Death Zone Read online

  Al, a member of the high-altitude elite, was in his element, catching up with old friends. He knew climbers from many of the other expeditions and spent long hours swapping news of who had climbed what, by which route, and who had died since they last met. On the occasions I could listen in on these conversations, they always fascinated me; serious high-altitude mountaineers discuss avalanches, falls and ferocious storms in the same matter-of-fact way that normal mortals discuss the football results. A death here. A camp obliterated there. Fatalities are reported with the same sense of inevitability that casualties are reported from the front-line of a war; the news digested with the barest nod of the head, or a raised eyebrow.

  Inside they must be wondering when their turn will come.

  The rest of us made contacts at our own pace, lured into rival camps by the gravitational pull of freshly ground coffee and the aroma of newly baked bread … or in Sundeep’s case perhaps by the discovery that the Indian expedition had two pretty girls on board. Each camp had its own idiosyncrasies, as we quickly discovered. In the Norwegian camp, an ingenious diesel-powered heater warmed the team members while they tinkered endlessly with their satellite fax, munching on dried fish and strips of reindeer meat.

  In the camp of the Indian expedition, the tents were like Mongolian yurts, the members sitting cross-legged on exotic carpets imported from Delhi. Visiting it, you felt as if you had stumbled into the domain of a wandering Moghul king. The Indian leader was Mohindor Singh, a high-ranking official in the Indo-Tibetan border police, from which ranks he had formed his team. With thirty-nine members, Singh was in charge of a huge expedition and his logistics (and therefore his logistical problems) were on a far grander scale than ours. Nevertheless he attacked them with military efficiency and within days he had his members setting out up the glacier to establish advance base camp.

  My favourite ‘other home’ belonged to the Catalans, six climbers from Girona in the north of Spain. What their mess tent lacked in structure (it was constructed mostly from plastic sheeting), it more than compensated for in the warmth of the welcome and the excellence of its coffee. They had thought carefully about their food; a large ham was hanging from the roof, and a deliciously pungent cheese stood in pride of place on the table.

  The Catalans were, like the Russians, attempting a more difficult and more avalanche-threatened route than our own proposed line. Instead of turning left up the East Rongbuk glacier, they planned to carry on to the eastern side of the North Col where they would establish advance base near ‘Tilman’s camp’. Assisted by just three Sherpas, they hoped to ascend the difficult ice face from there to the Col and then continue up the North Ridge. With so little support it was an ambitious proposal even though several of their team had considerable 8,000-metre experience.

  ‘I think we need more Sherpas,’ one of the Catalan climbers confided in me. I could only agree. They left base camp before us, taking everything with them as they had neither the resources nor the manpower to keep a permanent camp at the foot of the Rongbuk.

  The deficiencies of our own mess tent became clear as each day passed. With no heater and just a single flimsy layer of canvas, it was extremely cold, particularly at night. Dressing for dinner meant putting on thermal gloves and outer gloves, along with (as a minimum) a down jacket or down suit.

  Roger quickly became the focus of our early conversations in the mess tent; we were endlessly fascinated by his job.

  ‘How safe are those jumbos?’

  ‘What’s the nearest you’ve got to crashing?’

  ‘Any babies born on board?’

  ‘Can you loop the loop in a 747?’

  Roger patiently answered these and more for hours on end, his supper often untouched and congealing in front of him. From that point on, Brian took the mickey out of our aviation obsession ruthlessly. Whenever there was a lull in the conversation he would fire a question at our resident pilot:

  ‘The Messerschmit 109, Roger, is it true what they say about the stall rate?’ or ‘Ever shot down a Junkers, Rog?’

  At the end of each meal I would retreat to the comparative warmth of our two-man tent and massage my frozen feet back to life.

  Next door to our own mess tent was the Sherpa canteen. If ours was the ‘officer’s mess’, theirs was very much a working men’s club, sensibly annexed to the cook tent so that the maximum heat was retained. Much has been written about the ‘us’ and ‘them’ of eating arrangements such as this, but Sherpas are far too wise to be done over in matters of comfort. Their mess tent was warmer and far more sociable than our own, with an occasional barrel of alcoholic ‘chang’ on hand to keep out the cold.

