thought of doing—and studies the slope above us. “But you are right,” he says. “It is more than a thousand feet to the North East Ridge. He did not fall that far. Perhaps from those rocks below the Yellow Band. You are correct in much of your forensic analysis, but I fear you are wrong about one thing, my friend.”
“What’s that?” I say, and then splutter since I’ve forgotten to lower my mask, and the simple re-breathing gizmo in the mask doesn’t adapt itself well to transmitting human speech. I lower the damned thing and try again.
J.C. begins to say something but then stops and points uphill.
Three roped figures—Pasang in the lead, Reggie in the center, and the Deacon in anchor position—are using their long ice axes to pick their way slowly down the slope. They’re only twenty yards or so away. I should have known that the cautious Deacon would have taken the time to get them roped together before responding to my flare rather than have everyone come rushing down solo.
“What am I wrong about?” I ask, picking up the conversation thread with J.C. He only shakes his head and steps back from the corpse as our three friends arrive, make a slow loop around the body, and create a semicircle downhill with the corpse as its focus, the easier for them to view it. I’m instantly sorry that I hadn’t taken off at least my Shackleton anorak to cover the gorak-invaded buttocks and hollowed-out lower insides of Lord Percival. Now poor Reggie is leaning closer, having to see this horrible view of someone she’d grown up with almost as if he were her brother.
My mask is still lowered. “I’m sorry, Reggie,” I say, realizing that there are tears welling under my thick greenish goggles. Maybe it’s the cold wind bothering my eyes.
She pulls down her own oxygen mask and looks at me questioningly. Her goggles are raised. Her face is very pale in the late morning light.
“I’m sorry you have to see your cousin like this,” I say again. My only wish right now is that I hadn’t been the one to find him.
She cocks her head, looks at the other three men, then back at me. They’re all staring at me now.
“This isn’t Percival,” says Reggie, having to raise her voice to be heard over the coldly quickening wind.
I take another step back out of sheer reflex. My crampons slip on something, and I have to lean on my axe or tumble. I remind my body that we’re still just yards above a sheer drop-off to total oblivion. I’m very confused. It’s a British climber, of that I’m certain. If not her cousin…
“I know those broad shoulders and those green climbing boots,” says Reggie. “Percival is much slimmer, his upper body much less developed. And he’s never owned green leather boots. Jake, I’m all but certain that you’ve found George Leigh Mallory.”
It’s after midnight, but all five of us—the Deacon, Pasang, Reggie, Jean-Claude, and I—are sitting up in our sleeping bags in Reggie’s Big Tent, which has been pitched on the slab slopes at Camp V, each of us hanging on to one of the interior struts in an effort to keep the ever-rising wind from ripping the canvas apart or hurling us off the mountain. We are very, very tired.
I feel bad that we hadn’t taken time to bury George Mallory that afternoon—the previous afternoon, I realize, as I look at my watch. It’s the nineteenth of May now, two whole days after the Deacon’s planned summit day. The wind has grown stronger every hour, a lenticular cloud that had been hovering over Everest’s summit all morning descended on us in a whirl of snow after darkness fell, and if we’d stayed on the North Face with Mallory, we would have had to spend at least an extra hour or two hacking at the frozen rocks to free enough stones to cover his body. Even piling the thinnest layer of cairn stones would have taken more energy and time than we had with the storm coming in. After we’d searched the body carefully and made note of the position and clues as to his fall and jotted down notes of landmarks, such as they were, so we could find Mallory’s final resting place again when we had to, the Deacon announced that it was time to make the long west-to-east traverse to Camp V. When I objected, saying that Mallory surely deserved to be buried properly despite the approaching darkness and rising wind, it was Reggie who said, “He’s lain out here under the snow and sun and moon and stars for almost a year, Jake. Another night won’t matter. We’ll stay lower—here at Camp Five rather than Six—and come back to bury Mallory tomorrow.”
As it happened, of course, we never did.
I still feel bad about it.
But it turned out to be wise that we turned back when we did and traversed to Camp V rather than attempted to climb to the tiny Camp VI. By two p.m., the wind was raging hard enough to have ripped one of the small Meade tents at Camp V partially off its moorings. It was now a slumped, snow-covered green mass of canvas and snapped tentpoles on the steep mountainside. We could have labored to re-erect it, possibly using our ice axes as poles, but we didn’t bother. The other Meade tent had been ripped open by small falling rocks that tore through the canvas walls and roofs like canister shot. If anyone had been in that tent when those rocks hit, they would almost certainly have been killed. And there was a long night of higher winds and more hurtling rocks ahead of us.
So that leaves the five of us crowded into Reggie’s Big Tent, which had been pitched atop a tilted boulder but in the rockfall-proof lee of two larger boulders when the Deacon and Pasang carried loads to Camp V yesterday. (Sunday, I amend, when I again remember that it’s past midnight.) The Deacon and Pasang had not only weighted all the edges of the tent down with serious-sized stones and driven German steel pitons into solid rock for tent stakes, but also lashed the whole tent down with about twenty yards of the new high-tensile rope zigzagging back and forth over the apex of the dome and tied down to large boulders both lower than the tent and uphill.
Reggie’s tent is big enough for the five of us to gather in for a meal, everyone sitting up, but stretching out to sleep is going to be a difficult proposition.
Despite not having time to excavate frozen-in-place stones to bury Mallory, we’d spent a very cold hour huddled over his corpse on the North Face. Even though we’d found tags in his clothing reading “G. Mallory,” the Deacon wanted to be certain of the dead man’s identity. So at one point three of us used our knives to chip away at the gravel on the left side of his body where the corpse was frozen in place until we could leverage him up a little to get a glimpse of his front and face.
That process felt precisely like lifting a log that has been frozen in place in the soil through a long, hard winter.
In the end, it was the Deacon who’d scooted closer on his back and then lain supine under the stiff, suspended body long enough to look into the dead man’s face.
“It’s Mallory,” said the Deacon.
“What else do you see?” asked Pasang.
“His eyes are closed. There’s stubble on his cheeks and chin, but no real beard.” The Deacon’s voice sounded weary.
“I meant in terms of visible injuries,” said Pasang.
“There’s a terrible puncture wound on his right temple, over his eye,” said the Deacon. “Perhaps he struck a rock on the way down or the pick of his ice axe recoiled back against him as he tried to self-arrest.”
“Does the wound go all the way through the bone of the skull there?” asked Pasang.
“Yes.”
“Can we let him down now?” I asked, gasping for breath. We all had our oxygen masks lowered for this task. The exertion of simply lifting a partially hollowed-out frozen corpse was almost too much for me.
“Yes,” the Deacon said again, sliding out and away from the dead man. And then, almost whispering, he said, “Good-bye, George.”
We’d gone through Mallory’s pockets and poked through a canvas bag he’d had hanging against his chest. As I mentioned, the corpse wasn’t wearing the metal rig for oxygen tanks and had no rucksack—only that one small carrying bag pressed against his chest and under his arm, and a few things stuck in his pockets.
In the pocket of his Norfolk jacket there was an altimeter much like the ones we carried—specially calibrated for altitudes up to 30,000 feet—but the crystal had been broken in the fall and the altimeter’s hands were missing.
