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I’d been one of the first to volunteer, so as I dragged the corpse down from the death zone towards Everest Base Camp, I could hardly complain. This was an adventure. This was something I’d be able to tell my kids and grandkids about. This would be written about in the press, a film crew was interviewing everyone, and a special team were examining each body we managed to retrieve, gathering personal effects and doing their best to contact any next of kin.
This was important, and I should have been enjoying it. But the dead were talking to me.
At first, it might have been the wind playing around my frozen ears, or ice crackling in my hair. Or maybe it was my breath freezing and dropping into the snow, crystals of unuttered fears. But then I heard my name.
Richard.
I didn’t tell anyone. In such conditions, you can hardly admit to something like that. But looking around the camp that evening, I could see at least three others who seemed quiet and withdrawn, their eyes distant. I wanted to talk to one of them. But evening came, and with it exhaustion.
We all retired early to our tents. The last thing I saw outside was the glaring red bulk of the tent where they kept the corpses.
––––––––
There were varying accounts of how many people had died on Everest and been left frozen to the mountain’s skin, fixed there like dead parasites. Before I volunteered to help retrieve some of them, I’d always wondered at the teams who could leave their dead behind. It can’t be that hard, I’d thought. But then the mountain had clasped me in its teeth, and I’d come to understand.
There is no normality in places like this. I was in the wild, at the very edge of survivability. This was a place of extremes, where a sprained ankle or a stomach bug could mean a slow, cold, lonely death. I’d heard many stories of climbers leaving wounded companions behind, vowing to return but sometimes unable to save even their own lives. And I imagined that their empty promises of sending help were lost amidst Everest’s storms, forever echoing around the mountain. It gave the wind a haunting lilt.
Perhaps it was one of those whispers I had heard.
The last day we went up, I travelled with sixteen other climbers. We’d come to know each other quite well during the seven days we had been working, and it would be a sad final journey off the mountain and away to our separate corners of the globe. It was a strange endurance challenge—most people ran marathons across the Sahara, or cycled across Australia—but we’d all wanted to feel that we were making a difference.
Nineteen frozen corpses in the red tent paid testament to that. I’d already vowed that I would visit them one more time before leaving, though such snooping was strictly forbidden.
We found the body of a German woman that afternoon, frozen into a small cave in the rock face just where several expeditions had marked on their climbing maps. The researchers at Base Camp thought she had been there for at least thirty years, so contacting her relatives would likely be a time-consuming effort. Something for them to do after I was back at home, running the hills of South Wales and remembering my great adventure. Perhaps one day I would even—
Richard.
I looked around at the other climbers. The body was close behind me, bound in canvas now and being towed by two American men. They were quiet and respectful, and one of them returned my haunted gaze.
I went to ask if he’d heard anything, but a gust of wind stole my words before I even spoke, and a haze of snowflakes blurred my surroundings.
The storm came in quickly, and because we’d not anticipated it, getting down safely became a real challenge. I concentrated hard, sweat warming and then cooling my skin inside my layers, my backpack frozen to my coat, ice pick swinging and spiked boots stamping at the ice.
Richard.
I looked left and right, but there was only the wind. It spoke again. I could not decipher what it said. All the way down to Base Camp through that long afternoon, through all the effort and the slips and stumbles that could have led to injury and death, the wind whispered to me.
There was no way to ask anyone else what they were hearing. And by the time we reached camp and collapsed into our tents, I no longer wished to know.
Sleep came and took me away, and the frozen German woman haunted my dreams with her half-open eyes.
––––––––
Next morning when I woke, my kit had been packed and stacked outside my tent. The realisation that I was leaving caused a brief panic in me, and I had crazy ideas about fleeing the camp and climbing on my own, going as high as I could until the freezing wind and snow ensured that I would remain forever.
But I quickly gathered myself. My companions were sitting around the fire pit, hands wrapped around mugs, staring into the flames. Some of them spoke softly, others seemed silent. Everyone was feeling the pull of the mountain much more now that we had to leave.
I took a step towards them, then quickly changed direction. Head down, as if not seeing them meant that they would not see me, I marched across to the closed red tent and ducked inside.
The first thing that struck me was the smell. This was not decay, or age, but the muggy, warm odour of climbing clothes and sweat-soaked gear that I’d become used to since hiking into the Himalayas. Not unpleasant, I found it a compellingly personal smell. It was honest and human—the bare scent of extreme effort and the will to survive.
I smiled and went to speak to whoever else had come into the corpse tent. Then I realised that no one had.
The first man who turned his head was a sherpa who had been lost on the higher slopes eighteen years before. I could hear the crick of his neck, and his skin had turned leathery and smooth, like a china doll’s. His eyes were withered, too small for their sockets. He smiled, and I could not understand what he said.
Others turned to look at me. One retained very little skin on his or her skull, and I was not sure whether they were smiling. Another was swollen within her bright red coat, the exposed skin of her face black and brittle. They looked at me and welcomed me in. A man raised one hand offering me something.
I stepped forward to find out what. I was not afraid.
His had been a more recent tragedy. Part of an Indian expedition, he had died less than twenty years ago, and his eyes seemed to retain some of their shine. I smiled, and he lifted my hand, turning it over so that I could see the waxy effect of my flesh, and the blackened stumps of frostbitten fingers.
From outside I heard the faint sound of crying. But outside the tent was now somewhere else.
The dead spoke, and though I could still not understand, I knew that they sounded lost. Perhaps that was the true language of the dead.
I sat with them, and the mountain breathed my name one last time.