K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [123]
It was dusk before an exhausted Bonatti and Mahdi reached the point on the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet, where the team had agreed to pitch Camp IX. But there was no tent in sight. Deeply alarmed, Bonatti cried out, “Lino! Achille! Where are you?” He scanned the frozen slope above him, as darkness began to engulf the mountain. The only answer was silence.
Bonatti guessed that his teammates must be less than 600 feet away, somewhere in the scattered rocks. The traverse to reach those rocks, however, would be perilous in the extreme, and it was now almost pitchdark. Bonatti’s headlamp had ceased to work, and Mahdi had no lamp of his own.
Abruptly, a light pierced the gloom, to the left and slightly above the climbers. At Camp IX, one of the summit duo must at last have heard Bonatti’s cries and turned on his own headlamp to show the way. But now Bonatti heard Lacedelli call out, “Have you got the oxygen?”
“Yes!”
“Good! Leave it there and go straight down!”
What could Lacedelli mean? Was he simply unwilling to share his small tent with the two teammates who had worked so hard to support the summit bid? “I can’t!” Bonatti protested. “Mahdi can’t make it!”
The beam of light promised safety only a few hundred feet away. Crazed by exhaustion, Mahdi started scrabbling, out of control, across the dangerous slope toward Camp IX. Bonatti shouted at his partner to stop, but the language barrier now worked its sinister confusion. (Mahdi spoke only Urdu, Bonatti only Italian, with a mere handful of English words their common vocabulary.) “Mahdi! Turn back! No good!” yelled Bonatti, to no avail.
Abruptly the beam of light switched off. Once again, only silence came from above. A panicked Mahdi yelled in English, “No good, Compagnoni Sahib! No good, Lacedelli Sahib!”
At last Bonatti managed to coax the Hunza back to the precarious stance he had kicked in the slope. For another half hour, Bonatti screamed his own curses into the night. “No, I don’t want to die!” he wailed. “Lino! Achille! Help us, damn you!” Not a word came from Camp IX.
Finally, in a fog of rage and despair, Bonatti turned to the slope before him and began to hack out a ledge with his ice ax. The two men had neither tent nor sleeping bag. Never before had anyone attempted, let alone survived, a bivouac in the open at such an altitude.
“I could have gone down in the dark by myself, even without a headlamp,” Bonatti recalled in 2003. “But Mahdi was out of his mind. Several times I had to keep him from running away. Mahdi was like an unchained force of nature. Even in the night, he was yelling crazily. I had to find a way to calm him down just with the tone of my voice. I tried to invent my own English—convincing sounds, more than words. ‘Good, Mahdi, good,’ I said over and over. ‘No! No!’ he answered. That was his only word.
“It took a long time to dig a ledge out of the icy slope. We sat very close together. Mahdi was too tired to take his crampons off, so I did it for him. Otherwise his frostbite would have been even worse.
“I spent the whole night looking at my five fingers to see if they were still there. Making up problems in my head to see if I still think right. I kept banging my legs with my ice ax—that was before we knew it was a bad thing to do. It was as if one breath lasted the whole night.”
In the wee hours, a sudden snow squall descended on the mountain. Bonatti and Mahdi were smothered in blowing snow. Three times Bonatti had to dig himself and Mahdi out.
As soon as first light arrived, Mahdi took off, almost running down the mountain toward Camp VIII. “In the morning,” Bonatti remembered, “I was a piece of ice. I didn’t have the strength to restrain him. All I could do was put on his crampons. My heart was beating fast as I watched him go. Then he reached a flat area, and I knew he was okay.” Bonatti cached the oxygen gear in the snow,