Into Thin Air (16 page)

Following what Owen described as his “blood-chilling exchange” with Woodall in Pheriche, the editor was “persuaded … that the atmosphere of the expedition was deranged and that the
Sunday Times
staffers, Ken Vernon and Richard Shorey, might be in danger of their lives.” Owen therefore instructed Vernon and Shorey to return to South Africa, and the newspaper published a statement declaring that it had rescinded its sponsorship of the expedition.

Because Woodall had already received the newspaper’s money, however, this act was purely symbolic and had almost no impact on his actions on the mountain. Indeed, Woodall refused to relinquish leadership of the expedition or make any kind of compromise, even after he received a message from President Mandela appealing for reconciliation as a matter of national interest. Woodall stubbornly insisted that the Everest climb would proceed as planned, with him firmly at the helm.

Back in Cape Town after the expedition fell apart, February described his disappointment. “Maybe I was naive,” he said in a halting voice freighted with emotion. “But I hated growing up under apartheid. Climbing Everest with Andrew and the others would have been a great symbol to show the old ways had broken down. Woodall had no interest in the birth of a new South Africa. He took the dreams of the entire nation and utilized them for his own selfish purposes. Deciding to leave the expedition was the hardest decision of my life.”

With the departure of February, Hackland, and de Klerk, none of the climbers remaining on the team (aside from the Frenchman Renard, who had joined the expedition merely to be listed on the permit and who climbed independently from the others, with his own Sherpas) had little more than minimal alpine experience; at least two of them, says de Klerk, “didn’t even know how to put their crampons on.”

The solo Norwegian, the Taiwanese, and especially the South Africans were frequent topics of discussion in Hall’s mess tent. “With so many incompetent people on the mountain,” Rob said with a frown one evening in late April, “I think it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll get through this season without something bad happening up high.”

*
Belay
is a climbing term that denotes the act of securing a rope to safeguard one’s companions as they climb.

* Although Neby’s expedition was billed as a “solo” endeavor, he had employed eighteen Sherpas to carry his loads, fix ropes for him, establish his camps, and guide him up the mountain.

* Only climbers listed on the official permit—at a cost of $10,000 a head—are allowed to ascend above Base Camp. This rule is strictly enforced, and violators face prohibitive fines and expulsion from Nepal.

APRIL 16, 1996 • 19,500 FEET

I doubt if anyone would claim to enjoy life at high altitudes—enjoy, that is, in the ordinary sense of the word. There is a certain grim satisfaction to be derived from struggling upwards, however slowly; but the bulk of one’s time is necessarily spent in the extreme squalor of a high camp, when even this solace is lacking. Smoking is impossible; eating tends to make one vomit; the necessity of reducing weight to a bare minimum forbids the importation of literature beyond that supplied by the labels on tins of food; sardine oil, condensed milk and treacle spill themselves all over the place; except for the briefest moments, during which one is not usually in a mood for aesthetic enjoyment, there is nothing to look at but the bleak confusion inside the tent and the scaly, bearded countenance of one’s companion—fortunately the noise of the wind usually drowns out his stuffy breathing; worst of all is the feeling of complete helplessness and inability to deal with any emergency that might arise. I used to try to console myself with the thought that a year ago I would have been thrilled by the very idea of taking part in our present adventure, a prospect that had then seemed like an impossible dream; but altitude has the same effect on the mind as
upon the body, one’s intellect becomes dull and unresponsive, and my only desire was to finish the wretched job and to get down to a more reasonable clime
.

Eric Shipton

Just before dawn on Tuesday, April 16, after resting for two days at Base Camp, we headed up into the Icefall to begin our second acclimatization excursion. As I nervously threaded my way through the frozen, groaning disorder, I noticed that my breathing wasn’t quite as labored as it had been during our first trip up the glacier; already my body was starting to adapt to the altitude. My dread of getting crushed by a falling serac, however, was at least as great as before.

I’d hoped that the giant overhanging tower at 19,000 feet—christened the Mousetrap by some wag on Fischer’s team—had toppled by now, but it was still precariously upright, leaning even farther over. Again I redlined my cardiovascular output rushing to ascend from its threatening shadow, and again dropped to my knees when I arrived on the serac’s summit, gasping for air and trembling from the excess of adrenaline fizzing through my veins.

Unlike our first acclimatization sally, during which we stayed at Camp One for less than an hour before returning to Base Camp, Rob intended for us to spend Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Camp One and then continue up to Camp Two for three additional nights before heading down.

At 9:00 A.M., when I reached the Camp One site, Ang Dorje,
^*
our climbing sirdar,
^†
was excavating platforms for our tents in the hard-frozen snow slope. Twenty-nine years old, he is a slender man with delicate features, a shy, moody temperament, and astounding physical strength. While waiting for my teammates to arrive, I picked up a spare shovel and started helping him dig. Within minutes I was exhausted from the effort and had to sit down to rest, prompting a belly laugh from the Sherpa. “Are you not feeling good, Jon?” he mocked. “This is only Camp One, six thousand meters. The air here is still very thick.”

Ang Dorje hailed from Pangboche, an aggregation of stonewalled houses and terraced potato fields clinging to a rugged hillside at 13,000 feet. His father is a respected climbing Sherpa who taught him the basics of mountaineering at an early age so that the boy would have marketable skills. By the time Ang Dorje was in his teens, his father had lost most of his sight to cataracts, and Ang Dorje was pulled from school to earn money for the family.

