CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.’
I threw the playing cards across the floor of my tent in frustration. It was a stupid game anyway; I hated Patience. Two days ago I decided that if I got all my cards ‘out’, then the weather would give me a chance – if I didn’t then the typhoon would move in. I had lost, so made the contest the best of three. Two days later it was 37–38 to me in the lead, but victory still just eluded me. I lay back down and just stared at the roof of the tent. My socks swayed gently as they dried on the string, slung across the poles. I flicked them impatiently.
These past few days had been the longest days I had known. My watch seemed to have slowed down, and the monsoon drew ever closer to the mountain, beckoning in the time when Everest would be buried again under five feet of snow.
My days revolved around the midday radio call from Base Camp, when they would give me the forecast. The call was scheduled daily for 12 noon. Keeping it to certain times saved battery power, and batteries were crucial. I always slept with them down my sleeping bag. It was the warmest place for them and where they would last the longest. I waited anxiously for the forecast today. It was only 9.15 a.m. and already I was fiddling with the radio; checking the squelch just in case.
I desperately longed for news that the typhoon would move away. Yesterday it was reported to be stationary. Today would be vital. I waited anxiously. I knew that we were running out of that precious commodity: time. I checked my watch again.
At 12.02 p.m. the radio came to life.
‘Bear at Camp Two, it’s Neil. All okay?’ I heard the voice loud and clear; the reception was good today.
‘Yeah, in the loosest sense of the word,’ I replied, smiling.
‘I’m worried you may be going slowly insane up there, am I right?’ Neil joked.
‘Insane? Me? What do you mean?’ I replied. Neil chuckled into the radio.
‘Daft,’ he replied. ‘Now listen, I’ve got a forecast and an e-mail that has come through for you – from your family. Do you want to hear the good or the bad news first?’
‘Go on, let’s get the bad news over with,’ I replied.
‘Right, the bad news. Well, the weather’s still shit. The typhoon is on the move and heading this way. If it is still on course tomorrow you’ve got to get down. I’m sorry. We all hate it.’
He had said it straight. I paused before replying. I knew he would say something like that. I had prayed so hard, yet it hadn’t worked. I shook my head.
‘. . . and the good news?’ I asked dismissively.
‘Your Mum has sent a message. Says all the animals are well.’ Click.
‘Well, go on, that can’t be it. What else?’
‘Well, they think you’re still at Base Camp. Probably best that way, you know. Otherwise your mother may just suddenly turn up,’ Neil chuckled.
‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow,’ I replied. ‘Pray for some change. It will be our last chance, eh?’
‘Roger that, Bear . . . oh, and don’t start talking to yourself. Out.’
‘How’s Miguel getting along . . . Hello, Neil.’ He hadn’t heard me.
I dismantled the radio and put the batteries down my bag again. I had another twenty-four hours to wait. It was these moments just after the radio call which felt the longest. I lay back down and shuffled the cards once more.
*
That afternoon I walked for twenty minutes up the glacier to the Singaporean Camp Two. I wanted to see if I could borrow some cough medicine. I had finished all mine but still I was being kept up most of the night heaving and spluttering. I wondered who would be in their camp.
Only a few Singaporeans remained now at Camp Two. The rest had returned to Base Camp some days ago, after their summit bid had failed that fateful night that Mick had fallen. The two who were still here undid their tent flap. One of them was the leader of the team. We sat and chatted for a while. It was good to have company.
‘No, Bear, I’m not going any higher, it’s my ribs. They’re screwed,’ the leader said. ‘It’s all this coughing. I’ve managed to actually crack two ribs, I’ve been coughing so hard. It hurts to breathe. It won’t let me go any higher.’
I sympathized with him as I coughed hard into my jacket sleeve. My own ribs were taking their own pounding up here. I asked if they had any extra cough medicine.
They produced a vat, the size of about four waterbottles. Across the front in felt-tip was written ‘cough medicine’. My eyes lit up. I had been swilling my cough medicine from a tiny pot, the size of a shot-glass. It had made no difference. I filled a big mug full, chatted a bit more then shuffled carefully back down to my own tent. This should cure me, I thought, I mean, just look at the colour of it. It reminded me of diesel oil, but it should do. I took a giant swig and smiled as it soothed the inflamed back of my throat.
*
As I wrestled with life and solitude at 21,200 feet up the mountain, back in England at Mick’s parents’ home all was very different.
Mick’s father had been following the team’s progress closely on the internet, from his office. Various other teams were keeping their web-sites updated daily, and by the time of the summit attempt a few days earlier they were updating almost hourly. Such was the advance of the Americans’ communication that during the confusion everyone had encountered at the South Summit (at 10.00 a.m. on 19 May), Mick’s father, Patrick, was receiving live reports on their progress. He knew his son was up there at the same time and shared in the disappointment when he heard they were being forced back, having got so close. Nothing, though, prepared him for what he heard next.
An American report came through saying that a ‘British climber had fallen’, nothing else was known. The words flashed up on Patrick’s screen. He stared in horror. It was 8.45 a.m. in the City, the heart of London.
For the next three days he heard nothing more on the incident. Why? What had happened? Couldn’t they say? Had someone died? Was it Mick? His mind raced with the possibility, the strong possibility, that the ‘British climber’ reported to have fallen might have been Mick. Our satellite phone was switched off at Base Camp. Everyone there was too busy trying to get Neil and Mick off the mountain safely. Patrick could get no more news.
He dared not tell his wife, Sally. He couldn’t. He describes those days and nights as the most ‘agonizing experience imaginable’. He is a man of great strength but even he was shaken. He recounts: ‘What was so hard was not being able to share it with Sally. I couldn’t, as I didn’t know for certain. I couldn’t work, sitting there, looking at the screen in front of me, the screen that had given me the news originally – it made me feel sick. I dreaded facing the reality. The possibility that our only son was dead.’
It was not until Mick eventually returned to Base Camp that he was able to ring his father and tell him he was safe. Mick had had no idea that Patrick knew anything about it. Relief swept across his father’s face. A relief that only a father, I guess, can know. Mick assured him all was okay, and announced that he would not return again up the mountain. Ever. He knew only too well how lucky he had been. He took off his Everest crampons for the very last time. He thought of me still up at Camp Two, and looked knowingly up the mountain.
Meanwhile, some 3,700 feet above Base Camp, I waited for that next and final forecast, longing with all my heart for a chance. That chance was now in the hands of the weather.
That night in my tent I could hear the deep rumble of the jet-stream winds above me. The sun had disappeared down beyond the bottom end of the Western Cwm. It left me all alone. I curled tight inside my bag and closed my eyes. I really missed the others.
*
I crept out of my tent long before dawn. The glacier looked cold and hostile as it swept away to the west. I zipped my down jacket up and stumbled across the ice to have a crap. It was 4.30 a.m. I waited for the sun to rise whilst sitting in the porch of my tent and wondered what it would bring today.
Thengba and Ang were still asleep in their tent. I wished that I was also.
I couldn’t believe that all the work we had done so far, boiled down to today. I prayed for the umpteenth time, for that answer to my prayers. The typhoon had to move or peter out. It had to. My mind wandered to being up there; up there climbing in that deathly land above Camp Three. That land where, as I had read, only the ‘strong and lucky survive’. Please. I dozed off dreaming about it.
By ten o’clock I was ready on the radio. I rechecked the strength of the batteries. They were nice and warm. I looked at my watch again. Come on.
This time they called early. It was 11.58 a.m. I jumped for the set.
‘Yep, Base Camp, I’ve got you,’ I said anxiously.
‘Bear, you dog. It’s come.’ The voice was excited. It was Henry speaking.
‘The forecast has said that at 11.00 p.m. last night the cyclone began revolving, and has spun off to the east. They think it will clip the Eastern Himalaya tomorrow, but nowhere near here. We’ve got a break. They say that the jet-stream winds are lifting again in two days. How do you think you feel?’
‘We’re rocking, yep, good, I mean fine . . . I can’t believe it. Alrighty.’ I punched the air and yelped. Thengba came scurrying across to my tent and peered in inquisitively. I howled again. Thengba grinned and climbed in. I couldn’t stop patting him violently on the back. He laughed out loud, showing all his two black teeth. He kind of understood. It had been a long five days.
Neil was already preparing at Base Camp to come back up. Another chance had suddenly opened and he had to take it. It might be his last attempt ever. He had openly said that if he was turned back this year as well, he would never return. Already he had climbed to 28,700 feet and now only a few days later he was preparing to go up again. It was unheard of. People said that his body would not be able to cope. They didn’t know, though, what was going on inside him. Just one last attempt. My last one, he thought. And this time something excited him more than ever before.
Mick was staying firmly at Base Camp. He was still in shock. He needed rest. He helped Geoffrey and Neil pack up one final time. If this failed we all knew our attempt was over. The monsoon hovered down in the Nepalese plains, awaiting its grand entrance. In one week’s time, we knew it would all be over.
During the course of the day, both the depleted Singapore team and Bernardo had left Camp Two towards Camp Three. It meant that they would be a day ahead of us in the attempt. This was good. They would have valuable information on the conditions above the South Col. I prayed that they would be safe. Those of us still on the mountain were a small group now.
*
By 7.00 p.m. that evening, Camp Two was again full of friends. Neil and Geoffrey were there along with Michael and Graham, both now recovered from their illness. Carla and Allen had also come back up for a second attempt. The weariness of trying again showed dreadfully in Carla. Her body was crying out for relief. She looked understandably gaunt and frail. Allen took two hours longer than everyone else to arrive. The fatigue was showing in him as well.
