10

THE BROCKEN SPECTER

Mountain of Shishapangma, Nyalam County,

Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China

October 7, 2014

Dawn at twenty-four-thousand feet in the Himalayas was a slow, mostly silent affair. That day it was no different. Mountain guide Neil Quinn could hear only the occasional sounds of his high-altitude penance—the climbing hardware rattling like Marley’s chains, spiked crampons scraping against rock, the occasional buzz of radio static—over the constant backbeat of heavy breathing, heart pounding, every bone, muscle, and sinew protesting.

It had been going on for hours. The remaining members of the 2014 Snowdonia Ascents Shishapangma expedition—three Sherpa, two client climbers, and Quinn, the expedition leader—had left their Camp Two tents a few minutes after 1 a.m. to climb through the night toward the summit. The commercial climbing operators may describe the highest Himalayan peak located entirely in Tibet as “a sleeping snow giant,” or “one of the easier eight-thousanders,” even as an “ideal stepping-stone for Everest,” but going for its top was still brutal. For hours of freezing darkness, the six climbers had been a summit team in little more than name only, each lost within the individual roundel of snow and rock that fell under the beam of their headlamps as they worked their way up the steep northwest ridge.

The gradual realization that the softer, grayer light of dawn was finally fraying the edge of his pool of lamplight made the Englishman stop for a moment and take stock of how his charges were faring. At first, it was all he could do to lean over his ice axe, drag in some deep breaths, and repeatedly curl his fingers and toes in order to bring back some semblance of life. “Shit, it’s cold!” Quinn muttered to no one as he forced his head up from the ice-encrusted front of his down suit to look around.

In the east, a red line sliced the horizon as if night’s throat had been cut. Crimson, orange, and yellow welled up into the dark above. The sight promised continued good weather, even though Quinn knew it wasn’t going to get much warmer. Shishapangma was always a cold mountain and they, the last team on the hill, were climbing it late in the autumn season. The region’s hard fall into winter was just weeks away.

Watch them for frostbite, Quinn reminded himself as he turned his eyes up the ever-steepening ridge to seek Gelu, the expedition’s sirdar, and his cousin Tenjin. He soon picked out the two Sherpas’ climb suits bright and high in the golden light that was now crowning the mountain. They were already fixing rope up the snowy channel that marked the entrance to the “central” summit, exactly as they had agreed. It was always super windy up there and no one wanted anyone flying away.

Quinn wondered what the two Sherpas were seeing. The summit just above them at the top of the couloir was actually false, some forty-five feet or so lower than the true apex of the mountain, which lay at the end of another crest, a fifteen-hundred-foot fin of snow that was heavily corniced and prone to avalanche. More often than not, climbers arrived exhausted at the central summit, took in the life-threatening tightrope walk that offered so few meters more of altitude, and declared the job done. A hair over the mythical eight-thousand-meter mark, it pretty much satisfied everyone except Henrietta Richards, the self-appointed record-keeper of Himalayan climbing.

Even up there, it was easy for Quinn to imagine the equally frosty post-climb interviews at Henrietta’s book-lined apartment in Kathmandu that verified every Himalayan summit claim. He could hear that upper-class English accent, undiminished by forty years of living in Nepal—the faintest trace of humor perceptible only to those who had met her often—as it asked the unsuspecting “central summiteer” of Shishapangma, “But I assume you do understand what a ‘false summit’ is?” If they didn’t when they stepped into that fabled living room, they certainly did by the time they left.

Quinn smiled to himself at the thought. He and Henrietta had become friends since “that awful Sarron business” as she referred to it. She knew everything there was to know about the mountains that he loved and in return he enjoyed feeding that knowledge with reports of his own experiences up there. Turning his mind back to that day’s summit for them, false or otherwise, Quinn told himself he’d call it with Gelu Sherpa when he got up there, false summit or not.

With a look back down the steep ridge, Quinn quickly saw Tore Rasmussen not far below, relentlessly plodding upward. Despite having no previous Himalayan experience, the blond Norwegian bricklayer was a natural mountaineer; a by-product of his lean yet muscular build and resting heart rate of forty. From the first day of the expedition, Quinn had the feeling Rasmussen would summit, even if the dour loner was difficult to please—or like for that matter. The coarse man might go on to top every other eight-thousand-meter peak, or just as easily shrug his shoulders and say, “Horrible! Never again!” as if the “disgusting food” and “bloody cold” he had complained about continually were all Quinn’s fault.

