Dead Lucky (23 page)

Yet Dawa Tenzing could not or would not be convinced. Alex and his team had obviously trained their Sherpas to follow a set of “standard operating procedures,” not one of which dealt with our current circumstances. As a last resort, I told Dawa Tenzing that I would unclip and climb down unroped.

“You must not!” he said. “You must not!”

“Don't worry. It's only a short way, then I'll clip back on.”

Again he insisted that I stay on the rope, but his unwillingness to consider the options had left me with no choice, so I unclipped my ascender.

Although I told Dawa Tenzing not to worry, I was certainly scared as I lowered myself over the lip. The drop was nothing more than some angular boulders stacked on top of each other. Because the biggest boulder was uppermost and overhung the others, I was unable to see what lay below. I stretched my legs downward and felt for footholds with my feet, but I could not judge how large or solid they were. My hands felt as if they were going to peel away from the holds due to lack of strength, so I moved quickly. I found a good handhold to my right, a rock ledge for my left foot and another for my right, then I was down.

I was unaware that minutes previously Dawa Tenzing had witnessed me emerging from a delirious state. He must have been startled when I proceeded to give him immediate and lucid instructions to perform what he considered to be dangerous actions.

I called for him to descend, and he quickly rappeled down. Straightaway I clipped on to the rope. Any grave concerns he may have had about my mental state were no longer relevant, as we were both past the obstacle and safely attached to the rope. The short rocky section ahead looked ridiculously easy from below and had posed no great obstacle during the ascent. Had I turned my mind to my own welfare, I would have realized I was not seeing the world through my usual eyes.

The steep snow slope below the rock was no longer frightening. I could see the fixed rope lying on the snow at my feet and leading across to the gentler slope of the main ridge, a half-dozen strides away. But as I looked in that direction, I was stunned to see that Pemba had appeared, as if out of nowhere. He was at my level, with no oxygen mask, holding on to the fixed rope.

I removed my mask as I approached him. “Are Harry and Thomas behind you?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “because Thomas is dead.”

I was standing right next to him, so there was no mistaking his words. I was stunned motionless for a moment, then I hugged him and began to sob on his shoulder.

“It's okay,” he said. “It's okay.”

But it was not okay. Pemba spoke good English, but he did not have the words for this. He did not want me to grieve so openly. He wanted me to be strong.

From that moment I don't remember what took place. I was running low on energy at all levels, and I certainly did not have the emotional energy to deal with Thomas's death. Lethargy overcame me again, and again I had no awareness of the passage of time. And while I was mentallyabsent from whatever was going on, Pemba, Lakcha, Dorje, and Dawa Tenzing dragged me down the slope. From my own experience of rescuing climbers suffering from cerebral edema, I can imagine what a delirious, unaccommodating person I must have been—staggering a few steps, collapsing in the snow, muttering nonsense, refusing to cooperate.

Shortly before four o'clock, the five of us reached the top of the Second Step. Seven hours of descending had brought me only 500 vertical feet below the summit, with half of that distance gained thanks to the unceasing efforts of the Sherpas. There were other Sherpas present at the top of the step, but I remembered none of them. Perhaps they were from another expedition; perhaps they were simply unrecognizable in their down suits and oxygen masks. My harness had worked itself loose again, and Lakcha helped me tighten it. I was rigged ready to go, but I slumped onto the slope to rest.

Immediately Lakcha said, “No, you've got to go! You've got to go!” He kept saying it, so with his help I hauled myself to my knees and then to my feet. The cliff was vertical, which meant there was no room for mistakes. I checked my harness, my descender, and the rope—everything was in order. At least I could manage that much. Then I started to rappel.

The drop-off begins with a short snow slope. Almost immediately, I was going faster than expected, so I brought myself to a stop. At the lip of the cliff, where the snow slope finished, I faced the choice of climbing down the ladder or rappeling the cliff. I balanced on the top rung of the ladder, and for an indefinite time I contemplated the choices. Perhaps it was my inability to choose that jammed both the workings of my brain and my ability to relate to time. Apparently, I rappeled down the ladder, a third, more time-consuming option, but one that sidestepped the need for me to make a choice.

