The Everest Files (11 page)

‘Kami? You OK?'

The sound of his name gave him a shock. Kami suddenly realised it was Sasha standing in front of him, a porter by her side.

‘You look half dead,' Sasha told him with concern, ‘Would you like some tea?'

Kami slumped down for a rest and watched as Sasha brought out her trekking flask. The drink was sweet and energising, warming his body core and bringing him back to life.

‘You going down to pick up some gear?' she asked.

‘No. They took me off the team,' he told her miserably.

‘What? How come?'

Kami began to relate the tale, starting with the photos.

‘I know about them,' Sasha interrupted him, ‘My editor called me yesterday to warn me about it. That's why I decided to cut my rest short and come straight up to Base Camp to talk to Alex.'

‘I got the blame for it,' Kami told her. ‘It was my camera and … '

‘But you didn't take those photos!' Sasha exclaimed. ‘Pemba did!'

Kami felt a tiny surge of hope kindle inside him.

‘I remember it absolutely,' Sasha continued, ‘I thought it was a bit weird the way that Pemba was creeping around, hiding behind trees and rocks, taking shots of me and Alex.'

‘But it was my camera,' Kami said miserably, ‘so I'm still going to be blamed.'

Sasha fixed him with her most direct gaze.

‘Kami, look at me and just tell me the truth. Did you know the camera was going to be used for that purpose?'

‘No.'

‘So Pemba took it without your permission?'

‘Yes.' Kami felt a great surge of relief as he said that single emphatic word.

‘Stand up,' she told him. ‘We're going right back up to Base Camp and I'm going to put Alex straight on this.'

‘I think it is too late to change things,' he said doubtfully.

‘I don't think so, Kami,' Sasha told him firmly. ‘You've taken the rap for something that's not your fault and now we're going to put things right.'

Sasha was good to her word. By the close of that day she had indeed put things right and – after an intense re-examining of the evidence – Kami was back on the team.

‘I think we got it wrong,' Alex conceded to Kami with a smile. ‘I'm happy to have you back onboard.'

Kami emerged from the tent feeling like he had been granted a second life. He performed a small puja and rang Shreeya's bell to signify his thanks to the gods.

Pemba and Nima were grilled at length by Kurt, Alex and Sasha. Pemba was sacked from the expedition. He left in bad grace, scattering foul curses at Westerners and Sherpas alike as he packed his stuff and ran off towards Gorak Shep.

Nima was given a second chance. He obviously wasn't entirely innocent, everyone realised, but he hadn't been the one to steal the camera, take the shots, or email them to the USA so there was little evidence to nail him with.

‘I'll be watching you,' Alex Brennan told Nima sternly. ‘One more problem and you are going back to Namche, you understand?'

‘Yes, sir.'

After the inquisition, and his swift re-instatement, Kami walked into the mess tent feeling bruised and uncertain of how the others would treat him. But the welcome was warm, particularly from Tenzing and Jamling.

‘Put it behind you,' Jamling advised him, ‘There's plenty of work to do now.'

A number of shake-down days followed; acclimatisation time in which the Western team members recovered from the trek. They were given buckets of warm water to shower with, and encouraged to drink prodigious amounts of tea and hot chocolate.

Kami had a different brief; his days were spent with Nima, shuttling backwards and forwards to the ‘clean' area of the glacier and harvesting fresh ice for the expedition water supply. They were given a sledgehammer and a sharpened steel bar to tackle the task.

It was dangerous and exhausting work; one of them had to hold the steel bar in place as it was smashed deep into the ice with the sledgehammer. A badly aimed shot would have meant a shattered wrist at the very least.

They wrapped the bigger chunks of ice in a tarpaulin and lugged them laboriously back to Lopsang's boiling cauldron.

Time and time again.

One week after arriving at Base Camp, a puja ceremony was held to placate the gods and afterwards Tenzing got the whole Sherpa team together; ‘The icefall is open,' he told them with pride, ‘I want the following six men to carry up to Camp One tomorrow.'

