The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (65 page)

Next he cradled the cold tube of a Kata thermometer under his armpit for several minutes. He hobbled out among the dirt and gravel, watching the red fluid dive in the wind with one eye on the sweep hand of his pocket watch. Finally Hingston placed a swatch of dark fur on a large stone, suspending a black-bulb thermometer above it. He rested the toe of his boot on the fur and waited for the mercury to rise.

Hingston surveyed his surroundings. The boulders around him had been sculpted by wind over centuries, their surface scarred and striated on the windward side, smooth and glassy on the lee side. They reminded him of coral. Hingston marveled at the diverse conditions that shaped animate and inanimate objects, the legion adaptations of mammal and insect and bird life to this hostile world.

The signs were everywhere. The finches and sparrows that shelter between stones or village walls, or in the warm underground dens of mouse hares, protecting their delicate plumage from the wind; the red-billed choughs that stand with their heads facing scouring gales, anchoring themselves long enough to pick at meager grass. Himalayan butterflies inhabited the most godforsaken places, barren wastelands up to 17,000 feet: these species of
Parnassius
were ill-suited to such elevations, save that they could cower their wings low against the wind, and knew to only fly when the air was calm. Hingston had even seen
Pseudabris
beetles that played dead. Thrown off green stalks of vetch or iris by gusting wind, the beetles would collapse upon the soil as if dead, only to spring buzzingly to life when the weather abated.

Hibernation was a rule here. When the expedition reached the Tibetan plateau in April, the country appeared gray and moribund. But it was only sleeping. A minute universe was saving itself for fairer climes,
and Hingston had shown this to the climbers, lifting stones and turning soil to reveal curled caterpillars; dozing colonies of ants; arachnids reclined in hollow snail shells. The design of nature was flawless; the signature of its perfection pervasive.

He raised the thermometer to his face, squinting to read the scale.

—Thirteen point three.

Hingston was very cold. He would soon call for Kami to brew tea.

At Camp III, four thousand vertical feet above Hingston, Colonel Norton lay in his quilted eiderdown sleeping bag composing dispatches to be couriered and telegraphed to
The Times
of London. The wind outside was howling. Suddenly the colonel glanced at his wristwatch.

—Four o’clock, he bellowed.

—Bloody freezing, Somervell called from the next tent. Isn’t that specific enough?

—Not for South Kensington.

Somervell hacked out a cough in reply. He crouched in the tent’s flapping vestibule and studied a pair of thermometers. He glanced at the red sliver of fluid in the bottom thermometer, then inverted the case to reset the instruments. The metal indices plummeted in the glass.

Somervell recorded the temperature as minus seven degrees Fahrenheit. He estimated the wind speed at fifty miles per hour, which according to Beaufort’s numbers would be a force nine gale. It was a blind guess. Somervell knew that winds at sea were hardly comparable to those on a mountain, just as low temperatures in the Arctic were not half so severe as those on Mount Everest, where the oxygen-starved body had no power to warm itself.

Somervell lifted his face to the mountain above. Fractocumulus clouds had swirled over the upper pyramid, sheathing everything in white. Walsingham and Price were somewhere among those clouds. Somervell thought the high camps would drop to at least twenty below in the nighttime, which meant fifty degrees of frost, excluding the tremendous wind.

Several hours later Hugh Price staggered down the north ridge of Mount Everest, searching for Camp VI in failing light and whirling snow. At 26,800 feet the camp was the highest bivouac ever made by men. Price’s vision was blurred and doubled by a mild case of snowblindness, and he did not see the tent until he was very close, a sagging blotch of green canvas on a shelf of jagged rocks. Price tore open the tapes and dived inside, panting. There was snow everywhere. The canvas walls were screaming in the wind.

Price pulled off his boots and tried to fasten the door flap. It was dark now and it took him ten minutes to knot the tapes, grasping with numb fingers in the blackness. He knocked chunks of ice from one of the eiderdown bags and pushed his legs inside. Snow and ice covered Price’s clothing and the lining of the sleeping bag; if his body warmed, the ice would melt and soak him. Ashley’s sleeping bag lay beside him in a frozen heap. Price wondered dimly if Ashley could have made the summit. It seemed impossible in this blizzard.

Price sat up and rummaged in the darkness for matches. He must light the lamp and burn magnesium flares to help Ashley find the tent. He felt a tin of café au lait. A compass. An empty water flask. He gasped and burrowed back into his sleeping bag. He was too cold. He must eat something to gain strength, but he felt no hunger, only terrible thirst. There was no water and he was too weak to melt snow on the stove. Price thought of the coming hours and the agony of sleepless visions, the long ticking nightmare of unquenchable thirst and chills and fatigue. He wondered if he would survive it. The second eiderdown bag lay beside him.