  Our two base camp cooks were Dhorze and Dawa, ever smiling, ever busy, ever chopping onions with the chipped blades of machetes in the dark smoky confines of their kitchen. Like all cooks they had their good days and their bad days, but somehow their bad days seemed to outnumber the good. They were far better company than they were chefs de cuisine, but no one had the heart to tell them, we liked them far too much.

  ‘I’ll have you know that Dhorze spent a week in the kitchen of a major Kathmandu hotel,’ Simon said grandly one night, alarmed by the rising tide of complaints after just a few days at base camp.

  ‘Cleaning out the bins?’ was someone’s cruel response.

  On soups they were at least consistent, producing cauldrons of steaming broth pepped up with ginger and the prolific use of garlic. Their main courses were geared for bulk intakes of carbohydrate with huge mounds of rice, pasta and dumplings, garnished with boiled cabbage and strangely scented lentils. It always looked all right. It just didn’t taste very good.

  Sometimes what the eye beheld was not backed up by what the taste bud revealed. Strips of cabbage could taste like boiled soap, mild-looking lentils could attack the tongue in a searing rage of chili pepper, and even the humble baked bean could leave the victim with a lingering aftertaste of cheap aftershave, like gargling with Brut 33. Inevitably, the craving for more familiar fare was hard to resist, and the bottles of HP sauce and tomato ketchup were soon in strong demand.

  ‘Got any spam fritters?’ was Al’s daily request.

  ‘Eggs! Give me eggs, God damn you!’ was Brian’s.

  Still, we cheered heartily every time the food was brought into the mess tent, unwilling to disappoint our cooks. Later, back in our own tent and feeling faintly traitorous, Kees and I dined on Emmenthal cheese and oatcakes, rounded off with Bendicks Bittermints and a splash of Courvoisier brandy from my personal food supply. Others, like Tore and Brian, who had no supplies of their own, found they could not stomach much of the food and so ate badly. They said little at the time, but the complaints would become a lot more vocal before the expedition was over.

  Occasionally, when mutterings reached a fever pitch, Simon would graciously declare the next meal a ‘Wayfarer’ meal, and let us loose on the prepacked foil sachets of ready-cooked western food. He timed these announcements perfectly, basking in the tidal wave of gratitude like a headmaster who has just announced an unexpected school holiday, and cunningly diverting attention from the other minor grievances which fester away on all expeditions. ‘Wayfarer’ days were eagerly awaited by all, and were the only times I saw Brian eat anything like a substantial meal.

  While we bickered about the food in the ‘officer’s mess’, the Sherpas were consulting with the Lamas of the nearby Rongbuk monastery to determine an auspicious date for the puja ceremony. This was fixed for the morning of 14 April; we would leave for the trek to advance base camp the following day.

  The preparations for the puja ceremony had begun in Kathmandu with the purchase of strings of prayer flags paid for with a 200-rupee donation from each team member. At base camp, the Sherpas built a two-metre-high stone cairn just outside the camp and collected the food and drink which would be consumed at the ceremony. Kees, Ned and myself would not be able to participate in the main part of the event, because we intended to film it, so I donated my precious l
itre of Paddy’s Irish whiskey in the hope that the gods would excuse our absence.

  After breakfast, the entire expedition gathered by the cairn, dressed in full high-altitude regalia complete with the heavy down suits and wind layer. Crampons, ice-axes and harnesses were also brought along and placed against the cairn to be blessed along with canned foods, biscuits, and bowls of rice. It was a colourful scene, played out beneath a perfect azure sky; one of the clearest days we had seen, with no more than the lightest of winds.

  I had expected the Lama to be a venerable old man in an orange robe, but in fact the ceremony was led by a young Nepali dressed in a brightly-coloured fleece and a pair of expensive sunglasses. He sat reading from a prayer-book as incense was burned, lifting the prayers to the gods.

