Bear Grylls (36 page)

As we swept down through the valley, the rotors began to bite into the thicker air. On the horizon I could see a tiny figure with two big white dots on his feet. ‘Neil?’ I muttered,
grinning to myself questioningly. We swooped down to pick him up and lifted off with ease. The pilots, still both on oxygen, looked round at us. A look of understanding came over their faces as
they saw us huddled together, grinning. We were away.

Mick and Geoffrey raced ahead of the rest of the team and covered the thirty-five miles to the rocky airfield at Lukla, in some twenty-eight hours, non-stop. An amazing feat that I knew I could
never have done. My body was in pieces.

As the two of them began the long journey down, Neil and I leant back in the helicopter, faces pressed against the glass, and watched our life for the past three months become a vague shimmer in
the distance. The great mountain faded into a haze, hidden from sight. I leant against Neil and closed my eyes – Everest was gone.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

WHY

The harsh world of the mountains – cold, white and hostile had been our life for the past ninety-three days. We were leaving that world behind us now. As the chopper
swooped and wound its way back through the valleys, that hostility slowly became replaced by the rich flora of the foothills. Glaciers were exchanged for the warmth of yellow rock-beds, and snow
was substituted for the buds of the late-spring flowers. I felt the richer air fill my nostrils and a warmth swept over me. We were leaving a lot behind.

The three months up there had changed every one of us. Fear, worry, pain, but also a sense of wonder had held us strongly together for all that time. But still, the long awaited dream of home
held me captive. As the valleys that we knew so well flew past beneath us, I felt that dream getting ever closer.

Kathmandu was the sprawling mass of fumes and ancient diesel buses that I remembered it to be. Nothing else seemed to have changed. I felt like a naïve stranger returning into the hustle
and bustle of it all. I had been away from all this for so long, living a life of simplicity amongst the hills. The confusion of the city below frightened me as we hovered above the landing pad at
the airport. A different world was now awaiting us.

On arriving at the Gauri Shankar hotel, I apologized to the receptionist for my smell. My clothes were black with the dirt of months of mountain living. I shifted around
slightly embarrassedly. She seemed most forgiving and smiled. I returned the compliment and took the key. It had been a while since I had seen a girl.

The shower was all I had hoped it to be; it was unlikely, though, to disappoint, when my last shower had been over twelve weeks earlier.

The bathroom floor became thick with grime, as the dirt and sweat washed off me. I felt both fear and strain falling away with it. As the cold water splashed over me, I felt a deep relief. I
sang quietly to myself. Neil sat on the bed, swigging a cool beer, his feet still bandaged and raised.

Leaning over the balcony of the hotel in my towel, whilst Neil showered, I saw the Russian team, who had been on the north side of Everest. They talked in low voices and moved their bags
lethargically around. They looked mentally exhausted. I put on a T-shirt and, still in my towel and holding my beer, I went down to see them. As my eyes met theirs, I knew something was wrong. I
knew that look. Neither of us talked for a few seconds as we just looked at each other. They had been crying; big Russian, bearded men, crying.

Sergei and Francys Arsentiev were recently married. They loved to climb. Everest was the culmination of a dream; a dream that had gone horribly wrong. Francys had been coming
down from the summit when she collapsed. Nobody knew why. Maybe cerebral oedema, or a heart attack, or maybe just exhaustion. She didn’t have the energy to carry on. She died slowly where she
sat. Sergei, her husband, went off in search of help; drunkenly he staggered in a stupor of fatigue and desperation. He fell to his death and was never seen again.

The Russian I sat with asked me feebly if I had seen anyone fall whilst we had been up there, or had we seen a body, or just . . . anything. His voice was weak, he knew that it was unlikely, but
he had to try. His eyes seemed dead. I felt a sickness well up inside as I thought of Sergei and his wife both dead on the mountain. ‘What the hell am I doing celebrating?’ Emptiness
swept over me. I pushed the beer slowly aside without even looking at it.

That afternoon, lying on my bed, I struggled to understand why we had survived. Why had we even been there? I thought of Sergei and Francys Arsentiev; they hadn’t been the only ones who
had died in the last few weeks. Roger Buick, a New Zealand climber, had also collapsed whilst still quite low on the hill. He had died there from a heart attack. Life seemed tragically volatile,
almost cheap. Mark Jennings was a British climber who had reached the top but had died on the descent. That killer symptom of collapsing to the ground from fatigue had claimed his life as well.
These were all experienced, fit climbers. I wrestled to understand why we had survived when others had been robbed of precious life. What a waste, what an unnecessary waste. As I lay there I found
no real answers. A year later, I still find myself bereft of any.

The Russians’ faces had been buried in deep despair; they weren’t interested in answers; they had lost their comrades. I closed my eyes. I remembered the words of an old corporal of
mine when he had lost his best friend; they were all I could find. Said in his broad Welsh accent he had put it down to the ‘Shape of life, Bear. Shape of life.’ The words didn’t
seem to answer anything, but they were all I had.

Human nature hungers for adventure, and true adventure has its risks. Everyone knows those risks on Everest, yet the reality of seeing it first hand makes such words seem hollow. These are real
lives, with real families and it still confuses me today.

I remain loyal, though, to the belief that those brave men and women who died during those months on Everest are the true heroes. To them goes the real glory. This must be their families’
only relief.

Neil had lived with death on Everest, twice now. It was twice too much. We wandered the streets of Kathmandu and tried to put it all behind us. As we walked I felt a liberation. The rickshaws
honked, the street sellers scurried by clutching their wares, and the fumes lingered sordidly around the tiny, muddy backstreets. The rush of everyday life seemed to dull the memories of the
mountain, and all those emotions began to lift off me.

