CHAPTER FOUR

Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the World

We were pilgrims in a wilderness of catastrophic light and sound. Glacial melt from the Kangshung and East and West Rombok Glaciers thundered through the valley as we hiked the last seven miles from Rombok Monastery in full view of Everest. The snow-covered leviathan appeared weightless. Light bounced off a thousand facets on the mountain ice. Cirrus clouds pulled their fine silk threads across the steep North Face.

We had finally arrived at Everest Base Camp, but we were ill-prepared to stay. Distant tent clusters were the only evidence of life on a moraine criss-crossed by hundreds of gurgling channels. With neither tent nor stove nor extra food, and sneakers and summer sleeping bags instead of hiking boots and winter bags, we offered ourselves like idiots to the elements. Yet this was our challenge; if monks could subsist on barley and water in caves for years, we could scrounge enough food from the pseudo-lamas to hang out a few days at Everest Base Camp.

“We’ll offer to carry loads in exchange for food and clothing,” John suggested. I reminded John that I was a doctor and that it would not be seemly for me to perform manual work. John failed to see the humor in this and headed toward a far-off group of red and blue tents. I headed toward a separate group of tents beneath a glacier’s dirty edge. While imagining the choice food items a well-financed mountaineering expedition might have to offer, I stepped knee-deep into an ice-blue channel.

A sign reading “NO FOOD, KEEP OUT” guarded an enclave of tents, from which fifteen pairs of Japanese glacier goggles eyed the water line on my pants. “How’s the weather?” I asked. “No food,” said a man bundled in an enormous parka. I introduced myself as an American physician and the same man volunteered that two of their climbers had gotten pulmonary edema. Their doctors were evacuating them to Kathmandu. Daily precipitation had made it too dangerous for their team to get onto the West Ridge. They had tried for one month. I tried to conceal my delight and offered my services. Fifteen pairs of glacier goggles shook their heads no. They had everything they needed. I had the moraine to myself.

I found John next to a similar sign, “NO TREKKERS, NO FOOD!” John had engaged Rod, the base camp manager of an American North Ridge team, in an animated conversation. It turned out that Rod knew Mark Sonnenfeld, our climbing mentor in college, and we took turns recounting epic anecdotes of the young Mark Sonnenfeld being helicopter-rescued in the Canadian Rockies, and breaking his wrist in a fall off Dartmouth’s administration building. Clouds suddenly swept Everest from view. “You better set up your tent,” Rod said.

“Don’t have one,” John said. “We were hoping we could carry loads. Blake’s a doc.”

“You’re a doc?” Rod said, looking at my wet sneakers and pants. I explained that I had accidentally stepped in a stream, and Rod stuck out his hand in greeting. A Chinese man in his early twenties walked toward us and Rod introduced Mr. Tang, the Chinese Mountaineering Association liaison officer. Rod explained that we were both climbers and would be joining their expedition.

“No more trekkers,” Tang said.

“They’re climbers,” Rod replied.

“They not on list,” Mr. Tang shouted, becoming red-faced. Rod said that we were staying and Mr. Tang had a tantrum. The more he screamed, the more Rod insisted, until Mr. Tang stomped off toward the Japanese Camp.

“Don’t worry about Tang,” Rod said as he led us to the team’s communal tent. “Tang never agrees to anything. We do what we want.” Once inside the tent, it became impossible not to stare at the empty Stroh’s beer cans, fruit rolls, bags of hard candy, herb teas, Pepperidge Farm cookies, and an enormous block of cheddar cheese. After weeks of consuming little but yak by-products, the assortment of junk food seemed irresistible.

“These guys know Sonnenfeld,” Rod said when introducing us to Steve, the sickly looking expedition leader, who was sunken into a beach chair next to a radio. He did not offer us any of the food. The radio clicked. “Camp One to Camp Three,” Steve said into the receiver.

“Tom at Three. The North Col avalanched this morning. Misha’s porters fell 2,000 feet. Hurt bad. One torn knee. One wrenched back. Doubt they’ll make it down tonight. Sending Mike with them, over,” came the transmission.

“We’ll be waiting. Did the yaks arrive? Over.”

“Got in a fight with the yak drivers. Their rocks against our ice axes.” Sounds of a struggle interrupted the transmission before, “Send women!“ came screaming through the receiver. Steve jerked the microphone away from his ear.

