hissing noise I’ve been hearing for a while now isn’t snow, it is the last of the Unna cookers and Meta fuel blocks working to melt pathetically small pots of snow, one after the other. It must have been working for a while now, because Reggie—decked out in all her layers and sitting on her folded-up sleeping bag, boots braced against a ridge in a slab to keep her from sliding off the mountain—has already filled three of our thermoses with… something tepid.
I try to remember the boiling point of water at 27,000 feet—164 and some decimal degrees Fahrenheit? 162?—anyway, something so cool that before long, if we keep climbing, it seems the water will be boiling in the pot without any burner under it.
Actually, I vaguely remember George Finch saying that if we humans ever managed to get into outer space—totally above the atmosphere—our blood would boil in our veins and brains even while the temperature on the shaded side of our bodies might be more than 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. “Of course,” Finch had added to make us feel better (it was while we were eating dessert at the four-star Zurich restaurant), “you wouldn’t have to worry about your blood boiling in outer space, since your lungs and bodies would already have exploded like those poor deep-sea creatures we dredge up from the depths from time to time.”
That had put me off my pudding.
I haul my sleeping bag up the slab slope to sit next to Reggie. As I’m tucking it under my butt, my boots slip—I haven’t put on crampons yet because my fingers aren’t up to all the strap-tying—and Reggie has to steady me with a firm hand again before my heels can find another wedge of rock to hold the rest of me in place. We’d had to move slightly onto the North Face to find even this pathetic campsite. There’d been no sign of Mallory and Irvine’s Camp VI from last year; we may have missed seeing it in the long shadows, rock mazes, and swirling snow at dusk. And while the Face here next to the North Ridge and just below the Yellow Band doesn’t seem all that steep—perhaps the 35- to 40-degree slate roof of the church that George Mallory had so famously climbed as a boy would be a good comparison—one real slip might well keep one falling the 6,000 feet or so to the East Rongbuk Glacier.
“How do you feel, Jake?” I realize that she’s not using oxygen, and I’m glad I haven’t yet dragged my overnight oxygen tank out of the tent.
“Great,” I say dully. If my skull had been stuffed with wool down at Camp V altitude, up here at Camp VI it was mostly empty except for pain…and thinking or speaking is enough to cause that pain to leap and cavort.
“You coughed all night,” says Reggie.
I’d noticed that. The constant cough—caused, I presume, by the unbelievable dryness that reaches into the smallest vesicles in your lungs and dries up the mucus in your throat at this altitude—sometimes makes you feel that you’re literally going to cough your guts up.
“Just the cold air,” I say. In truth, I feel that there’s something solid stuck in my throat. It’s a nauseating thought and I try not to dwell on it.
Reggie opens her arms. “I thought you might like to see the sunrise.”
“Oh…yeah…thanks,” I mumble.
My God, it’s beautiful. Part of my malfunctioning brain and warmth-desiring soul is dimly aware of this beauty. After a moment, both the reality of what I’m seeing and a bit of the rising sun’s warmth begin to sink into the semi-ambulatory chunk of frozen, coughing, shivering flesh that I’ve become.
At this moment, Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort and I are, without any doubt, the highest people on the planet to be touched by the rising sun. I look to my left and crane my aching neck to gaze up at the summit of Everest—so close! so infinitely far away!—just 2,000 impossible feet above, less than a mile of ridgeline to the west of us now, and the radiance of the sun shining a benediction on the reddish rock of the summit. The gleaming snowfields of the Summit Pyramid below the final vertical section to that summit look like something divine, something not of this world.
What had John Keats said about Negative Capability—holding two opposite ideas in one’s mind at the same time without straining to reconcile them? Beats me. Maybe it hadn’t been Keats at all…maybe it had been Yeats or Thomas Jefferson or Edison. Wait…what was I just thinking about?
“Here, drink some of this,” says Reggie and hands me one of the thermoses. “It’s not hot, but it has caffeine in it.”
The tepid coffee almost makes me gag, but I decide that vomiting this stuff all over Reggie wouldn’t be the proper way to thank her for getting up before dawn at the top of the world to heat my morning coffee.
I realize that from time to time Reggie has been using the binoculars slung around her neck to scan the slopes below us.
“Anything?” I say.
“There’s just enough snow on the North Face…to make…every rock and boulder in it look like a human body at first glimpse.” She lowers the binoculars. “No. Nothing to see yet. Except those two human beings climbing directly towards us.”
“What?” I say and borrow her binoculars. It takes me a minute to find what she’s talking about, even with her pointing to help, since the objects are just gray specks moving slowly against gray-black rock along the ridge. It’s only when they move in front of the occasional small snowfield that I actually realize that the specks are alive and climbing.
“The Deacon leading,” I say.
“And Jean-Claude?”
“No, the second man on the rope is too tall for J.C. It must be a very tall Sherpa whom the Deacon is…wait! It’s Pasang!”
She takes the glasses back. I watch her face light up with pleasure. Somehow, that view is a perfect complement to the world of warming blue sky, clouds far below us in the valleys, huge glaciers visible winding back upon themselves where there are no low clouds, and scores of summits 20,000 feet and more in altitude igniting with the sun’s rays one after another like a series of tall, white candles being lit by an invisible altar boy. Below each newly lighted candle lies the white altar cloth of countless glaciers, ridges, and pristine snowfields.
It takes another half hour for the two figures to reach us—during much of the last part of that climb they are hidden from us as they work their way through the maze of gullies that starts about 1,000 feet below the Yellow Band and continues to the ridgeline above us—but then, suddenly, they’re with us. Waiting for our friends to reach our altitude has given Reggie and me time to eat a hearty breakfast—some English biscuits, bits of chocolate, a few spoonfuls of semi-thawed macaroni, and then a bit more chocolate and coffee. Reggie and I haven’t been conversing—the silence is what a writer type such as I’d once imagined myself to be (at least until I met that Hemingway fellow in Paris) might describe as “companionable.” So I content myself with trying to get my groggy brain in gear by naming the summits already glowing with light: the cliffs and North Peak of Everest itself, of course; the snowy top of what must be Kanchenjunga far to the east; Cho Oyu to the west; Lhotse just beginning to catch the light to the south; the more distant Gyankar range slowly changing from intangible shadow to granite solidity in the sun’s rays; and far, far away, peering at us over the now visible curve of the earth, some incredibly high peak in Central Tibet. I have no idea what it might be.
Then the Deacon and Pasang are here, still roped together on 60 feet of Deacon Miracle Rope. Reggie and I exchange pleasurably guilty glances about this—we never did rope together during the previous day’s climb, not even after we moved out onto the North Face or had to claw our way up through the gullies, using our hands in some steep places. I can’t quite understand why that little secret between us pleases me so much.
“It’s not even seven a.m.,” says Reggie. “When on earth…did you leave? And from where?”
Pasang’s oxygen mask has been dangling free of his face for the entire time I’d been able to see him through the binoculars. I doubt that he’s run out of O2, since I can see the tops of two tanks poking out of his rucksack. Those should easily have got him up from the North Col, even at the high-flow rate. And it’s certainly not like Dr. Pasang to show off. Perhaps he can just climb higher than us Europeans without