  Just as we were preparing to film, our DAT sound recorder started to misbehave, affected perhaps by the sub-freezing temperatures in which it was kept. Kees spent several frustrating minutes trying to reanimate it but it stubbornly refused to transport the tape. He changed the battery and tried again. Still nothing. I was starting to sweat inside my down suit: the puja ceremony was one of the film sequences we could not afford to miss.

  Ned started to shoot mute pictures with the 16mm Aaton and I ran to the tent to get the standby digital camera, forgetting that my short sprint would leave me gasping for air at this altitude.

  When I returned, we recorded the sound on the back-up camera, keeping fingers crossed that the result would still be in sync. It was the first serious equipment failure, and it did nothing for my peace of mind. I was already haunted by the fear that we would have a camera failure high on the mountain, but the possibility of our gear giving up at base camp had foolishly never occurred to me.

  Despite the problems, Ned managed to shoot the puja ceremony through to the climax when the prayer flags were unfurled and attached to the specially-built cairns. The group stood together for the final chants, throwing handfuls of rice and Tsampa towards the flagpole with a rousing cry. Then the whiskey and beers were broken out, and toasts drunk to the success of the expedition.

  It was an auspicious start to the expedition, unlike the puja for Simon’s previous attempt at Everest, where the central flagpole had broken in the wind just seconds after it was raised (an ill omen, understandably greeted with horror by Sherpas and members alike).

  ‘To Everest!’ Brian raised his glass, ‘We come not to conquer you but to befriend you! Chomolungma!’

  Then we retired to our tents. At 5,000 metres, a single glass of whiskey was enough to wipe us out for the day. I dozed fitfully, visited by nightmares in which our cameras suffered horrible fates; spontaneously jumping out of packs and sliding into crevasses, tumbling down seracs and getting crunched under the feet of stampeding yaks.

  When I woke up, I found a real nightmare in progress: mad professor Kees with a voltmeter and screwdriver in hand, and with one of the back-up cameras and the DAT sound recorder in pieces around the tent. Odd screws, tightly-coiled springs and other crucial-looking components were strewn around him in the most alarming fashion.

  ‘Kees! What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Oh just tinkering.’

  ‘Tinkering? If you screw those machines up, Kees, we’ve got no bloody film! What the hell’s that, for example?’

  I pointed to a printed circuit board from the DAT which seemed to have fallen into one of Kees’s climbing boots. Kees looked wounded.

  ‘Oh. Not quite sure. But I think it has a problem.’

  Kees has always been the master of the vague response and under pressure he sometimes clams up completely. He gave me one of his ‘trust me’ looks, and resumed his tinkering, pushing the metal probes deep into the guts of the DAT machine like a back-street surgeon performing a dodgy transplant operation.

  ‘And what’s wrong with the camera?’

  “The microphone is falling off. I’m just removing the plastic casing and reassembling it.’

  ‘I think I’d better go for a walk.’

  Unable to watch, I left Kees muttering over his voltmeter and went to the Catalan camp to see if their ham was finished. When I returned, he had both pieces of equipment working perfectly. ‘Oh ye of little faith’ was his final word on the subject before wandering across the moraine to celebrate with a bath in the freezing cold river.

  It was the last chance for a wash; our trek to advance base camp would begin the following morning.

  5

  At dawn on 15 April the yaks were herded reluctantly into huddles as we took down our tents and packed up the equipment ready to leave. From their depressed air and collective bad temper, it was pretty clear the yaks knew what was coming: the trek to advance base camp is ‘hard drill’, as Simon described it, particularly if you are a yak carrying a fifty-kilogramme load.

  In theory the yak herders and their beasts work on a price structure laid out by the Tibetan Mountaineering Association. To read their literature, the hiring and organisation of yaks sounds no more difficult than, say, hiring a ‘redcap’ baggage porter at Heathrow. In practice, the scene at base camp on the morning of our departure was gloriously chaotic, with chief sirdar Nga Temba besieged from all sides by yak herders objecting to the size of the loads, and haggling for bonuses.

  Tibetan yak herders are not coy; they do not find it awkward to express their displeasure like many westerners do. Negotiations are carried out with a dazzling array of scowls, ugly pouts, and murderous glances. Nga Temba remained calm, which seemed to infuriate them more. Soon, he was besieged by a jostling, yelling mob, with no sign of a single pack being loaded.

