Wait. They don’t grow this high.
I stop and raise my binoculars. My hands are so unsteady that I have to crouch, almost losing my balance in doing so, and then steady the glasses on my planted ice axe.
The “green plant” is a single green leather boot on the right foot of a corpse lying facedown on the steep slope, his arms stretched above him as if he were still trying to arrest his slide. The left foot is bare except for remnants of stockings. The “small patch of snow” isn’t snow at all. It appears to be marble-white flesh visible through rents in the corpse’s shirt and trousers. The motion is rags or fragments (or flesh?) blowing in the rising wind.
My second muddled thought is Is this Lord Percy Bromley or the Meyer fellow, or could it be the Deacon or Pasang or even Reggie? Did one of my friends fall without my seeing or hearing them? Such an unnoticed event is all too possible, locked away as I am beneath my layers of leather and goose down, oxygen mask and goggles, with the regulator burbling air at me audibly with every breath. A marching band might have fallen behind me without my hearing or seeing them.
No, neither the Deacon nor Pasang—nor Reggie for that matter—is wearing green leather boots today. And now I can tell, even from hundreds of feet away, that this dead body has been there awhile. I notice that the waves of scree—those small, loose rocks that make up so much of the North Face here—have slid down to cover parts of the head of the corpse.
Moving more carefully than ever, I’m quite aware of the Very flare gun in my rucksack pocket, but I’m not yet willing to use it until I get a closer look. Working to watch my feet rather than the distant apparition, I begin the steep descent toward the corpse and the terrible drop-off beyond it.
Monday, May 18, 1925
Eventually I fire the green flare—it doesn’t seem to go very high, and it burns for only a few seconds before arcing down onto the steep slope above me and fizzling out with a final hiss. Then I collapse next to the corpse. My legs will no longer support me, although I don’t know whether that’s due to my excitement or near-total exhaustion.
It has to be either Bromley or Kurt Meyer. Or so I was certain when I was looking down at the dead man a few seconds earlier. But then I noticed the ragged and raveling puttees on the lower legs and realized that he had to be British. Germans and Austrians don’t climb in puttees.
I’ve found Percival Bromley.
That’s when I fired the flare gun—having to remove two layers of mittens and still almost dropping the green-cased 12-gauge flare cartridge because of fingers as stiff with shock as with the cold. After setting the pistol away, I realized that my knees were weak and that perhaps I’d better sit down.
Because of the two oxygen tanks and some fragile things in the rucksack, I don’t sit on it the way I normally would on a mountainside, and within minutes the deep-space cold of the granite here on the North Face of Everest is working its way through my layers of silk and cotton and wool and goose down up to my rear end and then through my thighs and upper legs. I’m quickly and deeply chilled. Now that I’ve recognized the English puttees on the corpse, I also note the tattered wool knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket and am even more sure that this must be Percival Bromley. As I’d seen through the binoculars, he’s lying facedown with his arms raised and long, thin, bare, and sun-browned fingers sunken deep into the frozen gravel above his head and face, which are both half-buried in the loose scree.
Right now, I have no interest whatsoever in seeing the dead man’s face. As I mentioned, I’ve seen dead bodies in the mountains, but I’m not eager to see this one’s face until I must. I actively hate the thought that, responding to my flare, Reggie will be down here in a few minutes and will have to see her much-loved cousin looking like this.
Part of that feeling is embarrassment. The corpse is still mostly clothed and intact save for the visible bone of a broken right lower leg—a classic boot-top break, I think—and a few rips in the fabric across his surprisingly broad and muscled back, but goraks have been at his buttocks, and these are completely exposed. The birds—gorak just means “raven” in Tibetan, but I imagine that they actually must be some variant species of alpine choughs—have eaten their way through poor Lord Percival’s rectum and begun hollowing out his insides. I consider laying my jacket over the obscene damage to the body, as one would cover the face of someone who died suddenly on the street in London or New York, but I’m already shivering with the cold. I need that wool layer. I also know that I’d better take my crampons off, stand up, stamp my frozen feet back into circulation, and walk around until I warm up a bit.
In a minute.
The corpse’s hands look deeply tanned, an unusually dark brown. For a moment I wonder if this is the result of decomposition, but then I realize it’s just the same high-altitude dark tan that J.C., the Deacon, and even Reggie and I have had after five weeks and more of hiking across Tibet and shuttling loads up the Trough and the glacier here on Everest. This high-altitude UV turns even white British, French, and American skin a deep brown quickly enough. I also notice that there’s no sign of frostbite on any of the exposed skin—even on the bare backbone and shoulders revealed where his shirt and Norfolk jacket have split in the middle. And those are powerful shoulders. I hadn’t realized that Cousin Percival was such an athlete.
Dead bodies don’t develop frostbite, Jake. Only the living suffer that indignity.
I know this. My brain is still working, just in absurd slow motion—thoughts and insights arriving rather like the muted sounds of some distant explosions reaching one long after the initial flashes.
Bromley’s left leg is crossed over his right just above where the terrible break in his lower right leg shows white bone and the ripped remnants of semi-mummified ligaments.
He was alive when he came to rest here, I realize. At least long enough to cross his good leg across the broken one in an attempt to relieve the pain.
The thought makes me ill enough that I tug down my oxygen mask in preparation to vomit. But the urge passes quickly. I realize that I’m being an absolute child—what the hell would I have done if I’d been old enough to serve in an American regiment in the Great War? Those fellows were knee-deep in decomposing bodies and dying men for the better part of a year.
So what? comes the answer from that more conscious part of my mind. It’s only poor Percival Bromley I’m dealing with here. You were never a soldier, Jake.
I can see through the rip in the Norfolk jacket that young Bromley had been wearing seven or eight layers of clothing: an outer anorak that has turned to tatters in a year’s cold wind, the wool Norfolk jacket, at least two sweaters, some layers of cotton and silk. What I’d first taken through the binoculars for a bare and browned skull is actually a leather motorcycle helmet similar to the thin flying helmet that I’m wearing. The dead man’s leather helmet is torn and ripped in places, and I think it somewhat odd that the visible tufts of Bromley’s hair are almost white-blond at the ends but dark brown further down. Do men ever dye their hair the way women do?
I don’t see any goggle straps on the side of his buried face.
He obviously had fought—and succeeded—in stopping his tumble and slide before he went over the drop-off just twenty or so yards below us, and his arms are in the classic mode of finger-clawing self-arrest a sliding climber uses as a last resort if he’s lost his ice axe. I look up the slope but can’t see Bromley’s axe. Nor can I see the boot missing from his left foot.