The Abominable: A Novel

Tuesday, May 5, 1925

We reach the site for Camp III around noon, and as we emerge from the forest of ice pinnacles in the Trough below the glacier and get our first real look at the sight and the North Col beyond and above it, I say, “Dear God, what a terrible place.” It’s made more terrible by a rough pyramid of rocks set closer to the great snow and ice wall leading up to the North Col—a monument to the seven dead porters from the 1922 avalanche, I realize—and made even more pathetic by the seven empty oxygen tanks stacked next to the rock pyramid.

I have no way of knowing that Camp III will someday be a haven of thicker air and respite from impossible hardships for all of us, but in the meantime will become a terrible test of my endurance.

It is just Jean-Claude and me leading and our personal Tiger Sherpas, Lhakpa Yishay and Norbu Chedi climbing roped with J.C., Ang Chiri and Babu Rita roped with me, who have made this first trip from Camp II to Camp III. We stop a bit short of the actual campsite—marked, as always, by the fallen tentpoles and torn canvas of demolished and snow-covered old tents and other expedition detritus—and look ahead at the more than 1,000-foot wall of ice and snow leading to the North Col that connects the North Ridge of Mount Everest to the south ridges of Changtse. “Col” is a Welsh word meaning “saddle,” but this is certainly the highest mountain saddle I’ve ever set eyes on.

While the Sherpas sit on boulders and pant, worn out, J.C. and I look through his binoculars at the huge wall of snow and ice that rises beyond the Camp III site. I feel happy to be with just my French friend and the Sherpas. Reggie is back at Camp II today, supervising the Team Two Sherpas with their loads to carry up here to Camp III now that Jean-Claude has marked the way across the glacier with bamboo wands. The Deacon’s all the way back at Base Camp, shuttling back and forth to Camps I and II with Tiger Team Three.

“Mallory’s ice chimney is gone,” Jean-Claude says and hands me the small field glasses.

A year ago, Mallory had free-climbed those last 200 feet or so up through the ice chimney to the North Col, and it was in that crack in the vertical ice face that they’d dropped Sandy Irvine’s ingenious rope and wood ladder—the same one that Bruno Sigl had lied about his men using; the same one that Reggie had admitted to climbing with Pasang, despite the ladder’s frayed appearance, a year ago this coming August. The ladder had allowed the scores of porters on last year’s huge expedition to climb to the North Col without someone constantly cutting steps for them.

Now both ice chimney and ladder are gone, folded into the churnings of the ever-shifting ice wall and glacier. The last 200 vertical feet to the ledge on the North Col where both previous expeditions have set their tents is once again a slick, solid 90-degree ice wall. But the more than 800 feet of snow and ice below that look bad as well.

“The snowfields look deep headed up to the ice wall,” I say between ragged gulps for air. We’ve been climbing this last hard bit between Camps II and III without oxygen—the last such oxygen-tank-free climbing we’ll be doing if the Deacon sticks to his plan—and I understand why the Tiger Sherpas with us have all but collapsed where they sit, lying back against their loads, too tired to remove the bulging thirty- to forty-pound packs from their backs.

J.C. removes his Crooke’s-glass goggles and squints up at the wall.

“Don’t go snow-blind on me,” I say.

He shakes his head but continues studying the 1,000-foot snow and ice wall while holding his hand above his eyes and squinting. “More fresh snow there than on the glacier,” he says at last, pulling up his goggles. “It’s probably as bad as…”

Jean-Claude stops before finishing his thought, but I can read his mind well enough by now to hear the unspoken parts of that sentence: It’s probably as bad as the snow slope conditions in 1922 when the avalanche killed seven Sherpas. We won’t know that for sure until the Deacon finally gets up here to Camp III, but I suspect the worst.

“Let us get our friends back on their feet before we lie down beside them and we all take a cold final nap,” says Jean-Claude. He turns and starts coaxing the four exhausted Sherpas to their feet, the men sagging under their loads. “It is only a few hundred more yards and downhill from here,” he says to them in English, knowing that his Sherpa Norbu and my man Babu will translate for the other two.

As we stagger out onto the moraine from the forest of huge ice pinnacles at the base of the glacier, all of us wearing crampons today— 10-point for the Sherpas and full 12-point for J.C. and me—and keeping them on even though we’re now ready to cross moraine rocks, I point to the open spot just ahead of us and about 200 feet short of the campsite and say, “This must be about where Kami Chiring confronted Bruno Sigl a year ago.”

Jean-Claude only nods, and I sense how very tired he is.

The three miles of climbing between Rongbuk Base Camp and Camp I amounts to hiking uphill on lateral moraine beds and across fields of shallow ice between hundreds of the penitente ice pillars. The three uphill miles between Camp I and Camp II are a mixture of moraine and actual glacier crossing, but the majority of the way is along the Trough among and between the ice pinnacles at the bottom of the valley. But almost all of the almost five hard miles uphill from Camp II here to Camp III at the base of the wall is on the ever more steeply rising glacier.

