Between the First and Second Steps,
Northeast Ridge, Mount Everest—28,090 feet
May 16, 2010
11:53 a.m.
With each pull of his straining lungs, Quinn bitterly contemplated the godless air burial he had just heard. Stevens’ cleanup operation was complete. Even the smallest of blasts would have amplified within that rocky hollow to eject the body out into the void, the burst of explosives scouring the alcove clean of its seventy-year secret in an instant. If it hadn’t been shattered by the blast, then it would have been by the contact it made with the sharp rocks on the long, long fall to the glacier below.
His breath steadying, Quinn told himself to put it all from his mind, to get going. It was too cold to wait any longer. The wind had increased dramatically. It was now barreling up the face, ripping and tearing at him. As far as he was concerned, Stevens could fend for himself. Setting off along the exposed traverse that led back to the ridgeline, Quinn hunched forward, forcing each leaden step, bracing his body against relentless punches from the fierce gusts that began to bring flurries of snow. His visibility soon dropped to only a few yards, making him search for the remnants of old fixed ropes in the snow and rocks at his feet to find the way.
With every new step, he bargained with the mountain, pleading for a release from the elemental beating. Validating the offers he was making, Quinn mentally removed the collector’s camera from inside his chest pocket and wove complex, improbable scenarios of when and where he would swap it for the one now in Stevens’ pack. He settled on the fact that they would both be exhausted when they made it back to the High Camp. Even Stevens would have to sleep at some point. He would switch it then. It had to be done, whatever the risks. It was the only pledge he could offer the mountain in exchange for his deliverance—a deliverance he wasn’t sure he deserved.
Back up on the ridge, the wind was launching itself over the edge to twist and boil above the ten-thousand-foot drop straight down to the Kangshung Glacier below. One of the gusts was so strong it forced Quinn to fall onto all fours to prevent himself from being blown off the ridge. On his hands and knees, he clipped his fate into a blue nylon rope that led across the ridgeline. It looked the most recent of the tangle that lined the way. It was the only thing he could do.
In a stuttering stop and go, he began to follow its line, making his precarious way along the upper edge of the mountain. A bulb of dark rock began to fleetingly appear before him through the streaking snow and cloud. Quinn knew it was Mushroom Rock, the unusual three-foot-high formation that stood proud on the crest of that part of the ridge. The sight brought some mental relief from the weather’s assault. They had cached extra oxygen beneath it on the way up. His current cylinder would be nearly empty by now and the thought of the additional oxygen was a comfort, pulling him onward. It would make him warmer and help him to move down faster. He could even permit himself the luxury of a few minutes’ rest at four-liters-per-minute flow, double what he had been using all day, a much-needed boost to continue the treacherous descent.
Quinn dug deeply as he approached the bulb of rock, jamming his feet hard into the top of the mountain ridge, leaning his left shoulder out into the wind, occasionally having to tug the old rope he was following up and out of the snow to move his carabiner along it. Constantly working his fingers inside his down mittens and wiggling his cramped toes inside his double boots, he desperately tried to keep his weakened circulation moving to his extremities and stop the extreme cold from freezing them. When his goggles began to catch big snowflakes that congealed around the frames, he swiped them away to keep sight of that blue rope. It led the way to his survival.
With some relief, Quinn finally arrived at the rock to huddle down next to it, needing to recover from that last push through the fierce weather before he could do anything more. Feeling the hard rocks jabbing through the knees of his suit, their rough edges digging into his patellae, he was, at first, too tired to even alter his position. Wiping his ski goggles again with the back of his gloved hand, he twisted his head to search the base of the rocky projection for the two oxygen cylinders that they had left there on the way up. Orange and marked with two big black X’s, he told himself that they would be easy to find.
But, in those conditions, they weren’t. Unable to see them, Quinn pulled up the goggles, squeezing his eyes against the icy blast to peer into the grey and white, desperate for a glimpse of orange. With his gloved hand, he probed in vain at a small mound of snow that had built up on the lee side of the column of rock even if he knew already that it was too small to be hiding them, that they hadn’t even put them there. Quinn pulled his goggles back down with the realization that the cylinders had been taken. He recalled Stevens lagging behind him on the way up.
Did he move them to be able to control their descent?
Quinn wasn’t in a position to wait to find out, determined not to if that really was Stevens’ intention. Getting back onto his feet, he resumed his weary trek along the ridge, his experience telling him that he must push as hard as he could to try and get down over the First Step and past Green Boots Cave before his existing bottle gave out.
He did make it to the First Step.
Slowly climbing down the steep rocks, it was almost as if he could feel his oxygen flow gradually dwindle and then cease. He fought on, regardless. Green Boots Cave, Green Boots Cave, he started to repeat over and over in his head. It was the next identifiable feature of his path to safety, that rocky overhang that housed the body of a dead Indian climber whose green plastic Koflach boots still projected out for everyone passing to see. From there it would be on to the Exit Cracks. There the route turned down the face. Gravity would help pull him still lower through the yellow rocks of the Yellow Band and down to the High Camp.
Feeling his way along a low wall of rock like a blind man, his useless oxygen mask angrily pulled down from his mouth as if it was somehow to blame for his predicament, Quinn was slow to realize that he had made it to his first objective. He was even slower to notice the masked figure in the black down suit approaching him through the swirling snow. When it finally registered, he straightened up to see that the other climber was holding an orange oxygen bottle out to him, two black X’s on its side.
I have to have it.
Quinn stretched forward to take it, the cylinder his only desperate thought, no sense of awareness left for the second black shape uncoiling itself from beneath the overhang and rising up behind him.
Standing tall, the second figure raised the other double-X oxygen cylinder. It arced down onto the back of Quinn’s neck, the Englishman going down like a felled tree, oblivious to the cause of his collapse.