I begin walking again, then suddenly realize that I’m getting too close to the Grand Couloir. I’m far west of where the First Step rises so far above me on the North East Ridge and almost have reached a point below the terrible Second Step. That’s the end of my search zone. Any further in this direction and I’ll be wading in the deep snows and steep exposures of Norton’s Couloir. I turn and angle downward as I zigzag back toward the east and the North Ridge, where the tilted tents wait.
The drop-off 100 or so feet below me now is a constant sense of menace at the back of my mind. One slip and I’ll be over the edge in a few flapping, screaming, helpless seconds. I’m sorry now that I made that stupid joke about shooting off a red flare as I fell; the fall to the glacier below would be the worst and last conscious moments of my life. I can think of few deaths more terrible.
What does one think about when falling thousands of feet through the air?
I try to banish that question by assuming that I will strike a rock and be safely unconscious before catapulting off the lip of this cliff to my death so much further below. That cheers me up a bit. But I don’t really believe it. Part of my altitude-stupid brain tries to calculate the actual arithmetic of how many minutes and seconds I’ll be conscious during the free fall.
“To hell with that,” I say aloud and spend my mental energy watching my boots and the snow-patched mountainside ahead of me.
I’m just thirty or so minutes into the search when I find myself wishing that the Deacon had provided us with individual wireless sets rather than these ugly flare pistols. Of course, the 60 pounds or so of each wireless might be a tad tiresome to carry at these altitudes, and the fragile vacuum tubes would require lots of padding and tender loving care to avoid breakage, but the real problem would be the 300 miles or so of electrical cord that we’d each have to trail behind us as we…
I stop and shake my head to clear the fuzziness away. Something seems to be fluttering downhill from me, like branches shaking on a bush or shards of silk blowing in the wind. Or some spectral thing waving at me. Beckoning to me.
I can also see something green in the same small patch of snow below and ahead of me where I’d seen some sort of motion.
That’s odd. My mind works dully, shifting its gears through high-altitude molasses. I didn’t think green plants grew this high.
Wait. They don’t grow this high.
I stop and raise my binoculars. My hands are so unsteady that I have to crouch, almost losing my balance in doing so, and then steady the glasses on my planted ice axe.
The “green plant” is a single green leather boot on the right foot of a corpse lying facedown on the steep slope, his arms stretched above him as if he were still trying to arrest his slide. The left foot is bare except for remnants of stockings. The “small patch of snow” isn’t snow at all. It appears to be marble-white flesh visible through rents in the corpse’s shirt and trousers. The motion is rags or fragments (or flesh?) blowing in the rising wind.
My second muddled thought is Is this Lord Percy Bromley or the Meyer fellow, or could it be the Deacon or Pasang or even Reggie? Did one of my friends fall without my seeing or hearing them? Such an unnoticed event is all too possible, locked away as I am beneath my layers of leather and goose down, oxygen mask and goggles, with the regulator burbling air at me audibly with every breath. A marching band might have fallen behind me without my hearing or seeing them.
No, neither the Deacon nor Pasang—nor Reggie for that matter—is wearing green leather boots today. And now I can tell, even from hundreds of feet away, that this dead body has been there awhile. I notice that the waves of scree—those small, loose rocks that make up so much of the North Face here—have slid down to cover parts of the head of the corpse.
Moving more carefully than ever, I’m quite aware of the Very flare gun in my rucksack pocket, but I’m not yet willing to use it until I get a closer look. Working to watch my feet rather than the distant apparition, I begin the steep descent toward the corpse and the terrible drop-off beyond it.
Monday, May 18, 1925
Eventually I fire the green flare—it doesn’t seem to go very high, and it burns for only a few seconds before arcing down onto the steep slope above me and fizzling out with a final hiss. Then I collapse next to the corpse. My legs will no longer support me, although I don’t know whether that’s due to my excitement or near-total exhaustion.
It has to be either Bromley or Kurt Meyer. Or so I was certain when I was looking down at the dead man a few seconds earlier. But then I noticed the ragged and raveling puttees on the lower legs and realized that he had to be British. Germans and Austrians don’t climb in puttees.