And the glacier is filled with hundreds of crevasses covered over with new snow.

I’ve followed J.C. for two days now as he’s threaded our route through those invisible crevasses, leaving only our footsteps in the deep snow—much of the time Jean-Claude was breaking trail through snow up to his thighs or waist—but also marking that route with wands and fixed ropes for the steeper parts.

Both days have been sunny, and through my goggles the glacier snowfields are merely a maze of sastrugi drift-ripples and corresponding blue shadows everywhere. Some of those blue shadows are shadows. Many are crevasses under their thin coverings of snow—gaps that would drop a man (or woman) hundreds of feet into the heart of the glacier. Somehow Jean-Claude always seems to know which shadow means what.

Twice between Camps II and III we’ve had to detour around crevasses too extensive to flank. The first time, yesterday, J.C. finally found a snow bridge that he judged would hold our weight. Jean-Claude crossed first while I belayed, my ice axe sunk deep in the ice, and then we rigged two strong, waist-high guide ropes across along with jumars that would carabiner onto the Sherpas’ new climbing harnesses.

The second crevasse had no snow bridges, and trying to detour around it either way just led us into endless fields of more hidden crevasses. Finally I belayed J.C.—while the Sherpas belayed me—with an extra ice axe laid across the lip of the crevasse so the rope would not cut into the snow. Jean-Claude used his new, short ice axes and 12-point crampons to descend 60 or 70 feet into the terrible crack until he reached a point where the walls were close enough together that he could take one huge step (for a short man) and slam his right ice hammer and right crampon front blades into the opposing ice wall. Then he swung his left arm and leg across a widening abyss that dropped into absolute darkness, kicked both crampon fronts into the blue ice wall, and began climbing with his short axes smacking into ice, each one higher than the other, up the opposite wall.

Once J.C. climbed out and was standing on the other side of the crevasse, I threw a coil of strong rope across and then two of the long ice axes, which he used to anchor the ropes. Then I used two axes and several long ice screws to anchor the ropes on our side of the crevasse. J.C. was wearing one of the climbing harnesses that none of us had tried on the mountain yet, and now he clipped carabiners from the harness onto one of his jumar thingies, lifted his cramponed boots up and over the rope, and just scooted hand over hand, butt first, back toward us along the doubled rope across the bottomless drop as if he were a child on a playground.

“The Sherpas can’t do that with their loads,” I gasped out when he unclipped from the ropes and moved away from the treacherous edge.

Jean-Claude shook his head. He’d been doing all the climbing and work, and I was still the one gasping and panting. “We have our fine fellows dump their loads here for now and we go back to Camp Two. Reggie should have had her team of nine porters bring up the ladders to Two by now. We lash two of the ten-foot ladders together, provide guide ropes as we did on the snow bridge, and…voilà!”

“Voilà,” I repeated with less enthusiasm. It had been a long, hard, dangerous climb up the glacier to this point, we were less than two-thirds of the almost five miles to Camp III, and now we had to head back down to Camp II to start hauling up ladders and more rope. The Sherpas with us were grinning. They’d had enough of hauling loads for one day and were more than happy to dump their heavy loads and walk unencumbered back down the safely wand-marked glacier.

The Deacon had warned us that this was how all the previous expeditions’ planning and schedules, including Mallory’s the year before, ended up in disarray, with loads being dumped up and down the entire eleven-mile Trough and glacier trek up to Camp III and the North Col. All the military planning in the world, he said, can’t overcome the inherent chaos of crevasses and sheer human exhaustion.

“We need more wands anyway,” J.C. said. It was true. There were so many crevasses that Jean-Claude’s route up the glacier twisted this way and then that, rarely a simple straightforward route along the three and a half miles or so we’d covered. We’d underestimated the number of bamboo wands we’d need to mark the route accurately enough for porters following—especially in a snowstorm.

But by early afternoon of this Tuesday, the fifth of May, we have our loads safely delivered to Camp III. Crossing 15 feet or more of the lashed-together wooden ladders above the endless crevasse drop with only the waist-high guide ropes to steady us on our crampons had been an experience I didn’t look forward to having again (though I knew I would have to, many times). We’ve erected J.C.’s and my small Meade tents and Reggie’s hemispherical Big Tent in anticipation of the scheduled rush of men and matériel to come. For tonight, the four Sherpas can sleep in it.

The plan is for us to spend this one night here, waiting for Reggie’s Tiger Team Two with nine Sherpas and their loads, scheduled to arrive before noon tomorrow, and then some of us are to continue waiting—and acclimating—at Camp III until the Deacon comes up the next day, Thursday, May 7, with Tiger Team Three. Only then, according to the plan, and perhaps with even one more day of acclimation for some of us, can anyone attempt to tackle the 1,000-foot slope and wall up to the North Col. Mostly, I think to myself, because the Deacon doesn’t want anyone to climb onto the North Col until he’s present and—presumably—leading the climb.

