Dead Lucky (19 page)

I knew that Dylan and Dorje experienced a different kind of put-down. “So your Dad's climbed Everest?” their schoolmates would ask. “Did he get to the top?” When my sons answered “No,” the kids were dismissive, understanding even less about the reality of climbing Everest.

When I had woken myself up at 3:30 A.M. on the walkout from the Makalu Expedition in 1999 so that I could call Dylan on his eleventh birthday, he had asked me if I had reached the summit. When I'd replied “No,” I had received that same deflated “Oh.”

The answer was obvious. I would climb Everest for Barbara, I would climb it for the boys, and I would climb it for me. And while I was at it, I would climb it because it was there.

Today was May 24, Dylan's birthday. When we reached the High Camp at 27,000 feet, I would ring him on Richard's phone with my best wishes. I would tell him that while I was not yet on the summit, I was on my way.

IN PACKING THAT MORNING, there was not much thinking involved, as everything I had carried up was coming with me, except my diary and SLR camera. The most time-consuming part of getting ready was putting on my harness and boots in the tent. It wasn't until I emerged from the tent that I realized it was another perfect day. Of course, I knew that our tent was precariously pitched on a slope, but I was unprepared to deal with the huge drop. It was like stepping out onto the wing of an airplane. But once I had clipped my crampons to my boots, pulled my oxygen mask onto my face, and attached my ascender clamp to the rope, I felt at ease again, despite the visual restrictions of the mask. As I began to move up the fixed rope, I was immediately reminded of the difficulties imposed by the altitude; even when breathing oxygen, I understood why Dorje had warned me about the day's climb. It was obviously more involved than yesterday's snow slope.

As we moved away from the camp, we encountered low rock walls, only two or three feet high, that we wended our way between. There were some big step-ups, which were simple enough, but they did take extra effort. I took a few too many of these at once and had to stop and breathe hard. We had climbed only 150 feet above the camp when we came to a broad shelf across the slope, with plenty of room for a tent. It seemed that one had recently been packed up, as the ground across the entire flat area was well trodden. There was a long pile of rocks on the downhill edge of the shelf, while on the uphill side lay an amazing flat block of rock, almost the ideal dimensions for a park bench. Dorje and I were a little ahead of Lakcha and Dawa Tenzing, so we immediately sat on the rock. It was a great campsite—much better than ours—but an inconvenient distance from the other tents.

My eyes were first taken by the view—out across Changtse and westward to the peaks on the Nepalese border. But then my eyes dropped to the long pile of rocks in front of us, which had been stacked in a curiously regular fashion. At the same instant Dorje and I realized what we were looking at.

“Igor,” said Dorje.

It was Igor Plyushkin, buried beneath a pile of stones, his boots and trousers visible between the rocks. Suddenly it made sense that the whole area had been heavily trodden. This was one of the jobs the Sherpas had been doing only two afternoons before. I had known of Igor's death from the moment it had happened, but now it was macabre—the magnificent panorama, a perfect campsite with its God-given perfect park-bench rock, forever haunted by the centerpiece of a semi-open tomb.

When Kirk Wheatley had passed Dorje and me on our way to the North Col, he had told us about finding Igor slumped on the slope, but with a tent not far below him. Kirk had sat with him for twenty minutes and had finally been able to urge Igor into the tent. It seemed that Igor had pushed himself too far and too hard. He survived the night but the next day fell sick only fifteen yards into the descent, complaining he could not breathe properly. Extra oxygen, medicines for altitude sickness, and injections of adrenaline did not save him. He was an accomplished climber, who had won the coveted Snow Leopard Award for climbing all five of the former USSR's 23,000-foot peaks in less than forty-two days.

Before we left, I began to say a Buddhist prayer for Igor, one that I had memorized in Tibetan eleven years ago, but after a few dozen syllables, the remainder of it disappeared from my mind. Perhaps the prayer had been taken for Igor; perhaps I had just lost the lot.

That morning when I had decided to go for the summit, I had accepted that there was an atmosphere of death and that I would have to take it in my stride. Now was my test. There was no insensitivity in my decision to continue—just an extra resolve to play everything very safely.

