I was having some trouble breathing now, and when I’d pulled the straps of my metal-frame oxygen rig back on and set things back in their carryalls, I stood there next to that Camp VI boulder for a full moment, doubled over with rasping coughs. I realized that I’d coughed paint spatters of bright red blood onto the black boulder.
“Is this another frozen something in my throat?” I managed to rasp at Pasang when I’d finished my second spasm of coughing.
He had me open my mouth so that he could inspect it with the tiny light from one of Reggie’s Welsh miner headlamps.
“No, Mr. Perry,” he said at last. “No more obstructions. But what’s left of the lining of your throat is so raw and swollen that it may completely shut off your upper air passages unless we get down low very soon.”
“And then…I die?” I said. It was a sign of my fatigue that the answer to that question did not interest me more than it did.
“No, Mr. Perry. Should that happen, I will perform a simple tracheotomy…here.” His gloved finger touched near the hollow of my throat. “We have plenty of spare glass tubes and rubber hoses from the oxygen kits,” he added.
Will perform a simple tracheotomy—the import of that sentence struck me only later.
“What if that doesn’t work, Dr. Pasang?” My rasping, pained voice sounded dangerously close to a whine.
“Then, to prevent your lung from collapsing, I make a small entrance hole here to reinflate your collapsed lung and to get you breathing again,” he said, placing that gloved finger on the left side of my chest. “Again, the various bits of hosing and valves we have would work perfectly. The only problem will be sterilizing them with water boiling at such a low temperature up here.”
I looked down at my chest: a hole there with a bit of rubber O2-rig hosing sticking out for me to get air? Reinflating my collapsed lung?
I rucked the oxygen rig higher on my back, tightened the straps, readied the face mask, and said in the firmest voice I could muster, “I’m strong enough to go down.”
24.
Tracts of Mount Everest that take days—or even weeks—to ascend can often be descended, at least to the glacier camps, but many times even to Base Camp, in a mere matter of hours: a long afternoon.
But that’s with fixed ropes in place. We’d pulled up most of our miles of fixed rope to deny the Germans an easy ascent. We’d also pulled out route marker wands and flags that separated the proper path up…or down…from dangerous dead ends in a vertical couloir snowfield ending in a long drop to the Rongbuk or East Rongbuk Glacier.
Pasang seemed to know his way. The afternoon clouds were closing around us in earnest now, and pellets of snow were lacerating the tiny exposed parts of my cheeks outside the oxygen face mask. I was on full 2.2-liter flow—Pasang didn’t even seem to be using his oxygen most of the time—but I simply couldn’t get enough air down through my swollen-shut throat. And every breath I did manage to swallow hurt like hell.
Certain odd things happened during these hours.
When we were at the site of our old Camp V—the Germans had set the last remaining Whymper tent on fire for some reason—Pasang parked me on a rock near the burned remnants, actually tying off my climbing rope to the rock for a few minutes, as if I were a child or a Tibetan pony to be kept in place, while he went to search for the extra oxygen rigs and food stores that we’d hidden in the boulders to the east, toward the North Ridge. Any that Sigl and his friends hadn’t found and appropriated, that is.
While I was sitting there, taking my oxygen mask off at regular intervals in desperate and doomed attempts to drag in more air and oxygen from the thin atmosphere, Jean-Claude came down the snowy slope and sat next to me on the boulder.
“I’m really happy to see you,” I rasped.
“I’m happy to see you as well, Jake.” He grinned at me and leaned forward to rest his chin on his mittened hands propped on the adze of his ice axe. He wore no oxygen rig, no oxygen mask. I figured that they must have come off during his fall to the glacier.
“Wait,” I said, straining to think clearly. I knew that something wasn’t logical here, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it for a moment or so. “How can you have your ice axe?” I said at last. “I saw Reggie carrying it on her rucksack as she and the Deacon headed for the summit.”
Jean-Claude showed me the light wood shaft of the axe. There were three notches about two-thirds of the way toward the blade. “I borrowed Sandy Irvine’s axe from where you left it on that rock,” said J.C. “Sandy said he didn’t mind.”
