My voice, when I try to speak, is slow and cautious, as if my words were threading their way through a crevasse field. “So The Spirit of Man…was part…of the Propaganda Bureau’s…effort to keep the War going no matter what the cost in lives.”
Reggie says nothing and doesn’t even nod, but I can see that she’s proud of me for catching up to things. I’m not used to being the slow pupil in the class, but I pride myself on being smart enough to know if and when I am.
Jean-Claude looks troubled. “Reggie—Lady Bromley-Montfort,” he says just loudly enough to be heard over the noise of the wind rattling the tent walls, “you must have another reason for telling us this incredibly personal information about Ree-shard.”
“I do,” says Reggie. “I know how eager all three of you are to use my aunt’s money to get a chance to climb Mount Everest. But you see, I’m not totally convinced that dear Mr. Richard Davis Deacon wants to return from the mountain.”
Saturday, May 16, 1925
The Deacon’s plan, before he stole my book and stalked off, was for us to wake in the middle of the night, make some hot tea and get dressed by our hissing lanterns, and be out of the tent and climbing toward Camp V somewhere around four in the morning, so as J.C., Reggie, and I crawl deeper into our mummy bags to get some sleep, I set my pocket watch to vibrate me awake at 3:30. The watch is a beautiful and expensive thing, a gift from my father upon my graduation from Harvard, and whatever else happens on Mount Everest, I most dearly want no harm to come to it. It has a clever little feature whereby one can set a time and the watch will soundlessly announce that set time with the insistent flutter of a small metal arm set into the back of the device.
I keep the watch in a waistcoat pocket, and at 3:30 a.m. there comes the frenzied flutter over my heart. Despite my fatigue, I awake at once.
Oddly, I’ve managed to sleep quite a bit during the few hours allowed us. Once Jean-Claude had shaken me awake and whispered, “You’re not breathing, Jake,” and I’d taken a snort of English air from the bottle we’d rigged between us, but other than that, it has been my best sleep so far at altitude. At Camp III, just the exertion of rolling over had led to my gasping awake, panting from the effort, and I’d kept rolling over onto irritating patches of my own frozen breath, but here, 1,500 feet higher, I’ve slept like a baby.
Well, we aren’t leaving for Camp V this morning. The sides of the tent are still rippling and snapping, and I can clearly hear the rattle of countless snow pellets on canvas. Another day to sleep and catch up on rest, I think gratefully while burrowing back into my bag, even while the more conscious part of my brain knows that staying another day at this altitude isn’t a good idea.
The term “Death Zone” wasn’t used much in 1925, but the basic understanding of it was just becoming known after three British expeditions to Everest.
Here at Camp IV our bodies are already suffering the consequences of altitude. I mentioned earlier in this narrative that there’s as much oxygen at altitude as at sea level—20.93 percent, to be pedantic—but with the decreasing atmospheric pressure, our lungs and bodies can’t gain access to that precious resource. Way down at Camp I, at only 17,800 feet of altitude, the atmospheric pressure—and thus the oxygen our bodies can normally drag into our lungs—is half that at sea level. If we make it to the summit of this mountain at just over 29,000 feet, the pressure will be one-third that at sea level, barely enough oxygen to allow one to stay conscious and not enough to prevent headaches, nausea, severe “mountain lassitude,” and—perhaps the worst thing from a climber’s point of view—severe mental grogginess, hallucinations, and impaired judgment.
So above 8,000 meters—a little more than 24,000 feet, not much more than 500 feet higher than where we are sleeping this night on the North Col—the once-and-future term “the Death Zone” becomes an absolute imperative not to linger. At and above 8,000 meters, your body is dying—literally dying, more so every minute you stay at such an altitude. The technical term is necrosis. Not only will brain cells be dying by the millions, Dr. Pasang has explained, but the rest of the brain fails to function properly in the fog of oxygen deprivation, even while our circulation becomes thick and sluggish and major organs begin to swell (as our hearts already have for all of us, even the Sherpas), literally swelling toward bursting, or generally just shut down and cease to work at all.
Our average heartbeats have long since quickened to 140 beats per minute or more, making every upward step or simple physical activity dangerous as well as difficult. In a vain attempt to get more oxygen to our muscles and brains, our blood has already dramatically thickened in our veins, increasing the likelihood of fatal strokes or thrombosis every hour we stay at this altitude or climb higher. Ironically, because the blood in our veins has turned a much darker red due to oxygen shortage, our faces, lips, and extremities tend to glow blue.
Only the occasional whiff of English air helps us ward off some of these more severe problems.
And we’re still 5,500 feet below the mountain’s summit.
Thinking We have to get down lower soon, I nonetheless burrow deeper into my eiderdown bag and drift back to sleep. I admit to taking a long inhalation from the oxygen tank first. It warms my frozen feet and toes.
Then someone or something is crashing through the tent doors and I snap awake, trying to sit up. It takes three attempts to do so.
Reggie is gone. Out to the loo? I think but then notice that her sleeping bag is missing.
It’s the Deacon coming in through the door flaps amidst a flurry of snow and a moving wall of cold air. If it weren’t for the red bands he’d earlier wrapped around the arms of his goose down duvet, I wouldn’t recognize him: he’s absolutely coated with snow and ice, his flying helmet, balaclava, and goggles are rimmed with icicles, and his huge outer mittens make cracking-ice noises when he tries to remove them. He has an ice-covered oxygen rig on his back, but the mask isn’t over his face, and I’m sure the regulator has been switched to Closed.
“Chilly morning,” he says, panting.
I pull my watch out. It is a little after seven a.m.
“Where have you been, Ree-shard?” J.C.’s beard, I notice, is coming in much more nicely than mine. I seem to be all stubble and itch.
“Just seeing if the North Ridge will go,” answers the Deacon. “It won’t.”
“The snow?” I say.
“The wind,” says the Deacon. “It must be well over one hundred and twenty miles per hour. I was trying to walk up the slabs while leaning forward so far that my nose was almost touching granite.”
“Climbing alone?” says Jean-Claude, a hint of rebuke in his voice. “Not what you would advise us to do, Ree-shard.”
“I know.” The Deacon has fumbled our Unna cooker into place just inside the Whymper’s outer vestibule, and is trying to use his frozen hands to get a match lit indoors and transferred to the cooker. The wind blows it out each time. “To hell with it,” he says and brings the cooker inside—another total breach of fire safety protocol. I light the Meta for him, and he sets a cauldron of snow in the most sheltered part of the small vestibule.
“I don’t think we’ll get to Camp Five,” he says, unzipping outer layers as if the below-freezing temperature in the tent were some tropical climate.