Bear Grylls Page 23

  We had agreed beforehand to share Bernardo’s tent. I found it and climbed in slowly. At this height everything happens in a strange form of slow motion. The effect of the thin air makes people move like spacemen. Slowly and deliberately I shifted inside and removed my pack and oxygen tank. I’ll lie down for a second, I thought. I fell back in a heap.

  I was woken suddenly by the sound of Bernardo returning. I still had my pack on. I sat up wearily as he peered into his tent. He smiled, his face looked tired but radiant. I didn’t have to ask if he had reached the summit, his eyes said it all.

  ‘Beautiful, Oso. Beautiful.’ Bernardo repeated the words again and again, in a dreamy voice. I admired his strength. He had done it. We huddled together in the tent. He seemed so alive. Much more so than me. I smiled at the thought.

  The two Singapore climbers also returned. They too had been successful. I tried to imagine the jubilation of the rest of their team back at Base Camp. Soon Singapore would be celebrating the country’s first ascent and rightly so; these two climbers had risked and given their all. They collapsed in their tents. Unlike Bernardo, their exhaustion was written all over them as they literally staggered the last few yards to their tent and disappeared. They would leave the South Col tomorrow; a triumphant, drained pair.

  Bernardo stayed twenty minutes with me and then left. Adrenalin was carrying him. He wanted to return to Camp Two that afternoon. Only a man like Bernardo, born and bred in the Andes, a climber and guide all his life, with two previous attempts on Everest behind him, could do this. He left the tent with a big smile.

  ‘It’s all yours, Oso. Vaya con Dios.’ The same words he had said almost six weeks earlier.

  Two hours later Neil and Allen arrived. They had overtaken Geoffrey and Michael. The stronger seemed to be shining now. Neil shook my arm excitedly. We were here at the Col together. That togetherness gave me strength.

  Geoffrey and Michael also soon arrived with four Sherpas. Three of them would climb with us to the summit, and one would come with us as far as the Balcony Ledge. They would help us take a spare oxygen canister up to this point. There, we would need to replace our canisters with a fresh tank for the final part of the summit bid. The plan was that this fresh tank would last all the way to the summit and back to the Balcony. As we then came down, with our tanks getting low after ten hours’ use, we would be able to collect our half-empty ones previously cached at the Balcony, and carry on down the last leg to Camp Four. It didn’t leave much margin for error.

  As they arrived they informed me that Graham, an Everest summiteer in his own right, had turned round 300 feet above Camp Three. He had felt too weakened by the illness that we had both had, and knew from experience that he would never have the energy to reach the summit. He had headed down after Carla, dejected. He had given so much. But it wasn’t his time.

  We both had the same illness, but somehow I was still here. What did he know about the next stage, that I didn’t? I pushed the thought aside and helped to put up another tent.

  The Col is a deathly place, where humans are not meant to survive. The thin air that I felt, as I removed my mask in a bid to conserve oxygen, seemed to burn my lungs like frozen fire. At this height the human body begins to deteriorate fast. It cannot recover, but instead begins to eat into its own muscle and bone in a struggle to survive. You cannot digest food and the clock continually ticks away.

  We struggled frantically to erect two more tents. The weather was worsening and we needed shelter fast.

  We pulled a tent from its stuff-sack and tried to pin it down. The wind ripped it from our groping hands and the material flapped wildly as we tried to contain it. In the confusion of wind and high altitude, what should have taken us minutes to put up, actually took us an hour and ten minutes. We got colder and more irritated as we tried to force wrong poles into the wrong slots. We had done it a thousand times, we could do it blindfolded, yet here we were floundering like drunks trying to get a tent up. My hands were getting bitterly cold.

  As we finally secured the last corner with a pile of black slab rock, the wind was roaring ferociously. A 70 m.p.h. gale was driving the clouds over the lip of the Col towards us. We huddled in the tents and waited. Waited for night to come.