“Is that you, Strange?”

“I’m so horny the yaks are nervous.”

“So is Greg,” said Tom’s voice, after more wrestling sounds. “He’s got diarrhea—I think it’s giardia. Send some antibiotics.”

Steve looked at us apologetically. “I would carry the medicine up myself, but I pulled an intercostal muscle.” Steve demonstrated his wet, hacking cough. Rod said we could “hump” loads for the team and it was agreed. “I’m sending up two trekkers with a load to Camp One tomorrow,” Steve said. “Over.”

“Do they have nice asses?” came the reply.

Steve saw me staring at a bag of BBQ corn chips and handed me the bag, saying, “Now that you’re humping loads, help yourself.” Steve explained that Pepperidge Farm cookies were the expedition’s favorite, mainly because the company had sent them three times the amount Steve had requested. Ten trekkers who had paid $5,000 each for the privilege had accompanied the team to Base Camp; only one remained. Steve spoke in brief sentence fragments and quickly tired of banter. It had been raining for four weeks. If the rain kept up, they would never get a summit attempt.

“At least we’re doing better than the Spanish expedition on the North Face,” Rod said. “Poor bastards. They have one of the best Sherpas anywhere. He’s summited Everest three times. But it doesn’t look like they’ll summit.” Rod sounded cheerful when he said this.

We joined some of the team members in a hackysack game, in which a circle of players juggle a small, leather sack with their feet without letting it touch the ground. Even Mr. Tang joined in. Tang looked diminutive in his oversized down expedition parka. He scowled at us and often said that he hated mountains. But eventually I grew fond of Mr. Tang. Like any twenty-one-year-old man on his first trip away from home, Mr. Tang longed to return to his family and friends in Beijing. He turned out to be a natural hackysack player. Years of studying martial arts enabled him to send either foot in a roundhouse to retrieve wayward sacks back into the game. The longer we played, the more I admired his skill with his feet.

“He can’t play,” Mr. Tang said of Yongdup, a bare-chested yak man who strode up to our circle wearing yak-soled boots. Even in his parka, Mr. Tang looked puny next to the well-muscled Yongdup. “He steal water jugs!” Mr. Tang complained. “And cooking pot. You must search his tent.”

“Bullshit,” Rod said, and tossed the tiny leather sack to Yongdup. Yongdup kicked the sack twenty yards into the moraine. “You can’t trust him!” Mr. Tang shrieked. Yongdup stepped up to within inches of Tang’s face. Mr. Tang had no concept of compromise, which left him in jeopardy of either losing face in an argument or else being beaten up by Yongdup. John distracted Yongdup by retrieving the sack and lobbing it back to him. Again, Yongdup kicked the sack defiantly back into the scree. There was no limit to Yongdup’s laughter, just as there was no getting him to play by our rules.

The next morning I got up early with Brack, a cardiothoracic surgeon who was part of the team, in order to examine the two Sherpas injured in the avalanche the day before, who were now lying quietly in a tent across the moraine. One man had a grotesquely swollen knee. The right side of the other man’s back was tender and swollen. The Sherpas were incredible. They had fallen 2,000 feet in an avalanche and then walked fourteen miles down a glacier.

“They’re lucky to be alive,” Brack said, with the confidence of a man who himself had participated in eight Himalayan expeditions. He gave the men some pain pills and directions in Nepalese. Outside the tent, Brack said, “The older man has a grade-four tear of the medial collateral ligament in his right knee. Unless he gets an operation in Kathmandu, he’ll never climb again. But he can’t afford to go to Kathmandu. Maybe it’s just as well—the operation also could do him more harm than good.”

Brack smiled when I asked him if he had seen many cases of pulmonary and cerebral edema, where in reaction to shifts in altitude the lungs or brain become engorged with fluid. “I’ve never seen a single case,” he said. “I guess I’m lucky.”

John and I met Misha on the terminal moraine in full view of Everest. We were in a tremendous mood. Rod had loaned us down sleeping bags rated to forty degrees below zero. We would be carrying a load to Camp One tomorrow, which meant that we would be eating with the team for the indefinite future. And the music of the Doors was blaring on the largest cassette box we had ever seen.

