Kampa Dzong, Tsang Province, Tibet
April 15, 1939
3:51 a.m.
Josef retreated into an empty room opposite the latrine, leaving the door slightly ajar to listen for the boy’s return. Sitting there alone in the stink of his filthy crawl into the castle, he tucked his chin down into his chest to evade the vile odor only for his nose to be met by the sour but slightly less offensive smell of the falcon chick he was still holding.
Warily he began to stroke its soft down, alert to the threat of its needle -sharp beak and the small black sickles of its talons. Relaxed and warm, the young bird went to sleep in his hands with a faint, repetitive whistle of slow breathing. Its rhythm settled Josef also. Gently pushing the sleeping chick inside his jacket, he closed it up and dozed lightly himself until disturbed by the patter of the boy’s soft footsteps tripping up and down the corridor. Quietly getting up and reaching out of the door, Josef pulled him into the room. “Ang Noru?” he whispered.
The boy nodded. He pointed back out the door but then down at Josef’s hobnailed boots, making a clicking noise through his teeth as he shook his head from side to side. Understanding, Josef took his boots off and stuffed them into his rucksack alongside the climbing rope, squeezing it tight. When he was positive there were no rattles from within, he put it back on, picked up his ice axe, and gestured for the boy to lead the way.
The fort was a labyrinth of close, dark walls, the air inside stale and musty. Phurbu darted ahead, skirting the sides of each passageway like a rat, stopping at every corner or the slightest hint of a sound. Whenever he sprang forward, Josef almost had to break into a trot to keep up with him. They moved at their quickest when they had to pass through the molten glow of burning butter lamps. Their passing would cause the smokey flames to flicker, bending light and shadow up the walls, momentarily illuminating their ancient painted detail: rolling brown hills stood sentinel before jagged lines of snowcapped mountains; billowing cloud faces with bulging cheeks blew blue lakes into rows of cresting waves shaped like horses’ heads; wide-eyed demons with massive teeth and blood-red curling tongues chased white-faced sahibs down steep hillsides; a huge, silver-haired ape reared up on its hind legs atop a mountain …
The boy stopped at the last one, raised his hands in the air with a quiet growl, and whispered, “Migou,” to Josef as he pointed at the beast.
“Schneemensch,” Josef mouthed in reply, more to himself, before urging the boy onward. Heading ever deeper into the sleeping castle, they came to a set of steep stairs that dropped straight down through the bowels of the building, seemingly continuing into the very rock of the hill. The temperature fell with every step, the cold stone chilling Josef’s stockinged feet. At the last, the boy motioned that they stop. Together they craned their heads around the wall to see a small guardroom, little more than a lobby, lit with more flickering butter lamps. A low corridor beyond was lined on each side with heavyset wooden doorways. The cells.
In the center of the guardroom was a table, to the side a low wooden bunk. At the table, a guard was leaning forward onto his crossed arms. The tall bamboo jug and two rakshi bowls to the side of his head instantly gave Josef hope that the man was in a drunken sleep. In the bunk a second guard most definitely was sleeping, head thrown back, open mouth emitting a guttural snore that ebbed and flowed up and down the stone walls.
With the point of his ice-axe pick, Josef lightly tapped the stone of the staircase wall.
Neither of the guards stirred.
He tapped again.
This time the guard at the table did move to raise his head groggily, look around, and then slump forward onto the table.
Silently pulling out the smallest metal piton he could find in his pocket, Josef also turned his axe around so as to hold it by the neck like a club.
He waited for a few minutes before tossing the piton across the lobby into the cell corridor. The metal nail briefly clattered across the stone floor.
The guard at the table raised his head again, turning to the source of the noise. Slowly he got up and staggered into the corridor.
Josef crossed the lobby behind him in three long yet silent strides to bring the wooden shaft of his axe down heavily on the back of the guard’s neck. The man gave a brief grunt under the force of the blow, falling forward until Josef caught him with his other hand and slowly let him sink to the ground.
Dragging the prostrate guard further along the cell corridor, Josef pulled his rope from his pack and cut three short lengths. He tied the unconscious man’s hands and feet and gagged him with the third piece. Picking up the rest of the rope he returned to the lobby to find the second man still sleeping soundly.
