The Khumbu Hotel, Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal
June 5, 2009
2:35 p.m.
Entering the Khumbu Hotel, Quinn was quickly pulled aside by the doorman who said breathlessly, “Mr. Neil, you must watch out, sir. Two men looking for you this morning. I say you not here, not know where you are. They are bad men, Mr. Neil, very bad men. The type that is fucking the mother.”
Quinn was more amused by the man’s anxious turn of phrase than concerned about his visitors as he bumped into Ross MacGregor and Yves Durrand walking out. With a slightly apologetic look, Durrand said, “Neil, I know things are not great, but we’re on our way home tomorrow, so would you have a drink with us later? I’ve got a table at the Rum Doodle booked for eight. Some of the Sherps will be there too. I told Dawa this morning when he brought round the other bags. Despite everything, it would still be nice to get together one last time, and we must give the Sherpas their tips if Sarron is not going to be paying them anything.”
Quinn was in no mood to party, but he liked the Scotsman and the Swiss and he needed to catch up with Dawa and Pemba, particularly as Henrietta was going to be speaking to them, so he agreed. Back up in his hotel room, he tried to take a nap. Despite being still exhausted from the climb and additionally drained by Henrietta Richards’ interview, he could only sleep fitfully, a staccato of bad dreams pushing him repeatedly back to wakefulness. In the end, he resigned himself to just lying there and resting. After a while he couldn’t even do that.
He picked up Henrietta’s book that she had insisted he take with him and turned to the section about George Leigh Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine’s final attempt on the summit in 1924. He already knew well the story of how the two climbers had set off one last time for the summit and never returned, leaving the world guessing whether they actually summited before they died, making it to the top of Everest nearly thirty years before Hillary and Tenzing. He was also aware of the search for their bodies, motivated by the thought that one of them might still bear the borrowed Kodak Vest Pocket camera that they took with them, the hope being that frozen within would be undeveloped film that might finally reveal the truth of the greatest climbing mystery once and for all.
In her book Henrietta had thoroughly assembled all the known facts, including the details of Irvine’s ice axe being found in 1933 and then Mallory’s body in 1999. Mallory’s axe and Irvine’s body were still missing and, unlikely as it seemed, it did make Quinn wonder about the old axe that Dawa had returned to him. He got up and pulled it from his dusty duffel bag. Taking a facecloth and a glass of water from the bathroom, he started to clean and, for the first time, study the axe seriously.
It was slightly more than thirty inches long. The shaft was ash, the wood still tight, light tan in color, crosshatched with black grain lines, varnished with age. Only in one place, near the bottom, was it damaged, the wood pockmarked and gouged as if a wild animal had chewed it. On one side, near the head of the axe, he saw that the wooden shaft bore the faint stencil mark of two numbers:
99
On the other side, he made out a rougher carving of two capital letters, lightly cut into the wood, trying for a Gothic elegance yet slightly irregular and amateur: