Two All-Action Adventures

Adrenalin filled my tired limbs, I just longed now to see the Col. Two hundred metres of clambering over the shingly, black rocks and the saddle appeared. I knew at once that this was it.

The South Col is a vast rocky area, the size of four rugby pitches, strewn with the remnants of old expeditions that had been here. Empty oxygen canisters lay scattered about randomly; they told a hundred tales. It was here that in 1996, in the fury of the storm, men and women had struggled to find their tents. Few had managed. Their bodies lay within metres of the flat area, many of them now partially buried beneath ice and rock. It was a sombre place; a place where many now rested eternally. A grave that many of their families could never visit.

People talk of rubbish dumped at the Col; it is a false image. The vastness and desolation of this wild, windswept place dwarfs the few items left here. The fragments of old tents and canisters were never left intentionally, they were left in desperation. They were the only marks of men and women who had struggled frantically to save their own lives. There was an eeriness to it all.

My impression of the Col was one of isolation. It was a place unvisited by all but those strong enough to reach it. No helicopters can reach above Camp One at the highest, let alone up here. No amount of money or technology can put a man here; only a man’s spirit could do that. I stood motionless as I surveyed the place. The wind blew in gusts over the lip of the Col and ruffled the torn canvas of the wrecked tents. A sense of excitement swept over me. I gazed in disbelief.

Two tents, one from the Singapore expedition and the other belonging to Bernardo, stood alone in the middle of the Col. Both groups had come up the day before. The tents were now empty. The two Singapore climbers and Bernardo were somewhere above us. I wondered what they were going through right now. I thought of the Singaporean leader still at Camp Two. He would be willing his team-mates on. The whole of Singapore awaited news of this attempt. I hoped they had succeeded.

We had agreed beforehand to share Bernardo’s tent. I found it and climbed in slowly. At this height everything happens in a strange form of slow motion. The effect of the thin air makes people move like spacemen. Slowly and deliberately I shifted inside and removed my pack and oxygen tank. I’ll lie down for a second, I thought. I fell back in a heap.

I was woken suddenly by the sound of Bernardo returning. I still had my pack on. I sat up wearily as he peered into his tent. He smiled, his face looked tired but radiant. I didn’t have to ask if he had reached the summit, his eyes said it all.

‘Beautiful, Oso. Beautiful.’ Bernardo repeated the words again and again, in a dreamy voice. I admired his strength. He had done it. We huddled together in the tent. He seemed so alive. Much more so than me. I smiled at the thought.

The two Singapore climbers also returned. They too had been successful. I tried to imagine the jubilation of the rest of their team back at Base Camp. Soon Singapore would be celebrating the country’s first ascent and rightly so; these two climbers had risked and given their all. They collapsed in their tents. Unlike Bernardo, their exhaustion was written all over them as they literally staggered the last few yards to their tent and disappeared. They would leave the South Col tomorrow; a triumphant, drained pair.

Bernardo stayed twenty minutes with me and then left. Adrenalin was carrying him. He wanted to return to Camp Two that afternoon. Only a man like Bernardo, born and bred in the Andes, a climber and guide all his life, with two previous attempts on Everest behind him, could do this. He left the tent with a big smile.

‘It’s all yours, Oso. Vaya con Dios.’ The same words he had said almost six weeks earlier.

Two hours later Neil and Allen arrived. They had overtaken Geoffrey and Michael. The stronger seemed to be shining now. Neil shook my arm excitedly. We were here at the Col together. That togetherness gave me strength.

Geoffrey and Michael also soon arrived with four Sherpas. Three of them would climb with us to the summit, and one would come with us as far as the Balcony Ledge. They would help us take a spare oxygen canister up to this point. There, we would need to replace our canisters with a fresh tank for the final part of the summit bid. The plan was that this fresh tank would last all the way to the summit and back to the Balcony. As we then came down, with our tanks getting low after ten hours’ use, we would be able to collect our half-empty ones previously cached at the Balcony, and carry on down the last leg to Camp Four. It didn’t leave much margin for error.