The Lhotse team were also back. Andy and Ilgvar would try once more. Nasu, alternatively, had decided to leave Base Camp the day before to return to Kathmandu. I wouldn’t see him again now. He believed he had actually reached the summit of Lhotse on the first ascent, as he was ahead of the other two. Andy didn’t really believe this. He knew that the summit had been still too far away. An air of doubt hung around it all; but no one would ever really know.
I was so relieved to see Neil arrive at Camp Two. He smiled and we hugged. We both knew the chance that was ahead of us – words weren’t needed. I had missed him especially.
Darkness came quickly or maybe time just seemed to race by, now that others were here. It was funny how the minutes had crept by so slowly for almost nine weeks in total. Nine weeks I had waited for this chance. And now that it was here, the minutes didn’t seem to be able to go slowly enough. Despite the excitement, part of me dreaded what lay before us. In less than ten hours, the struggle would begin. I knew the next four days, God willing, to the summit and back to Camp Two, would be undoubtedly the hardest of my life. But there was a purpose to it. At its end was my dream that I had held on to for so long. The summit of Everest, I felt, was waiting for us.
I shared my tent that had been all mine for so long with Michael, the Canadian. As I had got to know him over the past two months I had come to like him a lot. He had a tenderness under his outdoor rugged image that I couldn’t help but warm to. He was as scared as I was. I could tell.
He busied himself nervously in the tent; sorting out his kit, rechecking each item meticulously. Counting glucose tablets, checking the length of straps for waterbottles that would hang round our necks (the best place to stop them freezing), checking the simple things which are always the first to go wrong: spare gloves, spare goggles, tape, blister kit, ready-tied prussik knots for emergency rope work, you name it, it all came out and was checked. It took our minds off things.
We shifted around tentatively, trying to give each other some room. I knew Michael needed space to be alone before it all started, we all needed it, but we had to try and cope with what we had. I understood. I tried to quietly rest as he sorted his things out. I lay back on my rucksack and closed my eyes. I felt that mixture of fierce excitement and deep trepidation. I couldn’t quite believe what now lay before us.
The words that my grandfather had written to me in one of the letters that Ed had brought when he arrived, rang in my head. They were powerful words to me. At ninety-two years old, he had a wisdom that cut right to my core.
‘Keep on in there, your struggles are a triumph for guts and Godliness.’
The words guts and Godliness struck me hard. It was all that I aspired to. I knew somehow my grandfather understood me.
That night we tried desperately to sleep. From 5.00 a.m. the next day, the biggest battle of my life would begin. I found it hard to even pray.
Michael and I shuffled nervously all night. I peed at least four times. Michael chuckled as I rolled over with my pee-bottle and filled it again.
At 4.45 a.m. I started to get ready. It was invariably always the worst time; the time when you felt warm and cosy and were trying to shake the heaviness from your eyes. By 5.15 a.m. I crawled out of our tent and breathed deeply in the morning chill. It would allow Michael some space to get ready.
We tried to eat some porridge oats with hot water. I added masses of sugar to try and make it taste a bit better, but still I could only manage a few gulps. My mind was elsewhere. I was worried that so long up here would have made me weak, that my body would be drained from living at Camp Two, and would have used up my vital reserves. But I had to be strong enough now; I knew that I would soon find out.
At 5.45 a.m. we all met on the ice and sat in silence as we put our crampons on. I had done this so many times in the last two months, yet this morning it felt like my first time. As we started off, leaving Ang and Thengba watching from their tent, I hoped with all my heart to see them safely again four days later. Much would have happened for better or for worse by then. The glacier ahead of us leading up to the Bergschrund and the Lhotse Face seemed eerily still. I felt a mild sickness inside. It was nerves.
My cough was still there but irritated me less now, or maybe I was just used to it; resigned to the discomfort. The angle steepened as we neared the ropes of the ice above us. The Lhotse Face loomed away far above.
In silence we started up towards Camp Three. I hoped it wouldn’t take as long as last time. I hoped to be able to reach it in around five hours.
By 10.00 a.m. we were well into the climb. We moved methodically and carefully up the blue ice. It crunched, then splintered beneath our crampons as they gripped firmly with each step we took. I leant back on my harness and reached into my windsuit. I pulled out several glucose tablets. They tasted sweet in my dry mouth. I swigged at the waterbottle that hung around my neck and looked around.
Five and a half hours of climbing, and the tents were only 100 feet away. It still took twenty-five minutes to reach them. I climbed with Graham. We were both slow and tired. It showed with him especially. He swore under his breath. It was all taking so long. I tried to keep patient and just keep moving slowly. The principle was that if you were moving up, however slowly, you would eventually reach your destination. It is just that the process hurt so much.
We collapsed into two tents. Neil, Graham, Michael and I in one, Geoffrey, Carla and Allen in the other. We settled down to the odious task of trying to melt ice. The gas stove had blocked again; frozen solid. I undid it, rubbed it, and put it back together. The flame flickered and then lit.
I thought of my ice-axe buried under the ice outside the tent. I had known that it would be impossible to retrieve; Mick had told me so. I had borrowed an axe instead from Pascuale,3 an American climber on the mountain. I had picked up his spare axe the day before from Camp Two, assuring him jokingly over the radio that I would stay alive to return it. He made me promise. He was a friend and knew the risks up there. ‘Be careful’ had been his last words to me.
Up in the tents at Camp Three we tried to get on with things quietly. Living in these close quarters, under pressure, when you are scared, tired and thirsty, is a sensitive business. My time in the Army had helped me in learning how to live with people in confined spaces like this. I had spent enough cold nights in a patrol huddled together waiting for dawn. This was much the same – only a little higher! I needed this training now as we settled down for the night, squeezed in the tent, tucked into the ledge in the ice here at 24,500 feet. The other thing the Army had taught me was about going that extra mile. About pushing yourself that little bit more, and how the finish is always just after the point at which you most want to give up. I reminded myself of this as I lay cramped between all the kit and stinking bodies. I would need that discipline more than ever before now. That extra mile; that little bit further.
Carla, despite our advice to the contrary, had insisted on coming up with us to Camp Three. Henry at Base Camp had refused to allow her up. He knew that she was too tired. She had given her word that she would only go up with us from Camp Three if the winds died down. Henry knew that in anything but perfect conditions she would not survive. Her body was completely drained after her first attempt. The forecast would be given to us at 6.00 p.m. at Camp Three; it would decide Carla’s fate. If the winds higher up were above 40 knots, she would have to turn back.
The radio crackled with the voice of Henry from Base Camp.
‘The winds are going to be rising, guys. You’ve still got a window, but the conditions are far, far from ideal. I’m sorry, Carla, but you are going to have to come down. I can’t risk you up there. It’s too dangerous,’ Henry announced. There was a long pause.
‘No way, no way. I’m going up. I don’t care. I’m going up,’ Carla retorted angrily. ‘You can’t make me come down. Not after I’ve come so far.’
Henry erupted down the radio. ‘Carla, listen, we had a deal. If the winds were strong you would come down. I didn’t even want you up there but you insisted, but now the ride ends. We had a deal and you come down. That’s the end of it.’ He was worried having her loose up there.
She burst into tears, shouting in Spanish at him. I felt for her like never before. She had given so much for this chance. And now, this close, she was being forced back. I knew what she must be feeling. I would be the same. But Henry was right, she wouldn’t make it in the winds up there. It wasn’t her fault; she had used her strength on the first attempt. She didn’t have that same strength now. It had taken her three hours more than us to reach Camp Three. If she was slow like that higher up, she would die. We all knew this and tried to comfort her in the tent.
It slowly dawned on her that she would go no further. Her dream was ending here and it hurt. She was one of the most determined women I had ever met, and the grief now showed all over her face. She sobbed quietly to herself in front of us. She knew secretly that it was the right decision.
We sat for the best part of an hour in silence. I noticed that my headache had now returned for the first time in ten days. I cursed it and tried to drink some more of the disgusting, lukewarm water in my bottle. I longed for something cool to drink; I swallowed an aspirin.
*
Geoffrey and I were the first to leave Camp Three. We wanted to leave at different intervals to avoid any delays on the ropes. At 5.45 a.m. the two of us climbed out of the tent and began fixing our oxygen masks. It would be our first time on the mountain breathing supplementary oxygen. We had experimented in breathing the oxygen at Base Camp, but never under extreme exertion and never so high up; I wondered what difference it would make.
We squeezed a large tank into our rucksacks, fitted the regulator and made sure the lead was free and the gauge not caught up in any straps. I hoisted the rucksack onto my back and tried to make it comfortable. It weighed me down and sat awkwardly on my shoulders. It felt four times as heavy as it had when we were testing it at Base Camp; and even then it had been an effort to lift. I shuffled again. It felt a little better.
The balance between the effort needed to carry the heavy tanks and the benefit the oxygen gives, is a constant debate. The conclusion generally is that the benefit of the oxygen outweighs the weight, but not by much. The air above this height now becomes so thin that it is almost impossible to live. Only a very few exceptional and physiologically different people can climb free of supplementary oxygen above here. Even the majority of Sherpas use oxygen high on Everest.
The tanks form what is known as an ‘open system’, where the regulator allows a small trickle of oxygen to flow through the mask. This amount can be adjusted to give between 1 and 4 litres of oxygen a minute. This combines with the normal air you are breathing to marginally boost the level of oxygen inhaled. But not by much. The body needs to breathe about thirty litres of air a minute during extreme exertion; if you used a closed system, of breathing compressed air, the tank would last minutes. It would be impossible to do, as you can only realistically carry one or two tanks at the most. The ‘open system’ therefore is the only real method of using supplementary oxygen up high. A trickle of oxygen mixed with normal air is all this provides.