I remembered when I had returned from Ama Dablam almost eight months earlier; the excitement, the determination – it was gone now. I had spent it all on the mountain. The photos of Everest
for sale in the stalls no longer held the same magic. I looked at them out of habit more than anything.

We were due to be flying out early the next morning, to get Neil home to some proper medical attention. His feet were now really beginning to swell and blister, as the dead tissue in his toes
began to decompose. He hobbled around with me like an old man. It was good to try and move them, despite the strange looks we received from passers-by. We ignored them, they didn’t need to
know.

Mick and Geoffrey would arrive in Kathmandu by plane from Lukla in a day or so. It would be a shame not to be together for a while in Kathmandu, but we had no idea how long they would be. We
needed to get Neil back.

That last night, ‘out on the tiles’ in Kathmandu, Neil ‘got lucky’ with a beautiful Scottish girl. It hasn’t taken him long, I thought, smiling. I left them kissing
outside the down-market Casino. I felt strangely happy for him, almost jealous. I reassured myself by thinking that I was far too exhausted to possibly attempt that. I grinned. That would do. I
went back to the hotel and fell fast asleep as if drugged by the intoxicating rich air of Kathmandu – at only 3,000 feet.

If a man was taken straight from sea-level to the summit of Everest, he would be unconscious in minutes, and dead soon after. The hostility of that place of dreams had allowed
us through her fickle net for a few brief moments on the top. We had returned alive. But why had we done it? Or as one paper, rather too accurately, put it: ‘What makes a scruffy,
twenty-three-year-old want to risk it all for a view of Tibet?’ Before I left, I am sure that I would have had a far more slick reply than I do now. The answer seems somehow less obvious, or
maybe just less important. I don’t know; I don’t really think about it much. It is just good to be home.

Without any doubt, though, the draw of the mountains is their simplicity. That fierce force of nature, where the wind howls around you and you struggle for breath and life itself; it is
strangely irresistible to man. The simple sound of ice beneath your crampons, crunching as the teeth bite into the frozen surface. The raw beauty of being so high and so remote, being like, as
Hillary said, ‘ants in a land made for giants’, seeing the greatest mountain range in the world sprawled beneath you. All of it inexplicably draws us to them. I feel those emotions and
see those views as I write.

I am not sure if I would return to climb other great peaks, the ones above 26,000 feet – I suspect not. I feel that I undoubtedly used up at least four of my nine lives during those
months, and it is always good to keep a few in the bank for emergencies. In truth, though, it is the mountains that I love, the air, the freedom, the heather, the streams. I will always be amongst
those, but maybe now in a way that I can just ‘be’; free to enjoy them, with nothing any longer to prove. That, to me, is the real spirit of the mountains.

My experiences on Everest are now just memories; they may fade, but they will never leave me. It is something that maybe only those who have been there will understand.

Since our return, though, people have congratulated me on ‘conquering Everest’, but this feels so wrong. We never conquered any mountain. Everest allowed us to reach her summit by
the skin of our teeth, and let us go with our lives where others died. We certainly never conquered her. If I have learnt a deep understanding of anything, it is this. Everest never has been nor
ever will be conquered. It is what makes the mountain so special.

One of the questions I repeatedly get asked since returning is, ‘Did you find God on the mountain?’ The answer is no. You don’t have to climb a big mountain to find a faith. I
actually began my faith whilst sitting up a tree as a sixteen-year-old. It is the wonderful thing about God; He is always there, wherever you are. That’s what best friends are for. If you
asked me did He help me up there, then the answer would be yes. In the words of the great John Wesley when asked by some cynic whether God was his crutch, he gently replied, ‘No, my God is my
backbone.’ He was right.

The return to the rich air of sea level brought with it an abundance of blessings. The wind was moist and warm, the grass grew and the air was thick with oxygen. The rush,
though, from the extreme altitudes we had been to, back to virtually sea level, brought with it its dangers as well. Several of us experienced recurring nose-bleeds and Mick and Jokey had both
passed out several times. These were all purely reactions, for the first time in a while, to too much oxygen. But our bodies soon adapted and within several weeks our precious acclimatization was
lost.

When we were next to fly in a plane, gone would be the time when we could quietly announce to our neighbour during the safety brief that in the case of a loss in cabin pressure feel free to use
our oxygen masks – we won’t need them.

As for the rest of the team, well, Neil returned to his own company, Office Projects Ltd, in London. His feet healed remarkably well and now only cause him a minimum of pain. He still
doesn’t have much feeling in them but he managed to keep all his toes.

In 1996, whilst he was away, to his horror, his business did a record high quarterly turnover in his absence. Now, though, when he returned, his new-found confidence ensured that his business
set an even higher record. He had only been back a month and he found himself winning contracts wherever he looked. He bought a huge BMW and whopping big speedboat on the proceeds.

I smile as I meet him in London and hear of all his latest ‘acquisitions’. If anyone deserves them, it is him.
⁴

Funnily enough, in the same week that he bought his speedboat, I also bought a boat. Mine, unfortunately, wasn’t quite as grand as his, being only a nine-foot-long, rotting old fishing
boat. Still, I felt certain that our time on the mountain had maybe created a secret yearning for the sea. Maybe it was the freedom and peace that it offers, I don’t know. I am currently
writing this book on a small uninhabited island off the South Coast,
⁵
and my fishing boat has broken down. So I am cursing the day I bought it as I go
hungry, awaiting the island’s owner at the end of the week. Still . . .