Dead Lucky (18 page)

Dorje and I turned and followed the ice gully uphill to a level area, where we put on our crampons. Although we did not need the spiked frames on our boots for crossing the flat glacier, we would need them on the snow face leading to the North Col. It was simpler and safer to wear them from this point.

By the time we had attached our crampons, the sun had left us for the day, so we walked the breadth of the glacier in the shade. Dorje and I were less than halfway up the fixed ropes when the temperature dropped dramatically. My down suit was stashed at the North Col because I had not wanted to carry warm clothes up and down between Advance Base Camp and Camp One for the rare occasions that we needed our warmest gear. But today, with our very late start, I knew we would feel the cold. I had packed a down vest, which I now put on, so that my core at least was warm. Dorje wore his down suit from Advance Base Camp, so the late start was no particular inconvenience for him.

Harry was pleased to see us at the North Col. Thomas was an intriguing character with a sharp intellect and many amusing stories, which he told in perfect English. But he did have a Germanic seriousness which could be off-putting. Thomas was a man with a career who had found mountaineering, whereas Harry and I were committed climbers who had been forced to find careers. It gave us a similar outlook, and with a shared sense of humor, too, we found that we got along very well. At the North Col, however, Thomas was subdued. The nature of his visual impairment was such that his eyesight became less effective the higher he climbed. Here, at 23,200 feet, his vision was already significantly compromised. He told me that all he could see were shapes. Nevertheless, we were in good spirits in the mess tent. We had not forgotten Igor's death; that evening it seemed to make us value life even more.

One problem of sleeping on snow is that it compacts, not just from body weight but also from body heat. The disfiguration of the snow under the thin nylon floor was made worse by the amount of sitting that took place in the tent—a lot of time was spent putting on and taking off boots or shuffling through gear looking for gloves or goggles. The 7Summits-Club sleeping tents were shared—the A-Team would occupy them for a few days, followed by the B-Team. By May 22, after several weeks of regular occupation, the floor of my three-person tent—which would only ever accommodate two at the most because of the inevitable discomfort factor—was shaped like a crater made by some minor missile. Sleeping in the curvature of the snow bowl was like lying in a frozen hammock. Given the circumstances, I slept reasonably well, thanks to the ritual of my midnight read with my lightweight headlamp.

The next morning I woke early, partly due to the bomb crater. Harry, Thomas, Pemba, and Passang had set off on the long climb to Camp Two not long after breakfast, breathing oxygen from the moment they left camp. I was in no hurry because I needed to wait for Lakcha and Dawa Tenzing to arrive from Advance Base Camp, as Alex had requested. When they joined us, our group would be nine, with a ratio of two Sherpas to each Westerner. After Igor Plyushkin's death, Alex was limiting the risks as much as he could.

Lakcha and Dawa Tenzing arrived at the North Col at 10:30 A.M. but stopped for a late breakfast before tackling the second leg to Camp Two.

Dorje and I left them to their recuperation. Now that I was not filming, I could dispense with the stop-start approach of a cameraman and adopt a slower pace that I could maintain for hours at a time. I elected to do without oxygen for as long as I could. The first 1,500 feet of height gain was a simple matter of plodding up a broad snow ridge. I had climbed the first six hundred without oxygen with Mike and Christopher ten days earlier as an acclimatization exercise and saw no reason to begin using it now.

Had the weather been fine and relatively calm, I would have been happy with the uninteresting but strenuous task of hiking up the easy-angled snow ridge. The amazing panorama would have compensated for the repetitive nature of the climbing, the view improving with every step. But today the constant winds prevented any such improvement. My hood was pulled tight around my face and gave me tunnel vision, so the climb became boring and uninviting. The sky was clear, but the winds blasted us with snow, obscuring the outline of the mountain and making nearby rocks appear as black shapes. The higher we climbed, the stronger the wind blew. At around 24,300 feet I was feeling totally uninspired, and decided the cure was to ask Dorje to reach into my pack to turn my oxygen on. The climbing became easier immediately, which was pleasing, but the oxygen mask made it hard for me to see my feet—not exactly a safety feature.

Two hundred feet higher, at the junction of the snowy ridge and the rock-face above, was a campsite where the last of the tents were being packed up by Sherpas because all the climbers from that team were already off the mountain. Soon it would be the end of May—the close of the climbing season—and the number of climbers had decreased markedly. This suited me fine, as I had never before had to deal with crowds on a big Himalayan mountain and did not want to start now.

Our Camp Two was approximately 500 vertical feet above the abandoned camp. On average, the rock-face was no steeper than the ridge had been, and the bright blue fixed rope that had been laid in place for the 2006 season showed us the easiest way up to our camp.

The camp itself would not have met safety standards anywhere. The slope was a mass of loose rocks, which meant that tents could only be pitched if they were propped up on slabs of rock that had been piled together to form rough platforms. Each tent had its own platform, in every case too small, so a part of every tent overhung nothingness. It was not a place that induced a good night's sleep.

The tent that Dorje and I chose had a particularly lumpy floor. We worked out that the only place level enough for the stove was in the doorway. While Dorje melted snow for drinks and dinner, I carefully squeezed outside to take in the view. The wind had dropped to almost nothing, which encouraged me to take photos.

It had become a magnificent afternoon, with views in every direction. Behind and above us was the unbelievable mass of Mount Everest, which had only seemed bigger with every upward step. Stretching to the east, beyond the cascade of lower peaks in the middle foreground, were the rocky brown hills of Tibet. On the skyline were distant snow-capped peaks, with names known only by nomadic yak-herders.