As they arrived they informed me that Graham, an Everest summiteer in his own right, had turned round 300 feet above Camp Three. He had felt too weakened by the illness that we had both had, and knew from experience that he would never have the energy to reach the summit. He had headed down after Carla, dejected. He had given so much. But it wasn’t his time.

We both had the same illness, but somehow I was still here. What did he know about the next stage, that I didn’t? I pushed the thought aside and helped to put up another tent.

The Col is a deathly place, where humans are not meant to survive. The thin air that I felt, as I removed my mask in a bid to conserve oxygen, seemed to burn my lungs like frozen fire. At this height the human body begins to deteriorate fast. It cannot recover, but instead begins to eat into its own muscle and bone in a struggle to survive. You cannot digest food and the clock continually ticks away.

We struggled frantically to erect two more tents. The weather was worsening and we needed shelter fast.

We pulled a tent from its stuff-sack and tried to pin it down. The wind ripped it from our groping hands and the material flapped wildly as we tried to contain it. In the confusion of wind and high altitude, what should have taken us minutes to put up, actually took us an hour and ten minutes. We got colder and more irritated as we tried to force wrong poles into the wrong slots. We had done it a thousand times, we could do it blindfolded, yet here we were floundering like drunks trying to get a tent up. My hands were getting bitterly cold.

As we finally secured the last corner with a pile of black slab rock, the wind was roaring ferociously. A 70 m.p.h. gale was driving the clouds over the lip of the Col towards us. We huddled in the tents and waited. Waited for night to come.

Michael, Allen and Geoffrey were in one of the larger tents, and the Sherpas were in the other. Neil and I made do with the one-man tent that Bernardo had left. We had struggled to squeeze into it, and all our kit was piled up at the windward end. The tent was missing its outer skin, and the inner had several gaping holes through which the wind raced. I tried to block them with my rucksack. The wind just whistled instead. I wriggled in an attempt to stretch my legs. We would have about nine hours to wait like this before we would leave.

We slowly began to settle down to the odious, but essential, task of melting ice. At this height the gas burns at a much lower temperature. What took a long time before, now seemed to take for ever. Physiologically it is almost impossible to drink fast enough to stay hydrated in the Death Zone; but when it takes two hours to boil a small pot between two, the task of replenishing ever diminishing fluid levels becomes a losing battle. We thirstily sipped at the mug of hot water. What had taken so long to produce seemed to vanish in a minute. Restlessly, we began again.

We had to be hydrated to stand a chance of surviving a period of seventeen hours of extreme climbing in the Death Zone. During that time, eating or even drinking would not be possible. Two pairs of inners and then a huge pair of outer mitts ensured that fumbling for a nibble of anything was impossible.

As for drinking, I knew that our waterbottles, however hot when we started, and wherever they are kept, would be frozen in half an hour in these temperatures. Putting them down your front was now pointless as they would be far too inaccessible. Windsuit, down suit, then fleece, made certain of this. Up here, every bit of warm kit we carried would be worn. Fully clothed, one looks like something between an astronaut and a fighter pilot as you stagger clumsily about. Nothing up here is easy. But despite the inability to drink, still people carried one or even two waterbottles. It was force of habit. They would both quickly freeze but they are a security that no climber can comfortably leave behind.

Sitting in the tents awaiting nightfall, I felt this deep sense of impending doom. I was already exhausted and dozy from the altitude. The thought of seventeen hours, the longest marathon of my life, weighed down by heavy oxygen tanks, terrified me. I didn’t feel strong enough. I lay there waiting, more scared of the night ahead than I had ever been.

I knew that all our hard work was for this next twenty-four hours, but still I just wished it would pass away. I tried to convince myself of all that lay the other side of it. Home, families . . . Shara; but even all my memories seemed strangely distant up here. Maybe they felt the same about me. I wondered who really cared right now. I reached for my mask and breathed slowly. I would allow myself five minutes breathing on it. It would be no use reaching nightfall and having no energy to move. I gave myself this treat every half-hour or so.

