Dead Lucky (39 page)

Many people have a problem with the issue of my death, and I must admit that I did at first. I was not able to fathom how I could have survived the set of circumstances I had experienced.

The facts of the matter are that within an hour of leaving the summit of Mount Everest, I was overcome by lethargy. At times I seemed to be conscious, but I behaved erratically, sometimes with great strength. I wanted to climb up the mountain, not down it. I wanted to jump off the Kangshung Face. I continually rejected my oxygen mask and the Sherpas continually made me put it back on. My symptoms were consistent with cerebral edema, which at 28,000 feet is a death sentence.

It was because I had shown no signs of life that I had been left by the Sherpas on the mountain with nothing in the way of life support. When Dan Mazur and his team found me next morning, they considered me to be close to death, which was a considerable improvement on how I had been the night before. When they heard me speak, they had agreed that I had a good chance of surviving.

Because of the frostbite I suffered, and a paralyzed left vocal cord, I spent a lot of time with all kinds of doctors during the second half of 2006. None of them could tell me why I was alive. It seemed that none of them wanted to ask the question. I know enough about high-altitude physiology to appreciate that the cold should have killed me, that cerebral edema should have killed me, that hypoxia should have killed me, and that if I was somehow surviving all of these, then dehydration should have tipped me over the edge. And maybe that's what occurred. But whichever of these it was, I was regarded as dead.

If I was dead on the evening of May 25 but alive on the morning of May 26, what happened? Some may say that I had not really died. When I first arrived back at Advance Base Camp and was told that everyone believed me to be dead, my first thought was that this conclusion had been reached because I was overdue. Storms, disorientation, and exhaustion often delay climbers. On the biggest mountains, these three causes could easily add a few days to a descent, and I assumed that this was what had happened to me. I was certainly disoriented when I came down, and my sense of time was hugely distorted.

But a chill went down my spine when I learned that, after lying totally motionless in the snow at 28,000 feet for two hours, I had been pronounced dead, with the probable cause of death being cerebral edema. No one that season who had lain down on the Northeast Ridge exhausted, delirious, and unable to move had survived—not David Sharp, not Igor Plyushkin, not Vitor Negrete, not Jacques-Hugues Letrange. I knew myself too well to assume that I was tougher, stronger, or fitter than those men. Like them, I had been declared dead.

Perhaps one difference was that I had learned never to give up. During my second season among the daunting peaks of New Zealand's Southern Alps, when I had just turned twenty-one, my partner Matt Madin and I had climbed Silberhorn, an impressive but straightforward peak near Mount Cook. We gained confidence from the ease of our success on Silberhorn and decided to traverse south along the crest of the range to the summit of Mount Dampier, the country's third-highest peak. All went well at first, but soon the going became tougher.

Hours passed as we struggled up ice that was harder and steeper than either of us had encountered on any mountain during our short mountaineering careers. We had learned to climb in the Australian bushland on granite, which offered the security of superb friction. By comparison, Dampier's ice was hard, slippery, and dangerous. We thought escape would be easier if we continued upward to Dampier's summit and then down the other side, but we experienced no joy upon reaching the summit. The descent to the south was just as hard.

The sun was setting by the time we found a low point in the ridge from where we could descend. We dropped down onto the shady side of the ridge above the Linda Glacier. Instantly we were cold, and hurried to find a safe route down the hard snow of the steep face. At least we had left the ice behind. Darkness came all too quickly, and we still had not found a way down. Every time we descended, the slope below us steepened, and as we peered downward with our headlamps, every option looked like suicide. We were exhausted, with our spirits beaten from constantly climbing in a state of intense fear.

Throughout the night we searched for a way down until finally I felt I could go no further. I sat on a ledge that I had dug in the snow with my ice axe and decided that I would die there. I no longer had the strength to climb up to the crest and reclimb the frightening ridge above it. I accepted that this was my last resting point, that I would freeze to this spot.

It was Matt's turn to scout for a route down, and from near the end of our 165-foot rope I heard him call out.