The real headache hits me before darkness fully falls on this Tuesday night.

I’ve had a headache since we reached Base Camp far below, but suddenly it feels as if someone is driving an ice screw into my skull every thirty seconds or so. My vision flutters, dances with black dots, and begins to constrict into a tunnel. I’ve never had a migraine headache in my life—only two or three serious headaches of any sort that I remember—but this is terrible.

Not bothering to layer into my goose down or outer jackets or to pull on my gloves or overmittens, I crawl on all fours out of the flapping tent, turn away from where we’d staked out the other, larger tent, and vomit behind the closest boulder. The headache makes me continue to dry retch even after my stomach is empty. Within seconds, my hands are freezing.

Dimly, distantly, I realize three things: first, the wind has come up so strongly that the small Meade tent J.C. and I have been crouching in is flapping and banging like wash hung out to dry in a hurricane (I’d thought the noise was only in my throbbing skull); second, that along with the wind have come deeply freezing temperatures and a blizzard so intense that I can barely see the Big Tent eight feet away; third and finally, that Jean-Claude has pulled on his Finch duvet jacket and, leaning out of our tent’s opening, is screaming for me to come back inside.

“Vomit in here, Jake, for the love of Christ!” he is shouting. “We’ll toss the basin out. If you stay out there another minute you’ll be fighting frostbite for a month!”

I can barely hear him over the gale-force winds and the flapping of canvas. If my head weren’t pounding with pain and my insides weren’t busy turning themselves inside out, I would have found his invitation amusing. But rather than be amused now, I am almost too exhausted to crawl back into the wind-pounded tent we’re sharing. I can no longer see Reggie’s Big Tent with the four Sherpas huddling in it only eight or nine feet away, but I can hear its canvas fighting the wind. Between that tent and ours, it sounds like two infantry battalions exchanging fire. Then I’m back inside and J.C. is rubbing my frozen hands and helping me crawl back into my sleeping bag.

My teeth are chattering too hard for me to speak, but after a minute I get it out—“I’m d-d-d-dying and…wha…w…we’re…n…not even…o…on…the fucking mountain y-y-yet.”

Jean-Claude starts laughing. “I don’t believe you are dying, mon ami. You just have a healthy dose of this altitude sickness that I, too, have been fighting.”

I shake my head, try to speak, stutter, and finally get the word out. “Edema.”

I wouldn’t be the first man attempting Everest to die of a pulmonary or brain edema on the way up. I can imagine nothing else that would cause this level of headache pain and nausea.

J.C. sobers up at once, brings the electric torch out of his rucksack, and passes the light in front of my eyes several times.

“I think not,” he says at last. “I believe it is altitude sickness, Jake. Combined with the terrible sunburn you received in the Trough and on the glacier. But we shall get some hot soup and tea into you and see how you feel.”

Except we can’t heat any soup. The Primus stove—the larger type we’d brought up to cook for up to six people—simply will not light.

“Merde,” whispers J.C. “A few minutes more, my friend.” He begins expertly to disassemble the complex mechanism, blowing into tiny valves, checking small pieces, using the flashlight to look down narrow cylinder parts as my father used to peer down the gun barrel after cleaning his rifle.

“All pieces are present and accounted for and looking proper,” he announces at last. He reassembles the Primus as rapidly as a U.S. Marine would reassemble his rifle after fieldstripping it.

The damned thing still won’t light.

“Bad fuel?” I manage to suggest. I’ve curled up in my sleeping bag so my voice is muffled by folds of canvas and down. Even watching J.C. do such fine work with his bare hands in this terrible cold has made my head hurt worse. I desperately do not want to have to crawl outside to vomit again—not as long as I can lie absolutely still and just roll up and down these waves of headache pain and stomach cramps like a small dinghy on hurricane-driven waves.

“We used almost all the water in our bottles and canteens during the long trek up from Camp Two,” Jean-Claude says. “We can go days without warm food, but if we can’t melt snow for hot tea and drinking water, we may be in some trouble if we’re stuck here for several days.” He’s pulling on his outer layers.

“What do you mean stuck here for several days?” I manage to say through the frost-rimmed opening in my sleeping bag. “Reggie and her Tiger Team will be arriving tomorrow before noon and the Deacon and his Sherpas before nightfall. This place is going to look like Grand Central Station by this time tomorrow—we’ll have food and fuel and Primuses enough for an army.”