Talking to Rod, we learned he was an amiable wealth of information about the three American teams on Everest that season. A British climber named Doug Scott was leading an expedition that was expected any day. They would try the Northeast Ridge, where the British climbers Joe Tasker and Pete Boardman had disappeared at 27,000 feet in 1982. As with their legendary countrymen Mallory and Irving, their bodies had never been recovered. “Shit,” Rod said, noticing a man with a mane of unkempt Medusa hair bounding toward us across the expanse of moraine. This was our first glimpse of Misha.

Misha had wild, eccentric blue eyes. He walked to within inches of Rod’s face before screaming, “I not paying Sherpas. They are laziest goddamned Sherpas I ever had.”

Rod looked Misha directly in the eye and said, “You’re lucky they didn’t get killed in that avalanche.”

Misha clenched his fists and yelled, “Sherpas lie. There was no avalanche! Sherpas steal my cameras! Sherpas steal everything.” Misha turned to John and said, “I am Misha, famous Russian filmmaker. Maybe you see one of my mountain films on German television?” Misha snapped his head back to Rod and softened his tone. “I need to use your ropes.”

“Why did you send your Sherpas up in an avalanche?” Rod asked.

“I lose all my equipment because of fucking Sherpas.”

“You can’t use our ropes,” Rod said.

I thought Misha would punch Rod, but he stormed across the moraine like a spoiled child in the direction of his tents. “You’ll never meet nicer people than these Sherpas,” Rod said, as Misha stomped away. “They’re honest. They do most of the dangerous climbing on most Himalayan expeditions. Misha doesn’t do any hard climbing. He sends his Sherpas to fix all of his lines before he goes up. We don’t have any Sherpas. We want to do everything ourselves.”

At sixty-five years old, Charlie was the expedition’s youngest spirit. We hiked with him to Camp One, at 18,000 feet, where one of the climbers from Camp Three would come down from 21,500 feet to ferry more choice food items back up to where the expedition was beginning its technical climbing. Charlie’s white, Santa Claus hair and beard gave away his age; Buddy, his mountaineering teddy bear, dressed in its own miniature wool pants, down parka, and glacier goggles and strapped on top of Charlie’s pack, belied it. After Rod finished packing our loads, we learned that twenty-five pounds felt twice as heavy at this altitude as it did in the flatlands.

As the three of us started across the moraine, Charlie stuttered, “Well B-Buddy, are you r-ready?” I wondered if Charlie always trekked with his teddy bear, or if the altitude had done this to him. He told John and me, “You go right ahead, gentlemen. I’ll hike slower than both of you. Don’t wait for me.”

“We wouldn’t think of hiking without you,” John said. John wasn’t threatened by Charlie’s talking to Buddy, but I couldn’t help thinking that there must have been something wrong with a grown man who consulted his teddy bear before each drink of water, snack, or rest. Hiking at my own pace in front of Charlie and John, I questioned Charlie’s sanity as the trail wound through house-sized boulders and tall dirt columns sculpted by rain and runoff. Everest disappeared from view once the trail turned up a side valley that carried the East Rombok Glacier. I should have waited for John and Charlie, but I was impatient and hiked ahead.

Endless switchbacks wound ever higher above the trickle of glacial melt sparkling in the sun. As my heart beat louder and my mind moved slower, fear tugged at the base of my brain. Was my body acclimatizing quickly enough to compensate for the changes in altitude?

Was water oozing through my alveolar membranes to fill my lungs with pulmonary edema? Was my brain swelling like a wet sponge to herniate against the base of my skull? The symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness summed up how I felt at the moment: headache, dizziness, nausea, no desire to eat or drink. I collapsed to rest when I arrived at a cairn of rocks. A marmot barked at my approach. Charlie and John arrived with a refreshing breeze that blew cool air off the end of the glacier.

At Camp One, Tom, Steve’s radio correspondent, bounded off the ice and immediately gulped down two liters of the grape drink we had brought. Between gulps, Tom told us that he had hiked down from Camp Three, approximately ten miles, in just over two hours. With luck, he would make it back to Three in time for dinner. Tom had just finished his internship in Seattle, where he had arranged to postpone his residency in anesthesiology until January so he could go on this expedition. For future reference, I asked how he had finagled a break between internship and residency. “Ever hear of the Hornbine Couloir on Everest?” Tom said. “Well, the famous Hornbine happens to be my residency director.”