Soon I began to enjoy the climbing, as we were in an incredibly spectacular place with enough challenging sections to keep me engaged and enough horizontal sections to ease the effort. There were another eight or so climbers not far from us, and we slowly gained on them. We had a brief stop for a snack and a drink and then continued climbing. Because bluffs rose above us, our view of the mountain was restricted, so every buttress we rounded revealed a different scene. Although I enjoyed the variety of the climbing, it seemed to go on forever. I was amazed at how long it took to reach our highest camp. The last 500 feet was a long slog up a wide slope with good views across to the summit pyramid. Disconcertingly far above us, near the top of the snow slope, was the cluster of our tents—Camp Three, or High Camp. I set myself a rhythm, which matched the pace of the man above me, Scott Woolums, the leader of the Project Himalaya team we had been climbing among all day.

As we approached the tents, Scott veered off to the right while I continued upward. The first two tents were occupied, and Harry shouted a greeting to me as I passed.

“Welcome to High Camp!”

I merely waved, deeply tired and wanting to find a tent. Again we faced the propped-on-rocks syndrome. Every tent seemed as insecure as the next, so I chose the nearest empty one. Dorje was not far behind me, and as soon as we were settled inside, I took my ice axe with me to visit Harry, who was only ten yards away. The axe would provide the means for me to stop myself if I slipped.

I squatted outside in my big mountain boots, which are not designed for squatting.

“Sit in the doorway,” said Harry. “It's more secure.”

Then he laughed. Security needed to be redefined before being applied to this highest settlement on earth. Admittedly, the tents not taken down would all have blown away within a few weeks of our departure, but for the time being, it was a settlement for nearly two dozen people.

I flopped into Harry's tent and accepted a drink. I did not take much because all our water bottles were almost empty, and in each tent it would take a couple of hours in the cold oxygen-thin air to melt enough snow for a couple of decent drinks each. Simple pleasures were not easily won up here.

Although I had some basic knowledge and had used my oxygen set effectively enough over the past two days, I asked Harry to run through the system again. Tomorrow would be the climax of the climb, and I wanted to be sure I knew everything I needed to know. The system was not complex, but at high altitude routine tasks can prove challenging. I also wanted to confirm the location of our spare bottles.

“Don't worry about that,” Harry said. “The Sherpas have got it under control, and you'll be together.”

I had not been using my oxygen set around camp because it was cumbersome when unpacking and taking photos, but now I was beginning to feel lightheaded. Harry passed his mask across to me, and I pulled it over my mouth, inhaled, then passed it back to him. We continued this as we talked. It was like being in an anti-opium den where we partook of oxygen to prevent hallucinations.

Because Harry had summited Everest the previous year, I asked him about the final climb. It was only a matter of hours away, and there was nothing like a recent update from the horse's mouth.

With our summit strategy agreed upon and my other questions answered, I carefully climbed back uphill. I stopped by Lakcha and Dawa's tent to tell them I had spoken with Harry and that our departure for the summit would be at 11:30 P.M., which was much as they expected. It was still a beautiful afternoon. All we needed was for the weather to hold for another twenty-four hours. I squeezed into the tent, which was at an even more ridiculous angle than the one at Camp Two. We were now at 27,300 feet—I couldn't blame the Sherpas for not going to the same lengths to make things comfortable.

Once inside, I called Dylan on the Iridium phone and wished him happy eighteenth birthday. Barbara had not returned from work. When I rang back again later, I spoke to no one, only Barbara's message on the voicemail that finished with the words “We'll get back to you as soon as we can.”

I thought how nice it would be for all of us to be together, but the thought lasted only a minute.

I left them with a message, the short, sharp sentences of extreme altitude. “I'm feeling strong. The weather's fantastic. We'll be leaving at midnight. I love you all.”

From that moment on, my whole being was focused on climbing as far as I was able to climb, and then returning safely.