At that second a gust that must exceed a hundred miles per hour hits the north side of the tent, slides under the ground cloth, and is about to lift us into the air and carry us away when Jean-Claude throws himself spread-eagled across the tent floor. After half a moment when it seems undecided whether we are going to become airborne or not, we bounce once, hard, in the same spot, while the tent walls start whipping back and forth and cracking like renewed volleys of rifle fire. I guess that a couple of our carefully rigged tie-downs have ruptured or stakes have pulled out. Or perhaps the wind has just blown away the half-ton boulders we’d tied guy ropes onto for extra security.

“Perhaps they will not be arriving tomorrow after all,” Jean-Claude says loudly enough to be heard over the volley fire. “But we will need a way to melt snow for tea and drinking water before then. And we need to check on the Sherpas next door.”

It looks from the outside as if Reggie’s hemispherical Big Tent is handling the wind better than our A-shaped Whymper tent, but once we’re inside, we immediately see that the four Sherpa inmates in the Big Tent aren’t doing so well. Jean-Claude and I have brought some frozen tins of food as well as dragging the dead Primus along in the vague hope that one of the Sherpas will be able to repair it. Snow blows in behind us as we enter, and we hurry to lace the entrance back up.

The only light in the tent comes from the stubby little open-flame ghee-butter candle of the sort that Hindus use for their religious services. Ghee is clarified butter, and the stench from the tiny candle adds to my already adequate nausea. The four Sherpas look pathetic; Babu Rita, Norbu Chedi, Ang Chiri, and Lhakpa Yishay are all huddled together in a wet goose down Finch-jacket heap in the center of the tent space. Two of them have crawled half into their down sleeping bags—also damp—but the other two don’t even have their bags with them. There’s no gear or food from their loads in the tent—not even an extra blanket—and all four men, earlier thought to be some of our sure-to-be-named Tiger Sherpas, look at us the way the terminally lost look at possible rescuers.

“Where are your other two sleeping bags?” demands J.C.

“Lhakpa lightened the load in his pack at Camp Two,” says Norbu Chedi, his teeth chattering. “He left his and my bags and the extra ground cloth behind…by accident, Sahib.”

“Merde!” says Jean-Claude. “Sleeping bags were the lightest things in your loads. Do you have any water?”

“No, Sahib,” says my personal Sherpa, Babu Rita. “We drank it all from our bottles during the climb to this camp. We were hoping that you had already melted us some.”

J.C. plunks the recalcitrant Primus down in the middle of our crowded little huddle and explains the problem. Babu and Norbu translate for Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay.

“Where’s the food?” asks Jean-Claude. “The soup and the food tins?”

“We could not get to the pack loads,” says Norbu. “Buried too deep in snow.”

“Nonsense,” snaps J.C. “We dumped those loads just a few yards from here only hours ago. We need to go out now and bring in the food and packs, see what there is for us to use. Was there a second Primus packed, by any chance?”

“No,” Babu says in a hopeless tone. “But I carried many cans of Primus fuel up the glacier.”

Jean-Claude shakes his head. I would do the same but my head hurts too much. The small cans of kerosene are useless unless we can get the Primus working. “Get your gloves, mittens, and Shackleton overjackets on,” orders J.C. “It’s snowing too hard—and getting too dark—to sort through the loads out there, so we’re going to pull the packs and load bags into the tent.”

It is getting dark outside, and the blizzard still restricts our vision to only a couple of yards. I’m wondering whether we should have roped up for this effort when Jean-Claude shouts over the howling wind for Babu and Ang to hang on to each other and me, and for Norbu and Lhakpa to keep a grip on each other and him. We stagger and feel our way the few yards from the Big Tent to the general vicinity of where we think the Sherpas dumped their packs. J.C.’s rucksack and load bags, as well as mine, are weighted down by rocks right at the entrance to our tent. Of course they’re empty, since, with the exception of a few food tins, we hauled the two heavy tents, tent staves and poles, and the nonworking Primus stove up in our loads. So our lives now depend on what we find in the Sherpas’ loads. Camp III is supposed to be sheltered—compared to Camp IV up on the North Col, much less compared to any camps exposed up on the North or North East ridges higher up—but the wind whipping down the 1,000-foot slope of ice and snow is so strong that it literally knocks me over. Babu Rita and Ang Chiri dutifully fall into the snow with me. On all fours, I flail around trying to find their rucksacks and pack loads amidst the drifts, snow-covered boulders, and the growing heaps of snow on this side of the tents.

“Here!” I can barely hear J.C.’s voice, but the two Sherpas and I crawl toward it.

We all grab some part of the load masses now under ten inches or more of new snow and begin dragging them back to the Big Tent…but where is the Big Tent? Luckily, Lhakpa Yishay had left burning the one tiny ghee candle they had set on the floor—foolish to leave it unattended, since fire is always a danger in these canvas tents—and we all crawl and tug and grunt and swear in the direction of that tiny light.

Inside—it was impossible to unload the packs and rucksacks and load bags outside in the wind and snow—things are a real mess.