Tom filled his pack with our loads and, before stepping onto the glacier, handed me a stamped letter from his back pocket. “I almost forgot. Would you mind giving this to Rod? It’s a letter to my wife and kids.”

“R-Ready, B-buddy?” Charlie asked, as he prepared to join Tom on the hike back up to Camp Three, and I thought how precious the human body is, how delicate the balance between life and death.

With Tom and Charlie gone, John and I ate as much of the expedition food as we could. We deserved it after carrying our loads. Triscuits and sardines with mustard sauce naturally led to potato chips and cheddar cheese and quarts of grape drink, granola bars, mixed nuts, raisins, and fruit rolls. I ate so much my stomach felt full for the first time in over a month. Without warning, the stream five hundred feet below suddenly seemed noticeably louder. I shortly thereafter succumbed to four bouts of projectile vomiting.

“Hold still!” John yelled, hurrying to position his camera, “O.K. Now do it again.”

Back at Base Camp later that evening, Yongdup unzipped the door of the communal tent and stepped brazenly inside, accompanied by two yak men who gawked at the incredible array of food and equipment. Their smiles reminded me of my own first sight of the tent. “No,” Rod said to Yongdup, who was helping himself to a bag of pretzels. “No,” to one yak man, who found a bottle of rice wine. A still louder “No!” to the other yak man, who grabbed a case of Pepperidge Farm cookies. Suddenly the three men turned on Rod. I was afraid for myself and pushed my beach chair against the wall of the tent. Rod traded handfuls of pretzels in exchange for the rice wine and cookies, and herded the yak men out. “Expeditions breed this kind of relationship,” Rod said.

Two days later, cough or no cough, Steve was determined to get to Camp Three. Rod hiked slowly with Steve. If all went well, Charlie would be waiting to meet us at Camp Two, and would then return to Base Camp with us. John and I did not know the route to Camp Two, but we did not want to wait for Rod and Steve. A trail of sticks with red plastic flags led us back onto the lip of the East Rombok Glacier. We moved cautiously around holes in the ice, beneath which a freezing river raged through dark caverns. We took care to see that the other was not getting too tired or had lost his sense of humor, early warning signs of altitude sickness.

I got a headache that afternoon. John tried to get me to eat more sardines, the idea of which made both of us laugh until our stomachs hurt. A trail zig-zagged across the glacier to a steep scree slope on one side of the valley, then back to the other side. The sun had slickened the icy jaws of the trail that opened into the river. Twice great sprays of rocks and car-sized boulders rained down from the cathedrals of rotten stone at the valley’s rim. Twice we sprinted in terror before realizing that we were a safe distance away. The higher we climbed, the thicker the glacier became, until the ice beneath our feet was hundreds of feet thick. As the valley narrowed and steepened, the glacier threw countless creaking ice pinnacles into the path of the wind. We were insects in a giant’s world. The higher we climbed, the smaller and more insignificant we became.

One foot fell in front of the other. Thoughts acquired a weight of their own: the Sherpa’s discombobulated knee; climbers fighting the yak men; Rod fighting with Misha; everyone fighting with Mr. Tang. Mountains emphasize the best and the worst in each of us.

Camp Two’s tents sat on their own ridge of lateral moraine, a safe distance from avalanches, dwarfed beneath vertical oceans of scree and the energetic sweep of the glacier. Charlie cradled Buddy like a nursing baby. “B-B-Buddy and I are g-glad to s-see you,” he said. He looked tired but he talked enthusiastically about the North Col, where the Sherpas had been avalanched off the mountain. In the morning Rod wasn’t feeling well and decided to hike back down to Base Camp with Charlie, John, and myself. A rejuvenated Steve climbed alone to Camp Three.

We took three days to recuperate from humping loads to Camp Two. Then tragedy struck again. We met death in a boulder field. A solemn procession of Japanese climbers with glacier glasses and zinc oxide over their sun-charred faces carried a corpse lashed to a stretcher of ski poles. Twenty-four climbers followed. The funeral procession passed as quickly as it had come, and I found myself wanting to know how the climber had died, as though knowing would help me avoid a similar situation.

“I’ve never seen a dead body,” John said, resting on a boulder. “My grandfather had a closed casket. No one else in my family has died.”

