“Thank God we have a weapon with us,” said Reggie.
“Is it the pistol you used in the War?” I asked.
“I bought it before going to war and used it all four years. Now I only wish we’d brought the rifles up to Camp Three or Four. That was stupid of me to leave them all at Base Camp.”
I hadn’t paid much attention to the three rifles, even when Reggie or Pasang went out hunting with one. I assumed they were regular hunting rifles, although I remembered now that one of them—perhaps the Deacon’s—had boasted a telescopic sight mounted on it.
The Sherpas were babbling at Reggie again, but I could tell by the way Semchumbi hung his head that no Sherpas had thought to break into the “sahibs’ tent” and crates to get the rifles during the “yeti attack.”
“That’s all right,” said the Deacon. “No matter. We’ll get some extra tents from Camp Two to shelter the fourteen Sherpas up here, and then the five of us will go down to Base Camp and fetch the rifles. Which of you Sherpas wants to come with us to Camp Two?”
Dr. Pasang repeated the Deacon’s question in Nepalese. None of the Sherpas volunteered.
“Fine,” said the Deacon. “So I’ll choose you, you, you, you, you, and you…” He pointed out six of the Sherpas, including both Nawang Bura and Semchumbi. “You’ll come down to Camp Two with us, help us break down some tents, and haul them back up here to Camp Three.”
When Pasang interpreted the command and the men started shaking their heads, the Deacon snapped to the Sherpa doctor, “Tell them it’s not a request, damn it. It’s an order. If they don’t get at least three more tents up here tonight, some of these men will be dead by morning. Tell those six that we sahibs and Pasang will stay with them at Camp Two until they pack up at least four more tents to haul up here. We’ll wait until they get safely back on the glacier before the five of us head down to check out Base Camp. And they can have my pistol to bring back up to Camp Three.”
The six men sighed and hung their heads, but a couple of them brightened at the idea of getting the large Webley Mark VI pistol. Semchumbi said something which Reggie translated as “The cook says that if it is their destiny to die by the hands of yeti on Cho-mo-lung-ma, so be it.”
The Deacon only grunted. “Tell those six to get their rucksacks. And also tell them to get a bloody move on.”
Reggie leaned close to the Deacon and half-whispered, “Is it really wise to give up the only firearm we have?”
“I’m not giving it up,” said the Deacon. “I’m only lending it to Semchumbi until we return from Base Camp. There are fourteen Sherpas here who need protection. All five of us at least will have Very pistols.”
In ten more minutes we were ready. The Deacon made a small ceremony of handing his Webley revolver to Semchumbi and then set his heavy flare gun—loaded with a flare cartridge—in the large pocket of his Shackleton anorak. After a moment’s hesitation, Reggie, Pasang, Jean-Claude, and I took out our smaller Very pistols, loaded them with 12-gauge cartridges—I chose the white flare, which left me only one spare cartridge, the red one—and put the pathetic little flare pistols in our outer pockets.
“Do we want to rope up for the glacier?” asked Jean-Claude.
The Deacon thought a minute and then said, “I think not. I’ll lead with you alongside me to point out crevasses that may have been covered by last night’s snow. Jake, you help herd the six Sherpas in a tight pack, single file behind Jean-Claude and me. Where we step, they step. Reggie and Dr. Pasang, you please bring up the rear.”
To Semchumbi he said, “Tie the lanyard of my pistol to your wrist—that’s right—and don’t hold it by its handgrip unless you intend to shoot someone. There’s no safety for it, of course.”
Semchumbi handled the heavy gun as if it were a cobra, but it seemed to put some confidence back into the other five Sherpas and even in those who were to remain behind.
Everyone nodded. We left Camp III and started up onto and then down the long, dangerous glacier toward Camp II.
4.
It was almost dusk when we reached Base Camp.
Everything had taken too long—shepherding the six frightened Sherpas down the glacier to Camp II at 19,800 feet, checking out that the camp hadn’t been harmed and didn’t seem to be inhabited by yetis or mountain demons, helping the Sherpas break camp and then reload the tents, poles, and stakes—one big Whymper tent bound for Camp III and three smaller Meades—and finally convincing the anxious Sherpas that they’d be safe on the five-mile carry between Camps II and III. In the end, only Semchumbi’s possession of the heavy Webley pistol persuaded them to head back up the glacier; their friends and relations at Camp III would be waiting for their protection with that gun.
