Whatever message those…creatures…had brought, they’d wanted to share it only with me.
I shook my head, signaling to Pasang that it was nothing and that I was okay, pulled my mask back into place, and we continued the long, dangerous slog downward.
There were three tents near the old site of Camp IV on the North Col—two of our green Whympers and a smaller, tan-colored German tent. All three were empty. Pasang thoroughly searched the German tent, coming out with only a few more documents, and then kicked it to shreds.
He untied from our common rope, gestured for me to sit on an empty packing crate while he went off to see if our hidden caches—gear we’d dangled down into one of the crevasses—was still there.
I went off oxygen for a while and just sat panting, every inhalation hurting my throat, every exhalation hurting it more, and tried to enjoy the heat from a Primus stove Pasang had lighted.
It was deep twilight when Pasang returned with two fresh oxygen tanks and some more food to put in the bubbling pot. All of the North Col and most of the North Ridge we’d come down were in deepening shadow now. Only the upper ridges, top fifth of the North Face, and actual summit of Everest continued to glow red and orange and white in the last, rich rays of the setting sun.
The snow plume from the summit was stretched out farther east than I’d ever seen it. The winds up there must be terrible—inhuman—fatal to any living thing.
They’re both on the Southwest Ridge or already huddled together in their buttoned-together sleeping bags in Reggie’s domed tent on the South Col, I told myself. But I didn’t believe it. I imagined their bodies lying frozen and stiff as Mallory’s and Irvine’s somewhere up there on this side of the summit or on the terrible snow ridge beyond. Or hanging dead on their climbing rope the way Meyer and Percival had. Waiting for the goraks to find them.
I knew at that second that even if I survived this day, this retreat from the mountain, even if I ever climbed again someday, I would never, ever, under any circumstances, return to Mount Everest.
Our caver’s ladder no longer dropped down the 100-foot vertical ice wall section of the 1,000-foot descent from the North Col, of course—we’d chopped away its support and dropped it and some climbing Germans so long ago—but the Germans had replaced it with some of their three-eighths-inch clothesline climbing rope attached to two new deadman anchors they’d sunk into the snow of the ice ledge at the lip of the Col.
Pasang and I took time to add a third deadman—we filled an empty rucksack from Camp IV with snow, buried it as deep as we could, and trampled the snow heavy on top of it—and I used a girth-hitch runner and one of the spare German carabiners to add our anchor to the two other deadman anchors.
But we still didn’t trust the damned rope they’d left. Luckily we both carried 120-foot lengths of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope we’d hauled from the Camp IV crevasse cache, and now we tied these to our rope waist harnesses with figure-eights-on-a-bight knots, and I then set the separate friction knots for rappelling. We no longer had any of Jean-Claude’s clever jumars with us. I realized that I should have asked him for a couple when he’d paused to chat with me up at Camp V.
So now we had two dangling ropes, one of which we trusted, so we could rappel down the ice face at the same time. The last thing we did before rappelling was to retrieve our Welsh miner’s headlamp rigs from the carryalls and fumble through the small batteries we’d brought until we found a few that would still work.
Then, with me leading for a change, we stepped backwards over the edge of the North Col and off Mount Everest proper in a quick belay to the remaining 900-foot snow slope below.
We discussed bivouacking for the night somewhere down past Camp III—we had a sleeping bag apiece—but both of us wanted to keep moving. Even at a night-hiking pace with our little headlamps showing the way through the glacier crevasses, we should be at Base Camp or beyond by dawn.
Pasang was leading on 30 feet of rope across the glacier as we’d just left the empty Camp III site when I fell through covering snow into a crevasse.
Pasang, hearing my shout, reacted immediately—as professionally as any professional climber who’s ever climbed—slamming his ice axe deep in the firm snow at his feet and bracing himself for the belay, so I only fell about 15 feet. I’d kept my ice axe as well, and it was jammed against the opposing walls above me, giving me a solid handhold to cling to while I formed Prusik knots with my free hand for the climb up.
But then I made the mistake of looking down deeper into the crevasse with my headlamp beam.
Twenty feet lower than me were dead, blue faces, dozens of them, with dozens of open mouths and frozen, staring eyes. Dead arms and blue hands reached up toward my boots from their snow-covered dead bodies.
I screamed.
“What’s wrong, Jake?” shouted Pasang. “Are you injured?”
“No, I’m okay,” I gasped as loudly as I could through my swollen throat and damaged larynx. “Just pull me…pull…”
“You do not want to Prusik while I belay?”
“No…just pull me up…fast!”
Pasang did so, ignoring the fraying of the rope over the icy edge of the crevasse. He was very strong. I had my ice axe free and was chopping holds as I came up. Then I was out.
I crawled over to where Pasang stood, winded and gasping—he hadn’t been using the oxygen rigs at all, reserving all the tanks for my use—as I described what I’d seen.
“Ahh,” said Pasang. “We’ve accidentally stumbled upon the crevasse that Herr Sigl and his friends used for the mass grave of our Sherpa friends at Camp Three.”
I started shaking and had trouble stopping. Pasang produced a blanket from one of his overstuffed carryall bags and laid it over my shoulders.
“Don’t you want to…go see?” I asked.
“Is there a chance that any of them might be alive?” he asked. Our headlamp beams danced upon one another’s chests in the dark.
I thought for a moment of the blue faces, frozen eyes, and frozen hands and bodies I’d seen piled down there. “No,” I said.
“Then I do not want to see,” said Dr. Pasang. “I believe I was some yards off the proper path. Would you care to lead for a while, Mr. Perry, the better to avoid more crevasses?”
“Sure,” I said and, setting my oxygen mask back in place, took the lead on the rope. Most of our marking wands were gone, but Sigl’s Germans had left readable boot prints where the original safe trail through the crevasses had been. I lowered my head to play the beam along ahead of me and concentrated on route finding and on forgetting everything else for a while. I knew that if I wandered off the true path, Jean-Claude would come back to set things right.
Camp II at 19,800 feet and Camp I at 17,800 feet were simply gone. Whatever the Germans had done with the remaining tents and caches, Pasang and I could find no trace with our headlamps. Because of our careful descent—and more due to my slow pace—it was approaching the false dawn now as we did the last mile or so from Camp I down to where Base Camp used to be at 16,500 feet. If there were a couple of Germans waiting for us down here as the Deacon had feared, our Welsh miner’s lamps would be a dead giveaway in a literal sense, but Pasang and I found that—as exhausted as we both were—we couldn’t stop until we got out of this damned valley.
Again and again I imagined Reggie and the Deacon alone, perhaps ill or injured, stuck far up there at Camp VI or Camp V—a different universe from this one in the glacier valley—stuck and ill or injured and awaiting rescue from Pasang and me.
There’d be no such rescue. I was having so much trouble breathing that I could barely stand and was staggering more than striding down the long moraine slope between looming
We came carefully out of the moraine ridges and pinnacles to where Base Camp had been. There was nothing left. All of the bodies had been removed, all the tents taken somewhere and most probably burned. It was as if the Deacon-Bromley Expedition had never been here at all.
The sky was getting lighter now—the black of night giving way to the slight gray glow of the predawn. Taking a wide half-circle around where the tents and
