I went to one knee on the steep slope, shucked off my clumsy outer mittens, and did what Pasang had ordered—not expecting any sort of resuscitation technique to do any good on a man who looked so dead, his body and exposed face already coated with a thin veneer of windblown ice crystals.
But Pasang pulled out the largest syringe I’ve seen since a medical-farce sketch done by Harvard’s Hasty Pudding group. The needle must have been six inches long; the whole thing looked more like something a veterinarian would use on cattle than anything that could conceivably be applied to a human being.
“Hold his arms down,” instructed Pasang and ran his fingers across Lobsang’s bare brown chest. The Sherpa’s unblinking eyes still stared up into eternity.
Why hold his arms? I remember thinking. Is the corpse going somewhere?
Pasang was busy counting ribs and finding the poor Sherpa’s bony breastbone under the skin, and then he used both his now bare hands to lift the ridiculous syringe three feet into the air and then plunge it down through Lobsang Sherpa’s skin and breastbone directly into the man’s heart. The point of the needle made a sound as it pierced Lobsang’s breastbone, a sickening clack audible even over the last hisses of the red flare and the howling of the wind. Pasang pushed down the plunger of the huge syringe.
Lobsang Sherpa’s body arched upward—he would have thrown himself off the mountain if the Deacon and I hadn’t been holding him down—and the little man began gasping in great gulps of air.
“Jesus Christ,” the Deacon whispered to himself. I agreed. It was the damnedest medical thing I’d ever seen—and continued to be so for another six decades and more.
“Adrenaline straight to his heart,” gasped Dr. Pasang. “If anything can bring him back, that will.”
Pasang put his foot next to Lobsang Sherpa and pulled the needle from the man’s chest the way I’d heard that soldiers were taught to remove a stuck bayonet from an enemy’s carcass. Lobsang gasped, blinked wildly, and tried to sit up. After a few moments, Pasang and I worked to help Lobsang to his thick-booted feet. To me it felt like I was helping Lazarus stand.
Amazingly, Lobsang was able to support some of his own weight. If he hadn’t, we would have been forced to abandon him; at that altitude, even three men couldn’t carry dead weight 100 feet up a steep slope. With the Deacon and me half-supporting the blinking, gasping man and Dr. Pasang following close behind with his rucksack, the four of us staggered uphill to Reggie’s Big Tent. If there’d been little hope of five of us sleeping in the domed tent earlier, there was no chance now with a sixth person joining us. I had mixed feelings about that sixth person being alive.
We’d used the Unna cooker to heat water and soup hours earlier, and now Reggie gave the gasping Lobsang some cocoa. He gulped it down. When it looked as if he might be able to answer questions, Reggie asked the first one—in English and then in rapid-fire Nepalese. “Why have you come up here in the dark, Lobsang Sherpa?”
The man’s eyes widened again, and I had a flash of sickening memory of those dead eyes staring at nothing only a few minutes earlier.
He babbled in Nepalese, looked around, and repeated it in urgent English. “You must come down, Memsahib, Sahibs, Dr. Pasang. You must come down now. Yeti have killed everyone at Base Camp!”
2.
Somehow we all managed to sleep a few hours before the gradual, gray brightening that passed for sunrise in the center of a cloud. Lobsang Sherpa had been put on continuous oxygen, low flow, and he slept the best. The rest of us had taken some snorts of English air when the cold—or in my case the coughing—grew bad enough. Lady Bromley-Montfort was allowed to pick a lavatory boulder first, and then the rest of us went out one by one or in groups of two. The good thing about being severely dehydrated above 25,000 feet was that one’s kidneys didn’t require much attention.
We didn’t try to fire up the Unna cooker, even though we had six more Meta fire bars. We’d make do with the two small thermoses left from what we’d filled the day before.
There was almost no talk as we got into our layers. The Deacon asked Lobsang a few questions about these “yeti” who supposedly attacked, but the Sherpa wasn’t making much sense, and the four of us “sahibs” didn’t believe in yeti anyway. The Deacon, who’d seen the “monster’s” tracks in both 1921 and ’22, was the biggest skeptic. He’d reminded us more than a few times how hot sunlight melts the tracks of a regular, run-of-the-mill quadruped into what looks to be a biped’s large footprints. I guess I could say that I was a skeptical agnostic on the whole yeti business in 1925, but I know I didn’t believe that some big two-legged beastie was eating our Sherpa porters.
All of us checked the tubes and valves of our oxygen sets as we stored them in the RBT—we fully planned to use those particular extra O2 sets on our summit bid when we returned to Camp V—and then we filled our rucksacks with the few things we were taking down. All four of us had our Very pistols, and everyone but me had three flares left. I was the only one hauling two O2 tanks in his rucksack—at the Deacon’s request.
“We don’t all have to go down,” I said when we were finally standing outside the tents in what was the perfect equivalent of a freezing London fog. “I can stay up here until the rest of you get things sorted out.”
“What would you do up here alone, Jake?” asked Jean-Claude.
“Bury Mallory.”
J.C. didn’t seem surprised by the answer. I knew he’d also felt bad about leaving the body there, exposed, on the slope where he’d died. But we both also knew that we’d done the right thing in following the Deacon’s orders to retreat to Camp V when we did. If we’d been caught out in yesterday evening’s wind and storm, there’d be more than one body to bury on the North Face of Everest this day.
“No, Jake,” said the Deacon. “Besides the fact that you probably wouldn’t even find George’s body in this cloud—especially given the fact that he’d be covered by fresh snow today—we need you to lead the descent to Camp Four.”
“Jean-Claude can lead,” I said. My last, lame protest.
“Jean-Claude will take over when we get to the snowfields and crevasses of the North Col,” said the Deacon with a climbing leader’s finality. “You lead us down the rock. You’re our rock man. That’s why we paid to bring you here to this mountain, my American friend.”
Instead of arguing, I turned my oxygen-tank regulator to the lower setting of 1.5 liters of flow, tugged my mask into place, and strapped it to my flying helmet—thinking of the similar bit of strap in George Mallory’s pocket as I did so—and shrugged into my heavy pack. I wasn’t carrying much besides the two oxygen tanks, my small Very pistol, the two remaining 12-gauge flare cartridges, and a chocolate bar.
Only the lead climber during the long descent was to be carrying and using the two oxygen bottles. We’d cached the other five full bottles left over from yesterday and their simple rigs there at Camp V, and between the Deacon on Sunday and J.C. on Monday, the Sherpas had portered up no fewer than six full backpacks of three tanks each, using none in their ascent. These were cached a little lower, at the level of the collapsed and rock-riddled tents, where we’d found Lobsang just last night. If we returned to these upper camps, those twenty-three tanks of English air should be more than enough to support both a search for Percy and a serious summit attempt for at least four of us. Perhaps even enough for summit attempts by two groups of three. That would be nice, I remember thinking, if we get six people on the summit.