Enough snow has come in that our down jackets and trousers (the Sherpas chose not to wear the extra down trousers we had for them) and the two spread sleeping bags are covered with snow that body heat soon will melt into moisture. The wetter goose down gets, the less insulating property it has, until, when soaked enough, it will provide all the insulating warmth of a cold, wet washrag.

Dizzy, trying hard not to be violently sick again, I curl up on the driest part of the tent floor I can find and shiver, my head hurting worse with each shiver and shake. The sudden, overpowering stench of the kerosene doesn’t help matters.

Jean-Claude is going through the packs and load bags: several more tins of frozen food and sealed packs of what the Royal Navy has called “portable soup” since the early 1800s, but no water. Five more Primus-fuel-sized cans of kerosene.

We now have enough kerosene to blow up a German pillbox or burn a hole in the wall of the North Col, but the damned Primus stove won’t ignite it.

J.C. clears a space in the middle and lays down an extra wool shirt of his as a work area. He has brought a flashlight from his personal rucksack and adds the beam of its light to the ever-diminishing blue flicker of the tiny ghee-candle lamp.

He sets up the Primus again. We have two big pots for boiling, and each of us has his tin cup for drinking. J.C. makes sure that the fuel tank is two-thirds filled with fresh kerosene as the instructions suggest, primes it with a bit of burning alcohol in the tiny spirit cup below the burners, pumps up the pressure, and tries again to ignite the burners.

Nothing.

J.C. allows himself a torrent of French so picturesque that I can pick up only one vulgarity in twenty. He begins disassembling the damned thing again, taking great care not to spill the kerosene or remaining alcohol.

“How can it not work?” I manage to say from my fetal position and through my throbbing headache.

“I…do…not…know,” Jean-Claude says through gritted teeth. Wind batters the wall of the Big Tent so hard that four of us grab the wooden ribs of the dome, trying to hold the tent down with our weight and waning strength. While outside, J.C. had swung his little steel-tubed instrument, and he whispered the results to me inside: the barometer was frighteningly low and still falling; the temperature at nightfall outside was minus thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. We had nothing but our bodies, tents, and fears with which to measure the velocity of the wind down here in the “sheltered” area at the base of the North Col, but these winds have to be hurricane velocity. Some must be a hundred miles per hour or more.

I force myself to sit up and look at the disassembled brass pieces of the Primus now gleaming faintly in the weak light from the single flashlight and the dying ghee-candle dish.

I’m thinking, There may be no more idiot-proof piece of machinery in the world than a Swedish-built Primus stove.

The Deacon had bought mostly the new 1925 models, but except for being improved for high altitudes—some of the improvements suggested by a certain George Finch—they differed very little from earlier pressure stoves going back to 1892. We’d used Primuses from our stores for cooking all the way through Sikkim and across Tibet. None had ever failed to light.

As J.C. holds the burner up to the light yet again, making sure there is no blockage, I dully paw through the other pieces.

The simple little machine is a brass 1925 (O) Primus 210 model—the new kind with fixed legs. The procedure for lighting it is the same as for all the other Primuses I’ve used over my years of hiking and climbing. Primuses have always worked at any altitude I’ve been at.

First, one uses the pumping mechanism set into the main fuel tank to pressurize that fuel tank. This rise in pressure forces the kerosene in the main tank up and along the tube that rises to the burners. To preheat those burner tubes, one lights a small amount of methylated spirits—alcohol—in the built-in spirit cup encircling the burner tube.

We’ve done all that a dozen times this afternoon and now darkening evening with no luck.

Once those burner tubes reach a high enough temperature, a fine, almost invisible spray of hot paraffin gas is emitted through the central jet in the burner. When air mixes with that gas—even the thin air of Mount Everest—the stove’s simple and sturdy little flame ring forces the gas into a circle. Technically, it’s not the kerosene burning in the blue-flame ring of a Primus stove, it’s the plasma paraffin gas generated from the spray of kerosene. The noise from those flame-ring burners has always been loud enough that many climbers and campers have called their Primuses “roarers.” Indeed, there are few sounds more reassuring to an exhausted mountain climber than the roar of a Primus stove as it melts snow for drinking water, heats soup or stew, and generally adds to the warmth of a cold tent pitched high in the snow and rock.

Now…nothing.

“We can make tea and maybe even some soup on the little spirit burner stove,” I say. “Heat up some sardines.” The small alcohol-burning stoves are meant for the high camps—mostly to make hot tea—but are supposed to be included as a backup stove for every camp.

“There was no spirit burner in any of the packs,” says Jean-Claude. We exchange guilty glances, and I realize we’re sharing our sense of shame at having supervised our loads, Sherpas, and selves so poorly on this, our first real outing toward the mountain.

“So it has to be the Primus,” I say.