Kami's name was on the list. He tried to play it cool, not showing much reaction to the order, at least not in front of the rest of the Sherpas for whom such a request was routine. But he was blushing with quiet pride as he savoured the moment.

This was what he had been hoping for. It meant he was no longer one of the yak boys. He was one of the climbing Sherpa team. On probation, almost certainly, but Kami was determined not to let Jamling down.

Kami wrote a letter to Shreeya that night. He had intended to make it an exhaustive account of everything that had happened to date, but in the end it turned out to be short and sweet – the nearest thing to a love letter he had ever written.

It was remarkable how all the stress dissolved away as he put his feelings and passion into words.

Just the thought that she would hold the fragile scrap of paper in her hand before the week was out filled Kami with a sense of longing which surprised him with its intensity.

He sealed the missive and gave it to one of the mail runners.

The Everest climb was about to begin.

4.45 a.m the next day. It was blowing hard as Kami joined Jamling outside the tent along with Alex Brennan, Sasha and Kurt. The night air was filled with cloud and it was cold enough to numb his lips. Snow granules were beginning to pitter against the Gore-Tex of his hood and he half expected the veteran Sherpa to call off the load carry in favour of another day.

‘All set?' Jamling asked.

Evidently a snow squall wasn't going to put him off.

Kami nodded and swung his load onto his back. There were at least six oxygen cylinders inside the pack and he reckoned he was carrying thirty kilos or more. The metal tubes clunked as he began the trek up the glacier, the rounded bases forming an uncomfortable series of hard bumps against the bottom of his spine.

Jamling kept up a fast but steady pace, his squat figure pinpointed in the quartz beam of Kami's head torch. The Westerners quickly got left behind.

They passed a pair of Japanese climbers who had stopped to drink something hot from a flask. Their faces were ghostly pale in the artificial light; thin tendrils of steam rising from their shared cup. Kami got a tantalising whiff of sweet chocolate as they passed.

At the edge of the icefall Jamling stopped and shrugged off his rucksack.

‘We have to kit up now,' he said.

Kami pulled out his crampons, grateful that he had practised for this moment; he snapped the sharp metal teeth straight onto the correct place on his boot without hesitation. With these vital bits of kit he would be stable on the ice, his feet unlikely to slip.

Jamling grunted his approval as he saw the expert way he did it.

Kami wrapped the ice-axe sling around his wrist and the two climbers moved off the easy ground of the glacier and entered the icefall. For Kami it was a thrilling moment – the first few steps when he could really consider that he was
on
Everest. Not just looking at it from afar, not dreaming of it, but really a part of it.

His climb had begun and he felt his body begin to warm up as the gradient quickly sharpened.

Kami was aware that the world they were now entering was loaded with the potential for sudden death. The icefall was a tortured place, gravity and the turbulent geology of the underlying rock having twisted the glacier far out of shape.

It is a bit like the penny falls in an amusement arcade; here something eases, there something pushes. A bit more pressure. A touch more stress. And the coin drops; except here in the icefall it is not a penny at all – it's a block of ice the size of a five-storey building.

The bodies of icefall victims are seldom found. They normally lie beneath many hundreds or even thousands of tons of frozen debris, a quantity that not even the most determined army of men could shovel aside.

Little wonder that this stage of the Everest climb inspired such fear.

Over the previous days a specialised Sherpa team had been busy marking the route; a series of bamboo sticks – each with a small red pennant attached – had been placed to mark the safest path through the maze of seracs, those terrifying and unstable blocks of glacial ice that towered on every side.

The terrain was so treacherous that even a seemingly solid surface could collapse without warning. But there was plenty of fixed rope and Kami was diligent in clipping his short ‘cow's tail' sling onto the fixed lines, his karabiner sliding along the 9mm cords with a faint hum of metal on nylon.

As they penetrated deeper into the icefall the snow storm petered out and the sky slowly lightened as a reluctant dawn broke through. It was a gloomy, sullen start to the day, a glowering headwall of grey cloud hanging over the Khumbu valley and obscuring the high peaks.