When Ashley returns
, he thought,
I will give him his bag.

Price wriggled his sleeping bag into Ashley’s and sank toward sleep.

The diary of the head lama of Rongbuk Monastery records that in the third month of the Wood Rat year of the fifteenth
rab-byung
, a party of
thirteen European gentlemen arrived accompanied by a hundred porters and three hundred pack animals. The gentlemen bestowed fine gifts upon the lama. They requested his blessing upon their expedition, which sought to climb the tallest mountain on earth for the fame and honor it would bring them. The lama warned the climbers that his country was a very cold one, and only chaste and pious men could survive in such a harsh domain. Nevertheless the Europeans persevered for weeks at their strange errand, erecting seven tents in succession toward the summit. They used iron pegs and chains and plates to challenge Chomolungma, but still they failed. The Europeans returned to the monastery to request a funeral benediction for a comrade who had died upon the mountain. The lama performed the service with great sincerity, knowing that the dead European’s soul had suffered untold difficulties for the sake of nothing.

Ashley Walsingham’s body has never been found. It is not known whether he died of a fall or if he was benighted on the mountain. There are hundreds of bodies on Mount Everest and they cannot be brought down from their great height. Walsingham did not reach a record elevation, nor did he set foot on untrodden ground. His name is recorded only in the thicker annals of human exploration, and only then as a footnote. Of late these volumes are seldom read and never admired.

It would be decades before men would scale Mount Everest. These men would be a breed apart from the climbers of 1924. They would reach the summit by a different route on a morning of vivid sunshine. They would know the names of their predecessors, but little else of that vanished world, and they would bring to the mountain no magnum bottles of champagne, nor anthologies of poetry or prose, nor stockings or sweaters handknitted and darned, nor scraps of fabric safeguarded through the trenches of Picardie and Ypres. The men who finally climbed Mount Everest would find the mountain less strange than those who had come before, and so it would go on with each generation in turn, until the mystery would shimmer briefly, a last green flash of the setting sun, then cease altogether.

Dorian Karchmar, Marysue Rucci, Simone Blaser, Emily Graff, Elizabeth
Breeden, Jonathan Karp, Richard Rhorer, Andrea DeWerd, Cary
Goldstein, Sarah Reidy, Loretta Denner, Jackie Seow, Ruth Lee-Mui,
Christopher Lin and the entire team at Simon & Schuster. Raffaella De
Angelis, Jason Arthur, Cathryn Summerhayes, John McGhee and Jeff
Kleinman.

Marlene Dunlevy, Ryan Bowman, Eric Bain, Ben Urwand, Emily
Cohen, Ryan Wilcoxon, Elizabeth Beeby, Adam White, Leslie Henkel,
Alice Brett and Catherine Foley. My father and mother; my siblings
Brandon, Alyssa and Lucian.

This is a work of fiction, but it owes its existence to the many lives
that inspired it. Wilfred Owen, George Leigh Mallory, Robert Graves,
Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, T. Howard Somervell,
J. B. L. Noel, Geoffrey Winthrop Young and F. S. Smythe are among
the scores of individuals whose experiences—captured in their letters,
memoirs, diaries, poems or other accounts—made me write this book. I
hope I can be forgiven for taking certain liberties with historical events
and geography, as well as the people and military units mentioned in
these pages. Although I have endeavored to be as faithful to the past as
possible, fiction ultimately diverges into a world of its own.

Dr. A. M. Kellas’s speech “Notes on the Possibility of Ascending
the Loftier Himalaya” is derived from the version printed in
The
Geographical Journal
, vol. 47, no. 6, delivered at the Royal Geographical
Society on May 18, 1916. Two excerpts from
The Times
of London appear
in this book: “Everest Victims: Story of a Grand Lama’s Warning,”
July 29, 1924, issue, and “The Mount Everest Tragedy: Message from the
King,” June 21, 1924, issue; a portion of the latter is extracted as Ashley’s
eulogy from the King. J. B. L. Noel’s 1924 film
The Epic of Everest
, also
quoted here, is available from the British Film Institute. The verse that
Pritchard recites when he meets Tristan is from Rudyard Kipling’s poem
“If—”; the online encyclopedia entry for “poste restante,” which Tristan
reads with Mireille, is from Wikipedia. The article “Post from the Peak
of Everest” appeared in the
Daily Chronicle
of February 13, 1924. Dr.
Hingston’s view of the Rongbuk Valley is based on his chapter “Natural
History” in the official expedition narrative,
The Fight for Everest, 1924
,
while the account of the lama’s diary is derived from E. O. Shebbeare’s
expedition diary in the Alpine Club archive. I am indebted to Wilfred
Owen not only for this book’s title, but for the trigger word “mistletoe,”
which he used in his own letters to his mother—a word too perfect for
any substitute.