I stupidly move the brass tank in both hands but find no holes or leaks. Since kerosene would be spilling out if the circular tank had been breached, it isn’t the most clever troubleshooting I’ve ever done. As if hypnotized, I count eleven languages imprinted on the side of the metal tank. Only eight years after the Great War, and this Swedish company—B. A. Hjorth & Co., Stockholm, as it says on the Primus as well as on an accompanying card advertising “Practical Accessories for the Primus” (e.g., a spirit can with a nozzle, part No. 1745; a cleaning needle case, No. 1050; and, of course, a Wind Shield, No. 1601)—is selling the stove in at least these eleven countries.

This version of the Primus has only a triangular plate as a “wind shield,” but J.C. has blocked the wind with his body huddled over the stove each time he’s tried to light it, so the wind shield is not the problem. Technically, we’re supposed to use Primuses outside the tents, but there’s no hope at all of getting this thing lighted in the gale-force winds ripping at even the entrances to our tents.

“Not at fault,” says Jean-Claude as he inspects each disassembled piece: the burner nipple for heat and quench, the reserve cap parking boss, the burner collector collar, the flame ring, the nitrile seals, the lead seal in the burner itself, or the leather for the pressurizing pump.

He whispers under his breath, uses the few tools he’s brought with him—a screwdriver, small wrench, some wire probes—to reassemble the stove, and tries again to light it. Nothing.

“It’s not building up pressure in the tank,” he says at last.

“How can that be?” I force myself to say. One pumps a Primus and it builds up the pressure to force the kerosene up into the tiny pipes. It’s always worked for me.

Jean-Claude shakes his head.

Norbu Chedi speaks softly, almost apologetically: “On the Dongkha La, long before Kampa Dzong, Nawang Bura dropped his load down a steep incline. No sahib saw, since Nawang was back with the rear pack mules. There was a Primus that bounced free off large rocks for many yards downhill. Nawang Bura retrieved it and the other materials and repacked them without mentioning the accident to Dr. Pasang or Sahib Deacon or to Lady Bromley.”

“That was weeks ago,” I say. “Surely we would have used that…this…Primus since then.”

“Maybe not,” Jean-Claude says wearily. “We got into the habit of using the same Primuses at each camping spot. This one was taken out of reserve stores to go up the mountain. It’s one of the 1925 models adapted for higher altitudes.”

“Can’t you fix it?”

Our lives may depend upon his doing so if we’re trapped here many days. Hot soup and tea will be important, but melting the snow for drinking water is imperative.

“The tank isn’t leaking,” says J.C. “I’ve taken the pressurizing pump apart and inspected it and the leather bits more than a dozen times. I can’t see anything wrong or broken anywhere. It just…won’t…fucking…work.”

None of us says anything for a very long moment, but the silence is filled in with a wilder, louder howl of wind that makes all of us grab on to the floor cloth or tent walls to keep from flying away.

“Sandy Irvine fixed dozens of things, built the rope ladder up to the Col, and repaired and redesigned the entire oxygen apparatus at Base Camp or above,” mutters J.C. “And I—a Chamonix Guide and the son of a blacksmith and inventor and steel industrialist—can’t even fix a putain Primus stove on our second night out above Base Camp.”

“Without the Primus or spirit burner, what are our other options to get a controlled flame to melt some snow, heat some soup?” I ask. “We have the two pots. We have our tin cups. We have plenty of matches. We have some more alcohol. We have lots of kerosene.”

“If you’re thinking of dumping some kerosene into a cup and lighting it to put our pots on, forget it, Jake,” says Jean-Claude. “Kerosene by itself doesn’t burn in the way we need to heat things. To get a good blue flame we need…” Suddenly J.C. falls silent and takes the brass tank from my hands. He’s already pulled off the pressure-pump mechanism, but now he tries the permanent screw that I’ve always used to turn the flame up at the beginning of a cooking session and then turned the other way to shut the Primus off after its use.

“The damned vent screw,” says Jean-Claude. “It turned when I tried it each time, but it’s cross-threaded…it’s not opening to allow the pressurized kerosene jet to rise. In fact, the damned thing’s cross-threaded and bent enough that the tank won’t even hold pressure. The goddamned vent screw!”

He sets his wrench and small pair of pliers to work on the screw, but it won’t thread properly. And now it is stuck. I see him using all of his massive arm and hand strength to get the screw to turn. It does not.

“Let me try,” I say. I’m larger than Jean-Claude, my hands are much larger than Jean-Claude’s, and I’m probably stronger than the Chamonix Guide, but I can’t get the vent screw to turn either with my bare hands or with the wrench or pliers.

“Totally cross-stripped, the tank unpressurized and not able to be pressurized with the vent screw broken,” says Jean-Claude. It sounds like our death sentence, but what’s left of the logical parts of my brain reminds me that we can do without water for a few days, without food for weeks if need be. But my guess is that lots of snow-melt water and some hot soup would have gone far to reduce this headache and the other altitude sickness symptoms I’m feeling.

