“Do we have to worry anytime soon about Sigl or whoever’s carrying your rifle taking potshots at us?” I asked, if only to change the subject.
“I think the chap carrying my rifle will be careful about when and where he shoots at us,” said the Deacon.
“That’s reassuring,” I said. “Why should he be?”
“Because he’s looking for the same thing we are,” said the Deacon.
“Escape from crazy Nazis?” I said.
The Deacon shook his head. “Whatever Meyer and Bromley had with them. I believe that Bruno Sigl made the mistake one year ago of shooting either Meyer or Bromley or both—I’m sorry, Reggie, but I do think that’s the case—at a place where the bodies fell or avalanched beyond Sigl’s ability to reach them.”
“I agree,” said Reggie. “That fits with what Kami Chiring saw last year from near Camp Three using the Germans’ binoculars. He thought he saw three figures up on the North East Ridge…then, suddenly, only one. And he heard what could have been the echo of pistol shots.”
“So that’s where we search,” said the Deacon. “Along the ridgeline. The North East Ridge—where few people save for Mallory and Irvine have ever gone.”
“And, if you are correct in your theory, mon ami,” said J.C., “Sigl and Reggie’s cousin Percival and this young Meyer fellow.”
“Yes,” said the Deacon. “I don’t think Sigl will make the same mistake twice—or allow his sniper to, if someone else is carrying my Lee-Enfield. If they’d shot us anywhere on the North Ridge or during this climbing traverse to Camp Six here, our bodies might easily have fallen—probably would have fallen—down one of the gullies toward the main Rongbuk Glacier or all the way down and over the North Face onto the East Rongbuk Glacier six thousand feet below. The chances of whatever they’re looking for surviving such a fall in one piece, even if it’s just a document, would be very small.”
“What an encouraging thought,” said J.C.
“So they’ll be reluctant to shoot unless they know we won’t fall far,” continued the Deacon, undeterred. “So my suggestion is that we just keep outclimbing the bastards.”
Reggie rubbed her pale forehead. I wondered if her head ached as abysmally as did mine. At least she didn’t have my terrible cough.
“What do you mean, Richard?” she asked. “We’ve come pretty far. We’re very tired.”
“I mean we keep climbing until dark,” said the Deacon, turning his goggles up toward the Yellow Band and North East Ridge above us. The wind was blowing spindrift along that ridge and out away from the two impossibly distant but strangely near-looking Steps and the Summit Pyramid. There was snow underfoot—or I should say “undercrampon”—everywhere now. We were moving into a different world. And one that tolerated almost no forms of life.
“We either climb or traverse around that First Step—we could even bypass it by traversing along that narrow ridgeline atop the Yellow Band—and then climb back up toward the ridge and get the best of that damned Second Step,” continued the Deacon. “We stay just below the ridgeline on this side so we don’t show ourselves in silhouette to the shooter below, then set up Reggie’s Big Tent in the first-ever French-Anglo-American Camp Seven somewhere below the final Summit Pyramid.”
“What does this achieve, Ree-shard? Does it not merely postpone the inevitable? I need not remind you that les boches are armed, and we have…Very pistols.”
“First of all,” says Reggie, speaking for the Deacon, who was out of breath, “getting to the North East Ridge is the best way to look for my cousin Percy and whatever Kurt Meyer spent months sneaking out of Europe. That’s important. That’s the real reason we’re here.”
“But the odds of actually finding them…,” I began.
“You found George Mallory,” said Reggie.
I sighed. “In that huge open area down there. And I literally almost stumbled over him. I’ve been looking through my binoculars for ten minutes, but I can’t even see his body from here. I know where it was.”
I still felt bad about our not taking the time to bury Mallory.
“Well, there’s always the chance that we shall stumble over Herr Meyer or my cousin,” said Reggie. “At least if we climb to the North Ridge, we shall be walking where Kami Chiring last saw him. But camping above the Second Step, Richard…if the usual wind rises, I don’t think even my domed tent could survive it. And it will be very cold up there so near to twenty-nine thousand feet.”
