The Second Step, Northeast Ridge, Mount Everest—28,333 feet
May 17, 1939
5:16 p.m.
Josef knew he was finished when he couldn’t untie the knot that linked him to the Sherpa. He tried to squeeze his brain beyond the exhaustion and the numbing cold, ordering it to tell his fingers what to do. They fumbled at the rope, but it was hopeless. It was a knot that he had tied a thousand times. No recall. Gone.
Pushing his freezing hands back into his woolen mittens, Josef lay back, unable to respond to a faint internal command to get up and keep moving. The only thing he could do was slowly tug once more at the rigid rope tied around his middle. The effort to do even that sent him over the edge again. He drifted away to somewhere warmer, easier.
When he returned to the swirling cold of the mountainside, Ang Noru was looking down at him, shaking him gently by the shoulders. The Sherpa’s snow goggles and blackened face beneath were encrusted with ice. His lips were trembling slightly. They moved, but no words came.
Josef pointed to the knot. The Sherpa untied it.
A remote thought reminded Josef of the strip of red tape with which he had marked their exit from the steep step on the way up. After their precarious, desperate struggle to climb up it, he had hammered a piton into the rock, reassuring himself that it would be an easier rappel on the descent, marking the spot for this very moment.
He couldn’t see it anywhere. Pulling his ice-covered snow goggles down around his neck, he looked some more. Nothing. It was difficult to focus his eyes. His sight was going.
Slowly he reached into his wind-jacket pocket and pulled out his last piton. Taking the ice axe, he tried to beat it into the rock, but the side of the axe head continually slipped off the top of the piton. Ang Noru gently took the axe from him and pounded the nail in until it could go no further.
Josef laid back on the freezing rock, resting his head by the piton. His eyes tried to lock on its metal loop projecting from the black stone, the overexposed white snow beyond, but everything was a blur. Pushing his head against some loose snow, he imagined himself crawling into the mountainside, worming his way into the rock like the blade of the piton. It would be safe in there, away from the wind and the cold.
He started to cough again, huge coughs that twisted his body into knots, ripped at his throat, and filled his mouth with blood. With no adrenaline left to dramatize it, no energy to panic about it, Josef finally accepted that he was dying. It was almost a relief. He lay back again and looked up at the fast cloud passing over him. A long time passed before a contradictory urge made him search his pocket for a steel carabiner. Clutching it, he pushed it onto the piton at the fourth attempt.
Rope.
It was there, loose and untied, between him and the Sherpa.
He could see that Ang Noru was also now resting. It made Josef happy to see it. He needed to rest. He had done well. Josef told himself it was time to let the Sherpa go. Ang Noru was stronger. He might still make it down if alone. If he stayed with Josef, he too would surely die. While he looked at the Sherpa’s still body, Josef told himself that he must work a little more, do one last thing, and then it could be finished.
Centimeter by centimeter, he threaded the frozen, coarse rope through the metal loop. When he faintly saw the black tape of the rope’s halfway marker, his instinct pulled the two sides of the rope together. With one hand, he tugged the doubled rope down on the carabiner. The piton that held it didn’t move. It was set into that rock for the next hundred years.
With his feet Josef heel-kicked the rope toward the edge of the cliff. When gravity finally caught it and pulled the coils of rope away from him over the edge, Josef leaned across to pull at the Sherpa’s jacket. It was a shame to wake him, but it was time. Ang Noru awoke as if stuck with a cattle prod. He was on his feet in an instant. With a stream of apologies pouring from his lips, he reached down and pulled Josef up.
It was a hard pull. It told Josef he was right; the Sherpa did still have strength.
Josef unfolded upward from his icy seat, still holding the top of the doubled rope in one hand.
He could stand.
He could do what he had to do.
Josef turned to look back up the mountain and stepped over the double rope that hung over the cliff. From behind him he pulled a reluctant, heavy loop of it up and around his right hip and over his left shoulder. Pushing his ice axe back into the straps of his rucksack, he grasped the rope in front of him with his left mitten and the rear of the rope with his right.