At Camp II the Deacon asked Nawang Bura to go down to Base Camp with us since he was the only surviving Sherpa who claimed to have seen the yeti attack. Before leaving for Camp I and Base Camp, the six of us used the big Primus in the mess tent at Camp II to cook up a hearty lunch of cocoa—hotter than anything the five of us had drunk in days—as well as pea soup, biscuits, ham, cheese, and some fresh chocolate bars for dessert.
After the mid-afternoon meal, I was sure that all of us wanted to crawl into one of the few remaining tents at Camp II and sleep around the clock. But we couldn’t.
It was two and a half miles from Camp II down to Camp I at only 17,800 feet—relatively easy going when we’d formerly hiked up and down the bamboo-wand-marked path in the center of the Trough, but this Tuesday we stayed away from the usual trail and took twice as long descending on a rough lateral moraine that ran above the Trough and abutted the glacier itself. The high moraine route across larger stones was much harder than the usual walk down the Trough, but we were anxious not to blunder into whatever might be waiting for us at Camp I or coming up from that camp. We wanted to see them before they saw us.
Nothing and no one unusual waited for us at Camp I. The tents were empty, extra oxygen rigs and food stores cached right where they’d been when we’d passed this way days ago heading up to the North Col. We studied the few snowfields around Camp I, attempting to find strange boot prints—or, I admitted only to myself, the gigantic footstep imprints of a yeti—but other than the total absence of the few Sherpas who’d been permanently stationed there, there was nothing unusual to see at our first camp above Base Camp. I admit that after days and nights at real altitude, the air at 17,800 feet felt thick enough to swim in.
It was a final three miles from Camp I down to Base Camp at a mere 16,500 feet, and once again we stayed off the beaten trail—which prolonged both the descent and my anxiety. By the time we reached a moraine ridge that looked out and across the next lower ridge to Base Camp itself, we were all, save for Nawang Bura, carrying Very pistols in our gloved or bare hands. The Deacon’s much larger Very pistol looked gigantic compared to the smaller German flare pistols carried by J.C., Reggie, Pasang, and me. Nawang had brought a large carving knife with him from Camp II.
Personally, I wished the Deacon had kept the damned revolver.
We found a place where we could all lie on our bellies along the rocky ridge that looked over the final moraine ridge between us and Base Camp, and we studied the camp through our binoculars.
“Douce Mère de Dieu,” whispered Jean-Claude.
I couldn’t speak. I just let my jaw sag and worked hard at keeping the field glasses from shaking in my hands.
There were bodies spread all around Base Camp. Every tent was torn and collapsed, including the large Whymper mess and infirmary tents, and even the canvas tarps had been ripped off the sanga-walled low stone enclosures.
The bodies were sprawled seemingly at random, and none of them looked intact. Here there was a decapitated torso, there a body with its head and limbs intact but with all of its internal organs ripped out; far out on the plain beyond the point where the glacial stream turned into a shallow river, vultures circled and swooped over two more dead bodies. We could tell through the glasses that those two farth
est-flung corpses were dressed in Sherpa clothing, but we could make no identification—especially since the low clouds kept moving along the ground like a thick fog, obscuring the bodies from our view and then suddenly revealing them again in all their gore and horror. The amount of blood at Base Camp was…absurd was the only word that came to mind at the time.
So we couldn’t make out anyone’s identity in the camp area through the binoculars, only gaze at the ungainly attitudes of death, each torn body, lopped-off limb, and decapitated head in its own pool of blood.
I didn’t fully believe what I was seeing. I lowered the glasses, wiped my eyes, and looked again. The field of carnage remained the same.
Pasang stood to walk down to the camp, but the Deacon silently pulled him back low behind the moraine ridgeline. “We’ll wait awhile,” whispered the Deacon.
“There may be wounded men there who need tending,” said Pasang.