The lethargy one feels at this height is extraordinary. The lack of oxygen slows the body down to a crawl. Laziness just fills your limbs. You just can’t be bothered. Just don’t care. That’s the danger of this place, it creates a blind nonchalance. It took me ten minutes to turn over and reach to my left to get my pee-bottle and urinate. Everything was in slow motion. My urine came out a deep dark brown. Neil chuckled. It meant that I was losing our competition over who could rehydrate the fastest. I was still severely dehydrated and we hadn’t even begun. I grinned weakly back at him.

‘Let’s wait until we see yours,’ I mumbled and turned over.

The zip of our porch was broken. It fluttered only half closed. From where I lay I could see the route ahead. It looked menacing as the wind licked across the sheer ice, picking up loose fragments of powder snow and chasing them away. I thought of all that had happened.

I could see the place where Mick had fallen. It seemed strangely still in that ice gully. He had been so lucky; or had he been protected? My mind swirled. I thought of all those brave and famous mountaineers who had sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of their dreams up here. I thought of those who hadn’t wanted to sacrifice anything, those whose lives had been cruelly robbed from them. The numbers were too many. These people were determined fighters, yet the mountain had beaten them. It confused me.

I wondered if we would reach the top. It felt so distant; maybe we would get so close like the others, turned away empty-handed; or maybe fate would make another turn, where we would join the bitter ranks of those who never came home. I had never felt a fear of the unknown like this before. I fiddled with the pot and lay some more ice gently inside.

On the first successful expedition here in 1953 with Hillary, they had used an extra camp above the Col, which they had placed near the Balcony. We, though, had no more camps. Experience up here had concurred that it was more effective to try to climb it all in one go from the Col. It made this last day and night horrifically long.

In 1996, when those tragedies had struck, the entire route from the Col upwards had been roped. This year we had none, until just under the South Summit. It made the majority of this climb dangerously exposed. Ropes could not compensate for mistakes this time. Mick’s fall had shown this. It had to be perfect from here on. Errors were out of the question. It increased the pressure for us.

It was 7.00 p.m. exactly. Half an hour to go. At 7.30 p.m. we would start the laborious task of getting dressed and ready. It would take at least an hour and a half. By the end, no parts of our body or face would be visible. We would be transformed into these bizarre cocooned figures, huddled, awaiting our fate.

I reached into the top pouch of my rucksack and pulled out a few scrumpled pages wrapped in plastic. I had brought them just for this very moment. I unfolded them carefully and read.

Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength: they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not grow faint. Isaiah 40, vv. 27–31.

I felt that this was all I had up here. My God was the only person I felt who understood me now. I knew that back home my family would be strangely unaware of what I was going through. These words were my only comfort. They would ring round my head for the next night and day as I climbed.

Darkness seemed to cover the mountain in minutes. The moon was now almost entirely hidden; we had missed the ideal full moon by over two weeks now. It made the visibility very low.

As night came, the wind seemed eerily to die away. The tent no longer shook with the force of the gusts. The jet stream no longer roared. It seemed as if the mountain was beckoning us towards it. And like willing victims, we began the lengthy task of getting prepared.

Halfway through the ordeal of dressing, Neil took his last piss. He was looking forward to winning the ‘clear pee competition’: the ideal way to be, before starting. He should win, he had drunk continually all afternoon. He knelt and pissed. It came out a deeper and richer brown than mine. He looked down in anger. I smiled.

‘I think that concludes the event, Neil. Winner’s prize is the last swig of the mug,’ I mumbled with relish. Neil laughed. I swigged.

Twenty minutes later we sat squashed together in the tent, hidden under a mass of down and fur. I had put a fresh battery in my headtorch; I would need it. In the cold, batteries last a tenth of their normal time. I fitted it round my fleece hat and switched it on. The beam flashed brightly as it darted around. We crawled slowly out. It was time.

We had decided to leave at 9.00 p.m. intentionally. It was much earlier than people normally left. Our forecast, though, had promised strong winds higher up. These were reckoned to increase during the next day. We wanted, therefore, to do as much of our climbing at night, before the winds got any worse. On top of this, was a desire just to get going. The wait disturbed me. I wanted it all to start or end, but not to linger. I fidgeted nervously with the mask over my face.

Geoffrey, Allen and Michael emerged from their tents. They heaved the tanks onto their backs and moved slowly towards us. It was almost impossible to recognize who was who. The only sound was of their crampons scraping across the rock under them.