In 1984 he was working as a cook boy for a group of Western trekkers when he caught the attention of a Canadian couple, Marion Boyd and Graem Nelson. According to Boyd, “I was missing my kids, and as I grew to know Ang Dorje he reminded me of my eldest son. Ang Dorje was bright, interested, keen to learn, and conscientious almost to a fault. He was carrying a huge load and he had nosebleeds every day at high altitude. I was intrigued.”

After seeking the approval of Ang Dorje’s mother, Boyd and Nelson started supporting the young Sherpa financially so that he could return to school. “I will never forget his entry exam [to gain admission to the regional primary school in Khumjung, built by Sir Edmund Hillary]. He was very small in stature and prepubescent. We were crammed into a small room with the headmaster and four teachers. Ang Dorje stood in the middle with his knees quaking as he tried to resurrect the bit of formal learning he had for this oral exam. We all sweated blood … but he was accepted with the proviso that he would have to sit with the little kids in the first grades.”

Ang Dorje became an able student and achieved the equivalent of an eighth-grade education before quitting to go back to work in the mountaineering and trekking industry. Boyd and Nelson, who returned to the Khumbu several times, witnessed his maturation. “With access for the first time to a good diet, he began to grow tall and strong,” recalls Boyd. “He told us with great excitement when he learned to swim in a pool in Kathmandu. At age twenty-five or so he learned to ride a bicycle and took a brief fancy to the music of Madonna. We knew he was really grown up when he presented us with his first gift, a carefully selected Tibetan carpet. He wanted to be a giver, not a taker.”

As Ang Dorje’s reputation for being a strong and resourceful climber spread among Western climbers, he was promoted to the role of sirdar, and in 1992 he went to work for Rob Hall on Everest; by the launch of Hall’s 1996 expedition, Ang Dorje had climbed the peak three times. With respect and obvious affection, Hall referred to him as “my main man” and mentioned several times that he considered Ang Dorje’s role crucial to the success of our expedition.

The sun was bright when the last of my teammates pulled into Camp One, but by noon a scum of high cirrus had blown in from the south; by three o’clock dense clouds swirled above the glacier and snow pelted the tents with a furious clamor. It stormed through the night; in the morning when I crawled out of the shelter I shared with Doug, more than a foot of fresh snow blanketed the glacier. Dozens of avalanches rumbled down the steep walls above, but our camp was safely beyond their reach.

At first light on Thursday, April 18, by which time the sky had cleared, we gathered our belongings and embarked for Camp Two, four miles and 1,700 vertical feet above. The route took us up the gently sloping floor of the Western Cwm, the highest box canyon on earth, a horseshoe-shaped defile gouged from the heart of the Everest massif by the Khumbu Glacier. The 25,790-foot ramparts of Nuptse defined the right wall of the Cwm, Everest’s massive Southwest Face formed the left wall, and the broad frozen thrust of the Lhotse Face loomed above its head.

The temperature had been brutally cold when we set out from Camp One, turning my hands into stiff, aching claws, but as the first of the sun’s rays struck the glacier, the ice-spackled walls of the Cwm collected and amplified the radiant heat like a huge solar oven. Suddenly I was sweltering, and I feared the onset of another migraine-intensity headache like the one that had hammered me at Base Camp, so I stripped down to my long underwear and stuffed a fistful of snow beneath my baseball cap. For the next three hours I slogged steadily up the glacier, pausing only to drink from my water bottle and replenish the snow supply in my hat as it melted into my matted hair.

At 21,000 feet, dizzy from the heat, I came upon a large object wrapped in blue plastic sheeting beside the trail. It took my altitude-impaired gray matter a minute or two to comprehend that the object was a human body. Shocked and disturbed, I stared at it for several minutes. That night when I asked Rob about it he said he wasn’t certain, but he thought the victim was a Sherpa who’d died three years earlier.

At 21,300 feet, Camp Two consisted of some 120 tents scattered across the bare rocks of the lateral moraine along the glacier’s edge. The altitude here manifested itself as a malicious force, making me feel as though I were afflicted with a raging red-wine hangover. Too miserable to eat or even read, for the next two days I mostly lay in my tent with my head in my hands, trying to exert myself as little as possible. Feeling slightly better on Saturday, I climbed a thousand feet above camp to get some exercise and accelerate my acclimatization, and there, at the head of the Cwm, fifty yards off the main track, I came upon another body in the snow, or more accurately the lower half of a body. The style of the clothing and the vintage leather boots suggested that the victim was European and that the corpse had lain on the mountain at least ten or fifteen years.

The first body had left me badly shaken for several hours; the shock of encountering the second wore off almost immediately. Few of the climbers trudging by had given either corpse more than a passing glance. It was as if there were an unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren’t real—as if none of us dared to acknowledge what was at stake here.

On Monday, April 22, a day after returning from Camp Two to Base Camp, Andy Harris and I hiked over to the South African compound to meet their team and try to gain some insight into why they had become such pariahs. Fifteen minutes down the glacier from our tents, their camp was clustered atop a hump of glacial debris. The national flags of Nepal and South Africa, along with banners from Kodak, Apple Computer, and other sponsors, flew from a pair of tall aluminum flagpoles. Andy stuck his head inside the door of their mess tent, flashed his most winning smile, and inquired, “Hi there. Is anybody home?”