couldn’t keep me warm. I would begin to doze off despite the physical misery, but then slam awake either from the intense chill or with a sense of someone strangling me. Or both.
It feels better to be moving now, dragging on my boots and packing the high felt Laplander “slippers” deep into my empty rucksack. But every move uses up my energy and makes me have to stop and gasp for breath. I see Jean-Claude taking the same pauses as he labors to tie his frozen bootlaces. The Sherpas are moving even more slowly and ponderously than J.C. and me.
But eventually we’re all packed, booted, cramponed, and layered—Jean-Claude and I have taken back our Finch outer clothing for the descent—and then J.C. makes me moan and the four Sherpas slump silently when he says, “We have to pack the tent and staves and ground cloths as well.”
“Why?” I ask plaintively. Reggie’s experimental Big Tent has survived the two days and nights of hurricane winds, but the damned thing is
“We may need it for shelter on the glacier,” Jean-Claude explains.
I stifle the urge to moan again. The idea of bivouacking anywhere on the open glacier seems like death to me. But if for some reason we
I realize that J.C. is right and I say to Babu Rita, “All right, you heard the man. You and Ang Chiri begin taking down the staves. Norbu, you and Lhakpa get outside and pull up all of the stakes and untie all the tie-downs. Don’t cut them unless you have to and then only right next to the tie-down knot—and leave all the ropes attached.”
If we have to pitch this tent on the glacier, I don’t think we’ll have the energy to attach new ropes. And there won’t be these friendly rocks and boulders around.
It’s strange to be standing outside and wearing a pack load again. The winds haven’t abated, and the blizzard is coming down as heavily as it has the past two days and nights, but Jean-Claude’s handy combination aneroid barometer and thermometer tells us that the low pressure is climbing along with the temperature, which is up to a balmy ten degrees Fahrenheit.
“Good for the crampons on the glacier snow,” J.C. says into my ear under the wind roar and buffet.
Nothing is good.
J.C. and I are both surprised that there’s only about two feet of new powder on the glacier rather than the four or five feet the intensity of the three-day storm made us fear, but the crust is not frozen solid enough to keep us from crashing through up to our knees or waist every dozen steps or so. And none of us ever seem to fall through at the same time. We descend the glacier like six blind men with palsy.
We’ve decided to rope up, all together, using the Deacon’s hideously expensive Miracle Rope that was his personal invention (at Lady Bromley’s expense) for this expedition. For things like casual guiding ropes on the glacier, on the way up we’d strung the alpine-standard three-eighths-inch cotton rope—what I think of as “the Mallory-Irvine rope,” since they were last seen using it on this very mountain—but for vertical fixed ropes and for roping up in dicey situations, the Deacon insisted on this new blend of cotton, manila, hemp, and other material for his rope. It made the rope thicker and heavier—five-eighths of an inch rather than the three-eighths that had been standard for so many years in alpine climbing—and thus heavier to haul and harder to knot quickly, but his Alpine Club contacts led the Deacon to a commercial rope-testing facility in Birmingham: the three-eighths-inch standard cotton rope, even when new and unfrayed in any way, would snap at 500 pounds of pressure. This sounds like a lot, but when a normal-sized male is free-falling, say, while leading on a 30-foot belay, his mass plus velocity after falling 60 feet will almost always snap the standard three-eighths-inch cotton rope. “I think we use the damned stuff more as sympathetic magic rather than as a real safety precaution,” the Deacon said.
That low tensile strength was also the reason, the Deacon had pointed out to us the previous winter when he’d had us testing his new rope in Wales, why so many climbers—in the Himalayas now as well as in the Alps— lost their lives while descending steep slopes again rather than rappelling down with any real assurance of safety. The Deacon’s new Mixed Fibre Rope, as he liked to call it, had tested out to more than 1,100 pounds’ strain before snapping. Not yet satisfactory to the Deacon—he envisioned what would later become the 5,000-test-pound average nylon-blend rope of the future, without knowing how it could be manufactured with the materials of 1924–25—but decidedly better than the three-eighths-inch cotton “clothesline rope” (as the Deacon called it) that Mallory and Irvine had tied onto on their last day.
