Now he dumps the heavy load he’s been carrying, pulls an almost empty rucksack from it, and says to Reggie, “Go ahead and supervise the establishment of Base Camp here, if you will, Lady Bromley-Montfort. I’m going to reconnoiter up the valley as far as Camp One.”
“That’s ridiculous,” says Reggie. “It will be dark before you get there.”
The Deacon reaches into the almost empty rucksack and pulls out one of Reggie’s leather battery-lamp headpieces. He flicks its headlamp on and then off. “We’ll see if this Welsh miner contraption works. If not, I have an old-fashioned hand torch in my rucksack.”
“You should not go alone, Ree-shard,” says Jean-Claude. “And especially not onto the glacier. The crevasses will be impossible to see in the twilight.”
“I won’t have to climb onto the glacier proper just to reach Camp One,” says the Deacon. “I have some biscuits in my jacket pocket, but would greatly appreciate it if you would keep some coffee and soup warm for me.”
He turns and disappears up the valley of gathering shadows.
Reggie calls Pasang over, and within minutes they are organizing the tired Sherpa porters, unloading the yaks and mules, and deciding which tents to erect where in this strangely sad place. Pasang directs the lifting of a large Whymper tent rainfly inside one of the crumbling sangas, or rock walls, hangs curtains on the side, and declares this the medical tent. Several Sherpas line up for consultation and treatment almost at once.
Our valley is in darkness, but Everest blazes far beyond and above us in a cold, powerful, self-contained isolation. That strikes me as terrifying.
It was our last night in Sikkim—April 2—right before we crossed over the Jelep La into Tibet, when I celebrated my 23rd birthday. I hadn’t told anyone about the date, but someone must have noticed it on my passport, because we definitely had a celebration.
I don’t even remember the name of the tiny village some 12 or 13 miles between Guatong, where we stayed that night, and the border—perhaps it had no name, it certainly had no dak bungalow—but it did have what I called a Ferris wheel and what the Deacon called “a miniature version of the Great Wheel at Blackpool” and what Reggie called “a little version of the Vienna Wheel.” The thing was crude, built out of raw lumber, and consisted of four “passenger cars” that were little more than wooden boxes one crawled into. At its high point, this “Great Wheel” couldn’t carry a person’s feet more than ten feet above the ground, and the mechanism to make it work, once I’d been coaxed into sitting in one of the boxes, consisted of Jean-Claude pulling the next car down on one side and the Deacon pushing up on the other. The contraption must have been built for the village children, but we’d seen no children on our way into the village and would see none before we left in the morning.
Then they stopped me at the nominal high point—all eight of the village huts were spread out in panorama, their rooftops just a little higher than my knees—and Reggie, the Deacon, Jean-Claude, Pasang, and several of the English-speaking porters began singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” followed by a ragged chorus of “Happy Birthday.” I confess to blushing wildly as I sat there with my wool-stockinged legs dangling.
Reggie had packed in all the makings for a seriously civilized cake, even icing and candles, and she and Jean-Claude and the cook, Semchumbi, baked it in one of the Primus and stone stoves before we all ate dinner that night. The Deacon produced two bottles of good brandy, and the four of us drank each other’s health deep into the night.
Finally, when everyone had staggered off to their sleeping bags in their own tents, I stumbled outside mine and looked up at the night sky. It was one of the few times during our days in Sikkim when it wasn’t raining.
Twenty-three years old. It seemed so much older, but no wiser, than 22 for some reason. Had Sandy Irvine been 22 or 23 when he died on Everest the year before? I couldn’t quite remember. Twenty-two, I thought. Younger than I was that night in Sikkim. The brandy fumes made me dizzy, and I rested against one of the splintery support props for the Not-So-Great Wheel as I continued looking beyond black treetops at a half-moon rising above the jungle. It was a Tuesday, and I was one day from dropping off most nations’ maps, into the high-desert wilderness of Tibet.
I thought of Reggie. Had she brought a nightgown? Or did she sleep in some combination of her clothes and underwear or in pajamas as most of us did? Or in the nude as the Deacon did, even in places where centipedes and snakes had been common?
I shook my head again to rid myself of that image of Lady Bromley-Montfort. At the very least, Reggie was a decade older than I—probably more.
So what? asked my brandy-liberated brain.
I looked at the half-moon rising—bright enough to paint the upper rain forest leaves silver and diminishing stars to invisibility in its slow climb toward the zenith—and imagined various acts of heroics I might perform during the coming trek or climb, something that would endear me to Reggie in some manner greater than, or at least different from, the mere friendship we seemed to enjoy now.
She baked me a birthday cake. She’d known the date of my birthday and carted in all that flour and sugar and canned milk—and found eggs somewhere in this village or the last—and worked with Semchumbi and J.C. over an open kitchen fire to bake it. I had no idea how that was done, but the cake had been delicious, down to its chocolate icing. And there had been a small conflagration of twenty-three small wax candles burning on it.
She baked me a birthday cake. In my calf love, I edited out J.C.’s and Semchumbi’s contribution to the cake and the Deacon’s hearty singing and back-clapping and the rare gift of the brandy. She baked me a birthday cake.
Before I started blubbering, I managed to crawl back into my tent, remove my boots, and struggle into the sleeping bag, trying to keep that single thought—She baked me a birthday cake—as my last before dreaming, but my actual last thought before falling asleep was—Now I’m 23. Will I survive to be 24?
My first morning at Everest Base Camp, I wake with a splitting headache and nausea. This is profoundly disappointing since I’ve only recently felt 100 percent after the bout of dysentery that Dr. Pasang cured more than a month earlier in Sikkim. I always thought, since I was the youngest, that I’d be the healthiest during this expedition, but it’s turning out that I’m the invalid of the group.
For a moment I can’t remember what day it is, so before crawling out of my warm sleeping bag into the terrible cold—our thermometer will show us later in the day that the high temperature will be minus nineteen degrees Fahrenheit—I check my pocket calendar. It is Wednesday, April 29, 1925. We’d fallen behind Norton and Mallory’s trekking time way back in Sikkim but made up for that with shortcuts Reggie showed us in the long trek west across Tibet to the mountain-fortress village of Shekar Dzong before turning south to the Rongbuk. We also spent only one night in villages where the previous expeditions had spent two. It was precisely one year ago that Mallory, Irvine, Norton, Odell, Geoffrey Bruce, Somervell, Bentley Beetham, and a few other high-climbers with hopes of reaching the summit had awakened to their first day in Base Camp at this very spot.