“Perhaps they will not be arriving tomorrow after all,” Jean-Claude says loudly enough to be heard over the volley fire. “But we will need a way to melt snow for tea and drinking water before then. And we need to check on the Sherpas next door.”
It looks from the outside as if Reggie’s hemispherical Big Tent is handling the wind better than our A-shaped Whymper tent, but once we’re inside, we immediately see that the four Sherpa inmates in the Big Tent aren’t doing so well. Jean-Claude and I have brought some frozen tins of food as well as dragging the dead Primus along in the vague hope that one of the Sherpas will be able to repair it. Snow blows in behind us as we enter, and we hurry to lace the entrance back up.
The only light in the tent comes from the stubby little open-flame ghee-butter candle of the sort that Hindus use for their religious services. Ghee is clarified butter, and the stench from the tiny candle adds to my already adequate nausea. The four Sherpas look pathetic; Babu Rita, Norbu Chedi, Ang Chiri, and Lhakpa Yishay are all huddled together in a wet goose down Finch-jacket heap in the center of the tent space. Two of them have crawled half into their down sleeping bags—also damp—but the other two don’t even have their bags with them. There’s no gear or food from their loads in the tent—not even an extra blanket—and all four men, earlier thought to be some of our sure-to-be-named Tiger Sherpas, look at us the way the terminally lost look at possible rescuers.
“Where are your other two sleeping bags?” demands J.C.
“Lhakpa lightened the load in his pack at Camp Two,” says Norbu Chedi, his teeth chattering. “He left his and my bags and the extra ground cloth behind…by accident, Sahib.”
“Merde!” says Jean-Claude. “Sleeping bags were the lightest things in your loads. Do you have any water?”
“No, Sahib,” says my personal Sherpa, Babu Rita. “We drank it all from our bottles during the climb to this camp. We were hoping that you had already melted us some.”
J.C. plunks the recalcitrant Primus down in the middle of our crowded little huddle and explains the problem. Babu and Norbu translate for Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay.
“Where’s the food?” asks Jean-Claude. “The soup and the food tins?”
“We could not get to the pack loads,” says Norbu. “Buried too deep in snow.”
“Nonsense,” snaps J.C. “We dumped those loads just a few yards from here only hours ago. We need to go out now and bring in the food and packs, see what there is for us to use. Was there a second Primus packed, by any chance?”
“No,” Babu says in a hopeless tone. “But I carried many cans of Primus fuel up the glacier.”
Jean-Claude shakes his head. I would do the same but my head hurts too much. The small cans of kerosene are useless unless we can get the Primus working. “Get your gloves, mittens, and Shackleton overjackets on,” orders J.C. “It’s snowing too hard—and getting too dark—to sort through the loads out there, so we’re going to pull the packs and load bags into the tent.”
It is getting dark outside, and the blizzard still restricts our vision to only a couple of yards. I’m wondering whether we should have roped up for this effort when Jean-Claude shouts over the howling wind for Babu and Ang to hang on to each other and me, and for Norbu and Lhakpa to keep a grip on each other and him. We stagger and feel our way the few yards from the Big Tent to the general vicinity of where we think the Sherpas dumped their packs. J.C.’s rucksack and load bags, as well as mine, are weighted down by rocks right at the entrance to our tent. Of course they’re empty, since, with the exception of a few food tins, we hauled the two heavy tents, tent staves and poles, and the nonworking Primus stove up in our loads. So our lives now depend on what we find in the Sherpas’ loads. Camp III is supposed to be sheltered—compared to Camp IV up on the North Col, much less compared to any camps exposed up on the North or North East ridges higher up—but the wind whipping down the 1,000-foot slope of ice and snow is so strong that it literally knocks me over. Babu Rita and Ang Chiri dutifully fall into the snow with me. On all fours, I flail around trying to find their rucksacks and pack loads amidst the drifts, snow-covered boulders, and the growing heaps of snow on this side of the tents.
“Here!” I can barely hear J.C.’s voice, but the two Sherpas and I crawl toward it.
We all grab some part of the load masses now under ten inches or more of new snow and begin dragging them back to the Big Tent…but where is the Big Tent? Luckily, Lhakpa Yishay had left burning the one tiny ghee candle they had set on the floor—foolish to leave it unattended, since fire is always a danger in these canvas tents—and we all crawl and tug and grunt and swear in the direction of that tiny light.
Inside—it was impossible to unload the packs and rucksacks and load bags outside in the wind and snow—things are a real mess.
Enough snow has come in that our down jackets and trousers (the Sherpas chose not to wear the extra down trousers we had for them) and the two spread sleeping bags are covered with snow that body heat soon will melt into moisture. The wetter goose down gets, the less insulating property it has, until, when soaked enough, it will provide all the insulating warmth of a cold, wet washrag.
Dizzy, trying hard not to be violently sick again, I curl up on the driest part of the tent floor I can find and shiver, my head hurting worse with each shiver and shake. The sudden, overpowering stench of the kerosene doesn’t help matters.
Jean-Claude is going through the packs and load bags: several more tins of frozen food and sealed packs of what the Royal Navy has called “portable soup” since the early 1800s, but no water. Five more Primus-fuel-sized cans of kerosene.
We now have enough kerosene to blow up a German pillbox or burn a hole in the wall of the North Col, but the damned Primus stove won’t ignite it.
J.C. clears a space in the middle and lays down an extra wool shirt of his as a work area. He has brought a flashlight from his personal rucksack and adds the beam of its light to the ever-diminishing blue flicker of the tiny ghee-candle lamp.
He sets up the Primus again. We have two big pots for boiling, and each of us has his tin cup for drinking. J.C. makes sure that the fuel tank is two-thirds filled with fresh kerosene as the instructions suggest, primes it with a bit of burning alcohol in the tiny spirit cup below the burners, pumps up the pressure, and tries again to ignite the burners.
Nothing.
J.C. allows himself a torrent of French so picturesque that I can pick up only one vulgarity in twenty. He begins disassembling the damned thing again, taking great care not to spill the kerosene or remaining alcohol.
“How can it not work?” I manage to say from my fetal position and through my throbbing headache.
“I…do…not…know,” Jean-Claude says through gritted teeth. Wind batters the wall of the Big Tent so hard that four of us grab the wooden ribs of the dome, trying to hold the tent down with our weight and waning strength. While outside, J.C. had swung his little steel-tubed instrument, and he whispered the results to me inside: the barometer was frighteningly low and still falling; the temperature at nightfall outside was minus thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. We had nothing but our bodies, tents, and fears with which to measure the velocity of the wind down here in the “sheltered” area at the base of the North Col, but these winds have to be hurricane velocity. Some must be a hundred miles per hour or more.