“Yeah,” I say. But I don’t really mean it.
After a long silence, Jean-Claude turns to me. When he’s sure that we’re out of earshot of Norbu Chedi, who’s gone ahead, he whispers, “If I buy it on this mountain, Jake, make sure I’m buried in a crevasse or just left where I lie. All right?”
“I promise,” I say. “And you do the same for me, okay?”
J.C. nods and we say nothing else during the last fifteen minutes of our snowy pony ride to Base Camp.
Friday, May 15, 1925
Base Camp is almost deserted when we arrive there before noon.
Dr. Pasang is still there, of course, with both his frostbite patients resting in their tents. Pasang carried out the amputations when everyone returned from the monastery yesterday: all ten toes for Ang Chiri, four toes and three fingers on the right hand for Lhakpa Yishay. Normally, Pasang told J.C. and me, he would have waited much longer before operating, but the rot from Ang Chiri’s toes was spreading to his entire foot, and gangrene also threatened Lhakpa’s right hand and left foot.
Jean-Claude and I look in on both men; Ang Chiri is more cheerful than ever and, he says, is looking forward to trying the new wooden wedges in the toes of his hiking boots to see how well he can walk with no real toes. Of course, J.C. and I think but do not say aloud, a Sherpa spends most of his life at home in sandals, not wearing English-made hiking boots. But evidently Ang isn’t worried about that fine distinction.
Lhakpa, who’s lost less than Ang, is far gloomier. Both men have their feet bandaged with yellow-red iodine stains leaking through. He is cradling his now two-fingered right hand and all but weeping and repeating the mantra—according to Pasang’s interpreting—that he’ll never find work again.
Outside the tents, J.C. and I comment on Ang Chiri’s high morale and Pasang says softly, “Never discount the power of a little post-surgical opium to cheer one up.”
There are only about five other Sherpas in Base Camp, and Pasang tells us that yesterday Reggie and the Deacon assigned most of the men carrying tasks—hauling loads to the “upper camps,” Camp III at the base of the last ice slope and Camp IV on the North Col. Also according to Pasang, a messenger brought word today that high winds and heavy snow up there were keeping everyone except the Deacon, Reggie, and two Tiger Sherpas lower than the North Col, and Pasang guesses that even those four may have retreated to Camp III by now. At least Camps II and III now have plenty of tents, sleeping bags, and food for the mobs moving in and through.
Pasang tells us that he is eager to get to the higher camps himself, once his two patients are better. That freedom for him, of course, depends upon no more injuries so severe that he has to take the injured man or men all the way back down here to Base Camp. My own guess is that Pasang doesn’t like being separated from his employer—Lady Bromley-Montfort—for such long periods.
Jean-Claude and I decide that we’re going to do a carry to the highest camp we can reach today, despite the relatively late hour for departing from Base Camp. I think we both need some high, clean climbing and carrying to get rid of the terrible taste of that dawn’s “sky burial.” I know I do.
While many of the oxygen rigs have already been transported higher by Sherpas, J.C. and I test the tank integrity of two such backpack-frame rigs—almost no leakage in any of the six tanks—and we shrug into the harnesses to haul the O2 sets up as high as we can get by nightfall.
With the Irvine-Finch-modified oxygen rigs on our backs—we won’t be breathing any of the English air today, so the masks and valves are tucked into the metal frame there—we’re hauling close to the Deacon’s guideline carry-load total of 25 pounds, but we also have to haul some personal stuff up with us if we’re going to be staying at any of the high camps—perhaps stay there until the summit bid itself. So we grab two off-the-shoulder, hang-in-front “carry bags”—actually gas mask containers (minus the masks) from the Great War which the Deacon had purchased both cheap and by the dozens. They’re perfect for cramming in our personal effects of some extra clothing, shaving kit—which I haven’t used for a week, since I hate shaving in cold water—camera gear, toilet paper, and all the rest. It’s probable that there are extra sleeping bags waiting at the high camps, but J.C. and I aren’t going to take any chances: we roll the bags tight, put on their protective waterproof covers, and tie them onto the outer metal bars of the oxygen rig frames.
We have our assortment of odd-sized ice axes (keeping only the long axes out and unlashed) as well as two of J.C.’s jumars, we’ve strapped on our 12-point crampons (despite the fact that most of the way to Camp II is on moraine rock), and it’s cold enough and snowy enough today that we’re wearing our Finch duvet jackets and Reggie eiderdown pants under our outer Shackleton anoraks and snow pants.
We shake hands with Pasang when we leave, and then we’re walking up the stony valley between walls of dirty moraine ice and the occasional ice pinnacle. The weather remains lousy, and visibility is down to about 15 feet. The wind is even stronger here than out in the Rongbuk Valley, and while the falling snow doesn’t seem to be accumulating much, hard pellets of the stuff sting our faces like buckshot.
Tied together by 40 feet of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope, more rope slung over our shoulders, with me in the lead, Jean-Claude and I head up the twelve-mile valley and glacier to the North Col.
J.C. and I exchange only a few necessary words during our long trek up the Trough, then the glacier above Camp II. We’re each lost in our own thoughts.
I’m thinking about death in the mountains. Beyond my real sense of guilt at Babu’s useless death during our clowning around, I’m remembering other mountain deaths and my reaction. I’m not totally new to sudden death on a mountain.
I’ve mentioned before that the Harvard Mountaineering Club didn’t formally come into existence until last year, 1924, but when I attended Harvard from 1919 to 1923, there were a few of us—the Harvard Four, as we were known in climbing circles—who spent every vacation and spare moment climbing in the nearby Quincy Quarries in the spring and autumn and in the New Hampshire mountains during the winter.
Instructor Henry S. Hall, who would found the formal club in ’24, was our informal leader, and our ad hoc climbing group met in his home. The other two members of our little group were Terris Carter (same year as me) and Ad Bates, a year behind us and a tough little mongrel of a climber, all knees and elbows and flying heels, but strangely skillful.
Professor Hall, with his older and more experienced mountaineering pals, specialized in climbing in the Canadian Rockies and, on rare occasions, in Alaska. During a school break in the early autumn of my junior year, the four of us were climbing on Mount Temple in Alberta, doing the East Ridge—which today would be classified IV 5.7 or so—when Ad slipped, snapped the 60-foot rope connecting him to Terris and me, and fell to his death. We hadn’t been set for belay, and Ad’s fall was so sudden and so vertical that if the rope hadn’t snapped, Terris and I would almost certainly have gone over the north face to fall with him.
We mourned Ad’s death, of course, in the way that only the young can mourn the death of someone their own age. I’d tried to talk to Ad’s parents when they came to Harvard to pick up his things, but all I could do was sob. I started missing classes when school resumed, just sitting in my room and brooding. I was sure I’d never climb again.
That’s when Professor Hall came to see me. He told me either to get back to my classes or drop out of school. He said I was just wasting my parents’ money the way it was. As to climbing, Hall told me that he’d be taking student climbers to Mount Washington as soon as the first snow fell and that I should make up my mind whether to continue climbing—he thought that I had some skill at it—or run away from it now. “But dying’s part of this sport,” Professor Hall told me. “That’s a hard fact—unfair—but it’s a fact. When a friend or partner on the rope dies, if you’re going to continue to be a climber, Jake, you have to learn how to say ‘Fuck it’ and move on.”