Into Thin Air (19 page)

APRIL 28, 1996 • 21,300 FEET

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.… We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience
.

Joan Didion

I was already awake at 4:00 A.M. when the alarm on my wrist watch began to beep; I’d been awake most of the night, struggling for breath in the meager air. And now it was time to commence the dreaded ritual of emerging from the warmth of my goose-down cocoon into the withering cold of 21,300 feet. Two days earlier—on Friday, April 26—we’d humped all the way from Base Camp to Camp Two in one long day to begin our third and final acclimatization sortie in preparation for the summit push. This morning, according to Rob’s grand plan, we would climb from Camp Two to Camp Three and spend a night at 24,000 feet.

Rob had told us to be ready to leave at 4:45 sharp—forty-five minutes hence—which allowed barely enough time to dress, force down a candy bar and some tea, and strap on my crampons. Shining my headlamp on a dime-store thermometer clipped to the parka I’d been using as a pillow, I saw that the temperature inside the cramped two-person tent was seven degrees below zero Fahrenheit. “Doug!” I yelled at the lump burrowed in the sleeping bag beside me. “Time to get rolling, Slick. You awake over there?”

“Awake?” he rasped in a weary voice. “What makes you think I ever went to sleep? I feel like shit. I think something’s wrong with my throat. Man, I’m gettin’ too old for this stuff.”

During the night, our fetid exhalations had condensed on the tent fabric to form a fragile, interior sheath of hoarfrost; as I sat up and began rooting around in the dark for my clothing, it was impossible not to brush against the low nylon walls, and every time I did so it instigated a blizzard inside the tent, covering everything with ice crystals. Shivering hard, I zipped my body into three layers of fuzzy polypropylene pile underwear and an outer shell of windproof nylon, then pulled my clunky plastic boots on. Yanking the laces tight made me wince in pain; for the past two weeks the condition of my cracked, bleeding fingertips had been steadily deteriorating in the cold air.

I tramped out of camp by headlamp behind Rob and Frank, wending between ice towers and piles of rock rubble to reach the main body of the glacier. For the next two hours we ascended an incline pitched as gently as a beginner’s ski slope, eventually arriving at the bergschrund that delineated the Khumbu Glacier’s upper end. Immediately above rose the Lhotse Face, a vast, tilted sea of ice that gleamed like dirty chrome in the dawn’s slanting light. Snaking down the frozen expanse as if suspended from heaven, a single strand of nine-millimeter rope beckoned like Jack’s beanstalk. I picked up the bottom end of it, attached my jumar
^*
to the slightly frayed line, and began to climb.

I’d been uncomfortably cold since leaving camp, having underdressed in anticipation of the solar-oven effect that had occurred every other morning when the sun hit the Western Cwm. But on this morning the temperature was held in check by a biting wind that gusted down from the upper mountain, creating a windchill that dipped to perhaps forty below zero. I had an extra pile sweater in my backpack, but to put it on I would first have to remove my gloves, pack, and wind jacket while dangling from the fixed rope. Worrying that I was likely to drop something, I decided to wait until I reached a part of the face that was less steep, where I could stand in balance without hanging from the rope. So I continued climbing, and as I did so I grew colder and colder.

The wind kicked up huge swirling waves of powder snow that washed down the mountain like breaking surf, plastering my clothing with frost. A carapace of ice formed over my goggles, making it difficult to see. I began to lose feeling in my feet. My fingers turned to wood. It seemed increasingly unsafe to keep going up in these conditions. I was at the head of the line, at 23,000 feet, fifteen minutes in front of guide Mike Groom; I decided to wait for him and talk things over. But just before he reached me, Rob’s voice barked over the radio Mike carried inside his jacket, and he stopped climbing to answer the call. “Rob wants everybody to go down!” he declared, shouting to make himself heard above the wind. “We’re getting out of here!”

It was noon by the time we arrived back at Camp Two and took stock of the damage. I was tired but otherwise fine. John Taske, the Australian doctor, had some minor frostnip on the tips of his fingers. Doug, on the other hand, had suffered some serious harm. When he removed his boots he discovered incipient frostbite on several toes. On Everest in 1995 he’d frostbitten his feet badly enough to lose some tissue from a big toe and permanently impair his circulation, making him particularly susceptible to cold; now this additional frostbite would make him yet more vulnerable to the cruel conditions of the upper mountain.

