19.
The second half of the distance between the First and Second Steps was as iffy and frightening as the first half.
A series of sharp and uneven upthrusts, slippery rocks, and snowy crests make the ridgeline itself impracticable, so the Deacon—who was leading on a rope that now included all of us—forged a trail in the snow about ten feet below that windy ridge above the North Face and Great Couloir on the East Rongbuk Glacier side. The exposure just kept getting more and more absurd, and when the Deacon would take a new step and the snow would slide inches or even feet under him before building up into an unstable platform just capable of stopping his slide, all of us held our breath. Not one of the four of us had a belay stance worth a tinker’s damn.
We didn’t look behind us for the five Germans, but we could feel them breathing down our cold necks. The last J.C. had seen with his glasses while the rest of us were preparing Percy and Kurt Meyer for “burial” was that the German lead climber—we still thought he was Bruno Sigl—had managed to get himself around the Blind Step and was fixing rope for his four climbing partners. Obviously Sigl was the strongest climber of the five Germans, and we were glad that the others were slowing him down slightly.
But not enough.
Then Jean-Claude came back to the group and we took a moment over the bodies of Meyer and Bromley.
Reggie said a brief prayer, and I was surprised to see the Deacon saying the words right along with her. Years later, I looked up the Anglican burial service and prayers and realized that Reggie had done some thoughtful editing, but evidently the Deacon had repeated the words so often over dead comrades on the battlefield that he could keep up with her ellipses and edits. Anyway, it sounded right—although a tad too long, I thought, what with the Germans coming up the North Face behind us—when we sat there with the two bodies laid out on the short rock spur above the north edge of the cliff. Reggie had taken out her own gold and green silk handkerchief, smaller than the flag Percival had been carrying, with the Bromley coat of arms on it, and had knotted it around her cousin’s face. Kurt Meyer’s face was covered with a clean white handkerchief from the Deacon’s pocket.
Reggie bowed her head—goggles still in place—and intoned:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills; from whence cometh my help. My help cometh even from the Lord, who hath made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved; and he that keepeth thee will not sleep.
Behold, he that keepeth the glory of this high mountain world shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord himself is thy keeper; the Lord is thy defence upon thy right hand;
So that the sun shall not burn thee by day, neither the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil; yea, it is even he that shall keep thy souls.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in, from this time forth for evermore.
Thus unto Almighty God we commend the souls of our brothers here departed, our brothers of the rope and of high places—Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer—and we commit their bodies to the ground and air and ice; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through Percival’s trust in his Saviour Jesus Christ and through Kurt Meyer’s love of the Lord-God Jehovah, whose coming, in glorious majesty, shall judge the world when the earth and the sea and these high places shall give up their dead.
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.
“Amen,” the rest of us said, and then Jean-Claude, Pasang, and I pushed at the booted feet of the two men until they slid over the edge of the rock spur and spun silently downward into shattered oblivion somewhere on the Kangshung Glacier almost two miles below. None of us watched the bodies fall. Immediately we set to repacking our rucksacks. I saw Reggie put her envelope of photos into some pocket in her inner jacket—we’d distributed copies before the ad hoc funeral—and now I slid mine down in a safe place against the back of my pack. Then we retrieved our ice axes and started the trudge toward the Second Step.
The sun had been warm when we’d sat a moment on the east side—the leeward side—of Mushroom Rock, but as soon as we got down off the ridgeline to the North Face again for the traverse, the rising wind blowing over miles of vertical snow and ice leached the warmth right out of us. We had to keep moving or freeze.
No one spoke until we came back up onto the ridgeline proper right at the base of the Second Step. The thing was terrifying to look at, even without the sure knowledge that trigger-happy Germans would soon be popping up behind us and within easy rifle range.
“If you get us up there, Jake…,” the Deacon said when he’d tugged down his oxygen mask. “…No, I mean
I looked up at the steep snow slope rising to the impossible heap of boulders ending in a sheer rock face.
I said, “Yeah, it’ll be a veritable Alamo up there.”
“What is this ‘Alamo’?” asked J.C. He seemed far too cheery for the circumstances.
I was coughing again, so Reggie explained the history of the Alamo to him in three or four succinct sentences.
“It sounds like a glorious battle,” said J.C. after Reggie had just sketched the outline of the fight without revealing its ending. “What was its outcome?”
I sighed. “The Mexicans overran the place and slaughtered all the defenders,” I said between coughs. “Including my hero David Crockett and his pal Jim Bowie, the guy who invented the Bowie knife.”
“Ahhh,” said Jean-Claude and smiled. “Then thanks be to God that we shall be fighting mere Germans and not Mexicans.”
I was in the process of taking off my Shackleton jacket, goose down layers, and all outer mittens down to my thinnest silk gloves.
We’d crampon-climbed together as high as we could up the snow slope to the base of the rocky Second Step proper. The rock cliff looked to be about 90 feet high, its great slab sides absolutely unclimbable, but there was a crack—“joint” was the better word—in the rock a bit to the left of its central mass, and at the base of that narrow crack and 90-foot wall, J.C., the Deacon, Reggie, and I were all busy scouting a climbing route. I’d shoved my Crooke’s goggles up for a better view.
The problem—as life-and-death challenges are so cutely called in mountain-climbing circles—was just too damned hard to solve. Especially at this impossible altitude. And
The first ten yards or so of the 90 feet of cliff would probably go, because there were various tumbled boulders, rock extrusions, and smaller cracks on the lower third of this six-mile-high impossibility. A groove between the largest of those boulders and the cliff face angling east from it might work, with perfect rock climbing and a serious expenditure of energy, but I’d have to step out and balance atop that damned boulder before attempting the second pitch of the three-section climb.
This first pitch between the boulders and the cliff face and then smack dab atop the boulders onto the steep snowfield would have been a challenging but fun afternoon’s scramble in Wales near Pen-y-Pass. I couldn’t imagine the amount of energy it was going to require at 28,246 feet.
But I kept looking—trying to figure the best route. If there
From somewhere atop that big boulder some 30 feet and change up the cliff, there would be a high, risky step onto a steep snow band or—more appropriately—steep cone of snow, on which I’d have to traverse steeply uphill and back to the central crack where the cliff here met the face at almost a right angle. God knows whether that cone-shaped snow patch would stay on the cliff or avalanche off with me on it. Then, if I made it back to a point higher on the central crack, I’d have to learn how to levitate like a Buddhist holy man to get to the base of the