The Deacon whispered, “They’re all dead.” We all sat propped against a rock while the mists opened and then closed around us. We took turns watching with binoculars until real evening gloom began setting in.
“There might be wounded men we can’t see from here,” whispered Pasang. I’d never seen the Sherpa so worked up. “I need to go down there.”
The Deacon shook his head. “Semchumbi’s body count was right. Everyone’s there, and they’re obviously all dead. Wait.” It wasn’t a request. I’d never heard former British Army captain Richard Davis Deacon’s military command voice before.
Time passed. The clouds kept hiding bodies, revealing them, then hiding them again. It grew colder. Nothing living moved except the occasional gorak raven alighting on one of the ravaged corpses. The light was very dim when the Deacon finally said, “All right.”
The Deacon suggested—quietly commanded—that we spread out as we approached the killing ground. I noticed that he put his own flare pistol in his pocket but gestured for the other four of us to keep ours in hand. Only later did I realize that any enemy hiding in the rocks might easily mistake our 12-gauge Very pistols for actual pistols; the Deacon’s flare-barreled, military-issue blunderbuss gave away the illusion.
It was a bizarre and disturbing inspection. My instinct was to check every bloodied but intact body for any signs of life—after all, hadn’t Pasang brought Lobsang Sherpa back to life at Camp V with his absurdly large adrenaline needle? But the Deacon hurried our inspections, hushed our groans and exclamations when we recognized old friends amongst the dead, and gestured for J.C. and me to join him in converging on the large Whymper tent that had held the crates of weapons.
The large tent was torn apart, rags of canvas hanging like shreds of flesh we’d seen on some of the corpses scattered about. All of the crates had been torn open as if by a wildly swung axe (or claws, I wondered?), but the crates holding the hunting rifles and all the extra boxes of cartridges—for the Webley as well as for the rifles—had simply disappeared.
The Deacon crouched so that the rock sangas the Sherpas had erected around this former tent would give us a little cover from any armed assassins in the surrounding rocks and hills. At the moment, the constantly shifting cloud-fog was our best (and only) friend.
“Well, the yetis are armed now, if they weren’t before,” the Deacon said softly to Jean-Claude and me. Reggie, Pasang, and a visibly terrified Nawang Bura were still out in the fog moving from body to body, kneeling briefly, and then going on to the next corpse.
“Don’t cluster in tight groups,” ordered the man who again struck me as Captain Richard Davis Deacon of the Yorkshire Regiment’s 33rd/76th Foot Battalion. “It’s better that we raise our voices from a distance if we have to than group into tight target clusters.”
“Certainly no human being could do this,” said Reggie. She was standing over the corpse of a Sherpa who’d had his heart and all interior organs scooped out of his body. His face was covered with blood but still recognizable. The absolute identifiers were the shoes, specially made by our resident Sherpa cobbler for a man whose toes had just been amputated.
“Ang Chiri,” I said softly, not coming closer than ten or twelve feet from Reggie and the terrible corpse.
“I need to do a quick postmortem on one or two of these remains to find the actual cause of death,” said Pasang. “Mr. Perry, Monsieur Clairoux, Lady Bromley-Montfort, could you help me carry Ang Chiri’s and Norbu Chedi’s bodies to what’s left of the infirmary tent? Some of the operating board is still intact, and I saw a workable lantern in the debris.”
To find the actual cause of death? I mumbled to myself. These men had been torn and clawed and bitten to bloody shreds and shattered bones. What could an autopsy show?
The Deacon had a different question. “You’re going to light a lantern and do postmortem examinations while these killers may still be around and waiting?” he asked from where he was crouched over the headless corpse of Lhakpa Yishay. I knew it was Lhakpa because his severed head had been propped between the exposed and shattered ribs in his hollowed-out chest. I thought of the Breakers of the Dead.
“Yes, I need the light from the lanterns,” said Pasang. “And, Mr. Deacon, would you please carry over Lhakpa Yishay’s head…yes, just the head. Once I get the bodies within the sanga rock walls of the infirmary, we can disperse again according to your wishes.”
