“For looting purposes?” asks Jean-Claude. “Or perhaps I should say…scavenging?”
Norton frowns. “It would appear that way. Although there’s precious little of value that we left behind, unless one were to count the caches of barley and tinned food we left at various camps.”
“Kami later insisted to me that they’d left a religious talisman behind by accident,” says Odell. “He thought he’d left it at Base Camp or perhaps tucked in one of the sanga rock walls at Camp Two. He said they couldn’t return to their family and village without it. I believed him.”
“What did they say they’d seen?” asks the Deacon.
I surreptitiously glance at my own watch. We have only three minutes or less before these esteemed climbers are expected at yet another Royal Geographical Society formal banquet here in the RGS’s Lowther Lodge. A glance over my shoulder shows me that the electric lamps along Exhibition Road where it runs into Kensington Road are burning. The October night has fallen.
“Kami said that he and his cousins reached our old Base Camp on twenty June,” says Odell. “They searched, but the talisman wasn’t there. What they did find there shocked them…seven hobbled Mongolian ponies down below the memorial cairn, down where there’s a bit of that tough grass a few hundred yards below the melt pond.”
“No one tending the ponies?” asks the Deacon.
“Not a soul,” says Odell. “And a bit further up the valley, before one gets too deep into the penitente ice pinnacles, they came across what Kami immediately identified as Lord Percival Bromley’s Whymper tent—the same one he’d slept in every night we’d seen him during the trip in—and two dead Tibetan ponies. The ponies had been shot in the head.”
“Shot!” cries out Jean-Claude.
Odell nods. “Kami told us that he and his younger cousins were alarmed. Nema would go no further, nor stay near the murdered ponies, so Desno took Nema back down the valley to Base Camp, while Kami kept climbing up the glacier toward Camp Two. He had to find the talisman, he said. He was also curious and somewhat alarmed for Bromley, who had been kind to him during his few visits to our camps during the trek in.”
“Did he see Bromley again?” I ask.
“No,” says Odell. “Kami found his talisman—set into the stones in the sanga they’d set up at Camp Two, right where he thought he might find it.”
“What exactly is a sanga again?” asks Jean-Claude.
The Deacon responds. “The rock walls we and the porters build at Camp One and above. They enclose the tents we use and keep things from flying away when the winds rise. The porters often sleep within sangas that have only a ground cloth and a pole-supported tarp for a roof.” The Deacon turns back to Odell. “What did Kami see?”
Odell rubs his cheek. “Kami admitted to us that he should have turned back to his cousins as soon as he found his talisman, but instead, out of curiosity, he continued climbing toward Camp Three.”
“That must have been dangerous with the monsoon snows covering the crevasses,” says Jean-Claude.
“That’s the odd thing,” comments Colonel Norton. “We’d expected the monsoon to hit full force by the first week in June…indeed, there were some serious flurries during the last days before Mallory and Irvine’s final effort. But the monsoon hadn’t arrived at Rongbuk when we finally left on sixteen June, nor had it arrived when Kami says he was back there on the twentieth of June. Some snow, very strong winds, but no actual monsoon. It didn’t really strike until we were all back in Darjeeling. Very odd.”
“Kami said that when he was at Camp Two, long before he got the last four miles up the glacier and through the last field of high penitentes, he heard what sounded like thunder from higher on the mountain, above the North Col,” says Odell.
“Thunder?” asks the Deacon.
“Kami found it very odd,” says Odell, “since it was a totally clear day—bright blue sky, snow plume off Everest’s summit clearly visible—but he said that it sounded like thunder.”
“Avalanche?” suggests J.C.
“Or pistol or rifle shots with echoes?” says the Deacon.
Norton looks shocked at that suggestion, but Odell nods. “Kami spent the night bivouacked on the glacier and in the morning light saw new tents at our site for Camp Three and, he said, more tents up on the ledge on the North Col where we’d set Camp Four. He also said that he’d seen three figures high up on the mountain, above where the Northeastern Ridge runs into the North Ridge. Far to the west, he said, between Steps One and Two…where a boulder was, he said. A boulder that looked like a mushroom. Three tiny black figures stood near that rock and then, suddenly, only one figure. Hours later he watched men coming down the sheer ice face from the North Col, using the rope ladder Sandy Irvine had cobbled together. He thought there were four or five descending.”
“It wouldn’t have been possible for even a sharp-visioned Sherpa to see figures so high on the ridgeline without field glasses,” muses the Deacon.
“Oh, yes,” says Colonel Norton with a smile. “Kami admitted that he’d ‘borrowed’ a good pair of Zeiss binoculars from one of the Germans’ empty tents at Camp Three.”
“And you left Irvine’s rope ladder behind?” the Deacon asks Norton. “Still in place on the ice cliff to the North Col?”
“We considered taking it down because it was dangerous, frayed and overly used,” says the colonel. “But in the end it was too much trouble to take it down, and some thought it might even last till our next expedition, so we left it where it was. Partially as a memorial to Sandy, truth be told.”
The Deacon nods. “I know you all must go in a moment, but what did Kami tell you that made you report the death of Lord Percival as told by a certain Bruno Sigl from Germany?”
Odell clears his throat. “Kami was frightened at the thunder, but stayed near Camp Three that second day just to see who the down-climbing figures turned out to be—hoping it was Bromley—but just as he was about to give up and leave the Camp Three area, he was shouted at in heavily accented English to stop. The man who shouted at him was holding a black pistol. A Luger, Kami thought. He stopped.”
“A pistol on Mount Everest,” whispers Jean-Claude. I could hear the revulsion at the idea in his voice. I felt it myself.
“At least it answers the question of who shot Bromley’s and Meyer’s little ponies,” I suggest.
The Deacon shakes his head. “They might have gone lame. Bromley or Meyer may have put them down themselves, planning to walk back to Tingri or Shekar Dzong with the yaks.”
“At any rate, poor Kami thought he was going to be shot for trespassing and for the theft of the Zeiss glasses,” continues Odell, “and he told us that he’d only hoped that his cousins would be brave enough to find his body and to bury it there in a crevasse with the proper ceremonies. But instead the German man with the Luger demanded in English—Kami had spent enough time in Calcutta that he could hear the German accent—to know who Kami was. Kami told him that he was a Sherpa with the Norton-Mallory Expedition and that he’d returned with others to retrieve a few forgotten items and that he was expected back.
“‘How many others?’ the German demanded.
“‘Nine,’ lied Kami, ‘including two sahibs waiting at the Rongbuk Monastery.’”
“Clever man,” the Deacon says.
“At any rate,” says Odell, “the German put his pistol away, identified himself as a European explorer, Bruno Sigl, and said that he was there simply reconnoitering the area with two friends—a number Kami did not believe because he’d seen the seven riding Mongolian ponies and four or five figures still on Irvine’s rope ladder—and that he, Sigl, had seen Bromley and an Austrian with Bromley, Kurt Meyer, carried to their deaths by an avalanche just twenty hours earlier.