I nodded. That made sense.
Finally I worked up the courage to say, “What’s it like being dead, my friend?”
J.C. gave me that Gallic shrug I was so used to and grinned again. “Être mort, c’est un peu comme être vivant, mais pas si lourd,” he said softly.
“I don’t understand. Can you interpret that for me, J.C.?”
“Sure,” said Jean-Claude. He slammed the point of his ice axe deep in the snow again so that he could lean on it as he faced me. “It means…”
“Jake!” came a call from Pasang through the shifting snow flurries.
“I’m here!” I rasped as loudly as I could without screaming from the pain in my throat. “I’m here with Jean-Claude.”
J.C. took his watch from his Finch duvet pocket. “I need to go down ahead and mark the routes for you and Pasang. I will talk to you later, my dear friend.”
“Okay,” I said.
Pasang came up out of the swirling snow cloud carrying two fresh oxygen tanks for us to swap out to and yet another canvas bag of edibles, water, and other supplies.
“I couldn’t hear you well, Mr. Perry,” he said. “What did you just shout?”
I smiled and shook my head. My throat hurt too much for me to repeat it. Pasang added the replacement tank to my rig, set the flow valve to high again, made sure that air was flowing, and helped me attach the leather strap of my oxygen mask to my leather motorcycle helmet.
“It’s getting colder,” he said. “We’ll have to keep moving until we get to Camp Four on the North Col. Is it all right if I tie you in close on the rope…fifteen feet? I want to be able to see you—or hear you if you need help—even through the blowing snow.”
“Sure,” I said into the mask and valves, the syllable almost certainly unintelligible to Pasang. After he’d tied on the short rope, I stood, swayed, got my balance with the tall Sherpa’s help, and started to head off down and to the left toward the steep North Face rather than the North Ridge. Pasang tapped me on the shoulder and held me back. “Perhaps I should lead for a while, Mr. Perry.”
I shrugged, trying to make it as exquisitely Gallic as J.C.’s shrug had just been—but of course I couldn’t. So I stood there stamping my cold feet until Pasang passed me on the rope, and then I began to plod along close behind him.
25.
The North Ridge was still all downward-tilting slabs, usually under snow. I’d almost forgotten. If Reggie and the Deacon had done their traverse to the South Summit and down—rappelling down that big rock I was thinking of now as “K. T. Owings’s Step” (and would, nearly thirty years later, smile at its being renamed “the Hillary Step”)—the two of them would be descending on the upward-tilting friendlier slabs of the Southwest Ridge of Everest by now, moving down that rocky stairway toward the South Col and Western Cwm below that.
Or was that possible yet? They’d have had to make that traverse of the snow-corniced knife ridge between the summits—the one we’d been able to see from a few vantage points during our approach and climb. Was that even down-climbable, or was it the death trap that the cornice on the North East Ridge had been for Bromley and Kurt Meyer and Jean-Claude? No, not a trap for J.C., I thought. He’d known the fragile cornice was there and shoved Sigl onto it deliberately, knowing it couldn’t bear the weight of two men, even if one of them was a small, light Frenchman.
But could the Deacon and Reggie be on the Southwest Ridge by now, down to where
Owings had promised fixed ropes? I had a vague memory of seeing two more flares in the skies over Everest’s summit before Pasang and I had reached our old Camp VI. Green and red. White, then green and red.
Owings had discussed that sequence. What was the message from the Deacon to his old friend? Put the Bovril on the Primus, we’re only hours out?
I doubted it. The Deacon had never liked Bovril.
Or perhaps the Deacon and Reggie had summited by now and done the smart thing: retreated back the way they’d come. Would they be at the single tent at Camp VI yet? No, wait, I dimly remembered that the Deacon had been carrying the heavy load of Reggie’s Big Tent and Reggie had an Unna cooker. They could stop anywhere.