Taking one last look at the Sherpa, he began to walk backward.
At the cliff’s very edge, he stopped, leaning back over the huge void below. The rope that snaked around his body dug into his thick clothes as it took the strain. He thought for a moment about Magda and then told himself to count to nine and let go.
He knew only one of the Jews’ names, but he remembered each of their faces as he took those last nine steps down the cliff. He saved the name he had for his ninth, final step, whispering, “Ilsa” as he released the rope.
He thought he would fall forever, but the drop lasted only a few seconds.
The sudden impact with the rocky ledge below snapped the bones of his lower left leg. The excruciating pain, the outline of the limb, his limb, bent strangely inward at the ankle, told him it was broken. A thought, It’s going to be much slower than you imagined, grew from the agony.
Using his ice axe, Josef dragged himself into the little alcove that led off the ledge. Slipping out of his pack and pushing it to the side, he pulled himself around and up against the far wall. Leaning back he let the cold numb his pain, diverting his mind by replaying the climb, reversing it all the way back down to their surprising release from the valley camp. He heard again the British officer saying, “We will have to make it look like you both overpowered me when you were under my charge. The Gurkhas are honest, loyal men. I do not want to make them complicit in anything that might prejudice their futures, whatever it may do to my own.”
The crunching sound of Ang Noru dropping from the rope onto the lip of the cave pierced the shadows within.
On seeing his horribly twisted leg, the Sherpa instantly ducked inside to crouch alongside the German, trying to tend to it.
Josef pushed him away.
“Go down while you still can.”
“No,” came the refusal.
Lifting his axe by the head with his right hand, Josef pushed at the Sherpa with the spiked end.
“Go away. It’s over.”
The Sherpa easily pushed the axe’s shaft away with a hand and stared at Josef, speechless.
“It’s all right, my friend. You must go. Someone has to tell of what we have done. I’ll rest here.”
The Sherpa hesitated.
“Go, please.”
Ang Noru leaned forward to briefly touch his forehead to the side of Josef’s head. As he did so, Josef heard him say only one word.
The Sherpa turned and left the small cave. Alone now, Josef tried to recall what the Sherpa had said but couldn’t. It had gone with him. He remembered instead, for a moment, that there was something more that he should have given him, to take down, but that thought also dissolved, still incomplete.
He laid his ice axe down alongside his body. Its small flag was missing. It must have been torn away in the fall.
As he leaned once more against the cold stone of the cave, riding new waves of pain from his leg, he imagined that little flag caught by the wind, twisting and spiraling as it was blown away from the mountain. He flew with it into the air, back over the hills, over Tibet, Sikkim, India, the oceans, until they arrived at other hills, softer and greener. He wondered if Magda could see them as they flew.
I’m sorry.
A sudden fit of bloody coughing dragged Josef back down into the dark of the small cave. The walls around him closed in. He thought that the English army officer was actually there now, talking to him as he had for those hours before Ang Noru returned without the Tibetan. His final words to Josef filled the cave. “No man has the right to deny the destiny of another, whatever his masters might command. True honor is much more than blind loyalty. Good luck.”
He must have fallen unconscious for a while. When Josef came to, he couldn’t feel his broken leg anymore, only an intense heat burning inside his chest, violent like sodium reacting to water. Compelled to put out the fire, he forced the neck of his jacket open, pulling at the silk kata scarf within. He tugged the scarf away with his left hand and held it tight in his mittened fingers. He pulled it up to his face and held it over his eyes, catching a glimpse once more of the old abbot placing it over his neck before he set off, hearing again the mumble of his blessings, understanding again what he wanted him to do, acknowledging again that it was what he knew he should do all along.
A great weight bore down on him. It pushed his head forward, down into the opening of his jacket.
Josef felt his chin touch the top of the camera still hung around his neck.
He recalled what it was that he should have given Ang Noru.
It was too late now.
Tilting his head back up, he stared out at the faint white blur that was all that was now left of his world beyond the cave.
What was it the Sherpa had said?
Josef mouthed the word as he closed his eyes one last time.
“Summit.”