Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [92]
I cursed myself as my body shivered and my joints ached with fever. There was no way I was going to be able to climb – and seventeen and a half thousand feet up is a nightmare of a place to recover.
Mick, Neil, Karla and Alan were to leave base camp at dawn the next morning. Michael, Graham and Geoffrey would form a second wave, scheduled to leave a day later – weather permitting.
As for me, I kept throwing up all day. I was drained and pale. My Everest dream lay in a pool of vomit outside my tent.
I had given my everything for this chance at the top – and now all I could do was sit and watch it slipping away.
Please, God, help me get better – and fast.
That night was probably the longest and loneliest of the expedition.
I was dry, I was safe, I was near my friends – but I just felt desperate. And alone.
An opportunity lost.
In a matter of hours, Neil, Mick, Karla and Alan would leave base camp for the first summit attempt on Everest’s south side for over six months – and I would not be part of it.
Graham and Michael were both also sick – coughing, spluttering, run down and weak.
Henry had insisted that Geoffrey wait to be part of a second team. Four and four was safer than five and three. Nobly, he had agreed.
The four of us would form a pretty mediocre-looking reserve summit party – that’s if there was going to be a chance for a second summit team.
I doubted there would.
At 5 a.m., I heard the first rustles from Mick’s tent – but this morning things were different. There was no banter. Neil and Mick whispered to each other as they put on their harnesses in the cold air of dawn.
They didn’t want to wake us. But I hadn’t even come close to sleep.
The pair would want to get moving soon. They both crouched outside my tent to say goodbye. Mick shook my hand and held it.
‘You’ve been such a backbone to this team, Bear. Just hang on in there and get strong again. Your chance will come, buddy.’
I smiled. I so envied them – their timing, their opportunity – and their health.
At 5.35 a.m. the four of them, along with Pasang, left base camp. I could hear their boots crunching purposefully across the rocks towards the foot of the icefall.
My tent had never felt so quiet – and so bleak.
Two days later, as the guys started to head up towards camp three, I woke feeling much stronger. Against all the odds. Not 100 per cent but definitely halfway there.
That was good enough for me. The antibiotics were kicking in.
That morning, though, the forecast that came in had changed – dramatically and very suddenly. Everest has a habit of doing this.
‘Severe warning: Tropical cyclone forming south of Everest. Likely to turn into a typhoon as it approaches the mountain.’
The typhoon was due in two days – that didn’t give the guys much time up there.
It would not only bring gale-force winds, it could also potentially drop up to five feet of snow in a matter of hours. Anyone still up there in that would – in Henry’s words – ‘become unreachable’.
That afternoon, I went to Henry with a suggestion.
Michael and Graham were still ill. But I was feeling almost fit again.
‘Why not let Geoffrey and me head up to camp two, so we can be in position just in case the typhoon heads away?’
It was a long shot – a very long shot – but as the golfer Jack Nicklaus once said: ‘Never up, never in.’
Sure as hell, I wasn’t going to stand any chance of the summit, sitting here at base camp twiddling my thumbs, waiting.
In addition, at camp two, I could be a radio go-between from base camp (where Henry was) and the team higher up.
That was the clincher.
Henry knew that Michael and Graham weren’t likely to recover any time soon. He understood my hunger, and he recognized the same fire that he had possessed in his own younger days.
His own mountaineering maxim was: ‘Ninety-nine per cent cautiousness; 1 per cent recklessness.’
But knowing when to use that 1 per cent is the mountaineer’s real skill.
I stifled a cough, and left his tent grinning.
I was going up.
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