But had they? How late was it? How many hours had passed since Pasang and I had left the Second Step?…Camp VI?…Camp V? I fumbled under my layers for my watch but couldn’t locate it. Had I loaned it to Jean-Claude when he’d visited me a while ago? I didn’t think so.
It would be dark soon, the sun soon to be eclipsed by the summit of Lhotse. We’d come out of one layer of cloud into a cold but fairly clear afternoon. I could see two green tents far, far below on the North Col.
I looked to my right and noticed three odd-looking objects floating in the sky about 10 degrees above the angle of the North Ridge. Odd.
They vaguely resembled kites or balloons in shape but were much more organic. Obviously living beings. They floated rather the way jellyfish do, but always keeping parallel with the uncomprehending Pasang and me as we descended the ridge. All three were translucent, and I could see dim colors—red, yellow, blue, white—flowing through them almost like the pulsing blood in someone’s veins. One of the floating objects had squarish stubs on each side, somewhat like vestigial wings. Another had an extension of its head part that looked a little like a bird’s beak, though almost transparent. The third thing had a tourbillion of cascading light particles near its center, almost as if it hosted a brilliantly lighted interior snowstorm.
All three floating things were pulsating in rhythm with one another, but not, I clinically noticed, in rhythm to the beating of my own straining heart. As Pasang led me lower, never turning to his right to look at them, the three objects floating above the ridgeline—each transparent but oddly dark, especially when a cloud passed behind them—kept pace with us.
I looked away. They did not stay in my field of vision when I turned my head.
To see if my mind was being affected by illness or altitude, I looked at the peaks spread out seemingly at our feet and tested myself by recalling their names and altitudes—Changtse beyond the North Col at 24,878 feet, Khartaphu there on the other side of the pass to the Kharta Glacier at 23,894 feet, the shoulder and summit fields of Pumori to my extreme left, 23,507 feet, and to its right, abutting the Rongbuk Glacier, the summit of Lingtren at only 21,142 feet.
My mind and memory didn’t seem to be malfunctioning.
I looked back to my right. The three organic objects still floated parallel to our path of descent, always staying at the same angle of degrees above the line of the North Ridge but shifting positions amongst themselves: now the one with the blunt bird’s beak on the left, then the one with the square little penguin wings pulsating and floating to the left of the triad, and finally the one with the coruscating center of pulsing light taking the lead as they descended with us.
Souls? Could souls look like that? Is that what we really look like—after we shake off our bodies?
I reminded myself that I didn’t believe in God, Heaven, Hell, or any sort of afterlife, not even the tidy Buddhist theory of reincarnation.
But three of them? What three souls would follow us into the darkness this evening?
Jean-Claude. Reggie. The Deacon.
I pulled my oxygen mask down so as not to screw up the valves and tried to speak, but succeeded only in choking out a cough…or perhaps a sob. It was loud enough to make Pasang, carefully picking his way down slabs ten feet ahead of me, stop and turn around.
Realizing that tears were freezing to my exposed cheeks, I could only point toward the three hovering objects. Pasang turned his head and looked. A few seconds later I followed his gaze.
Another wisp of snow cloud had moved in. The three organic floating things were gone. Although I’d seen other small clouds move in front of them and block my view before, they’d always been there after the cloud passed, but this time I was sure they would be gone for good. When the streamer of cloud passed, they were.
Whatever message those…creatures…had brought, they’d wanted to share it only with me.
I shook my head, signaling to Pasang that it was nothing and that I was okay, pulled my mask back into place, and we continued the long, dangerous slog downward.
There were three tents near the old site of Camp IV on the North Col—two of our green Whympers and a smaller, tan-colored German tent. All three were empty. Pasang thoroughly searched the German tent, coming out with only a few more documents, and then kicked it to shreds.
He untied from our common rope, gestured for me to sit on an empty packing crate while he went off to see if our hidden caches—gear we’d dangled down into one of the crevasses—was still there.
I went off oxygen for a while and just sat panting, every inhalation hurting my throat, every exhalation hurting it more, and tried to enjoy the heat from a Primus stove Pasang had lighted.
