Bear Grylls Page 22

  We tried to eat some porridge oats with hot water. I added masses of sugar to try and make it taste a bit better, but still I could only manage a few gulps. My mind was elsewhere. I was worried that so long up here would have made me weak, that my body would be drained from living at Camp Two, and would have used up my vital reserves. But I had to be strong enough now; I knew that I would soon find out.

  At 5.45 a.m. we all met on the ice and sat in silence as we put our crampons on. I had done this so many times in the last two months, yet this morning it felt like my first time. As we started off, leaving Ang and Thengba watching from their tent, I hoped with all my heart to see them safely again four days later. Much would have happened for better or for worse by then. The glacier ahead of us leading up to the Bergschrund and the Lhotse Face seemed eerily still. I felt a mild sickness inside. It was nerves.

  My cough was still there but irritated me less now, or maybe I was just used to it; resigned to the discomfort. The angle steepened as we neared the ropes of the ice above us. The Lhotse Face loomed away far above.

  In silence we started up towards Camp Three. I hoped it wouldn’t take as long as last time. I hoped to be able to reach it in around five hours.

  By 10.00 a.m. we were well into the climb. We moved methodically and carefully up the blue ice. It crunched, then splintered beneath our crampons as they gripped firmly with each step we took. I leant back on my harness and reached into my windsuit. I pulled out several glucose tablets. They tasted sweet in my dry mouth. I swigged at the waterbottle that hung around my neck and looked around.

  Five and a half hours of climbing, and the tents were only 100 feet away. It still took twenty-five minutes to reach them. I climbed with Graham. We were both slow and tired. It showed with him especially. He swore under his breath. It was all taking so long. I tried to keep patient and just keep moving slowly. The principle was that if you were moving up, however slowly, you would eventually reach your destination. It is just that the process hurt so much.

  We collapsed into two tents. Neil, Graham, Michael and I in one, Geoffrey, Carla and Allen in the other. We settled down to the odious task of trying to melt ice. The gas stove had blocked again; frozen solid. I undid it, rubbed it, and put it back together. The flame flickered and then lit.

  I thought of my ice-axe buried under the ice outside the tent. I had known that it would be impossible to retrieve; Mick had told me so. I had borrowed an axe instead from Pascuale,3 an American climber on the mountain. I had picked up his spare axe the day before from Camp Two, assuring him jokingly over the radio that I would stay alive to return it. He made me promise. He was a friend and knew the risks up there. ‘Be careful’ had been his last words to me.

  Up in the tents at Camp Three we tried to get on with things quietly. Living in these close quarters, under pressure, when you are scared, tired and thirsty, is a sensitive business. My time in the Army had helped me in learning how to live with people in confined spaces like this. I had spent enough cold nights in a patrol huddled together waiting for dawn. This was much the same – only a little higher! I needed this training now as we settled down for the night, squeezed in the tent, tucked into the ledge in the ice here at 24,500 feet. The other thing the Army had taught me was about going that extra mile. About pushing yourself that little bit more, and how the finish is always just after the point at which you most want to give up. I reminded myself of this as I lay cramped between all the kit and stinking bodies. I would need that discipline more than ever before now. That extra mile; that little bit further.

  Carla, despite our advice to the contrary, had insisted on coming up with us to Camp Three. Henry at Base Camp had refused to allow her up. He knew that she was too tired. She had given her word that she would only go up with us from Camp Three if the winds died down. Henry knew that in anything but perfect conditions she would not survive. Her body was completely drained after her first attempt. The forecast would be given to us at 6.00 p.m. at Camp Three; it would decide Carla’s fate. If the winds higher up were above 40 knots, she would have to turn back.

  The radio crackled with the voice of Henry from Base Camp.

  ‘The winds are going to be rising, guys. You’ve still got a window, but the conditions are far, far from ideal. I’m sorry, Carla, but you are going to have to come down. I can’t risk you up there. It’s too dangerous,’ Henry announced. There was a long pause.