Later that afternoon I was woken by a voice speaking English. I had spoken very little English since passing Harry and Thomas just above the First Step at about 4:00 A.M. When I'd needed to speak since then, it had been in my broken Nepali. My mind began trying to identify this out-of-place voice.

Suddenly, I realized it was Peter Adamson. I was always ready to listen to what Peter had to say, so I forced myself to wake up more fully. I was lying on my side, wedged into a cleft in the rock and attached to a rappel rope. The rope took enough of my weight to stop me from slipping out of the flared cleft. Peter was out of sight, but his voice came from a rope that dangled down from higher up. My good mate Peter was someone who always knew what to do when in a fix. In fact, the aim of his company, Adventure West, was to show people how to find win-win answers to lose-lose situations.

Others might say that I was currently facing a lose-lose situation, but Peter was here and he always found a solution. I could not have asked for a better person to help me. None of the options looked good, but at least I now knew that I was on the side of a cliff in Australia. More precisely, I was on a volcanic pinnacle rising out of a patch of Queensland tropical rainforest, surrounded by sugarcane plantations on the coast north of Mackay. I had been here many times before with Peter, and it was very likely that Tenzing Sherpa was with him as well. I had done more rappeling and climbing with Tenzing than with any other Sherpa, our adventures split between the Himalaya and Peter's human resource development courses.

Someone was speaking in Nepali, but it was not Tenzing. Peter was calling me insistently. I was in a tough spot, but at least I was in the shade and out of the hot North Queensland sun.

“Lincoln!” called Peter. “Your mind is playing tricks with you.”

My mind was groggy. I could hear him, but I did not reply.

“They are trying to help you down. Help yourself.”

But still I did nothing.

“Please try to change what's happening in your mind!”

Suddenly I understood. Usually it was me shouting encouragement to the coal miners battling their fear on the volcanic cliffs of the pinnacle. For eight months in 1998, and again in 2002, Tenzing and I had worked with Peter and his small team, turning around the fortunes of a coal mine that had been suffering from the hard times that had hit the industry. Every five-day team-building course in the bush involved a different bunch of miners, and each course had culminated in a rappel descent of the fearsome pinnacle. What was different this time, I now understood, was that Peter was putting me through the course not as a facilitator but as a participant.

“Everyone is trying to help you.”

The issue here is trust, I thought. Trust above fear. Peter was testing me, trying to push me to do something that I felt I shouldn't.

“All you have to do is use your rock-climbing skills to get down quickly.”

“Okay then.”

It didn't feel right, but I did trust Peter. And so I let myself go. I slipped out of the cleft far too quickly, my grasp of the rappel rope too loose. Suddenly I was plummeting down the rope. Instinctively, I pulled the rope into braking mode across the descender. I slowed down just as I shot over the bulge, then I came to a stop, dangling in space. Fear kicked in as I realized this was not a test I had to pass but a fight for my life. I was no longer with Adventure West, no longer in Queensland. Pemba was there, rappeling alongside me. As my rope slipped across the lip of the bulge above, I swung toward him. I thought to absorb the impact by bending my legs as we collided. His feet hit mine and the sharp points of our crampons locked together. As I disentangled my feet from his, I kicked the crampon points on one of my boots into his thigh. My shouted apology was muffled by my oxygen mask. To avoid swinging away from Pemba, I held on to him. He implored me to let go, and I could see there was a danger of our ropes twisting around us, threatening to tangle us together and leave us hanging in space like two insects suspended from a spider's web.

To avoid such a potentially fatal entanglement, I pushed away from Pemba and swung like a pendulum. My momentum carried me just far enough for me to pull myself onto a small ledge, which felt marginally safer than hanging in space. It was obvious I could not stay on the ledge for long, but I did not want to relinquish its illusion of security. Adrenaline had given me a burst of energy when I first slipped from my niche, but it was wearing off and I felt myself fading. My mind seemed to disassociate itself from all decisions, which left me simply standing there, empty.

