Bear Grylls Read online

  He, though, had the courage and discipline to do what others before had refused to do and ended up paying for with their lives. He got to his feet and slowly turned round. He had to retreat to the relative safety of Camp Four. His attempt was over. He had no choice. He was too alone.

  Michael had also turned back just before him. He was just too tired. He had climbed all his life and knew when it was wrong. In his own words he admits: ‘It just didn’t feel right. The sight of the lightning boded badly. I didn’t want to carry on. My body couldn’t go on. The effects of the illness were still with me. I would never have survived.’ And so another brave mountaineer turned round. It takes courage to do this. Only the three of us now remained alone at the Balcony. We still waited; we had no idea they had turned back.

  At 3.00 a.m., shivering uncontrollably and on the threshold of our ability to wait much longer, we saw the torches of the Sherpas below.

  ‘Thank God, oh man, thank you,’ I muttered wearily to myself. I knew that I wouldn’t have been able to sit motionless much more. I felt numb with cold.

  When they arrived we struggled desperately to change our tanks. This involved removing the regulators from our existing ones and putting them on the fresh canister. At Base Camp we had got this process down to a fine art. We could do it blind. Up here, in the dark and cold, it was a different game altogether.

  I removed my outer mitts to be able to grip the regulator. My hand shook with the cold. I twisted it off and tried to line it up on the new tank. My shivering became frantic and in despair I screwed it on carelessly. The screw-threads jammed. It wouldn’t budge. I swore at it out loud.

  Neil and Allen were ready by now. Allen just got up and left, heading up the ridge. I fumbled crazily. ‘Come on, damn you, come on.’

  I felt the whole situation begin to slip away from me. I was losing patience and concentration as well. We had come too far to fail now. Too far. Neil shivered next to me uncontrollably. I was holding him up. He had been ready a while now.

  ‘Come on, Bear, fucking get it working,’ he stuttered through his mask. But it was jammed – there was nothing I could do. Neil had now lost any feeling in his feet. He knew what that meant. He was getting badly frostbitten with every minute I kept him waiting. He squeezed his toes tight but only felt a numbness come over them.

  We both huddled above the tank, fumbling frantically, and then suddenly it came loose. I lined it up and tried again. This time it fitted snugly. My hands were freezing now and before tightening the regulator, I thrust them inside my down jacket to try and warm them up. Ten seconds later I tightened it all, squeezed the tank into my pack and heaved it onto my shoulders. We had lost precious minutes. We knew that if we were to have even a chance of the summit we had to get going soon.

  One of the three Sherpas who were meant to continue then suddenly stood up, turned and headed down. This wasn’t meant to happen. They should stay together as a team. What was happening? The Sherpa felt worried by the storm and the winds that were beginning to rise. They were too dangerous. He wanted to go down. There was nothing we could do.

  The other two Sherpas would continue, but they wanted to rest at the Balcony for a few minutes. We couldn’t argue. Neil and I turned and headed up after Allen onto the ridge that would eventually lead us to the South Summit.

  Those first few minutes after we climbed over the Balcony Ledge onto the ridge, I began to warm up. I felt the blood now reach into my feet again and my legs lost the stiffness that the wait had caused. My breathing reached that level again where you just heave aggressively into your mask. My eyes stared at the snow in front of me. I noticed that it was getting lighter and that the storm had passed. As we were drawing closer it seemed as if now the mountain was beginning to open her arms to us. I felt an energy now that I had not had before. I pushed the pace on.

  I moved past Neil and mumbled to him that I had to keep moving. The faster pace was keeping me warm. He nodded slowly and tiredly at me as I went past. His head was low and he looked deeply exhausted. But I knew he wouldn’t stop, he was too close and he knew it. Today was 26 May, the day that his father had died some fifteen years earlier, when Neil was only nineteen. The fact that this early dawn at 28,000 feet Neil was struggling with every sinew, one last time, to achieve what had so cruelly eluded him now twice, was all the more poignant. His father somewhere up above would be cheering him on; of that I was certain. He leant over his axe, heaving into his mask. I knew, though, that he would not turn round, so carried on.