  ‘No way, no way. I’m going up. I don’t care. I’m going up,’ Carla retorted angrily. ‘You can’t make me come down. Not after I’ve come so far.’

  Henry erupted down the radio. ‘Carla, listen, we had a deal. If the winds were strong you would come down. I didn’t even want you up there but you insisted, but now the ride ends. We had a deal and you come down. That’s the end of it.’ He was worried having her loose up there.

  She burst into tears, shouting in Spanish at him. I felt for her like never before. She had given so much for this chance. And now, this close, she was being forced back. I knew what she must be feeling. I would be the same. But Henry was right, she wouldn’t make it in the winds up there. It wasn’t her fault; she had used her strength on the first attempt. She didn’t have that same strength now. It had taken her three hours more than us to reach Camp Three. If she was slow like that higher up, she would die. We all knew this and tried to comfort her in the tent.

  It slowly dawned on her that she would go no further. Her dream was ending here and it hurt. She was one of the most determined women I had ever met, and the grief now showed all over her face. She sobbed quietly to herself in front of us. She knew secretly that it was the right decision.

  We sat for the best part of an hour in silence. I noticed that my headache had now returned for the first time in ten days. I cursed it and tried to drink some more of the disgusting, lukewarm water in my bottle. I longed for something cool to drink; I swallowed an aspirin.

  Geoffrey and I were the first to leave Camp Three. We wanted to leave at different intervals to avoid any delays on the ropes. At 5.45 a.m. the two of us climbed out of the tent and began fixing our oxygen masks. It would be our first time on the mountain breathing supplementary oxygen. We had experimented in breathing the oxygen at Base Camp, but never under extreme exertion and never so high up; I wondered what difference it would make.

  We squeezed a large tank into our rucksacks, fitted the regulator and made sure the lead was free and the gauge not caught up in any straps. I hoisted the rucksack onto my back and tried to make it comfortable. It weighed me down and sat awkwardly on my shoulders. It felt four times as heavy as it had when we were testing it at Base Camp; and even then it had been an effort to lift. I shuffled again. It felt a little better.

  The balance between the effort needed to carry the heavy tanks and the benefit the oxygen gives, is a constant debate. The conclusion generally is that the benefit of the oxygen outweighs the weight, but not by much. The air above this height now becomes so thin that it is almost impossible to live. Only a very few exceptional and physiologically different people can climb free of supplementary oxygen above here. Even the majority of Sherpas use oxygen high on Everest.

  The tanks form what is known as an ‘open system’, where the regulator allows a small trickle of oxygen to flow through the mask. This amount can be adjusted to give between 1 and 4 litres of oxygen a minute. This combines with the normal air you are breathing to marginally boost the level of oxygen inhaled. But not by much. The body needs to breathe about thirty litres of air a minute during extreme exertion; if you used a closed system, of breathing compressed air, the tank would last minutes. It would be impossible to do, as you can only realistically carry one or two tanks at the most. The ‘open system’ therefore is the only real method of using supplementary oxygen up high. A trickle of oxygen mixed with normal air is all this provides.

  Generally we would climb on 2.5 litres a minute. This was deemed the most efficient rate. But even this, at these extreme heights, was hardly enough to stay
alive, let alone moving at any pace. But as they say, ‘it is just enough to do the stuff.’ But there was no scope for mistakes in this. The majority of the bodies we would encounter up above Camp Four had died because of one thing: not enough oxygen. Their bodies had slowly suffocated to death, and the lack of oxygen in their brains made them hardly even aware of what was happening.

  I double-checked that the tubes were free and not snagged up. I checked the tubes were soft and that no condensation had frozen inside them. I checked my mask was tight around my face, then carried out the same procedure with Geoffrey. Our eyes caught each other through our goggles and we knew it was time to start across to the first rope that would lead on and up the Lhotse Face, towards Camp Four, somewhere far above us.

