Dead Lucky (30 page)

There was an amazing, indefinable feeling throughout that Friday evening, a gathering of belief that grew from a mixture of influences. The harshest of these was the shock of Greg's message that I had only a fifty-percent chance of survival. Against such odds, leaving it to chance was too dangerous. Among everyone assembled, and our other friends scattered across the country and the world, there was a feeling that if everyone could believe in me, then I would make it through. There is no rational method of establishing belief. Hope can be a precursor, but belief has to be allowed to come from within.

TRUE TO HIS PROMISE, Ang Karma had made the preparations for the Tibetan Buddhist ceremony. The statue of the Buddha, photo, prayer books, offering bowls, and incense were in place, as always, on the altar in his meditation room of his Kathmandu home. He had tracked down an appropriate photo of me on the Net, and had printed the image in color. There was nothing else he needed—except for the frame into which he would put my photo. He left the house to buy a frame that was fit for the occasion of marking my death, but when he returned home with it, his wife, Kunga, told him that I had been found alive. Shortly afterward, when Barbara rang with news of my survival, Karma was in a much happier state of mind. She said she was sorry to have put him to such unnecessarytrouble. It was no trouble at all, he said. The frame could be used for a happier purpose—another photo of the Dalai Lama would be a good choice.

AT THE TIME of my demise, Dick Smith was in the United States buying a Citation CJ3. As it was a new $9 million jet, he wanted to take a test flight before handing over the check. In Wichita, Kansas, Dick was taxiing out to the runway when his cell phone rang. Normally he would ignore such a call, but as it was from Marilyn, his secretary back in Sydney, he picked up the phone.

The first words Marilyn said were “Lincoln Hall has died on Everest.”

As the patron of the Australian Sceptics, Dick always examined the evidence behind any claim that hadn't been proved, but because he knew the huge risks involved in an Everest climb, this time he did not question the news. The death of his friend Rob Hall near the summit ten years earlier, plus the eleven other Everest deaths that season, had clearly demonstrated the dangers.

Dick tossed up in his mind whether to continue with the takeoff. For the moment he decided to say nothing to Pip Smith, his wife, who was sitting behind him. They got airborne and he flew up to 42,000 feet. While flying across the vast Midwest, he was supposed to be checking whether the aircraft was acceptable, but the news had distracted him. When he brought the plane back down to the tarmac at Wichita, he realized he had not taken in all the details of the flight. But he bought the plane anyway and ended up flying it back to Australia.

As they taxied toward the hangars, he said, “Pip, there's some very sad news. I've just been told by Marilyn that Lincoln has died on Everest.”

He felt sick and could not sleep that night. The next day they were checking their e-mails, and there was a message from our mutual friend Anne Ward, from Kununurra in the north of Western Australia. The very brief message read: “Have you heard? Lincoln's alive!”

Through his company Dick Smith Foods, Dick was the major financier of our expedition. Over two decades or more he had funded many expeditions, most during his years as chairman of the Australian Geographic Society. Often the funding was in the form of small grants, but occasionally he would fund entire expeditions. As the supporter of so many dangerous undertakings, he realized that one day, on one of the adventures he had sponsored, someone would die. That day came with my death on May 26, but his perfect record was restored when, early on the morning of May 26, I looked up and greeted my rescuers.

THE
WHITE LIMBO
GUY

W
ITH THE SUN ABOUT TO RISE, on the morning of May 26, Dan Mazur and Jangbu Sherpa were startled to find me alive, sitting cross-legged on the crest of the ridge at 28,000 feet. In the semi-light between dark and day, they spotted a yellow object wafting in the breeze. At first Dan thought it was a wind-damaged tent, but as he and Jangbu approached, it became clear that it was the empty arms of my yellow down suit. And wearing the suit, in a rather ineffectual fashion, was me.

During the twelve hours since I had been left for dead, I had not spoken. My brain, my tongue, my lips, and my mouth took a few seconds to coordinate themselves.

“I imagine you are surprised to see me here,” I managed to say at last.

And they were indeed.

