Later that afternoon, on a steep snowy slope below a rock face, Jean-Claude showed us his last technological tour de force.
It was a small and relatively light metal wedge-shaped device that had steel springs—released by hand pressure, tightening automatically when you exerted no pressure—that could slide along a fixed rope. J.C. had laboriously climbed the slope in his new 12-point crampons, attached the Deacon’s Miracle Rope to a long ice axe driven deep into the ice under the boulders some 150 meters above us, reinforced that belay with several ice screws, and then removed his crampons and expertly glissaded down the steep slope to us. The rope lay like a long black fault line on the blindingly white snow.
Then J.C. showed that he had one of these hand clamps for the rope for each of us.
“It is simple, non?” he said. “Release the hand pressure completely, and it locks tight to the rope. One could dangle if one chose. Squeeze ever so slightly with one hand, and the mechanism glides along the rope as if the rope were a guide. Squeeze hard, and the mechanism—and you—no longer has…how do you pronounce it? Friction? Friction on the rope.”
“What do you suggest we use this gadget for?” I asked, but I saw that the Deacon had grasped the idea.
“It would be best if it were attached to some light climbing harness,” said the Deacon. “So that one could have both hands free while staying attached to the fixed rope.”
“Exactement!” cried Jean-Claude. “I am working on precisely such light leather and canvas harnesses. For today, though, we try the one hand, no?”
And with that J.C. clamped his little device onto the fixed rope and began sliding it up as he climbed steadily, even without crampons. The Deacon went next, getting the hang of when to apply pressure, when to release it, within a few paces. It took me longer, but soon I realized the added security of climbing with this silly little spring-driven device gripping the fixed rope harder than one’s heavily mittened hand ever could. It would give even more assurance if it were attached, say, by a line and carabiner, to the climbing harness that he and the Deacon had been talking about.
At the top of our 150-meter 50-degree slope, we huddled together as a cold wind rose. The sun was setting behind peaks to the west. The moon was rising in the east.
“Now we use it for a controlled descent,” said Jean-Claude. “You will see, I believe, that one could use this device even on vertical fixed ropes. It is, how do you say it? Proof for fools?”
“Foolproof,” said the Deacon. “Show us the fast descent.”
So J.C. unclamped his device from the double line of fixed rope—double so we could retrieve the rope after our rappel down the slope—retrieved the ice axe so that only the deep screws held the doubled line on belay, re-clamped onto the line below me, and began a rapid, no-crampon glissade that he controlled only by the spring pressure of the device in his hand.
“Incredible!” I gasped as the Deacon and I reached the bottom after one of the fastest glissades I’d ever experienced.
“We shall practice more later before we leave and during the trek in to Everest,” said Jean-Claude.
We were in twilight shadow now and it suddenly became very cold. J.C. was already pulling the rope free of its needle-eye ice screws and retrieving the long line.
“Do you have a name for this device?” asked the Deacon.
J.C. grinned as he expertly wrapped the long coil of Miracle Rope from his fist to his elbow, coil and coil again. “Jumar,” he said.
“What does that mean in French?” I asked. “What does it stand for?”
“Nothing,” says J.C. “It was the name of my dog when I was a boy. He could climb a tree after a squirrel if he chose. I have never seen a better dog-climber.”
“Jumar,” I repeated. Odd word. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever get used to it.
“I’ve been worrying about that last ice wall between the Rongbuk Glacier to the North Col on Everest for some months,” the Deacon said quietly as we approached London and the murky winter sunrise.
I nodded awake. “Why?” I whispered. “In ’twenty-two, you and Finch and the others found snow slopes up to the Col and cut steps for the porters. Last June there weren’t any snow slopes, but there was that fissure—the ice chimney—that Mallory free-climbed and dropped fixed ropes and then Sandy Irvine’s jury-rigged rope ladder down.”
The Deacon bobbed his head slightly. “But Rongbuk is a glacier, Jake. It rises, subsides, fissures, faults, moves, crumbles, creates its own crevasses. All we know for sure is that it won’t be as it was last year for Mallory—a chance to show off his climbing techniques—or for Finch and us the year before that. This spring that ice wall may have climbable fissures or new snow slopes—or it may be two hundred feet of vertical ice.”
“Well, if it is sheer vertical ice,” I said, tiredly but with a new sense of bravado, “J.C. and his front-point crampons and silly little ice axes and the whatchamacallems—jumars—have given us a way to climb it.”
The Deacon drove in silence for a moment. I could see the dome of Saint Paul’s coming over the horizon with the sun.
“Then, Jake,” he said, “I shall have to assume that we are ready to go climb Mount Everest.”
Chapter 9
I just wish this Lord Bromley-Whatsis, his serene buggering Highness, had bloody well buggered himself down to Calcutta from the hills and helped us bandobast these buggering great heavy crates to the bloody freight depot a full buggering day earlier, is what I damn well wish.
C alcutta is a terrifying city, with Kipling’s “sheeted dead” underfoot on an evening walk—not dead bodies, it turns out, but people wrapped in their sheets and sleeping on what passes for sidewalks—and everything smelling of incense, spices, human piss, cattle, the not unpleasant sweat-and-breath scent of multitudes, and fragrant smoke from burning cow dung. All the dark-skinned men’s stares are curious, dismissive, or outright angry, while the women’s stares—even the Mohammedan women’s eyes peering out from beneath and above the black cloth covering them from head to foot—are alluring, inviting, and, for me, filled with sexual promise.
It is only the twenty-second of March, 1925, far from the terrible summer pre-monsoon heat and the downpours of the later-summer monsoon rains, but the air of Calcutta already feels like a wad of wet blankets wrapped around me head to toe.
At least these have been my impressions so far during our two and a half days here.
Everything is strange to me. Even though I’d crossed the Atlantic in a liner from Boston to Europe last year, the five weeks of travel on the HMS Caledonia from Liverpool to Calcutta seemed a thousand times more exotic. The first days were rough going—the tugs barely got us out of Liverpool harbor against the wind and waves—and I was surprised to find out that I was the only one of the three of us who did not succumb to seasickness at some point on the voyage. The pitching and rolling seemed like a fine game, a simple challenge in getting from Point A to Point B and then onward and upward to the wooden deck, where I ran my twelve miles daily and nightly in a pitching, rolling oval, and I never had a hint of the nausea that all but ruined the early part of the voyage for Jean-Paul and the Deacon.