I told John about an autopsy I had done on a man who had left a bar without paying and driven at high speed into a tree. The car exploded and burned for half an hour before the firemen could pull him out. I couldn’t even identify the man’s race; his cooked flesh smelled sweet, like barbecue.

“That’s disgusting,” John said.

“He had liters of beer in his stomach. Smelling that was disgusting.”

“You sound so removed,” John said. “How old were you when your dad died? That must have been hard on you.”

I had seen my father die from lung cancer when I was fourteen, then a close friend drown the following spring. Eventually I’d seen several friends die in climbing accidents, and many people die in hospitals. John wondered if the climber had a wife and children, if there was a God who cared about each of us, if one of us would get hurt. I told him that we were cosmic fertilizer.

The next day, a group of yak men loaded their shaggy beasts and beat them into a line across the moraine long before the sun had chiseled the prehistoric chill from the valley floor. John was carrying two fifteen-pound oxygen bottles. I carried a twenty-five-pound tape deck and five pounds of batteries. Rod filled his pack with choice food items. Once the yaks hit the switchbacks, it would be too dangerous to try to pass all fifteen of the behemoths. With no incentive to catch up, we took frequent rests. Hiking slowly would give our bodies more time to acclimatize and help us avoid getting sick during the fourteen-mile hike from Base Camp to Camp Three. If all went well, we would stay at Camp Two that night, and continue to Camp Three tomorrow.

On a switchback above us, a yak bucked a blue barrel that careened down a steep dirt embankment toward the river. As the barrel tumbled faster down the slope, I hoped that it didn’t contain anything choice, like Pepperidge Farm cookies. I did not see the ton of charging mane and horns until it was upon me. “Chuh!” I shrieked, and threw a rock at the yak. The beast kept coming and I leapt off the trail after the barrel.

An unfamiliar yak man ran down the trail after me. He pretended to throw a baseball-sized rock at my head. Only then did I realize that the yaks were from the Spanish team coming down, not from our North Ridge team going up. The yak man had seen me throwing a rock at his yak, and blamed me for his load bounding toward the river. He looked crazed, like he wanted to kill me. I ran far enough down the slope that John became an easier target.

“Tashi delek,“ John said, “Tu je che“ (“Thank you”), his hands folded as if in prayer. The yak man pretended to throw the rock at his head. “Hello-thank you,” John pleaded and pointed to me, “He did it.”

A loud CLAP came from the rotten amphitheater of cliffs a thousand feet above us. CLAP-CLAP and our heads snapped up to see yak-sized boulders careening off an ancient buttress. The boulders seemed to fall for a long time before they hit the shoulder of scree, and exploded into perfect waves of shattered rock that fanned toward us. The expanding waves seduced us with their beauty, this glimpse of death. We ran from them as much for fun as from any real danger.

At Camp Two, Brack and another climber drank soup outside their tents. Brack looked pale. His eyes were sunken and listless. He introduced us to Paul, a short, stocky man who spilled Knorr leek and potato soup into his beard. “Paul got pulmonary edema during the night,” Brack said authoritatively, even though he looked worse than Paul. “He’s doing well now. As soon as we finish our soup, we’ll continue to Base Camp.”

“It’s funny,” Paul said. “Last night I woke up drowning in my own juice. Now I’m drinking soup.”

“I didn’t need a stethoscope to diagnose this one,” Brack said. “Paul got better with sitting up and oxygen. I didn’t have to use Lasix. We hiked down at daylight. With a bit of luck, we’ll make it to Base Camp in time for dinner.” Brack spent all of his breath talking and paused to sip his soup. Paul looked sternly at Brack, who grudgingly continued, “That’s only half of it. This morning I vomited bright red blood, twice.”

“I’m going with you,” Rod said.

“That won’t be necessary,” Brack said.

“It’s mountain etiquette,” Rod said. “I grew up in the mountains. It will get dark before you get off the glacier.”

“We’ll be fine,” Brack said gruffly, and wobbled to his tent.

Bad judgment is a classic sign of mountain sickness, something climbers have to be vigilant for in themselves and their partners at all times. I followed Brack to a rock with a view of the ice sails billowing down the frozen river in front of us. I was a recent graduate from medical school with no independent experience, and Brack was a cardiothoracic surgeon and veteran of eight Himalayan expeditions. All of this made me hesitate before saying the obvious: Brack had a bleeding ulcer and was too stubborn to admit it. He did not speak for some time and appeared to be in the throes of indecision. “We’ll make it to Base Camp tonight,” Brack said. “The question in my mind is whether I should go straight to the American Hospital in Kathmandu. I don’t want to go.”

