The fluttering that first caught my eye comes from a web of three-eighths-inch rope, what the three of us, with some contempt, have come to call clothesline rope even though we’d used it enough in the Alps. It’s been pulled far too tight around Bromley’s waist, is looped and tangled around his left shoulder, and its broken end—I can see the frayed and splayed threads right where the rope broke—is flapping and whipping in the still-rising wind. This, then, is the “wave” I’d seen.
Bruno Sigl said that Bromley had been roped to Kurt Meyer when the avalanche carried the two of them away. I guess we have to credit the German for telling the truth after all.
But the avalanche or the sheer violence of the fall has snapped the rope. God alone knows where Kurt Meyer might have ended up. Again I scan the slope above me, but can see neither a dead German nor any of my three friends coming down to join me.
Should I fire off the other two flares? Maybe they missed the first green one. It burned for only a few seconds.
I decide to wait. My hands still haven’t warmed up.
Suddenly there’s motion, but it’s not someone coming down from above—it’s a short man in a Shackleton jacket traversing directly across the steep face toward me from the east.
It must be Kurt Meyer, I think. He somehow survived the fall and has been waiting all this time for someone to find him and Bromley.
Or maybe Meyer also died here, and now his mummified corpse is coming to talk to me. Or maybe it’s just Percy Bromley’s ghost.
It’s my gasping and coughing, not the delusions, that make me realize I’ve been off English air for too long. I set my mask back in place and turn the flow up to 2.2 liters per minute. This clears my head almost immediately.
Just before the goggled and thickly garbed figure arrives, I recognize him: Jean-Claude. With the help of the oxygen, it takes me only thirty seconds or so to remember that the Deacon had said that J.C. would be coming up to Camp V with a group of Sherpas for a high carry today. He must have seen the green flare and come to investigate.
I stand, teetering just a bit, and lean uphill onto my ice axe, and Jean-Claude carefully steps around the corpse and hugs me before pulling down his mask and turning so that we are both looking down at the dead man.
“Mon Dieu,” he says over the rising wind.
I tug my own mask lower so that I can speak.
“It’s definitely Bromley,” I explain. “You see the puttees, J.C. Definitely British. You see the broken right leg. There are probably other injuries we can’t see from this angle. But I don’t think he could have fallen from as far as the North East Ridge and…you know…be in one piece like this. And definitely not from the North Ridge—this is due west, too far. He would have been almost to the Second Step, up along the ridgeline. No avalanches there.”
I’ve talked too much and breathed too little, so when my hacking starts, I put the mask back in place and bend over until the coughing fit passes.
“His right leg is broken in other places as well, Jake,” says J.C. “And you see that his right elbow looks broken too…or at least severely dislocated. I believe that the right side of this poor fellow’s body took the worst of the fall…” Jean-Claude pauses, shields his eyes—he raises his goggles for a better view, which I haven’t yet thought of doing—and studies the slope above us. “But you are right,” he says. “It is more than a thousand feet to the North East Ridge. He did not fall that far. Perhaps from those rocks below the Yellow Band. You are correct in much of your forensic analysis, but I fear you are wrong about one thing, my friend.”
“What’s that?” I say, and then splutter since I’ve forgotten to lower my mask, and the simple re-breathing gizmo in the mask doesn’t adapt itself well to transmitting human speech. I lower the damned thing and try again. “What?”
J.C. begins to say something but then stops and points uphill.
Three roped figures—Pasang in the lead, Reggie in the center, and the Deacon in anchor position—are using their long ice axes to pick their way slowly down the slope. They’re only twenty yards or so away. I should have known that the cautious Deacon would have taken the time to get them roped together before responding to my flare rather than have everyone come rushing down solo.
“What am I wrong about?” I ask, picking up the conversation thread with J.C. He only shakes his head and steps back from the corpse as our three friends arrive, make a slow loop around the body, and create a semicircle downhill with the corpse as its focus, the easier for them to view it. I’m instantly sorry that I hadn’t taken off at least my Shackleton anorak to cover the gorak-invaded buttocks and hollowed-out lower insides of Lord Percival. Now poor Reggie is leaning closer, having to see this horrible view of someone she’d grown up with almost as if he were her brother.
My mask is still lowered. “I’m sorry, Reggie,” I say, realizing that there are tears welling under my thick greenish goggles. Maybe it’s the cold wind bothering my eyes.
She pulls down her own oxygen mask and looks at me questioningly. Her goggles are raised. Her face is very pale in the late morning light.
“I’m sorry you have to see your cousin like this,” I say again. My only wish right now is that I hadn’t been the one to find him.
She cocks her head, looks at the other three men, then back at me. They’re all staring at me now.
“This isn’t Percival,” says Reggie, having to raise her voice to be heard over the coldly quickening wind.
I take another step back out of sheer reflex. My crampons slip on something, and I have to lean on my axe or tumble. I remind my body that we’re still just yards above a sheer drop-off to total oblivion. I’m very confused. It’s a British climber, of that I’m certain. If not her cousin…
“I know those broad shoulders and those green climbing boots,” says Reggie. “Percival is much slimmer, his upper body much less developed. And he’s never owned green leather boots. Jake, I’m all but certain that you’ve found George Leigh Mallory.”
Tuesday, May 19, 1925
It’s after midnight, but all five of us—the Deacon, Pasang, Reggie, Jean-Claude, and I—are sitting up in our sleeping bags in Reggie’s Big Tent, which has been pitched on the slab slopes at Camp V, each of us hanging on to one of the interior struts in an effort to keep the ever-rising wind from ripping the canvas apart or hurling us off the mountain. We are very, very tired.
I feel bad that we hadn’t taken time to bury George Mallory that afternoon—the previous afternoon, I realize, as I look at my watch. It’s the nineteenth of May now, two whole days after the Deacon’s planned summit day. The wind has grown stronger every hour, a lenticular cloud that had been hovering over Everest’s summit all morning descended on us in a whirl of snow after darkness fell, and if we’d stayed on the North Face with Mallory, we would have had to spend at least an extra hour or two hacking at the frozen rocks to free enough stones to cover his body. Even piling the thinnest layer of cairn stones would have taken more energy and time than we had with the storm coming in. After we’d searched the body carefully and made note of the position and clues as to his fall and jotted down notes of landmarks, such as they were, so we could find Mallory’s final resting place again when we had to, the Deacon announced that it was time to make the long west-to-east traverse to Camp V. When I objected, saying that Mallory surely deserved to be buried properly despite the approaching darkness and rising wind, it was Reggie who said, “He’s lain out here under the snow and sun and moon and stars for almost a year, Jake. Another night won’t matter. We’ll stay lower—here at Camp Five rather than Six—and come back to bury Mallory tomorrow.”