  The energy that I was experiencing worried me. I thought that perhaps I was getting too much oxygen; maybe my regulator was giving me 3.5 litres per minute not 2.5. If that was the case then I would soon find my tank empty. My mind raced with the possibilities. I checked the gauge again. It firmly read 2.5. It had to be right. The memory of what happened to Mick loomed in my mind. All I could do was hope that it wouldn’t fail; not now, not so close.

  After an hour on the ridge we hit this deep drift snow again. I cursed. The energy that I had felt before began to trickle from my limbs with each step forward. I could see Allen just ahead, floundering in the powder. He seemed to be making no upward progress as he slid back down into the deep snow beneath him. I looked up and the Face just soared away above. It was drift snow as far as I could see.

  To our right, the Face dropped sharply away. The gradient was extreme. Nothing lay between us and the plains of Tibet, 8,000 feet below. I looked back down at my feet.

  I hardly even noticed the magic of the views up here, of the entire Himalaya stretched below us, bathed in the pre-dawn glow. I didn’t have the energy. My mind and focus were entirely directed on what my legs were doing. Summoning up the resolve to heave one’s thigh out of the deep powder and throw it a step forward was all that seemed to matter. An anger filled my head each time the snow would sink up to my waist. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do this for much longer.

  Somewhere beneath the South Summit we found the ropes that had been put in on the team’s first attempt. I clutched at them eagerly. They posed some vague sense of comfort as I stooped and clipped in. I clipped a jumar on to the rope as well; it would stop me slipping back. Exhausted, I allowed myself to rest. The harness took my weight and I sat slumped in a ball, breathing. I closed my eyes.

  As we approached the South Summit, the wind began to pick up. I noticed it at once as it swirled around my feet. It howled and whipped the surface snow up into a frenzy.

  Noel Odell, one of the climbers who had attempted Everest in the pre-war years, spoke of the sight above here like this: ‘the mighty summit seemed to look down with cold indifference and howl derision in windy gusts.’ Nothing seemed to have changed in seventy years. I kept moving slowly, driven by the knowledge that the South Summit wasn’t far.

  In many ways those last few metres to the South Summit were the hardest of my life. I wasn’t close enough to feel the adrenalin of being near the top. Instead, though, I just felt this deep pounding fatigue that reduced me to two steps at a time. It was all I could manage.

  Neil was soon close behind me again. I had to keep moving. Just get to the South Summit, was all I thought, just get there. You’re so close. Allen in front had already staggered over the snow lip and reached it. But still it never seemed to arrive.

  I felt every ounce of energy now being sucked from my body. I knew that this is what it must be like to drown. My body, more than ever before, screamed at me in desperation to turn around. I moaned out loud for the first time, as if I was venting the voice that told me to turn back. I couldn’t, not now.

  In a drunken stupor, barely aware of anything around me, I collapsed in a small hollow on the leeward side of the South Summit, at 28,700 feet. My head leant back on the ice behind me, my eyes were tightly closed. My head then fell forward and I began to hyperventilate. My body desperately needed more oxygen; but all I had was the 2.5 litres that trickled past my nostrils every minute. It wasn’t enough, but it was all I had, and the tank was getting lo
wer by the second.

  Over the top of us, arctic hurricane-force winds blew like I had never experienced before. They seemed to howl as the three of us sat huddled together. I was worried that I was low on oxygen. I couldn’t reach the tank to check the gauge, it was buried in my pack; it was too cold to start fumbling around just to confirm what we should already know. I should be able to calculate it. I tried to work out the mathematics in my head. The thin air robbed me, though, of the ability to do these basic sums. I gave up, frustrated at how slow my mind was working. I would have to take the gamble. It was a chance that I had to take. I hoped it was the right decision.