  Within ten yards though I felt as if I was choking on my mask. I didn’t seem to be getting any air from it. It was suffocating me. I ripped it from my face gasping frantically. I hung on my harness from the Face, tubes and connections wrapped round me in a chaotic jumble. This is crazy, I thought. I tried to untangle myself. My mask swung freely beneath me. I found that I had to remove my entire pack to free everything before trying again. I checked the air-bubble gauge that told me that oxygen was flowing. It read positive. I refitted the mask and carried on.

  Five minutes later, nothing seemed to have changed. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I swore in a muffled cry, as I tried to gulp air through my mask once more. I could hardly breathe with it on. I found myself throwing my head back to get a deeper breath, but still I felt stifled by the mask. I tried to keep going but couldn’t. I stopped again and tore it from my face, gulping in the outside air.

  It was working; everything said that it was working. I couldn’t understand it. It felt as if I was trying to run a marathon uphill, with a pair of rugby socks stuck in my mouth. I was gasping without getting relief. Geoffrey stooped behind me, leaning over his axe. He was also struggling. He didn’t even look up. We were both lost in our own worlds; trying desperately to breathe.

  I replaced my mask, determined to get used to it. I knew I had to trust it. I had been told over and over to trust it. The only place that I would get life from up here was the Russian fighter pilot’s mask that covered my face. I had no choice but to keep it on.

  I continued on up, slowly but methodically, I was not going to take my mask off again. I tried to ignore the pain. The rope stretched away above me, straight up the Face.

  An hour later Geoffrey was some way behind, but I kept plodding on, three steps at a time. The ice crunched away beneath me.

  Eventually the route started to traverse across the Face. Away to my right it soared upwards to the summit of Lhotse far above. To my left the ice fell at an alarming angle straight down to the Western Cwm, 4,000 feet below. It shimmered menacingly as the sun that was now rising glistened on its blue veneer. I couldn’t afford a mistake up here now. I tried to stop my eyes looking down, and focused on the ice in front of my feet. Slowly I began to cross the Face towards the rock band that divided the Face in two.

  The Yellow Band, as it is known, is a 150-feet high stretch of sedimentary sandstone rock that was once the sea-bed of the ancient Tethys sea. As Gondwanaland and Asia had collided, the rock was driven up into the sky. Millions of years later here I was traversing towards it, now only some 4,000 feet beneath the highest point on our planet. It seemed somehow surreal, as the Band loomed closer to my left.

  At its foot, I clipped on securely to the rope that the Sherpas had fixed only two weeks earlier. I hoped it was secure; it was all the protection that I had up here now.

  I glanced up and could see the sandy, yellow rock rising into the wispy clouds that were now hovering over the Face. I knew that once over this, Camp Four was only a few hours away.

  My crampons grated eerily as they met rock for the first time on the climb. They made a screeching noise as they scraped across it. They found it hard to grip, and would only hold when they snagged on a lip in the rock. Leaning back and out from the rock, I rested on my harness. The rock and ice seemed to sweep away below as the Face above steepened.

  I turned outwards and tried to sit against the rock, with my crampons jammed into a small crevice beneath me. I leant back, desperately trying to get oxygen into my body, sucking violently into the mask. As my breathing calmed down I looked at where I had crossed. Camp Two was now but a tiny speck in the hazy distance below. I remembered how I had sat there and watched Mick and Neil climbing up where I was now. I checked my karabiner once again on the rope.

  As I cleared the steep Yellow Band, the route levelled out into a gentle traverse for 500 metres. At the end of that was the Geneva Spur that would lead up to Camp Four. My body began to feel the excitement again.

  The Geneva Spur was named by the Swiss expedition in 1952, the year preceding Hillary and Tensing’s epic first ascent. It is an anvil-shaped black rib of rock that lunges out from the ice. It rises steeply up to the edge of the South Col, the small saddle that sits between the two great peaks of Lhotse and Everest. The Geneva Spur forms the last major hurdle before the Col, the place of our final camp.

  There was a raw simplicity in what I was doing. My mind was entirely focused on every move I made; nothing else clogged my thoughts. It is this straight simplicity that I knew drew men and women to climb. Man is living to his utmost, straining everything towards one single purpose. It made me feel alive.

