87

The North Col, Mount Everest—23,600 feet

May 9, 1939

7:50 p.m.

For three full days Josef and Ang Noru slaved to make a route up the steep snow face to the North Col, cutting steps into the steepest ice with their axes and fixing rope along the most exposed sections. When it was finally complete, they ascended twice from their glacier camp with supplies and equipment, putting up two tents on the high col, much as they had on the Zemu. One tent they filled with supplies; the other was for themselves. Now huddled inside it on the evening of their second carry, they debated whether they should make a third. Ang Noru was in favor, but Josef disagreed. He could feel how much each round trip up the massive snow face was wearing him down. They had enough already for a push to the top. It would be lightweight, desperate even, but it was always going to be like that. They had to go for it while he still could.

They left at daybreak carrying everything they thought they would need to get to the top. Despite their heavy burdens, they made good progress across the snowy saddle of the col and onto the never-ending white crest that led to the rising black layers of rock beyond.

The day awoke bright and clear, but soon a haze veiled the sun, and fuller, thicker clouds began to rise up, their edges laced with hints of color, changing from yellow to orange to brown. The wind steadily increased as they struggled on, bowed under their packs, huddling into their thick clothes for warmth as the temperature plummeted.

Before long the cloud had thickened still further to become a grey-purple conveyor belt that drove relentlessly over them, completely blocking the upper part of the mountain from their view. When it started to lash them from the side with thick snow, they had no alternative but to turn around.

Descending through the worsening conditions, Josef’s curses were insulated within the scarf that wrapped his face. His tired legs plunged into the ever-deepening snow, Ang Noru always two steps behind, until they made it back to their camp, where the pair dragged themselves inside their tiny tent. Ice-bound and exhausted as the storm raged around them, they lay there, unable to move, their world reduced to the drilling sound of flapping canvas, the numbing cold, and flurries of windblown snow that built up around them however much they tried to keep it out of the tent.

When the dark of the night began to close in, they reluctantly pulled themselves from the shelter of the tent to lash ropes over it to prevent it from being blown away. Then they collapsed the storage tent down on itself, weighting it with blocks of ice. Returning inside their pathetic canvas refuge, they wedged themselves against its sides, accepting that all they could do was shiver, endure, and hope that the little tent wasn’t going to be blown off the ridge.

The raging storm continued on through that night and all the next day. Their extremities lost all feelings from the cold. They used every bit of energy they had to boil snow into water and make tea. They picked at dry food. They stopped talking, each retreating into his own frozen hell, hoping only for salvation from the weather.

During their second night, Josef told Ang Noru that, whatever the conditions, they must try to break out of that place in the morning or they would surely both die there. Josef had to get the Sherpa off the mountain if he could.

Digging up and out of the tent’s entrance as the sun was rising, they saw that the wind was still pushing over the col, but the snow had stopped. The cloud looked a little brighter, as if better weather might be following it. They prepared themselves to leave, slowly, methodically, as if the act of kitting up momentarily reprieved them from their desperate predicament. Finally, they tied themselves together with a rope, silently accepting they were bound to the same fate, whatever their attempt at survival would provide.

Pushing themselves out of the tent, almost completely submerged by new snow, they stood in a white world without horizon. A hunched reading from Josef’s small brass compass offered their only clue to direction.

Josef waded ahead through the snow following the trembling bearing to the tip of a tent pole tied with red tape they had used to mark the end of the rope fixed up the long exit gully.

Stabbing his ice axe down and working it around to make a hole, Josef finally saw the frozen, matted line of hemp within. He tugged it repeatedly upward, the rope slicing up through the soft snow, finally breaking through the white waves like a whale breaching.

Together they followed the rope down over the edge, gripping it tightly as they floundered and slid in the deep powder that now filled the path they had cut. Spindrifts of loose ice blew down on them. Occasionally the snow beneath their crampons broke away altogether to leave them hanging on to the rope, struggling to hold themselves against the soft side of the mountain as it crumbled beneath their desperate feet.

At the end of the fixed rope, they dropped out of the cloud to see what they had both already silently anticipated. Their painfully prepared trail down the immense ice face was gone. Josef, refusing to be defeated, immediately started breaking a new path.

They had completed seven rope lengths when they both heard a “crack” like a rifle shot. After a moment’s hesitation, the whole slope started to slip with a growing roar.

Josef and Ang Noru were plucked from the hillside.

Accelerating downward, the snow beneath them began to fold and break, sucking them in.

Josef lost sight of Ang Noru.

He couldn’t breathe.

Instinct said, Twist your body over onto your front.

He tried once.

Twice.

Each time he was wrenched back by the snow.

With one last lunge, Josef made the move stick, digging the head of his axe downward and automatically lifting his toes up and back so that his crampon spikes didn’t catch and flip him down the face into a cartwheel that would never stop.

But still he continued to fall, the axe’s pick slicing through the snow beneath him, refusing to bite.

More snow pushed down on him from above, heavy like wet cement.

For a few seconds, he was able to push his head up, spit snow, and gulp a breath.

Another even stronger wave of snow crashed down on him, forcing him back under.

The axe’s pick scythed beneath him.

A flashed image of Kurt appeared.

He shook his head at Josef and released his grip from the roof once more.

The thought told Josef to surrender to the inevitable.

He commanded his frozen fingers to open and release the axe as he asked himself if Ang Noru was already dead …

His frozen fingers ignored the order, remaining locked tight on the axe head.

The pressure was becoming unbearable; his mind faded to black amidst the white that was crushing him.

Josef came to with Ang Noru, looking like some form of snow monster, digging the snow from his face and desperately shouting his name.

One of his hands was still clutching his ice axe, the pick caught in a loop of old rope pulled from deep within the snow and ice of the face—a remnant of a previous expedition long frozen into the side of the mountain.

Worming his way out of the broken snow, shocked and shivering, Josef looked up to see a trace of blue through the clouds above. Below, a new, perfectly white cloud bloomed from the valley as the avalanche hit the floor.