Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [97]
Five minutes later it hadn’t got any easier and I was struggling. I felt stifled by the mask. I stopped again and tore it from my face, gulping in the outside air.
Geoffrey stooped behind me, leaning over his axe. He didn’t even look up.
I replaced my mask, determined to trust it. It read that it was working. That meant it would be giving me a meagre trickle of about two litres of oxygen a minute. A small, steady, regulated flow that would last some six hours.
But two litres a minute is a fraction of what we were gasping down every minute in the thin air – working hard with a heavy load up a sheer face.
Yet this steady trickle of oxygen was just enough to take the edge off the hypoxia, and therefore justified the extra weight. Just.
I told myself that a sore back and shoulders mattered less than low oxygen saturation and death.
The rope stretched above me, straight up the face.
Away to my right the ice soared away, up towards the summit of Lhotse. To my left the ice fell at an alarming angle straight down towards the Western Cwm, some four thousand feet below.
Any mistakes would be punished by death up here now.
I tried to stop myself from looking down, and instead to focus on the ice in front of me.
Slowly I began to cross the ice towards the band of steep rock that divided the face in two.
The ‘Yellow Band’, as it is known, is a stretch of sandstone rock that was once a seabed of the ancient Tethys Sea, before tectonic shifting over many millennia sent it vertically up into the sky.
Here it was, this yellow rock stretching above me into the mist.
I leant against the cold rock, hyperventilating in my effort to get more oxygen into my lungs. I tried to recover some strength to start up the rock face.
I knew that once we were over this band, then camp four was only a few hours away.
My crampons grated eerily as they met the rock for the first time. They had no grip, and they skidded across the surface awkwardly. I dug my points into any small crevices I could find and carried on up.
As I cleared the steep yellow band of rock, the route levelled out into a gentle snow traverse across the face. At the end of this was the Geneva Spur, a steep, rocky outcrop that led up to camp four.
There was a mesmerizing simplicity to what we were doing. My mind was uncluttered, clear, entirely focused on every move. I love that feeling.
As I started up the Geneva Spur I could see Geoffrey some way below me – and behind him, the figures of Graham, Alan, Neil and Michael.
I climbed steadily up the spur, and an hour later found myself resting just beneath a small lip. The infamous South Col awaited me over the top.
I longed to see this place I had heard and read so much about. The highest camp in the world at twenty-six thousand feet – deep in Everest’s Death Zone.
I had always winced at the term Death Zone. Mountaineers are renowned for playing things down, yet mountaineers had coined the phrase – I didn’t like that.
I put the thought aside, pulled the last few steps over the spur, and the gradient eased. I turned around, and swore that I could see halfway around the world.
A thick blanket of cloud was moving in beneath me, obscuring the lower faces of the mountain. But above these, I could see a vast horizon of dark blue panned out before me.
Adrenalin filled my tired limbs and I started to move once more.
I knew I was entering another world.
The South Col is a vast rocky area, maybe the size of four football pitches, strewn with the remnants of old expeditions.
It was here in 1996, in the fury of the storm, that men and women had struggled for their lives to find their tents. Few had managed it. Their bodies still lay here, as cold as marble, many now partially buried beneath snow and ice.
It was a sombre place: a grave that their families could never visit.
There was an eeriness to it all – a place of utter isolation; a place unvisited by all but those strong enough to reach it. Helicopters can barely land at base