The Abominable

  “You did that for four years, Ree-shard,” J.C. said. “Worked to keep your men alive. You’re doing it now, here on the mountain.”

  Surprisingly, shockingly, the Deacon barked a laugh. “My dear friend,” he said, touching Jean-Claude’s shoulder. “My dear friends,” he said, looking at each of us in turn. He pulled his goggles up to say this to us with his gray eyes visible, and I could see that the cold wind was already causing them to tear up. “My friends, I failed miserably at keeping men under my command alive. I couldn’t even keep our thirty Sherpas alive during this peacetime expedition. They were under my command on the mountain. Most of them are dead. Dear Jesus, I couldn’t even keep track of my own rifle, much less be smart enough to keep our Sherpa friends from being killed. If all the good men I killed or helped to be killed in the Great War were to come with us on this climb up Mount Everest, the line would extend from Darjeeling to the bloody summit.”

  He fell silent.

  “Well,” I said after too much of that wind and silence, “I’d better start climbing before I freeze up. This is a decent belay point, so I’ll stay roped up until I get to the top left of that snowfield about forty-five feet up. It looks like one of you could come up and belay me—or at least spot me—from that point. We’ll kick up a little platform of snow there for you if need be. But, no, it’s a shitty belay point—if I fall from that face, I’d pull the belayer right off—so let me help get one of you and the fixed ropes that high, to that snowy point right at the base of the vertical last pitch, and then I’ll free-climb it without tying on, just carrying the rope loose around me so someone else can give it a try if I peel off.”

  “I’ll follow you up to that point when you find some belay points on the boulders,” said the Deacon.

  Jean-Claude was leaning over the edge of the North Face, studying our footprints and route with his field glasses. “The Germans are climbing toward Mushroom Rock,” he said over the wind. “We shall have to climb quickly if we are to reach our Alamo in time.”

  20.

  I didn’t know a damned thing about Zen meditation, if that’s what the Deacon really had been doing when he sat cross-legged and apparently lost in thought every morning before breakfast as Reggie recently suggested, and I certainly hadn’t had the time or interest on this insane climb to ask him about it.

  But I suspected then and I know now that mountain climbing—especially rock climbing under extreme, no-forgiveness-for-errors conditions—is a strange and beautiful equivalent to Zen. Everything empties out of the climber’s mind except the moves he’s planning to make, the holds he sees or senses or hopes for, the speed he’ll need to move at in order to stay attached to a steep or vertical face. One imagines—envisions, rehearses, feels—the motions he’s about to make, the stretches and reaches he’s ready to go for, the fingerholds or footholds he needs to find, the life-saving friction he’ll have to create where no friction should exist.

  So, with the Deacon’s belay rope tied on for only the first half of this impossible climb, I began the scramble—first to the left toward the off-width crack corner where the faces met at a sharp angle, the all-important joint starting just below that meeting of sheer faces, a mere fracture there but widening to become the 15- or 16-foot-high off-width crack 45 feet higher up. That crack was filled with rocks and pebbles—a joint—down low and appeared from below to be no factor whatsoever in this first half of the climb.

  That wasn’t quite true, actually, for as I quickly traversed left toward the south-facing wall near that joint, I moved into full shadow, and suddenly the air was painfully colder. Working near the useless joint would make me much colder—a negative factor. I had to move fast through these shaded parts, or later I’d be losing fingers, toes, feet, hands, and God knows what to the surgeon’s scalpel.

  I scrambled up the narrow groove near that meeting of cliff faces, then shifted right, my fingers finding holds that my eyes couldn’t see, my crampon points balancing on cracks that were less than half an inch wide. Then a short vertical climb, my left hand jammed deeply and painfully in a vertical crack just below the cone of snow halfway up, feet scrambling to the left and then to the right before finding the faintest traction, then up again until I could balance and cough and pant on the four-inch-wide top of a tall, skinny boulder. Four inches was a boulevard up here…a Kansas prairie.

