I felt completely disconnected from my body, I just watched it do its thing. Below Freds kept singing, “ ‘I get up, I get dow-wow-wown,’ ” from the song “Close to the Edge.” We came to a big snow-filled gully and glissaded down it carelessly, sliding twenty or thirty feet with each dreamy step. All three of us were staggering by this point. Cloud poured up the Western Cwm, and mist magically appeared all around us, but we were just above the South Col by this time, and it didn’t matter. I saw there was a camp in the col, and breathed a sigh of relief. We would have been goners without it.
The Indians were still securing their tents as we walked up. A week’s perfect weather, and they had just gotten into the South Col. Very slow, I thought as we approached. Siege-style assault, logistical pyramid, play it safe—slow as building the other kind of pyramid.
As we crossed the col and closed on the tents, navigating between piles of junk from previous expeditions, I began to worry. You see, the Indian Army has had incredible bad luck on Everest. They have tried to climb it several times, and so far as I know, they’ve never succeeded. Mostly this is because of storms, but people tend to ignore that, and the Indians have come in for a bit of criticism from the climbing community in Nepal. In fact they’ve been called terrible climbers. So they are a little touchy about this, and it was occurring to me, very slowly, that they might not be too amused to be greeted in the South Col by three individuals who had just bagged the peak on an overnighter from the north side.
Then one of them saw us. He dropped the mallet in his hand.
“Hi there!” Freds croaked.
A group of them quickly gathered around us. The wind was beginning to blow hard, and we all stood at an angle into it. The oldest Indian there, probably a major, shouted gruffly, “Who are you!”
“We’re lost,” Freds said. “We need help.”
Ah, good, I thought. Freds has also thought of this problem. He won’t tell them where we’ve been. Freds is still thinking. He will take care of this situation for us.
“Where did you come from?” the major boomed.
Freds gestured down the Western Cwm. Good, I thought. “Our Sherpas told us to keep turning right. So ever since Jomosom we have been.”
“Where did you say!”
“Jomosom!”
The major drew himself up. “Jomosom,” he said sharply, “is in western Nepal.”
“Oh,” Freds said.
And we all stood there. Apparently that was it for Freds’s explanation.
I elbowed him aside. “The truth is, we thought it would be fun to help you. We didn’t know what we were getting into.”
“Yeah!” Freds said, accepting this new tack thankfully. “Can we carry a load down for you, maybe?”
“We are still climbing the mountain!” the major barked. “We don’t need loads carried down!” He gestured at the ridge behind us, which was disappearing in mist. “This is Everest!”
Freds squinted at him. “You’re kidding.”
I elbowed him. “We need help,” I said.
The major looked at us closely. “Get in the tent,” he said at last.
XVII
Well, eventually I concocted a semiconsistent story about us idealistically wanting to porter loads for an Everest expedition, although who would be so stupid as to want to do that I don’t know. Freds was no help at all—he kept forgetting and going back to his first story, saying things like “We must have gotten on the wrong plane.” And neither of us could fit Kunga Norbu into our story very well; I claimed he was our guide, but we didn’t understand his language. He very wisely stayed mute.
Despite all that, the Indian team fed us and gave us water to slake our raging thirst, and they escorted us back down their fixed ropes to the camps below, to make sure they got us out of there. Over the next couple of days they led us all the way down the Western Cwm and the Khumbu Icefall to Base Camp. I wish I could give you a blow-by-blow account of the fabled Khumbu Icefall, but the truth is I barely remember it. It was big and white and scary; I was tired. That’s all I know. And then we were in their Base Camp, and I knew it was over. First illegal ascent of Everest.
XVIII
Well, after what we had been through, Gorak Shep looked like Ireland, and Pheriche looked like Hawaii. And the air was oxygen soup.
We kept asking after the Brits and Arnold and Laure, and kept hearing that they were a day or so below us. From the sound of it the Brits were chasing Arnold, who was managing by extreme efforts to stay ahead of them. So we hurried after them.
On our way down, however, we stopped at the Pengboche Monastery, a dark, brooding old place in a little nest of black pine trees, supposed to be the chin whiskers of the first abbot. There we left Kunga Norbu, who was looking pretty beat. The monks at the monastery made a big to-do over him. He and Freds had an emotional parting, and he gave me a big grin as he bored me through one last time with that spacy black gaze. “Good morning!” he said, and we were off.
So Freds and I tromped down to Namche, which reminded me strongly of Manhattan, and found our friends had just left for Lukla, still chasing Arnold. Below Namche we really hustled to catch up with them, but we didn’t succeed until we reached Lukla itself. And then we only caught the Brits—because they were standing there by the Lukla airstrip, watching the last plane of the day hum down the tilted grass and ski jump out over the deep gorge of the Dudh Kosi—while Arnold McConnell, we quickly found out, was on that plane, having paid a legitimate passenger a fat stack of rupees to replace him. Arnold’s Sherpa companions were lining the strip and waving good-bye to him; they had all earned about a year’s wages in this one climb, it turned out, and they were pretty fond of old Arnold.
The Brits were not. In fact they were fuming.
“Where have you been?” Trevor demanded.
“Well…” we said.
“We went to the top,” Freds said apologetically. “Kunga had to for religious reasons.”
“Well,” Trevor said huffily. “We considered it ourselves, but we had to chase your client back down the mountain to try and get his film. The film that will get us all kicked out of Nepal for good if it’s ever shown.”
“Better get used to it,” Mad Tom said gloomily. “He’s off to Kathmandu, and we’re not. We’ll never catch him now.”
Now the view from Lukla is nothing extraordinary, compared to what you can see higher up; but there are the giant green walls of the gorge, and to the north you can see a single scrap of the tall white peaks beyond; and to look at all that, and think you might never be allowed to see it again…
I pointed to the south. “Maybe we just got lucky.”
“What?”
Freds laughed. “Choppers! Incoming! Some trekking outfit has hired helicopters to bring its group in.”
It was true. This is fairly common practice, I’ve done it myself many times. RNAC’s daily flights to Lukla can’t fulfill the need during the peak trekking season, so the Nepali Air Force kindly rents out its helicopters, at exorbitant fees. Naturally they prefer not to go back empty, and they’ll take whoever will pay. Often, as on this day, there is a whole crowd clamoring to pay to go back, and the competition is fierce, although I for one am unable to understand what people are so anxious to get back to.
Anyway, this day was like most of them, and there was a whole crowd of trekkers sitting around on the unloading field by the airstrip, negotiating with the various Sherpa and Sherpani power brokers who run the airport and get people onto flights. The hierarchy among these half-dozen power brokers is completely obscure, even to them, and on this day as always each of them had a list of people who had paid up to a hundred dollars for a lift out; and until the brokers discussed it with the helicopter crew, no one knew who was going to be the privileged broker given the go-ahead to march his clients on board. The crowd found this protocol ambiguous at best, and they were milling about and shouting ugly things at their brokers as the helicopters were sighted.