Generally we would climb on 2.5 litres a minute. This was deemed the most efficient rate. But even this, at these extreme heights, was hardly enough to stay alive, let alone moving at any pace. But as they say, ‘it is just enough to do the stuff.’ But there was no scope for mistakes in this. The majority of the bodies we would encounter up above Camp Four had died because of one thing: not enough oxygen. Their bodies had slowly suffocated to death, and the lack of oxygen in their brains made them hardly even aware of what was happening.
I double-checked that the tubes were free and not snagged up. I checked the tubes were soft and that no condensation had frozen inside them. I checked my mask was tight around my face, then carried out the same procedure with Geoffrey. Our eyes caught each other through our goggles and we knew it was time to start across to the first rope that would lead on and up the Lhotse Face, towards Camp Four, somewhere far above us.
Within ten yards though I felt as if I was choking on my mask. I didn’t seem to be getting any air from it. It was suffocating me. I ripped it from my face gasping frantically. I hung on my harness from the Face, tubes and connections wrapped round me in a chaotic jumble. This is crazy, I thought. I tried to untangle myself. My mask swung freely beneath me. I found that I had to remove my entire pack to free everything before trying again. I checked the air-bubble gauge that told me that oxygen was flowing. It read positive. I refitted the mask and carried on.
Five minutes later, nothing seemed to have changed. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I swore in a muffled cry, as I tried to gulp air through my mask once more. I could hardly breathe with it on. I found myself throwing my head back to get a deeper breath, but still I felt stifled by the mask. I tried to keep going but couldn’t. I stopped again and tore it from my face, gulping in the outside air.
It was working; everything said that it was working. I couldn’t understand it. It felt as if I was trying to run a marathon uphill, with a pair of rugby socks stuck in my mouth. I was gasping without getting relief. Geoffrey stooped behind me, leaning over his axe. He was also struggling. He didn’t even look up. We were both lost in our own worlds; trying desperately to breathe.
I replaced my mask, determined to get used to it. I knew I had to trust it. I had been told over and over to trust it. The only place that I would get life from up here was the Russian fighter pilot’s mask that covered my face. I had no choice but to keep it on.
I continued on up, slowly but methodically, I was not going to take my mask off again. I tried to ignore the pain. The rope stretched away above me, straight up the Face.
An hour later Geoffrey was some way behind, but I kept plodding on, three steps at a time. The ice crunched away beneath me.
Eventually the route started to traverse across the Face. Away to my right it soared upwards to the summit of Lhotse far above. To my left the ice fell at an alarming angle straight down to the Western Cwm, 4,000 feet below. It shimmered menacingly as the sun that was now rising glistened on its blue veneer. I couldn’t afford a mistake up here now. I tried to stop my eyes looking down, and focused on the ice in front of my feet. Slowly I began to cross the Face towards the rock band that divided the Face in two.
The Yellow Band, as it is known, is a 150-feet high stretch of sedimentary sandstone rock that was once the sea-bed of the ancient Tethys sea. As Gondwanaland and Asia had collided, the rock was driven up into the sky. Millions of years later here I was traversing towards it, now only some 4,000 feet beneath the highest point on our planet. It seemed somehow surreal, as the Band loomed closer to my left.
At its foot, I clipped on securely to the rope that the Sherpas had fixed only two weeks earlier. I hoped it was secure; it was all the protection that I had up here now.
I glanced up and could see the sandy, yellow rock rising into the wispy clouds that were now hovering over the Face. I knew that once over this, Camp Four was only a few hours away.
My crampons grated eerily as they met rock for the first time on the climb. They made a screeching noise as they scraped across it. They found it hard to grip, and would only hold when they snagged on a lip in the rock. Leaning back and out from the rock, I rested on my harness. The rock and ice seemed to sweep away below as the Face above steepened.
I turned outwards and tried to sit against the rock, with my crampons jammed into a small crevice beneath me. I leant back, desperately trying to get oxygen into my body, sucking violently into the mask. As my breathing calmed down I looked at where I had crossed. Camp Two was now but a tiny speck in the hazy distance below. I remembered how I had sat there and watched Mick and Neil climbing up where I was now. I checked my karabiner once again on the rope.
As I cleared the steep Yellow Band, the route levelled out into a gentle traverse for 500 metres. At the end of that was the Geneva Spur that would lead up to Camp Four. My body began to feel the excitement again.
The Geneva Spur was named by the Swiss expedition in 1952, the year preceding Hillary and Tensing’s epic first ascent. It is an anvil-shaped black rib of rock that lunges out from the ice. It rises steeply up to the edge of the South Col, the small saddle that sits between the two great peaks of Lhotse and Everest. The Geneva Spur forms the last major hurdle before the Col, the place of our final camp.
There was a raw simplicity in what I was doing. My mind was entirely focused on every move I made; nothing else clogged my thoughts. It is this straight simplicity that I knew drew men and women to climb. Man is living to his utmost, straining everything towards one single purpose. It made me feel alive.
I would aim to reach a point in the ice just in front of me with every few steps I took, but invariably I would be forced to stop short; my body needed to rest and get oxygen. I would lean on my axe and stare at the point a few yards in front that had eluded me, then start moving again, determined to reach it in the next bound. In this manner I slowly approached the Geneva Spur.
I passed the point where the Lhotse route led. Up above I could see the tent where Andy and Ilgvar had rested yesterday afternoon, before their summit attempt. Far above that, I could see the tiny specks which were them struggling up for the summit. They still had a long climb ahead of them. I prayed that they would make it, and kept shuffling along.
As I started up the Geneva Spur I could see Geoffrey below and far behind me. He seemed to be moving better now. I wanted to keep in front and pushed on. Behind him I could see the figures of the others below, Neil, Allen and Michael, moving slowly across to the Yellow Band. Carla would be on her descent now. I didn’t know whether I envied her or felt sorry for her. I pushed the thought from my mind.
I climbed steadily up the Spur and an hour later found myself resting just beneath the lip. The Col awaited me over the top. I knew this, and longed to see the place I had heard and read so much about. The highest camp in the world at 26,000 feet, deep in the Death Zone.
I hated the term ‘Death Zone’, it conjured up images that I knew were all too real up here. Mountaineers are renowned for playing things down, yet it had been mountaineers who had coined the phrase. I didn’t like that.
It would be my first time in the infamous Death Zone. I wouldn’t have time now to worry about how my body would cope. For me, this was my chance.
As I pulled the last few steps over the top of the Spur, the gradient fell away to reveal a dark shingly rock plateau. As I swivelled slowly on my crampons, they grated against the slate under them. I swore I could see all of Nepal below. I sat, stunned and alone. Slowly, blanket cloud began moving in beneath me, obscuring the lower faces of the mountain. Above these, a horizon of dark blue sky lay panned out before me. I knew I had entered another world.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘If I go up to the heavens you are there, if I go down to the place of the dead, you are there also. If I ride the morning wind to the ends of the ocean even there your hand will guide me, your strength will support me . . . I can never be lost to your Spirit.’
Psalm 139, vv.5–10.
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.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘There are certain places that are rarely ever seen; and in those you will find a special sort of magic.’
Nineteenth-century Indian Missionary
The entire land of Tibet lay sprawled below us. I wondered if any binoculars would be strong enough to see us from down there. I didn’t feel at all remote; instead I felt strangely at home. The summit was only about six square feet. I stood on it and couldn’t stop smiling.
For twenty minutes we sat and just gazed. The horizon seemed to bend at the edges. It was the curvature of our earth. I stared in utter amazement. I wanted the moment to last for ever. I wondered, with a small grin, what Shara or my family would be doing at this precise moment. They would be asleep. They have more sense than me, I thought, and smiled. How I wished they could be here; I wanted everyone to be able to see what the horizon had laid before us. There truly was a magic to this place. It was sacred ground.
I had often gazed at pictures of the summit, taken by famous Everest climbers of past years – pictures showing the greatest mountain range in the world – the Himalaya, sprawled like a table cloth below and all around. The amazement of now standing on this precariously small summit myself and seeing the vast peaks of the world, poking like contorted limbs through the blanket cloud across the horizon, held me captive. I had always feared that I would be too tired to care – too nervous of where I was. But I was wrong. For the first time in three months I wasn’t tired. Instead adrenalin and energy pounded through my veins. I hardly dared blink.
The wind gently caressed the summit under me – the roof of the world was silent. It was as if the mountain was somehow allowing us to be here.
Technology is now so advanced, so precise – yet crouching here, it amazed me to think that no amount of science could put a man on the summit of Everest. Only the dangerously slow process of actually climbing the mountain could do that. We can put a man on the moon but not up here. It made me feel a little proud.
My mask now hung beneath me – I had turned my regulator off in a bid to conserve oxygen. I lifted my head and breathed deeply. The air at 29,035 feet felt scarce and cool as it filled my lungs. I smiled.
*
The radio crackled suddenly to my left. Neil spoke into it excitedly.
‘Base Camp, we need advice . . . We’ve run out of earth.’
The voice on the other end exploded with jubilation. It was uncontainable joy.
Neil passed the radio to me. For weeks I had planned what I would say if I reached the top, the message that I would want to give. All that just fell apart. I strained into the radio and spoke without thinking. ‘I just want to get home now,’ was all that came out. Not quite the speech that I had hoped for. The words wouldn’t exactly change mankind, but they were all I could manage.
The two Sherpas soon arrived. Pasang and Ang-Sering appeared like spacemen on the moon. Entirely hidden by down suit, goggles and mask, they staggered together to the top of the world. They had grown up in the same village as kids and had dreamt of becoming climbing Sherpas. Today, some four years on, as they reached the summit of Sagarmatha, their lives would change for ever. They would return to their village not only now as men, but also as true Sherpas. They would join the ranks of their Sherpa heroes, the Everest summiteers, revered throughout their land. We took a picture of them arm in arm and then hugged like children astride the roof of the world. I had never seen such joy in anyone’s eyes before.