  Ahead I could see the final ridge and the Hillary Step that lined the route to the true summit. Only 250 feet higher above this Step was the place of dreams.

  Snow was pouring from the top, as these winds raced over it. A vortex of cloud hovered below the leeward face, protected from the wind.

  Staring at it, my body just felt empty, all energy had been ripped from me. The ridge was a haze in front of me. Yet somehow in the few minutes that we lay there, in the midst of all that sought to stop us, I felt a peace. Something deep inside knew that I could do it. I would somehow find the energy. The more I looked at the ridge the more I felt this energy flooding back. Hillary once said that the mountains gave him strength; until this point I don’t think that I had really understood this. But lying there, at my weakest moment, I found the mountain giving me a strength I had never experienced before.

  The final ridge is only about 400 feet long, but it snakes precariously along the most exposed stretch of climb on this planet. On either side, down sheer faces, lie Tibet to the east and Nepal to the west. Steep granite rock lines the Nepalese side, and snow cornices protrude over the other. Shuffling carefully along the knife-edge ridge, over the tops of intimidating snow ledges, we began to make our way towards the Hillary Step; this was all that barred our way from the top. The strength seemed to be staying with me as we moved slowly along. I was feeling it like I had never done before.

  I knew exactly where I would see him, I had read the accounts of Rob’s tragic death up here many times. They proved right. Slumped and half hidden by the passing of two years, his frozen body sat in its immortal grave. Since that final appeal from his wife over the radio, where Rob had tried with all his being to stand up and climb these ten feet over the South Summit, he had sat here. Time up here stands still. The cold ensures this. All he had to do was manage those meagre ten feet over the lip in front of him; he knew that from then on it was all downhill. The exhaustion and fatigue at this altitude had robbed him, though, of his ability to do this. He had died where he now sat, only ten feet to my left. I let my gaze return to the ridge under me. I didn’t know what to think.

  I knew that we would see various corpses up here, yet somehow nothing had prepared me for the sight. Everyone knows the risks involved: it’s big boys’ games that demand you play by big boys’ rules; I knew this, yet the stark reality shook me. It is hard to describe. Rob’s death had been only one of many that day, yet the proximity at which I now climbed by him cut right into me. The sight lingered in my mind as we carried on along. Concentrate now, come on, Bear, concentrate. Strangely, though, I noticed that I wasn’t scared by the sight of him. Instead, I felt a quiet determination to be different – to stay alive.

  The rope was being whipped by the wind in front of me as I shuffled along. I thrust my ice-axe into the cornice to my right to steady myself. Suddenly the snow just gave way beneath it. My ice-axe just shot through the cornice. I stumbled to regain my balance; it should have been solid. I slowly realized that we were walking literally on the lip of a ledge of frozen water – with Tibet 8,000 feet directly below. I could see the rocky plains through the hole where the snow had been. I placed my ice-axe tentatively a little lower down and tugged on my sling that secured me to the rope. It held firm.

  At the end of the ridge we leant over our axes and rested. The Hillary Step now stood above us. This forty-feet ice wall was all that hid the summit from view. At sea-level this would be a relatively pleasant ice-climb that you would happily do on a sunny midwinter’s day in the Lake District; but where we were now, cowering from the wind, at almost 29,000 feet above the Lake District, it was becoming our final and hardest test. A test that would result in whether we would join the ranks of those who have seen in awe what lies over the lip ahead. If so, we would become only the 31st and 32nd Britons to have ever done this. The ranks were small but exclusive. My heart burned more than ever to be one of them.

  I remembered the last lip in the Icefall where I had felt my legs turn to jelly. It had worried me at the time, in case the same thing happened up here. If my legs failed me under the narcosis of high altitude, I would be powerless to fight it. I tried to dispel the thought as we rested for a few more seconds. We had to start up it soon. It was the same vertical gradient as the lip on the Icefall, only now so much higher. I struggled to stand and clipped on to the first rope. I looked weakly up above me.