Even worse, however, was the injury to Doug’s respiratory tract. Less than two weeks before departing for Nepal he had undergone minor throat surgery, leaving his trachea in an extremely sensitive condition. This morning, gasping lungfuls of caustic, snow-filled air, he had apparently frozen his larynx. “I’m fucked,” Doug croaked in a barely audible whisper, looking crushed. “I can’t even talk. The climb is over for me.”

“Don’t write yourself off just yet, Douglas,” Rob offered. “Wait and see how you feel in a couple of days. You’re a tough bastard. I think you’ve still got a good shot at the top once you recover.” Unconvinced, Doug retreated to our tent and pulled his sleeping bag over his head. It was rough seeing him so discouraged. He’d become a good friend, unstintingly sharing the wisdom he’d gained during his failed attempt on the peak in 1995. Around my neck I wore a Xi-stone—a sacred Buddhist amulet blessed by the lama from the Pangboche monastery—that Doug had given me early on in the expedition. I wanted him to reach the summit almost as badly as I wanted to reach it myself.

An air of shock and mild depression hovered over the camp for the remainder of the day. Even without unleashing the worst it could dish out, the mountain had sent us scurrying for safety. And it wasn’t just our team that was chastened and doubtful. Morale seemed to be at a low ebb for several of the expeditions at Camp Two.

The bad humor was most apparent in the bickering that broke out between Hall and the leaders of the Taiwanese and South African teams over sharing responsibility for stringing more than a mile of rope that was needed to safeguard the route up the Lhotse Face. By late April, a line of ropes had already been fixed between the head of the Cwm and Camp Three, halfway up the face. To complete the job, Hall, Fischer, Ian Woodall, Makalu Gau, and Todd Burleson (the American leader of the Alpine Ascents guided expedition) had agreed that on April 26 one or two members from each team would join forces and put ropes up the remainder of the face, the passage between Camp Three and 26,000-foot Camp Four. But it hadn’t happened as planned.

When Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri from Hall’s team, guide Anatoli Boukreev from Fischer’s team, and one Sherpa from Burleson’s team departed Camp Two on the morning of April 26, the Sherpas who were supposed to join them from the South African and Taiwanese teams stayed in their sleeping bags and refused to cooperate. That afternoon, when Hall arrived at Camp Two and learned of this, he immediately made some radio calls to find out why the plan had broken down. Kami Dorje Sherpa, the climbing sirdar for the Taiwanese team, apologized profusely and promised to make amends. But when Hall raised Woodall on the radio, the impenitent South African–expedition leader responded with a barrage of obscenities and insults.

“Let’s keep it civil, mate,” Hall implored. “I thought we had an agreement.” Woodall replied that his Sherpas stayed in their tents only because nobody came around to wake them up and tell them their assistance was needed. Hall shot back that Ang Dorje had in fact tried repeatedly to rouse them but they had ignored his entreaties.

At that point Woodall declared, “Either you’re a bloody liar or your Sherpa is.” Then he threatened to send over a couple of Sherpas from his team to “sort out” Ang Dorje with their fists.

Two days after this unpleasant exchange, the ill will between our team and the South Africans remained high. And contributing to the sour mood at Camp Two were disturbing snippets of news we received about Ngawang Topche’s worsening condition. As he continued to grow sicker and sicker even at low altitude, the doctors postulated that his illness was perhaps not simple HAPE but rather HAPE complicated by tuberculosis or some other preexisting pulmonary condition. The Sherpas, however, had a different diagnosis: they believed that one of the climbers on Fischer’s team had angered Everest—Sagarmatha, goddess of the sky—and the deity had taken her revenge on Ngawang.

The climber in question had struck up a relationship with a member of an expedition attempting Lhotse. Because privacy is nonexistent in the tenementlike confines of Base Camp, the amorous assignations that took place in this woman’s tent were duly noted by other members of her team, especially the Sherpas, who sat outside pointing and snickering during the encounters. “[X] and [Y] are sauce-making, sauce-making,” they would giggle, miming the sex act by pumping a finger into the open fist of the other hand.

