notebook and small pencil from an inner pocket.
Jesus Christ, I’m thinking. She really means it!
I play my trump card. She will have no answer to this. It will save our lives…or at least my life. “There’s no…Camp Six…up there,” I say, trying to fake a sound of regret in my voice. “We wouldn’t know where…to put one. We couldn’t…get one…set up before nightfall. We’ll die…of exposure.”
“Oh, nonsense,” says Reggie. She’s writing busily. Then she pushes the partially dried sleeping bags back into the tilted tent and shows me the note before setting it atop the closest bag, weighting it with a rock. The brief note, our death warrant I am sure, reads At Camp V at noon. Both well. Decided to go up to establish VI around 27,000. Will begin search on Face in morning.—Reggie.
She ties the tent flaps closed, and we gasp and moan getting to our feet. I have a second of vertigo that almost sends me headfirst the 2,000-plus feet down to the North Col, my arms flapping like vestigial wings on some flightless bird. Nothing between here and the drop-off beneath us would stop me if I did tumble backward. I continue to teeter groggily, flailing my arms in a vain attempt to find my balance, and then feel Reggie’s firm hand on my upper arm, holding me in place.
When I find my balance and some semblance of normal breathing, she slaps me on the shoulder as if nothing had happened.
“We can dump the first oxygen…tank…when it empties,” she says before pulling her mask back up. “Maybe we should use less…of the air…for the second part…of the climb. Have more…for…tomorrow.”
“Sure,” I pant over the top of my own mask. “Whatever…you say…ma’am.”
We turn around, facing up the impossibly steep heap of murderously slippery black granite slabs and snow, and prepare to take our first thirteen steps. Almost 6,000 feet above us, the West Face of Everest’s snowy Summit Pyramid begins to glow in the very cold and increasingly low early afternoon light. Spindrift is again being hurled out for miles to the southeast. I start to imagine what the wind will be like up at 27,000 feet, our destination just a few hundred feet below the Yellow Band that is the last physical landmark and dividing line beneath the North East Ridge and that straight—if almost certainly impossible—ridgeline route to that summit. But then I have to shut down my imagination or just sit on a boulder and start weeping like a child.
We take our first of thirteen steps.
Monday, May 18, 1925
Jake,” Reggie says softly, “if you’re awake, you might want to see this.”
I’m awake all right. Our “Camp VI” is a sad joke—the small 10-pound two-pole Meade tent precariously perched on a tilting slab so steep that we had to set our feet against the boulder that anchored the downhill end of the tent and sleep on an incline so steep that it felt as if we were half-standing. At least I’d thought to tie down an extra blanket on the flat face of the slab while we were lashing and weighting the tent to the side of the mountain, so the pure cold of this alien world at 27,000 feet hadn’t completely flowed up and into us from the cold rock all night.
I’d slept a few minutes during the darkness. I’d also been vaguely aware that, cocooned in our bags as we were, Reggie and I were still huddling together—rather like two passengers crowding together for warmth on the packed upper deck of an oddly tilted British double-decker bus on a London winter day. At least the winds were mild during the night. The suspense of waiting to be blown off this ridiculous excuse for a perch wouldn’t have allowed me even my few moments of half-sleep.
“Okay,” I say and sit up for the terrible ordeal of pulling on outer layers and boots that have stayed with me in the bag all night. My only concession to hygiene is to put on the last pair of clean cotton undersocks that are in my rucksack. It helps psychologically, if in no other way.
I crawl out of the uphill end of the tent. It’s like coming up and out of a hoar-frosted tunnel. Or perhaps it’s more like being born and finding out that you’re on the moon.
The band of sunlight has just moved down across our happy little home at 27,000 feet and I realize that the hissing noise I’ve been hearing for a while now isn’t snow, it is the last of the Unna cookers and Meta fuel blocks working to melt pathetically small pots of snow, one after the other. It must have been working for a while now, because Reggie—decked out in all her layers and sitting on her folded-up sleeping bag, boots braced against a ridge in a slab to keep her from sliding off the mountain—has already filled three of our thermoses with…something tepid.
I try to remember the boiling point of water at 27,000 feet—164 and some decimal degrees Fahrenheit? 162?—anyway, something so cool that before long, if we keep climbing, it seems the water will be boiling in the pot without any burner under it.
Actually, I vaguely remember George Finch saying that if we humans ever managed to get into outer space—totally above the atmosphere—our blood would boil in our veins and brains even while the temperature on the shaded side of our bodies might be more than 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. “Of course,” Finch had added to make us feel better (it was while we were eating dessert at the four-star Zurich restaurant), “you wouldn’t have to worry about your blood boiling in outer space, since your lungs and bodies would already have exploded li
ke those poor deep-sea creatures we dredge up from the depths from time to time.”
