and thousand-foot drops. Descent to the Kangshung Glacier beyond the North Ridge is a ten-thousand-foot vertical impossibility. So what other ways down—besides falling—might you be considering?”
The Deacon was leaning on his big ice axe, his massive load looming over his head. He gave J.C. a wolf’s grin. “I was considering a traverse,” he said. Only the absence of any real wind this amazing night allowed us to talk using normal tones.
“A traverse,” said Jean-Claude and looked out at the face, up at the summit, back to the face where the Grand Couloir gleamed in the starlight. “Not to Norton’s Grand Couloir and down, I trust,” he said. “It becomes a sheer drop a few hundred feet below here, but the avalanches would carry us away long before that. No traverse on or across the North Face can get us down,
“True,” said the Deacon. “But what about a traverse from the North Summit across to the South Summit and then down to the South Col, to what Mallory named the Western Cwm?”
There was a moment of silence at that suggestion, but I could see Reggie’s teeth gleaming in the starlight. Between the Deacon and Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort, it was suddenly as if we were being led up the tallest mountain in the world by two hungry wolves.
“That’s…nuts,” I said at last. “We have not a single clue as to what the ridge is like between the North Summit and the South Summit…or even from the First Step to the North Summit on this side, for that matter. Even if we were somehow to reach the highest summit of Everest and make that traverse to the South Summit, which I doubt is possible in itself, the descent from the South Summit to the South Col is probably doubly impossible. No one’s ever
“This is true, my friends,” Jean-Claude said solemnly.
“Let’s talk about it more when we get to Camp Six,” said the Deacon.
“I see little lights down where Camp Three used to be,” said Reggie.
“
I wanted to continue the conversation about this impossible traverse over the two summits of Everest, but there was no time for that. We hitched up our rucksacks, left the tumbled Meade tent and the torn-to-rags Meade tent where they lay in the snow, and began trudging up the steep ridge slope again. Luckily for all of us, the fixed ropes began again less than 200 feet above Camp V. With the Deacon falling back to last place to retrieve and coil ropes as we climbed, doing the really heavy work, the rest of us clamped our jumar devices onto the thick ropes and began sliding our way up, the entire line of us stopping every fourth step to gasp for more air.
We were all using what the Deacon had taught us as the “Mallory technique”: take in as deep a breath as you can—even while knowing it’s not enough in the thin pressure at this above-8,000-meter altitude—and use it for those four steps before stopping, panting, and repeating the process.
And so the five of us kept climbing toward the dawn.
13.
The single two-man Meade tent that Reggie had set up as our Camp VI was invisible during the climb and much further out on the North Face than I remembered, but Reggie led us right to it. There were some spare oxygen tanks and a small cache of food we’d left there before fanning out to look for bodies on the North Face that seemingly long-ago Monday, as well as our two sleeping bags from Sunday night. We were now hauling water, tea, coffee, and other tepid liquids with us after the boiling of snow we’d done at Camp V before departing the North Col.
“Looks very comfortable,” the Deacon said as he stared at the tiny tent pitched atop one boulder at a 40- degree up-angle and almost absurdly wedged between two other large boulders. Much of this part of the climb on the North Ridge, not far below the Yellow Band, had been through rock gullies and mazes of larger boulders. But Reggie had decided to pitch our Camp VI four days ago—eternities ago—at this site hundreds of feet off the ridgeline. There hadn’t been any near-flat places on the ridge, either, even if the high winds there had allowed us to consider it.
The pre-dawn indirect sunlight was slowly brightening the entire sky behind the North East Ridge—which was not so far above us now—and it wouldn’t be long until direct sunlight struck Everest’s summit just a mile or so west and some 2,000 feet above us.
We took our rucksacks off for the first time since Camp V and collapsed onto them, each of us taking care not to let either the pack or ourselves go tumbling down the steep-roof-slate slabs of the face. We were all very tired, and I felt both the codeine and Benzedrine wearing off. The coughing had returned with a vengeance.
Only J.C. was currently carrying his binoculars outside his many layers, so I took turns looking through his glasses for the men who wanted to kill us today. We scoped what we could see of the North Col and of the North Ridge up to the slight glimmer of collapsed but still visible green tent that was Camp V. I couldn’t see any figures moving anywhere.
“Maybe they gave up and went home,” I said between gut-wrenching coughs.
Reggie shook her head and pointed, her arm extended almost straight down. “They’re just leaving Camp Four, Jake. I see five men.”
“I also see five,” said the Deacon. “One of them seems to be carrying a pack and my rifle slung over his shoulder. There’s a chance that could be Sigl, unless he brought a more experienced sniper with him…which is a real possibility.”
“I agree completely,” I said. I realized that the Deacon was no longer training his glasses below, but had turned them and was studying something beyond the North Summit—the highest and true summit of Everest. “Looking for that mythical traverse?” I said, regretting my sarcasm as soon as I’d aired it.
“Yes,” said the Deacon. “Ken Owings said that there’s a very nasty step in the ridgeline between the two summits—he could see it from as far away as Thyangboche in the Khumbu Valley, where he lives. It’s a damned rock step, like our supposedly unclimbable Second Step here on the North East Ridge above us, but Ken says that this rocky step between the summits is about forty to fifty feet high from the downhill side.”
“That would be unclimbable at such an altitude,
“Perhaps,” said the Deacon. “But we don’t have to
No one said anything, but I suspect the other three were thinking what I was: I didn’t have the energy to climb another single step, much less a mile of the North East Ridge and two major steps—the Second Step above and to the right of us supposedly the “impossible” one—much less the steep Summit Pyramid and actual corniced summit. It simply wasn’t going to happen.
“Do we have to worry anytime soon about Sigl or whoever’s carrying your rifle taking potshots at us?” I asked, if only to change the subject.
“I think the chap carrying my rifle will be careful about when and where he shoots at us,” said the Deacon.
“That’s reassuring,” I said. “Why should he be?”
“Because he’s looking for the same thing we are,” said the Deacon.
“Escape from crazy Nazis?” I said.
The Deacon shook his head. “Whatever Meyer and Bromley had with them. I believe that Bruno Sigl made the mistake one year ago of shooting either Meyer or Bromley or both—I’m sorry, Reggie, but I do think that’s the case—at a place where the bodies fell or avalanched beyond Sigl’s ability to reach them.”
“I agree,” said Reggie. “That fits with what Kami Chiring saw last year from near Camp Three using the Germans’ binoculars. He thought he saw three figures up on the North East Ridge…then, suddenly, only one. And he heard what could have been the echo of pistol shots.”
“So that’s where we search,” said the Deacon. “Along the ridgeline. The North East Ridge—where few people save for Mallory and Irvine have ever gone.”
“And, if you are correct in your theory,
