I’d never heard a teacher or professor use that word before and it hit me hard. So did the lesson he was imparting to me.
But over my last few years of climbing, I’ve learned—at least partially—how to say “Fuck it” and move on. During my months in the Alps with the Deacon and J.C., we’d been involved in no fewer than five attempted rescue missions, three of which ended in tragedy for someone. It’s true that I didn’t know any of the dead climbers well, but I did get to know the terrible damage an alpine fall will do to the human body: fractured, splayed limbs, clothes torn off by jagged rocks on the way down, blood everywhere, crushed skulls or heads missing altogether. Death by falling from a great height is never a dignified thing.
Babu Rita hadn’t fallen from any height; he’d just followed two idiots in glissading down a slope that one could find with a toboggan run in any snowy American city’s municipal park. Only toboggan runs don’t usually have boulders concealed under the snow.
“Fuck it,” I hear myself whisper. “Move on.”
The wind howls between the ice pinnacles of the Trough, and once up on the glacier, we have to dig out fixed ropes for security between crevasses, but the flagged bamboo poles show us the way.
We get to Camp III before daylight starts to fade, but Reggie and the Deacon aren’t there. There are now six tents at Camp III—two of them oversized Whympers—but we find eight Sherpas curled up and sleeping in the smaller Meade tents. Pemba moans that none of them feel welclass="underline" all have been struck by “mountain lassitude”—our word for altitude sickness in 1925. Those not in sleeping bags are wrapped in heavy layers of blankets. Pemba says that Lady Memsahib and Deacon Sahib are up at Camp IV on the North Col with Tejbir Norgay and Tenzing Bothia. The winds up there, says Pemba, are very terrible.
Jean-Claude and I step back out of the odiferous Meade tent and confer. It’s late in the day, and it will be dark by the time we reach Camp IV. But we’ve brought our Welsh miner headlamps, I have an extra hand torch in my gas mask bag, and we both feel strong and impatient.
The hardest part of the climb, oddly enough, is the postholing from Camp III to the base of the slope and then trudging up the two hundred yards or so to the steep part where the first fixed ropes begin. The heavy snow and dimming day hide the boulder that killed Babu, but I can’t help imagining a layer of frozen blood under the new-fallen snow, like strawberry jam spread thin beneath white bread. When we reach the steeper fixed-rope part of the route, we have to use our ice axes to dig through the new snow until we can find the fixed rope and tug it up and out. Then we dig through our canvas bags and don our headlamp rigs and take out the ascender device that Jean-Claude named “jumar” after a dog he had as a kid. Or so he’s said.
As J.C. double-checks to make sure I’ve clipped the jumar onto the Deacon Miracle Rope properly, I say, “Did you really invent this doodad?”
My friend grins. “I did, but in collaboration with my father, who was helping a young French gentleman named Henri Brenot, who wanted some sort of mechanism for climbing free-hanging ropes in caves. Since it was just for one person, my father didn’t think to patent it, nor did Brenot, who called his larger cave rope-ascender devices singes—monkeys—so I decided to modify it, make it smaller and safer with stronger, lighter metal, added the curved handle and its handle guard, which we can fit our mittens into, and designed a sturdier cam to lock on to the rope without fear of slipping or shredding the line, and…voilà!”
“But ‘Jumar’ was really your dog’s name?”
Jean-Claude only grins more broadly and begins mechanically ascending—I’ve already begun thinking of it as “jumaring”—up the fixed rope.
A year ago, it would have taken Mallory or Irvine or Norton or any of the others four or five hours to get up this ice wall to the North Col, especially in a swirling snowstorm such as J.C. and I have just climbed through. Mallory would have spent much of his time on the ice face bent almost double, dutifully and exhaustingly using an ice axe to chip new steps out of the snow and ice. J.C. and I kicked in the front spurs of our new 12-point crampons and jumared up in less than forty-five minutes—and that included a time-out halfway up to hang from the rope and eat bars of chocolate. We did use our long ice axes, but only to stab into snow with our left hands for balance on the way up or to bat away the ice and snow covering the next few yards of fixed rope above us.
The traverse from the ice shelf across the North Col to Camp IV at the northwest corner under the tall seracs should have been worrisome in so serious a storm, but the Deacon and others have done such an excellent job of setting out permanent bamboo wands and red pennants that even in high winds and the near whiteout, it’s as easy as walking along a well-marked eight-foot-wide highway between invisible 100-foot drops into crevasses.
Camp IV now consists of one medium-sized Whymper tent, brought up in separate loads, as well as the RBT—Reggie’s Big Tent—and two smaller Meade tents in which the Deacon planned to store loads for higher carries. When some of this stuff goes up to Camps V and VI, the Meade tents as well as the Whymper tent here will host Sherpas on their way up or down in the theoretical supply line.
The Deacon and Tejbir Norgay look up in surprise as we come through the Whymper tent door, shaking snow off our outer layer into the small vestibule before joining them. I imagine we’re a sight in our high-cinched eiderdown hoods, full-face leather flying helmets, glowing headlamps, iced-over goggles, and snow-rimmed Shackleton anorak shoulders. The two men obviously aren’t expecting company as they huddle over an Unna cooker, the Meta fuel boiling up a big pot of something—at the pathetically low temperature it takes to boil things at 23,500 feet. Water boils at somewhere around 170 degrees Fahrenheit at this altitude, as opposed to 212 degrees at sea level. Although 170 degrees may sound hot, by the time the cold air hits it, our “boiled” liquids are down to around body temperature.
When we reveal our faces, the Deacon says, “Just in time for dinner, gentlemen. Beef stew. And we’ve made plenty.”
J.C. and I are surprisingly ravenous. Evidently the nausea we shared after the morning’s sky burial has worked itself out during our hours of trekking and climbing.
I’ve expected a rebuke from the Deacon regarding Babu Rita’s death, but it never comes—not even a pointed question as to whether we enjoyed the sky burial or had an interesting time with the Breakers of the Dead. I know that the Deacon himself has attended such terrible rites, but he makes no mention of it, ironic or otherwise. My guess is that he sympathizes with our reaction to the horrors we’ve seen. I know that Richard Davis Deacon also liked Babu very much.
“What is the climbing plan, Ree-shard?” asks J.C. when we’ve finished the last of the stew and reheated biscuits and are sipping our tepid coffee.
“In the morning, unless the weather gets actively worse, we’ll try the North Ridge to Camp Five,” he says. “I managed to get the two Meades up there a few days ago…we can only hope they haven’t blown away or been carried all the way down to the glacier by an avalanche.” He points to where J.C. and I have dumped our oxygen rigs in the corner of the tent. “Did you use any of that on the way up?”