The Summit of Mount Everest—29,029 feet
May 17, 2010
9:30 a.m.
The five Sherpas coming up from the south side were jubilant. After the storm of the previous day, it was a perfect morning and their work of fixing the ropes along the Knife-Edge Ridge and up the famous Hillary Step had gone quickly and well despite the new snow. It was an unspoken privilege of preparing the route to the top that the Sherpas summited first, before any of the foreign climbers, and the Mother Goddess was showing her approval of the correct natural order by rewarding them with a beautiful day.
Traversing the slow diagonal from the top of the Hillary Step, the summit mound finally appeared. The Sherpas were extremely surprised, a little shocked even, to see a climber already sitting there, totally still, alone in the morning brightness on the top of the world. Approaching, they thought, at first, that the figure was dead, a forgotten corpse from the season before. But as they got closer, they saw the man was alive.
Kneeling around him, they peered at his broken and cut face. With a sense of horror, they remarked on the streaks of blood and ice that covered his suit.
The man did not move. He made no acknowledgement of their arrival.
Seeing that the figure lacked an oxygen system, one of the Sherpas unclipped his mask and, dialing up the regulator, passed the mask to the man. He very slowly took hold of it. The Sherpas would say later that he seemed to offer it to other invisible figures on either side of him before pushing it onto his own face. They thought, at the time, that the man was very close to the end, that his mind was gone.
For fifteen minutes he sat there, silently breathing the oxygen.
Another of the Sherpas then passed him a flask of warm tea. Again he appeared to offer it to others, invisible to the Sherpas but real to him, before drinking from it himself.
More time passed.
The Sherpas waited, not sure what to do next. They had to descend soon.
Finally, Neil Quinn beckoned the nearest Sherpa close to his face. He paused, looked from side to side, and then whispered through broken lips, “It’s only me now. I think I should go down with you. But first I need to find my ice axe. I left it here last year.”