*
The memory of what went on then begins to fade. Neil still assures me that for my reputation’s sake it would be best not to say too much about my delirious state of being up there. I don’t believe him, but I do remember having some vague conversation on the radio. Funnily enough it was with my family, some three thousand miles away – the people who had given me the inspiration to climb.
At Base Camp they had managed to set up a ‘patch through’ via our satellite phone. By them holding the radio next to the receiver I suddenly found that, from the pinnacle of the world, my mother’s voice was booming loud. I couldn’t believe it. I quickly lost the reception.
My mother still maintains that I cut her off, as she was ruining the moment; I still profess that I don’t know what she is on about. ‘Cut my own mother off? Please.’
Up there, the time flew by and quickly passed. Like all moments of magic – nothing can last for ever. We had to get down. It was 7.48 a.m.
Neil checked my oxygen; I knew it would be dangerously low.
‘Bear, you’re right down. It’s on 4 out of 25. You better get going fast,’ he mumbled frantically.
I had just under a fifth of a tank to get me back to the Balcony. I doubted that I could make it; I had to leave now if I was to have any chance. I heaved the pack and tank onto my shoulders, fitted my mask and turned round. I never looked back. The summit was gone. I knew that I would never see it again.
*
I had only spent twenty-five minutes there in total, a lot of which had been taken up with trying frantically to take a few pictures for my sponsors. I knew if I failed in this, then my life would be in grave danger on my return. In all, I had only spent a few of those minutes on top just looking, just being. But the views I saw and the magic I felt during those precious few minutes will remain embedded in me for ever. They had surpassed my wildest imagination. I knew that I could never forget.
Within minutes of leaving the summit, the exhaustion set in. The adrenalin of before, that had driven me to the top, was now replaced by this deep fatigue. I could never have believed how hard it could be or how much energy was required just to go down. My two steps of before that I had struggled to keep count to were now completely lost in drowsiness. I tried desperately to concentrate, but my mind seemed to drift in and out of awareness.
One of the last people I had spoken to before leaving England, now three months earlier, had offered me just one solitary piece of advice; the words now rang in my ear. Mike Town, an experienced climber with whom I had spent many a blustery New Year in Cumbria, charging round the fells with his two woolly Bernese mountain dogs, had said one thing before I left – ‘Be careful, above everything on the descent, because that’s the danger time.’ Strangely I now remembered those words. ‘That’s the danger time.’
Statistically, the vast majority of accidents happen on the descent. The concentration and adrenalin of going up seem to disappear. In its place comes a weary nonchalance. Nothing matters apart from one’s longing for warmth and comfort. Lost in these thoughts you become careless. The focus gone and the mind weary, it is all too easy to lose one’s footing or clip carelessly into a rope. Along the route were the remnants of brave men who had been caught by these emotions. Mick was one of the few lucky ones who had lived. I had to be careful now, I had to be alert; but still the drowsiness tried to pull me away, tried to deaden my senses. It was one of the hardest times as I tried desperately to fight the fatigue. I sensed that I was losing.
I struggled to find the right rope at the top of the Hillary Step. Sifting the frozen ropes apart with my mitts on, I tried to feed it through my figure-of-eight abseil device. It wouldn’t go. In frustration I just looped it twice through my karabiner in an Italian hitch (a knot that sounds very dicey, but in actual fact is a quick and effective method of descending a rope), and then just let my body-weight force the rope through my gloves. I left the summit slope irrevocably behind me. I was alone again.
I moved across the ridge and, out of fear, I scaled those ten feet that had eluded Rob Hall before, all in one go. Those vital few feet lead back up to the South Summit; it would be the turning point for me. From then on, as Rob would have known, it was all downhill.
Somewhere beneath the South Summit the two Sherpas caught me up. We had been faster than them on the ascent but now, as weariness swept over me, I found them close behind. My tiny rate of oxygen I was now using, in my effort to make it last until the Balcony, was causing my dangerously slow pace. Pasang and Ang-Sering now climbed alongside me. We had come a long way together and now for the first time I really needed their presence. It made me feel secure.
Slowly we battled against the fatigue, down through the broken snow that our floundering bodies had caused on the way up. I suddenly just felt this longing to get home, yet I knew that was still weeks away. Between us and Base camp lay three treacherous days of avalanche-prone descent. I pushed the longing from my mind.
I somehow just knew when my oxygen ran out. It was nothing sudden but, instead, was this slow realization that the meagre flow of air that I could occasionally feel against my damp cheeks was no longer running. I removed my mask; it was now of no use and would only hamper my breathing. It hung limp and redundant from my rucksack. I was too tired to stow it away.
I could see the Balcony below, it wasn’t far. I just had to make it there. I knew our half-used tanks that we had cached on the ascent awaited us. I let my legs wearily drag through the deep snow. I couldn’t keep going much longer. I lost sight of the Balcony as my head slumped and my goggles misted over again for the umpteenth time. I continued to collapse down the slope. Eventually too tired to even feel any relief, I slumped to the ground next to the tanks at the Balcony.
I feasted on the fresh tank, after now almost fifteen minutes without oxygen. I breathed it in gulps. Warmth flooded back into my body; we were almost down. Camp Four was somewhere below us, only 1,700 feet of descent divided us. It was the section though that had almost claimed Mick’s life. No ropes would protect us on the blue ice there. The urge to hurry, as Camp Four becomes visible, would have to be resisted; the last hurdle is always the most dangerous. We were weak and vulnerable after spending nearly sixteen hours climbing in the Death Zone above the South Col. Reaching the sanctuary of Camp Four was our sole desire as we sat and stared for one last time at the Himalaya below us. We began to descend and leave the land of magic behind us.
We were all now together as a group. The Sherpas and I led the way and Allen and Neil followed behind. As the tents came into sight far below us, the excitement came again. The tents, despite looking like uninvited visitors on the exposed Col, vulnerable to everything the mountain could offer, still seemed to symbolize the finishing post of our ordeal. Oxygen, water and rest awaited us. The tents grew in size as we came slowly and carefully down the ice.
I concentrated harder than ever before as I waded down through the deep snow. We soon came out of it and onto the blue ice again. In the light of day we could see clearly where we had climbed on the ascent. I tried to contain my excitement with each step that we came down. My crampons had lasted well. They bit firmly into the blue ice beneath the deep snow gully. I knew now that I was getting near ‘home’. Very near.
I wondered what had happened to Geoffrey and Michael, and prayed that they would be there safely. We hadn’t heard a word. There had been nothing we could do up there. We had been struggling to survive ourselves. I knew they must have turned back and I hoped they would be in the tents. I had no idea that they were watching us long before we ever saw them.
At the Col, I moved like a drunk across the slabs of rock and granite. It felt so strange not to feel ice beneath me any longer. The teeth of the crampons scraped and groaned as they slid over the stones. I leant on my axe to steady myself. The tents were only yards away; Michael grinned out at me from within, sheltered from the wind. I am not sure whether I even managed to smile back, I was too drained.
For sixteen hours we had neither drunk nor eaten anything. As predicted our water-bottles had frozen within twenty minutes of leaving the Col. We hadn’t slept for over forty hours now. Our bodies felt strangely distant from our minds. Both just ached for some relief. In the porch of Neil’s and my tiny, one-skinned tent, still fully clothed and looking like a somewhat deflated Michelin man, I very unceremoniously just collapsed. Everything went black.
‘Bear, come on, you’ve got to get in the tent. Come on. Bear, can you hear me?’ Michael’s voice woke me. My goggles were still on, albeit a little lop-sided. I grinned and nodded, and shuffled into the tent. My head was pounding. I was severely dehydrated. I needed to drink. I hadn’t even peed for over eighteen hours. My body was in turmoil.
Neil was hovering around with Allen, shedding their crampons and harnesses. Michael and Geoffrey now squatted and talked with me. I think they found the sight of me lying like a second-century mummy somewhat amusing, or maybe it was their relief that we were down. They had waited unknowingly back here for a long time. The suspense of not knowing was now over. The evidence of what had happened was lying sprawled beside them as they made me a warm drink from the stove. I felt so happy to see them.
As the afternoon turned to evening for the second time since being above 26,000 feet, we talked. We hadn’t known why Michael and Geoffrey had retreated. They told their story. The lightning, the problems with their oxygen – also the fear. Geoffrey felt some regret at turning round, but you make decisions up there that feel right and that is never a bad way to operate. After all he was alive and safe. The lesson that I had learnt in the last twenty-four hours is that staying alive is all that really matters. The corpses had shown me that.
Michael turned to me later in the evening, as we were getting ready to try to get comfortable for one last night of tossing and turning in the Death Zone. There was a twinkle in his eye. We had come through a lot together in the past few months and had shared those same frustrations at Base Camp when we were ill and all the others were preparing to leave. We had shared a tent together that last night before leaving Camp Two for our summit bid. We had started on the same journey above Camp Four that had eventually beaten him. We knew each other pretty well by now. He said quietly to me something that I have never forgotten. It was the voice of twenty years’ climbing experience in the wild Rockies in Canada. He said: ‘Bear, I don’t think that you have any idea of the risks you guys were taking up there. In the same situation I would turn round again, you know.’ I smiled at him and he hugged me.
*
At 9.00 a.m., a little later than we had hoped, we moved out from the South Col. The wind still blew and snow whipped over the rocks; nothing seemed any different from when we had arrived forty-eight hours earlier. Yet so much had happened. I clipped into the rope and began to abseil off the lip, down the Geneva Spur. The Col was hidden once more.
Neil and I climbed together. He was moving faster than me, but I no longer cared. I had nothing to keep up for any more. We had done it, I could be slow now if I wanted. The tiredness had started before we had even left the Col. My body had been unable to recover at all up at Camp Four that last night. Instead I had just lain there awake – surviving.