“You have two choices,” I said. “You can stay in Base Camp and worry. Or you can do what you would tell one of your patients to do.”

That night, alone at Camp Two, John and I listened eagerly to the evening’s radio communication. “Rod at Base to Three, over.”

“Tom at Three. How’s Paul?”

“Paul’s lungs are clear. He’s eating soup and loving it. Brack’s resting in his tent. He didn’t vomit any more blood. I did orthostatics on him. He’s fine, just tired.”

“Glad to hear it. We’re all rooting for him. Will he evacuate to Kathmandu?”

“Doesn’t want to.”

“Have the Japanese doc look at him tonight.”

“Already did.”

“Good job,” Tom said. “I’m sleeping by the radio tonight. I’ll turn the radio on every two hours for one minute. Call if there’s a problem. Everyone carried full loads to Camp Four today. If the weather holds, we’ll establish Camp Five next week.”

“Here’s the latest on the Japanese death,” Rod said. “He was their best climber. He was exhausted, descending from 23,000 feet to rest at Base, and drowned crossing the river.”

Vertical oceans of scree and the energetic sweep of the glacier dwarfed Camp Two’s tents. John won the toss for Rod’s expedition sleeping bag and slept soundly. I spent the night shivering in everything I had: thermodactyl long underwear, warm-up pants, Carolyn’s silk top, a wool sweater and wool pants, balaclava, three pairs of socks, and two summer sleeping bags. John and I had experienced many sleepless nights in snow caves, on cliff ledges, in boxcars, and on the side of the road. Shivering as Orion crawled across the sky, I realized that for the first time since I had arrived in the mountains, I felt healthy.

Snowfall obliterated the trail to Camp Three. The morning’s radio communication confirmed “heavy dumping.” As Yongdup broke camp and drove the yaks ever farther up the glacier, we spent the day playing rummy and foraging through Camp Two’s extensive cache of peanut M&M’s, Cadbury chocolate, and quarts of hot Jello, vegetable soup, and macaroni and cheese.

At noon, we ventured onto the folds of Changtse’s Glacier. We explored wind tunnels and climbed flying buttresses of blue ice. A bare-handed ascent up the back of a gently sloping serac led to an adrenaline-filled descent through feathery crust. That night we gorged ourselves on junk food and played rummy for six hours. I slept soundly in Rod’s expedition bag.

Carrying our packs even a short distance the next morning gave fresh insight into the climber’s expression “humping loads.” I sang songs in my head, even songs that I hated, to keep myself from going insane with boredom as the spectacular ice highway turned into an endless series of rises. This eventually led to cursing in foreign languages: “Ya kelb, yebne kelb” (“You dog, son of a dog,” in Egyptian); “Ta turn kalooch. T’un pisc que ho disc. Vay ood jarack varie” (“Squash head. You’re not wearing any underwear. You smell horrible,” in Armenian); “Va tu faire foutre, grand merde” (“Go fuck yourself, big shit,” in French); and “Come caca. No come las uvas” (“Eat shit, don’t eat the grapes,” in Spanish). Even John looked mad. “Fuck Everest,” I said to the Northeast Ridge that unfolded before us for hours without end. “Fuck climbing,” I said to the fresh snowfall. “Fuck,” I said to myself, 1,008 times.

We swaggered into Camp Three with the Doors blaring on the tape deck at peak volume. John and I thought it made for an appropriate way to introduce ourselves to the expedition members we hadn’t met yet. It took several minutes for the climbers to crawl from their tents.

“You made great time,” said Steve, whose cough had gotten worse. “Looking good,” said Tom, the expedition’s remaining doc. “Let’s party,” said the other Steve, who everyone referred to as “Strange.” We remembered him from our first radio transmission—he was the one who’d inquired about the comeliness of our asses. Strange sang along with us to Jim Morrison, “Break on through. Break on through. Break on through. YEAAAA-AHHHH!”