  Michael, Allen and Geoffrey were in one of the larger tents, and the Sherpas were in the other. Neil and I made do with the one-man tent that Bernardo had left. We had struggled to squeeze into it, and all our kit was piled up at the windward end. The tent was missing its outer skin, and the inner had several gaping holes through which the wind raced. I tried to block them with my rucksack. The wind just whistled instead. I wriggled in an attempt to stretch my legs. We would have about nine hours to wait like this before we would leave.

  We slowly began to settle down to the odious, but essential, task of melting ice. At this height the gas burns at a much lower temperature. What took a long time before, now seemed to take for ever. Physiologically it is almost impossible to drink fast enough to stay hydrated in the Death Zone; but when it takes two hours to boil a small pot between two, the task of replenishing ever diminishing fluid levels becomes a losing battle. We thirstily sipped at the mug of hot water. What had taken so long to produce seemed to vanish in a minute. Restlessly, we began again.

  We had to be hydrated to stand a chance of surviving a period of seventeen hours of extreme climbing in the Death Zone. During that time, eating or even drinking would not be possible. Two pairs of inners and then a huge pair of outer mitts ensured that fumbling for a nibble of anything was impossible.

  As for drinking, I knew that our waterbottles, however hot when we started, and wherever they are kept, would be frozen in half an hour in these temperatures. Putting them down your front was now pointless as they would be far too inaccessible. Windsuit, down suit, then fleece, made certain of this. Up here, every bit of warm kit we carried would be worn. Fully clothed, one looks like something between an astronaut and a fighter pilot as you stagger clumsily about. Nothing up here is easy. But despite the inability to drink, still people carried one or even two waterbottles. It was force of habit. They would both quickly freeze but they are a security that no climber can comfortably leave behind.

  Sitting in the tents awaiting nightfall, I felt this deep sense of impending doom. I was already exhausted and dozy from the altitude. The thought of seventeen hours, the longest marathon of my life, weighed down by heavy oxygen tanks, terrified me. I didn’t feel strong enough. I lay there waiting, more scared of the night ahead than I had ever been.

  I knew that all our hard work was for this next twenty-four hours, but still I just wished it would pass away. I tried to convince myself of all that lay the other side of it. Home, families . . . Shara; but even all my memories seemed strangely distant up here. Maybe they felt the same about me. I wondered who really cared right now. I reached for my mask and breathed slowly. I would allow myself five minutes breathing on it. It would be no use reaching nightfall and having no energy to move. I gave myself this treat every half-hour or so.

  The lethargy one feels at this height is extraordinary. The lack of oxygen slows the body down to a crawl. Laziness just fills your limbs. You just can’t be bothered. Just don’t care. That’s the danger of this place, it creates a blind nonchalance. It took me ten minutes to turn over and reach to my left to get my pee-bottle and urinate. Everything was in slow motion. My urine came out a deep dark brown. Neil chuckled. It meant that I was losing our competition over who could rehydrate the fastest. I was still severely dehydrated and we hadn’t even begun. I grinned weakly back at him.

  ‘Let’s wait until we see yours,’ I mumbled and turned over.

  The zip of our porch was broken. It fluttered only half closed. From where I lay I could see the route ahead. It looked menacing as the wind licked across the sheer ice, picking up loose fragments of powder snow and chasing them away. I thought of all that had happened.

  I could see the place where Mick had fallen. It seemed strangely still in t
hat ice gully. He had been so lucky; or had he been protected? My mind swirled. I thought of all those brave and famous mountaineers who had sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of their dreams up here. I thought of those who hadn’t wanted to sacrifice anything, those whose lives had been cruelly robbed from them. The numbers were too many. These people were determined fighters, yet the mountain had beaten them. It confused me.

  I wondered if we would reach the top. It felt so distant; maybe we would get so close like the others, turned away empty-handed; or maybe fate would make another turn, where we would join the bitter ranks of those who never came home. I had never felt a fear of the unknown like this before. I fiddled with the pot and lay some more ice gently inside.

  On the first successful expedition here in 1953 with Hillary, they had used an extra camp above the Col, which they had placed near the Balcony. We, though, had no more camps. Experience up here had concurred that it was more effective to try to climb it all in one go from the Col. It made this last day and night horrifically long.