The fatigue of almost sixty hours without sleep showed. On the Lhotse Face as I rested and swigged from my bottle, I lost my grip and it slipped through my fingers. I didn’t know how I had done this, but one moment I was drinking, and the next it was scuttling down the Face to the glacier, some 4,000 feet below. I winced; it was Ed Brandt’s favourite waterbottle that I had borrowed. It had gone to the summit with me and I knew he would treasure it even more now. I just sat and watched it hurtling away like a speck below me. Sorry, Ed, I thought. He’ll murder me. I grinned. At least it had gone out in glory.
Coming down the Lhotse Face seemed to take as long as going up it. Camp Two awaited us at the bottom, across the glacier, and Neil swore at me for being so slow, but he waited patiently. We were still a team. It showed. Three hours later, staggering slowly side by side, we shuffled those last few metres into the camp. Thengba was jumping on the spot with happiness. We were alive, that was all that he cared about. We embraced, and for the first time I relished his smell of diesel oil and yak meat. It was good to be with him. We had spent a lot of time together beforehand at Camp Two.
Andy and Ilgvar were also now at Camp Two. They looked tired. Andy could hardly speak from his sore throat caused by the dry air. But they had succeeded. Together they had reached the summit of Lhotse, the fourth highest mountain on our earth. The strain of the climb was written all over them. Andy smiled at me. It was as if since our climb on Ama Dablam together he had suspected that I would reach the top of Everest. I had never shared his suspicions; for me they had been only hopes. Maybe that is what makes him a friend. We shook hands like two gentlemen in a London club, then started to laugh. We had both seen that special place.
That night I slept like the dead. I drank a final litre of water, squeezed into my sleeping-bag and forgot everything. I didn’t move an inch for twelve deep hours until just before dawn the next day.
My eyelids seemed sealed shut as I tried to prise them open. It was 5.30 a.m.
‘Bear, let’s just get going, eh? It’s the last leg, come on, I can’t sleep when we’re this close,’ Neil announced in the chilly air with condensation pouring from his mouth. I shuffled sleepily.
‘Two minutes, okay? Just two minutes,’ I replied.
‘We’ll leave at six,’ he announced.
‘Yeah, yeah, just belt up now, okay?’ I mumbled tiredly. ‘Blooming maniac.’ I had been dreaming of hot chocolate back in England, and resented his interruption. I fumbled to pack my rucksack. It seemed to weigh a ton now that I was bringing everything off the mountain. It brimmed with kit. I swore quietly.
We didn’t eat before leaving, in anticipation of that elusive fresh omelette at Base Camp. Instead we slowly began to get ready to leave. We were all slow putting on our crampons, and ended up leaving some five minutes late, at 6.05 a.m. ‘So what? It doesn’t matter, we are homeward bound,’ I mumbled. Our guards were beginning to drop.
An hour along the glacier we were stopped suddenly in our tracks. The mountain around us roared violently, then the sound of an echoing crack shook the place. We crouched and waited.
To the side of us, almost exactly five minutes ahead on the exact route we were going, the side of the Nuptse Face collapsed. White thunder pounded down the slope as we stood and stared in horror. It rolled like an all-enveloping cloud across the glacier. The Cwm became obscured in this wave of snow, the spray of which rose high into the air. Slowly the sound began to fade away. We stood in disbelief, some 500 metres back. It had clean missed us. If we had left on time, five minutes earlier, it would have covered us. We stood motionless and silent. For once being late had paid off.
It brought us abruptly back to our senses. We couldn’t afford to relax; not yet. Just a bit more luck, come on, we are so near, I thought. My desperation to be safe was greater than ever before. As the journey nears its end, the risks increase – there is more to lose. We had tasted the summit yet were still within the mountain’s grasp. We could not afford to be careless, not now. After all, we still had one last descent through the Icefall to complete. Statistically, I knew our odds would now be at their very worst. The familiar Army expression of ‘it’s not over until the fat lady sings’ rang in my ears. I began to long for the sound of her voice to ring round the mountains instead.
As we crossed each crevasse, the mountain began to feel more distant behind us. We were emerging slowly from her jaws. I hadn’t descended below Camp Two now for over ten days. I knew that I was leaving something extraordinary behind me. We all walked in silence, lost in our thoughts.
Twice during those few hours moving through the Cwm, I quietly wept behind my glasses. I wasn’t quite sure why I was crying. I thought of my father waiting back home. Somehow I knew that he understood what I had gone through. I just longed to be home. I didn’t try to stop the tears; they had been stored up for a long time. I just let them flow.
Two hours of wading through the powdery snow of the avalanche, and we sat at the lip of the Icefall. The tumbling cascade of frozen water seemed to beckon us in, one last time. We had no choice but to oblige.
Neil strangely crossed himself again at the lip and plunged in, the rope buzzing as he abseiled over the edge. He was gone from sight. I smiled; that was twice he had done that now. Something deep had happened up there with him, I could see it. I pushed the thought away, clipped in, checked the rope and followed Neil down into the glassy depths.
The route had changed beyond all recognition. There must have been a lot of movement whilst we had been up there. The new ropes snaked over the giant ice cubes and led us through treacherously angled overhangs that would crush a house in an instant if they chose that moment to come loose. I swallowed and raced through them. Geoffrey and the others followed on. The ice must have laughed at our feebleness as we hurried nervously through the dark shadows of its jaws above. With each mousetrap of ice we passed through, I felt some of the tension leave me. Each step was a step towards home.
We could see Base Camp to our left, below us. My body filled with excitement and I felt energy fill my weary limbs. I could hardly believe we were almost back. I felt like it had been an age since I had last seen Base Camp. An entire lifetime seemed to have passed up there. The tents seemed to shimmer below us, as if calling us back. I hurried through the ice.
At 12.05 p.m. we unclipped from the last rope for the final time. I let my head fall on my chest as I moved across the ice, out of the Icefall; I couldn’t quite believe it, but it was true. We were home – a little ruffled, but home.
Neil and I threw our crampons to the ground and hugged like three year-olds at a birthday party. I turned excitedly and looked back up at the tumbling, broken glacier and shook my head in disbelief. I was breathing heavily. It had let us through. I thanked the mountain sincerely in my mind and looked around me.
I hardly recognized the bottom of the Icefall now that summer was coming and some of the ice was beginning to melt into stream water. Relieved, so relieved, we splashed in the puddles of freezing water. It felt cool on my sweaty face. I splashed water into the air, dunked my head in the stream and then shook it violently. Waves of worry and tension seemed to leave me as I yelped and threw my head back and forth, shaking my hair. The sun was warm and we knew we were safe at last.
We hugged again as Geoffrey, Michael, Andy and Ilgvar arrived with Pasang and Ang-Sering. It was one of the finest moments I have ever known. We shared the same emotions; the same relief swept over us all. It showed in our eyes. They were all ablaze.
The walk across the rocks to our camp, that before had been the curse of us, suddenly became a delight. I skipped over them with renewed vigour. I could see everyone at Base Camp waiting outside the mess tent. I was dying to see Mick.
My windsuit now undone to the waist, karabiners clipped to my jacket and with water dripping off me, I dropped my pack for the last time. Neil beside me was smiling from ear to ear. He looked a different person now that the strain was lifted from him. He whacked me hard on the back and grabbed my head in his arms; we had come a long way together.
I turned to Mick and we hugged. Grinning, he shook Neil and I with excitement. We had done it together. Mick had also tasted life up high – near the top; he knew what was up there; we had climbed this mountain as a team, as brothers. Mick felt no bitterness about having got so close. He had seen and experienced too much to feel bitter. He had come within a whisker of dying, and he knew it. His family had implored him not to go back up, and a lesser man might have ignored them. He had made the only real decision and was alive now. That was all that mattered. In my mind he had reached the top. I have never thought of it as any other way. He is my bravest friend.
*
Still sweaty from the descent and soaked from the melt-water at the bottom, we drank in the morning sun. The vast jeroboam of champagne that had sat like some idol at Base Camp for two months was ceremoniously produced. It took four of us twenty minutes of hacking away with ice-axes and leatherman tools to finally get the cork off. I feared it would blow a hole in the tent at 17,450 feet in Base Camp. I squinted behind Neil as we wrestled with it.
‘If it hits you, Neil, it won’t make much difference to you, so let me tuck in here behind,’ I argued. He chuckled as we wrestled frantically, shaking the jeroboam way beyond the recommended ‘safe’ limit. Neil tried to shield his head under his arm, but before he managed to get it there, the cork just erupted like some tectonic explosion. It flew round the room what seemed like four times, then lodged itself in a bucket of used tea-bags. Screams went up. The party had begun.
I groped for the cigarettes that Patrick had brought out for me over two months ago. I opened them, lit one and spluttered violently. My throat was still red and sore from my illness and the incessant coughing up high had reduced it to an inflamed mess. I spat blood-filled saliva on the floor. Much as I would have loved to have my first cigarette for ten months there and then, I just couldn’t. I stubbed it out on the floor and sipped at the champagne. At least I had tried.
I felt like drinking a gallon of this Moët et Chandon that had travelled so far, yet my body just couldn’t cope. Sipping slowly was all I could manage and even after a few of those I felt decidedly wobbly. People were noticing this, but I didn’t care. I closed my eyes and flopped against the rock wall; a huge smile was plastered across my face.
An hour later I began to peel myself off the wall. I felt hungover, and I had only had three and a half sips. I felt sure that climbing Everest meant that I would be able to drink like a whale. Something must be wrong. I rather sheepishly got up and staggered out of the tent, squinting in the bright sun. The Sherpas were chuckling as I emerged. I smiled and waved at them to be quiet. My head hurt.
