Then we’ll take turns groaning and moaning as we work together to light the damned Meta burner and to open some tins and bags of food—not a small accomplishment at this altitude—taking two hours to prepare a dinner we don’t want: pemmican, perhaps, or some bully beef (which the Deacon must be fond of, since he packed so much of it), and then “boil” some lukewarm tea with lots of sugar and condensed milk.
I gag just thinking about it. Perhaps I’ll just sleep all day and night instead. We still have water in our thermoses. That will do me until tomorrow. Or forever. Whichever comes first.
So I’m amazed—beyond amazed—when Reggie says, “What do you say…to going…up to…Camp Six?”
“Today?” I manage in little more than a squeak.
She nods, pulls a delicate lady’s watch from somewhere under her unzipped Finch duvet, and says, “It’s not quite noon. The Deacon says…they climbed from Camp Five…to Camp Six…in just under…four and a half hours. We can be there long before….dark.”
For a moment I’m certain that this is sheer bravado, that Reggie can’t be serious, but then I look at her sunburned face and beautiful eyes above the tugged-down oxygen mask and beneath the raised goggles and realize that she’s totally serious.
“They made that climb…starting…in the morning,” I say. “When they were rested.”
Reggie shakes her head, and I see curls of her blue-black hair trying to escape the wool cap she wears under the goose down hood. “You don’t really rest…up this high. Just…hurt. Lie…awake. We might as well do it…seventeen hundred feet…higher…tonight. Start hunting for…Percy…in the morning. Come downhill.”
“The Deacon and J.C. will expect us to be here…at…Camp Five,” I manage.
Reggie shrugs. “I’ll write them a note.” She takes a small leather notebook and small pencil from an inner pocket.
Jesus Christ, I’m thinking. She really means it!
I play my trump card. She will have no answer to this. It will save our lives…or at least my life. “There’s no…Camp Six…up there,” I say, trying to fake a sound of regret in my voice. “We wouldn’t know where…to put one. We couldn’t…get one…set up before nightfall. We’ll die…of exposure.”
“Oh, nonsense,” says Reggie. She’s writing busily. Then she pushes the partially dried sleeping bags back into the tilted tent and shows me the note before setting it atop the closest bag, weighting it with a rock. The brief note, our death warrant I am sure, reads At Camp V at noon. Both well. Decided to go up to establish VI around 27,000. Will begin search on Face in morning.—Reggie.
She ties the tent flaps closed, and we gasp and moan getting to our feet. I have a second of vertigo that almost sends me headfirst the 2,000-plus feet down to the North Col, my arms flapping like vestigial wings on some flightless bird. Nothing between here and the drop-off beneath us would stop me if I did tumble backward. I continue to teeter groggily, flailing my arms in a vain attempt to find my balance, and then feel Reggie’s firm hand on my upper arm, holding me in place.
When I find my balance and some semblance of normal breathing, she slaps me on the shoulder as if nothing had happened.
“We can dump the first oxygen…tank…when it empties,” she says before pulling her mask back up. “Maybe we should use less…of the air…for the second part…of the climb. Have more…for…tomorrow.”
“Sure,” I pant over the top of my own mask. “Whatever…you say…ma’am.”
We turn around, facing up the impossibly steep heap of murderously slippery black granite slabs and snow, and prepare to take our first thirteen steps. Almost 6,000 feet above us, the West Face of Everest’s snowy Summit Pyramid begins to glow in the very cold and increasingly low early afternoon light. Spindrift is again being hurled out for miles to the southeast. I start to imagine what the wind will be like up at 27,000 feet, our destination just a few hundred feet below the Yellow Band that is the last physical landmark and dividing line beneath the North East Ridge and that straight—if almost certainly impossible—ridgeline route to that summit. But then I have to shut down my imagination or just sit on a boulder and start weeping like a child.
We take our first of thirteen steps.
Monday, May 18, 1925
Jake,” Reggie says softly, “if you’re awake, you might want to see this.”
I’m awake all right. Our “Camp VI” is a sad joke—the small 10-pound two-pole Meade tent precariously perched on a tilting slab so steep that we had to set our feet against the boulder that anchored the downhill end of the tent and sleep on an incline so steep that it felt as if we were half-standing. At least I’d thought to tie down an extra blanket on the flat face of the slab while we were lashing and weighting the tent to the side of the mountain, so the pure cold of this alien world at 27,000 feet hadn’t completely flowed up and into us from the cold rock all night.
I’d slept a few minutes during the darkness. I’d also been vaguely aware that, cocooned in our bags as we were, Reggie and I were still huddling together—rather like two passengers crowding together for warmth on the packed upper deck of an oddly tilted British double-decker bus on a London winter day. At least the winds were mild during the night. The suspense of waiting to be blown off this ridiculous excuse for a perch wouldn’t have allowed me even my few moments of half-sleep.
“Okay,” I say and sit up for the terrible ordeal of pulling on outer layers and boots that have stayed with me in the bag all night. My only concession to hygiene is to put on the last pair of clean cotton undersocks that are in my rucksack. It helps psychologically, if in no other way.
I crawl out of the uphill end of the tent. It’s like coming up and out of a hoar-frosted tunnel. Or perhaps it’s more like being born and finding out that you’re on the moon.
The band of sunlight has just moved down across our happy little home at 27,000 feet and I realize that the hissing noise I’ve been hearing for a while now isn’t snow, it is the last of the Unna cookers and Meta fuel blocks working to melt pathetically small pots of snow, one after the other. It must have been working for a while now, because Reggie—decked out in all her layers and sitting on her folded-up sleeping bag, boots braced against a ridge in a slab to keep her from sliding off the mountain—has already filled three of our thermoses with…something tepid.
I try to remember the boiling point of water at 27,000 feet—164 and some decimal degrees Fahrenheit? 162?—anyway, something so cool that before long, if we keep climbing, it seems the water will be boiling in the pot without any burner under it.
Actually, I vaguely remember George Finch saying that if we humans ever managed to get into outer space—totally above the atmosphere—our blood would boil in our veins and brains even while the temperature on the shaded side of our bodies might be more than 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. “Of course,” Finch had added to make us feel better (it was while we were eating dessert at the four-star Zurich restaurant), “you wouldn’t have to worry about your blood boiling in outer space, since your lungs and bodies would already have exploded like those poor deep-sea creatures we dredge up from the depths from time to time.”
That had put me off my pudding.
I haul my sleeping bag up the slab slope to sit next to Reggie. As I’m tucking it under my butt, my boots slip—I haven’t put on crampons yet because my fingers aren’t up to all the strap-tying—and Reggie has to steady me with a firm hand again before my heels can find another wedge of rock to hold the rest of me in place. We’d had to move slightly onto the North Face to find even this pathetic campsite. There’d been no sign of Mallory and Irvine’s Camp VI from last year; we may have missed seeing it in the long shadows, rock mazes, and swirling snow at dusk. And while the Face here next to the North Ridge and just below the Yellow Band doesn’t seem all that steep—perhaps the 35- to 40-degree slate roof of the church that George Mallory had so famously climbed as a boy would be a good comparison—one real slip might well keep one falling the 6,000 feet or so to the East Rongbuk Glacier.