The Deacon asked me to give Pasang some cover with my stubby Very pistol while Pasang was absorbed in his work under the cone of yellow light coming down from the lantern hanging on a tall tentpole he’d propped against the splintered operating table. I tried to keep my gaze averted—staring out into the shifting cloud-fog as it moved between us and the ice seracs and moraine ridges, every movement of fog looking to me like something huge and gray suddenly lurching out of the darkness—but sometimes I had to look back to where Pasang was digging in Ang Chiri’s emptied-out chest cavity. I realized that Pasang was using a scalpel and tongs from his doctor’s bag—most of the rest of the medical tools in the former infirmary tent here at Base Camp had been dumped and scattered but not carried away—to probe around poor Ang’s all-too-visible spinal cord.
I quickly looked away, back toward the gathering darkness all around us. In the oversized gray, waterproof Shackleton anoraks worn over their bulging goose down jackets, Reggie, the Deacon, Jean-Claude, and even Nawang Bura looked too much like yetis standing or ambling in the roiling cloud-fog. It was beginning to snow again.
I heard a “plink” of metal on metal behind me and turned in time to see Pasang using tongs to drop something small and dark into a white metal basin on the autopsy-stained operating board.
“Mr. Perry, could you please help me remove Mr. Ang Chiri’s body—we’ll set it over there on the ground just within the sanga—and perhaps help me lift Mr. Chedi onto the table?”
I did so, donning my thick overmittens so the blood wouldn’t get on my hands. That was a mistake; I never did get the blood off those mittens.
I admit that I stared when Pasang lifted Lhakpa Yishay’s disembodied head, held it close to his own face, and rotated it under the light as if he were inspecting a rare crystal. The entire left side of Lhakpa’s face had been gouged out—scooped out, actually—as if by a massive bear’s paw and claws. I could see something gray and glistening from the depths of that terrible cavity.
I turned away again and fought down nausea just as the doctor set the head down on the table, leaning it on the right side of Lhakpa’s shattered face. Then Pasang lifted a thin but wicked-looking saw. I resisted the impulse to put my hands over my ears as I heard the rasp of that saw on Lhakpa’s skull. In a minute, there was another “plink” of metal dropping into metal, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, Pasang had moved Lhakpa’s head aside and was digging around in Norbu Chedi’s disemboweled corpse.
Jesus H. Christ, I thought. Is this really necessary? Can’t we just bury what’s left of the poor bastards?
Pasang had put on long rubber gloves from the doctor’s bag he’d carried down in
his rucksack, but his arms were bloody up to the elbows.
Suddenly there came a rushing, rustling noise from my right, and I raised the German Very pistol, only barely avoiding pulling the trigger as I realized that the silence was being broken by Reggie, Jean-Claude, and Nawang Bura, all huddled low and moving fast behind the Deacon. Once in the rough square of the low stone sanga, the Deacon silently pointed at each person and then toward his or her appointed post along the low wall. The sahibs still had their Very pistols in their hands. Nawang Bura now had his knife tucked in his broad belt and was carrying a meat cleaver he’d found somewhere amidst the detritus of Base Camp.
“Find anything?” I whispered.
“Twelve dead, just as Nawang Bura told us,” hissed the Deacon from his place opposite the gap in the sanga that had served as the entrance to the infirmary tent.
“What about the two out on the plain?” I whispered.
“Both dead. Heads smashed in. Hearts ripped out,” the Deacon whispered back.
“Who went out to check on them?” I asked.
“Me.”
I tried to imagine having enough courage, even with the enveloping nightfall and fog, to walk alone and exposed those hundreds of yards out to where the two bodies lay on the plain. I didn’t think that I could have done it. Then I realized that the Deacon had almost certainly done that very thing, exposing himself to enemy fire that way and worse, a hundred times or more during the four years of the War.
“Do we know who they were other than Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay?” I managed to ask.
The Deacon whispered to the others crouching around the sanga before answering me. “Keep a sharp watch out. Try looking out of the corners of your eyes—one picks up small motions better that way.” Then to Dr. Pasang, “Will you be finished and dousing that bloody lantern soon by any chance?”