“Let me try,” I say. I’m larger than Jean-Claude, my hands are much larger than Jean-Claude’s, and I’m probably stronger than the Chamonix Guide, but I can’t get the vent screw to turn either with my bare hands or with the wrench or pliers.
“Totally cross-stripped, the tank unpressurized and not able to be pressurized with the vent screw broken,” says Jean-Claude. It sounds like our death sentence, but what’s left of the logical parts of my brain reminds me that we can do without water for a few days, without food for weeks if need be. But my guess is that lots of snow-melt water and some hot soup would have gone far to reduce this headache and the other altitude sickness symptoms I’m feeling.
Meanwhile, the hemispherical tent walls are trying to rip themselves away from the curved wooden interior staves holding them in place. The thin ground cloth—the Sherpas hadn’t bothered with setting down the thicker one before raising the tent—is trying to rise up under us even with all six of us, and the heavy food loads and kerosene cans, spread about on it. I’ve never been in an earthquake, but it must feel like this. Only not as loud. We’re still shouting at each other to be heard.
“Jake and I are going back to our own tent to sleep,” Jean-Claude tells Babu and Norbu. “It’d be a little too crowded in here with six men trying to stretch out. Get some sleep—tell Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay not to worry. This storm may break by morning and either Lady Bromley-Montfort will be here with her Sherpas and supplies, or we’ll just walk back down to Camp Two.”
Since we’ve kept our boots and Shackleton jackets on, we just crawl out the door. But J.C. says, “Wait a minute, Jake,” and begins handing out the cans of kerosene to me. He also brings the reassembled but still unworkable Primus. “We’ll stack the cans just outside your tent,” he shouts to Babu Rita.
But he doesn’t. J.C. motions to me to carry my armloads of miniature cans with him to the far side of our poor sagging tent. There he sets his behind a boulder and I do the same. He puts his mouth near my ear so that I can hear him over the wind. “Some of the worst injuries I’ve seen in the mountains came from tent fires. I don’t trust our friends to keep from experimenting with burning cans of kerosene when they’re thirsty enough.”
I nod, understanding that on a calm day or night, such experiments—especially if done just outside the tent—might be worth the risk. But not in a tent that’s leaping and shaking under and around you.
Our own small tent, seven feet by six, is sagging and pitiful-looking. J.C. holds up one finger, telling me to wait outside a moment, and then he crawls in just far enough to pull a coil of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope from his rucksack. He cuts different lengths and we use the heavier rope to add more tie-downs to the wind-whipped tent. The long stakes don’t work worth a damn here on the lateral moraine, so we’re adding to the already existing spiderweb of lines to rocks frozen into the moraine, boulders, and even to one ice pinnacle.
By now I’m frozen through and relieved when we’re finished and can crawl into the low tent.
We crawl deep into our still dry goose down sleeping bags, removing our boots but putting them in the bags with us so that they won’t be too frozen to get into in the morning. At this temperature, if a climber leaves his boots outside his bag, the laces tend to snap off when he tries to tie them in the morning. With George Finch’s goose down duvet still on under the sleeping bag down, plus Reggie’s hood and Michelin Man goose down trousers, what little body heat I have left builds up again quickly enough.
“Here, Jake, put these in your bag as well.” J.C.’s left his bulky hand torch on, and I can see that he’s handing me a frozen tin of spaghetti, a smaller tin of meat lozenges, a solid brick of the rubber-protected “portable soup,” and the can of peaches (I can see the dent) that Reggie threw at the Deacon’s head the hundred years ago that was Saturday.
“You’re kidding,” I say. How am I supposed to sleep with these freezing cans against me?
“Not at all,” says Jean-Claude. “I have twice as many in my bag. Our body heat may melt—or at least soften—some of the food. The tin of peaches has syrup in it and we’ll share it with the other four in the morning to…how do you say it in English?…slake our thirst.”
Let’s open it and drink it now, just the two of us, is my unworthy thought. But nobility wins out. That and my sure knowledge that the fluid in the peach can is frozen as solid as a brick at the moment.
J.C. flicks off the hand torch to save the batteries but then says in an almost perfect imitation of the Deacon’s voice, “Well, what lessons have today’s events taught us, my friends?”
The Deacon asks that after almost every climb and certainly after every problem we have with a climb, but J.C.’s mimicry of the vaguely tutorial Oxbridge accent is so dead-on that I laugh hard despite the pain it causes to my aching skull.
“I suppose we should check the contents of our loads more carefully when carrying to any higher camp,” I say into the loud darkness.
“Oui. What else?”
“Double-check that none of the porters has tossed out something essential—such as his and his mate’s sleeping bag.”
“Oui. What else?”
“Probably have an Unna cooker in each camp as well as a roarer.” The Unna cookers we’ve brought to Everest, smaller and lighter than Primuses and using a solid fuel to burn, were generally used in higher camps when weight in the load had to be kept to a minimum. I’m fairly certain that Mallory and Irvine had an Unna cooker at their Camp VI.
“Primuses almost always work,” is J.C.’s response. “Robert Falcon Scott hauled one nine hundred miles to the South Pole and most of the way back.”
“And look what happened to Scott and his men,” I say.
We both start laughing. As if in response, the wind off the North Col roars more loudly. I feel as if our little two-man tent is going to shake itself to death despite—or perhaps because of—the spiderweb of tie-downs we’ve added outside.
There’s no more talk between us until I ask, “Do you think Reggie will be here with the Sherpas and extra loads by late morning?”
Jean-Claude’s silence goes on so long that I almost decide he’s fallen asleep. Then he says, “I doubt it, Jake. If the blizzard continues this cold and this hard, I think it would be foolhardy to try to come up those last three and a half miles of glacier. Remember, they don’t know that we have a damaged Primus. They assume that we are eating and drinking all right and…what is your American phrase that I like so much in Mark Twain? Ah, yes—hunkering down. Yes, just hunkering down here and waiting, as they are. My guess is that Lady Bromley-Montfort wisely retreated from Camp Two at the first signs of the blizzard hitting them. It’s a cold, windblown site at the best of times.”
He is right about that. Camp II is supposed to be pleasant because earlier expedition members said that, unlike Camps I and III, it’s positioned to catch any sunlight the Himalayan skies might offer. But in our time there, it has been cloudy, windswept, and bitterly cold. Its only advantage is its beautiful view of Mount Kellas, named after the physician who died during the 1921 reconnaissance expedition.
“With the fixed ropes we’ve set along the way,” I say hopefully, “they might come up from Camp One or even from Base Camp in a few hours.”
“I think not,” says Jean-Claude. “The snow was more than knee-deep when we broke trail this morning. Now those tracks are gone—swept away and filled in. I suspect that many of the fixed ropes will also be buried by morning. This is a hard snowstorm, my friend. If Reggie or the Deacon should try to come up, they and the porters would be…what is your word?…”