“You’re all forgetting something,” I rasped between coughs.
“What, Jake?” said the Deacon.
“You and Norton compared the Second Step to the prow of a battleship,” I managed to say before coughing again. “A hundred feet of near-vertical rock. No man alive—not even Mallory—could climb that. Not at that ungodly altitude. And the North Face below that Second Step looks too steep to traverse.”
“You’re wrong, Jake,” said the Deacon. “There’s one man alive who can do that vertical rock free climb of the Second Step.”
I mentally scrambled to think of all the great European and American rock climbers who might be up to the challenge of free-climbing the Second Step at this debilitating altitude, but could think of no one.
“You, Jake,” said the Deacon. “You, my friend. Let’s go.”
He pulled the straps of his heavy rucksack on again. This time, I noticed, he clipped his oxygen face mask in place. All the rest of us did the same. The Deacon put the two heavy, full oxygen bottles we’d left cached there at Camp VI in his already overloaded backpack. Then he led the way up the boulder-strewn face toward the very steep rock gullies that would lead us up and through the Yellow Band and out into more such gullies and rock mazes before we could reach the windswept North East Ridge.
14.
This climb up the North Face through the Yellow Band and beyond toward the North East Ridge was the most demanding and technical climbing we’d yet encountered on Everest. Despite the much steeper incline, the more challenging terrain, and ever more terrifying exposure to the 8,000-foot drop, we still hadn’t roped up. There were numerous ways through the maze of overhanging rocks and snow masses, most of them up steep snow gullies, and most of them leading to dead ends with dangerously overhanging snow masses or blocking boulders. The Deacon had chosen the one he thought would have the best chance of exiting onto the somewhat shallower slope that should open out onto the ridgeline not too far east of that large outcropping on the ridge called the First Step. I suppose we weren’t roped together both out of stupid habit after hours of parallel climbing and because we were concentrating on front-crampon-kicking our way up the steep gully, jabbing our ice axes in ahead of us, leaning heavily on them, panting for breath (we were using our bottled oxygen only intermittently, which added to our mental dullness), and then kick-stepping our separate ways up another agonizing step or two. All this kicking led to clumps of falling snow—theoretical precursors to real avalanches—that no one wanted to follow directly below and behind. We were spread out with no one person really leading the climb, no prescribed order of climb, and no one within grabbing distance of anyone else should anyone slip and start sliding. But every time I looked, the Deacon was first, the highest, the one breaking trail; then came Jean-Claude, then me, then Pasang, and then—at least 15 feet lower than her Sherpa friend and following in his tracks—Lady Bromley-Montfort.
Reggie fell when we weren’t quite two-thirds of the way up the steepest part of the snow gully.
I was leaning on my ice axe and looking almost straight down past my boots at the moment and I saw her slip. Her right cramponed boot came down on a rock that should have been the protruding point of a solid boulder beneath the snow—we’d used many such boulder tips as footholds already in this gully—but it wasn’t. The loose rock rolled out from beneath her, Reggie fell heavily onto her side, the air going out of her with an “Ooomph,” and she began sliding immediately.
To her credit she’d held on to her ice axe during the hard fall
and then rolled onto her front, braced herself properly, and dug the broad adze edge in to begin her self-arrest. It was done with the sure, sudden grace of an accomplished climber.
But the damned 12-point crampons—so useful in our climbing the last few days—dug into the snow as she was sliding, the points digging deep, and flipped her over, the large ice axe flying out of her hands.
Now she was sliding down the gully headfirst toward the steep drop-offs and sharp rocks below. Pasang swung around at once and began loping in impossibly broad strides down the steep gully snow, but he had no chance of intercepting her. She was two-thirds of the way down the gully now and picking up speed toward a 100-foot drop-off that fell to the high point of the great catchment basin where I’d found Mallory’s body far below. Beyond that point, it would all be terrible tumbling and smashing.
Then Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort did an incredible thing.