But despite the Sherpas’ laughter (to say nothing of their own notoriously libertine habits), they fundamentally disapproved of sex between unmarried couples on the divine flanks of Sagarmatha. Whenever the weather would turn nasty, one or another Sherpa was apt to point up at the clouds boiling heavenward and earnestly declare, “Somebody has been sauce-making. Make bad luck. Now storm is coming.”

Sandy Pittman had noted this superstition in a diary entry from her 1994 expedition posted on the Internet in 1996:

April 29, 1994

Everest Base Camp (17,800 feet),

The Kangshung Face, Tibet

 … a mail runner had arrived that afternoon with letters from home for everyone and a girlie magazine which had been sent by a caring climber buddy back home as a joke.… Half of the Sherpa had taken it to a tent for closer inspection, while the others fretted over the disaster they were certain that any examination of it would bring. The goddess Chomolungma, they claimed, doesn’t tolerate “jiggy jiggy”–
anything
unclean–on her sacred mountain.

Buddhism as it is practiced in the high reaches of the Khumbu has a distinctly animistic flavor: the Sherpas venerate a tangled mélange of deities and spirits who are said to inhabit the canyons, rivers, and peaks of the region. And paying proper homage to this ensemble of deities is considered crucially important to ensure safe passage through the treacherous landscape.

To appease Sagarmatha, this year—as every year—the Sherpas had built more than a dozen beautiful, meticulously constructed stone chortens at Base Camp, one for each expedition. A perfect cube five feet high, the altar in our camp was capped with a triumvirate of carefully selected pointed stones, above which rose a ten-foot wooden pole crowned with an elegant juniper bough. Five long chains of brightly colored prayer flags
^*
were then strung radially from the pole above our tents to protect the camp from harm. Every morning before dawn our Base Camp sirdar—an avuncular, highly respected, forty-something Sherpa named Ang Tshering—would light sprigs of juniper incense and chant prayers at the chorten; before heading into the Icefall, Westerners and Sherpas alike would walk past the altar—keeping it always on the right—and through the sweet clouds of smoke to receive a blessing from Ang Tshering.

But for all the attention paid to such rituals, Buddhism as practiced by the Sherpas was a refreshingly supple and non-dogmatic religion. To stay in Sagarmatha’s good graces, for instance, no team was permitted to enter the Icefall for the first time without first undertaking an elaborate
puja
, or religious ceremony. But when the frail, wizened lama slated to preside over the puja had been unable to make the trip from his distant village on the appointed day, Ang Tshering declared that it would be O.K. for us to climb through the Icefall after all, because Sagarmatha understood that we intended to perform the puja very soon thereafter.

There seemed to be a similarly lax attitude concerning fornication on the slopes of Everest: even though they paid lip service to the prohibition, more than a few Sherpas made exceptions for their own behavior—in 1996, a romance even blossomed between a Sherpa and an American woman associated with the IMAX expedition. It therefore seemed strange that the Sherpas would blame Ngawang’s illness on the extramarital encounters taking place in one of the Mountain Madness tents. But when I pointed out the inconsistency to Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa—Fischer’s twenty-three-year-old climbing sirdar—he insisted that the real problem was not that one of Fischer’s climbers had been “sauce-making” at Base Camp but rather that she continued to sleep with her paramour high on the mountain.

“Mount Everest is God—for me, for everybody,” Lopsang solemnly mused ten weeks after the expedition. “Just husband and wife sleep together, is good. But when [X] and [Y] sleep together, is bad luck for my team.… So I tell to Scott: Please, Scott, you are leader. Please tell to [X] not to sleep with boyfriend at Camp Two. Please. But Scott just laughs. The first day [X] and [Y] in tent, just after, Ngawang Topche is sick at Camp Two. So he is dead now.”

Ngawang was Lopsang’s uncle; the two men had been very close, and Lopsang had been in the rescue party that brought Ngawang down the Icefall on the night of April 22. Then, when Ngawang stopped breathing in Pheriche and had to be evacuated to Kathmandu, Lopsang rushed down from Base Camp (with Fischer’s encouragement) in time to accompany his uncle on the helicopter flight. His brief trip to Kathmandu and speedy trek back to Base Camp left him quite fatigued and relatively poorly acclimatized—which didn’t bode well for Fischer’s team: Fischer relied on him at least as much as Hall relied on his climbing sirdar, Ang Dorje.