K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [126]
The descent was a nightmare, as each man fell and slid several times, but fetched up in soft snow. Instead of downclimbing the edge of the rock band, they plunge-stepped straight down the Bottleneck, which did not avalanche. At one point in the night, the men thought they were lost. Their fingers were frostbitten (both would later undergo amputations). Finally they saw a light in the distance—a headlamp or a stove inside one of the tents at Camp VIII. The ordeal was over. According to their account in Desio’s book: “Arms were flung around our waists, questions were fired at us, hands were clapped on our shoulders. Abram, Bonatti and Gallotti literally jumped for joy, and the two Hunzas, Mahdi and Isakhan, seemed hardly less delighted.”
K2 had been climbed.
Bonatti corroborates that joyous reunion. He wrote in 1961, in Le Mie Montagne, “At 11 P.M., five hearts were exulting over the same victory in the same tent…. At that moment, and only for that moment, I forced myself to forget all other reality.”
Only for that moment…. Bonatti recalled in 2003, “I kept waiting for Lacedelli or Compagnoni to apologize. At Camp VIII, there was no ‘Bravo, Walter.’ Not a word of thanks, never. In base camp, I waited to hear excuses. I was conscious of what I had suffered, but I was young and ingenuous. The true of story of K2—the really bad story—begins after the expedition.”
Amazingly, Bonatti had escaped from the bivouac unscathed. It was Mahdi who turned out to be the true martyr of K2, eventually suffering the amputation of nearly all his toes and fingers. The finest Hunza climber of his day, Mahdi had, just the year before, helped carry the badly frostbitten Hermann Buhl down Nanga Parbat. After K2, reduced to a virtual cripple, Mahdi would never again go into the high mountains.
In Ascent of K2, Desio makes no acknowledgment of Mahdi’s sacrifice. The closest he comes to mentioning the man’s terrible frostbite is in a single comment about the effort of the team to get down the mountain: “The Hunzas, however, postponed their departure from Camp V until they had administered first aid to Mahdi. As a result, the return of the climbing party was delayed for a whole day.”
Back in Italy, the triumph on K2 made a titanic splash. Compagnoni and Lacedelli were instantly enshrined in the pantheon of their country’s demigods of adventure. For decades, they remained Italy’s most famous mountaineers. And in 2004, as the country engaged in a year-long celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of its greatest mountaineering achievement, Compagnoni and Lacedelli, then ninety and seventy-nine years old, were feted again as national heroes.
Bonatti, however, was lastingly embittered by the expedition. In 1961, he published Le Mie Montagne, a memoir of his finest climbs. There he revealed how Desio’s expedition had changed his very character: “Until the conquest of K2 I had always felt a great affinity for and trust of other men, but after what happened in 1954 I came to mistrust people. I tended to rely only on myself.”
The publication of Bonatti’s version of what happened on July 30 and 31 caused quite a stir in Italy. Rather than the innocent miscommunication at dusk that Compagnoni’s account had described, Bonatti made it clear that he thought his two teammates had hung him and Mahdi out to dry. “They didn’t want to know if we were in the bivouac,” he bitterly mused in 2003. “I was supposed to die. That would make the expedition even more glorious.”
By the time I read On the Heights, the English translation of Le Mie Montagne, I was twenty-two years old. Bonatti was already a hero of mine, because his epic adventures—the terrible retreat from the Frêney Pillar on Mont Blanc, the amazing solo on the Petit Dru, and, of course, K2—were legendary. But after reading his own gripping accounts of these climbs, I saw him as even more of a supernatural character. He was