tonight, but we should be back at Camp Five together by two p.m. I don’t think any of us had adequate rest last night, and I…don’t want…any more altitude health problems if we can help it.” He looks at me. “Your cough is getting worse, Jake.”
I shake my head irritably. “It’ll go away when I go back on bottled air.” I know it won’t—my throat still feels like I’ve got a chicken bone caught in it—but I don’t want to argue or whine.
The Deacon nods, obviously not convinced, and opens his pack. “I have something for each of you,” he says and pulls out what look to be three short, wide-barreled black metal pistols.
“Dueling pistols?” says Reggie, knowing better. I’m the only one who laughs, and that soon turns into my hacking cough.
“I did not know that Very signal pistol came in such a small size,” says Pasang. The Deacon is setting out colored Very shells, each not much bigger than a shotgun shell—both shells and pistols much smaller than any nautical or military Very gear I’ve ever seen. I’d seen the Deacon write the word on a list in London. I hadn’t known why at the time, and he spelled it “Verey” for some reason (evidently it was an English thing), but I’d always seen such pistols spelled “Very,” after the name of the fellow who first designed the flare guns.
“My Webley and Scott Mark Three flare pistol in the War was a blunderbuss of a thing,” the Deacon is saying. “Big brass flared barrel. Fired a one-inch-caliber flare—the kind of one-inch-bore Very pistol you’ve probably seen, Jake. But some German boffin designed these smaller twelve-gauge Verys for night patrol work. We captured a few.” He pulls his larger British-made Very pistol out of his pack to show us the comparison. It and its flare cartridges are easily twice the size of the smaller German ones laid out on the rock before us. Even in smaller size, the flare pistols have that ugly, black metal, totally functional German look to them.
“So,” I say, feeling sarcastic this fine morning at 27,000 feet on the North Face of Mount Everest, “the army just let you walk off with three of the smaller German ones and your larger British Very pistol? How generous!”
“I admit I did walk off with the big one,” says the Deacon. “No one thought to ask for it back and I didn’t remind them. A lot of that was going on during the demobilization. The smaller ones for you—and I gave Jean- Claude his yesterday—I purchased via mail order from the Erma-Erfurt Company before they went out of business.”
“How do we use them?” asks Reggie, all business now. She’s picked up one of the pistols and—showing her familiarity with firearms—has broken open the breach to make sure it isn’t loaded. She fingers the smaller, color- coded 12-gauge shells lying atop the flat rock next to the Deacon’s hand.
“You see, the flares come in three colors—red, green, and what we called ‘white star’ during the War,” continues the Deacon. I have to admit that he doesn’t sound like he’s lecturing: just explaining something to friends. “I suggest that we use green to signal that we’ve found something and that the others should come to you. Red to signal that you’re in distress in some way and need help. White to signal that everyone should return to Camp Five.”
“So if I fall off the mountain,” I say, still feeling a little lightheaded and silly, forgetting completely for the moment the grim purpose of our search, “I should fire a red flare on the way down?”
The other three look at me as if I’ve grown a second head.
“Couldn’t hurt, Jake,” the Deacon says at last. “You’re lowest—closest to the drop-off.”
Then we’re all busy for a moment, pulling on our rucksacks and setting the Very pistols and their cartridges in the outside pockets, reachable without having to remove the packs, but safely away from our oxygen tanks.
“About searching in the area so low on the Face,” says Reggie when we’re all loaded up and standing. “Do you really think that Percival could have fallen that far from the North East Ridge or from the Face just off the North Ridge?”
The Deacon doesn’t shrug, but there’s the sound of a shrug in his soft tones. “Once a body begins falling on a slope this steep, Reggie…it tends to continue falling for a long way. If the fall started with a snow avalanche the way Sigl says it did, then Percy’s and Meyer’s bodies would have picked up vertical velocity right from the beginning of the fall.”
“So their corpses probably wouldn’t be here on the Face still at all,” says Reggie.
The Deacon doesn’t answer, but we can all hear the silent
“But I don’t think Bruno Sigl told us the truth about an avalanche being the cause of your cousin’s and that Meyer fellow’s death,” the Deacon adds. It’s the first time I’ve heard him that decisive on the subject.
“But if Percy and Meyer fell off the other side, the south side, of the North East Ridge above us…,” begins Reggie.
“We won’t find them,” the Deacon says with a flat finality. “More than twelve thousand feet almost straight down to the Kangshung Glacier. Even if we climb this mountain along the…North East Ridge…the way Mallory said he was going to…there’ll be very little reason to look off the south side. We couldn’t make out bodies—or parts of bodies—from that altitude. Especially after a year of snowfall down there. And I’m not going anywhere near the inevitable snow cornice up there.”
“What about me?” I ask.
“What about you?” says the Deacon.
“The actual parameters of my search area.”
“Oh,” says the Deacon and points to the line of blue ink farthest down on the search-grid map. “I gave you the most dangerous bit, Jake. This lowest area just above the drop-off. I wouldn’t think that you’d have to go too far below the level of Camp Five—not right down to the drop-off lip itself—since any human body that had fallen that far from the North East Ridge would be in small pieces. Or at least terribly mangled. Food for the goraks…the high-altitude ravens that fly even this high. Oh, I apologize, Lady Bromley-Montfort.”
“For what?” Reggie asks coolly.
“For being so stupidly insensitive,” says the Deacon. He looks down.
“I’ve seen corpses in the mountains before, Mr. Deacon,” says Reggie. “And I’m well aware not only of what a long fall does to the human body but that even at these altitudes, some scavenger will have gotten at Meyer’s and my cousin’s bodies if they’re still somewhere on the mountain.”
“Still,” says the Deacon, almost certainly still being insensitive in his clumsy effort to ameliorate the harshness of his earlier comment, “the North Face at this altitude is a high desert. Even after only one year, there should be some mummification.”
I feel that I have to change the subject toward something more pleasant. Craning to look up at the tall Sherpa, I say, “Dr. Pasang, I’m surprised you were able to come climbing away from your patients. How is Tenzing Bothia?”
“He died,” says Pasang. “A pulmonary embolism—a blood clot caused by altitude that had moved and blocked the main artery to his lung. There was nothing I could have done to save him even if I’d been in the tent with him on the North Col that night. He died as he was being evacuated to Base Camp from Camp One.”
“Jesus,” I whisper to myself.
Reggie looks visibly shaken. “Amen,” she says.
Since the Deacon is descending about half the catchment basin with me here on the North Face below the Yellow Band in order to reach
I’m reminded again that many more climbers die descending mountains than trying to ascend them. As I’d also been reminded on the Matterhorn, when descending, one is facing outward rather than leaning into the mountain, so on steep but not vertical slopes a climber tends not to use his hands on descents when he might on the climb up, and you’re already going in gravity’s direction, no matter how slowly and carefully you try to move downward. This steep slab and snow slope stretching out below the “ill-defined rock rib” that the Deacon has asked Pasang to check isn’t as steep as the part of the Matterhorn where four of Edward Whymper’s comrades slipped and fell to their deaths on his triumphal first climb, but this damned down-sloping granite is still slick and dangerous—and much more difficult out here on the North Face than descending the better-defined and rather