  This was the “high step” up onto the snowfield I’d seen from below and had decided to worry about only when I got there.

  Well, I was there. There was really nothing to wedge my crampons or hands against to get any lift for that four-foot or broader step up onto the steep, snow-covered, downward-tilting slab. (It was never level enough at any point to be called a ledge.)

  Death in such rock climbing can come quickly when you pause to think things out. Sometimes you must trust to instinct, experience, and the brief advantage of adrenaline over rational thought.

  Knowing now that the Deacon couldn’t hold me if I fell during this giant step—leap was more like it—and seeing 8,000 feet of empty air under my boots and between my legs as I made the upward lunge—I was, for a fraction of an instant, sorry that I’d tied onto the belay rope even for this lower, “easier” part of the climb. I really, really didn’t want to pull the Deacon with me when I slid over the edge to my death.

  I landed on my belly on the slippery snow. The steep shelf had been exposed to sunlight for hours now, and parts of the snowfield were wet, slippery…my fingers clawed into loose snow and found no grip whatsoever. I began sliding on my belly backwards and to the right, toward the sheer drop-off.

  Then the front-point crampons on my flailing boots found some traction in the six- to eight-inch-deep snow on this slab. My sliding slowed, then stopped. Moving in slow motion, the crampons on the front of my stiff boots the only real contact with the snow—much less the unreachable rock beneath the snow—I managed to use the four steel points at the front of my crampons to push my body inch by inch up and to my left. Eventually, despite the steep slant and the absurd exposure, I stood, reaching for a higher rock to balance myself.

  Then I walked to the far left—north—side of this cone-shaped snow shelf, found a corner there where I could kick together a tiny snow platform on which to stand, ran the rope once around the only rock belay I could find—a three-inch upward-slanting spur about the height of my nose but smaller than my nose—shook the rope loose, took up its slack, set it over my shoulder in the way I’d done a thousand times, and shouted “On belay!”

  “Climbing!” shouted the Deacon and—sometimes using my taut rope to keep himself from catapulting off the face backward—he clambered up toward me in his George-Mallory-cum-electrified-spider mode.

  Within minutes he was up with me. I knew I had to start moving—we were in the shadow here, and I was freezing without my goose down outer layers or serious mittens and gloves, my body was already shaking (perhaps partially from the adrenaline as well as from the cold)—so I wedged myself up two or three feet along the off-width crack in the corner and let Richard Davis Deacon take my place on the marvelously level square foot of snow I’d piled up in the corner. (An off-width crack, in climber parlance, is one that’s too wide for your hand or fist to find traction in, far too wide for a piton to be driven into—if you happen to be one of those iron-mongering Germans who even use pitons—but too goddamned narrow to wedge your entire body into. To most intents and purposes, other than tossing bottles or something into as a garbage pail, off-width cracks are useless.) Now my foot was in that crack, the pressure of the crampons on limestone and my two extended arms merely holding me a few feet higher than the top of the Deacon’s head there in the angle where the two cliff faces met. It was an exhausting position to hold at any altitude, and up here I knew I couldn’t hold it for more than a minute.

  “Keep the belay rope tied on,” gasped the Deacon. His face was ashen from his climb, even with the help of my taut belay rope at times. I can’t imagine what my face looked like, but
at the moment I felt like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with two horns of light emanating from his temples. Only I was going up—with luck—not down.

  “No,” I said. I held myself in place with my boot, my back, and one extended hand while I untied from my waist-rope harness, looped the belay rope twice over the cloth belt of my Norfolk jacket so it would stay with me as long as I was climbing but would pull loose the instant I peeled off the face, and started scrambling upward while I still had a trace of warmth and energy and will left anywhere in my shaking body.

  21.

  I knew the instant I started free-climbing the impossible Second Step that whether I lived another three minutes—including the time I’d still be conscious while falling a mile and a half—or lived another seventy years, this would be the climbing effort I would be most proud of.

