sorry. You must go down today.” He turned to Reggie and the Deacon. “Mr. Perry can walk almost unassisted—I believe he will continue to be able to do that for a while, especially during a descent. When he no longer can, I shall carry him. When we are off the mountain and his breathing improves, I shall escort him down to Rongbuk Monastery and then make arrangements for us to return to Darjeeling.”
“Hey!” I croak-coughed. “Don’t I get a say in…”
Evidently I didn’t.
We all stood. The wind had died down appreciably, but the lenticular hat was back on Everest’s summit.
The Deacon pulled out his large Very military pistol and fired a flare high into the sky toward and beyond the summit. A white star-flare, the phosphorus burst much brighter than our regular mountaineering flares.
“I believe,” said the Deacon, his voice a strange mixture of sadness and a weary sort of exaltation, “that I… that we”—he looked at Reggie, who nodded—“can reach this summit, traverse the steep crest line between the two summits, rappel down that Big Step Ken told me about, and get to the fixed ropes Owings and his Sherpas have set up on the southern approach ridge by…before…midnight. If we can’t down-climb with our torches and headlamps, we’ll bivouac in the Big Tent somewhere beyond the South Summit and leave the tent behind us when we continue our descent in the morning.”
“That’s nuts,” I said. “The first ascent of Everest—that we know about—and you want to do a damned traverse down the southern way. Totally nuts.”
The Deacon and Reggie only grinned at me. The world had gone insane.
“One favor,” said the Deacon. “Keep all your belay rope and the extra coils—and J.C.’s coil there as well— but leave that hundred feet of rope going down the Second Step for us to pull up after you’ve descended. If we do have to turn back from the summits, we’ll need it. All right?”
I nodded dumbly.
The Deacon took a folded piece of paper from some inside pocket and said, “Here’s the name and address of the man in London to whom you have to deliver those photographs, Jake. Deliver them to him personally. No one else. For God’s sake don’t lose this.”
I nodded again and put the folded paper in my buttonable wool shirt pocket beneath all my outer layers. I didn’t unfold the paper or think to glance at the name, I was so shocked and depressed at realizing that I really was going to have to go down rather than up…and after I’d free-climbed the Second Step for them!
But mostly, I think, this sudden surge of deep depression came from my bottomless sense of loss at Jean- Claude’s sudden death. The truth was just settling deep into my mind and soul that I’d never see my friend from Chamonix again, nor hear his laugh.
“Pasang,” said Reggie, “if for whatever reason you rather than Jake needs to be the one to go to London to deliver your various copies of the photos, you know whom to see and where to go, do you not?”
“I do, my lady.”
The Deacon offered his hand. I shook it, still not believing we were parting.
“Stay alive,” I heard myself saying to him.
“I will,” said the Deacon. “Remember, my destiny is to die on the North Wall of the Eiger…not on Everest. You feel better soon, Jake.”
And then Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort kissed me. On the lips. Hard. She stepped back next to the Deacon, and I had a last look at her beautiful, incomparable ultramarine eyes.
“Don’t forget to pull your goggles back down,” I said dully.
Then Pasang and I were jumaring down the rope we’d so conveniently left for Bruno Sigl to climb, then we were down on the snow at the base of the still-terrifying Second Step, and then I could see the Deacon hauling up the long rope, and then, in an eyeblink—he was gone. They were gone. Presumably hiking up the widening west end of the North East Ridge onto the snowfields that led to the Summit Pyramid and the summit.
And I was heading back down.
Walking single file along the knife-edge ridge toward the dead Germans lying in the snow, I started crying like a baby. Pasang patted my back and squeezed my shoulder. “It is the trauma of your choking,” he said.
“No it isn’t.”
I hadn’t heard the Deacon give orders or suggestions to Dr. Pasang, but as we came to each of the four dead Germans, he seemed to know exactly what to do. I confess that I only leaned on my ice axe, trying to breathe through my ragged, torn throat, and watched.
First, he searched each German, removing certain documents but mostly the pistols they carried. One of the dead men had a Schmeisser submachine gun tucked under his outer shell and another had the Deacon’s Webley pistol, which Pasang handed to me. I tucked it into my duvet pocket under my Shackleton anorak. Pasang was also relieving each of the four dead men of their oxygen rigs before going through their carryalls or small rucksacks, pulling out anything we might need or that might be of intelligence importance and placing it in his own full bag. He filled one of the canvas carryalls and handed it to me.
“We shall wear the metal oxygen rigs from now on, Mr. Perry, and leave the heavier rucksacks behind,” he said. “We will carry our other items in these shoulder bags.”
My mind was so dull that it was hard to do the math, but I was pretty sure that three full oxygen tanks for each of us should get us down to Base Camp—or at least to the lower camps where we’d hidden some of Jean- Claude’s new breathing rigs. I doubted if the Germans had found them all.
“You concur with the plan, Mr. Perry?”
I nodded, still unable to speak.
Before we set off—before Pasang even tugged up the heavy shoulder straps of his new O2 rig and various kit bags—he took out a long, curved penknife, cut the ropes connecting each of the four dead men, and dragged the bodies one by one to the lip of the south side of the ridge and shoved them over the edge. I felt a strong emotion through the general numbness at the time, but I couldn’t have said whether it was outrage at these four Germans despoiling the glacier below, where J.C.’s body must lie, or some raw, unholy joy that four of the Germans had paid for Sigl’s crime.
The actual disposal of the bodies made sense to me only much later. All five of us had assumed in 1925 that there would be more English expeditions coming soon—perhaps as early as 1926. None of us could have guessed that the next expedition wouldn’t be until 1933, and that—although they found Irvine’s ice axe, they wouldn’t think to climb down to where it pointed to find Irvine himself—the ’33 expedition wouldn’t even get beyond the First Step. The ’38 expedition, a small one, would be England’s last try at conquering Everest from the north.
But we didn’t know that. Leaving a trail of dead Germans just beyond Mushroom Rock, especially Germans all shot by a British sniper rifle, might cause some sticky diplomatic cables between Berlin and Whitehall. And pushing the corpses off the North East Ridge onto the North Face wall wouldn’t have been wise: we’d found Mallory’s and Irvine’s bodies on that face through sheer chance. It wouldn’t be good for these Germans ever to be found.
As I watched Pasang dispose of the last of the German bodies, I did realize one important thing. The coughing up of that frozen…thing…from my throat, combined with the illness that frozen mucous membrane had given me for days now, had weakened me far more than I’d been willing to admit. Even to myself. Standing there on the ridge, watching Pasang do the work of tidying things up, I felt the last of the adrenaline-rush energy that had gotten me up the Second Step flow out of me like water down a drain.
Dr. Pasang was right. If I’d tried to push on to the summit—as much as I thought I needed to—or even spent one night camped at this altitude, I would have died. This truth came to me while I was standing on the North East Ridge so close to the summit, but ready now to head down, wanting only to survive and to do my duty for Reggie and the Deacon and Cousin Percy and Kurt Meyer—and in a way for our Sherpa friends who’d been killed. And for Jean-Claude. Especially for Jean-Claude.
Just get down, survive, and get those photographs to the British authorities who needed to have them.
When we got down off the ridgeline beyond the Mushroom Rock, I was certain that I didn’t have the energy to do the Big Step around the embedded boulder on the North Face again. But I stood and watched as Pasang made it look easy—knowing where the ledges and handholds are on the other side makes a huge difference—and then he belayed me across with no problem, although I did slip at the end of my swing and Pasang had to lift me
