Into Thin Air (28 page)

“Thanks anyway,” Beck said. “I think I’ll just wait for Mike. He’s got a rope; he’ll be able to short-rope me down.”

“O.K., Beck,” I replied. “It’s your call. I guess I’ll see you in camp, then.” Secretly, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to deal with getting Beck down the problematic slopes to come, most of which were not protected by fixed lines. Daylight was waning, the weather was worsening, my reserves of strength were nearly gone. Yet I still didn’t have any sense that calamity was around the corner. Indeed, after talking with Beck I even took the time to find a spent oxygen canister that I’d stashed in the snow on the way up some ten hours earlier. Wanting to remove all my trash from the mountain, I stuffed it into my pack with my other two bottles (one empty, one partially full) and then hurried toward the South Col, 1,600 feet below.

From the Balcony I descended a few hundred feet down a broad, gentle snow gully without incident, but then things began to get sketchy. The route meandered through outcroppings of broken shale blanketed with six inches of fresh snow. Negotiating the puzzling, infirm terrain demanded unceasing concentration, an all-but-impossible feat in my punch-drunk state.

Because the wind had erased the tracks of the climbers who’d gone down before me, I had difficulty determining the correct route. In 1993, Mike Groom’s partner—Lopsang Tshering Bhutia, a skilled Himalayan climber who was a nephew of Tenzing Norgay’s—had taken a wrong turn in this area and fallen to his death. Fighting to maintain a grip on reality, I started talking to myself out loud. “Keep it together, keep it together, keep it together,” I chanted over and over, mantra-like. “You can’t afford to fuck things up here. This is way serious. Keep it together.”

I sat down to rest on a broad, sloping ledge, but after a few minutes a deafening BOOM! frightened me back to my feet. Enough new snow had accumulated that I feared a massive slab avalanche had released on the slopes above, but when I spun around to look I saw nothing. Then there was another BOOM!, accompanied by a flash that momentarily lit up the sky, and I realized I was hearing the crash of thunder.

In the morning, on the way up, I’d made a point of continually studying the route on this part of the mountain, frequently looking down to pick out landmarks that would be helpful on the descent, compulsively memorizing the terrain: “Remember to turn left at the buttress that looks like a ship’s prow. Then follow that skinny line of snow until it curves sharply to the right.” This was something I’d trained myself to do many years earlier, a drill I forced myself to go through every time I climbed, and on Everest it may have saved my life. By 6:00 P.M., as the storm escalated into a full-scale blizzard with driving snow and winds gusting in excess of 60 knots, I came upon the rope that had been fixed by the Montenegrins on the snow slope 600 feet above the Col. Sobered by the force of the rising tempest, I realized that I’d gotten down the trickiest ground just in the nick of time.

Wrapping the fixed line around my arms to rappel, I continued down through the blizzard. Some minutes later I was overwhelmed by a disturbingly familiar feeling of suffocation, and I realized that my oxygen had once again run out. Three hours earlier when I’d attached my regulator to my third and last oxygen canister, I’d noticed that the gauge indicated that the bottle was only half full. I’d figured that would be enough to get me most of the way down, though, so I hadn’t bothered exchanging it for a full one. And now the gas was gone.

I pulled the mask from my face, left it hanging around my neck, and pressed onward, surprisingly unconcerned. However, without supplemental oxygen, I moved more slowly, and I had to stop and rest more often.

The literature of Everest is rife with accounts of hallucinatory experiences attributable to hypoxia and fatigue. In 1933, the noted English climber Frank Smythe observed “two curious looking objects floating in the sky” directly above him at 27,000 feet: “[One] possessed what appeared to be squat underdeveloped wings, and the other a protuberance suggestive of a beak. They hovered motionless but seemed slowly to pulsate.” In 1980, during his solo ascent, Reinhold Messner imagined that an invisible companion was climbing beside him. Gradually, I became aware that my mind had gone haywire in a similar fashion, and I observed my own slide from reality with a blend of fascination and horror.

I was so far beyond ordinary exhaustion that I experienced a queer detachment from my body, as if I were observing my descent from a few feet overhead. I imagined that I was dressed in a green cardigan and wingtips. And although the gale was generating a windchill in excess of seventy below zero Fahrenheit, I felt strangely, disturbingly warm.

At 6:30, as the last of the daylight seeped from the sky, I’d descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four. Only one obstacle now stood between me and safety: a bulging incline of hard, glassy ice that I would have to descend without a rope. Snow pellets borne by 70-knot gusts stung my face; any exposed flesh was instantly frozen. The tents, no more than 650 horizontal feet away, were only intermittently visible through the whiteout. There was no margin for error. Worried about making a critical blunder, I sat down to marshal my energy before descending further.

Once I was off my feet, inertia took hold. It was so much easier to remain at rest than to summon the initiative to tackle the dangerous ice slope, so I just sat there as the storm roared around me, letting my mind drift, doing nothing for perhaps forty-five minutes.