  I couldn’t breathe well because of the ragged constriction in my throat, but to hell with that. I’d taken in one deep but unsatisfying gulp of the frigid open air here above 28,140 feet, and now I would complete this climb on that single gulp of oxygen. Or not.

  Conventional wisdom and climbing experience suggested that I should try to stay to the far left of the 25-foot face, using the off-width crack for something.

  To hell with that. Staying close to that off-width crack, I felt in my aching gut, meant death. I took a narrow branch of one of the smaller rising cracks to the right instead.

  The largest of the vertical cracks on the right was all but filled with small, loose stones. Again—death to get one’s boot or hand in there. Forget that as well.

  Hand-jams and fingers on nonexistent holds—and speed, as much speed as I could muster—got me up the first two-thirds of the flat face. Looking down would have just made me laugh out loud—the curve of the earth had been visible since we’d reached the foot of the First Step; here on the Second Step, the tops of mountains 200 miles away were peering over the haze of that impossible curve, and the summit of every 8,000-meter peak in the Himalayas was below me now—so I just refrained from sightseeing and kept moving upward like a lizard on hot rock.

  Only this rock wasn’t hot; it was freezing with the deep cold of outer space. This damned slab faced mostly north and rarely got the sun’s rays to warm it. My hands and every part of my body coming in contact with it, and I wanted all my body in contact with it, were absorbing that numbing cold faster than I could scramble.

  I put my freezing hands where I somehow knew invisible fingerholds would be. The steel tips of my crampons shot sparks from limestone and granite.

  I was nearing the top now—which was a fucking overhang, of course, and one unclimbable even in Wales on a summer day unless you had Prusik knots galore, a stout rope to hang from, and one of Jean-Claude’s dog-name jumar doohickeys to cam-slide up and over it with—so I kept clawing my way upward, one crampon point finding a hold, then slip-sliding to my left toward that hitherto useless goddamned off-width crack.

  Okay. Just because the crack was still too large up here for my hand or forearm to jam in, and still too narrow to hold my body, that didn’t mean I couldn’t jam my elbow into the crack with an angled arm lock, then, a fraction of a second later, cram my left foot and leg in below. That, I realized, was my plan.

  Some plan.

  There were no solid footholds or handholds anywhere near that crack, of course—God wasn’t going to make it that easy—but friction and speed are God in such a free climb, and I prayed to, and used, both to get a few feet higher.

  Lungs burning now, vision tunneling, ignoring the pain as the sharp rock of the crack ripped at my leg, I knee-barred a couple of yards more up toward the top of the Second Step and encountered…another overhang.

  Once again I had to stop myself from laughing. It would have used up the last oxygen in my lungs, not that my lungs had any oxygen left in them.

  The overhang petered out about six feet to my right, so I extended my right leg as far as I could, crampons scraping, until my boot found a ledge there that was about the width of a broken pencil. I shifted all my weight to it, couldn’t find a hold for my sliding, questing right hand, and just used a friction grip against a slightly less than vertical part of the slab.

  One more ledge, three feet higher, for my left boot, a few more seconds of teetering above absolutely nothing, and then I was up, the top half of my body over the lip of the overhang, my right hand finding ridges and rocks and holds galore. I was on top of the Second Step.

  I pulled myself all the way up and rolled a few more inches away from the edge so that the 8,000-foot drop wasn’t directly under my head and shoulders or feet or butt any longer.

  I still couldn’t get a breath, but I could stand, and I did so. Just a couple of feet beyond the cliff face of the Second Step up there was a nice four-foot-long-by-three-foot-wide limestone bench, with plenty of rock ripples, ridges, and even a few stunted bollards behind it for tying off belay ropes.

  Thank you, God.

  My breath rasping so painfully in and out of my sore throat that I thought I might scream, instead I called down—in a steady and calm voice, I was told later by Dr. Pasang—for everyone to start coming up as I belayed them. I’d brought 120 feet of Miracle Rope with me; with the tie-offs around the rock bench and bollards, I used 97 feet of it.

