Using the long ice axe as a walking stick, Quinn gradually left the battleground behind. A canopy of bright stars now filled the night sky curving over him and, although even colder, there was not the slightest breeze to carry away the intensifying noise from the summit party in the other, distant mess tent. It was still in full swing, probably recently reinvigorated by news of the fight in the No Horizons Tent. Everest Base Camp thrived on two things: summits and gossip.
The cut on his cheek stinging, Quinn stopped, trying to shake off the pain and the shock of Sarron’s attack. He had always heard that the guy was difficult, a tough guy, a bit of a crook even, but there were many of those on Everest and he had worked well with a lot of them. Even when people had particularly warned him about Sarron he had thought that he could deal with pretty much anyone. But he couldn’t handle this guy. He was absolutely crazy.
But isn’t it really your own hubris that walked you into this nightmare?
Quinn knew it was. He had told himself that after eight summits he had Everest’s number, that he could get a sixteen-year-old boy up and down it, even when inside he had serious reservations about getting involved with such a young client.
And yes, it was also about the money.
The expedition company that originally booked him for 2009 had folded just a few months before the season began. When he had made it known to the other outfits he was available, he thought he’d already missed out for that year, but almost immediately Sarron had jumped at the chance of hiring him. Quinn had actually been slightly flattered that the Frenchman had been so keen. Like him or not, Sarron was an important player on the mountain and the fact that he was also offering to pay him twenty thousand dollars to be the head guide, more than he was usually paid, with a bonus of another ten thousand if one client in particular was successful, made it better still. Until that season Quinn had always accepted that he was never going to be paid enough for the task of guiding on Everest. It hadn’t mattered. He made up the shortfall in his wallet in his head, with thoughts that April and May were lean months elsewhere in the mountains and that he would be doing what he loved on the greatest mountain in the world. Yes, it was true. The combination of his hubris and Sarron’s—or should he say, Tate Senior’s money—had pushed his normal standards aside.
Unscrewing the cap of the whiskey bottle, he took yet another long swig, letting it burn, hurt even. When he pulled the bottle back down, he noticed the music from the party again. An older rock song was playing. It was called “Photograph.”
Of course it was.
The word immediately took him back to those chaotic moments on the summit with Dawa and the boy—dangerous, absurd, little more than a soulless business transaction.
All for a bloody photograph.
Quinn was still surprised and disgusted with himself that he had gone along with it. With everything that had happened since, the fact that he hadn’t even looked at his camera put the futility of that summit photo into even greater context.
But why am I so surprised?
One way or the other, it was always about a photograph.
Even for him.
A photograph had brought him to that place, to mountaineering, in fact.
Standing there, alone in the cold, drinking more whiskey, he recalled the tall-ceilinged school library where he had first seen the fateful picture. In the beginning that library had just been a place of sanctuary, a book-lined alternative to the hard walls and fickle Lord of the Flies atmosphere that otherwise pervaded the old English boarding school he was sent to at seven years old. He would hide inside its realm of utter silence, forensically working his way through the literary fads of young boys in the ’70s: hand-me-down paperbacks by men like Dennis Wheatley, James Herbert, Sven Hassel, Erich von Däniken, that weren’t even to be found on the library’s shelves but bartered and borrowed in the dangerous corridors outside.
Whenever he finished his latest contraband text, he would be drawn to the rows of National Geographic that blocked a wall of shelves with decades of fading yellow.
Those compact, solid journals soon became his reason to visit the library. Quinn would study them for hours, diving into the rich, glossy photographs and reading the elegant descriptions. He let them transport him far from that place, to the top, the bottom, the hottest, the coldest, the wettest, the driest, even the nothingness of outer space. He didn’t know it then, but those magazines ignited a wanderlust that would never leave him, a desire for adventure that could never be satisfied, however much he tried.
One image appeared often. It was the perfect photograph, one of the most famous of the twentieth century. Every time he came across it, it would hold him transfixed within its sublime instant. The picture showed a man in an almost jaunty “one foot up, one foot down” pose, as if triumphantly stepping onto the shoulder of some huge beast he had hunted for years and finally felled with the perfect shot. A tight snow pyramid beneath his feet cascaded down like newly opened champagne. To each side of its sloping, white shoulders, a distant horizon was lined with the tops of other mighty, yet clearly lower, mountains. It was unequivocally the “top of the world.”