Instead of grabbing helplessly at snow with her mittens or gloved fingers to slow her accelerating slide as most of us would do, she continued spinning down the ever-widening gully-chute but deftly reached back to her rucksack, which had somehow stayed on her as she plummeted toward the drop-off, and pulled the two short J.C.-designed ice hammers from where she’d had them strapped securely in webbing above the side water bottle pockets.
With almost no time left before she was launched out over the most vertical part of the North Face, Reggie made sure she’d looped the wrist straps of the hammers around her wrists, used the tip of one hammer to spin herself around so that she was head upwards, and then raised each arm and hammered the pick points deep in the snow. Three lightning-fast blows like that and she’d stopped spinning, but she was still sliding.
Two more deep thrusts, using the weight of her upper body to keep the points of the hammers buried so deep in the snow that her mittened hands weren’t visible, she slowed to a stop just yards above the drop-off to the full North Face.
The Deacon and Pasang continued hopping and crampon-bouncing perilously back down the gulley, losing in minutes countless feet in altitude that it had taken us the better part of a painful hour to gain. They arrived at Reggie’s side—she was still lying spread-eagled and facedown in the snow, her crampons raised—at almost the same instant. J.C. and I turned to join them, but the Deacon shouted at us to stay put—we’d lost enough time.
Within a minute, Reggie was sitting up—Pasang’s cramponed boot giving her a footrest to keep her from sliding as she sat on the snow—and soon she was drinking hot tea from a thermos the Deacon had produced.
The wind was still so negligible that J.C. and I could hear everything Reggie said from almost 100 feet below our site on the near-vertical slope. “Stupid, stupid,” she kept muttering. “Stupid!”
Pasang was looking her over—reaching beneath her outer layers to feel her arms, legs, and torso in ways that made me sorry that I wasn’t a doctor—and called up to us that other than some bruises and contusions, Lady Bromley-Montfort seemed all right.
“We need to know about your ankles,” the Deacon said in a worried tone. Often the impact of crampons flipping one over during a steep slide sprains or breaks ankles, or snaps the lower leg bones, as we’d seen so clearly with George Mallory’s corpse—and he hadn’t even been wearing crampons when he died. It had just been his heavy boots that had caused that compound fracture of the tibia we’d seen gleaming whitely.
With both men’s help, Reggie stood, wobbled slightly, was steadied by Pasang’s huge hand, and said, “They’re sore—my ankles, I mean—but no real sprain. Nothing broken.”
Pasang knelt in front of her right then and for a moment I thought he was praying; then I realized he was simply re-tightening the lady’s crampon straps.
“Here’s your ice axe back,” said the Deacon, handing it to her.
Reggie frowned—I could see the side of her face from where I stood leaning on my axe 100 feet up-slope—and said, “This isn’t my ice axe.”
“It has to be,” said the Deacon. “I found it where it bounced about twenty feet to the base of that gully to your right.”
Reggie pointed. “There’s my old axe up there, half buried there about halfway down the gully. I feel stupid for letting go of it. This is a new Schenk ice axe.”
“You did not let go of your own ice axe, my lady,” said Dr. Pasang. “It was ripped out of your hands. Had you tightened the wrist strap on it—as you did on the ice hammers—the wrenching torque certainly would have snapped your wrist.”
“Yes,” said Reggie in a distracted voice. “But whose axe is this? It looks brand-new, but the wood of the shaft is darker than mine. And it has three notches on it here about two-thirds of the way up the shaft.”
“Three notches?” said the Deacon in an odd-sounding voice. He took the ice axe from her and studied it carefully. Then he removed his binoculars from his pack and began scanning the narrower gully to the right of the one in which J.C. and I were still standing. Every second I was not moving made me colder, especially my feet.
“There is something up there,” said Pasang, pointing upward.
“Yes,” said the Deacon. “A man. Or a body.”
With the two tall men half-supporting Reggie for her first dozen cramponed steps or so, all three of them started climbing steadily—not back up the gully we’d almost climbed and in which J.C. and I waited, but toward the narrower, steeper one to our right. Someone or something was waiting up there for us.
