Authors: Linda Leblanc
The steep snow ridge plummeted thousands of feet to his left and cornices hung over an immense, empty space to the right. As he climbed endlessly, Lhotse slowly dropped away. Following the tracks left by Paul and Jarvis, Dorje plunged his axe in, took a step, breathed, took another, and breathed again.
Place one foot, take five breaths, lift and place the next, take five breaths
became his mantra. He was alone on the great white shelf, higher than any being on earth at that moment, and felt very much alive knowing that every move could be his last. He wished Beth, Nima, and his father could see him now, plodding steadily upward to become one of the elite few who had made it and the first to do it solo.
Dorje stopped to give his quivering legs a rest and watched the sunrise behind Kangchenjunga, its ice crystals shimmering in a dazzling array. Thousands of feet below him, the Western Cwm looked like a calm, milky river with granite banks. And perched atop a spur in the distant Imja Valley, stood the eloquent silhouette of the Tengboche monastery. The monks would be at Morning Prayer by now, and in his mind he heard the low hum of their chanting, the haunting drumbeats, and the eerie moan of the long
dung-chens
. Reaching for the
sungdi
blessed by the Tengboche lama to protect him, he remembered giving it to Beth at Base Camp.
Four hundred feet below the South Summit, he encountered the treacherous rocks Jarvis had warned of and took the path around them in waist-deep, unstable snow that felt about to collapse under him with every step. By 9:00 a.m. he arrived on the snowy dome of the South Summit at 28,700 feet and sat down to change his cylinder. Seeing an oxygen bottle with the mark of Union Jack on it, Dorje imagined it being left by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953—the year he was proclaimed the Tenzing of the future. And the future was now. He could see the Cornice Traverse, the Hillary Step, and the final slopes to the summit. Only 300 more feet to fulfill his fate and return to Beth a hero. His eyes passed over the Cwm dotted with the tents of Camp II 8,000 feet below and the High Camp where Marty was sleeping wrapped in two bags with plenty of oxygen and water. He’d be all right for a few more hours.
After adjusting the regulator for a higher flow, Dorje set out for the most intimidating section of the climb along the narrow ridge where a misplaced step would send him tumbling 10,000 feet. As he headed up, an image appeared in his mind—something he hadn’t noticed but had seen. Perhaps it was the altitude playing with his brain. To make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, Dorje looked back and there it was: a dark spot 200 hundred feet below him, something he hadn’t passed on the way up. His heart lurched. It couldn’t be. Removing the binoculars from his pocket, he focused on a bright green parka lying on the Southeast Ridge. Not moving. “Damn! Damn! Damn! Why did you leave the tent?” Looking again, he hoped he was wrong, but it was Marty with his face buried in the snow. An image that had lingered in him since childhood crawled from its dusty corner again: the face of a climber on a stretcher, skin blackened as if charred, fingers and toes that would be cut off. He too had lain in the snow.
“I will not stop now,” Dorje yelled. “We agreed. No turning back for any reason.” He shoved the binoculars into his pocket and continued up. “You can’t expect me to come down now. I am almost to the top of the world.” His legs were too heavy to move and every breath seared his throat. With black, angry thoughts roiling in his head, Dorje drove his axe in the snow and slumped over it. “I should just leave you there, you wacko
mikaru.
You want to die anyway because of your stupid father. So why should I give up my mountain for you?” He rose again, dragged his left foot forward and planted it, and then his right. Two deep breaths and he was moving again. Nothing could stop him now, not a cornice, not the Hillary Step, and certainly not a jealous idiot who had called him a bastard and punched him in the face. Dorje had endured headaches, nausea, and extreme physical and mental exhaustion to get here. The summit was in sight and the ropes were set. One hour to the top and two down to camp. He had waited 16 years for this moment; Marty could wait a while longer. Cursing each delay, Dorje took the binoculars out again. On his hands and knees now, Marty was crawling up the ridge as he’d done on Kangchenjunga. Dorje turned back to the mountain. It wasn’t his problem. He didn’t tell him to leave the tent and come up here. The man wouldn’t turn around for him, so why should he give up everything? A promise made.
“Aggghhh!” Dorje yelled so loud his throat burned. “No, no, no!” His cry pierced the thin, cold air and shook free a fragile lip of snow. A tiny avalanche toppled toward him, the snow bouncing and flying in the air as it gained momentum. Standing there, he let the powder strike his face. And it was cold, deadly cold. With almost three more hours of climbing and descent plus a rapidly approaching storm, Marty would be dead by the time he got there. Probably was close to it already.
