The Deacon’s plan, before he stole my book and stalked off, was for us to wake in the middle of the night, make some hot tea and get dressed by our hissing lanterns, and be out of the tent and climbing toward Camp V somewhere around four in the morning, so as J.C., Reggie, and I crawl deeper into our mummy bags to get some sleep, I set my pocket watch to vibrate me awake at 3:30. The watch is a beautiful and expensive thing, a gift from my father upon my graduation from Harvard, and whatever else happens on Mount Everest, I most dearly want no harm to come to it. It has a clever little feature whereby one can set a time and the watch will soundlessly announce that set time with the insistent flutter of a small metal arm set into the back of the device.
I keep the watch in a waistcoat pocket, and at 3:30 a.m. there comes the frenzied flutter over my heart. Despite my fatigue, I awake at once.
Oddly, I’ve managed to sleep quite a bit during the few hours allowed us. Once Jean-Claude had shaken me awake and whispered, “You’re not breathing, Jake,” and I’d taken a snort of English air from the bottle we’d rigged between us, but other than that, it has been my best sleep so far at altitude. At Camp III, just the exertion of rolling over had led to my gasping awake, panting from the effort, and I’d kept rolling over onto irritating patches of my own frozen breath, but here, 1,500 feet higher, I’ve slept like a baby.
Well, we aren’t leaving for Camp V this morning. The sides of the tent are still rippling and snapping, and I can clearly hear the rattle of countless snow pellets on canvas.
The term “Death Zone” wasn’t used much in 1925, but the basic understanding of it was just becoming known after three British expeditions to Everest.
Here at Camp IV our bodies are already suffering the consequences of altitude. I mentioned earlier in this narrative that there’s as much oxygen at altitude as at sea level—20.93 percent, to be pedantic—but with the decreasing atmospheric pressure, our lungs and bodies can’t gain access to that precious resource. Way down at Camp I, at only 17,800 feet of altitude, the atmospheric pressure—and thus the oxygen our bodies can normally drag into our lungs—is half that at sea level. If we make it to the summit of this mountain at just over 29,000 feet, the pressure will be one-third that at sea level, barely enough oxygen to allow one to stay conscious and not enough to prevent headaches, nausea, severe “mountain lassitude,” and—perhaps the worst thing from a climber’s point of view—severe mental grogginess, hallucinations, and impaired judgment.
So above 8,000 meters—a little more than 24,000 feet, not much more than 500 feet higher than where we are sleeping this night on the North Col—the once-and-future term “the Death Zone” becomes an absolute imperative not to linger. At and above 8,000 meters, your body is dying—literally dying, more so every minute you stay at such an altitude. The technical term is
Our average heartbeats have long since quickened to 140 beats per minute or more, making every upward step or simple physical activity dangerous as well as difficult. In a vain attempt to get more oxygen to our muscles and brains, our blood has already dramatically thickened in our veins, increasing the likelihood of fatal strokes or thrombosis every hour we stay at this altitude or climb higher. Ironically, because the blood in our veins has turned a much darker red due to oxygen shortage, our faces, lips, and extremities tend to glow blue.
Only the occasional whiff of English air helps us ward off some of these more severe problems.
And we’re still 5,500 feet below the mountain’s summit.
Thinking
Then someone or something is crashing through the tent doors and I snap awake, trying to sit up. It takes three attempts to do so.
Reggie is gone.
It’s the Deacon coming in through the door flaps amidst a flurry of snow and a moving wall of cold air. If it weren’t for the red bands he’d earlier wrapped around the arms of his goose down duvet, I wouldn’t recognize him: he’s absolutely coated with snow and ice, his flying helmet, balaclava, and goggles are rimmed with icicles, and his huge outer mittens make cracking-ice noises when he tries to remove them. He has an ice-covered oxygen rig on his back, but the mask isn’t over his face, and I’m sure the regulator has been switched to
“Chilly morning,” he says, panting.
I pull my watch out. It is a little after seven a.m.
“Where have you been,
“Just seeing if the North Ridge will go,” answers the Deacon. “It won’t.”
“The snow?” I say.
“The wind,” says the Deacon. “It must be well over one hundred and twenty miles per hour. I was trying to walk up the slabs while leaning forward so far that my nose was almost touching granite.”
“Climbing alone?” says Jean-Claude, a hint of rebuke in his voice. “Not what you would advise us to do,
“I know.” The Deacon has fumbled our Unna cooker into place just inside the Whymper’s outer vestibule, and is trying to use his frozen hands to get a match lit indoors and transferred to the cooker. The wind blows it out each time. “To hell with it,” he says and brings the cooker inside—another total breach of fire safety protocol. I light the Meta for him, and he sets a cauldron of snow in the most sheltered part of the small vestibule.
“I don’t think we’ll get to Camp Five,” he says, unzipping outer layers as if the below-freezing temperature in the tent were some tropical climate.
“I poked my head in to wake them all,” continues the Deacon. “Reggie’s been up for a while, working on a stove that won’t bring water to boil. Evidently this morning’s giving them some insomnia, headaches, breathing problems, cold toes, sore throats, and sour thoughts.”
The Deacon shows white teeth through the icicles still dangling from his new beard. “I think this beautiful bitch of a mountain has already declared war on us, my friends. God or the gods or destiny or chance grant that we be worthy of the challenge.” Suddenly he pulls off his inner mitten and silk glove and thrusts his bare, bluish right hand toward me. “Jake, I apologize sincerely and completely and without reservation for my idiocy in taking and tossing your book last night. There’s no excuse for such behavior. I shall buy you a new copy—perhaps get Bridges to autograph it for you—as soon as we get back from this adventure.”
Since Robert Bridges has been the Poet Laureate of England since 1913, I consider that one hell of a decent offer.
I don’t know what to say, so I just shake his offered hand. It’s like grasping a slab of frozen beef.
Reggie comes in and laces the tent flaps behind her. She’s wearing every bit of goose down outerwear we had available. The only thing that would prevent her from climbing the mountain dressed as she is now is the high Laplander furred boots that several of us prefer to wear in camp while our mountain boots dry. The Laplander boots have relatively soft soles that won’t work on near-vertical snow, rock, and ice.
“Tenzing Bothia’s sick,” she says without greeting or prelude. “He’s been vomiting the last six or seven hours. We need to get him down…at least to Camp Three but preferably lower.”
The Deacon sighs. We have a tough decision pending. If we stay here at Camp IV on the Col, we get weaker by the hour, but we’re in a good position to make a break for Camp V high on the North Ridge if the weather moderates. Then again, that may not happen for a week or more. But if we all go down, there’ll be hell to pay in terms of logistics. Camp III at the bottom of the ice wall is already overflowing with Sherpas, every tent filled. Some of them are probably already suffering from mountain lassitude and also may have to be evacuated down the mountain to Base Camp. Our loads—meant for Camps V and VI and our search for Percival up there—