The Sherpa tent was still all closed up. Neil hurried them. They mumbled at him. They were tired. They said that they would leave in a few minutes. They told us to go on; they would follow behind. We didn’t argue.

We turned towards the Face some 300 metres in front, and started moving. Someone’s crampon pierced an old gas bottle. It hissed violently. No one even looked at it. There was something mystical about the five of us moving slowly across the Col. We must have seemed like shadows being drawn towards the darkness. Soon the tents were invisible behind us in the night.

As we reached the ice, the gradient steepened dramatically. We bent lower into the slope and moved steadily up, our headtorches swaying slowly as they lit up the ground in front of our feet. Our world became that light. It showed us where to kick our crampons and showed us where to place our ice-axe. The light was all we knew.

As the time passed the group spread out. It was natural. You can’t afford to wait for everyone. Not up here. Each of you is fighting your own private war for survival. Your own private war in your mind as to why you keep going.

The group naturally divided into two. Allen, Neil and I led the way, and Michael and Geoffrey followed behind. They both soon fell way back. After two hours, as the three of us perched on a small lip of ice, we looked down below. The two lights of Geoffrey and Michael seemed distant and small. The Face here seemed steeper than anywhere else on the mountain. We were still dangerously without rope. I dug my crampons in, hoped they would hold, and leant back against the ice.

‘Are you scared?’ Allen asked me quietly. They were the only words any of us had spoken so far. The words seemed faint through his mask.

‘Yes, a little,’ I replied, ‘but not as scared as I would be if I could see the angle of this Face,’ I added, peering out into the black. It was true. It was too dark to see the danger; all you could see was the intensity of the snow and ice, lit brightly by your torch in front of you. We stood and turned into the Face again and carried on up.

As we climbed I seemed to lose myself in this surreal world of torchlight. Two steps then a rest. Was my grip secure? I shuffled. Neil and Allen were only yards from me, but somehow we were each alone. It was the most lonely work I had ever done. I clung to their heels even when my body said rest. I didn’t want to lose them. They were all I had up here.

At midnight we came across this deep powder, drift snow. We hadn’t expected this. It drained our reserves as we floundered about in it. Each step we took forward, our feet would slide back in the loose snow. It took three steps just to make the ground of one. Snow filled my mask and gloves, and my goggles began to steam up.

I swore to myself. Where the fuck is the Balcony? It must be soon. I looked up and the ice and rock ledges disappeared above into darkness. I shook my head. I knew I was tiring.

For the next two hours, I resigned myself to the fatigue. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t swear when snow filled my goggles, or as I slid backwards; I wouldn’t swear when the lip ahead was another false horizon. I just kept following and forgot everything.

At 1.00 a.m. we came over one more ledge and collapsed in the snow of the Balcony. A sense of excitement refilled my body. We sat now, as high as Lhotse. We were now at 27,700 feet above sea-level. I turned down my oxygen to 1 litre a minute as we weren’t moving, and waited. I lay back against the snow and closed my eyes. It was to be a long wait.

We had to wait for the Sherpas to arrive. They were bringing spare oxygen canisters. We would swap our half-empty ones for fresh tanks. Those should then last to the summit and back to the Balcony. It would give us about ten hours to complete the round trip. The time factor up here was your oxygen. If you weren’t going to make the summit and back in that time, you had to have the self-discipline to turn around. But discipline can get blurred when the summit is in sight; it is why people die.

The three of us sat huddled in the snow and waited for the Sherpas, Geoffrey and Michael to arrive. It was bitterly cold, a deep, chilling cold. It was – 45°C.

I curled into a ball and tried to keep warm. My toes began to feel numb even when I moved them.

At 2.00 a.m. there was still no sign. None of us talked. We buried ourselves in our own worlds, trying to fight the cold and the likelihood of frostbite. On such a small flow of oxygen, frostbite comes easily. I wiggled my toes again and held my hands close to my chest. ‘Come on.’

Suddenly the entire sky lit up before us, the mountains flashed as if in daylight, then disappeared again. I looked up sharply, then looked at Neil. The lightning flashed across the horizon once more and the thunder then rippled through the valleys below.