That had put me off my pudding.
I haul my sleeping bag up the slab slope to sit next to Reggie. As I’m tucking it under my butt, my boots slip—I haven’t put on crampons yet because my fingers aren’t up to all the strap-tying—and Reggie has to steady me with a firm hand again before my heels can find another wedge of rock to hold the rest of me in place. We’d had to move slightly onto the North Face to find even this pathetic campsite. There’d been no sign of Mallory and Irvine’s Camp VI from last year; we may have missed seeing it in the long shadows, rock mazes, and swirling snow at dusk. And while the Face here next to the North Ridge and just below the Yellow Band doesn’t seem all that steep—perhaps the 35- to 40-degree slate roof of the church that George Mallory had so famously climbed as a boy would be a good comparison—one real slip might well keep one falling the 6,000 feet or so to the East Rongbuk Glacier.
“How do you feel, Jake?” I realize that she’s not using oxygen, and I’m glad I haven’t yet dragged my overnight oxygen tank out of the tent.
“Great,” I say dully. If my skull had been stuffed with wool down at Camp V altitude, up here at Camp VI it was mostly empty except for pain…and thinking or speaking is enough to cause that pain to leap and cavort.
“You coughed all night,” says Reggie.
I’d noticed that. The constant cough—caused, I presume, by the unbelievable dryness that reaches into the smallest vesicles in your lungs and dries up the mucus in your throat at this altitude—sometimes makes you feel that you’re literally going to cough your guts up.
“Just the cold air,” I say. In truth, I feel that there’s something solid stuck in my throat. It’s a nauseating thought and I try not to dwell on it.
Reggie opens her arms. “I thought you might like to see the sunrise.”
“Oh…yeah…thanks,” I mumble.
My God, it’s beautiful. Part of my malfunctioning brain and warmth-desiring soul is dimly aware of this beauty. After a moment, both the reality of what I’m seeing and a bit of the rising sun’s warmth begin to sink into the semi-ambulatory chunk of frozen, coughing, shivering flesh that I’ve become.
At this moment, Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort and I are, without any doubt, the highest people on the planet to be touched by the rising sun. I look to my left and crane my aching neck to gaze up at the summit of Everest—so close! so infinitely far away!—just 2,000 impossible feet above, less than a mile of ridgeline to the west of us now, and the radiance of the sun shining a benediction on the reddish rock of the summit. The gleaming snowfields of the Summit Pyramid below the final vertical section to that summit look like something divine, something not of this world.
This altitude is not of this world, I think dully. We humans are not meant or evolved to be up here, I think, with some small sense of panic stirring in me. At the same time, a totally contradictory thought rises to the surface: I’m meant to be here. I’ve waited all my life for this.
What had John Keats said about Negative Capability—holding two opposite ideas in one’s mind at the same time without straining to reconcile them? Beats me. Maybe it hadn’t been Keats at all…maybe it had been Yeats or Thomas Jefferson or Edison. Wait…what was I just thinking about?
“Here, drink some of this,” says Reggie and hands me one of the thermoses. “It’s not hot, but it has caffeine in it.”
The tepid coffee almost makes me gag, but I decide that vomiting this stuff all over Reggie wouldn’t be the proper way to thank her for getting up before dawn at the top of the world to heat my morning coffee.
I realize that from time to time Reggie has been using the binoculars slung around her neck to scan the slopes below us.
“Anything?” I say.
“There’s just enough snow on the North Face…to make…every rock and boulder in it look like a human body at first glimpse.” She lowers the binoculars. “No. Nothing to see yet. Except those two human beings climbing directly towards us.”
“What?” I say and borrow her binoculars. It takes me a minute to find what she’s talking about, even with her pointing to help, since the objects are just gray specks moving slowly against gray-black rock along the ridge. It’s only when they move in front of the occasional small snowfield that I actually realize that the specks are alive and climbing.
“The Deacon leading,” I say.
“And Jean-Claude?”
“No, the second man on the rope is too tall for J.C. It must be a very tall Sherpa whom the Deacon is…wait! It’s Pasang!”
She takes the glasses back. I watch her face light up with pleasure. Somehow, that view is a perfect complement to the world of warming blue sky, clouds far below us in the valleys, huge glaciers visible winding back upon themselves where there are no low clouds, and scores of summits 20,000 feet and more in altitude igniting with the sun’s rays one after another like a series of tall, white candles being lit by an invisible altar boy. Below each newly lighted candle lies the white altar cloth of countless glaciers, ridges, and pristine snowfields.