Ed Brandt announced that the sat-phone was charged. We could call home. I remembered his waterbottle that I had dropped. I winced; I would tell him some other time. I went into the communications tent, sat down and dialled home. Someone could let Colonel Anthony now know that I had really reached the top. I grinned. I am sure he would just turn and say that he knew that weeks ago.
That afternoon I lay in my tent with Mick. I peeled off my clothes and got into fresh socks and thermals. I had reserved a set especially for this moment. It had been a good decision. Mick wore my tweed cap and plied me with questions. We sat huddled for hours and talked and talked. I had missed him.
‘How come Geoffrey has lost two stone in weight, I’ve lost about one and a half stone, Neil looks like he’s fresh out of Weight-Watchers HQ, yet you still have love handles, eh?’ Mick joked.
‘You know what they say, Miguel, it takes courage, faith and chocolate cake to climb Everest.’ He shook his head in disbelief, and I secretly felt my sides to see if I did have those love handles. He was right.
*
Henry poked his grinning face through the tent. He had done his job well. He had orchestrated the entire expedition successfully. That in his books meant that we were all alive. To him that was what mattered. His face showed the relief.
‘Well done, boy. Well done, eh?’ he said to me, smiling. He had watched me on Ama Dablam, all the way through to now. He had trusted me and helped me; I owed him a lot for that trust. I had lived up to his expectations; it was all I had hoped for. I thanked him; it was his help and advice that had carved the way for me. He knew how grateful I was; I hardly needed to say it.
‘I knew you had it in you,’ he added.
‘I’ve been lucky, though, Henry, you know. Very lucky,’ I replied.
He reeled on me, his eyes ablaze.
‘No, Bear, you haven’t been lucky. No.’ He spoke fast and abruptly. ‘You, young man, have pushed and pushed for this. You alone got there. Do you understand? You pushed hard, didn’t you?’ I remembered our conversation before I had left Base Camp. Our eyes met. I nodded. We smiled and he withdrew from the tent chuckling.
As the day dragged on, with Sherpas moving slowly around Base Camp, exhausted but exhilarated, the rest of us focused on Neil’s feet. They were in the early stages of severe frostbite. The feet and toes looked blistered and puffy. He sat soaking them in warm water. They were tender and battered. He suspected that he wouldn’t ever feel them again properly. We didn’t know whether he would lose them or not. We didn’t discuss it.
The long wait we had both had at the Balcony had left its mark on him. We had to get him evacuated as soon as possible. He would need proper medical attention on them soon, if he was to keep them. Andy helped bandage them carefully; they had to be kept warm and protected. There was no way that he would get them in a pair of boots; he needed an airlift out of here by helicopter.
The insurance company said that dawn the next day was the soonest they could get one out to us. At 17,450 feet we were on the outer limits at which helicopters can fly. Only the Nepalese military pilots have the suitable choppers and local knowledge to reach here. One would be with us, they hoped, weather permitting, at 6.30 a.m. tomorrow morning. We waited in anticipation; yet no amount of anticipation could keep sleep from me that night. I knew I would sleep like never before as my body began to wallow in the elusive rest that it had so longed for. I daydreamed for a while for some strange reason of getting a dog. Yes, I’ll get a dog when I get home, I said to myself, then I fell fast asleep, smiling.
*
‘One only, one only!’ The Nepalese pilot bellowed over the noise of the rotors. I took no notice and hopped in.
‘I am his personal doctor, I must under all circumstances be with him,’ I fibbed unconvincingly. The pilot looked somewhat bemused.
‘What?’
‘Yes, that’s right, at all costs,’ I insisted, bundling Neil in. He grinned. His feet all bandaged up looked like loaves of bread. I winked at him.
The co-pilot looked bemused as well. ‘Most unusual, but if you are his doctor then I’ll take him down to Lobuche then come back for you. The air is too thin to take off with two passengers.’ I felt a wave of guilt come over me and nodded gratefully.
‘Yes, I must insist,’ I continued, showing the patience of a pregnant camel in the latter stages of labour, ‘I’ll be waiting here.’
I pray the insurance company never gets to hear about this. I’ll be stung for thousands, I thought. Oh, sod it.
The chopper struggled to lift off, then pointed its nose down and swept away across the glacier fading from sight in the glaring sun that was now rising.
Mick and Geoffrey never believed it would work.
‘That’s the last you’ll see of them,’ they joked. I sat staring into the sun, squinting to see if I could see it returning. There was no sign.
Twenty minutes later, the distant sound of rotors could be faintly heard. I could still see nothing. I dared not get too excited. I couldn’t face a thirty-five-mile walk out to Lukla, in the lower foothills. I didn’t have the strength. ‘It has to come back.’
Slowly noise grew and on the horizon I could see the tiny speck of a helicopter winding its way through the valley. It was coming back. My heart leapt. Geoffrey and Mick shook their heads in disbelief.
‘You dog, I can’t believe it,’ they shrieked over the noise of the chopper, now hovering above the ice. It touched down and I clambered in, grinning. I tapped the pilot on the shoulder to say okay. All I had with me was my filthy fleece and my ID documents; everything else would have to be taken down through the valleys by yak. If this was going to work then there wouldn’t be room for any surplus baggage. I knew that I wouldn’t see any of my equipment again for some time.
Inside the cockpit both the pilots were breathing through oxygen masks. They needed to, coming straight into this height. They pulled on the throttle and angled the blades. The chopper strained under the weight, then it slowly lifted off.
Six feet up, though, all the warning lights flashed and buzzed furiously. The chopper began to lose height then just dropped the last three feet down on to the ice. It had been an abortive take-off, the rotors didn’t have enough air to bite on. We tried again and failed. The Nepalese pilot scurried round to the fuel dump and let a load out onto the ice. He scrambled back in and we tried one last time. If it didn’t work then they would have to leave without me. I can’t be that heavy, I thought.
The chopper struggled and just managed to lift off, then dipped its nose and swept only feet above the rocks that raced away below us. The skids missed some of them by what seemed like only a few inches. The pilot strained to get more speed and lift; the joystick shook in his hands. Their eyes darted between the dials and the rocks below, just beneath the height of the skids. They were sweating. Now would be a bad time to die, I thought, having just got off the mountain safely. I knew that only a few years ago a chopper had crashed trying to take off from here, killing everyone aboard. I swallowed, I couldn’t do this as a living.
Slowly the chopper gained height and the glacier dropped away below us. The pilots sat back in their seats and looked at each other, then at me and grinned; it had been close. I think they knew that I wasn’t a doctor, but they also knew when someone was desperate. That is why they had come back. I thanked them and smiled.
As we swept down through the valley, the rotors began to bite into the thicker air. On the horizon I could see a tiny figure with two big white dots on his feet. ‘Neil?’ I muttered, grinning to myself questioningly. We swooped down to pick him up and lifted off with ease. The pilots, still both on oxygen, looked round at us. A look of understanding came over their faces as they saw us huddled together, grinning. We were away.
Mick and Geoffrey raced ahead of the rest of the team and covered the thirty-five miles to the rocky airfield at Lukla, in some twenty-eight hours, non-stop. An amazing feat that I knew I could never have done. My body was in pieces.
As the two of them began the long journey down, Neil and I leant back in the helicopter, faces pressed against the glass, and watched our life for the past three months become a vague shimmer in the distance. The great mountain faded into a haze, hidden from sight. I leant against Neil and closed my eyes – Everest was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Why
‘Two roads diverged in a wood –
I took the road less travelled,
And that has made all the difference.’
Robert Frost
The harsh world of the mountains – cold, white and hostile had been our life for the past ninety-three days. We were leaving that world behind us now. As the chopper swooped and wound its way back through the valleys, that hostility slowly became replaced by the rich flora of the foothills. Glaciers were exchanged for the warmth of yellow rock-beds, and snow was substituted for the buds of the late-spring flowers. I felt the richer air fill my nostrils and a warmth swept over me. We were leaving a lot behind.
The three months up there had changed every one of us. Fear, worry, pain, but also a sense of wonder had held us strongly together for all that time. But still, the long awaited dream of home held me captive. As the valleys that we knew so well flew past beneath us, I felt that dream getting ever closer.
Kathmandu was the sprawling mass of fumes and ancient diesel buses that I remembered it to be. Nothing else seemed to have changed. I felt like a naïve stranger returning into the hustle and bustle of it all. I had been away from all this for so long, living a life of simplicity amongst the hills. The confusion of the city below frightened me as we hovered above the landing pad at the airport. A different world was now awaiting us.
*
On arriving at the Gauri Shankar hotel, I apologized to the receptionist for my smell. My clothes were black with the dirt of months of mountain living. I shifted around slightly embarrassedly. She seemed most forgiving and smiled. I returned the compliment and took the key. It had been a while since I had seen a girl.
The shower was all I had hoped it to be; it was unlikely, though, to disappoint, when my last shower had been over twelve weeks earlier.
The bathroom floor became thick with grime, as the dirt and sweat washed off me. I felt both fear and strain falling away with it. As the cold water splashed over me, I felt a deep relief. I sang quietly to myself. Neil sat on the bed, swigging a cool beer, his feet still bandaged and raised.
Leaning over the balcony of the hotel in my towel, whilst Neil showered, I saw the Russian team, who had been on the north side of Everest. They talked in low voices and moved their bags lethargically around. They looked mentally exhausted. I put on a T-shirt and, still in my towel and holding my beer, I went down to see them. As my eyes met theirs, I knew something was wrong. I knew that look. Neither of us talked for a few seconds as we just looked at each other. They had been crying; big Russian, bearded men, crying.
