Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [98]
No amount of money can put a man up here. Only a man’s spirit can do that.
I liked that.
The wind now blew in strong gusts over the lip of the col and ruffled the torn material of the wrecked tents.
It felt as if the mountain was daring me to proceed.
PART 4
‘Both faith and fear may sail into your harbour, but allow only faith to drop anchor.’
CHAPTER 89
The last four thousand feet on Everest is a deathly place, where humans are not meant to survive. Once inside the mountain’s jaws, at this height, your body is now literally dying.
Every hour is borrowed time.
Two tents, one from the Singapore expedition and the other belonging to our Bolivian friend, Bernardo, stood in the middle of the col. Both teams had come up the day before us.
The tents now stood empty.
I wondered what those climbers were going through right now, somewhere above us. The whole of Singapore awaited news of their attempt.
I hoped they had succeeded.
We’d also agreed with Bernardo beforehand to share resources and use his camp as he made his own summit bid. So I crawled awkwardly inside his now vacant tent.
At this height the effect of thin air makes people move like spacemen. Slow, laboured and clumsy. On autopilot, I removed my oxygen tank and pack, and then slumped into the corner.
My head ached painfully. I just had to close my eyes – just for a second.
The next thing I heard was the sound of Bernardo, and I sat up wearily as he peered into his tent.
He smiled straight at me. His face looked tired, with dark bags under his panda-eyes, from where he had been wearing goggles in the high-altitude sun for so many weeks.
Yet his face was radiant.
I didn’t have to ask if he had reached the summit. His eyes said it all.
‘It is beautiful, Bear. Truly beautiful.’
Bernardo repeated the words again in a dreamy voice. He had done it. We huddled together in the tent, and I helped to get a stove going to melt some ice for him to drink.
It would have been many, many hours since his last swig of any liquid.
Yet, despite his fatigue, he seemed so alive. For him, all the pain was now gone.
The two Singapore climbers also returned. They, too, had been successful. All of Singapore would be celebrating.
Two hours later, Neil and Alan reached the col. They had overtaken Geoffrey and Michael. Neil shook my arm excitedly as he poked his head into Bernardo’s tent.
We were here together, and that togetherness gave me strength.
It was time to leave Bernardo and help Neil get a tent up.
Now Geoffrey and Michael were also staggering slowly across the col. They told us that Graham, an Everest summiteer in his own right, had turned around, some three hundred feet above camp three.
He had felt too weakened by the illness we had both had. He knew he would not survive any higher up.
What did he know about the next stage that I didn’t?
I pushed the thought aside.
The weather was worsening – we needed shelter fast.
The wind ripped a corner of our tent from Neil’s hands, and the material flapped wildly as we both fought to control it.
What should have taken us minutes actually took almost an hour. But finally we had it erected.
We huddled in the tent and waited. Waited for night to come.
CHAPTER 90
The thought of seventeen hours weighed down by those ruddy heavy oxygen tanks filled me with dread.
I could feel that slowly, methodically, my strength was deserting me.
I had no idea how I would lift the tanks on to my back – let alone carry them so far, and so high, through the waist-deep snow that lay ahead.
Instead, I tried to remind myself of all that lay on the other side.
Home, family, Shara. But they all felt so strangely distant.
I couldn’t picture them in my head. Oxygen deprivation does that. It robs you – of memory, of feeling, of power.
I tried to push negative thoughts from my mind.
To think of nothing but this mountain.
Just finish this, Bear, and finish strong.
The lethargy that you feel at this height is almost impossible to describe. You have nothing to drive you – and you just