Calgary, February 2020
We live in a world of noise. Coming to work, I am greeted by a deafening rock and roll song blasting from the office next door. At lunch time, I walk by a construction site with all its noise-producing machinery going at full blast. At home, in the evening, the dishwasher roars, and some advert screams from the TV. When I cannot stand it anymore, I go to my bedroom, close the door and pretend to be listening to silence.
There is one moment of silence I will never forget. It happened in the Himalayas, near Mount Everest, under the east face of Lhotse – the huge, terrifying, unsurmountable east face of Lhotse. I was sitting on the top of the moraine, next to the wall, and was desperately hoping to hear the voices of my friends, but I heard nothing. At those altitudes, there is no life: only rock, ice and silence. The silence of death.
To start from the beginning, I was born in Czechoslovakia, and in 1969, after the Russian invasion, I immigrated to England and then to Canada. Also, I like mountains, the higher the better, so I spent my holidays going to the Himalayas, wandering through the valleys and admiring the mountains. However, I had no desire to climb them. My concept of a holiday is to have a good time, not to be a hero and fight for life on some awful wall. With this in mind, I found myself again in Namche Bazar, a small town, which is a centre of trekking and climbing activity in the Everest region. It is customary to stay there for few days to get acclimatized to higher altitudes so, one evening, just to kill some time, I went to a restaurant. The place was crowded and, as I was looking for a space to sit down, I overheard two guys speaking Czech. It is always nice to hear my mother tongue in a faraway place, so I joined them at their table. They were pleased to see me; we talked about our plans and our lives. The older one, Mike, was an owner of a successful construction company in Prague and, the other, Stan, was Mike’s climbing partner, but their plan was the exact opposite of mine. They were not interested in an easy, pleasant holiday but were after serious, hard-core mountaineering. They wanted to climb the east face of Lhotse, traverse to the regular Mount Everest route, and descend to the Everest base camp. Right away, I thought it was bit too ambitious, but maybe they were real experts. We talked until late at night, and I offered to help them carry the loads from the base camp to the foot of the mountain face.
The base camp for that climb is a beautiful spot. It is a flat meadow, surrounded by rocks that are perfect for climbing, and the nearby Island Peak just begs to be ascended. When I arrived at the camp, Mike and Stan were already sorting the pile of baggage that the porters brought in the day before. The trip from the base camp to where the climb begins takes one day, and with the amount of material to be transported, we needed at least three trips.
Following breakfast, the next morning, we started with our heavy packs towards our objective. After about two hours of walking, suddenly the face appeared, and what I saw left me speechless. I saw 3000 meters of nearly vertical rock and ice, with no platform on which to rest or spend the night. To me, it looked like the face of death.
"Boys, you really want to climb that?" I blurted out.
My friends also looked stunned, but then Mike said, "It is not a first ascent, so it must be possible. Maybe it is not as bad as it looks."
I did not say anything, but I knew that in the Himalayas nothing is easy, and this looked terrifying. We continued, and after many long hours, we reached the place where the climb started. Back at base camp, I could not stop myself from saying, "Do you really want to climb that? Have you already done something similar?"It turned out that last year they had ascended Cho Oyu, an 8000-metre peak in the Himalayas and, in the Alps, they had climbed the north face of the Matterhorn. But Cho Oyu is a high-altitude hike and, nowadays, the north face of the Matterhorn is not considered a really a difficult climb.
"In other words, you are saying that we are not qualified," replied Mike, feeling a bit insulted.
"I don’t know about that, but this is an extreme ascent, and any mistake will cost you your life."
"I did not become a successful entrepreneur by avoiding difficulties!" uttered Mike.
"The purpose of mountaineering is not to become a successful entrepreneur but to have a nice holiday. What kind of a holiday is this, spending days fighting for your lives on this awful wall? I have a suggestion: forget the wall. We can stay here for a few days, scramble over those nice rocks, then climb Island Peak and descend to Namche Bazar. We would enjoy ourselves and make some pleasant memories."
Stan appeared to like the idea, but Martin got mad and barked, "This is not why we came here!" And that was the end of the discussion.With a somewhat depressed disposition, we continued carrying the loads for two more days, and then came the time to say goodbye. "After eight days, I will wait for you at the Everest base camp, but the only important thing is that you return alive. Nothing else matters," were my parting words.
For the next few days, I continued wandering through the valleys, and then I hiked up to the Everest base camp. The climbing season was almost over, and the camp was half empty. I asked one of the climbers if he had seen two Czechs descend the regular route, but he knew nothing about them. He contacted the higher camps, but nobody had seen them there either. It was obvious that my friends had not reached the top of the face.
"Maybe they have descended and are down in our base camp now," I told myself optimistically. I went back, but the base camp was empty. There was nobody there. I went to the foot of the mountain face and called their names, desperately hoping to hear the voices of my friends, but I heard nothing, only the cruel silence. I stayed there for most of the day, but then the sun began to set, and I knew I had to go down."Boys, we knew each other for only a short time, but I did not expect this kind of parting." Tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was surrounded by silence.