This shouldn’t be here, I thought, what’s going on?

Seconds later the sky flashed again. It was an electric storm. It was moving up through the valleys. We sat some 5,000 feet above it. I had never seen anything like it in my entire life. I stared, open-eyed in disbelief. We looked at each other nervously and knew what it meant.

If that came up towards us it would be fatal. It would turn the mountain into a raging mass of snow and wind. ‘It can’t come over us. It mustn’t,’ I mumbled.

Unbeknown to us three, huddled into the snow at the Balcony, Geoffrey and Michael were also fighting a battle on the slopes way below us.

Geoffrey was having problems with his oxygen set. The flow wasn’t running properly. It choked him and his pace slowed drastically. Alone, and separated from Michael, he moved tentatively. He turned to see what the flashes were. The storm below shocked him. He struggled on but soon realized it was futile. He would never make it at this pace. He faced the frightening possibility that he might have to retreat from the mountain. He sat and tried to think, his mind swirling in indecision.

He, though, had the courage and discipline to do what others before had refused to do and ended up paying for with their lives. He got to his feet and slowly turned round. He had to retreat to the relative safety of Camp Four. His attempt was over. He had no choice. He was too alone.

Michael had also turned back just before him. He was just too tired. He had climbed all his life and knew when it was wrong. In his own words he admits: ‘It just didn’t feel right. The sight of the lightning boded badly. I didn’t want to carry on. My body couldn’t go on. The effects of the illness were still with me. I would never have survived.’ And so another brave mountaineer turned round. It takes courage to do this. Only the three of us now remained alone at the Balcony. We still waited; we had no idea they had turned back.

At 3.00 a.m., shivering uncontrollably and on the threshold of our ability to wait much longer, we saw the torches of the Sherpas below.

‘Thank God, oh man, thank you,’ I muttered wearily to myself. I knew that I wouldn’t have been able to sit motionless much more. I felt numb with cold.

When they arrived we struggled desperately to change our tanks. This involved removing the regulators from our existing ones and putting them on the fresh canister. At Base Camp we had got this process down to a fine art. We could do it blind. Up here, in the dark and cold, it was a different game altogether.

I removed my outer mitts to be able to grip the regulator. My hand shook with the cold. I twisted it off and tried to line it up on the new tank. My shivering became frantic and in despair I screwed it on carelessly. The screw-threads jammed. It wouldn’t budge. I swore at it out loud.

Neil and Allen were ready by now. Allen just got up and left, heading up the ridge. I fumbled crazily. ‘Come on, damn you, come on.’

I felt the whole situation begin to slip away from me. I was losing patience and concentration as well. We had come too far to fail now. Too far. Neil shivered next to me uncontrollably. I was holding him up. He had been ready a while now.

‘Come on, Bear, fucking get it working,’ he stuttered through his mask. But it was jammed – there was nothing I could do. Neil had now lost any feeling in his feet. He knew what that meant. He was getting badly frostbitten with every minute I kept him waiting. He squeezed his toes tight but only felt a numbness come over them.

We both huddled above the tank, fumbling frantically, and then suddenly it came loose. I lined it up and tried again. This time it fitted snugly. My hands were freezing now and before tightening the regulator, I thrust them inside my down jacket to try and warm them up. Ten seconds later I tightened it all, squeezed the tank into my pack and heaved it onto my shoulders. We had lost precious minutes. We knew that if we were to have even a chance of the summit we had to get going soon.

One of the three Sherpas who were meant to continue then suddenly stood up, turned and headed down. This wasn’t meant to happen. They should stay together as a team. What was happening? The Sherpa felt worried by the storm and the winds that were beginning to rise. They were too dangerous. He wanted to go down. There was nothing we could do.

The other two Sherpas would continue, but they wanted to rest at the Balcony for a few minutes. We couldn’t argue. Neil and I turned and headed up after Allen onto the ridge that would eventually lead us to the South Summit.