  Just as it seemed violence was inevitable, a Tibetan negotiator in a brightly-coloured silk hat emerged from the TMA building and tried to pacify the yak herders. None of us had any idea what he said, but his words whipped them into an even bigger frenzy. Individual loads were now under discussion as the mob moved from one pile of equipment to another. Boxes were lifted and rejected as too heavy, packs were tested and thrown contemptuously aside.

  Then, bewilderingly, the mood abruptly changed. The arguments finished and the yak herders split into groups to load their animals. Agreement had been reached and everyone was happy, with not the slightest indication that they had been close to a riot just minutes before.

  We ate an early lunch, and then left ahead of the main body of the expedition, to film the team members and yaks together as they came towards us up the Rongbuk glacier. We had three or four false starts, with a film jam in the 16mm camera, but Ned pulled out his spare magazine in the nick of time and got a wonderful series of telephoto shots, through the shimmer of radiation haze. I operated the DAT sound, recording the eerie whistling of the yak herders echoing off the walls of the valley.

  After leaving the broad moraine plateau the track takes the left hand, eastern side of the valley, and funnels into a constricted gulley between the glacier and the crumbling slopes. These shed a continuous fusillade of runaway stones and boulders whose clattering approach sets the nerves on edge. In the gulley there was ample evidence of big rock slides, where football-pitch-sized sections of the valley walls had given way and slumped down to the glacier ice.

  Because we were one of the first teams to leave base camp, the trail was barely broken through the snow. The yaks had a hard time of it, frequently stumbling to their knees or getting stuck in the compacted narrow path through the ice. The herders had to maintain an almost constant barrage of shouts and yells to encourage them to go ahead.

  ‘Huioy!’ was one of the mildly threatening shouts, but the one to clear a really bad yak jam was ‘Irriaaaargh!’ – a terrifying roar which almost always shifted the blockage. Where words failed, a substantial rock was lobbed at the yak’s rump. That never failed.

  The Rongbuk glacier is a huge mass of ice but so much rubble lies on it that the ice itself is barely visible on the lower stretches. Only after an hour of trekking does it start to reveal crevasses and distant ice pinnacles, but they too are stained dark grey from the gl
acial dust.

  Three hours after leaving base camp, we began the steep climb up the spur which marks the beginning of the East Rongbuk glacier. Brian pointed out to me how easy it had been for Shipton to miss the significance of the narrow valley on the survey expedition of 1922.

  At a casual glance the valley gives no clue that a huge glacier system lies behind it, so cunningly does it conceal its true significance. The mouth is little more than an innocent cleft in the valley wall, when seen in scale with the rest of the landscape. A pathetic trickle of water (it is more a brook than a stream) runs out of the defile down towards the Rongbuk glacier. There is no sign of any ice, and anyone looking up the valley from the Rongbuk sees nothing more than an unpromising stony ravine.

  No wonder Shipton got it wrong; he dismissed exploring the valley in favour of continuing down the Rongbuk proper on the ‘direct’ route which leads straight to Everest. Now I could see the situation for myself, I was not at all surprised by his decision – the direct route doesn’t seem just the obvious option, it seems the only one.

  The orientation of the East Rongbuk valley is another confusion. It looks as if it leads away from Everest. Trekking into it, there are thus two surprises, firstly that the glacier system contained within it is every bit as significant as the Rongbuk itself. The second is that the East Rongbuk valley and its glacier curve unexpectedly in an elegant southerly arc, right to the foot of the North Col. The mystery of why so little water apparently escapes from the mouth of the valley is thought to indicate that a huge underwater river runs unseen beneath the rock.

  Shipton couldn’t know it. How sad it is that he had no air support, for one aerial pass would have unlocked the secrets of the East Rongbuk in a matter of minutes. But the East Rongbuk was the hidden key which would ultimately unlock Everest’s North Face. It would take a further expedition, and another two years, before this vital geographic twist would be surveyed, after the ‘obvious’ route proved to be too technically daunting and rebuffed all attempts.