I’ve found Percival Bromley.
That’s when I fired the flare gun—having to remove two layers of mittens and still almost dropping the green-cased 12-gauge flare cartridge because of fingers as stiff with shock as with the cold. After setting the pistol away, I realized that my knees were weak and that perhaps I’d better sit down.
Because of the two oxygen tanks and some fragile things in the rucksack, I don’t sit on it the way I normally would on a mountainside, and within minutes the deep-space cold of the granite here on the North Face of Everest is working its way through my layers of silk and cotton and wool and goose down up to my rear end and then through my thighs and upper legs. I’m quickly and deeply chilled. Now that I’ve recognized the English puttees on the corpse, I also note the tattered wool knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket and am even more sure that this must be Percival Bromley. As I’d seen through the binoculars, he’s lying facedown with his arms raised and long, thin, bare, and sun-browned fingers sunken deep into the frozen gravel above his head and face, which are both half-buried in the loose scree.
Right now, I have no interest whatsoever in seeing the dead man’s face. As I mentioned, I’ve seen dead bodies in the mountains, but I’m not eager to see this one’s face until I must. I actively hate the thought that, responding to my flare, Reggie will be down here in a few minutes and will have to see her much-loved cousin looking like this.
Part of that feeling is embarrassment. The corpse is still mostly clothed and intact save for the visible bone of a broken right lower leg—a classic boot-top break, I think—and a few rips in the fabric across his surprisingly broad and muscled back, but goraks have been at his buttocks, and these are completely exposed. The birds—gorak just means “raven” in Tibetan, but I imagine that they actually must be some variant species of alpine choughs—have eaten their way through poor Lord Percival’s rectum and begun hollowing out his insides. I consider laying my jacket over the obscene damage to the body, as one would cover the face of someone who died suddenly on the street in London or New York, but I’m already shivering with the cold. I need that wool layer. I also know that I’d better take my crampons off, stand up, stamp my frozen feet back into circulation, and walk around until I warm up a bit.
In a minute.
The corpse’s hands look deeply tanned, an unusually dark brown. For a moment I wonder if this is the result of decomposition, but then I realize it’s just the same high-altitude dark tan that J.C., the Deacon, and even Reggie and I have had after five weeks and more of hiking across Tibet and shuttling loads up the Trough and the glacier here on Everest. This high-altitude UV turns even white British, French, and American skin a deep brown quickly enough. I also notice that there’s no sign of frostbite on any of the exposed skin—even on the bare backbone and shoulders revealed where his shirt and Norfolk jacket have split in the middle. And those are powerful shoulders. I hadn’t realized that Cousin Percival was such an athlete.
Dead bodies don’t develop frostbite, Jake. Only the living suffer that indignity.
I know this. My brain is still working, just in absurd slow motion—thoughts and insights arriving rather like the muted sounds of some distant explosions reaching one long after the initial flashes.
Bromley’s left leg is crossed over his right just above w
here the terrible break in his lower right leg shows white bone and the ripped remnants of semi-mummified ligaments.
He was alive when he came to rest here, I realize. At least long enough to cross his good leg across the broken one in an attempt to relieve the pain.
The thought makes me ill enough that I tug down my oxygen mask in preparation to vomit. But the urge passes quickly. I realize that I’m being an absolute child—what the hell would I have done if I’d been old enough to serve in an American regiment in the Great War? Those fellows were knee-deep in decomposing bodies and dying men for the better part of a year.
So what? comes the answer from that more conscious part of my mind. It’s only poor Percival Bromley I’m dealing with here. You were never a soldier, Jake.
I can see through the rip in the Norfolk jacket that young Bromley had been wearing seven or eight layers of clothing: an outer anorak that has turned to tatters in a year’s cold wind, the wool Norfolk jacket, at least two sweaters, some layers of cotton and silk. What I’d first taken through the binoculars for a bare and browned skull is actually a leather motorcycle helmet similar to the thin flying helmet that I’m wearing. The dead man’s leather helmet is torn and ripped in places, and I think it somewhat odd that the visible tufts of Bromley’s hair are almost white-blond at the ends but dark brown further down. Do men ever dye their hair the way women do?