“I think we can get down here!”

There was an energy in his voice that I had not heard for hours, so I stood up and carefully climbed across to him. The combined power of our two fading headlamps showed that, yes, the face was still steep below us but with a huge mound of avalanche debris piled up against it that lessened the angle and completely filled the huge crevasse that ran the length of the snow-face. An hour later we had descended the avalanche debris and were headed down the Linda Glacier toward Plateau Hut. Twenty-six hours of nonstop climbing had passed between our departure from the hut and our return to it.

Mountain climbers who discover the ways of mountaineering by themselves, rather than by taking guided climbs, find themselves in extreme situations. It is through those narrow escapes from death that climbers learn their limits. At 4:00 A.M. on Mount Dampier's East Face, I had given myself up for dead. It was a serious misjudgment that could have cost us our lives, if Matt had listened to me. The lesson I learned that night was that as long as you can keep moving, you should do so, because you will never know exactly how much you still have left to give.

On several occasions since that night, I have had to dig deeper into myself than I did on Dampier, every time extending my boundaries. We all have survival instincts, but I believe that when those instincts have been tested to the edge there is a resonance within a hidden level of consciousness which allows the energy you need to be pulled from somewhere. On Everest, as nowhere else, I had been determined to survive. Hallucinations were dancing through my mind, but beneath them was a commitment to come home. Perhaps in my case that commitment extended beyond death.

The natural forces on Everest can destroy every last shred of life, and I was lucky to have been spared that maelstrom. The elements could have been much crueler to me on the night that spanned May 25 and 26. Even so, how could I be alive? I can't answer this to my satisfaction, and I don't expect to until I have recovered properly and have had time to explore what happened. In the meantime, I rely on Tibetan Buddhism, where there is an understanding that there are eight levels of death. Judging from the criteria, I passed through the first two of these.

THERE IS A CYNICAL belief among the less informed that consciousness is an entity that is either present or absent and is therefore impossible to manage. Psychologists know that mental activities can take place at a subconscious level, without our awareness. Tibetan Buddhists understand that the subconscious mind has many levels, all of which can be explored through meditation.

Meditation is commonly thought of as a form of relaxation, a calming of the mind, but that is only the beginning. Meditation is the essence of Tibetan Buddhism. It is like exercise, in that you can take a walk in the park or you can be an Olympic gymnast. It can calm your mind, improve your sleep, or disempower your anger. You can also utilize meditation to explore the very nature of your mind. The high lamas of Tibetan Buddhism use meditation to examine the nature of reality. Although a long-time student of Tibetan Buddhism, I remain at the stage of learning to understand my mind. There are many Buddhist meditative practices that can be taught only by a lama initiated into a particular rite, but through that rite, students can experience different levels of consciousness. These are windows into a different aspect of reality.

On Mount Everest in 2006 I chose to meditate at high altitude, generally when I woke in the middle of the night and did not feel like reading. These midnight meditations were times of stillness and may have helped build the framework that kept me alive.

Meditation and hallucination are, effectively, opposites. Meditation is a stilling of the mind where thoughts no longer have control, while hallucination is the mind desperately scrambling for a foothold in a brain that is no longer doing its job properly.

Hallucination was my friend on the mountain. Cerebral edema had me in its grasp and was guiding my behavior, but my subconscious mind was still active. It was my subconscious that threw up solutions to the gaps in my conscious perception. When my sense of balance was compromised, my subconscious offered me a solution by putting me on a boat. The physical reality of being perched on a narrow ridge of the world's highest mountain—and of knowing that my balance was out of order—would have been too scary to contemplate. My misperception did not lessen the danger, but it may have prevented me from panicking. As the morning sun warmed me and Dan's oxygen set resuscitated thousands of brain cells, my subconscious offered me the concept of an airplane because this adequately explained why I was at the cruising level of a jet.