I’d tightened the drawstrings on my hood until only a tiny opening remained around my eyes, and I was removing the useless, frozen oxygen mask from beneath my chin when Andy Harris suddenly appeared out of the gloom beside me. Shining my headlamp in his direction, I reflexively recoiled when I saw the appalling condition of his face. His cheeks were coated with an armor of frost, one eye was frozen shut, and he was slurring his words badly. He looked in serious trouble. “Which way to the tents?” Andy blurted, frantic to reach shelter.

I pointed in the direction of Camp Four, then warned him about the ice just below us. “It’s steeper than it looks!” I yelled, straining to make myself heard over the tempest. “Maybe I should go down first and get a rope from camp—” As I was in midsentence, Andy abruptly turned away and moved over the lip of the ice slope, leaving me sitting there dumbfounded.

Scooting on his butt, he started down the steepest part of the incline. “Andy,” I shouted after him, “it’s crazy to try it like that! You’re going to blow it for sure!” He yelled something back, but his words were carried off by the screaming wind. A second later he lost his purchase, flipped ass over teakettle, and was suddenly rocketing headfirst down the ice.

Two hundred feet below, I could just make out Andy’s motionless form slumped at the foot of the incline. I was sure he’d broken at least a leg, maybe his neck. But then, incredibly, he stood up, waved that he was O.K., and started lurching toward Camp Four, which, at the moment was in plain sight, 500 feet beyond.

I could see the shadowy forms of three or four people standing outside the tents; their headlamps flickered through curtains of blowing snow. I watched Harris walk toward them across the flats, a distance he covered in less than ten minutes. When the clouds closed in a moment later, cutting off my view, he was within sixty feet of the tents, maybe closer. I didn’t see him again after that, but I was certain that he’d reached the security of camp, where Chuldum and Arita would doubtless be waiting with hot tea. Sitting out in the storm, with the ice bulge still standing between me and the tents, I felt a pang of envy. I was angry that my guide hadn’t waited for me.

My backpack held little more than three empty oxygen canisters and a pint of frozen lemonade; it probably weighed no more than sixteen or eighteen pounds. But I was tired, and worried about getting down the incline without breaking a leg, so I tossed the pack over the edge and hoped it would come to rest where I could retrieve it. Then I stood up and started down the ice, which was as smooth and hard as the surface of a bowling ball.

Fifteen minutes of dicey, fatiguing crampon work brought me safely to the bottom of the incline, where I easily located my pack, and another ten minutes after that I was in camp myself. I lunged into my tent with my crampons still on, zipped the door tight, and sprawled across the frost-covered floor too tired to even sit upright. For the first time I had a sense of how wasted I really was: I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life. But I was safe. Andy was safe. The others would be coming into camp soon. We’d fucking done it. We’d climbed Everest. It had been a little sketchy there for a while, but in the end everything had turned out great.

It would be many hours before I learned that everything had not in fact turned out great—that nineteen men and women were stranded up on the mountain by the storm, caught in a desperate struggle for their lives.

* A radial keratotomy is a surgical procedure to correct myopia in which a series of spokelike incisions are made from the outer edge of the cornea toward its center, thereby flattening it.

1:25 P.M., MAY 10, 1996 • 29,028 FEET

There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention—that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and fear, the pain of his fatigue and the longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary—the sunshine, the memories, the future; which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life
.

Joseph Conrad

Neal Beidleman reached the summit at 1:25 P.M. with client Martin Adams. When they got there, Andy Harris and Anatoli Boukreev were already on top; I had departed eight minutes earlier. Assuming that the rest of his team would be appearing shortly, Beidleman snapped some photos, bantered with Boukreev, and sat down to wait. At 1:45, client Klev Schoening ascended the final rise, pulled out a photo of his wife and children, and commenced a tearful celebration of his arrival on top of the world.

From the summit, a bump in the ridge blocks one’s view of the rest of the route, and by 2:00—the designated turn-around time—there was still no sign of Fischer or any other clients. Beidleman began to grow concerned about the lateness of the hour.

Thirty-six years old, an aerospace engineer by training, he was a quiet, thoughtful, extremely conscientious guide who was well liked by most members of his team and Hall’s. Beidleman was also one of the strongest climbers on the mountain. Two years earlier he and Boukreev—whom he considered a good friend—had climbed 27, 824-foot Makalu together in near-record time, without supplemental oxygen or Sherpa support. He first met Fischer and Hall on the slopes of K2 in 1992, where his competence and easygoing demeanor left a favorable impression on both men. But because Beidleman’s high-altitude experience was relatively limited (Makalu was his only major Himalayan summit), his station in the Mountain Madness chain of command was below Fischer and Boukreev. And his pay reflected his junior status: he’d agreed to guide Everest for $10,000, compared to the $25,000 Fischer paid Boukreev.