up to the ledge as if I were a bag of laundry.
I was too tired and battered to feel embarrassed. I kept glancing up toward the summit, and once I thought I saw two tiny dots moving next to each other at the top of the snowy Summit Pyramid, just below the summit itself.
But I was too tired at that moment to pull my field glasses out of my canvas bag and look through them. I’ve always wondered since then whether I could have made out Reggie and the Deacon, if it truly was them on that final, steep Summit Pyramid.
Clipping on fresh oxygen tanks the Germans had found cached at Base Camp or east of Camp V where we’d hidden them, Pasang and I continued descending into the sunny afternoon. He wasn’t actually holding me up, but most of the time we walked together, and his arm was a steadying influence as I began to feel more and more woozy.
He guided me through the rest of that traverse along the ridge and then remembered precisely where to descend through the exit cracks onto the lower face and thus to our pathetic one-tent Camp VI, still standing (albeit still at the steep angle). The Germans evidently hadn’t seen it on their way up. There was a bit of food left—some chocolate, a can of sardines, one thermos of water we hadn’t taken up to the ridge with us—and we added all of it to our overflowing canvas carryalls.
It was at Camp VI, just before the clouds closed in and the snow began to fall again, that—while sitting on the boulder on the high side of the tent and bracing my elbows on my knees—I trained my field glasses on the summit of Mount Everest and, for the briefest few seconds before clouds shut off the view, saw something green and gold flapping there, right where the snowy peak of the steep pinnacle of the actual summit ridge should be.
Green and gold? The wind and weather were worsening up there, as they were down here at Camp VI at a mere 27,000 feet, but certainly the Deacon and Reggie wouldn’t have pitched her Big Tent right on the summit. That would be suicide.
Unless they meant to commit suicide together there, perhaps curled up together under both their sleeping bags, arms around one another, to be found by the next expedition to reach the summit.
Had they been lovers throughout this trip? I found myself wondering dully and with a true ache in my heart and belly. Had they made some insane pact to die together on the summit?
Then I remembered that Reggie’s Big Tent had no gold on it. It was the family crest flag of the Bromleys— gryphon and eagle battling for a golden lance or pike—that was green and gold. The silk flag that Percy had brought to the mountain and that Reggie had taken from the dead man’s pocket.
Percival’s and Reggie’s flag at the summit!
But the flapping I’d seen for so few seconds had been almost a person’s height off the snowy summit. How could they have…
Then I remembered. Reggie had taken Jean-Claude’s ice axe when we all parted, lashing it onto the outside of her pack next to the two short ice hammers there.
I grinned and rasped out a description of what I’d just seen to Dr. Pasang. He borrowed the glasses to look up, but the clouds were thickening then, and I don’t think he had a chance to see what I’d observed. That three- second glimpse of green and gold fabric flapping horizontally in the summit jet stream would stay with me for the rest of my life.
I was having some trouble breathing now, and when I’d pulled the straps of my metal-frame oxygen rig back on and set things back in their carryalls, I stood there next to that Camp VI boulder for a full moment, doubled over with rasping coughs. I realized that I’d coughed paint spatters of bright red blood onto the black boulder.
“Is this another frozen something in my throat?” I managed to rasp at Pasang when I’d finished my second spasm of coughing.
He had me open my mouth so that he could inspect it with the tiny light from one of Reggie’s Welsh miner headlamps.
“No, Mr. Perry,” he said at last. “No more obstructions. But what’s left of the lining of your throat is so raw and swollen that it may completely shut off your upper air passages unless we get down low very soon.”
“And then…I die?” I said. It was a sign of my fatigue that the answer to that question did not interest me more than it did.
“No, Mr. Perry. Should that happen, I will perform a simple tracheotomy…here.” His gloved finger touched near the hollow of my throat. “We have plenty of spare glass tubes and rubber hoses from the oxygen kits,” he added.
“What if that doesn’t work, Dr. Pasang?” My rasping, pained voice sounded dangerously close to a whine.
“Then, to prevent your lung from collapsing, I make a small entrance hole here to reinflate your collapsed lung and to get you breathing again,” he said, placing that gloved finger on the left side of my chest. “Again, the various bits of hosing and valves we have would work perfectly. The only problem will be sterilizing them with water boiling at such a low temperature up here.”
I looked down at my chest: a hole there with a bit of rubber O2-rig hosing sticking out for me to get air? Reinflating my collapsed lung?
I rucked the oxygen rig higher on my back, tightened the straps, readied the face mask, and said in the firmest voice I could muster, “I’m strong enough to go down.”
24.
Tracts of Mount Everest that take days—or even weeks—to ascend can often be descended, at least to the glacier camps, but many times even to Base Camp, in a mere matter of hours: a long afternoon.
But that’s with fixed ropes in place. We’d pulled up most of our miles of fixed rope to deny the Germans an easy ascent. We’d also pulled out route marker wands and flags that separated the proper path up…or down… from dangerous dead ends in a vertical couloir snowfield ending in a long drop to the Rongbuk or East Rongbuk Glacier.
Pasang seemed to know his way. The afternoon clouds were closing around us in earnest now, and pellets of snow were lacerating the tiny exposed parts of my cheeks outside the oxygen face mask. I was on full 2.2-liter flow—Pasang didn’t even seem to be using his oxygen most of the time—but I simply couldn’t get enough air down through my swollen-shut throat. And every breath I did manage to swallow hurt like hell.
Certain odd things happened during these hours.
When we were at the site of our old Camp V—the Germans had set the last remaining Whymper tent on fire for some reason—Pasang parked me on a rock near the burned remnants, actually tying off my climbing rope to the rock for a few minutes, as if I were a child or a Tibetan pony to be kept in place, while he went to search for the extra oxygen rigs and food stores that we’d hidden in the boulders to the east, toward the North Ridge. Any that Sigl and his friends hadn’t found and appropriated, that is.
While I was sitting there, taking my oxygen mask off at regular intervals in desperate and doomed attempts to drag in more air and oxygen from the thin atmosphere, Jean-Claude came down the snowy slope and sat next to me on the boulder.
“I’m really happy to see you,” I rasped.
“I’m happy to see you as well, Jake.” He grinned at me and leaned forward to rest his chin on his mittened hands propped on the adze of his ice axe. He wore no oxygen rig, no oxygen mask. I figured that they must have come off during his fall to the glacier.
“Wait,” I said, straining to think clearly. I knew that something wasn’t logical here, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it for a moment or so. “How can you have your ice axe?” I said at last. “I saw Reggie carrying it on her rucksack as she and the Deacon headed for the summit.”
Jean-Claude showed me the light wood shaft of the axe. There were three notches about two-thirds of the way toward the blade. “I borrowed Sandy Irvine’s axe from where you left it on that rock,” said J.C. “Sandy said he