  As I moved laboriously and clumsily up the ice and found the first small ledge, I leant in close and tried to rest. My goggles were plastered against my face as the mask pushed into me. Ahead and to my right, I could see a cluster of ropes protruding from the ice. They were old ones from past years. They were bunched in a tangled mess. I tried to focus my mind on which was the correct rope. My brain was working so slowly.

  You believe that your mind is sharp and alert until you have to actually test it. The ropes confused me. I couldn’t understand why my mind couldn’t discern and operate normally. I shut and opened my eyes in an attempt to focus.

  Only a year previously the slumped and frozen body of a climber was found hanging by his abseiling device from these ropes. It was the body of Bruce Herrod, the British climber with the South African team who had never returned from the summit in 1996. Nobody knew what had happened. The truth was not known until a year later, when he was found here in the ropes. He had been descending down but had clipped into the wrong rope. As they began to bunch up and become entangled, he lacked the energy or mental capacity to do anything. He died as he was – swinging with the wind from his harness, trapped in a jumble of ropes. He had been cut loose as they found him. The ropes now bunched in front of me were the only reminder of him. I reached for a clear line.

  As I heaved myself over the final lip, I strained to pull myself clear of the edge. I unclipped whilst still crouching, looking down at the snow around me. The line was now clear for Neil to come up. I lifted my head forward and stared.

  Only 200 metres away, along a gentle, easing slope, lay the crest of the summit that I had dreamt of for so long. A wave of adrenalin flooded through my veins. I could feel this surge of strength. I had never felt so strong and yet so weak all at the same time. I got to my feet without meaning to and started staggering towards the tiny, distant cluster of prayer flags. Gently flapping in the breeze, on the crest of a snow cornice, these flags marked the true summit – the place of dreams.

  I found it ironic that the last part of this immense climb should also be the flattest. Beneath here were thousands and thousands of feet of treacherous ice and snow, yet here it was a gentle slope almost beckoning us up to the top.

  However many of these pathetic, desperate shuffles I made, the summit never seemed to arrive. It never appeared to get any closer. I tried to count the steps as I moved. Come on, just do four, I would feebly tell myself, yet by two I always seemed to lose track of where I was. My counting became lost in this haze of weariness. I now breathed in gulps like a wild animal, in an attempt to literally devour the oxygen that trickled from my mask. Slowly the summit loomed a little nearer.

  As I drew now closer, my eyes welled up with tears. As I staggered those last few feet, I felt as if I was pulling all my emotions of the last year in a sledge behind me. Weary and broken I was slowly getting closer to the small place that had captured my imagination since I was a boy. Those last 100 metres were undoubtedly the l
ongest of my life as they crept slowly by beneath me. Yet eventually at 7.22 a.m. on the morning of 26 May, with tears creeping down my cheeks inside my goggles, the summit of Mount Everest opened her arms and welcomed me. It was as if she now considered me somehow worthy of this place. My pulse raced; and in a vacant haze, I suddenly found myself standing on top of the world.

  Allen embraced me, mumbling excitedly into his mask. We stood there, all our differences seemed to have vanished; we were here together. It was all that mattered. I turned and could see Neil staggering towards me, stumbling with exhaustion. I beckoned him on as he drew nearer and nearer.

  As he approached, the wind mysteriously began to die away as the sun rose slowly over the hidden land of Tibet. The mountains below were being bathed in a crimson red. A magic was in the air.

  As Neil arrived, he knelt down and crossed himself. He had never shown a faith before, but I had always seen it in him; it inexplicably just somehow showed. Here at 29,035 feet above sea-level, with our masks off to save our precious oxygen, Neil and I hugged as brothers. This early dawn was now the anniversary of his father’s death and I kind of knew that this moment was meant to be.

  I got to my feet and slowly began to look around. My eyes were ablaze. I swore that I could see halfway round the world.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BORROWED TIME

  ‘There are certain places that are rarely ever seen; and in those you will find a special sort of magic.’

  Nineteenth-century Indian Missionary