  In 1996, when those tragedies had struck, the entire route from the Col upwards had been roped. This year we had none, until just under the South Summit. It made the majority of this climb dangerously exposed. Ropes could not compensate for mistakes this time. Mick’s fall had shown this. It had to be perfect from here on. Errors were out of the question. It increased the pressure for us.

  It was 7.00 p.m. exactly. Half an hour to go. At 7.30 p.m. we would start the laborious task of getting dressed and ready. It would take at least an hour and a half. By the end, no parts of our body or face would be visible. We would be transformed into these bizarre cocooned figures, huddled, awaiting our fate.

  I reached into the top pouch of my rucksack and pulled out a few scrumpled pages wrapped in plastic. I had brought them just for this very moment. I unfolded them carefully and read.

  Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength: they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not grow faint. Isaiah 40, vv. 27–31.

  I felt that this was all I had up here. My God was the only person I felt who understood me now. I knew that back home my family would be strangely unaware of what I was going through. These words were my only comfort. They would ring round my head for the next night and day as I climbed.

  Darkness seemed to cover the mountain in minutes. The moon was now almost entirely hidden; we had missed the ideal full moon by over two weeks now. It made the visibility very low.

  As night came, the wind seemed eerily to die away. The tent no longer shook with the force of the gusts. The jet stream no longer roared. It seemed as if the mountain was beckoning us towards it. And like willing victims, we began the lengthy task of getting prepared.

  Halfway through the ordeal of dressing, Neil took his last piss. He was looking forward to winning the ‘clear pee competition’: the ideal way to be, before starting. He should win, he had drunk continually all afternoon. He knelt and pissed. It came out a deeper and richer brown than mine. He looked down in anger. I smiled.

  ‘I think that concludes the event, Neil. Winner’s prize is the last swig of the mug,’ I mumbled with relish. Neil laughed. I swigged.

  Twenty minutes later we sat squashed together in the tent, hidden under a mass of down and fur. I had put a fresh battery in my headtorch; I would need it. In the cold, batteries last a tenth of their normal time. I fitted it round my fleece hat and switched it on. The beam flashed brightly as it darted around. We crawled slowly out. It was time.

  We had decided to leave at 9.00 p.m. intentionally. It was much earlier than people normally left. Our forecast, though, had promised strong winds higher up. These were reckoned to increase during the next day. We wanted, therefore, to do as much of our climbing at night, before the winds got any worse. On top of this, was a desire just to get going. The wait disturbed me. I wanted it all to start or end, but not to linger. I fidgeted nervously with the mask over my face.

  Geoffrey, Allen and Michael emerged from their tents. They heaved the tanks onto their backs and moved slowly towards us. It was almost impossible to recognize who was who. The only sound was of their crampons scraping across the rock under them.

  The Sherpa tent was still all closed up. Neil hurried them. They mumbled at him. They were tired. They said that they would leave in a few minutes. They told us to go on; they would follow behind. We didn’t argue.

  We turned towards the Face some 300 metres in front, and started moving. Someone’s crampon pierced an old gas bottle. It hissed violently. No one even looked at it. There was something mystical about the five of us moving slowly across the Col. We must have seemed like shadows being drawn towards the darkness. Soon the tents were invisible behind us in the night.

  As we reached the ice, the gradient steepened dramatically. We bent lower into the slope and moved steadily up, our headtorches swaying slowly as they lit up the ground in front of our feet. Our world became that light. It showed us where to kick our crampons and showed us where to place our ice-axe. The light was all we knew.

  As the time passed the group spread out. It was natural. You can’t afford to wait for everyone. Not up here. Each of you is fighting your own private war for survival. Your own private war in your mind as to why you keep going.

  The group naturally divided into two. Allen, Neil and I led the way, and Michael and Geoffrey followed behind. They both soon fell way back. After two hours, as the three of us perched on a small lip of ice, we looked down below. The two lights of Geoffrey and Michael seemed distant and small. The Face here seemed steeper than anywhere else on the mountain. We were still dangerously without rope. I dug my crampons in, hoped they would hold, and leant back against the ice.