It must have been Strange’s ebullient nature that inspired me to add a quarter-cup of fresh black pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and ten cloves of garlic into that night’s meal, a salmon curry. Jeff, the only Canadian on the team, talked incessantly with us about how many loads everyone had carried and how their performance related to their chances of gaining the summit. He also put out the fires when kerosene dripping from the Nepalese stove ignited. “Pete summited Everest once from the Nepalese side,” Jeff said. “He’s strong as a yak. So is Tom, but he’s the only doc left and has to stay low. That leaves four out of ten who’ve been able to hump loads to Camp Four. Greg tried once and left his pack on the ridge. Do you believe that? A real sap. Mike’s a businessman. He hasn’t carried a load yet. But he donated $40,000 to the expedition. He can climb with me anytime.”

Once eleven people were crammed into Camp Three’s smaller version of Base Camp’s communal tent, Strange announced, “This curry’s hot enough to burn the ass hairs off a yak. I like it.” All of the climbers who had humped loads to Camp Four agreed.

“It’s too hot for me,” Greg said. Those who had not carried loads nodded.

“It’s time for the game you’ve all been waiting for,” Strange announced, and then pulled his knees to his chest to accentuate his rear.

‘“The Lowest Common Social Denominator.’”

“Take cover,” Pete yelled and pulled his fishing hat over his face.

Ripples of discontent erupted from the non-load-carriers as Strange lit a match and sang, “Break on through!” He held the match to his back side, and an instant later a jackhammer fart belched orange flames from his rear.

“That’s disgusting,” Greg said.

“The yak men almost killed us,” Strange told John and me. His bushy black eyebrows quivered as he recounted how Yongdup had refused to drive the yaks the last thousand meters to Camp Three. A shouting match between the yak men and the climbers escalated into a battle. The yak men armed themselves with rocks. The climbers clutched their ice axes nervously. Luckily, no one got hurt. For an extra ten dollars, the yak men agreed to drive the yaks the remaining distance. John recounted our own epic conflict with the yak men from the Spanish team.

“I’d like to go down to Base Camp tomorrow and rest,” Mike said. “But with the route going up so fast, I’m afraid to be away. I might miss the summit.”

“Don’t strain yourself worrying,” Strange warned. “We hardly have Camp Four established. It’s a long way to Six.” Strange turned to the man with the fishing hat. “Goddammit, Pete. If you hump loads any faster we’ll get heart attacks trying to keep up.”

“I can’t believe Misha sent his Sherpas to fix the North Col with heavy avalanche danger,” Pete said. “It had snowed for three days straight. Those men are better climbers than all of us put together. Misha sent them to their death.”

“I say we disembowel Misha and feed him to the vultures,” Strange said. “And Tang. That son of a bitch fought us every step of the way. He was a nightmare flying our gear from Beijing to Lhasa. Chop them both into little bits. We’ll have a Tibetan sky burial.”

I had seen pictures of a Tibetan sky burial: people hacking flesh from human corpses and mixing it with tsampa to feed to the vultures. Like us, the expedition members unanimously despised China’s destruction of Tibetan culture, just as the United States had exterminated native American cultures. But here we were, subsidizing China’s occupation of Tibet with our tourist dollars. Eating salmon curry and Pepperidge Farm cookies in enormous expedition sleeping bags on the slopes of Everest, Tibet seemed light-years away.

“I’m going to Antarctica next year,” Greg said. “I want to be the youngest person in the world to climb the highest mountain on each continent. I’ve already got North and South America and Africa. Antarctica is easy. But it cost $12,000 for the airfare from Patagonia to Antarctica. The airline has a monopoly. Anybody want to come?”

“Hand me the cough medicine,” Strange bellowed. “A toast to Brack, the concocter of this medieval brew.”

“Give it to me next,” Greg said.

“Don’t let Mike have any,” Strange said. “He’s addicted.” Mike did not say anything. Codeine, I learned, after taking a sweet vermilion sip, was the anti-tussive ingredient Brack had used in mixing up this home remedy—enough codeine for my mind to feel unsteady in my body when I tried to fall asleep in the warm expedition bag.

The next morning I crawled out of the tent not knowing if I was going to vomit or defecate. I felt dizzy. A pounding headache made it impossible to appreciate my first view of the North Col’s 3,000-foot curtain of ice and a foreshortened view of the summit. John made me eat Fig Newtons with powdered milk and I soon felt well enough to hike to the top of the East Rombok Glacier. Jeff pointed to the team’s fixed ropes up to the ridge, then the two miles of ridge to Camp Four, illustrating how camps Five and Six were weeks away. Their approach to the summit through the steppes was clear of snow, thanks to the jet stream scouring the rock clean with 200-mile-an-hour winds.