I don’t see any goggle straps on the side of his buried face.
He obviously had fought—and succeeded—in stopping his tumble and slide before he went over the drop-off just twenty or so yards below us, and his arms are in the classic mode of finger-clawing self-arrest a sliding climber uses as a last resort if he’s lost his ice axe. I look up the slope but can’t see Bromley’s axe. Nor can I see the boot missing from his left foot.
The fluttering that first caught my eye comes from a web of three-eighths-inch rope, what the three of us, with some contempt, have come to call clothesline rope even though we’d used it enough in the Alps. It’s been pulled far too tight around Bromley’s waist, is looped and tangled around his left shoulder, and its broken end—I can see the frayed and splayed threads right where the rope broke—is flapping and whipping in the still-rising wind. This, then, is the “wave” I’d seen.
Bruno Sigl said that Bromley had been roped to Kurt Meyer when the avalanche carried the two of them away. I guess we have to credit the German for telling the truth after all.
But the avalanche or the sheer violence of the fall has snapped the rope. God alone knows where Kurt Meyer might have ended up. Again I scan the slope above me, but can see neither a dead German nor any of my three friends coming down to join me.
Should I fire off the other two flares? Maybe they missed the first green one. It burned for only a few seconds.
I decide to wait. My hands still haven’t warmed up.
Suddenly there’s motion, but it’s not someone coming down from above—it’s a short man in a Shackleton jacket traversing directly across the steep face toward me from the east.
It must be Kurt Meyer, I think. He somehow survived the fall and has been waiting all this time for someone to find him and Bromley.
Or maybe Meyer also died here, and now his mummified corpse is coming to talk to me. Or maybe it’s just Percy Bromley’s ghost.
It’s my gasping and coughing, not the delusions, that make me realize I’ve been off English air for too long. I set my mask back in place and turn the flow up to 2.2 liters per minute. This clears my head almost immediately.
Just before the goggled and thickly garbed figure arrives, I recognize him: Jean-Claude. With the help of the oxygen, it takes me only thirty seconds or so to remember that the Deacon had said that J.C. would be coming up to Camp V with a group of Sherpas for a high carry today. He must have seen the green flare and come to investigate.
I stand, teetering just a bit, and lean uphill onto my ice axe, and Jean-Claude carefully steps around the corpse and hugs me before pulling down his mask and turning so that we are both looking down at the dead man.
“Mon Dieu,” he says over the rising wind.
I tug my own mask lower so that I can speak.
“It’s definitely Bromley,” I explain. “You see the puttees, J.C. Definitely British. You see the broken right leg. There are probably other injuries we can’t see from this angle. But I don’t think he could have fallen from as far as the North East Ridge and…you know…be in one piece like this. And definitely not from the North Ridge—this is due west, too far. He would have been almost to the Second Step, up along the ridgeline. No avalanches there.”
I’ve talked too much and breathed too little, so when my hacking starts, I put the mask back in place and bend over until the coughing fit passes.
“His right leg is broken in other places as well, Jake,” says J.C. “And you see that his right elbow looks broken too…or at least severely dislocated. I believe that the right side of this poor fellow’s body took the worst of the fall…” Jean-Claude pauses, shields his eyes—he raises his goggles for a better view, which I haven’t yet thought of doing—and studies the slope above us. “But you are right,” he says. “It is more than a thousand feet to the North East Ridge. He did not fall that far. Perhaps from those rocks below the Yellow Band. You are correct in much of your forensic analysis, but I fear you are wrong about one thing, my friend.”
“What’s that?” I say, and then splutter since I’ve forgotten to lower my mask, and the simple re-breathing gizmo in the mask doesn’t adapt itself well to transmitting human speech. I lower the damned thing and try again. “What?”
J.C. begins to say something but then stops and points uphill.
