“Do we have to worry anytime soon about Sigl or whoever’s carrying your rifle taking potshots at us?” I asked, if only to change the subject.
“I think the chap carrying my rifle will be careful about when and where he shoots at us,” said the Deacon.
“That’s reassuring,” I said. “Why should he be?”
“Because he’s looking for the same thing we are,” said the Deacon.
“Escape from crazy Nazis?” I said.
The Deacon shook his head. “Whatever Meyer and Bromley had with them. I believe that Bruno Sigl made the mistake one year ago of shooting either Meyer or Bromley or both—I’m sorry, Reggie, but I do think that’s the case—at a place where the bodies fell or avalanched beyond Sigl’s ability to reach them.”
“I agree,” said Reggie. “That fits with what Kami Chiring saw last year from near Camp Three using the Germans’ binoculars. He thought he saw three figures up on the North East Ridge…then, suddenly, only one. And he heard what could have been the echo of pistol shots.”
“So that’s where we search,” said the Deacon. “Along the ridgeline. The North East Ridge—where few people save for Mallory and Irvine have ever gone.”
“And, if you are correct in your theory, mon ami,” said J.C., “Sigl and Reggie’s cousin Percival and this young Meyer fellow.”
“Yes,” said the Deacon. “I don’t think Sigl will make the same mistake twice—or allow his sniper to, if someone else is carrying my Lee-Enfield. If they’d shot us anywhere on the North Ridge or during this climbing traverse to Camp Six here, our bodies might easily have fallen—probably would have fallen—down one of the gullies toward the main Rongbuk Glacier or all the way down and over the North Face onto the East Rongbuk Glacier six thousand feet below. The chances of whatever they’re looking for surviving such a fall in one piece, even if it’s just a document, would be very small.”
“What an encouraging thought,” said J.C.
“So they’ll be reluctant to shoot unless they know we won’t fall far,” continued the Deacon, undeterred. “So my suggestion is that we just keep outclimbing the bastards.”
Reggie rubbed her pale forehead. I wondered if her head ached as abysmally as did mine. At least she didn’t have my terrible cough.
“What do you mean, Richard?” she asked. “We’ve come pretty far. We’re very tired.”
“I mean we keep climbing until dark,” said the Deacon, turning his goggles up toward the Yellow Band and North East Ridge above us. The wind was blowing spindrift along that ridge and out away from the two impossibly distant but strangely near-looking Steps and the Summit Pyramid. There was snow underfoot—or I should say “undercrampon”—everywhere now. We were moving into a different world. And one that tolerated almost no forms of life.
“We either climb or traverse around that First Step—we could even bypass it by traversing along that narrow ridgeline atop the Yellow Band—and then climb back up toward the ridge and get the best of that damned Second Step,” continued the Deacon. “We stay just below the ridgeline on this side so we don’t show ourselves in silhouette to the shooter below, then set up Reggie’s Big Tent in the first-ever French-Anglo-American Camp Seven somewhere below the final Summit Pyramid.”
“What does this achieve, Ree-shard? Does it not merely postpone the inevitable? I need not remind you that les boches are armed, and we have…Very pistols.”
“First of all,” says Reggie, speaking for the Deacon, who was out of breath, “getting to the North East Ridge is the best way to look for my cousin Percy and whatever Kurt Meyer spent months sneaking out of Europe. That’s important. That’s the real reason we’re here.”
“But the odds of actually finding them…,” I began.
“You found George Mallory,” said Reggie.
I sighed. “In that huge open area down there. And I literally almost stumbled over him. I’ve been looking through my binoculars for ten minutes, but I can’t even see his body from here. I know where it was.”
I still felt bad about our not taking the time to bury Mallory.
“Well, there’s always the chance that we shall stumble over Herr Meyer or my cousin,” said Reggie. “At least if we climb to the North Ridge, we shall be walking where Kami Chiring last saw him. But camping above the Second Step, Richard…if the usual wind rises, I don’t think even my domed tent could survive it. And it will be very cold up there so near to twenty-nine thousand feet.”
“You’re all forgetting something,” I rasped between coughs.
“What, Jake?” said the Deacon.
“You and Norton compared the Second Step to the prow of a battleship,” I managed to say before coughing again. “A hundred feet of near-vertical rock. No man alive—not even Mallory—could climb that. Not at that ungodly altitude. And the North Face below that Second Step looks too steep to traverse.”
“You’re wrong, Jake,” said the Deacon. “There’s one man alive who can do that vertical rock free climb of the Second Step.”
I mentally scrambled to think of all the great European and American rock climbers who might be up to the challenge of free-climbing the Second Step at this debilitating altitude, but could think of no one.
“You, Jake,” said the Deacon. “You, my friend. Let’s go.”
He pulled the straps of his heavy rucksack on again. This time, I noticed, he clipped his oxygen face mask in place. All the rest of us did the same. The Deacon put the two heavy, full oxygen bottles we’d left cached there at Camp VI in his already overloaded backpack. Then he led the way up the boulder-strewn face toward the very steep rock gullies that would lead us up and through the Yellow Band and out into more such gullies and rock mazes before we could reach the windswept North East Ridge.
14.
This climb up the North Face through the Yellow Band and beyond toward the North East Ridge was the most demanding and technical climbing we’d yet encountered on Everest. Despite the much steeper incline, the more challenging terrain, and ever more terrifying exposure to the 8,000-foot drop, we still hadn’t roped up. There were numerous ways through the maze of overhanging rocks and snow masses, most of them up steep snow gullies, and most of them leading to dead ends with dangerously overhanging snow masses or blocking boulders. The Deacon had chosen the one he thought would have the best chance of exiting onto the somewhat shallower slope that should open out onto the ridgeline not too far east of that large outcropping on the ridge called the First Step. I suppose we weren’t roped together both out of stupid habit after hours of parallel climbing and because we were concentrating on front-crampon-kicking our way up the steep gully, jabbing our ice axes in ahead of us, leaning heavily on them, panting for breath (we were using our bottled oxygen only intermittently, which added to our mental dullness), and then kick-stepping our separate ways up another agonizing step or two. All this kicking led to clumps of falling snow—theoretical precursors to real avalanches—that no one wanted to follow directly below and behind. We were spread out with no one person really leading the climb, no prescribed order of climb, and no one within grabbing distance of anyone else should anyone slip and start sliding. But every time I looked, the Deacon was first, the highest, the one breaking trail; then came Jean-Claude, then me, then Pasang, and then—at least 15 feet lower than her Sherpa friend and following in his tracks—Lady Bromley-Montfort.
Reggie fell when we weren’t quite two-thirds of the way up the steepest part of the snow gully.