Camp Two was an obvious turnaround point—after negotiating a couple of snow-filled rock gullies, it was a simple snow ridge all the way down to the North Col. I had not come up here to contemplate retreat, but I found that my feelings were taking me in that direction. I understood how David Lien had been happy to call it quits at this camp, where the A-Team had found their tents destroyed by wind. It was beyond this point that climbers drove themselves to their deaths, either because unbending ambition overpowered common sense or because the determination to overcome the cold, the discomfort, and the danger was as unwavering as a GPS-programmed missile locked on to its target. Most climbers survived, of course—some of them because they had turned back here.

A maiden expedition to Mount Everest is the biggest first date you'll ever have. You need to know when to say no, when to back off, and when to open the throttle. I knew what I was up against. Did I want to face that nightmare of choices and judgments in a place where the latest bodies had barely frozen solid? Was this place where I stood now not high enough? Was it not beautiful enough? I did feel some fear within me—it is always present when I am on a mountain—but it was not fear that was steering me away.

There had been so much death this season—a ludicrous amount, given the good weather. I had wanted no part of it, and yet already I had been drawn in. I gave advice to a man who was to climb without oxygen, and he died because he followed that path. I witnessed an ocean of grief in a woman who had lost her husband. I heard wild tales of a man trapped between life and death but with no option to choose either. I heard rumors of another whose reality had become so distorted by the oxygenless air that he had leaped to his death. Everest had taken four lives from the hundreds of locals employed by the guiding industry. One of our teammates had expired while I had waited by the radio, ready to be the next man to step up in line.

I did not want to be that next man.

I returned to the tent, and Dorje grinned as he protected the stove while I moved past. I asked him what was involved in the climb to 27,000 feet the next day.

“A big climb,” he said. “Not much place to rest. You have to keep moving. Otherwise can be problem.”

I wondered if he was hinting that I might not be able to match the pace necessary to get to the camp. I pulled out my diary and drew a line down the middle of a blank page. On one side of the page I wrote the reasons why I should go up, and on the other side the reasons why I should not. Then I read through what I had written. There were good reasons on both sides of the page, so I put the diary away and deferred my decision to the morning.

Dorje insisted on cooking a freeze-dried meal, but all I wanted was fluid. I had some snacks and energy gels that would satisfy me. I tried to tell him in Nepali that I hated freeze-dried meals, but I had never learned the word for
hate,
and he cooked it anyway. It proved to be as repulsive to me as always. I knew the fault was not Dorje's, and not entirely the fault of the freeze-dried. At this height, I had no appetite for food and could not stomach the amount of fluid I needed to drink. In the cold, both were slow to prepare on our lightweight, low-powered stoves.

Dorje attempted to eat enthusiastically, but I could tell it was a struggle. He kept insisting that I take more, but as a vegetarian I was expert at politely refusing food that I did not want to eat.

When we wriggled into our sleeping bags, I expected to have a sleepless night. I put my oxygen mask on and set my regulator to less than half the daytime flow. Soon I slipped into a dozy kind of sleep. Without sensing the transitions in and out, I must have drifted into a proper sleep at some point, as the night passed much more quickly than I expected. It was the best sleep I had ever had on any expedition at such altitude, and I attributed it entirely to sleeping with a low flow of oxygen.

THAT SAME NIGHT, the C-Team members of the SummitClimb Everest Expedition were settling down to sleep at the North Col. They called themselves the C-Team because they were the also-rans from the expedition's summit attempts in the middle of May. While Phil Crampton and Jangbu Sherpa had been helping Ang Temba and their cerebral edema-stricken client down from the Second Step on May 17, two other members of the A-Team had reached the summit. Two days behind them, SummitClimb B-Team members Andrew Brash and Myles Osborne had been forced to retreat in the face of bad weather. With expedition leader Dan Mazur, these four plus Phil Crampton formed the C-Team and were ready to make a final shot at the summit at the end of the season.

THE NEXT MORNING Lakcha stuck his head in the tent and chatted in rapid Nepali to Dorje.

“Good morning, Lakcha Daai,” I called, wanting some advice drawn from his considerable experience.

“Good morning,” he said.

“I don't know whether I've got the strength to do this. You've seen me climb. What do you think?”

He laughed. “Only you can know!”

He was saying that reaching the summit depended on how much I wanted to push myself and how much I was prepared to risk. His laughter said he could tell me neither of those things.

Lakcha said a few more words to Dorje about the oxygen they would carry, then he disappeared out the door.

I picked up my diary and opened it.

On the left-hand side of the page I reread what I had written the previous evening.

These three were the same reason—namely, variations on not wanting to die.

Essentially, I did not want to cope with a climate of death that I felt came from a generational shift in values on Everest.

In a way, this seemed a wimpish, relatively trivial reason, but then I thought that there were very few sports where the participants expect to lose extremities or worse.

This was also nothing more than an excuse, given the discomfort I had already put myself through when acclimatizing.

So why was I here? It was the kind of excuse a school student would use for not doing their homework.

On the right-hand side of the page I had written the pros.

Barbara had encouraged me to make this climb, sacrificing many things during the two months I would be away. She wanted me to succeed for my own sake. I owed it to her not to squander the opportunity I now had.

Friends who understood the radical nature of our climb in 1984 would introduce me with the words “Lincoln has climbed Mount Everest.” I would then be asked, “And did you get to the top?” “No,” I would say, and inevitably they would emit a deflated “Oh,” as if I had embarrassed them with the answer. The fact that I had made the expedition happen and was largely responsible for getting everyone down alive counted for nothing. Twenty-two years of that was enough. I also wanted to find out whether or not I could get to the top.