15.
I was the first one to reach the man-in-the-other-gully because I cheated a bit; rather than descend our gully and re-climb the adjacent one, as Jean-Claude and the others were wisely doing, I used up most of my dwindling energy in free-climbing the nine-foot-high ridge of boulders separating our gully from the next one and dropping down into the snow there, barely arresting myself with wildly waving arms and a firmly and quickly sunk ice axe. But my idiotic and risky exertions got me to the corpse minutes before the others arrived.
And corpse it was, I saw at once. And—even with my very limited experience with dead bodies—it seemed a strange one.
The tall, muscular man looked as if he’d been sitting on a flat rock just a few yards above where his body had come to rest after it had finally tumbled over, still in a stiffened, seated position.
He was an English climber, there was no doubt of that. Like Mallory, he had no oxygen tanks or frame on his back—only a wind-tattered anorak over a Norfolk jacket and several visible layers of wool sweaters—and there were the remnants of a leather motorcycle or flying helmet strangely bunched up on the right side of his head, along with tattered and flapping remnants of a large wool overcap. He wore no goggles, and his face was bare to the elements.
What made his posture seem so strange to me, I realized, was that he was still frozen in a sitting-forward posture, his hands pressed together, fingers clasped, either in the motion of praying or trying to keep his hands warm. Those hands were pressed between his knees, which were so tightly closed against one another that they seemed a single frozen mass.
I steeled myself to crouch and look closer at his face.
It had been a handsome face and probably very young, although at least a year’s worth of Everest-altitude winds and sunlight had weathered it in odd ways. I could still see deep marks where a standard oxygen mask had been pressed down on the last day of his life near the bridge of his finely shaped nose and on both sides of what must have been a well-shaped mouth. It was disturbing to look at his mouth, actually, since either a final death scream or the tightening tendons associated with death had pulled it bizarrely open, shriveled lips pulled back and away from the white teeth, exposing a brown gum line.
His eyelids were closed—and the eyes themselves seemed deeply sunken, as if the eyeballs were missing—and frost and snow had settled in the occipital orbits. The right side of that once handsome young face appeared almost untouched except for odd, translucent strips of skin hanging from his cheeks, forehead, and chin.
What I first took to be a wound from a fall, a split of flesh and skin on the left side of his face, was, I realized just before the others arrived, only an open gouge where goraks had been pecking at the frozen flesh to get at softer tissue below. This had exposed the poor man’s left cheekbone, all of his teeth on the left side of his face, and ridges of brownish ligaments and muscle tissue. It was as if that side of the corpse’s face was smiling broadly at me, and I confess that the effect disturbed me.
Half of his forehead and scalp had come free from the dislodged motorcycle helmet and wool cap, and the hair I saw there was short and so blond as to look white through my Crooke’s glass goggles. I tugged the goggles up for a moment to look more closely and realized that the short, still-combed-back hair was white—but almost certainly because it had been bleached so by a year of exposure to the ferocious ultraviolet rays at this altitude. There was white stubble on the intact right side of his face, but some of the stubble was still blond along the shaded jawline of the damaged side.
I looked around for a rucksack or other detritus from a fall, but the only pack the corpse carried was a small canvas gas mask carryall slung around his neck in front, just as George Mallory’s had been. Fighting down a sudden surge of nausea, I reattached my face mask to my leather motorcycle helmet, set the regulator valve to low flow, and gulped down some English air to get my brain cells working again.
I stepped back from the body just as my four climbing companions kicked their way up the last yards of the gully to stand beside me. There was a shared moment of silence, more to let our lungs fight for oxygen than out of any intentional respect for the dead man at our feet. That would come later…For now, I drank in the rich air set to the 15,000-foot level from my pressurized tank and blinked away black dots that had been briefly dancing in my narrowing cone of vision. That free climb over the ridge rocks, at above 28,000 feet, wasn’t the smartest thing I’d done this endless week.