  The Deacon took his time, trying to free-climb major parts of the route himself but saving himself by falling back on the tension of the rope two or three times. I didn’t care and would never mention it to him. We weren’t in a contest here.

  Everyone else—except Jean-Claude—fully used the tension of the tied-off rope, belayed by two of us now, then three, then four, to make the impossible climb possible.

  No one could resist looking around from the summit of the Second Step. There was a Third Step beyond this one, further up the North East Ridge and just before Everest’s snowy Summit Pyramid, but that last step was a marshmallow compared to this crag. It was immediately obvious that we could traverse around it on the snowfield there if we didn’t want to scramble up and over the boulders.

  Beyond the Third Step—which it seemed we could throw a stone and hit—a snow slope led, first gradually and then very steeply, to the Summit Pyramid. That would be careful climbing, but nowhere near as technical as this Second Step.

  And then there was only the snowy summit with its treacherous cornices, all perfectly visible in the crystal air and pure sunshine. A little raggedy remnant of the former lenticular cloud trailed westward from that summit, but it wasn’t a change-of-weather-to-a-storm sort of lenticular. The wind here atop the Second Step was very strong, blowing, as always, from the northwest, but we leaned into it and screamed our joy aloud.

  At least some of the others did.

  I finally realized that I was not breathing at all. As my four friends took several steps further west atop the Second Step, I fell to my knees and then to all fours just beyond the limestone bench.

  I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t even cough. No air was moving in or out of my aching, battered lungs. The sharp lobster claw in my lower throat—feeling more like a jagged mass of cold metal now—was blocking all breathing. I was dying. I knew I was dying. My four friends were shouting and clapping each other on the back and looking up at the summit of Everest in the noon sunlight and I was dying, my vision already changing from dancing black spots to a quickly closing tunnel of blackness.

  Dr. Pasang turned around and took three quick strides to my side. He went to one knee, and I was distantly—irrelevantly, with real death this close—aware of the other three also surrounding me now, the men looking down at me in confusion, Reggie kneeling next to me but obviously not knowing what to do. It’s true, I thought and learned forever in that second. We do all die completely alone, no matter who’s nearby.

  “Help me prop him up,” came Pasang’s voice down an infinitely receding passage to sight and sound. I distantly felt someone’s hands roughly hauling me up off the rock, steadying me on my knees.

  It didn’t matt
er. It had been a minute and a half or two minutes now when I could draw no breath, expel no breath. The broken thing in my throat was cutting my throat open from the inside. I was drowning. Had already drowned. But without even the false gift of water rather than air filling my lungs. I made a few final gagging sounds and tried to topple forward, but someone’s hands still held my shoulders, insisting on making me die in a kneeling position. I was only vaguely sorry I was dying—I would have liked to have helped my four friends a little more.

  But I got them up the Second Step. This was my last conscious thought.

  Pasang’s palm—I believe it was Pasang’s broad hand—pressed so firmly against my chest that I was sure he was breaking ribs and my breastbone with the terrible pressure. It didn’t matter.

  At the same second, he slapped me so sharply on the back that my spine almost snapped.

  In one mighty, bloody push—as if some terrible sharp-edged creature were being born through my throat and mouth—the obstruction came up and flew free.

  Reggie finally allowed me to fall forward over the thing I’d coughed up—it looked like a bloody part of my spine, a crimson-covered super-trilobite that must have crawled down my throat while I slept at Camp V some nights earlier—but I didn’t care what the monster was, I was nearly weeping with the joy of being able to breathe again. Breathe painfully, it was true, but breathe. Air moved in and out. The tunnel of vision blackout widened and went away. I squinted in the bright light until Reggie gently pulled my goggles back into place. I’d climbed the Second Step without the goggles on so I could see my feet, see everything, but I didn’t want Colonel Norton’s agony of snow blindness.

  I’m going to live after all, I thought giddily. I retched a little, spat a lot, and spattered some more blood onto the spiny thing I’d coughed up onto the rock.