Myles Osborne and Andrew Brash had caught up to their two SummitClimb companions. When Myles heard those words, he thought that he himself must have said them, or that he was hallucinating, because there was no way that someone in as bad a shape as I was would be able to speak that articulately. Myles could see that I was without oxygen, without a pack, without even an ice axe. Perhaps I was a very experienced climber, he thought, who had been taking a power nap in the middle of some very challenging feat. Otherwise, how could I seem so coherent?

When Andrew saw me, he found himself moved to tears because it seemed inevitable that I would die and that he and his three friends would witness the process. Andrew's assessment appeared to be right on the money. I had taken my arms out of my down suit, which is why it was flapping in the breeze. I had also pulled off the gloves I had been wearing. The red balaclava that my mother had knitted me many years ago was lying at my feet.

Dan was busy trying to work out what was going on.

“Do you know how you got here?” he asked me.

“No,” I replied. “Do
you
know how I got here?”

“No, I don't . . .” He tried another tack. “Do you know your name?”

“Yes,” I said. “My name is Lincoln Hall.”

“You're the
White Limbo
guy?” interjected Andrew.

“Yeah, I'm the
White Limbo
guy.”

“What does that mean?” Dan asked.

“It's the book he wrote,” said Andrew, “about the Australian climb of the North Face in 1984.”

That piece of history was not relevant to Dan's assessment of my state.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“The Blue Mountains.”

“Where are they?” asked Myles.

“They're in Australia,” I said, “near Sydney.”

Despite my ability to speak in full sentences, Dan and the others were worried. My words were clearly no indication of what was going on in my head. My eloquence in the limited-vocabulary world of 28,000 feet was like a car engine revving on high but not in gear, making all the right sounds but going nowhere.

Jangbu had seen it all in his years as a climbing Sherpa. As a long-time guide and climber, Dan had seen a lot as well. Jangbu maintained his Buddhist equanimity, but Dan, Andrew, and Myles were asking themselves what on earth this guy was doing there. The weather was perfect and the summit was only a few hours away. Why did he have to be here on this particular day, at this particular time, when all four of the SummitClimb team were feeling strong?

They were angry to have encountered such a situation, but it was obvious to all of them that something would have to be done. In the short term, I had to be prevented from removing the gloves I was wearing. To them it seemed crazy, but in fact I was removing the gloves because they were not mine. My own were a pair of thick, cozy Black Diamond gauntlets, orange in color, but the pair I kept rejecting were thin dark-gray overgloves that offered very little protection. It did not occur to me to mention this to them. Maybe someone had exchanged their overgloves for my gauntlets when I had been dead, because in that state I had not needed them. Perhaps I had taken them off and they had blown away.

There were three possible reasons why I had pulled my arms out of my down suit on this bitterly cold morning. Even Andrew, a Canadian who was accustomed to the cold, could not get warm. The first possibility was that I was in the last throes of hypothermia, where a person dying from cold feels warm; the second was that cerebral edema was still muddying my mind and sensations. The third was that, by taking my arms out of my down suit, I felt I was handing back the Polish cloak.

For Dan and his team, the problem was what to do now. They knew I was a member of Alex's 7Summits-Club expedition because Alex had spoken proudly about having me on board. Dan pulled out his radio and called Kipa, the SummitClimb cook at Advance Base Camp. Kipa's radio was kept on 24/7, so he responded quickly. Dan asked him to rouse Alex or one of the other Russian guides, but the Russians were sleepy and none of them would believe that I was alive. On a perfect day for climbing, this was a very frustrating situation.

Dan decided to contact Phil Crampton, who had been turned back by the cold about an hour before I was found. Two weeks earlier Phil had incurred frost-nip while bringing cerebral-edema sufferer Juan Pablo down to safety from the base of the Second Step. Dan radioed Phil, who easily located the 7Summits-Club Sherpas at High Camp. They were still shattered from bringing me from near the summit all the way down to Mushroom Rock. Phil was very persuasive, so they quickly accepted that I was alive. However, they were too close to death themselves to be able to go back up to help me, but they did convince Alex that I was, in fact, in the world of the living.