However, not all of the interpretations offered by my subconscious were comforting. It seemed that once my mind was tuned to fear or danger, there were two directions it could take. One of these was the lifesaving reversion to an alert state; the other was a sinking into paranoia. I had experienced alertness when climbing down unroped from the Third Step, and again when the two Sherpas whom Alex had directed to escort me down the mountain refused to let me adopt a safer method of rappeling. The fear of damaging my hands to the point where they could no longer be of use had sparked that particular return to clarity.

But paranoia had kicked in after the Sherpa beat me with my ice axe. I became convinced that the pair of them wanted to rob me and were prepared to kill me to achieve that goal. There was some logic to support that belief—neither of them helped me to my feet at any of the many times I fell down; nor would they listen to my opinions about how best to negotiate obstacles. My paranoia may have been irrational, but my fear was certainly justified. The blows delivered by the young Sherpa were witnessed by the Italian Marco Astori, who descended the First Step after the three of us. In Kathmandu, Barbara photographed the bruises and Mike filmed them by chance during my question-and-answer session with the Sherpas at the Radisson.

It is possible that Alex asked the two Sherpas to do whatever it took to bring me down, although he would have been horrified to think that they would hurt me. Their intimidation certainly motivated me to keep moving when I thought I couldn't. The unfortunate irony was that, had they let me walk between them with the rope pulled tight, as I had suggested, we would have made much faster progress.

Perhaps the Sherpas themselves were not functioning normally. Certainly they did not behave in the considerate and professional manner of every other Sherpa I have worked with over almost thirty years. Ang Karma was shocked when I showed him my bruises. All he could say was that not all Sherpas were good Sherpas.

However, after my meeting at the Radisson's rooftop bar with all the Sherpas who had been with me on the mountain, I realized that this horrible event could not be adequately explained by the simple matter of branding the two Sherpas who bullied and threatened me as bad Sherpas. In my worst throes of cerebral edema, when Lakcha, Dorje, Dawa Tenzing, and Pemba struggled desperately to drag me down from just below Everest's summit, I behaved irrationally and struggled against their efforts to save my life. And while the two bullying Sherpas were deliberate in their abusive actions and seemed to take pleasure from tormenting me, who am I to judge their actions when my own had been so reprehensible only twenty-four hours earlier? The best course of action was to regard everything as water under the bridge, all resentment and confusion washed away. And while I am still shocked at what happened, I now think of the incident dispassionately, and number it as one of many close scrapes with death during those unbelievable two days.

WHILE I WAS ON the mountain, my hallucinations had seemed to be either comforting or menacing, but I came to realize later that there had been a third category. Everyday consciousness identifies only life or death—not the passage in between—which means the only way to process the event of dying is through an altered state of consciousness.

My experience with the cloak took on new meaning after a Buddhist healer referred me to “The Song of the Pearl.” The story dates back to the writings of Thomas, an apostle of Jesus. It describes a journey, a quest, and, most important, a cloak. At the completion of the quest the traveler is welcomed home and enfolded by a luxurious cloak, “the splendid robe of glory.” Even in my altered state of consciousness, death remained too abstract to be directly embraced or rejected, so its all-encompassing finality was represented by the cloak. My interpretation of this is that I had been drawn into the first and second levels of death, as described in the Tibetan texts, and that the scene on the Polish hill took place at a level of consciousness where my mind could still intercede. From here I was able to turn back from my spiral through the levels of death. By returning the cloak I had chosen to continue to battle for my life.

ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN at altitudes above 27,000 feet knows how desperate it is to survive at those heights. By normal standards, climbing at extreme altitudes is very slow, even when using an oxygen apparatus, so invariably climbers set out for the summit of Mount Everest in the middle of the night. Vision is limited by the bulky oxygen mask and by the narrow beam of a headlamp. Speech is also difficult because of the masks, and in any case, every breath is too valuable to be wasted on words. There is a fear of the unknown in a strange place where anonymity is the norm. Figures by the path are either resting or resting in peace; often it is impossible to tell which. Sometimes the figures are not sure themselves, and their slide from life to death can pass virtually unnoticed.