wind whipping down the 1,000-foot slope of ice and snow is so strong that it literally knocks me over. Babu Rita and Ang Chiri dutifully fall into the snow with me. On all fours, I flail around trying to find their rucksacks and pack loads amidst the drifts, snow-covered boulders, and the growing heaps of snow on this side of the tents.
“Here!” I can barely hear J.C.’s voice, but the two Sherpas and I crawl toward it.
We all grab some part of the load masses now under ten inches or more of new snow and begin dragging them back to the Big Tent…but where
Inside—it was impossible to unload the packs and rucksacks and load bags outside in the wind and snow— things are a real mess.
Enough snow has come in that our down jackets and trousers (the Sherpas chose not to wear the extra down trousers we had for them) and the two spread sleeping bags are covered with snow that body heat soon will melt into moisture. The wetter goose down gets, the less insulating property it has, until, when soaked enough, it will provide all the insulating warmth of a cold, wet washrag.
Dizzy, trying hard not to be violently sick again, I curl up on the driest part of the tent floor I can find and shiver, my head hurting worse with each shiver and shake. The sudden, overpowering stench of the kerosene doesn’t help matters.
Jean-Claude is going through the packs and load bags: several more tins of frozen food and sealed packs of what the Royal Navy has called “portable soup” since the early 1800s, but no water. Five more Primus-fuel-sized cans of kerosene.
We now have enough kerosene to blow up a German pillbox or burn a hole in the wall of the North Col, but the damned Primus stove won’t ignite it.
J.C. clears a space in the middle and lays down an extra wool shirt of his as a work area. He has brought a flashlight from his personal rucksack and adds the beam of its light to the ever-diminishing blue flicker of the tiny ghee-candle lamp.
He sets up the Primus again. We have two big pots for boiling, and each of us has his tin cup for drinking. J.C. makes sure that the fuel tank is two-thirds filled with fresh kerosene as the instructions suggest, primes it with a bit of burning alcohol in the tiny spirit cup below the burners, pumps up the pressure, and tries again to ignite the burners.
Nothing.
J.C. allows himself a torrent of French so picturesque that I can pick up only one vulgarity in twenty. He begins disassembling the damned thing again, taking great care not to spill the kerosene or remaining alcohol.
“How can it
“I…do…not…know,” Jean-Claude says through gritted teeth. Wind batters the wall of the Big Tent so hard that four of us grab the wooden ribs of the dome, trying to hold the tent down with our weight and waning strength. While outside, J.C. had swung his little steel-tubed instrument, and he whispered the results to me inside: the barometer was frighteningly low and still falling; the temperature at nightfall outside was minus thirty- eight degrees Fahrenheit. We had nothing but our bodies, tents, and fears with which to measure the velocity of the wind down here in the “sheltered” area at the base of the North Col, but these winds have to be hurricane velocity. Some must be a hundred miles per hour or more.
I force myself to sit up and look at the disassembled brass pieces of the Primus now gleaming faintly in the weak light from the single flashlight and the dying ghee-candle dish.
I’m thinking,
The Deacon had bought mostly the new 1925 models, but except for being improved for high altitudes— some of the improvements suggested by a certain George Finch—they differed very little from earlier pressure stoves going back to 1892. We’d used Primuses from our stores for cooking all the way through Sikkim and across Tibet. None had ever failed to light.
As J.C. holds the burner up to the light yet again, making sure there is no blockage, I dully paw through the other pieces.
The simple little machine is a brass 1925 (O) Primus 210 model—the new kind with fixed legs. The procedure for lighting it is the same as for all the other Primuses I’ve used over my years of hiking and climbing. Primuses have always worked at any altitude I’ve been at.
First, one uses the pumping mechanism set into the main fuel tank to pressurize that fuel tank. This rise in pressure forces the kerosene in the main tank up and along the tube that rises to the burners. To preheat those burner tubes, one lights a small amount of methylated spirits—alcohol—in the built-in spirit cup encircling the burner tube.
We’ve done all that a dozen times this afternoon and now darkening evening with no luck.
Once those burner tubes reach a high enough temperature, a fine, almost invisible spray of hot paraffin gas is emitted through the central jet in the burner. When air mixes with that gas—even the thin air of Mount Everest —the stove’s simple and sturdy little flame ring forces the gas into a circle. Technically, it’s not the kerosene burning in the blue-flame ring of a Primus stove, it’s the plasma paraffin gas generated from the spray of kerosene. The noise from those flame-ring burners has always been loud enough that many climbers and campers have called their Primuses “roarers.” Indeed, there are few sounds more reassuring to an exhausted mountain climber than the roar of a Primus stove as it melts snow for drinking water, heats soup or stew, and generally adds to the warmth of a cold tent pitched high in the snow and rock.
Now…nothing.
“We can make tea and maybe even some soup on the little spirit burner stove,” I say. “Heat up some sardines.” The small alcohol-burning stoves are meant for the high camps—mostly to make hot tea—but are supposed to be included as a backup stove for every camp.
“There was no spirit burner in any of the packs,” says Jean-Claude. We exchange guilty glances, and I realize we’re sharing our sense of shame at having supervised our loads, Sherpas, and selves so poorly on this, our first real outing toward the mountain.
“So it has to be the Primus,” I say.
I stupidly move the brass tank in both hands but find no holes or leaks. Since kerosene would be spilling out if the circular tank had been breached, it isn’t the most clever troubleshooting I’ve ever done. As if hypnotized, I count eleven languages imprinted on the side of the metal tank. Only eight years after the Great War, and this Swedish company—B. A. Hjorth & Co., Stockholm, as it says on the Primus as well as on an accompanying card advertising “Practical Accessories for the Primus” (e.g., a spirit can with a nozzle, part No. 1745; a cleaning needle case, No. 1050; and, of course, a Wind Shield, No. 1601)—is selling the stove in at least these eleven countries.
This version of the Primus has only a triangular plate as a “wind shield,” but J.C. has blocked the wind with his body huddled over the stove each time he’s tried to light it, so the wind shield is not the problem. Technically, we’re supposed to use Primuses outside the tents, but there’s no hope at all of getting this thing lighted in the gale-force winds ripping at even the entrances to our tents.
“Not at fault,” says Jean-Claude as he inspects each disassembled piece: the burner nipple for heat and quench, the reserve cap parking boss, the burner collector collar, the flame ring, the nitrile seals, the lead seal in the burner itself, or the leather for the pressurizing pump.
He whispers under his breath, uses the few tools he’s brought with him—a screwdriver, small wrench, some wire probes—to reassemble the stove, and tries again to light it. Nothing.
“It’s not building up pressure in the tank,” he says at last.
“How can that be?” I force myself to say. One pumps a Primus and it builds up the pressure to force the kerosene up into the tiny pipes. It’s always worked for me.
Jean-Claude shakes his head.
Norbu Chedi speaks softly, almost apologetically: “On the Dongkha La, long before Kampa Dzong, Nawang Bura dropped his load down a steep incline. No sahib saw, since Nawang was back with the rear pack mules. There was a Primus that bounced free off large rocks for many yards downhill. Nawang Bura retrieved it and the