The climber, standing in the photograph’s center, was completely swaddled in thick, gaitered boots, bulky grey trousers, and an all-covering navy blue parka. His face was masked and hidden, but the oxygen mask and dark goggles seemed to disappear the more you looked, until it revealed a white-toothed smile of utter joy. Above, reaching up into a clear yet darkening sky, was an ice axe raised in triumph. A number of flags were attached, mostly hidden behind the axe’s shaft, being torn back and away from the photographer by what must actually have been a violent, constant wind—the only clue in the photograph that the conditions were anything less than perfectly serene.
Only one flag was clearly visible: the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack. It branded the photo, soaring away from the fact that neither the person bearing the axe, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, nor the person so expertly using the camera, Sir Edmund Hillary, was actually British. It overpowered such details with the weight of its history to shout, “Great Britain, first to the summit of Mount Everest, May 29, 1953.” Even a young boy could see that the Britain that now lay outside his school gates was no longer great. It made crappy cars and put up ugly concrete tower blocks. It went on strike continually and sent its once-glorious soldiers no further than Northern Ireland, where they were reviled and executed by the Provisional IRA under a continual grey rain. But to young Quinn that Everest summit photo was British, and it was great. It made him believe in his country and also a little in himself as he wondered if, just maybe, one day he too could accomplish such a fantastic feat.
That famous photograph quickly directed him to the dry explanation of John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest and then accompanied him onward to many other mountains through the vivid translations of Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, Hermann Buhl’s Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage, Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider. It even pushed him out of the library to pull him eight feet up onto the top of the wooden wainscoting that ran around the inside of the old, exposed walls of the gymnasium. Once there, it left him all alone to the backbeat of a thumping heart, dry-mouthed with vertigo, edging breathlessly along its two-inch-wide lip, knees trembling, small fingers continually searching for handholds within the rough-shaped stones and crumbling mortar. The first time he completed a lap of the entire gymnasium, he shouted with joy, feeling taller and stronger when he climbed down. He never stopped climbing back up, higher and higher, until in the end he turned his back on all the privilege and security his expensive education could have provided and headed for the hills instead.
Quinn lifted up the old axe that Dawa had returned to him. It was almost identical to the one he remembered in that original photo. It felt balanced in his hand yet so heavy when compared to the smaller, modern axes made of titanium and carbon fiber they now used. As he looked at it, the whiskey suggested to him that it could indeed be the very axe that Tenzing had raised that fine day. It was that vintage, maybe even older. In different circumstances he would have considered it to be a good find. He often came across old equipment high up on Everest. Most of it was junk really, bits of old canvas, tent pegs, tin cans, discarded pitons, once a hammer, but rarely something interesting, something like this. Only one other time had he found something its equal when he stumbled across a discarded brass oxygen cylinder from one of the British climbs of the thirties. He had transported that cylinder all the way back to England as a souvenir, despite the fact that it was desperately heavy, only to reluctantly later sell it on eBay for twelve hundred pounds to a collector in Germany. He had been sad to let it go, but, as always, money was tighter than sentiment.
Increasingly chilled by the cold, Quinn let the axe fall and returned to the small tent that had been his Base Camp home for the past six weeks. Nearing it, he passed through the harsh, acrid smoke of a yakherder’s dry-dung campfire. Sat around the glowing embers were four hooded shadows, pushing themselves in close for warmth. One of them looked up and nodded at Quinn. It wasn’t a Tibetan. It was Lhakpa Sherpa. “Don’t worry, Mr. Neil. We take turns. Watch for Sarron. You sleep easy. Need rest. All better in the morning.”
Unzipping his tent, Quinn pushed the ice axe and then his pack inside before reaching for a small gas lamp, which he lit. Once he had crawled in also, he collapsed onto his sleeping bag for a few minutes to recover. Then, putting the old ice axe inside the biggest of the two kit bags at the back of his tent, he told himself to start repacking the rest of his gear for the long journey back to Kathmandu. But it was too cold; he was too tired. He’d do it tomorrow.
Instead, he pulled his sleeping bag around his shoulders and sipped more of the whiskey from the bottle. He’d drunk enough to no longer feel the pain it caused his split lips and sore throat, the sharp heat loosening his tired mind instead. The song “Photograph” was still caught in it, looping relentlessly. He drank to its beat.
Photograph.
Photograph.
Photograph.
He told himself not to do it but he did.
Reaching into his pack, he pulled out his camera and, from his kit bag, another battery pack. With fumbling, cold-deadened fingers, he put the charged battery into the camera and turned it on.
Neil Quinn began to scroll through the pictures it contained, following the one-way journey a sixteen-year-old boy had made to the roof of the world.
No amount of whiskey could help him after that.