her head. Her tumble on the slope had allowed a few strands of her beautiful blue-black hair to escape her fur- lined leather flying helmet. She had also just pushed up her heavy goggles, the better to inspect the corpse, I assumed, and her eyes were a more lovely ultramarine color than ever.
“This man looks to have been in his early twenties when he died,” said Reggie. “My cousin Percy turned thirty-four last year. Also, Percy has—had—dark hair, longer than this, and a sort of thin black mustache the way Douglas Fairbanks wore it in
“Who is this, then?”
“Gentlemen,” continued Reggie, her voice sad, “you are looking at the mortal remains of twenty-two-year- old Andrew Comyn ‘Sandy’ Irvine.”
Jean-Claude crossed himself. It was the first time I’d seen him do that.
I tugged my mask down long enough to say, “I don’t understand. I found Mallory seven or eight hundred feet lower…but there’s a rope around Irvine here, too. Also snapped off fairly close to the body…” I stopped.
The Deacon looked around. “You’re right, Jake,” he said. There was still only the lightest of breezes here above 28,000 feet. “Mallory didn’t fall from this height—down through the Yellow Band and across those poorly defined ridges and all those rocks—or his body would have been much more torn up.”
“They were down-climbing separately, then?” asked Jean-Claude. The disapproval in his tone of voice was that of a veteran Chamonix Guide.
“I don’t think so,” said the Deacon. “I think the accident—the fall—happened quite a ways below here, below the Yellow Band and that ridgeline, somewhere in those rock gullies below. One of them fell first—and, hard as it is to believe, I think it was Mallory.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because of the injury to Irvine’s knee,” said Pasang, panting.
I hadn’t noticed it. The fabric there just above the once light-colored but now filthy puttees was torn and caked with dried blood, the knee an exposed mass of gristle and smashed cartilage.
“What does that prove?” I asked before setting my mask back in place.
“It proves that Irvine had a small fall, Mallory a longer one,” said the Deacon. “But notice that the three- eighths-inch climbing rope has been broken off only ten or so feet from Irvine’s body—same as from Mallory’s—so my guess is that it snapped over a sharp rock edge, but not before giving both men internal injuries.”
“Which they died of?” asked Reggie.
“No,” said Pasang. “Mr. Mallory died from the results of his fall and the freezing night temperatures. But I think, as we all saw, that he must have lost consciousness from the terrible head wound, if not from the agony of the broken leg, within minutes, if not seconds. Mr. Irvine here was, I believe, pulled off his perch, probably a belay stance on a boulder somewhere below here, broke his knee in the short fall—very, very painful, by the way, a broken knee is one of the most painful injuries the body can sustain. But, with the rope broken, and probably hearing the diminishing screams and rock sounds of Mr. Mallory’s long fall, Mr. Irvine crawled some yards or even hundreds of feet uphill to this point before he sat in the darkness and froze to death.”
“Why would he go
“You remember that neither Mr. Mallory nor Mr. Irvine had a compass,” Pasang said softly. “Mr. Mallory was leading the way down through the rock mazes below the Yellow Band when he fell—perhaps—but definitely pulling Mr. Irvine off his belay stance before the rope broke, causing Mr. Irvine’s broken patella.”
“Patella?” said J.C.
“Kneecap,” said Pasang.
“But still,” persisted Jean-Claude, “why would Irvine drag himself
“Perhaps because there was a remaining band of sunset light up here near the ridge and Sandy was very, very cold and thought it might give him a few more minutes of warmth and life,” Reggie suggested. “Anyway, here is his notebook.”
She’d taken it not from the gas mask carryall but from Irvine’s Norfolk jacket breast pocket. We all crowded around. As we’d seen before, Sandy Irvine’s spelling was atrocious—probably a case of dyslexia, I realized many, many years later—but here he’d used a dull pencil to abbreviate most of his words, and reading it was like deciphering a German code.
I tugged my mask down again. “What does this mean
Jean-Claude answered. He couldn’t read Sandy Irvine’s abbreviated scribble any better than the rest of us, but he was an expert on George Finch’s, Sandy Irvine’s, and his and his father’s modified O2 tanks.
“That would be right,” said the Deacon, his voice almost hushed in respect. “If they’d gone on full flow all the way from Camp Five that morning, they would have discarded the first empty bottle somewhere just short of the First Step.”
“How many bottles of air did they have?” asked Reggie.
The Deacon shrugged. “No one’s sure. But from those notes I saw jotted on the margins of one of the old letters from Mallory’s pocket, wrapped in the fancy handkerchief…my guess is at least five between them.”
“My Lord,” whispered Reggie. “With five tanks, and leaving just before or after sunrise, they could have reached the summit of Everest and had enough bottled air to get them at least down past the Second Step again.”
“What do those last two entries say?” asked the Deacon.
The Deacon thought a minute then tried to snap his fingers through his thick mittens.
“What about this last part?” asked Pasang, peering at the note in the bright sunlight. He pointed to the
Reggie nodded and sighed.
I didn’t want to start crying, so I stared hard through my thick goggles at the dead man. There was no emotion on his face either.
“This part?” asked Jean-Claude, pointing to the last few jumbled jottings:
The Deacon and Reggie looked at one another, the Deacon nodded, and Reggie translated in a strained but steady voice.
“But it would have been just really dark, no moon, when they were trying to find their way down through these ledges and gullies,” said Deacon, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “Thus the goggles in their packs and pockets.”
“This is all…
“