There were 7Summits-Club Sherpas already climbing up the mountain, but their purpose was to strip the camps of tents, sleeping bags, stoves, and any personal belongings that had been left behind. None of them were wasting battery power by having their radios turned on. At the end of the season, with no climbers around, the climb up to Camps Two and Three was a routine day out in the mountains. No input was required from Base or Advance Base Camps, but Alex needed to let the 7Summits-Club Sherpas know that a rescue was under way.

Luckily, Jamie McGuinness, the manager of the Project Himalaya team, whose climbers I had overtaken on my way to the summit, also had Sherpas packing up camps. At Alex's request, Jamie radioed a Project Himalaya Sherpa already high on the mountain, asking him to contact the 7Summits-Club Sherpas.

Meanwhile, the five of us stayed put. There was still more work to be done to stabilize my condition. Myles gave me his bottle of warm Gatorade, as he felt I needed it more than he did. Dan had with him an experimental oxygen set, as well as a regular one in case the experiment did not work. He let me use the regular oxygen set and took the experimental set himself. Dan also gave me two Snickers bars, which I pocketed, as I was not interested in food.

There were many things I was not interested in at that time, such as where I was and why. Already behind me was the question and answer session. I felt no special gratitude toward Dan, Andrew, Myles, and Jangbu, because at that point I did not understand the sacrifice they were making on my behalf. I was not at all concerned that Roby Piantoni and Marco Astori, two Italian climbers, had passed by in the direction of the summit not long after the SummitClimb team had arrived. One of them carried an oxygen cylinder, the other did not, but that was their business.

I did not understand that my sense of balance was compromised and that, as a result, my mind had placed me on a boat. As a mountaineer, my survival depended on superb balance, and so it could not have been me who was rocking and swaying—it could only have been the substrate beneath my feet. My memory bank had referenced Antarctica, where several summers in a row I had looked out across a sea of icy mountains from the pitching and rolling deck of a boat. In reality, I was swaying toward the dangerous lip of the Kangshung Face, with Dan gently but firmly persuading me to stay put.

MY JOURNEY FROM POLAND brought me to a boat, but I had to hurry. As I boarded, the vessel was pitching under my feet, so Dan reached across and grabbed me by the shoulder.

“Only just in time,” he said. “Sit down—quickly, or you'll fall off.”

I moved to the edge so that I could enjoy the view, but Dan pulled me back again.

“You have to stay back here,” Dan insisted, “otherwise you could easily go over the edge.”

I said nothing, but I sat where he suggested and thought about how cold it was. The wind cut through me like a knife. One of Dan's team tied me by the waist to a blue rope, presumably so I would not get knocked overboard if we hit rough seas.

When the sun rose higher in the sky, warming me in the process, I realized that I was not on a boat at all but on an aircraft of some kind. I was sitting in the open with only sky above, so I could see very well that no boat could ever be as high as this. The place where I sat sloped at an angle steep enough for me to think that I could easily slip off the plane, had I not been tied to the blue rope. The natural position for me was to sit facing outward, down the slope. I wanted to look in the other direction, but the sun was much too bright for me to see anything at all, which was a pity. Undeniably spectacular as the panorama was in front of me, I would have liked to see the view from the other side of the aircraft. If I ever joined Dan's tour by airplane again, I would definitely bring my sunglasses so that I could see what lay beneath us on the other side.

The shadows seemed to be changing more quickly than the movement of the aircraft, which seemed odd. I wondered how we could be flying so slowly. Surely the aircraft would stall at this speed? Then I remembered other times I had looked out of the window of passenger jets at the leisurely change of the landscape, despite the incredible speed of the jet. Obviously, our aircraft was flying much more slowly than a jet, otherwise we would not have been able to sit on its sloping snow-covered open deck. The other clue to our slow speed was the complete silence and only the slightest breeze.

I MUST HAVE fallen asleep for a short time because when I came to, I was lying half propped up by the sloping snow, next to a rough rock pillar that looked like a giant mushroom. The snow was even brighter here, and because I was sheltered from the wind, I felt quite hot.