He whipped his body around and slammed one foot in the track he’d just made. Staring at the dark spot on the slope, Dorje was unable to take the next step. The summit with its wind-blown plume was beckoning to him and he was turning his back on it. “Toi ye!” he yelled and spit. Then he planted his axe and stepped forward, took a couple of remorseful breaths and started down.
With frozen hair, eyebrows, and lashes and icicles hanging from his nostrils, Marty was floundering in the snow. When Dorje reached him and found the cylinder not empty yet and a fresh one in his pack, he ordered, “Go back to the tent. You’re sick.”
Marty’s words came out in disconnected bits and pieces wandering in every direction, but Dorje got the message. His climbing partner was going to the top and he couldn’t stop him. If he tried to take him down like the Sherpas on Kangchenjunga, Marty would fight him all the way. “Now help me up,” Marty mumbled.
What should have been a simple maneuver was almost impossible. As the Darjeeling Sherpas had warned, weeks of carrying had sapped Dorje’s strength. He hated feeling like a frail grandpa. Using the binoculars, he frantically searched for Zopa and Namkha who planned to come up with the Americans. They should be at Camp V or at least the South Col by now. No sign of anyone. Perhaps the storm threat had turned them back.
Marty’s lids closed and rolled open again like the slow blink of a frog. Removing his mask momentarily, he yelled, “Just get me to my feet and rope up. Hillary or Tenzing couldn’t have made it alone and neither can you.”
Confused and no longer trusting his instincts, Dorje didn’t know if he should tie up with Marty or not. Mark had warned him about being in the Death Zone where there’s not enough oxygen to sustain life. The brain loses its capacity for reason and decision-making and lassitude diminishes bodily responses.
Remembering Paul’s warning about the most exposed section of the climb, Dorje finally concluded it was best to have someone belay him, but he still didn’t feel good about it. Dorje exaggerated his lips around the words to make sure Marty understood. “You will walk not crawl like a baby.” He resented having to make the arduous climb back up to the South Summit and around the treacherous rocks just below it where every step plunged him into unstable snow almost to his waist. Roped behind him, Marty used Dorje’s tracks but still stumbled and too often lay in physical collapse until Dorje went back and pulled him onto his feet. “Get up. I can’t carry you,” he shouted. When both were upright and moving, Dorje calculated they gained about twelve feet per minute.
From the South Summit, they stared at a 400-foot ridge of snow plastered to intermittent rocks—the exposed section Paul had spoken of. The only route was along a knife-edge, twisting line between a cornice on the right and a sheer drop on the left. Venturing too far onto the cornice, they risked it breaking away and sending them tumbling 10,000 feet down the Kangshun Face into Tibet. A misstep to the left would send them careening 8,000 feet down the Southwest Face into the Western Cwm. Thin, wispy clouds were drifting up from the valley and the sky was ablaze with purple and crimson, both possible signs of unstable weather and moisture coming from India.
“We must hurry,” Dorje said. “I will go first and you wrap—”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Marty growled as he planted his axe and wound the rope around the head. “I know more about this than you.”
“Then you should know enough to go home.”
Uncomfortable trusting his life to him but afraid to cross without a belay, Dorje traveled 100 feet along the Cornice Traverse. Feeling groggy as if he’d had too much
chang,
he now took seven breaths for every step, his ragged lungs sucking wildly at the air. Bone weary, he turned to anchor Marty and waited for him to follow. When his erratic, unsteady gait veered too far to the right, Dorje shouted, “Careful,” but doubted his voice carried far through the mask. A second later, the American was on his stomach sliding toward the 8,000-foot drop into the Cwm. If the anchor tore free, Dorje would be dragged with him. His heart slamming in his throat, he watched Marty drive the axe head and arrest the fall with snow flying back in his face. He hadn’t thought the man capable in his condition, but apparently terror worked miracles. The entire incident lasting only a few seconds seemed an eternity between life and death.
Forty minutes and thousands of gasping breaths after leaving the South Summit, they reached a rock cliff rising 40 feet straight out of the ridge and blocking it off. It appeared impossible to climb, smooth with almost no hand holds. “The Hillary Step,” Marty mumbled, his speech almost incoherent after depleting his last strength in the fall.