Soon they came to the first of the big crevasses – the massive cracks that are common on fast-moving glaciers. There was no route around the huge slot and the icefall Sherpas had bridged it with three sections of ladder.

Climbers from other teams were queuing to cross, forcing Kami and Jamling to wait. As they did so, Alex Brennan and the other Westerners caught them up.

‘Mind if we go first?' Alex asked them brusquely. ‘I want to burn it up to Camp One as fast as I can.'

‘Fine by us,' Jamling told him.

Brennan went out onto the ladders, crossing the crevasse with scarcely a pause as he forged quickly ahead. Kurt followed across – just as fast.

‘He is in big hurry!' Jamling observed.

‘He wants to get on the satphone,' Sasha told them grimly. ‘Damage limitation.'

‘Damage?' Kami asked. ‘More bad things about the … photos?'

He still had this terrible feeling that the Pemba photo incident would come back again to haunt him.

‘Nothing to do with you, Kami,' Sasha assured him, ‘a fax arrived back at Base. His popularity rating slipped in the polls.'

‘I'm sorry. I don't understand.'

‘As soon as Alex gets back to the States he'll be competing against a much more experienced politician to win his party's nomination. It's a sort of battle called the Primaries and the winner gets the chance to try to be president.'

‘Ah. Very important thing.'

‘Exactly. And up until now Alex has always been the most popular candidate. But yesterday a poll came out and his rival is storming ahead.'

‘That's why he's angry.' Kami couldn't help feeling a sense of relief.

‘Yep. His enemy is saying Alex doesn't care about the American people. That he's only interested in having an adventure on Everest thousands of miles away and not doing anything about the problems at home.'

‘I see.' Kami was surprised that anyone would want to attack Alex Brennan.

Jamling checked his watch.

‘Time to move,' he said. ‘Kami, you go first.'

Kami did as he was ordered, then took a tentative step out onto the ladder, his steel crampon spikes skittering alarmingly against the first of the aluminium rungs. It was a perilous balancing act, he realised, particularly with such a heavy load on his back.

Alex and Kurt had had no such load and they had made it look easy.

Three more steps; now he could feel the whole contraption bouncing wildly up and down. Logic told him that he was safe. Even if he fell he would merely dangle from the safety line until he could regain the ladder.

Assuming that the safety line held.

‘Go for it, Kami!' Sasha yelled.

‘Don't hang around!' Jamling called out with a laugh.

Looking down was a beginner's mistake. Kami wasn't especially liable to vertigo but the inky-blue depths of the slot made his head spin. Somewhere down there, he imagined, it must narrow to a bone crushing point.

He clasped his right hand to the breast pocket of his wind suit, feeling the reassuring outline of the shrine bell.

‘Get a move on,' Jamling yelled.

He hurried up the rising incline of the second and third ladders and made it to the far lip. Five minutes later Sasha and Jamling were by his side and, after a brief rest to eat some chocolate, the three of them continued following the marker wands through the icefall.

In the hours that followed they tackled two more big crevasse crossings and one almost vertical ice face which had been fixed with no fewer than five ladders.

On one of the crossings a sudden splintering noise startled Kami out of his trance. A chunk of ice the size of a minibus had popped off the wall of the crevasse and shattered into the depths.

Kami uttered a murmured prayer to the gods as they climbed out of the final chaos of ice onto the smoother terrain of the Western Cwm – the name given to the vast valley which leads to the higher camps of Everest.

They could see Camp One waiting just a few hundred metres off.

‘I'm going to file my report.' Sasha told them. She gave them both a cheery wave and disappeared into a tent to write her daily article.

Kami took his load to the equipment store, proud to have made it through the icefall. But if he was looking for praise he was in the wrong place. In any case the clock was ticking, as usual, and Jamling was quickly urging him to drink up his tea and get a move on.

‘We don't stay here?' Kami asked in surprise.

‘No. We're back to Base now.'

On went the empty packs. Farewells shouted to the cooks and Sherpas who would remain at the camp. Then they turned back down the fixed ropes, swallowed up once again by the icefall and praying for safe passage back down to Base Camp.