But even with the new, improved rope, J.C. and I have had to sort out the order in which we should all descend the mountain. Obviously Jean-Claude should go first, but then who? Of the other five of us, Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay can barely stand and stagger along on their frostbitten and swollen feet—neither had been able to tie the laces to his own boots, and J.C. and I had attached their crampons—so neither can be expected to hold a belay if Jean-Claude were suddenly to disappear into a hidden crevasse. And neither I nor the Deacon’s new Miracle Rope could be expected to hold the weight of three free-falling men on belay, no matter how quickly I could get my long ice axe into the glacier snow.
So we’ve compromised, with J.C. going first, then Babu Rita—the healthiest of the Sherpas this awful day— and then me (in the slight hope I might belay two men), and then Ang and Lhakpa staggering along, holding each other up, and finally with Norbu Chedi, frostbitten cheeks and all, as our anchorman. Theoretically I could belay Ang and Lhakpa if one or both of them fell into a crevasse behind me.
It is understood, at least by Jean-Claude and me, that if it reaches the point where Norbu Chedi has to belay all or most of us, we are dead men anyway.
So we follow J.C. up and away from our quickly disappearing wreckage of Camp III, back onto the East Rongbuk Glacier, and then down the glacier’s surprisingly steep slopes. How, in this never-ending blizzard, Jean- Claude can find his way and avoid the hundreds of crevasses he’d pointed out during the climb up in sunlight two days ago I’ll never know. Most of our route-marking bamboo wands either have blown away or are covered with snow, but occasionally J.C. reaches down and tugs one up, reassuring all of us that we are on the right track.
And although I believe in nothing supernatural, I will always—after this day—ascribe a weird but real sixth sense to Jean-Claude Clairoux in his ability to sense the presence of crevasses that would have been invisible even on a sunny, shadow-assisted day, much less in this blinding blizzard. Several times he holds up his arm telling us to stop where we are, and then he turns around and retraces his quickly disappearing steps in the snow, leading us back up and then around and then down past crevasses that sometimes become slightly visible to the rest of us in the passing, but more often than not remain unseen and unsensed by anyone other than Jean-Claude.
So, after the agonizingly slow hours of dressing, tying our bootlaces, getting our crampons on, and packing up the tent in different loads (J.C. hauling most of it), we suffer four more hours descending the glacier in this stop-and-start way before we get to the ladder-crossed crevasse that had been less than an hour short of Camp III on our way up on Tuesday.
Jean-Claude holds up his snow-covered arm and we stop, then approach slowly.
The combined 15-foot span of the two roped-together ladders has slipped out of place.
“Yeah.”
It’s still snowing so hard that we have trouble seeing the far side of the slumped span of the ladder only 15 feet away, but after a few minutes the flurries clear just long enough for us to assess the problem.
There’s been a subsidence on the far, southern lip of the crevasse, as if a column of ice supporting the far side has shifted downward six feet or so. One of our Miracle Rope guy lines is missing, and the other one—the one to our left as we look south—is slumping under its weight of snow and ice in a way that suggests that the eyelet stake and ice screws holding it on that side have come loose. We’d left two climbing rigs for the heavily laden porters who were to follow us up on Wednesday to put on for security—clipping the carabiner on the harness into one of the guy lines—to use as they crossed the rickety ladder, but the harnesses are now lost, either buried under the new snow or fallen into the widened crevasse.
We untie from our common rope, and Babu Rita ties back in as lead man of the four connected Sherpas. I tie on to Jean-Claude, who sinks to his hands and knees to crawl closer to the ladder and the edge of the crevasse.
I borrow Ang Chiri’s and Norbu Chedi’s long ice axes, and J.C. and I drive them as deep into the snow and solid ice as we can, running about 30 feet of free Miracle Rope to Jean-Claude so that the axes will be the primary
