We’re using our long ice axes, of course, and every thirteen steps both of us pause and bend almost double, leaning on the axes as we hungrily let the oxygen sets hiss air into our laboring lungs. We’re carrying three O2 tanks each—planning to use only one each on our way to Camp V—but rather than climbing with the metal oxygen rigs, we’re using the special rucksacks that Jean-Claude has adapted. It took a few more minutes to get ready with the rucksacks—oxygen lines and regulator valves have to be slipped through strategically placed holes that then lace up tightly—but we’re carrying extra food, clothes, and several other items that would have been unwieldy crammed into gas mask holders dangling on our chest or from our shoulders. I certainly feel the weight of the three tanks and their associated valves, hoses, and gear, but the total, thanks to both Mr. Irvine’s and Monsieur Clairoux’s alterations, is still under 30 pounds even with our load of extra items. And that includes another 10-pound Meade two-man tent we’re each carrying segments of.
The sun reaches us. I realize that the Michelin Man figure next to me is gesturing for me to put on my goggles; hers are already in place. I hate to do it because the special glass distorts colors and makes me feel—along with the damned oxygen mask—locked away in a different world, like a man in a heavy, metal-helmeted diving suit. But she’s right. We’re on a long stretch of rising slabs and low rock pinnacles now, not a snowfield around, but that won’t save us from snow blindness at this altitude. The ultraviolet rays alone will blind you if you climb too long, even on dark rock. Under our top layer of Shackleton anoraks, Reggie and I are carrying undersized military binoculars. These aren’t usually necessary for climbing on Everest, but they may help in the search for her cousin Percival. She hasn’t brought her glasses out yet, and I’ve seen nothing on the North Face to my right to make me reach for mine. Once when we pause to break a piece of chocolate and try to melt it in our mouths, I ask her if she’s been looking.
“Both sides of the ridge,” she gasps around the chocolate. “But…remember…Pasang and I looked…carefully…up to…Camp Five…last August. No sign…then…either.”
I’d almost forgotten that this climb to Camp V, so novel for me, was old territory for Lady Bromley-Montfort.
When we’d asked the Deacon how long it would take us to reach Camp V from the North Col, he’d given us the almost laughably precise number of five hours and ten minutes. But as with all things Deaconish, he’s actually gone through the records of the men in ’22 and ’24, including himself, climbing between Camp IV and Camp V while using oxygen, and come up with that exact figure.
After five hours and twelve minutes of climbing, we see the two small tents of the Deacon-established new Camp V just a few dozen yards above us.
My first thought is You must be kidding.
This is the worst campsite I’ve ever seen. In truth, there’s no campsite here. There’s a slight broadening of the slope, and in an area partially protected from rockfall and the wind by a high rock ridge, the Deacon and Tenzing Bothia and Tejbir Norgay have moved a few rocks to create two absurdly tilted platforms smaller than the tents that are set on them.
And the two small Meade tents aren’t even at the same level. One is off to the right of our line of ascent, tilting on the edge of nothing, and the other is in an even more precarious position 30 or so feet higher and to the left. This second tent literally hangs out over nothing—5,000 feet of open air to the main Rongbuk Glacier. For a moment I think this is some sort of sick joke prepared by the Deacon and his two Sherpas. We can’t spend a night here, I think. This is fucking impossible.
But then I see why the Deacon’s chosen the places he did; the rock ridge is good protection for the lower tent, while the more exposed-looking higher one has a web of heavy rope lines wrapped around three large boulders set next to it. There is new snow piled up on the windward side of each green tent, but neither one has collapsed or blown away.
Still, I can’t believe that we’re going to trust our lives to, much less actually close our eyes for a moment of sleep on, the slab slope of either of these insanely positioned sites.
But scan the ridge and mountain face as I may through my thick goggles, I can find no other possible tent sites.
Reggie turns around and sits on one of the large down-tilting slabs next to the lower tent. She turns off her oxygen flow and pulls down her mask. I do the same. The effect of drowning—of not getting enough oxygen to draw a full breath—is immediate and panic inducing. But it passes.
In slow motion, like one of the undersea divers I’d been imagining earlier, Reggie unlaces the tent’s door—the opening is toward the rock wall and away from the steep drop—and bends over to peer in.
“Sleeping…bags…and…everything’s here just where…the Deacon…and the porters…left it,” she says between audible pants. “Unna cooker and…Meta bricks, too. But…lots of…spindrift. Inside the…sleeping bags…we may be wet.”
Shit. Well, we’ve brought our own bags. The sun is so bright now that, out of the wind, it’s almost warm. I unzip my outer down jacket.
“Whisk…broom,” I manage and pat an outside pocket on the left side of my rucksack.
Reggie nods, retrieves the tiny broom, and somehow finds the energy to lean into the tent and brush most of the snow out. She turns the sleeping bags inside out and drags them out into the sunlight, weighting them down with rocks as protection against the occasional gusts of wind.
Then she pulls an altitude barometer from some inside pocket and consults it. “Twenty-five thousand two hundred fifty feet plus or minus two hundred feet or so given the weather,” she says and has to pant for air. I realize that she’s pointing downhill toward something to our left.
It takes me a minute to see it. Two patches of torn and tumbled green canvas on a snowy steep patch of rock. “Camp Five…in ’twenty-two…,” she says.
It gives me a certain stupid sense of satisfaction to know that we’ve come 200 or 300 feet higher than the iron men of the 1922 expedition before setting up our own camp.
“Where are the…tents…from…’twenty-four?” I ask.
Reggie shrugs. She’s said that she climbed to the site of the ’24 Camp V with Pasang last summer, so I suspect she knows where that site was but is too tired to tell me at the moment.
Whichever tent or tents we choose to spend the night in—and the thought of being in either precarious perch in a high wind makes my scrotum contract—I have a good sense from the Deacon’s and Norton’s and the others’ reports as to what the rest of this day will be like.
First, Reggie and I will get out our little list of necessaries—there’s already an Unna cooker here, so we’ll save ours for the higher camp tomorrow—and crawl into or onto our sleeping bags, luxuriating in the false sense of warmth under the sun-warmed tent canvas. Too exhausted to do anything constructive, we’ll just lie in our respective bags and stupors for forty-five minutes to an hour, perhaps taking the rare shot of English air to offset the headaches already roiling in our skulls like the shifting cloud mass in the East Rongbuk Glacier valley so far below.
Then one of us—I hope to God it’s Reggie—will find the energy to crawl, with frequent rests and more frequent groans, out of her bag, out of her daytime tent, and across the terribly steep slope to the nearest patch of clean snow—about ten paces from this tent, only about four paces from the hanging-over-nothing tent above us to the left—and will use the last of her energy to fill two big aluminum pots with snow.