Those first few minutes after we climbed over the Balcony Ledge onto the ridge, I began to warm up. I felt the blood now reach into my feet again and my legs lost the stiffness that the wait had caused. My breathing reached that level again where you just heave aggressively into your mask. My eyes stared at the snow in front of me. I noticed that it was getting lighter and that the storm had passed. As we were drawing closer it seemed as if now the mountain was beginning to open her arms to us. I felt an energy now that I had not had before. I pushed the pace on.

I moved past Neil and mumbled to him that I had to keep moving. The faster pace was keeping me warm. He nodded slowly and tiredly at me as I went past. His head was low and he looked deeply exhausted. But I knew he wouldn’t stop, he was too close and he knew it. Today was 26 May, the day that his father had died some fifteen years earlier, when Neil was only nineteen. The fact that this early dawn at 28,000 feet Neil was struggling with every sinew, one last time, to achieve what had so cruelly eluded him now twice, was all the more poignant. His father somewhere up above would be cheering him on; of that I was certain. He leant over his axe, heaving into his mask. I knew, though, that he would not turn round, so carried on.

The energy that I was experiencing worried me. I thought that perhaps I was getting too much oxygen; maybe my regulator was giving me 3.5 litres per minute not 2.5. If that was the case then I would soon find my tank empty. My mind raced with the possibilities. I checked the gauge again. It firmly read 2.5. It had to be right. The memory of what happened to Mick loomed in my mind. All I could do was hope that it wouldn’t fail; not now, not so close.

After an hour on the ridge we hit this deep drift snow again. I cursed. The energy that I had felt before began to trickle from my limbs with each step forward. I could see Allen just ahead, floundering in the powder. He seemed to be making no upward progress as he slid back down into the deep snow beneath him. I looked up and the Face just soared away above. It was drift snow as far as I could see.

To our right, the Face dropped sharply away. The gradient was extreme. Nothing lay between us and the plains of Tibet, 8,000 feet below. I looked back down at my feet.

I hardly even noticed the magic of the views up here, of the entire Himalaya stretched below us, bathed in the pre-dawn glow. I didn’t have the energy. My mind and focus were entirely directed on what my legs were doing. Summoning up the resolve to heave one’s thigh out of the deep powder and throw it a step forward was all that seemed to matter. An anger filled my head each time the snow would sink up to my waist. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do this for much longer.

Somewhere beneath the South Summit we found the ropes that had been put in on the team’s first attempt. I clutched at them eagerly. They posed some vague sense of comfort as I stooped and clipped in. I clipped a jumar on to the rope as well; it would stop me slipping back. Exhausted, I allowed myself to rest. The harness took my weight and I sat slumped in a ball, breathing. I closed my eyes.

As we approached the South Summit, the wind began to pick up. I noticed it at once as it swirled around my feet. It howled and whipped the surface snow up into a frenzy.

Noel Odell, one of the climbers who had attempted Everest in the pre-war years, spoke of the sight above here like this: ‘the mighty summit seemed to look down with cold indifference and howl derision in windy gusts.’ Nothing seemed to have changed in seventy years. I kept moving slowly, driven by the knowledge that the South Summit wasn’t far.

In many ways those last few metres to the South Summit were the hardest of my life. I wasn’t close enough to feel the adrenalin of being near the top. Instead, though, I just felt this deep pounding fatigue that reduced me to two steps at a time. It was all I could manage.

Neil was soon close behind me again. I had to keep moving. Just get to the South Summit, was all I thought, just get there. You’re so close. Allen in front had already staggered over the snow lip and reached it. But still it never seemed to arrive.

I felt every ounce of energy now being sucked from my body. I knew that this is what it must be like to drown. My body, more than ever before, screamed at me in desperation to turn around. I moaned out loud for the first time, as if I was venting the voice that told me to turn back. I couldn’t, not now.

In a drunken stupor, barely aware of anything around me, I collapsed in a small hollow on the leeward side of the South Summit, at 28,700 feet. My head leant back on the ice behind me, my eyes were tightly closed. My head then fell forward and I began to hyperventilate. My body desperately needed more oxygen; but all I had was the 2.5 litres that trickled past my nostrils every minute. It wasn’t enough, but it was all I had, and the tank was getting lower by the second.