Still farther behind, Quinn saw Alan Reid and Nima Sherpa. “Big Al,” as he’d introduced himself, seemed to be hardly moving despite the fact he was the only one of them using bottled oxygen. The heavy, ex-Army Cockney with the “Everest Dream” had talked a good game—in fact he never stopped talking—but he had always been going to struggle; the reason Quinn had assigned the fit young Sherpa to keep a close eye on him.

Quinn had weighed telling Reid to sit out the summit attempt, but with two other team members already calling it quits, Bill Owen, the owner of Snowdonia Ascents, had asked Quinn to give Reid a chance using O’s. “Let’s try and keep the dream alive a little longer, eh, Neil? You never know.” But Quinn did know. He had led many Himalayan climbs, summited Everest one way or another thirteen times, seen and experienced pretty much everything the “death zone” had to offer and then some. Even with supplemental oxygen, Big Al was unlikely to make it. This “stepping-stone” was just too high. In the half-dark that lingered lower down the mountain Quinn watched confirmation of the fact as Reid’s bulky figure crumpled into the snow like a marionette with severed strings. Soon after, Quinn’s radio crackled to life.

He tugged it from his icy breast pocket, holding it close to his face to hear, “Mr. Neil? Nima Sherpa here. Mr. Neil?”

“Go ahead, Nima. Over.”

“Member Al going down . . . I think time now. Necessary.”

“Does he accept? Over.”

“Yes, Mr. Neil.” There was a pause. “He say, he fucking well had enough.”

I bet he has, Quinn thought only to reply, “Okay, Nima. Keep me advised on your descent. Over.”

“Yes, Mr. Neil.”

“Good. Over.”

Quinn put the radio away and looked beyond the knife-edge of the ridge onto a bed of dense cloud, a soft sea of gray that masked the steep gorges below that fell into Nepal in treacherous cascades of broken rock and ice.

A smudge stained the haze.

The shadow darkened as if sucking up all the remaining ashes of the night.

A faceless head grew.

Long limbs extended.

Unasked, Quinn’s hypoxia quick-fired fantastic explanations for the strange black suited figure rising up before him.

Ghost.

Bat.

Vampire.

An iridescent halo began to shine around the towering shadow’s head.

Angel?

At 25,000 feet, understanding arrives like the dawn, slowly and silently. Quinn deliberately raised his right arm and moved it from side to side. The shadow waved back as if sluggishly beckoning him forward into the abyss.

“It’s a Brocken specter,” an internal voice with a refined German accent—another ghost—told Quinn. “Your own reflection cast by the rising sun onto cloud below.”

It was the first time Quinn had seen the phenomenon in all his years of climbing.

He stared at it, thinking, Now you really have seen it all, until, with almost a start, he realized he should try to get some video of it. Flicking off a mitten to hang on its lanyard, he dug deep inside his down suit to pull out his new iPhone. He risked baring his hand farther by taking off his fleece liner glove to clumsily switch it on.

Faintly surprised to see it even worked up there, Quinn took some video of the specter until it vanished, evaporating as quickly and quietly as it had appeared.

Rasmussen arrived alongside Quinn to replace the strange figure. The Norwegian looked equally ghostly. His down jacket, his fleece hat, his ski mask, all were rimed with ice. Only his mouth was uncovered, the yellowed teeth exposed in a tight grimace of exertion that stretched his lips into thin blue rubber bands.

“Did you see it, Tore?” Quinn asked as he tucked away his phone.

“What?” came the gruff reply that set the two icicles hanging from the ends of Rasmussen’s blond mustache trembling.

“The Brocken specter.”

“No. I didn’t, and you didn’t say it would be this cold, Neil Quinn. Really crappy stuff, you know?”

Quinn’s enthusiasm for what he had witnessed couldn’t be punctured. “It was amazing, first time in all my years of climbing. And here? Incredible.”

The icy Norwegian leaned over his long ice axe, looking down at the snow and dragging in deep, shuddering breaths. Finally he turned his frozen face back up at Quinn.

“Don’t be so damn pleased with yourself, Englishman. Where I come from a Brocken specter is an omen . . . an omen of death.”

Without waiting for a reply, Rasmussen resumed his miserable journey up the mountain.