It was deep twilight when Pasang returned with two fresh oxygen tanks and some more food to put in the bubbling pot. All of the North Col and most of the North Ridge we’d come down were in deepening shadow now. Only the upper ridges, top fifth of the North Face, and actual summit of Everest continued to glow red and orange and white in the last, rich rays of the setting sun.
The snow plume from the summit was stretched out farther east than I’d ever seen it. The winds up there must be terrible—inhuman—fatal to any living thing.
They’re both on the Southwest Ridge or already huddled together in their buttoned-together sleeping bags in Reggie’s domed tent on the South Col, I told myself. But I didn’t believe it. I imagined their bodies lying frozen and stiff as Mallory’s and Irvine’s somewhere up there on this side of the summit or on the terrible snow ridge beyond. Or hanging dead on their climbing rope the way Meyer and Percival had. Waiting for the goraks to find them.
I knew at that second that even if I survived this day, this retreat from the mountain, even if I ever climbed again someday, I would never, ever, under any circumstances, return to Mount Everest.
Our caver’s ladder no longer dropped down the 100-foot vertical ice wall section of the 1,000-foot descent from the North Col, of course—we’d chopped away its support and dropped it and some climbing Germans so long ago—but the Germans had replaced it with some of their three-eighths-inch clothesline climbing rope attached to two new deadman anchors they’d sunk into the snow of the ice ledge at the lip of the Col.
Pasang and I took time to add a third deadman—we filled an empty rucksack from Camp IV with snow, buried it as deep as we could, and trampled the snow heavy on top of it—and I used a girth-hitch runner and one of the spare German carabiners to add our anchor to the two other deadman anchors.
But we still didn’t trust the damned rope they’d left. Luckily we both carried 120-foot lengths of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope we’d hauled from the Camp IV crevasse cache, and now we tied these to our rope waist harnesses with figure-eights-on-a-bight knots, and I then set the separate friction knots for rappelling. We no longer had any of Jean-Claude’s clever jumars with us. I realized that I should have asked him for a couple when he’d paused to chat with me up at Camp V.
So now we had two dangling ropes, one of which we trusted, so we could rappel down the ice face at the same time. The last thing we did before rappelling was to retrieve our Welsh miner’s headlamp rigs from the carryalls and fumble through the small batteries we’d brought until we found a few that would still work.
Then, with me leading for a change,
we stepped backwards over the edge of the North Col and off Mount Everest proper in a quick belay to the remaining 900-foot snow slope below.
We discussed bivouacking for the night somewhere down past Camp III—we had a sleeping bag apiece—but both of us wanted to keep moving. Even at a night-hiking pace with our little headlamps showing the way through the glacier crevasses, we should be at Base Camp or beyond by dawn.
Pasang was leading on 30 feet of rope across the glacier as we’d just left the empty Camp III site when I fell through covering snow into a crevasse.
Pasang, hearing my shout, reacted immediately—as professionally as any professional climber who’s ever climbed—slamming his ice axe deep in the firm snow at his feet and bracing himself for the belay, so I only fell about 15 feet. I’d kept my ice axe as well, and it was jammed against the opposing walls above me, giving me a solid handhold to cling to while I formed Prusik knots with my free hand for the climb up.
But then I made the mistake of looking down deeper into the crevasse with my headlamp beam.
Twenty feet lower than me were dead, blue faces, dozens of them, with dozens of open mouths and frozen, staring eyes. Dead arms and blue hands reached up toward my boots from their snow-covered dead bodies.
I screamed.
“What’s wrong, Jake?” shouted Pasang. “Are you injured?”
“No, I’m okay,” I gasped as loudly as I could through my swollen throat and damaged larynx. “Just pull me…pull…”
“You do not want to Prusik while I belay?”
“No…just pull me up…fast!”
Pasang did so, ignoring the fraying of the rope over the icy edge of the crevasse. He was very strong. I had my ice axe free and was chopping holds as I came up. Then I was out.