Despite Lobsang’s obvious signs of terror, yeti weren’t even in my mind any longer.
“Two ropes going down today,” announced the Deacon without asking for our opinions or advice. “Jake will lead the first rope with Dr. Pasang following and Jean-Claude at anchor. Lady Bromley-Montfort will lead our second rope with Lobsang Sherpa coming next and me last. The fixed ropes may be partially buried, but Lobsang said that he’d found and pulled most of them free of the snow during his ascent last night, so that will help us in terms of time. Unless someone gets ill, no one will be using oxygen on the way down except Jake, who will pass it over to Jean-Claude when he takes the lead through the snowfields above Camp Four.”
J.C. started to protest that he wouldn’t need the oxygen, that he’d climbed most of the way to Camp V without it the day before, but the Deacon silenced all further talk simply by shaking his head once.
Before we all pulled balaclavas or heavy scarves over our faces, more or less effectively shutting off talk, Reggie said, “Lobsang is a bit non compos mentis. I wonder what we’ll find at Base Camp.”
“I suspect something real frightened the Sherpas, and they may have deserted the expedition,” said Dr. Pasang.
Lobsang Sherpa finally realized what we were talking about, although I was fairly sure that he hadn’t understood the Latin about his not being totally mentally capable. “No, no, no,” Lobsang Sherpa said in English. “Not frighten…not run off…all killed! Yetis killed them. All dead!”
“Were you there?” Pasang asked in English. “Did you see these yeti killing Sherpas?”
“No, no,” admitted Lobsang. “I also be dead if there. But cook Semchumbi and head of pack animals Nawang Bura see bodies. Everybody at Base Camp dead. Very terrible. Blood and heads and arms and legs everywhere. Yeti kill them!”
The Deacon patted him on the back and helped him make the correct knot for tying on to the same rope with Reggie and himself. “We’ll know soon,” he said. “Lady Bromley-Montfort, let’s remember that Lobsang Sherpa is the only one here with no crampons. We must be especially careful going down.”
I pulled away my mask for just a moment. “I only hope I can find the right bamboo markers and fixed lines in this cloud-fog,” I said. No one responded, so I tugged the mask back into place.
J.C. said, “We don’t need to wear the damned goggles in this dim light and fog today, do we?”
“No,” said the Deacon. “We’ll pull the goggles back into place only if it begins brightening. It’s most important we watch our footing during the descent.”
J.C. and I made sure that Dr. Pasang was tied on properly—we were leaving only about 30 feet of rope between climbers, a short length, to be sure, and dangerous in the sense that a fall by anyone wouldn’t give the next person on the rope much time to set himself (or herself) for belay—but I agreed with the Deacon’s unspoken suggestion that the lines between each of us should be short enough that we could keep the climber behind or in front of us in sight most of the time, no matter what the wind and weather might be like.
“All right, Jake,” called the Deacon from the far rear. “Start us down, please.”
Using my ice axe to pick my way carefully across the down-tilting snow and ice slabs, I started weaving my way down around boulders, past the battered lower section of Camp V, and then east a dozen yards or so back toward the spine of the North Ridge and the treacherous staircase there.
3.
No Everest expedition before ours had ever laid as much fixed rope as we had—and ours was the Deacon’s dependable Miracle Rope blend to boot—so no expedition members had ever had such relative ease of descending from Camp V.
Or at least we should have had such relative ease. In truth, the clouds were so thick and the wind gusts—up to fifty miles per hour was my guess at the time—were so frighteningly powerful and sporadic that descending the ridge and ice slope and glacier of Mount Everest on that Tuesday, May 19, was a pure nightmare for me.
Some of the marker wands remained in place, but others had been blown away by the night’s gales or blown sideways and covered with snow. At a hundred places during the descent on the North Ridge spur down to the North Col, I had to make the call. Do I go straight ahead here, or right here down that familiar-looking gully, or left down that steeper part? I kept remembering those dead-end gullies that led off to the east during our climb to Camp V in daylight, each wrong turn ending in a precipitous 6,000-foot drop-off to the main Rongbuk Glacier.
So I rarely chose a route to the right when I could find no flagged bamboo wands marking it. But twice a wrong left turn made me lead everyone out onto the North Face of Everest, and there were hidden precipices and vertical ice traps there as well. Both times I gingerly traversed backward until we were on the spine of the North Ridge again, and then I led the way down until we came across the next fixed rope and we could be sure where we were.
When we were wading through snow up to our waists on a somewhat lesser slope, I decided that we must be in the North Ridge’s snowfields not too far above the North Col, and I called for a pause and for J.C. to come forward and take my place and my oxygen tank to lead us through the crevasses.
“Remember, I want the rucksack back,” I said when I handed it over to him and before I slogged back to the rear of our three-person rope to tie in there. My flare pistol, cartridges, binoculars, empty water bottle, an extra sweater, and one half-eaten chocolate bar were still in the rucksack.
Jean-Claude’s descent was faster than mine had been; he found an iced-over crust area of the snowfield and almost glissaded us down despite our crampons. I realized then that after Babu’s death, I’d had enough of glissading for one expedition.
But a little more than two hours after setting out from Camp V, J.C. led us through the last few invisible crevasse fields to the small cluster of tents huddled in the shadow of the high seracs at the northeast corner of the North Col.
The entire camp was empty.
“Everyone scared,” said Lobsang Sherpa. “Last night I volunteer to go up. Tell you. Everyone else want to go down.”
“Why?” asked the Deacon. “If the yeti were supposed to be down below, wouldn’t everyone have felt safer staying at Camp Four?”
Lobsang shook his head almost violently. “Yeti climb,” he said. “They live up on Col in caves. They very angry at us.”
The Deacon didn’t bother to parse logic with the terrified Sherpa—I would at least have asked him why angry yetis would have started their depredations at Base Camp if they were angry at their homes on the North Col being invaded—but instead of discussing mythical monsters, we looked in the various tents for food and water. There were no water bottles or thermoses of drinks left behind—and the damned Sherpas who’d promised to stay waiting for us here at Camp IV two days earlier had taken the extra sleeping bags, Primuses, and Unna cookers with them as well—but Reggie found three overlooked Meta sticks, and we lit them and held blackened pots of fresh snow over the open fires at least to get meltwater. Then Pasang found two semi-frozen cans of spaghetti under a tangle of abandoned clothing in one of the Whymper tents, and the Deacon ferreted out a tin of ham and lima beans. We poured the mess into the last pot to cook over the waning fire.