Jean-Claude disentangles himself from the last coil of rope and walks over and picks up the Deacon’s pipe. “This is one hell of a stupid place to leave a pipe,” he says in English. He puts the damned thing in his large buttoned shirt pocket, where it won’t fall out.
“Shall we set up and start the rappel?” I ask.
“Jake, give me about three minutes to enjoy the view,” he says. I see that his ascent has sapped all of his energy.
“Good idea,” I say, and for five or ten minutes we just sit with our legs dangling over the drop, our butts on soft grass, and our backs against the sun-warmed curved spire stone that we plan to use as a rappel anchor.
The view from almost 250 feet up this rock slab—like looking out a big window on the 25th floor of some skyscraper in New York—
As for me, I’ve just done the only Welsh crag I’m going to climb this summer—perhaps this lifetime. Great fun, but just once, thank you.
It feels good to be alive.
After enjoying the view for a while and letting Jean-Claude get his wind back, we secure the ropes for the rappel. The section I’d used to pull J.C. using the rock as belay anchor looked okay, but we set it apart in my rucksack, to be used only if absolutely necessary.
The rappels down are fun. At the end of our first 80-foot descent, we swing our bodies right across the smooth rock—actually in a standing, boot-sole-running pendulum move—until Jean-Claude finally grips the edge of the vertical crack we’d climbed and stops his motion. A second later he is in the crack, with the really decent footholds and craggy bits we remember from the climb up—the one dependable platform in the whole vertical crack—and a few seconds later I swing up and join him.
J.C. has tied a good knot for our two-rope rappel—a stuck and irretrievable rope can be a nightmare on such a long rappel, and we need that extra twice-80-feet-each 160 feet of rope for the final single-rope descent from the crack here.
“Left rope to be pulled!” Jean-Claude and I shout out in unison. Pull the wrong rope, and J.C.’s beautiful knot will jam in the rappel sling we’d rigged, and we’re in trouble.
I check the ends of the ropes and remove a couple of small twists and the safety knots we’d tied at the end of the strands. Then—taking the left rope we’d both just shouted about as a reminder—I give it a steady pull. As it starts to travel freely and fall, I shout “Rope!”—an old habit and a necessary one. Eighty feet of falling rope can knock a climber off even the best narrow platform.
We pull the first strand and coil it as I shout “Rope!” once more and bring down the second length.
There’s no jam. There’s no debris falling with it. We retrieve the second rope, coil it, and J.C. begins knotting the two together in that flawless Chamonix Guide knot he does when he unites ropes.
Five minutes later we’re on the ground, retrieving the long rope and getting out of its way as the mass of it hits the ground, tossing up dust and pinecones.
Instead of inspecting and coiling it immediately, as would be proper, we both walk over to the boulder where the Deacon still appears to be sleeping.
I don’t believe it. I think he has been watching us during the hard parts of the climb and traverse.
But I use my jagged, torn sneaker to kick him on the knee to get his attention.
The Deacon shoves his cap up and opens his eyes.
I hear my voice coming out as an actual growl. “Are you going to tell us what the fu—…what the hell…this has to do with Everest?”
“Yes,” says the Deacon. “If you’ve brought my pipe back.”
Not smiling, Jean-Claude retrieves the pipe from his pocket. I’m sort of sorry to see that it hasn’t been snapped in two during the rappels.
The Deacon puts it in the chest pocket of his jacket, stands, and looks up at the face. All three of us are staring up at it.
“I climbed this with George Mallory in nineteen nineteen,” he says. “Five years, for me at least, of no climbing—four during the War and one when I was trying to get a job after the War.”
Jean-Claude and I wait, not happy. We don’t want old tales of heroism, whether about climbing or war. Our hearts and minds are aimed at Mount Everest now, a climb of snow, glaciers, crevasses, then ice walls, glazed rock slabs, windblown ridges, and a huge North Face that we won’t want to get very far out on.
“Mallory had done the rappel recon down from the top and had stopped to smoke his pipe on the grassy ridge,” says the Deacon. “It was only Mallory, me, and Ruth—his wife—on this climb, and Ruth didn’t want to do the full ascent. To the left of the grassy ridge, Mallory found the only indentation in the overhang that we might be able to climb without pitons, rope ladders, and all the modern overhang equipment.
“I went. But the move from the crack to the grassy ledge and then up again to and over the overhang took everything I had and more. We were roped together, but the belay points were as impossible as you just discovered them to be. Mallory and I had to do the same traverse across the same rock.”
“What does this have to do with Everest other than telling us that George Mallory is…was…a good rock climber?” There’s a bit of a growl still in my voice.
“When we came down the backside and around here to get our gear and hike out,” says the Deacon, looking back at the crag, “Mallory told his wife and me that he’d forgotten his pipe up on that grassy ledge, and before I had time to tell him that he had other pipes, that I’d buy him a new damned pipe, George is scrambling up the crack again, all the way to where you belayed, Jean-Claude, and then did that smooth rock traverse alone…by himself.”
I tried to imagine it. All I could see was a big black spider scuttling across the rock. Alone? No hope of belay or help? Even in 1919, such solo climbs, without protection of some sort, were considered bad form, showing off, and anathema to the protocols of the Royal Geographical Society’s Alpine Club, to which Mallory belonged.
“Then he took the sixty-foot coil of rope he’d climbed and traversed with, and rappelled down,” the Deacon continues. “With his pipe. And with Ruth furious at him for essentially doing the entire climb, except the overhang bit again, solo.”
J.C. and I wait in silence. There’s something here that might yet make sense of the day.
“On their last day, Mallory and Irvine left Camp Six at twenty-six thousand eight hundred feet about nine in the morning. They were slow to get started,” says the Deacon. “You’ve both seen the photos and maps of Everest, but you have to be
Jean-Claude and I keep listening.
“Once you get on the North East Ridge,” the Deacon says, “and if the winds allow you to stay on it, it’s like climbing steep, ice-covered, downward-tilted slabs to the summit. Except for the Three Steps.”
J.C. and I exchange glances. We’ve seen the Three Steps on the ridge maps of Everest, but on the map or in the photos taken from a great distance, they were just that—steps. Not a real barrier.
“The First Step you can work around along the North Face, just below it, then scramble back up to the ridge again if you’re good,” says the Deacon. “The Third Step no one alive knows about. But the Second Step—I’ve reached it. The Second Step…”
The Deacon’s expression is strange, almost pain-filled, as if he is telling some terrible tale from the Great War.
“The Second Step you can’t work around. The Second Step comes at you out of the whirling clouds and blowing snow like the gray bow of a dreadnought. The Second Step Mallory and Irvine—and the three of us— would have to free-climb. And this at twenty-eight thousand three hundred feet or so, where to take one step makes you stop to gasp and wheeze for two minutes.
“The Second Step, my friends, this bow-front gray hull of a battleship in our way on the North East Ridge route to the summit, is about a hundred feet high—much less than your scramble for the pipe today—but it is composed of steep, brittle, treacherous rock the whole way. The only possible route I could see before the wind and my climbing partner, Norton, growing ill, forced us down—the only possible climbing route I could see on the Second Step is a fifteen- or sixteen-foot perpendicular slab on the upper part of the free climb, which in turn is