The lights of Base Camp were visible by 7 p.m. Less than thirty minutes later Kami was perched on a wobbly wooden stool at the rough mess table. A piping hot meal of rice and tinned beans was served. Kami quickly drank about four cups of salted tea as he enjoyed the Sherpa chat about the day.

Kami felt his head getting heavier. He folded his arms on the table and thought he would just take a brief nap.

He woke up in the same position, freezing cold and stiff, at 6 a.m when Lopsang started up the morning stoves.

Kami got a day's ‘rest' after that first round trip through the icefall. He spent it running from one chore to another as Tenzing kept him on the go. In the morning he sharpened crampon spikes with a whetstone and sewed up some damaged wind suits. In the afternoon he peeled forty kilos of potatoes and helped rescue a yak that had fallen into a glacial stream half an hour down the glacier.

He did the work with good grace but his mind was distracted with the delicious prospect of going back on the mountain. Back up high. The taste had been intoxicating. He was waiting for someone to tell him if he was needed for more porter duties.

Alex Brennan and the other Westerners had come back down after their acclimatisation stay in Camp One and the next push would go up higher.

‘Will you take me back up?' Kami asked Jamling eagerly that evening, when nothing had been said all day.

Jamling laughed. ‘Don't worry. You'll be going up and down like an idiot before long.'

He was right. Brennan called the whole team into the yurt at eight the next morning.

‘We're going to film in the icefall today,' he said. ‘Going to get a killer sequence for the news outlets. I'll need at least eight porters for all the equipment. We're taking the mini crane, the whole shebang.'

Much to his delight, Kami was picked as one of the carrying team. He was paired up with Nima and instructed to follow the film crew, lugging the extendable crane arm up into the icefall. The metal structure weighed a hefty thirty kilos and was a cumbersome body length long.

Nima was in a grouchy mood.

‘We'll be hanging around all day up there,' he complained to Kami, ‘waiting for lumps of ice to fall on our heads while they mess about with the cameras.'

‘Maybe they'll get it done fast,' Kami suggested, at which Nima gave a sarcastic snort.

The morning dragged by, bitterly cold and windy, as shot after shot got ticked off the sequence list. George and his sound recordist set up a whole bunch of positions in and around the spectacular ice formations, shooting Alex as he made his way through the seracs.

‘They're making it look like he's on his own,' Kami remarked.

‘Pah!' Nima was contemptuous. ‘That's typical. It's us guys that do all the donkey work but you watch that film in the end and there'll hardly be a Sherpa in it.'

A huge ladder crossing came next, Kami and Nima performing a sort of high-wire double act as they shouldered the crane arm across. They got a round of applause from the waiting team and Brennan told them, ‘You guys are going to get a bonus for this. This is service beyond the call of duty.'

Kami was pleased to hear it. Every dollar he could earn was a dollar closer to paying off his marriage contract.

Lunchtime passed with no food; the afternoon was drifting on and there were still shots to do. The temperature had dropped by about five degrees and everyone was getting increasingly chilled from standing around. Brennan began to talk with George about the final shots which would be filmed from the bottom of a crevasse.

‘I want you to get down that slot,' the boss requested, ‘get me crossing from below.'

‘Great idea!' George was all for it.

‘You'll need protection,' Tenzing said, ‘we'll get a couple of the lads to rig you up a ladder at the bottom so you can move around safely.

Nima and Kami were picked for the task and two ropes were secured at the lip.

Nima walked to the edge of the gaping crevasse with supreme confidence. He abseiled into the gaping void with the practised air of someone who had done it a hundred times before.

Kami took the plunge next, less confident, but still managing to do a good job of it as the rest of the team looked on.

The temperature shift was shocking. The interior of the crevasse was way colder than up top. Kami felt himself shiver and wished he had thought to put on an extra layer.

Ten metres down. Fifteen. Kami felt he was descending into a bizarre blue universe as the glacial ice of the walls gradually tapered to a sinister, body crushing ‘V'.