Meanwhile, the hemispherical tent walls are trying to rip themselves away from the curved wooden interior staves holding them in place. The thin ground cloth—the Sherpas hadn’t bothered with setting down the thicker one before raising the tent—is trying to rise up under us even with all six of us, and the heavy food loads and kerosene cans, spread about on it. I’ve never been in an earthquake, but it must feel like this. Only not as loud. We’re still shouting at each other to be heard.

“Jake and I are going back to our own tent to sleep,” Jean-Claude tells Babu and Norbu. “It’d be a little too crowded in here with six men trying to stretch out. Get some sleep—tell Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay not to worry. This storm may break by morning and either Lady Bromley-Montfort will be here with her Sherpas and supplies, or we’ll just walk back down to Camp Two.”

Since we’ve kept our boots and Shackleton jackets on, we just crawl out the door. But J.C. says, “Wait a minute, Jake,” and begins handing out the cans of kerosene to me. He also brings the reassembled but still unworkable Primus. “We’ll stack the cans just outside your tent,” he shouts to Babu Rita.

But he doesn’t. J.C. motions to me to carry my armloads of miniature cans with him to the far side of our poor sagging tent. There he sets his behind a boulder and I do the same. He puts his mouth near my ear so that I can hear him over the wind. “Some of the worst injuries I’ve seen in the mountains came from tent fires. I don’t trust our friends to keep from experimenting with burning cans of kerosene when they’re thirsty enough.”

I nod, understanding that on a calm day or night, such experiments—especially if done just outside the tent—might be worth the risk. But not in a tent that’s leaping and shaking under and around you.

Our own small tent, seven feet by six, is sagging and pitiful-looking. J.C. holds up one finger, telling me to wait outside a moment, and then he crawls in just far enough to pull a coil of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope from his rucksack. He cuts different lengths and we use the heavier rope to add more tie-downs to the wind-whipped tent. The long stakes don’t work worth a damn here on the lateral moraine, so we’re adding to the already existing spiderweb of lines to rocks frozen into the moraine, boulders, and even to one ice pinnacle.

By now I’m frozen through and relieved when we’re finished and can crawl into the low tent.

We crawl deep into our still dry goose down sleeping bags, removing our boots but putting them in the bags with us so that they won’t be too frozen to get into in the morning. At this temperature, if a climber leaves his boots outside his bag, the laces tend to snap off when he tries to tie them in the morning. With George Finch’s goose down duvet still on under the sleeping bag down, plus Reggie’s hood and Michelin Man goose down trousers, what little body heat I have left builds up again quickly enough.

“Here, Jake, put these in your bag as well.” J.C.’s left his bulky hand torch on, and I can see that he’s handing me a frozen tin of spaghetti, a smaller tin of meat lozenges, a solid brick of the rubber-protected “portable soup,” and the can of peaches (I can see the dent) that Reggie threw at the Deacon’s head the hundred years ago that was Saturday.

“You’re kidding,” I say. How am I supposed to sleep with these freezing cans against me?

“Not at all,” says Jean-Claude. “I have twice as many in my bag. Our body heat may melt—or at least soften—some of the food. The tin of peaches has syrup in it and we’ll share it with the other four in the morning to…how do you say it in English?…slake our thirst.”

Let’s open it and drink it now, just the two of us, is my unworthy thought. But nobility wins out. That and my sure knowledge that the fluid in the peach can is frozen as solid as a brick at the moment.

J.C. flicks off the hand torch to save the batteries but then says in an almost perfect imitation of the Deacon’s voice, “Well, what lessons have today’s events taught us, my friends?”

The Deacon asks that after almost every climb and certainly after every problem we have with a climb, but J.C.’s mimicry of the vaguely tutorial Oxbridge accent is so dead-on that I laugh hard despite the pain it causes to my aching skull.

“I suppose we should check the contents of our loads more carefully when carrying to any higher camp,” I say into the loud darkness.

“Oui. What else?”

“Double-check that none of the porters has tossed out something essential—such as his and his mate’s sleeping bag.”

“Oui. What else?”

“Probably have an Unna cooker in each camp as well as a roarer.” The Unna cookers we’ve brought to Everest, smaller and lighter than Primuses and using a solid fuel to burn, were generally used in higher camps when weight in the load had to be kept to a minimum. I’m fairly certain that Mallory and Irvine had an Unna cooker at their Camp VI.

“Primuses almost always work,” is J.C.’s response. “Robert Falcon Scott hauled one nine hundred miles to the South Pole and most of the way back.”

“And look what happened to Scott and his men,” I say.

We both start laughing. As if in response, the wind off the North Col roars more loudly. I feel as if our little two-man tent is going to shake itself to death despite—or perhaps because of—the spiderweb of tie-downs we’ve added outside.