Over the top of us, arctic hurricane-force winds blew like I had never experienced before. They seemed to howl as the three of us sat huddled together. I was worried that I was low on oxygen. I couldn’t reach the tank to check the gauge, it was buried in my pack; it was too cold to start fumbling around just to confirm what we should already know. I should be able to calculate it. I tried to work out the mathematics in my head. The thin air robbed me, though, of the ability to do these basic sums. I gave up, frustrated at how slow my mind was working. I would have to take the gamble. It was a chance that I had to take. I hoped it was the right decision.

Ahead I could see the final ridge and the Hillary Step that lined the route to the true summit. Only 250 feet higher above this Step was the place of dreams.

Snow was pouring from the top, as these winds raced over it. A vortex of cloud hovered below the leeward face, protected from the wind.

Staring at it, my body just felt empty, all energy had been ripped from me. The ridge was a haze in front of me. Yet somehow in the few minutes that we lay there, in the midst of all that sought to stop us, I felt a peace. Something deep inside knew that I could do it. I would somehow find the energy. The more I looked at the ridge the more I felt this energy flooding back. Hillary once said that the mountains gave him strength; until this point I don’t think that I had really understood this. But lying there, at my weakest moment, I found the mountain giving me a strength I had never experienced before.

The final ridge is only about 400 feet long, but it snakes precariously along the most exposed stretch of climb on this planet. On either side, down sheer faces, lie Tibet to the east and Nepal to the west. Steep granite rock lines the Nepalese side, and snow cornices protrude over the other. Shuffling carefully along the knife-edge ridge, over the tops of intimidating snow ledges, we began to make our way towards the Hillary Step; this was all that barred our way from the top. The strength seemed to be staying with me as we moved slowly along. I was feeling it like I had never done before.

I knew exactly where I would see him, I had read the accounts of Rob’s tragic death up here many times. They proved right. Slumped and half hidden by the passing of two years, his frozen body sat in its immortal grave. Since that final appeal from his wife over the radio, where Rob had tried with all his being to stand up and climb these ten feet over the South Summit, he had sat here. Time up here stands still. The cold ensures this. All he had to do was manage those meagre ten feet over the lip in front of him; he knew that from then on it was all downhill. The exhaustion and fatigue at this altitude had robbed him, though, of his ability to do this. He had died where he now sat, only ten feet to my left. I let my gaze return to the ridge under me. I didn’t know what to think.

I knew that we would see various corpses up here, yet somehow nothing had prepared me for the sight. Everyone knows the risks involved: it’s big boys’ games that demand you play by big boys’ rules; I knew this, yet the stark reality shook me. It is hard to describe. Rob’s death had been only one of many that day, yet the proximity at which I now climbed by him cut right into me. The sight lingered in my mind as we carried on along. Concentrate now, come on, Bear, concentrate. Strangely, though, I noticed that I wasn’t scared by the sight of him. Instead, I felt a quiet determination to be different – to stay alive.

The rope was being whipped by the wind in front of me as I shuffled along. I thrust my ice-axe into the cornice to my right to steady myself. Suddenly the snow just gave way beneath it. My ice-axe just shot through the cornice. I stumbled to regain my balance; it should have been solid. I slowly realized that we were walking literally on the lip of a ledge of frozen water – with Tibet 8,000 feet directly below. I could see the rocky plains through the hole where the snow had been. I placed my ice-axe tentatively a little lower down and tugged on my sling that secured me to the rope. It held firm.

At the end of the ridge we leant over our axes and rested. The Hillary Step now stood above us. This forty-feet ice wall was all that hid the summit from view. At sea-level this would be a relatively pleasant ice-climb that you would happily do on a sunny midwinter’s day in the Lake District; but where we were now, cowering from the wind, at almost 29,000 feet above the Lake District, it was becoming our final and hardest test. A test that would result in whether we would join the ranks of those who have seen in awe what lies over the lip ahead. If so, we would become only the 31st and 32nd Britons to have ever done this. The ranks were small but exclusive. My heart burned more than ever to be one of them.