Stepping silently over to the snoring man, he knotted one end of the climbing rope to the end of the bed before weaving it around the frame of the bed and the guard’s ankles, knees, waist, chest, and arms. Leaning over the guard’s snoring face as he worked, Josef smelled the foul alcoholic odor of the man’s breath compete strongly with his own stinking jacket. It made his eyes water.
Tugging the scarf around his neck free to plug the gaping mouth, Josef suddenly felt a point sear into his chest as if the material of the scarf was secured to it by a fishhook. The sharp, slicing pain made Josef jerk forward, involuntarily slamming a hand down onto the sleeping guard to brace himself. The man beneath him instantly awoke. Utterly confused, he emitted a short-lived shout of alarm before Josef could force the scarf into his mouth and pull hard on the rope to clamp the bucking man to the wooden bedframe.
The shooting pains within Josef’s jacket continued from the stabbing beak of the awakened peregrine chick that had remained still and silent during his delicate journey through the castle. Doubling the rope into the hand already pushing the guard’s twisting, thrashing face, he desperately reached inside his coat to pull out the forgotten bird. As he held it away from his body over the wide eyes of the terrified, drunken guard, the hawk squawked and writhed in his hand, pecking furiously at the air, flapping its featherless wings, and clawing at Josef’s wrist with its taloned feet. A squirt of white excrement splashed into the guard’s wild eyes.
The young hawk and the man were squirming so violently, it left Josef with no option but to throw the eyas toward Phurbu, who scooped it up from the stone floor. Both hands now free, the German circled one last loop of rope around the guard’s neck and pulled it tight onto the man’s Adam’s apple. Gagged and immobilized, he could only blink up through soiled eyes at Josef in horror.
Josef searched for keys on both of the bound guards. They weren’t there. He looked back at the boy, who was sitting cross-legged, stroking the bird in silence; he hissed at him to get his attention. When the boy looked up, Josef made a turning motion with his hand.
Phurbu smiled back and, with one hand, pulled a tight bundle of old cloth from inside his jacket. Shaking it open, he triumphantly revealed a ring of keys that he must have taken during his search of the castle for Ang Noru. Josef guessed they had been intended for use as a—now unnecessary—bargaining chip for the hawk. Josef took the keys, running to open the cell that revealed the shadow of Ang Noru through the window of its barred door.
The Sherpa was sleeping on the bare stone floor, oblivious to any commotion. Shaking him awake with a hand over his mouth so that he didn’t cry out, Josef pulled him to his feet. His face scabbed and swollen, Ang Noru started to say, “Sahib Becker, you …” but Josef silenced him and pushed him quickly from the cell. There he gestured for the Sherpa to help him drag the unconscious guard back in.
That done, they returned to the guardroom where Josef pointed to the guard trussed to the bed, saying quietly, “We need the rope that holds that one to descend. We must tie him with something else and then leave them both in the cell.” Finding some lengths of webbing, they retied the guard’s hands, feet, and mouth before releasing the main rope and carrying him immobilized into Ang Noru’s vacant cell. All the time the guard just stared at them in mute terror. They relocked the door and, with Phurbu leading the way, fled back up through the castle to the latrine. One by one they wormed their way down through it and moved back along the ledge to where Josef had set a piton when he first climbed up onto it.
Looping their rope through the eye of the anchor, Josef cast both ends down the cliff face. While he waited for Ang Noru and the boy to climb down the rope to the next small ledge where he had prefixed another piton, a red tinge to the horizon silently announced the new day. Shadowy mountains began to appear in ever-increasing ranks just as he had seen painted on the walls inside the castle. To the east, the way he and Ang Noru had come, their heights were lost in ominous grey cloud. But, to the west, their summits were slowly sharpening against the dawn sky. One summit was higher and, at first, blacker than the rest. The horizontal lines of its snow and rock layers caught the faint rays of light as if the mountain was veined with gold. A great plume of cloud blew back from the peak as if that gold was really fire.
Josef stared at Everest until a tug on the doubled rope told him it was time to come down. Descending, he paused only once, the remaining peregrine chick fluffing itself and pecking at him anew as Josef cast the bundle of cell keys into its lonely nest.