Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Deacon’s face covered with sweat. His belay rope to Jean- Claude was tied off to Mushroom Rock, but the Deacon was carrying all the weight over his shoulder and once around his waist. He’d taken all the layers off his hands except for the thin silk gloves that made up the bottom layer, and now I could see blood soaking through the silk.
I admit that I was nervous. The phrase “dead weight” takes on a terrible reality when one actually has to lift a dead person. Nothing on earth seems quite so…heavy.
“All right, Jake…he has Percy’s body tied on…,” said Reggie.
I started to pull on the rope but Reggie shouted “Stop!”
I’d forgotten that J.C. had to finish securing Meyer’s corpse to the new rope belayed by Pasang and only
“Jean-Claude’s feet came off the crag,” reported Reggie. “He’s swinging free, trying to get his boots back on the rock.”
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the feeling of swinging freely, on a single rope held by a single man, over a drop of that magnitude.
The Deacon grunted, more from the exertion of the belay, I realized, than in acknowledgment of Reggie’s report. The tug from J.C.’s fall from the crag when I made him lose his footing with my premature pulling on Percy’s rope had been fast, hard, and harsh against the Deacon’s hands, shoulder, and middle.
“All right, his boots are touching rock again,” reported Reggie.
Sweat dripped from the Deacon’s stubbled chin. We’d all been off oxygen for quite a while now. Our rucksacks were stacked against the south side of Mushroom Rock.
Pasang had started lowering the third rope—the rope and lasso for Kurt Meyer—even before Reggie called him forward to do so. When 50 feet or so were played out, he ducked on all fours under my taut rope and then under the Deacon’s line to J.C. so that he’d be to the far left of our line of three busy belayers.
“A little more…a little more…slowly now…,” Reggie was reciting. “There, he has it. Give him another five feet or so of slack, Pasang.”
Pasang calmly did so.
“Darn…,” said Reggie. “He can’t reach Meyer from his half-perch on the crag. He’s going to have to swing out to grab him.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered. Anything can and usually does go wrong when there are multiple ropes dangling in such a confined area.
“Do you need help?” I whispered to the Deacon, who was bracing his boot soles—he’d removed his crampons for this—hard against a little ridge of rock about five feet north of the Mushroom Rock.
He shook his head and beads of sweat flew west in the rising wind.
“He’s swinging…he’s swinging again…he missed,” reported Reggie. “Now he’s pushing off almost horizontally from the crag to try again.”
“Jesus,” I whispered again. I think it was a prayer this time. I realized that I’d come to trust the Deacon’s Miracle Rope in most basic rappel and belay situations, but if the frayed old rope parted before Jean-Claude got the loop tight around Meyer’s body—and if J.C. then tried to hold on to the corpse, as I was sure he would—the weight of the
J.C.’s belay rope grew tauter than ever, the line cutting through the edge of the cornice and pressing down hard on our double-ice-axe setup. We’d run multiple lines from those axes to other anchors, and two back to the much-encircled Mushroom Rock bollard.
The Deacon grunted and held J.C.’s swinging weight. The silk of his gloved hands was dyed red now.
“Meyer’s upside down,” reported Reggie. “Jean-Claude is working to spin him around right-side up.”
“He’s got him!” cried Reggie. “He’s tying the loop off under Meyer’s arms. Now Jean-Claude’s swinging back to the crag.”
The Deacon grunted slightly. The blended rope was stretched so taut that it looked as if he was trying to land a giant marlin with only his bloody hands, arched back, and braced body.
“Jake, Pasang, get ready,” called Reggie. “Jean-Claude is going to cut the old rope now. He has his penknife open.”
I’d found a low boulder-ridge on which to brace my boots—I’d kept my crampons on since I didn’t know if I’d have the dexterity to strap them on again—and now I leaned back, bracing myself for the pull and dead weight to come.
The rope grew taut…but there was very little pull and almost no sense of weight. Had goraks hollowed Bromley’s corpse out the way they’d eaten into George Mallory’s abdominal cavity through the poor corpse’s exposed rectum? Jesus Christ, for Reggie’s sake, I hoped that wasn’t the case.
“Pull!” cried Reggie—needlessly, I thought, since both Pasang and I were pulling in our loads hand over hand. Only the Deacon remained on passive, strained belay. We’d decided before J.C. went over the cliff that we’d get the bodies up before pulling in our living friend—just to keep the various ropes free from tangling, for one reason; to keep J.C. and his belay line free of a free-falling corpse for another reason.
Bromley reached the cornice, and naturally his corpse hung up under the overhang of ice and snow.
“Give me a second,” said Reggie and leaned most of her weight out on the rotten, treacherous, already once-broken cornice, fishing around with her extended ice axe the way a captain’s mate would use a gaff to reach under a boat to bring in a big fish.
She hooked the rope. Percy’s head and shoulders bobbed up into sight, and I pulled for everything I was worth.
“Get back on the rock!” growled the Deacon, and I realized he was saying it to Reggie. She did so, creeping backward in no great hurry.
Now Meyer’s corpse, being pulled in by Pasang, came up onto the North East Ridge with no problem, the dead man’s head and shoulders sliding up and through the crescent-shaped hole that he and Percival Bromley had broken through the cornice almost a year ago. I noticed—distantly, since all my sense impressions seemed to be coming from a great distance at that moment—that yards of the old, frayed rope, cleanly cut in the middle by Jean-Claude just minutes before, still dangled from each dead body.
When the bodies were secure, pulled as far up toward us and Mushroom Rock as we could get them while leaving some room for ourselves, Pasang and I dropped our belay ropes and joined the Deacon on his. Reggie stayed on the rock spur, her head and shoulders hanging further out than before. She signaled down to J.C. that we were ready to bring him up.
This, I knew, would be the real test of the Miracle Rope. I wished we’d had enough rope with us to pass two lines around Jean-Claude, but 200 feet of what we did have had been needed for the dead bodies.
Now we pulled—slowly, constantly, the three of us in perfect rhythm, watching the frail line snake over the doubled shafts of the anchored horizontal ice axes. Reggie was calling out the distance remaining after each pull.
“Forty feet…thirty…twenty-five…Jean-Claude’s feet can’t reach the cliff face, he’s just hanging free…”
We knew that from the weight against our shoulders and hands. The Deacon was still bearing the brunt of that weight.
“Fifteen feet…ten…five…careful now!” Reggie quit calling distances, reached down, grabbed our friend’s anorak, and helped pull J.C.’s shoulders into sight. The three of us on belay tugged again and he came up and over and onto his hands and knees and quickly crawled away from the cornice. Reggie had almost fallen forward when her burden popped up onto the ridge, but Pasang had shifted his large right hand to her anchor rope and pulled it hard, tugging her back onto the rock spur. She also crawled toward us on all fours. After we’d retrieved all of the ropes, undone knots, and coiled and safely stowed the ropes under Mushroom Rock, we crouched in a tight circle around both bodies.