I remembered the last lip in the Icefall where I had felt my legs turn to jelly. It had worried me at the time, in case the same thing happened up here. If my legs failed me under the narcosis of high altitude, I would be powerless to fight it. I tried to dispel the thought as we rested for a few more seconds. We had to start up it soon. It was the same vertical gradient as the lip on the Icefall, only now so much higher. I struggled to stand and clipped on to the first rope. I looked weakly up above me.

As I moved laboriously and clumsily up the ice and found the first small ledge, I leant in close and tried to rest. My goggles were plastered against my face as the mask pushed into me. Ahead and to my right, I could see a cluster of ropes protruding from the ice. They were old ones from past years. They were bunched in a tangled mess. I tried to focus my mind on which was the correct rope. My brain was working so slowly.

You believe that your mind is sharp and alert until you have to actually test it. The ropes confused me. I couldn’t understand why my mind couldn’t discern and operate normally. I shut and opened my eyes in an attempt to focus.

Only a year previously the slumped and frozen body of a climber was found hanging by his abseiling device from these ropes. It was the body of Bruce Herrod, the British climber with the South African team who had never returned from the summit in 1996. Nobody knew what had happened. The truth was not known until a year later, when he was found here in the ropes. He had been descending down but had clipped into the wrong rope. As they began to bunch up and become entangled, he lacked the energy or mental capacity to do anything. He died as he was – swinging with the wind from his harness, trapped in a jumble of ropes. He had been cut loose as they found him. The ropes now bunched in front of me were the only reminder of him. I reached for a clear line.

As I heaved myself over the final lip, I strained to pull myself clear of the edge. I unclipped whilst still crouching, looking down at the snow around me. The line was now clear for Neil to come up. I lifted my head forward and stared.

Only 200 metres away, along a gentle, easing slope, lay the crest of the summit that I had dreamt of for so long. A wave of adrenalin flooded through my veins. I could feel this surge of strength. I had never felt so strong and yet so weak all at the same time. I got to my feet without meaning to and started staggering towards the tiny, distant cluster of prayer flags. Gently flapping in the breeze, on the crest of a snow cornice, these flags marked the true summit – the place of dreams.

I found it ironic that the last part of this immense climb should also be the flattest. Beneath here were thousands and thousands of feet of treacherous ice and snow, yet here it was a gentle slope almost beckoning us up to the top.

However many of these pathetic, desperate shuffles I made, the summit never seemed to arrive. It never appeared to get any closer. I tried to count the steps as I moved. Come on, just do four, I would feebly tell myself, yet by two I always seemed to lose track of where I was. My counting became lost in this haze of weariness. I now breathed in gulps like a wild animal, in an attempt to literally devour the oxygen that trickled from my mask. Slowly the summit loomed a little nearer.

As I drew now closer, my eyes welled up with tears. As I staggered those last few feet, I felt as if I was pulling all my emotions of the last year in a sledge behind me. Weary and broken I was slowly getting closer to the small place that had captured my imagination since I was a boy. Those last 100 metres were undoubtedly the longest of my life as they crept slowly by beneath me. Yet eventually at 7.22 a.m. on the morning of 26 May, with tears creeping down my cheeks inside my goggles, the summit of Mount Everest opened her arms and welcomed me. It was as if she now considered me somehow worthy of this place. My pulse raced; and in a vacant haze, I suddenly found myself standing on top of the world.

Allen embraced me, mumbling excitedly into his mask. We stood there, all our differences seemed to have vanished; we were here together. It was all that mattered. I turned and could see Neil staggering towards me, stumbling with exhaustion. I beckoned him on as he drew nearer and nearer.

As he approached, the wind mysteriously began to die away as the sun rose slowly over the hidden land of Tibet. The mountains below were being bathed in a crimson red. A magic was in the air.

As Neil arrived, he knelt down and crossed himself. He had never shown a faith before, but I had always seen it in him; it inexplicably just somehow showed. Here at 29,035 feet above sea-level, with our masks off to save our precious oxygen, Neil and I hugged as brothers. This early dawn was now the anniversary of his father’s death and I kind of knew that this moment was meant to be.

I got to my feet and slowly began to look around. My eyes were ablaze. I swore that I could see halfway round the world.

ABOVE THE CLOUDS