Three roped figures—Pasang in the lead, Reggie in the center, and the Deacon in anchor position—are using their long ice axes to pick their way slowly down the slope. They’re only twenty yards or so away. I should have known that the cautious Deacon would have taken the time to get them roped together before responding to my flare rather than have everyone come rushing down solo.
“What am I wrong about?” I ask, picking up the conversation thread with J.C. He only shakes his head and steps back from the corpse as our three friends arrive, make a slow loop around the body, and create a semicircle downhill with the corpse as its focus, the easier for them to view it. I’m instantly sorry that I hadn’t taken off at least my Shackleton anorak to cover the gorak-invaded buttocks and hollowed-out lower insides of Lord Percival. Now poor Reggie is leaning closer, having to see this horrible view of someone she’d grown up with almost as if he were her brother.
My mask is still lowered. “I’m sorry, Reggie,” I say, realizing that there are tears welling under my thick greenish goggles. Maybe it’s the cold wind bothering my eyes.
She pulls down her own oxygen mask and looks at me questioningly. Her goggles are raised. Her face is very pale in the late morning light.
“I’m sorry you have to see your cousin like this,” I say again. My only wish right now is that I hadn’t been the one to find him.
She cocks her head, looks at the other three men, then back at me. They’re all staring at me now.
“This isn’t Percival,” says Reggie, having to raise her voice to be heard over the coldly quickening wind.
I take another step back out of sheer reflex. My crampons slip on something, and I have to lean on my axe or tumble. I remind my body that we’re still just yards above a sheer drop-off to total oblivion. I’m very confused. It’s a British climber, of that I’m certain. If not her cousin…
“I know those broad shoulders and those green climbing boots,” says Reggie. “Percival is much slimmer, his upper body much less developed. And he’s never owned green leather boots. Jake, I’m all but certain that you’ve found George Leigh Mallory.”
Tuesday, May 19, 1925
It’s after midnight, but all five of us—the Deacon, Pasang, Reggie, Jean-Claude, and I—are sitting up in our sleeping bags in Reggie’s Big Tent, which has be
en pitched on the slab slopes at Camp V, each of us hanging on to one of the interior struts in an effort to keep the ever-rising wind from ripping the canvas apart or hurling us off the mountain. We are very, very tired.
I feel bad that we hadn’t taken time to bury George Mallory that afternoon—the previous afternoon, I realize, as I look at my watch. It’s the nineteenth of May now, two whole days after the Deacon’s planned summit day. The wind has grown stronger every hour, a lenticular cloud that had been hovering over Everest’s summit all morning descended on us in a whirl of snow after darkness fell, and if we’d stayed on the North Face with Mallory, we would have had to spend at least an extra hour or two hacking at the frozen rocks to free enough stones to cover his body. Even piling the thinnest layer of cairn stones would have taken more energy and time than we had with the storm coming in. After we’d searched the body carefully and made note of the position and clues as to his fall and jotted down notes of landmarks, such as they were, so we could find Mallory’s final resting place again when we had to, the Deacon announced that it was time to make the long west-to-east traverse to Camp V. When I objected, saying that Mallory surely deserved to be buried properly despite the approaching darkness and rising wind, it was Reggie who said, “He’s lain out here under the snow and sun and moon and stars for almost a year, Jake. Another night won’t matter. We’ll stay lower—here at Camp Five rather than Six—and come back to bury Mallory tomorrow.”
As it happened, of course, we never did.
I still feel bad about it.
But it turned out to be wise that we turned back when we did and traversed to Camp V rather than attempted to climb to the tiny Camp VI. By two p.m., the wind was raging hard enough to have ripped one of the small Meade tents at Camp V partially off its moorings. It was now a slumped, snow-covered green mass of canvas and snapped tentpoles on the steep mountainside. We could have labored to re-erect it, possibly using our ice axes as poles, but we didn’t bother. The other Meade tent had been ripped open by small falling rocks that tore through the canvas walls and roofs like canister shot. If anyone had been in that tent when those rocks hit, they would almost certainly have been killed. And there was a long night of higher winds and more hurtling rocks ahead of us.