Then I was able to see myself from somewhere else. My point of view was thirty feet away from the cliff and ten feet above the small ledge where my figure stood motionless facing the rock wall. I was hovering in midair above the huge drop of the North Face, looking at myself like a dispassionate spectator. There was no fear, no need to do anything.

Someone called my name, and suddenly my focus was on the rock one foot from my face. Fear flooded back in. Voices were urging me to swing away from the ledge and rappel down. I glanced around for a way to climb out of my predicament, but that was clearly impossible. I braced myself and leaned away from the rock to rappel. There was little strength left in my hands so I was not able to brake effectively as I slid down the rope. I landed unceremoniously in a heap on what passed for a ledge at the base of the Second Step.

Immediately, Sherpas grabbed me and started pushing and pulling me in the direction we needed to go. I recognized none of them. In my semi-delirious state I wondered why they were hurrying me so forcefully. Now that I was down the accursed Second Step I no longer felt in danger. But, of course, the danger zone for me now was the entire remainder of the mountain. I was higher than all of the summits around me. We were now well into the afternoon, yet I had descended only 600 feet during the last seven hours. We were still a thousand feet above our closest camp, and more than a half-mile away horizontally, with some tricky terrain ahead and less than three hours to nightfall.

My mind was groggy, but Pemba made me see sense. I had to grasp reality and clamber across the rock-face as quickly as I could.

“We must hurry,” he urged. “Still very far. We must hurry.”

He wore no oxygen mask. I could hear the worried tone in his voice, see the desperate look on his face. At midday he had watched Thomas die and had then climbed up to the Third Step to help me down. He was strung-out and with huge responsibilities.

Suddenly I shared his urgency and decided to make a radio call to Base Camp.

“This is quite an exciting spot,” I began. “I'm certainly compos mentis, whereas before I was really freaky. I had this gear to go down there, go down the Second Step. I couldn't even put the bloody gear on. A couple of the guys did it for me. I was out of it then, but I'm definitely into it now.

“These guys have got a huge amount of knowledge in terms of rescuing people. If you want to find the greatest density of rescue people in the mountains, this would have to be it. So we're going pretty well. Keep you posted. You don't have to keep ringing and saying how are we 'cause there'll be times when there'll be a lot going on and there'll be times when there's nothing much going on. Cop you later.”

I finished by dropping in those last three words of Aussie slang, complete with their coarse double entendre. Even when I was struggling, I could not curb my tongue.

The radio crackled back. “Lincoln, Lincoln, good to hear from you. This is Kevin at ABC. The problem is your Sherpas are becoming very, very weak and very, very tired, and you only have about three hours of workable daylight left. So please get all your strength. If you don't move, you won't get off this mountain. Come down, Lincoln.”

WE FOLLOWED A SYSTEM of ledges. Whenever one ledge petered out, another could be reached by stepping down or around an obstacle. As we moved away from the Second Step, I could see the route ahead for several hundred yards, a well-trudged line of footsteps below the crest of the ridge. The route tended downhill but with little loss of altitude, and that made me worry. We needed to lose height quickly. Five people had already died this season above our top camp, which for us was still at least two hours away.

Pemba was in front of me, with Lakcha and Dawa Tenzing following behind. I was unsure of Dorje's whereabouts, but I sensed he was ahead of us. Pemba stopped constantly, turning to face me and urging me on. Whenever I paused to unclip and reclip my harness sling at a fixed rope anchor, Lakcha sped up the process by reaching from behind and doing it for me. I plodded along as best I could, taking advantage of the cliff above me, resting my right hand against it for balance. But soon exhaustion began to overwhelm my instinct to keep moving.

We came to a rise in the ledge we were following. It was a huge effort to make a few uphill steps, but then a blessing came in the form of an anchor which tied the fixed rope low to the ground. The anchor's special aspect was that it allowed me the chance to kneel while I clipped past it. I dealt with the task of clipping but continued to kneel.