“Where are the ropes?” Dorje asked frantically looking around. “We’re supposed to have ropes.”
Reaching into the heavens, Everest created its own weather with a constant wind flapping furiously about them. “There,” Marty said pointing to a rope blown over the cornice and lying in a dangerously exposed area 50 feet below.
“But how will we get past without it?”
Marty pointed to a steep, narrow gap between one side of the rock and the adjoining cornice, an impossible place without a fixed rope. Dorje had promised Beth to turn around if it looked bad and this did. He was considering giving up when he thought about Hillary and Tenzing going where no man had gone before. Tenzing wasn’t afraid and Dorje had to be like him. “Belay me,” he yelled at Marty using hand signals. “I’m going up.” Wedged in the gap, he pressed backwards with his feet against the hard snow and inched upwards. Since going back for Marty, he had tried to ignore his frozen toes, but exerting pressure on them now engulfed him in pain. To cry out would waste precious oxygen and his tank was already reading low, so he tried to lessen his distress by mentally diffusing the pain over his entire body.
Once Dorje was over the Hillary Step, Marty sagged against the rock. “I’m too tired and sick to go on,” he shouted.
The route had flattened into an easy, half hour walk in Namche, but here in the Death Zone Dorje wondered if he could make it. His back to Marty, he told himself he had already done more for him than was expected and the American would have to be satisfied with making it to here. It was farther than he’d go to on Kangchenjunga, and Dorje wasn’t about to risk losing his own dream. Silently chanting his new, seven-breath mantra
Place one foot, but take seven breaths now, lift and place the next, take seven more breaths,
Dorje continued toward the summit until he was curiously straining against a rope. Damn. In his muddled thinking, he’d forgotten to release himself from Marty’s belay.
As his clumsy fingers tried to open the clip, Dorje looked back at Marty wedged between the rock and cornice. The man’s earlier laments,
If I don’t make it to the top it’s because I died here,
and
I might as well be dead
resonated in Dorje’s head. Marty wanted it as badly as he did, but there wasn’t enough time with more wispy clouds rising from the Cwm and Dorje’s oxygen running low. Besides, Marty said he was too tired and sick to go on. Finally getting the clip open, Dorje simply stared at it in confusion. His thoughts having exploded into a thousand little pieces, he couldn’t assemble them to make sense out of anything and was afraid of the wrong decision. Helping Marty, he would risk crippling his own chances of making the summit, but how could he be anyone’s hero, especially his own, if he left him behind? Questioning whether his shaky legs could bear even his own weight, Dorje snapped the clip shut and trudged back to the Hillary Step. After sinking his axe and digging his heels in next to the rock, he pulled the rope taut and signaled Marty to walk up the inside of the cornice while he pulled. Dorje’s arms and legs quivered and spots floated in front of his eyes. Afraid of blacking out, he wrapped the rope around his wrist so he wouldn’t lose Marty in case he did. After an interminable struggle to haul him up, Dorje collapsed with his mind in a fog and body screaming it could go no further.
Lying beside him, Marty raised his arm in slow motion and gave Dorje two grateful, light pats. With the summit in sight and only 30 or 40 minutes away, Dorje rolled onto his hands and knees, and then pushed to his feet. So dizzy he almost keeled over, he waited for the waves of nausea to pass before reaching for Marty’s hand. Shortening the rope and tying it to both harnesses, he could drag his companion up the mountain if he had to. Even though the slope had flattened, a precipitous drop on either side still posed a constant threat.
Stopping and taking seven breaths for every step, Dorje ignored the pain, nausea, and cold and continued upwards. As he stepped onto the table-sized summit, sixteen years of emotions overwhelmed him and clouded his eyes. Wishing his father, Beth, and Nima could see him standing on top of the world, Dorje motioned for Marty to take his picture as proof. Next to strings of prayer flags flapping furiously in the wind, he held the axe over his head in victory. After taking Marty’s picture, he stood relishing the moment when he was higher than anything on earth and had an unobstructed view in every direction. To the north were the rolling, brown hills of the Tibetan plateau, Kangchenjunga to the east, Makalu to the southeast, and Cho Oyu to the west. After tying a red ribbon from his father’s hair around a rock to anchor it and placing it with the pile of offerings, Dorje signaled Marty that they must start down. The first flakes had begun to fall.