It takes another half hour for the two figures to reach us—during much of the last part of that climb they are hidden from us as they work their way through the maze of gullies that starts about 1,000 feet below the Yellow Band and continues to the ridgeline above us—but then, suddenly, they’re with us. Waiting for our friends to reach our altitude has given Reggie and me time to eat a hearty breakfast—some English biscuits, bits of chocolate, a few spoonfuls of semi-thawed macaroni, and then a bit more chocolate and coffee. Reggie and I haven’t been conversing—the silence is what a writer type such as I’d once imagined myself to be (at least until I met that Hemingway fellow in Paris) might describe as “companionable.” So I content myself with trying to get my groggy brain in gear by naming the summits already glowing with light: the cliffs and North Peak of Everest itself, of course; the snowy top of what must be Kanchenjunga far to the east; Cho Oyu to the west; Lhotse just beginning to catch the light to the south; the more distant Gyankar range slowly changing from intangible shadow to granite solidity in the sun’s rays; and far, far away, peering at us over the now visible curve of the earth, some incredibly high peak in Central Tibet. I have no idea what it might be.
Then the Deacon and Pasang are here, still roped together on 60 feet of Deacon Miracle Rope. Reggie and I exchange pleasurably guilty glances about this—we never did rope together during the previous day’s climb, not even after we moved out onto the North Face or had to claw our way up through the gullies, using our hands in some steep places. I can’t quite understand why that little secret between us pleases me so much.
“It’s not even seven a.m.,” says Reggie. “When on earth…did you leave? And from where?”
Pasang’s oxygen mask has been dangling free of his face for the entire time I’d been able to see him through the binoculars. I doubt that he’s run out of O2, since I can see the tops of two tanks poking out of his rucksack. Those should easily have got him up from the North Col, even at the high-flow rate. And it’s certainly not like Dr. Pasang to show off. Perhaps he can just climb higher than us Europeans without needing the bottled oxygen. Whatever the fact of it may be, the Deacon has been wearing his mask until they arrive at our slab and find solid footing, but now shuts off the flow valve, lowers his mask, and stands gasping for a long moment before replying to Reggie’s question.
“Left…a little after…two a.m.,” he manages. “Camp…Five. Got there…yesterday…afternoon.”
I look at the Welsh miner’s lamp rigs still strapped over their wool caps just under their goose down hoods and have to smile. Between George Finch’s goose down garments, J.C.’s crampons and various other inventions, the Deacon’s new ropes and careful logistics, and my dashing, daring enthusiasm, we’ve all brought something special to this fourth and by far smallest expedition to Mount Everest. But it’s been Lady Bromley-Montfort’s damned miner’s
lamps and idea of beginning the climb in the middle of the night, whether there’s a full moon out or not, that’s probably made the biggest difference in how high we’ll get.
“You made good time,” says Reggie. She unfurls her sleeping bag so that it’s at the Deacon’s feet. “Have a seat, gentlemen. But make sure your boot soles and heels have a good grip on something first.”
Pasang grins and continues standing, turning to look out at the view, then turning again to look at the Yellow Band, North East Ridge, and Summit Pyramid of Everest itself all looming so deceptively close above us. The Deacon takes great care in removing his rucksack—in 1922, he’d once told us, Howard Somervell had been somewhere around 26,000 feet when he’d carelessly set his pack down only to watch it fall 9,000 feet to the main Rongbuk Glacier—and propping it between two small boulders behind him as he slowly seats himself. Neither man has put on goggles yet; the Deacon’s face is burned so dark by high-altitude sunlight that he and Pasang might have passed for brothers.
“We…made good time,” the Deacon says at last, “because some…incredibly thoughtful…persons strung…hundreds of feet of…fixed rope on the few steep…parts.” He nods his thanks in our direction. “The red-flagged bamboo wands…through the…gullies were also…a…welcome touch.”
“It seemed the least we could do since we were coming this way anyway,” says Reggie with another warming smile.
“It’s good you…came up here a…day early,” says the Deacon. “Gives us a full extra day for searching the North Face.”
“We’re not going to search the entire North Face, are we?” asks Reggie. I know she’s not serious.
The Deacon smiles thinly and gestures downward. I notice that his lips are cracked and bleeding.
“We’ll follow the plan…of imagining a huge trapezoid…running down from the North East Ridge from…where the North Ridge meets it near the First Step.” He shifts awkwardly to look up toward the First Step, only the top of which is visible from this vantage point, and says, “My God, it all seems possible from here, does it not, Jake? But that verdammte Second Step…”