Into Thin Air (10 page)

Some climbers rushed to where Kami came to rest at the bottom of the face, but he had died from the extensive injuries he’d suffered on the way down. His body was brought down to Base Camp, where, in the Buddhist tradition, his friends brought meals to feed the corpse for three days. Then he was carried to a village near Tengboche and cremated. As the body was consumed by flames, Kami’s mother wailed inconsolably and struck her head with a sharp rock.

Kami was very much in Rob’s mind at first light on April 8, when he and Mike hurried toward Base Camp to try and get Tenzing off Everest alive.

* A
chorten
is a religious monument, usually made of rock and often containing sacred relics; it is also called a stupa.

†
Mani
stones are small, flat rocks that have been meticulously carved with Sanskrit symbols denoting the Tibetan Buddhist invocation
Om mani padme hum
and are piled along the middle of trails to form long, low
mani
walls. Buddhist protocol dictates that travelers always pass
mani
walls on the left.

‡ Technically speaking, the great majority of the “yaks” one sees in the Himalaya are actually
dzopkyo
—male crossbreeds of yaks and cattle—or
dzom
, female crossbreeds. Additionally, female yaks, when purebred, are correctly termed
naks
. Most Westerners, however, have a hard time telling any of these shaggy beasts apart and refer to all of them as yaks.

* Unlike Tibetan, to which it is closely related, Sherpa is not a written language, so Westerners are forced to resort to phonetic renderings. As a consequence there is little uniformity in the spelling of Sherpa words or names; Tengboche, for instance, is written variously as Tengpoche or Thyangboche, and similar incongruities crop up in spelling most other Sherpa words.

* Although the Tibetan name for the peak is Jomolungma and the Nepali name is Sagarmatha, most Sherpas seem to refer to the mountain as “Everest” in daily conversation—even when speaking with other Sherpas.

APRIL 8, 1996 • 16,200 FEET

Passing through the towering ice pinnacles of Phantom Alley we entered the rock-strewn valley floor at the bottom of a huge amphitheater.… Here [the Icefall] turned sharply to flow southward as the Khumbu Glacier. We set up our Base Camp at 17,800 feet on the lateral moraine that formed the outer edge of the turn. Huge boulders lent an air of solidity to the place, but the rolling rubble underfoot corrected the misimpression. All that one could see and feel and hear—of Icefall, moraine, avalanche, cold—was of a world not intended for human habitation. No water flowed, nothing grew—only destruction and decay.… This would be home for the next several months, until the mountain was climbed
.

Thomas F. Hornbein

On April 8, just after dark, Andy’s hand-held radio crackled to life outside the lodge in Lobuje. It was Rob, calling from Base Camp, and he had good news. It had taken a team of thirty-five Sherpas from several different expeditions the entire day, but they’d gotten Tenzing down. Strapping him to an aluminum ladder, they managed to lower, drag, and carry him through the Icefall, and he was now resting from the ordeal at Base Camp. If the weather held, a helicopter would arrive at sunrise to fly him to a hospital in Kathmandu. With audible relief, Rob gave us the go-ahead to leave Lobuje in the morning and proceed to Base Camp ourselves.

We clients were also immensely relieved that Tenzing was safe. And we were no less relieved to be getting out of Lobuje. John and Lou had picked up some kind of virulent intestinal ailment from the unclean surroundings. Helen, our Base Camp manager, had a grinding altitude-induced headache that wouldn’t go away. And my cough had worsened considerably after a second night in the smoke-filled lodge.

For this, our third night in the village, I decided to escape the noxious smudge by moving into a tent, pitched just outside, that Rob and Mike had vacated when they went to Base Camp. Andy elected to move in with me. At 2:00 A.M. I was awakened when he bolted into a sitting position beside me and began to moan. “Yo, Harold,” I inquired from my sleeping bag, “are you O.K.?”

“I’m not sure, actually. Something I ate for dinner doesn’t seem to be sitting too well just now.” A moment later Andy desperately pawed the zippered door open and barely managed to thrust his head and torso outside before vomiting. After the retching subsided, he hunkered motionless on his hands and knees for several minutes, half out of the tent. Then he sprang to his feet, sprinted a few meters away, yanked his trousers down, and succumbed to a loud attack of diarrhea. He spent the rest of the night out in the cold, violently discharging the contents of his gastrointestinal tract.

In the morning Andy was weak, dehydrated, and shivering violently. Helen suggested he remain in Lobuje until he regained some strength, but Andy refused to consider it. “There’s no way in bloody hell I’m spending another night in this shit hole,” he announced, grimacing, with his head between his knees. “I’m going on to Base Camp today with the rest of you. Even if I have to bloody crawl.”

By 9:00 A.M. we’d packed up and gotten under way. While the rest of the group moved briskly up the trail, Helen and I stayed behind to walk with Andy, who had to exert a monumental effort just to put one foot in front of the other. Again and again he would stop, hunch over his ski poles to collect himself for several minutes, then summon the energy to struggle onward.

The route climbed up and down the unsettled rocks of the Khumbu Glacier’s lateral moraine for several miles, then dropped down onto the glacier itself. Cinders, coarse gravel, and granite boulders covered much of the ice, but every now and then the trail would cross a patch of bare glacier—a translucent, frozen medium that glistened like polished onyx. Meltwater sluiced furiously down innumerable surface and subterranean channels, creating a ghostly harmonic rumble that resonated through the body of the glacier.