DESPITE HARRY'S WISH that we start up the fixed rope at eleven thirty, only he and Pemba were ready at that time. It was midnight when I clipped on to the rope, with Lakcha in front and Dorje and Dawa Tenzing behind. I felt clumsy and awkward in my big boots and oxygen mask, and with the hood of my down suit pulled around my face. The doziness, which had been my best attempt at sleep during the few hours I lay in the tent, had not worn off. The first fifty yards were tough, but soon I had warmed up and found my rhythm. By the time we had reached the first sections of steeper rock, I found myself really enjoying the challenge of climbing, with the best part of those first hours being the Exit Rocks, a steep cliff that led us to the Northeast Ridge.

By now we had mingled with members of the Project Himalaya expedition who had left camp before us. We had overtaken a few climbers as they rested at different spots. When they consolidated as a team on the narrow but flat crest of the ridge, Lakcha, Dawa Tenzing, Dorje, and I moved to the front. I thought Harry and his team were still somewhere ahead, but I had no idea if anyone else was up there with them.

The batteries in my headlamp were fading quickly, so I asked Lakcha to unzip the top pocket of my pack and take out the spare. I stopped next to a large boulder on the crest of the ridge, figuring this was something solid against which I could lean while Lakcha found my headlamp. I turned off the fading light and became aware of the beauty of the night. I felt much closer to the stars, although in the scale of the universe they were no closer at all. The darkness was intense, seeming to exaggerate the updraft of cold air from the Kangshung Face.

Unfortunately, at that moment other climbers caught up to us, and I realized that Lakcha was almost blocking the trail, as he looked for my headlamp. We squeezed against the boulder to let the climbers past.

One of them said, “Whatever it is you're doing, would you do it somewhere else?”

There was nowhere else to stop on this narrow ridge, but I thought it an eloquent sentence in the circumstances. I later learned that Harry had been directly behind me, that these words had come into his mind as a favorite phrase of his. But he had not voiced this or any other phrase, had not removed his oxygen mask. I was discovering that life in the Death Zone was so far removed from the everyday world that telepathy had become an aberrant part of reality.

At last Lakcha handed me my headlamp and we were on our way, just ahead of a few more Project Himalaya climbers. My big worry on this final day to the summit had been that I would get trapped behind a line of many climbers waiting for someone to overcome an obstacle. This was a frequent problem at the Second Step, the hardest part of the climb. And yet here I was, already causing a traffic jam myself. But I had wasted only a few minutes, whereas sometimes climbers lined up for hours at the Second Step. The lines were nothing like Saturday morning at the supermarket. Here, on the roof of the world, four people spending half an hour at the Second Step was enough to ruin the summit chances of the people behind them, so tight are the safety margins on Everest. The maths was easy, even at this altitude.

I was now in the middle of the Project Himalaya team, which was no inconvenience to anyone, provided I kept moving. The height gain along this first section of the ridge was gradual, and when we reached a significant rise, we did not have to slow down because the fixed rope traversed the slope. A trail had been well trodden into the fragmented rock, following the natural strata. We made good speed—if speed can ever be the appropriate word close to 28,000 feet. My new headlamp was bright, but it still illuminated only a six-foot circle around me. I was moving well when suddenly I saw a body beside the trail. I immediately thought of “Green Boots” and David Sharp. Before the death of Igor Plyushkin, Alex had warned us that these would be the first bodies we would encounter.

Green Boots was the name given to a now-anonymous Indian climber who had died on the mountain in 1996. He had died with the top end of his body under a low rocky overhang and only his legs and lower body protruding. I was so startled by the body that I did not even take in David Sharp as a separate entity, until the wave of emotion had subsided and I realized that his body must have been there, too. Seeing Igor's grave the day before was the first time I had encountered a body on a mountain. All my other dangerous climbs had been on untrodden ground or challenging routes. In New Zealand I had climbed routes where people had died, but the bodies had always been removed.

It was strange to be marching past dead people in the dark, strange enough to make me believe in ghosts. Soon we reached the base of the First Step, junior cousin to the infamous Second Step and the first of the three cliffs that form steps in the ridge, visible from afar on the Northeast Ridge skyline. Several climbers were resting at the base of the First Step, partly because at this point there was enough space to do so but presumably also because this was the first of the acknowledged difficulties of the final climb to the summit.