didn’t mind.”
I nodded. That made sense.
Finally I worked up the courage to say, “What’s it like being dead, my friend?”
J.C. gave me that Gallic shrug I was so used to and grinned again.
“I don’t understand. Can you interpret that for me, J.C.?”
“Sure,” said Jean-Claude. He slammed the point of his ice axe deep in the snow again so that he could lean on it as he faced me. “It means…”
“Jake!” came a call from Pasang through the shifting snow flurries.
“I’m here!” I rasped as loudly as I could without screaming from the pain in my throat. “I’m here with Jean- Claude.”
J.C. took his watch from his Finch duvet pocket. “I need to go down ahead and mark the routes for you and Pasang. I will talk to you later, my dear friend.”
“Okay,” I said.
Pasang came up out of the swirling snow cloud carrying two fresh oxygen tanks for us to swap out to and yet another canvas bag of edibles, water, and other supplies.
“I couldn’t hear you well, Mr. Perry,” he said. “What did you just shout?”
I smiled and shook my head. My throat hurt too much for me to repeat it. Pasang added the replacement tank to my rig, set the flow valve to high again, made sure that air was flowing, and helped me attach the leather strap of my oxygen mask to my leather motorcycle helmet.
“It’s getting colder,” he said. “We’ll have to keep moving until we get to Camp Four on the North Col. Is it all right if I tie you in close on the rope…fifteen feet? I want to be able to see you—or hear you if you need help— even through the blowing snow.”
“Sure,” I said into the mask and valves, the syllable almost certainly unintelligible to Pasang. After he’d tied on the short rope, I stood, swayed, got my balance with the tall Sherpa’s help, and started to head off down and to the left toward the steep North Face rather than the North Ridge. Pasang tapped me on the shoulder and held me back. “Perhaps I should lead for a while, Mr. Perry.”
I shrugged, trying to make it as exquisitely Gallic as J.C.’s shrug had just been—but of course I couldn’t. So I stood there stamping my cold feet until Pasang passed me on the rope, and then I began to plod along close behind him.
25.
The North Ridge was still all downward-tilting slabs, usually under snow. I’d almost forgotten. If Reggie and the Deacon had done their traverse to the South Summit and down—rappelling down that big rock I was thinking of now as “K. T. Owings’s Step” (and would, nearly thirty years later, smile at its being renamed “the Hillary Step”)—the two of them would be descending on the upward-tilting friendlier slabs of the Southwest Ridge of Everest by now, moving down that rocky stairway toward the South Col and Western Cwm below that.
Or was that possible yet? They’d have had to make that traverse of the snow-corniced knife ridge between the summits—the one we’d been able to see from a few vantage points during our approach and climb. Was that even down-climbable, or was it the death trap that the cornice on the North East Ridge had been for Bromley and Kurt Meyer and Jean-Claude? No, not a trap for J.C., I thought. He’d known the fragile cornice was there and shoved Sigl onto it deliberately, knowing it couldn’t bear the weight of two men, even if one of them was a small, light Frenchman.
But could the Deacon and Reggie be on the Southwest Ridge by now, down to where Owings had promised fixed ropes? I had a vague memory of seeing two more flares in the skies over Everest’s summit before Pasang and I had reached our old Camp VI. Green and red. White, then green and red.
Owings had discussed that sequence. What was the message from the Deacon to his old friend? Put the Bovril on the Primus, we’re only hours out?
I doubted it. The Deacon had never liked Bovril.
Or perhaps the Deacon and Reggie had summited by now and done the smart thing: retreated back the way they’d come. Would they be at the single tent at Camp VI yet? No, wait, I dimly remembered that the Deacon had been carrying the heavy load of Reggie’s Big Tent and Reggie had an Unna cooker. They could stop anywhere.
But had they? How late was it? How many hours had passed since Pasang and I had left the Second Step? …Camp VI?…Camp V? I fumbled under my layers for my watch but couldn’t locate it. Had I loaned it to Jean- Claude when he’d visited me a while ago? I didn’t think so.
It would be dark soon, the sun soon to be eclipsed by the summit of Lhotse. We’d come out of one layer of cloud into a cold but fairly clear afternoon. I could see two green tents far, far below on the North Col.
I looked to my right and noticed three odd-looking objects floating in the sky about 10 degrees above the angle of the North Ridge. Odd.
They vaguely resembled kites or balloons in shape but were much more organic. Obviously living beings. They floated rather the way jellyfish do, but always keeping parallel with the uncomprehending Pasang and me as we descended the ridge. All three were translucent, and I could see dim colors—red, yellow, blue, white—flowing through them almost like the pulsing blood in someone’s veins. One of the floating objects had squarish stubs on each side, somewhat like vestigial wings. Another had an extension of its head part that looked a little like a bird’s beak, though almost transparent. The third thing had a tourbillion of cascading light particles near its center, almost as if it hosted a brilliantly lighted interior snowstorm.
All three floating things were pulsating in rhythm with one another, but not, I clinically noticed, in rhythm to the beating of my own straining heart. As Pasang led me lower, never turning to his right to look at them, the three objects floating above the ridgeline—each transparent but oddly dark, especially when a cloud passed behind them—kept pace with us.
I looked away. They did not stay in my field of vision when I turned my head.
To see if my mind was being affected by illness or altitude, I looked at the peaks spread out seemingly at our feet and tested myself by recalling their names and altitudes—Changtse beyond the North Col at 24,878 feet, Khartaphu there on the other side of the pass to the Kharta Glacier at 23,894 feet, the shoulder and summit fields of Pumori to my extreme left, 23,507 feet, and to its right, abutting the Rongbuk Glacier, the summit of Lingtren at only 21,142 feet.
My mind and memory didn’t seem to be malfunctioning.
I looked back to my right. The three organic objects still floated parallel to our path of descent, always staying at the same angle of degrees above the line of the North Ridge but shifting positions amongst themselves: now the one with the blunt bird’s beak on the left, then the one with the square little penguin wings pulsating and floating to the left of the triad, and finally the one with the coruscating center of pulsing light taking the lead as they descended with us.
Souls? Could souls look like that? Is that what we really look like—after we shake off our bodies?
I reminded myself that I didn’t believe in God, Heaven, Hell, or any sort of afterlife, not even the tidy Buddhist theory of reincarnation.
But three of them? What three souls would follow us into the darkness this evening?
Jean-Claude. Reggie. The Deacon.
I pulled my oxygen mask down so as not to screw up the valves and tried to speak, but succeeded only in choking out a cough…or perhaps a sob. It was loud enough to make Pasang, carefully picking his way down slabs ten feet ahead of me, stop and turn around.
Realizing that tears were freezing to my exposed cheeks, I could only point toward the three hovering objects. Pasang turned his head and looked. A few seconds later I followed his gaze.
Another wisp of snow cloud had moved in. The three organic floating things were gone. Although I’d seen other small clouds move in front of them and block my view before, they’d always been there after the cloud passed, but this time I was sure they would be gone for good. When the streamer of cloud passed, they were.