  I would aim to reach a point in the ice just in front of me with every few steps I took, but invariably I would be forced to stop short; my body needed to rest and get oxygen. I would lean on my axe and stare at the point a few yards in front that had eluded me, then start moving again, determined to reach it in the next bound. In this manner I slowly approached the Geneva Spur.

  I passed the point where the Lhotse route led. Up above I could see the tent where Andy and Ilgvar had rested yesterday afternoon, before their summit attempt. Far above that, I could see the tiny specks which were them struggling up for the summit. They still had a long climb ahead of them. I prayed that they would make it, and kept shuffling along.

  As I started up the Geneva Spur I could see Geoffrey below and far behind me. He seemed to be moving better now. I wanted to keep in front and pushed on. Behind him I could see the figures of the others below, Neil, Allen and Michael, moving slowly across to the Yellow Band. Carla would be on her descent now. I didn’t know whether I envied her or felt sorry for her. I pushed the thought from my mind.

  I climbed steadily up the Spur and an hour later found myself resting just beneath the lip. The Col awaited me over the top. I knew this, and longed to see the place I had heard and read so much about. The highest camp in the world at 26,000 feet, deep in the Death Zone.

  I hated the term ‘Death Zone’, it conjured up images that I knew were all too real up here. Mountaineers are renowned for playing things down, yet it had been mountaineers who had coined the phrase. I didn’t like that.

  It would be my first time in the infamous Death Zone. I wouldn’t have time now to worry about how my body would cope. For me, this was my chance.

  As I pulled the last few steps over the top of the Spur, the gradient fell away to reveal a dark shingly rock plateau. As I swivelled slowly on my crampons, they grated against the slate under them. I swore I could see all of Nepal below. I sat, stunned and alone. Slowly, blanket cloud began moving in beneath me, obscuring the lower faces of the mountain. Above these, a horizon of dark blue sky lay panned out before me. I knew I had entered another world.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ABOVE THE CLOUDS

  ‘If I go up to the heavens you are there, if I go down to the place of the dead, you are there also. If I ride the morning wind to the ends of the ocean even there your hand will guide me, your strength will support me . . . I can never be lost to your Spirit.’

  Psalm 139, vv.5–10.

  Adrenalin filled my tired limbs, I just longed now to see the Col. Two hundred metres of clambering over the shingly, black rocks and the saddle appe
ared. I knew at once that this was it.

  The South Col is a vast rocky area, the size of four rugby pitches, strewn with the remnants of old expeditions that had been here. Empty oxygen canisters lay scattered about randomly; they told a hundred tales. It was here that in 1996, in the fury of the storm, men and women had struggled to find their tents. Few had managed. Their bodies lay within metres of the flat area, many of them now partially buried beneath ice and rock. It was a sombre place; a place where many now rested eternally. A grave that many of their families could never visit.

  People talk of rubbish dumped at the Col; it is a false image. The vastness and desolation of this wild, windswept place dwarfs the few items left here. The fragments of old tents and canisters were never left intentionally, they were left in desperation. They were the only marks of men and women who had struggled frantically to save their own lives. There was an eeriness to it all.

  My impression of the Col was one of isolation. It was a place unvisited by all but those strong enough to reach it. No helicopters can reach above Camp One at the highest, let alone up here. No amount of money or technology can put a man here; only a man’s spirit could do that. I stood motionless as I surveyed the place. The wind blew in gusts over the lip of the Col and ruffled the torn canvas of the wrecked tents. A sense of excitement swept over me. I gazed in disbelief.

  Two tents, one from the Singapore expedition and the other belonging to Bernardo, stood alone in the middle of the Col. Both groups had come up the day before. The tents were now empty. The two Singapore climbers and Bernardo were somewhere above us. I wondered what they were going through right now. I thought of the Singaporean leader still at Camp Two. He would be willing his team-mates on. The whole of Singapore awaited news of this attempt. I hoped they had succeeded.