wind, it’s almost warm. I unzip my outer down jacket.
“Whisk…broom,” I manage and pat an outside pocket on the left side of my rucksack.
Reggie nods, retrieves the tiny broom, and somehow finds the energy to lean into the tent and brush most of the snow out. She turns the sleeping bags inside out and drags them out into the sunlight, weighting them down with rocks as protection against the occasional gusts of wind.
Then she pulls an altitude barometer from some inside pocket and consults it. “Twenty-five thousand two hundred fifty feet plus or minus two hundred feet or so given the weather,” she says and has to pant for air. I realize that she’s pointing downhill toward something to our left.
It takes me a minute to see it. Two patches of torn and tumbled green canvas on a snowy steep patch of rock. “Camp Five…in ’twenty-two…,” she says.
It gives me a certain stupid sense of satisfaction to know that we’ve come 200 or 300 feet higher than the iron men of the 1922 expedition before setting up our own camp.
“Where are the…tents…from…’twenty-four?” I ask.
Reggie shrugs. She’s said that she climbed to the site of the ’24 Camp V with Pasang last summer, so I suspect she knows where that site was but is too tired to tell me at the moment.
Whichever tent or tents we choose to spend the night in—and the thought of being in either precarious perch in a high wind makes my scrotum contract—I have a good sense from the Deacon’s and Norton’s and the others’ reports as to what the rest of this day will be like.
First, Reggie and I will get out our little list of necessaries—there’s already an Unna cooker here, so we’ll save ours for the higher camp tomorrow—and crawl into or onto our sleeping bags, luxuriating in the false sense of warmth under the sun-warmed tent canvas. Too exhausted to do anything constructive, we’ll just lie in our respective bags and stupors for forty-five minutes to an hour, perhaps taking the rare shot of English air to offset the headaches already roiling in our skulls like the shifting cloud mass in the East Rongbuk Glacier valley so far below.
Then one of us—I hope to God it’s Reggie—will find the energy to crawl, with frequent rests and more frequent groans, out of her bag, out of her daytime tent, and across the terribly steep slope to the nearest patch of clean snow—about ten paces from this tent, only about four paces from the hanging-over-nothing tent above us to the left—and will use the last of her energy to fill two big aluminum pots with snow.
Then we’ll take turns groaning and moaning as we work together to light the damned Meta burner and to open some tins and bags of food—not a small accomplishment at this altitude—taking two hours to prepare a dinner we don’t want: pemmican, perhaps, or some bully beef (which the Deacon must be fond of, since he packed so much of it), and then “boil” some lukewarm tea with lots of sugar and condensed milk.
I gag just thinking about it. Perhaps I’ll just sleep all day and night instead. We still have water in our thermoses. That will do me until tomorrow. Or forever. Whichever comes first.
So I’m amazed—beyond amazed—when Reggie says, “What do you say…to going…up to…Camp Six?”
“Today?” I manage in little more than a squeak.
She nods, pulls a delicate lady’s watch from somewhere under her unzipped Finch duvet, and says, “It’s not quite noon. The Deacon says…they climbed from Camp Five…to Camp Six…in just under…four and a half hours. We can be there long before….dark.”
For a moment I’m certain that this is sheer bravado, that Reggie can’t be serious, but then I look at her sunburned face and beautiful eyes above the tugged-down oxygen mask and beneath the raised goggles and realize that she’s totally serious.
“They made that climb…starting…in the morning,” I say. “When they were rested.”
Reggie shakes her head, and I see curls of her blue-black hair trying to escape the wool cap she wears under the goose down hood. “You don’t really rest…up this high. Just…hurt. Lie…awake. We might as well do it… seventeen hundred feet…higher…tonight. Start hunting for…Percy…in the morning. Come
“The Deacon and J.C. will expect us to be here…at…Camp Five,” I manage.
Reggie shrugs. “I’ll write them a note.” She takes a small leather notebook and small pencil from an inner pocket.
I play my trump card. She will have no answer to this. It will save our lives…or at least
“Oh, nonsense,” says Reggie. She’s writing busily. Then she pushes the partially dried sleeping bags back into the tilted tent and shows me the note before setting it atop the closest bag, weighting it with a rock. The brief note, our death warrant I am sure, reads
She ties the tent flaps closed, and we gasp and moan getting to our feet. I have a second of vertigo that almost sends me headfirst the 2,000-plus feet down to the North Col, my arms flapping like vestigial wings on some flightless bird. Nothing between here and the drop-off beneath us would stop me if I did tumble backward. I continue to teeter groggily, flailing my arms in a vain attempt to find my balance, and then feel Reggie’s firm hand on my upper arm, holding me in place.
When I find my balance and some semblance of normal breathing, she slaps me on the shoulder as if nothing had happened.
“We can dump the first oxygen…tank…when it empties,” she says before pulling her mask back up. “Maybe we should use less…of the air…for the second part…of the climb. Have more…for…tomorrow.”
“Sure,” I pant over the top of my own mask. “Whatever…you say…ma’am.”
We turn around, facing up the impossibly steep heap of murderously slippery black granite slabs and snow, and prepare to take our first thirteen steps. Almost 6,000 feet above us, the West Face of Everest’s snowy Summit Pyramid begins to glow in the very cold and increasingly low early afternoon light. Spindrift is again being hurled out for miles to the southeast. I start to imagine what the wind will be like up at 27,000 feet, our destination just a few hundred feet below the Yellow Band that is the last physical landmark and dividing line beneath the North East Ridge and that straight—if almost certainly impossible—ridgeline route to that summit. But then I have to shut down my imagination or just sit on a boulder and start weeping like a child.
We take our first of thirteen steps.
Jake,” Reggie says softly, “if you’re awake, you might want to see this.”
I’m awake all right. Our “Camp VI” is a sad joke—the small 10-pound two-pole Meade tent precariously perched on a tilting slab so steep that we had to set our feet against the boulder that anchored the downhill end of the tent and sleep on an incline so steep that it felt as if we were half-standing. At least I’d thought to tie down an extra blanket on the flat face of the slab while we were lashing and weighting the tent to the side of the mountain, so the pure cold of this alien world at 27,000 feet hadn’t completely flowed up and into us from the cold rock all night.
I’d slept a few minutes during the darkness. I’d also been vaguely aware that, cocooned in our bags as we were, Reggie and I were still huddling together—rather like two passengers crowding together for warmth on the packed upper deck of an oddly tilted British double-decker bus on a London winter day. At least the winds were mild during the night. The suspense of waiting to be blown off this ridiculous excuse for a perch wouldn’t have allowed me even my few moments of half-sleep.
“Okay,” I say and sit up for the terrible ordeal of pulling on outer layers and boots that have stayed with me in the bag all night. My only concession to hygiene is to put on the last pair of clean cotton undersocks that are in my rucksack. It helps psychologically, if in no other way.
I crawl out of the uphill end of the tent. It’s like coming up and out of a hoar-frosted tunnel. Or perhaps it’s more like being born and finding out that you’re on the moon.
The band of sunlight has just moved down across our happy little home at 27,000 feet and I realize that the