In midafternoon we reached a bizarre procession of freestanding ice pinnacles, the largest nearly 100 feet high, known as Phantom Alley. Sculpted by the intense solar rays, glowing a radioactive shade of turquoise, the towers reared like giant shark’s teeth out of the surrounding rubble as far as the eye could see. Helen—who’d been over this ground numerous times—announced that we were getting close to our destination.

A couple of miles farther, the glacier made a sharp turn to the east, we plodded to the crest of a long slope, and spread before us was a motley city of nylon domes. More than three hundred tents, housing as many climbers and Sherpas from fourteen expeditions, speckled the boulder-strewn ice. It took us twenty minutes to locate our compound among the sprawling settlement. As we climbed the final rise, Rob strode down to greet us. “Welcome to Everest Base Camp,” he grinned. The altimeter on my wristwatch read 17,600 feet.

The ad hoc village that would serve as our home for the next six weeks sat at the head of a natural amphitheater delineated by forbidding mountain walls. The escarpments above camp were draped with hanging glaciers, from which calved immense ice avalanches that thundered down at all hours of the day and night. A quarter mile to the east, pinched between the Nuptse Wall and the West Shoulder of Everest, the Khumbu Icefall spilled through a narrow gap in a chaos of frozen shards. The amphitheater opened to the southwest, so it was flooded with sunlight; on clear afternoons when there was no wind it was warm enough to sit comfortably outside in a T-shirt. But the moment the sun dipped behind the conical summit of Pumori—a 23,507-foot peak immediately west of Base Camp—the temperature plummeted into the teens. Retiring to my tent at night, I was serenaded by a madrigal of creaks and percussive cracks, a reminder that I was lying on a moving river of ice.

In striking contrast to the harshness of our surroundings stood the myriad creature comforts of the Adventure Consultants camp, home to fourteen Westerners—the Sherpas referred to us collectively as “members” or “sahibs”—and fourteen Sherpas. Our mess tent, a cavernous canvas structure, was furnished with an enormous stone table, a stereo system, a library, and solar-powered electric lights; an adjacent communications tent housed a satellite phone and fax. A shower had been improvised from a rubber hose and a bucket filled with water heated by the kitchen staff. Fresh bread and vegetables arrived every few days on the backs of yaks. Continuing a Raj-era tradition established by expeditions of yore, every morning Chhongba and his cook boy, Tendi, came to each client’s tent to serve us steaming mugs of Sherpa tea in our sleeping bags.

I had heard many stories about how Everest had been turned into a garbage dump by the ever-increasing hordes, and commercial expeditions were reputed to be the primary culprits. Although in the 1970s and ’80s Base Camp was indeed a big rubbish heap, in recent years it had been turned into a fairly tidy place—certainly the cleanest human settlement I’d seen since leaving Namche Bazaar. And the commercial expeditions actually deserved much of the credit for the cleanup.

Bringing clients back to Everest year after year, the guides had a stake in this that one-time visitors did not. As part of their expedition in 1990, Rob Hall and Gary Ball spearheaded an effort that removed five tons of garbage from Base Camp. Hall and some of his fellow guides also began working with government ministries in Kathmandu to formulate policies that encouraged climbers to keep the mountain clean. By 1996, in addition to their permit fee, expeditions were required to post a $4,000 bond that would be refunded only if a predetermined amount of trash were carried back to Namche and Kathmandu. Even the barrels collecting the excrement from our toilets had to be removed and hauled away.

Base Camp bustled like an anthill. In a certain sense, Hall’s Adventure Consultants compound served as the seat of government for the entire Base Camp, because nobody on the mountain commanded more respect than Hall. Whenever there was a problem—a labor dispute with the Sherpas, a medical emergency, a critical decision about climbing strategy—people trudged over to our mess tent to seek Hall’s advice. And he generously dispensed his accumulated wisdom to the very rivals who were competing with him for clients, most notably Scott Fischer.

Previously, Fischer had successfully guided one 8,000-meter mountain:
^*
26,400-foot Broad Peak in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan, in 1995. He’d also attempted Everest four times and reached the top once, in 1994, but not in the role of a guide. The spring of 1996 marked his first visit to the mountain as the leader of a commercial expedition; like Hall, Fischer had eight clients in his group. His camp, distinguished by a huge Starbucks Coffee promotional banner suspended from a house-size block of granite, was situated just five minutes’ walk down the glacier from ours.

The sundry men and women who make careers out of scaling the world’s highest peaks constitute a small, ingrown club. Fischer and Hall were business rivals, but as prominent members of the high-altitude fraternity their paths frequently crossed, and on a certain level they considered themselves friends. Fischer and Hall met in the 1980s in the Russian Pamir, and they subsequently spent considerable time in each other’s company in 1989 and 1994 on Everest. They had firm plans to join forces and attempt Manaslu—a difficult 26,781-foot peak in central Nepal—immediately after guiding their respective clients up Everest in 1996.

The bond between Fischer and Hall had been cemented back in 1992, when they had bumped into each other on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. Hall was attempting the peak with his
compañero
and business partner, Gary Ball; Fischer was climbing with an elite American climber named Ed Viesturs. On their way down from the summit in a howling storm, Fischer, Viesturs, and a third American, Charlie Mace, encountered Hall struggling to cope with a barely conscious Ball, who had been stricken with a life-threatening case of altitude sickness and was unable to move under his own power. Fischer, Viesturs, and Mace helped drag Ball down the avalanche-swept lower slopes of the mountain through the blizzard, saving his life. (A year later Ball would die of a similar ailment on the slopes of Dhaulagiri.)