There’s no more talk between us until I ask, “Do you think Reggie will be here with the Sherpas and extra loads by late morning?”

Jean-Claude’s silence goes on so long that I almost decide he’s fallen asleep. Then he says, “I doubt it, Jake. If the blizzard continues this cold and this hard, I think it would be foolhardy to try to come up those last three and a half miles of glacier. Remember, they don’t know that we have a damaged Primus. They assume that we are eating and drinking all right and…what is your American phrase that I like so much in Mark Twain? Ah, yes—hunkering down. Yes, just hunkering down here and waiting, as they are. My guess is that Lady Bromley-Montfort wisely retreated from Camp Two at the first signs of the blizzard hitting them. It’s a cold, windblown site at the best of times.”

He is right about that. Camp II is supposed to be pleasant because earlier expedition members said that, unlike Camps I and III, it’s positioned to catch any sunlight the Himalayan skies might offer. But in our time there, it has been cloudy, windswept, and bitterly cold. Its only advantage is its beautiful view of Mount Kellas, named after the physician who died during the 1921 reconnaissance expedition.

“With the fixed ropes we’ve set along the way,” I say hopefully, “they might come up from Camp One or even from Base Camp in a few hours.”

“I think not,” says Jean-Claude. “The snow was more than knee-deep when we broke trail this morning. Now those tracks are gone—swept away and filled in. I suspect that many of the fixed ropes will also be buried by morning. This is a hard snowstorm, my friend. If Reggie or the Deacon should try to come up, they and the porters would be…what is your word?…”

“Fucked?” I say.

“Non, postholing, at least all the way from Camp One, when they must leave the moraine and come onto the glacier. It is exhausting and terribly dangerous in a storm like this when one cannot see the trail or crevasses.”

“We left bamboo markers all along the way.”

“Many of which, we must assume,” says J.C., “will be buried or blown over by morning.” He switches to the Deacon’s slow, deep, educated British accent. “Another thing we have learned, my friends, is that at least every other bamboo marker or wooden rope guide must have a red flag on it.”

This time my head hurts too much to laugh. Also, I’m growing a bit frightened.

“What do we do if this storm keeps up all day tomorrow, Jean-Claude?”

“Experience tells us that we should stay here—hunkered down—until the storm finally passes,” he says over the gunshots of crackling canvas walls. “But I’m worried about the Sherpas who are missing sleeping bags. Already they do not look so well. I hope their friends can keep them warm enough tonight. But if this continues longer than another day, I think we should try to get down to Camp Two.”

“But as you said, it’s almost as windy and cold as this damned Camp Three.”

“But there should be at least six tents there by now, Jake. Odds are good that they will have left food supplies and at least one Primus and an Unna cooker with Meta solid fuel in a load stashed for a higher camp.”

“Ah, hell…all right,” I say.

I roll over, right into a frozen can of something. I also can feel every moraine rock beneath the tent, most of them pressing into my spine and kidneys. When we’d pitched the tent, there hadn’t been enough snow here in the spot furthest away from any avalanche danger to provide a comfortable, melt-your-body-form-into-it padding below the tent. Now the snow is mostly on top of the tent or drifted up to either side.

I’m just drifting between miserable, cold wakefulness and miserable cold sleep when Jean-Claude says, “Jake?”

“Yes?”

“I think we need to climb the ice wall straight up, not even go near the slope that avalanched in ’twenty-two. There’s too much new snow there. It’ll be harder, but I think we have to go straight up the nine-hundred-foot slope, setting fixed ropes as we go, and then climb the sheer blue-ice wall where Mallory’s chimney used to be.”

He must be joking, I think. Hallucinating out loud.

“Okay,” I say.

“Oui,” says J.C. “I was afraid you would want to go the old way.”

Jean-Claude starts to snore. I am asleep in ten seconds.

Sometime later—we eventually figure it to be about three a.m.—I awake to icy pellets being flung into my face, even though I’ve crawled down deep within my bag. To that and to Jean-Claude screaming at me over an infinitely louder wind roar.

The wind has finally ripped open the entire seam along the north wall of our guaranteed windproof new Meade tent and torn the canvas there to rags. The full force of the storm is blowing in on us.

“Quickly!” shouts Jean-Claude. The hand torch is lit, showing a blinding wall of snow blasting between the two of us. J.C. is tugging on his boots and then grabbing his rucksack in one hand and his flashlight and lumpy, food-tin-filled sleeping bag in the other, shouting at me all the time.

Boots unlaced, face stinging with minus-forty-degree cold, forgetting to put on my various gloves and mittens, dragging my own lumpy-with-cans sleeping bag in one hand and the almost empty rucksack in the other, I stumble after him and out into the maelstrom.

If Reggie’s Big Tent has blown down, we’re all dead.