“Fucked?” I say.
“Non, postholing, at least all the way from Camp One, when they must leave the moraine and come onto the glacier. It is exhausting and terribly dangerous in a storm like this when one cannot see the trail or crevasses.”
“We left bamboo markers all along the way.”
“Many of which, we must assume,” says J.C., “will be buried or blown over by morning.” He switches to the Deacon’s slow, deep, educated British accent. “Another thing we have learned, my friends, is that at least every other bamboo marker or wooden rope guide must have a red flag on it.”
This time my head hurts too much to laugh. Also, I’m growing a bit frightened.
“What do we do if this storm keeps up all day tomorrow, Jean-Claude?”
“Experience tells us that we should stay here—hunkered down—until the storm finally passes,” he says over the gunshots of crackling canvas walls. “But I’m worried about the Sherpas who are missing sleeping bags. Already they do not look so well. I hope their friends can keep them warm enough tonight. But if this continues longer than another day, I think we should try to get down to Camp Two.”
“But as you said, it’s almost as windy and cold as this damned Camp Three.”
“But there should be at least six tents there by now, Jake. Odds are good that they will have left food supplies and at least one Primus and an Unna cooker with Meta solid fuel in a load stashed for a higher camp.”
“Ah, hell…all right,” I say.
I roll over, right into a frozen can of something. I also can feel every moraine rock beneath the tent, most of them pressing into my spine and kidneys. When we’d pitched the tent, there hadn’t been enough snow here in the spot furthest away from any avalanche danger to provide a comfortable, melt-your-body-form-into-it padding below the tent. Now the snow is mostly on top of the tent or drifted up to either side.
I’m just drifting between miserable, cold wakefulness and miserable cold sleep when Jean-Claude says, “Jake?”
“Yes?”
“I think we need to climb the ice wall straight up, not even go near the slope that avalanched in ’twenty-two. There’s too much new snow there. It’ll be harder, but I think we have to go straight up the nine-hundred-foot slope, setting fixed ropes as we go, and then climb the sheer blue-ice wall where Mallory’s chimney used to be.”
He must be joking, I think. Hallucinating out loud.
“Okay,” I say.
“Oui,” says J.C. “I was afraid you would want to go the old way.”
Jean-Claude starts to snore. I am asleep in ten seconds.
Sometime later—we eventually figure it to be about three a.m.—I awake to icy pellets being flung into my face, even though I’ve crawled down deep within my bag. To that and to Jean-Claude screaming at me over an infinitely louder wind roar.
The wind has finally ripped open the entire seam along the north wall of our guaranteed windproof new Meade tent and torn the canvas there to rags. The full force of the storm is blowing in on us.
“Quickly!” shouts Jean-Claude. The hand torch is lit, showing a blinding wall of snow blasting between the two of us. J.C. is tugging on his boots and then grabbing his rucksack in one hand and his flashlight and lumpy, food-tin-filled sleeping bag in the other, shouting at me all the time.
Boots unlaced, face stinging with minus-forty-degree cold, forgetting to put on my various gloves and mittens, dragging my own lumpy-with-cans sleeping bag in one hand and the almost empty rucksack in the other, I stumble after him and out into the maelstrom.
If Reggie’s Big Tent has blown down, we’re all dead.
Thursday, May 7, 1925
It’s time to pack and go down,” says Jean-Claude as it begins to get light after two miserable, endless, restricted-to-the-tent days and two even more endless, wet, cold, sleepless nights at Camp III.
I lift my hands to where strips of my face are coming off and think, Maybe it’s past time we left.
We’d brought no mirrors in our personal kits. “Give it to me straight, Jean-Claude…leprosy?”
“Sunburn,” says J.C. “But you are a mess, my friend. Your sunburned skin is coming off in red and white strips, but your lips and the flesh underneath the peeling skin are almost blue—cyanotic, I think—from lack of oxygen.”
“Red, white, and blue,” I say. “God bless America.”
“Or Vive la France,” says Jean-Claude, but he does not laugh. I notice that he and three of the four Sherpas, all but Babu, also have a blue tinge to their lips, faces, and hands.
For breakfast, lunch, and dinner yesterday I’d tried to suck on a tin-shaped frozen wedge of potatoes and peas. It tasted of kerosene, as did everything else the Sherpas had carried in their mixed loads. I’d crawled outside to vomit again and have not tried to eat anything since then. (We had been able to thaw the tin of peaches enough that all six of us got one tiny, icy sip of the peach juice. The tantalizing hint of liquid was almost worse than having nothing at all to drink.)
I’m freezing. J.C. and I had assumed the first night that Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay would be able to wriggle into a sleeping bag with one of the other Sherpas—the bags were made for European-sized male bodies, not the diminutive Sherpas—but they weren’t able to manage it. These bags are sewn like a cocoon, not buttoned or zippered, so there is no way to open them up to spread one above and one below like eiderdown duvets. So that first night, Ang Chiri tried to sleep wearing just the wool outer clothing they’d chosen to keep on rather than wear the “Michelin” Finch goose down suits that J.C. and I had climbed into (and had been forced to shed our first hot day in the Trough and on the glacier where I received my terrible sunburn). The result was that Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay both had frostbitten toes and feet. J.C.’s English-speaking Sherpa, Norbu Chedi, had been gasping for air so hard both nights that he chose to sleep with his face outside the folds of his sleeping bag; the result is white patches of frostbitten cheeks for Norbu.
So last night Jean-Claude and I gave our Finch down jackets and trousers to Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay, and I didn’t sleep a wink all night. Under the new down coat and trousers, I was wearing just a regular Mallory-style wool Norfolk jacket and sweater and wool knickers and socks, and now even the eiderdown sleeping bag couldn’t keep me warm. I would begin to doze off despite the physical misery, but then slam awake either from the intense chill or with a sense of someone strangling me. Or both.
It feels better to be moving now, dragging on my boots and packing the high felt Laplander “slippers” deep into my empty rucksack. But every move uses up my energy and makes me have to stop and gasp for breath. I see Jean-Claude taking the same pauses as he labors to tie his frozen bootlaces. The Sherpas are moving even more slowly and ponderously than J.C. and me.
But eventually we’re all packed, booted, cramponed, and layered—Jean-Claude and I have taken back our Finch outer clothing for the descent—and then J.C. makes me moan and the four Sherpas slump silently when he says, “We have to pack the tent and staves and ground cloths as well.”
“Why?” I ask plaintively. Reggie’s experimental Big Tent has survived the two days and nights of hurricane winds, but the damned thing is heavy. I’d carried only parts of it uphill and the weight had been oppressive. Now, I thought, everything depended upon our getting down to Camp II or lower quickly. Leave the damned tent where it is for the next Tiger Team, is what I think but do not say aloud.