The Lost Explorer Read Free

carry at altitude. “Let’s get together for Snickers and tea.”
    Jake knew I’d found something important, but the other three were still oblivious. He tried to wave and yell and get their attention, but it wasn’t working. At 27,000 feet, because of oxygen deprivation, you retreat into a kind of personal shell; the rest of the world doesn’t seem quite real. So I got back on the radio and put some urgency into my third message: “I’m calling a mandatory group meeting right now!”
    Where we were searching was fairly tricky terrain, downsloping shale slabs, some of them covered with a dusting of snow. If you fell in the wrong place, you’d go all the way, 7,000 feet to the Rongbuk Glacier. So it took the other guys a little while to work their way down and over to me.
    I rooted through my pack to get out my camera. That morning, at Camp V, I thought I’d stuck it in my pack, but I had two nearly identical stuff sacks, and it turns out I’d grabbed my radio batteries instead. I realized I’d forgotten my camera. I thought, Oh, well, if I had had the camera, I might not have found the body. That’s just the way things work.
    When I told a friend about this, he asked if I’d read Faulkner’s novella
The Bear
. I hadn’t. On reading that story, I saw the analogy. The best hunters in the deep Mississippi woods can’t even catch a glimpse of Old Ben, the huge, half-mythic bear that has ravaged their livestock for years. It’s only when Ike McCaslin gives up everything he’s relied on—lays down not only his rifle, but his compass and watch—that, lost in the forest, he’s graced with the sudden presence of Old Ben in a clearing: “It did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon’s hot dappling.”
    As I sat on my pack waiting for the others, a feeling of awe and respect for the dead man sprawled in front of me started to fill me. He lay face down, head uphill, frozen into the slope. A tuft of hair stuck out from the leather pilot’s cap he had on hishead. His arms were raised, and his fingers were planted in the scree, as if he’d tried to self-arrest with them. It seemed likely that he was still alive when he had come to rest in this position. There were no gloves on his hands; later I’d think long and hard about the implications of that fact. I took off my own gloves to compare my hands to his. I’ve got short, thick fingers; his were long and thin, and deeply tanned, probably from the weeks of having walked the track all the way from Darjeeling over the crest of the Himalaya to the north face of Everest.
    The winds of the decades had torn most of the clothing away from his back and lower torso. He was naturally mummified—that patch of alabaster I’d spotted from a hundred feet away was the bare, perfectly preserved skin of his back. What was incredible was that I could still see the powerful, well-defined muscles in his shoulders and back, and the blue discoloration of bruises.
    Around his shoulders and upper arms, the remnants of seven or eight layers of clothing still covered him—shirts and sweaters and jackets made of wool, cotton, and silk. There was a white, braided cotton rope tied to his waist, about three eighths of an inch in diameter—many times weaker than any rope we’d use today. The rope was tangled around his left shoulder. About ten feet from his waist, I could see the frayed end where the rope had broken. So I knew at once that he’d been tied to his partner, and that he’d taken a long fall. The rope had either broken in the fall, or when his partner tried to belay him over a rock edge.
    The right elbow looked as if it was dislocated or broken. It lay imbedded in the scree, bent in an unnatural position. The right scapula was a little disfigured. And above his waist on a right rib, I could see the blue contusion from an upward pull of the rope as it took the shock of the fall.
    His right leg was badly broken, both tibia and