*
Sergei and Francys Arsentiev were recently married. They loved to climb. Everest was the culmination of a dream; a dream that had gone horribly wrong. Francys had been coming down from the summit when she collapsed. Nobody knew why. Maybe cerebral oedema, or a heart attack, or maybe just exhaustion. She didn’t have the energy to carry on. She died slowly where she sat. Sergei, her husband, went off in search of help; drunkenly he staggered in a stupor of fatigue and desperation. He fell to his death and was never seen again.
The Russian I sat with asked me feebly if I had seen anyone fall whilst we had been up there, or had we seen a body, or just . . . anything. His voice was weak, he knew that it was unlikely, but he had to try. His eyes seemed dead. I felt a sickness well up inside as I thought of Sergei and his wife both dead on the mountain. ‘What the hell am I doing celebrating?’ Emptiness swept over me. I pushed the beer slowly aside without even looking at it.
That afternoon, lying on my bed, I struggled to understand why we had survived. Why had we even been there? I thought of Sergei and Francys Arsentiev; they hadn’t been the only ones who had died in the last few weeks. Roger Buick, a New Zealand climber, had also collapsed whilst still quite low on the hill. He had died there from a heart attack. Life seemed tragically volatile, almost cheap. Mark Jennings was a British climber who had reached the top but had died on the descent. That killer symptom of collapsing to the ground from fatigue had claimed his life as well. These were all experienced, fit climbers. I wrestled to understand why we had survived when others had been robbed of precious life. What a waste, what an unnecessary waste. As I lay there I found no real answers. A year later, I still find myself bereft of any.
The Russians’ faces had been buried in deep despair; they weren’t interested in answers; they had lost their comrades. I closed my eyes. I remembered the words of an old corporal of mine when he had lost his best friend; they were all I could find. Said in his broad Welsh accent he had put it down to the ‘Shape of life, Bear. Shape of life.’ The words didn’t seem to answer anything, but they were all I had.
Human nature hungers for adventure, and true adventure has its risks. Everyone knows those risks on Everest, yet the reality of seeing it first hand makes such words seem hollow. These are real lives, with real families and it still confuses me today.
I remain loyal, though, to the belief that those brave men and women who died during those months on Everest are the true heroes. To them goes the real glory. This must be their families’ only relief.
Neil had lived with death on Everest, twice now. It was twice too much. We wandered the streets of Kathmandu and tried to put it all behind us. As we walked I felt a liberation. The rickshaws honked, the street sellers scurried by clutching their wares, and the fumes lingered sordidly around the tiny, muddy backstreets. The rush of everyday life seemed to dull the memories of the mountain, and all those emotions began to lift off me.
I remembered when I had returned from Ama Dablam almost eight months earlier; the excitement, the determination – it was gone now. I had spent it all on the mountain. The photos of Everest for sale in the stalls no longer held the same magic. I looked at them out of habit more than anything.
We were due to be flying out early the next morning, to get Neil home to some proper medical attention. His feet were now really beginning to swell and blister, as the dead tissue in his toes began to decompose. He hobbled around with me like an old man. It was good to try and move them, despite the strange looks we received from passers-by. We ignored them, they didn’t need to know.
Mick and Geoffrey would arrive in Kathmandu by plane from Lukla in a day or so. It would be a shame not to be together for a while in Kathmandu, but we had no idea how long they would be. We needed to get Neil back.
That last night, ‘out on the tiles’ in Kathmandu, Neil ‘got lucky’ with a beautiful Scottish girl. It hasn’t taken him long, I thought, smiling. I left them kissing outside the down-market Casino. I felt strangely happy for him, almost jealous. I reassured myself by thinking that I was far too exhausted to possibly attempt that. I grinned. That would do. I went back to the hotel and fell fast asleep as if drugged by the intoxicating rich air of Kathmandu – at only 3,000 feet.
*
If a man was taken straight from sea-level to the summit of Everest, he would be unconscious in minutes, and dead soon after. The hostility of that place of dreams had allowed us through her fickle net for a few brief moments on the top. We had returned alive. But why had we done it? Or as one paper, rather too accurately, put it: ‘What makes a scruffy, twenty-three-year-old want to risk it all for a view of Tibet?’ Before I left, I am sure that I would have had a far more slick reply than I do now. The answer seems somehow less obvious, or maybe just less important. I don’t know; I don’t really think about it much. It is just good to be home.
Without any doubt, though, the draw of the mountains is their simplicity. That fierce force of nature, where the wind howls around you and you struggle for breath and life itself; it is strangely irresistible to man. The simple sound of ice beneath your crampons, crunching as the teeth bite into the frozen surface. The raw beauty of being so high and so remote, being like, as Hillary said, ‘ants in a land made for giants’, seeing the greatest mountain range in the world sprawled beneath you. All of it inexplicably draws us to them. I feel those emotions and see those views as I write.
I am not sure if I would return to climb other great peaks, the ones above 26,000 feet – I suspect not. I feel that I undoubtedly used up at least four of my nine lives during those months, and it is always good to keep a few in the bank for emergencies. In truth, though, it is the mountains that I love, the air, the freedom, the heather, the streams. I will always be amongst those, but maybe now in a way that I can just ‘be’; free to enjoy them, with nothing any longer to prove. That, to me, is the real spirit of the mountains.
My experiences on Everest are now just memories; they may fade, but they will never leave me. It is something that maybe only those who have been there will understand.
Since our return, though, people have congratulated me on ‘conquering Everest’, but this feels so wrong. We never conquered any mountain. Everest allowed us to reach her summit by the skin of our teeth, and let us go with our lives where others died. We certainly never conquered her. If I have learnt a deep understanding of anything, it is this. Everest never has been nor ever will be conquered. It is what makes the mountain so special.
One of the questions I repeatedly get asked since returning is, ‘Did you find God on the mountain?’ The answer is no. You don’t have to climb a big mountain to find a faith. I actually began my faith whilst sitting up a tree as a sixteen-year-old. It is the wonderful thing about God; He is always there, wherever you are. That’s what best friends are for. If you asked me did He help me up there, then the answer would be yes. In the words of the great John Wesley when asked by some cynic whether God was his crutch, he gently replied, ‘No, my God is my backbone.’ He was right.
*
The return to the rich air of sea level brought with it an abundance of blessings. The wind was moist and warm, the grass grew and the air was thick with oxygen. The rush, though, from the extreme altitudes we had been to, back to virtually sea level, brought with it its dangers as well. Several of us experienced recurring nose-bleeds and Mick and Jokey had both passed out several times. These were all purely reactions, for the first time in a while, to too much oxygen. But our bodies soon adapted and within several weeks our precious acclimatization was lost.
When we were next to fly in a plane, gone would be the time when we could quietly announce to our neighbour during the safety brief that in the case of a loss in cabin pressure feel free to use our oxygen masks – we won’t need them.
As for the rest of the team, well, Neil returned to his own company, Office Projects Ltd, in London. His feet healed remarkably well and now only cause him a minimum of pain. He still doesn’t have much feeling in them but he managed to keep all his toes.
In 1996, whilst he was away, to his horror, his business did a record high quarterly turnover in his absence. Now, though, when he returned, his new-found confidence ensured that his business set an even higher record. He had only been back a month and he found himself winning contracts wherever he looked. He bought a huge BMW and whopping big speedboat on the proceeds.
I smile as I meet him in London and hear of all his latest ‘acquisitions’. If anyone deserves them, it is him.4
Funnily enough, in the same week that he bought his speedboat, I also bought a boat. Mine, unfortunately, wasn’t quite as grand as his, being only a nine-foot-long, rotting old fishing boat. Still, I felt certain that our time on the mountain had maybe created a secret yearning for the sea. Maybe it was the freedom and peace that it offers, I don’t know. I am currently writing this book on a small uninhabited island off the South Coast,5 and my fishing boat has broken down. So I am cursing the day I bought it as I go hungry, awaiting the island’s owner at the end of the week. Still . . .
Geoffrey left the Army, and found himself a job in the City. It had been a shame that for so much of the expedition we had been apart, but it just turned out like that. The main part of the climb, though, we had done together, and my respect for his decision to turn around above Camp Four remains immense. It showed a certain wisdom to be able to make rational decisions like that, well into the Death Zone. He remains a close friend.
Mick seemed profoundly changed by his time on Everest. He became gentler than I had ever known him to be and his gratitude for life seems to shine from him. He came all too close to losing it. He sums his thoughts up like this:
As for ‘Mick on Everest – the sequel’, it seems unlikely. I feel that the money, time and exposure to danger, involved in trying to achieve those extra 300 feet, is not worth it. In my three months that I was away, I was happier than ever before, more scared than I hope ever to be again, and more stressed than any bond dealer with £10 million in the wrong place, could ever imagine. I came home alive and for that I’ll always be grateful.
He has since launched a network marketing arm of Tiscali. I know he will be successful.
Henry Todd, our expedition manager, returns to the great Himalayan peaks twice a year – organizing expeditions. Almost half of his time is spent in these hills. They are his home. He still swears and shouts ferociously, grinning away from behind his matted beard, but the bottom line is that his expertise keeps people alive up there. We all couldn’t help but like him; and the faith and trust he placed in me made all the difference.
Graham returned to his family and the good Brown Ale of Newcastle. A month later he was awarded an MBE by the Queen, for services to mountaineering and charity. It had been given to the nicest of men. Having been forced to abandon his summit attempt with us because of the illness he had, he has subsequently agreed to return to Everest in the spring of 1999 – to try again. It would be his fourth time on the mountain.6
The other climbers with us returned to their homes. As is the nature of adventure, you return home having trodden some fine lines, and nothing ever seems to have changed. Buses smell, newspaper men blurt out the headlines and people get in a panic if the milk is a day old – but it is this continuity of life that makes it so good to return to.