A cornice broke off the rim of the North Col above us and blossomed into a spindrift avalanche. I held my breath. There was nowhere to run. The avalanche was miles away, but distances were deceiving. Jeff pointed out where the Sherpas fell from the North Col, then looked longingly at the summit. “I’m twenty-two years old. I’ll never be in better shape. I want the summit. You’ve got to want it. I want it bad.”

Rod looked well when we passed him on the glacier below Camp Two. Tom, Greg, and Mike were coming down with us to Base Camp for a rest. We joked with Rod that he should treat himself to an extra day at Camp Two. Rod insisted that he could make it from Base Camp to Camp Three in two days. This was fast, going from 17,000 to 21,500 feet, but Rod had just carried a load to 19,500 feet without problems. Then, the next day, he missed the morning radio call. At noon a barely audible voice was heard asking for help. It took precious minutes for us to discern that Rod had awoken with a “killer” headache. He had not been able to see or move for hours.

“What have you done so far?” Tom asked.

“I crawled to the oxygen tank. I took a Fiorinol. My headache’s a little better.”

Tom looked at each of us to see if we understood that Rod had cerebral edema, and his brain was being squashed against his skull. “No wonder his headache feels better,” Tom said with the receiver off. “He took a narcotic.” Clicking back on, he said, “Keep nursing the oxygen. How’s your vision?”

“Better.”

“Who else is in Three?”

“Just me. Everyone left to carry loads to Four.”

“Jesus,” Tom yelled again with the receiver off. “How do five people leave camp and not see that Rod could die any moment?” Click: “You’re going to be fine, Rod. It sounds like the worst is over. Hike down when they get back. Bring someone with you. There’s oxygen at Two. We’ll talk again in one hour.”

That night Rod and Steve arrived in Base Camp in time for another gourmet treat: pressure-cooked turnips sauteed with onions and cabbage and too much fresh black pepper (but never too much garlic), topped with a roux of yak cheese and powdered milk. A sumptuous feast in celebration of Rod’s being alive.

“This is fantastic!” Rod said, smacking his lips. “I’m not a religious man, but I thank God last night is over. I had the most intense head ache of my life. I tried to call for help but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see or hear. By morning everyone had left to hump a load. I couldn’t call out. I knew I had cerebral edema.”

“We were worried about you,” Tom said.

Rod laughed. “I was worried about me, too.”

A clanking reverberated across the moraine from a convoy of Chinese Army trucks, which had brought generators, gravel, steel, and a small army of tents. “Chinese expedition,” Tang said proudly, and described how the construction of new cement platforms was only the beginning. Concession stands would be completed within the year.

“Another humongous Chinese assault on Everest,” Rod said. “In 1960, the Chinese attacked Everest from Tibet with 214 people. They claimed that three climbers made it to the summit. But they did it at night, and couldn’t take a picture.”

“Three Chinese climbers made the summit,” Tang shouted. Rod said that the Nepalese were so mad at China for trying to appropriate their holy mountain that Gurkha soldiers with fixed bayonets lined the road all the way from the airport to the city when the Chinese Premier arrived in Kathmandu. “Three climbers made the summit,” Mr. Tang shouted again.

Rod and Mr. Tang continued to argue against the backdrop of the clanking generators. As much as I had been enjoying our encounter with the American Everest team, I longed to return to Lhasa. I began to focus on the garbage surrounding us, abandoned by hundreds of previous expeditions: piles of rusty cans, broken bottles, batteries, medical waste, and high-tech plastics with a half-life of 100,000 years, all tucked in middens across the terminal moraine.

Two days later we paid 150 yuan each to a Tibetan truck driver who took us to the main road. It was an exorbitant price, but we were too tired for the two-day walk. Crammed into an open truck with a dozen other trekkers, I contemplated the unanswered questions left in my mind after our encounter with the North Ridge expedition. Would Brack hemorrhage on the way to the hospital in Kathmandu? Would any of the climbers make it to the summit? What would the world’s highest concession stands do to Everest Base Camp?