  ‘Are you scared?’ Allen asked me quietly. They were the only words any of us had spoken so far. The words seemed faint through his mask.

  ‘Yes, a little,’ I replied, ‘but not as scared as I would be if I could see the angle of this Face,’ I added, peering out into the black. It was true. It was too dark to see the danger; all you could see was the intensity of the snow and ice, lit brightly by your torch in front of you. We stood and turned into the Face again and carried on up.

  As we climbed I seemed to lose myself in this surreal world of torchlight. Two steps then a rest. Was my grip secure? I shuffled. Neil and Allen were only yards from me, but somehow we were each alone. It was the most lonely work I had ever done. I clung to their heels even when my body said rest. I didn’t want to lose them. They were all I had up here.

  At midnight we came across this deep powder, drift snow. We hadn’t expected this. It drained our reserves as we floundered about in it. Each step we took forward, our feet would slide back in the loose snow. It took three steps just to make the ground of one. Snow filled my mask and gloves, and my goggles began to steam up.

  I swore to myself. Where the fuck is the Balcony? It must be soon. I looked up and the ice and rock ledges disappeared above into darkness. I shook my head. I knew I was tiring.

  For the next two hours, I resigned myself to the fatigue. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t swear when snow filled my goggles, or as I slid backwards; I wouldn’t swear when the lip ahead was another false horizon. I just kept following and forgot everything.

  At 1.00 a.m. we came over one more ledge and collapsed in the snow of the Balcony. A sense of excitement refilled my body. We sat now, as high as Lhotse. We were now at 27,700 feet above sea-level. I turned down my oxygen to 1 litre a minute as we weren’t moving, and waited. I lay back against the snow and closed my eyes. It was to be a long wait.

  We had to wait for the Sherpas to arrive. They were bringing spare oxygen canisters. We would swap our half-empty ones for fresh tanks. Those should then last to the summit and back to the Balcony. It would give us about ten hours to complete the round trip. The time factor up here was your oxygen. If you weren’t going to
make the summit and back in that time, you had to have the self-discipline to turn around. But discipline can get blurred when the summit is in sight; it is why people die.

  The three of us sat huddled in the snow and waited for the Sherpas, Geoffrey and Michael to arrive. It was bitterly cold, a deep, chilling cold. It was – 45°C.

  I curled into a ball and tried to keep warm. My toes began to feel numb even when I moved them.

  At 2.00 a.m. there was still no sign. None of us talked. We buried ourselves in our own worlds, trying to fight the cold and the likelihood of frostbite. On such a small flow of oxygen, frostbite comes easily. I wiggled my toes again and held my hands close to my chest. ‘Come on.’

  Suddenly the entire sky lit up before us, the mountains flashed as if in daylight, then disappeared again. I looked up sharply, then looked at Neil. The lightning flashed across the horizon once more and the thunder then rippled through the valleys below.

  This shouldn’t be here, I thought, what’s going on?

  Seconds later the sky flashed again. It was an electric storm. It was moving up through the valleys. We sat some 5,000 feet above it. I had never seen anything like it in my entire life. I stared, open-eyed in disbelief. We looked at each other nervously and knew what it meant.

  If that came up towards us it would be fatal. It would turn the mountain into a raging mass of snow and wind. ‘It can’t come over us. It mustn’t,’ I mumbled.

  Unbeknown to us three, huddled into the snow at the Balcony, Geoffrey and Michael were also fighting a battle on the slopes way below us.

  Geoffrey was having problems with his oxygen set. The flow wasn’t running properly. It choked him and his pace slowed drastically. Alone, and separated from Michael, he moved tentatively. He turned to see what the flashes were. The storm below shocked him. He struggled on but soon realized it was futile. He would never make it at this pace. He faced the frightening possibility that he might have to retreat from the mountain. He sat and tried to think, his mind swirling in indecision.