As for the Sherpas – they continue their extraordinary work. Pasang and Ang-Sering still climb together as best friends, under the direction of their ‘sirdar’ – Kami. The two Icefall doctors, Nima and Pasang, still carry out their brave task in the glacier; they remain a law unto themselves, playing poker in their tents by candlelight until the early hours and laughing out loud across Base Camp. They both still smoke incessantly. I did get the dog that I said I would buy, and called her Nima; though my dog is rather less brave than him – as she lies on her back, asleep by the fire.
Thengba, my friend with whom I spent so much time alone at Camp Two, has been given a hearing-aid by Henry. Now, for the first time, he can hear properly. I never believed that his grin could get any wider – but Henry assures me it has. Thengba’s days are now spent laughing along with his Sherpa friends’ banter. I am returning to Nepal next year to see him.
Despite our different worlds, we share a common bond with these wonderful men; a bond of friendship that was forged by an extraordinary mountain.
Once, when the climber Julius Kugy was asked what sort of person a mountaineer should be, he replied: ‘Truthful, distinguished and modest.’
All these men epitomize this. I made the top with them, and because of them. I owe them more than I can say.
The great Everest writer, Walt Unsworth, writes a vivid description of the characters of the men and women who pit their all on the mountain. I think it is accurate.
But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad . . . Three things these men have in common: faith in themselves, great determination and endurance.
*
8 JUNE 1998. DORSET, ENGLAND. The day after my twenty-fourth birthday.
I looked at my watch sleepily, it was 3.20 p.m. Damn, I thought, – the pigs. I had dozed off in my bedroom, fully clothed on my bed, and time had floated by in a blissful, summery haze. The animals would be going berserk with hunger. ‘I’ve got to stop these afternoon naps – they’ll become a habit,’ I mumbled to myself, as I sat upright.
Since returning, my body had slowly begun to unwind from the exhaustion of our time on the mountain. The months had drained me more than I could have imagined. I think that it was the constant worry and strain of not knowing what lay ahead that had plagued my waking hours the most. I had found that even on rest days at Base Camp where, on the face of it there was nothing to do but wait and sleep, the gentle nagging fear never really left the recesses of my mind. The fear of what the next day would bring, that intolerable waiting for the unknown, and the fear, I guess, of possibly not seeing my family again.
The relief that I now felt was immense; for the first time the pressure had fallen away, and rest came easily. Nothing but feeding the animals at home disturbed my rest those first few weeks after getting back, and oh . . . how I now loved my duvet.
My back had held up amazingly well. During the build-up to the climb I had experienced only the mildest of twinges – on the climb itself, it had never failed me. Despite the constant strain and hard discomfort of lying on the ground, I never felt any recurring pain. It had amazed me.
Now lying at home in bed, my back mildly ached for the first time. I smiled. So much had happened. It’s this flipping soft-living, I’m sure, I thought.
I slowly clambered off my bed and sat wearily looking around my room. My eyes rested on a bag in the corner. On our return, all my kit had been piled into a mass of different hold-alls and I was only now beginning to sort them out. This was one of the last ones that remained untouched, since my return four days ago.
I knelt down and began rummaging lazily through the kitbag. It was full of stinking clothes and equipment, which I had hurriedly packed that last night at Base Camp, before getting the chopper out the next morning. Socks that I had worn for months were festering in the bottom. They must have smelt like I had, when I stood proudly before the beautiful receptionist in the hotel in Kathmandu – they stank. I threw them in my pile for ‘immediate’ washing, and carried on sifting through the bag. Books, Walkman, tapes, medicines. They were all just as they were when I had stuffed them excitedly in at Base Camp.
As I pulled a pair of thermal long johns out, I noticed my sea-shell fall out with them. It clinked to the floor and lay on its side. I reached over and picked it up carefully. It had been my most treasured item in my tent for all that time on the mountain. I had found it with Shara on the beach in the Isle of Wight. I rolled it over in my hand and my mind wandered.
I remembered the number of times I had read the inscription on the inside of it. That lonely time, when all the others left Base Camp without me because I was ill; that fearful moment of leaving Camp Two for the final time, when I didn’t know what the future held. The words in the shell were as true now as they had been then. I read them slowly. They meant the world to me.
‘Be sure of this, that I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth.’ Matthew 28:20.
I gripped the shell tight in the palm of my hand and remembered. It had come a long way with me.
Suddenly the voice of my mother broke the silence, as she warbled from downstairs in her high-pitched tone. I turned towards the sound.
‘Bear, Beeeeaaarr. You may have climbed Everest, but whilst you are at home you jolly well pull your weight. Now hurry up and go and feed those pigs. That’s your job. Beeeaarr, did you hear me?’
I smiled, got slowly to my feet, and put the shell in my pocket. I scuttled down the stairs two at a time, muttering under my breath, ‘Blasted porkies.’
In the year following Bear’s ascent, Michael Matthews, a twenty-two-year-old British climber, reached the summit of Mount Everest, becoming the youngest Briton to climb the mountain. Tragically, he died of exhaustion during a storm on his descent.
Before Bear’s climb, the youngest British climber to have reached the summit was Peter Boardman. In 1975 he reached the summit aged twenty-four; sadly, he later died on Everest whilst climbing with Joe Tasker in 1982. The only other British climber under the age of twenty-five to have possibly reached the summit was Andrew Irvine. Irvine died with George Mallory on their famous 1924 expedition and the mystery surrounding their ascent of Everest has still not been solved. This book is a tribute to those brave men who never came home.
You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.
Matthew 5, v.2 (The Message Version)
British Everest Expedition 1998 – Official Sponsors
Davis, Langdon and Everest, Chartered Quantity Surveyors, London, UK
Gartmore Investment Management
SSAFA Forces Help
Eton College
Virgin and the Morelli Group
Karrimor
Quatar Airways
Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare
Breitling
Timex
Khyam Leisure
BT plc
John Duggan Esq
Michael Dalby Esq
The Grenadier Guards
Land Activities Sports Fund
PRI ITC Catterick
Household Division Funds
Lazards
St Hugh’s College, Oxford University
Citibank
Smithkline Beecham
Henderson Crosthwaite Institutional Brokers
Sharp Panasonic
Liquid Assets!: Moët et Chandon
Freedom Brewery
Charity Contributors
The Expedition was raising money for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and SSAFA Forces Help – the national charity, helping both serving and ex-service men and women and their families in need.
Many individuals and companies generously contributed to the fund-raising efforts, for which we are very grateful. The following is a list of some of the major corporate contributors:
Theakstons Brewery. Guinness Mahon. Perpetual. Bank of Ireland
Greenflag. Alliance and Leicester. RBS Avanta. Churchill Insurance
Aberdeen Prolific. Albert E Sharp. Baring Asset Management. Birmingham Midshires. Britannia Building Society. Halifax plc
Hill Samuel Asset Management. HSBC Holdings
Harrods. Rothschild Asset Management. London and Manchester. Pearsons
Save & Prosper. Scottish Equitable. Templeton. Virgin Direct
Ludgate Communications. Bristol and West
Dresdner Kleinwort Benson Research. Henderson Investors
Kleinwort Benson. Lansons PR
Mercury Asset Management. Northern Rock
Portman Building Society. Frere Cholmeley Bichoff
Luther Pendragon. Polhill Communications
Woolwich. Nonsuch High School
MORI. Biddick Harris PR. Broadgate Marketing. Chase de Vere
Chelsea Building Society. Colonial
Coventry Building Society. Financial Dynamics
Prospero Direct. Thomas Cook
Yorkshire Building Society. Brewin Dolphin Bell Lawrie
Cazenove. Financial and Business Publications Ltd
Lansons Communications. Rathbone Bros
Skipton Building Society. Walker Cripps Waddle Beck Brunswick PR. Norwich and Peterborough Building Society
*
A total of £52,000 has been raised for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, £13,000 for SSAFA Forces Help and £30,000 for the Rainbow Trust (a charity supporting terminally ill children and their families).
The fund-raising continues.
For further information on Bear Grylls see: www.beargrylls.com
Mount Everest
Summit 29,035 ft.
Camp 4 26,000 ft.
Camp 3 24,500 ft.
Camp 2 21,200 ft.
Camp 1 19,750 ft.
Base Camp 17,450 ft.
Bottom’s up! Geoffrey breathing oxygen and trying to rehydrate at Camp 4 (26,000 ft) before the second summit attempt.
The complete team at Base Camp. Back row: Graham, Mick, Michael, Bernardo, Iñaki, Javien, Andy, Bear, Henry, Carla, Ilgvar, Ed, Geoffrey, Kipa, Lakpa. Front row: Allen, Nasu, Neil, Lo, Kami, Dowa, Pemba, Pas, Ang
Dusk at Camp 4. The highest camp in the world at 26,000 ft. The clouds are pouring over the lip of the South Col.
1 A recent survey has established that the height of Everest has increased to 29,035 feet as a result of movement of the earth.
2 The preserved body of George Leigh Mallory was finally discovered at 27,000 feet on Everest in May 1999. No camera, nor the body of his companion, Sandy Irvine, has been found. It is presumed that Mallory fell to his death leaving Irvine to die alone, sitting in the snow. A photograph of Mallory’s wife, Ruth, that he promised to leave on the summit, was missing. The mountain’s greatest mystery still remains.
3 Pascuale Scaturro successfully reached the summit of Mount Everest late in May 1998.
4 In early 1999 Neil Laughton completed his dream of climbing the highest peak on each continent. By the summer of 1999 he had also reached the North Pole.
5 Green Island in Poole Harbour was very kindly lent to me by the Davies family. It was magic!
6 Graham Ratcliffe MBE reached the summit of Mount Everest from the South Side in May 1999. He is the first Briton to climb Everest from both sides.
