They climb onto a band of rotten rock, a tuff-and-lava composite that sometimes breaks right off in their hands. It takes Marie and Dougal two full days to find decent belay points for the 150 meters of the band, and every morning the rockfall is frequent and frightening. “It's a bit like swimming up the thing, isn't it?” Dougal comments. When they make it to the hard rock above, Eileen orders Dougal and Marie to the bottom of their “ladder” to get some rest. Marie makes no complaint now; each day in the lead is an exhausting exercise, and Marie and Dougal are beat.
Every night Eileen works out plans for the following day, revising them as conditions and the climbers' strength and health change. The logistics are complicated, and each day the seven climbers shift partners and positions in the climb. Eileen scribbles in her notebook and jabbers on the radio every dusk, altering the schedules and changing her orders with almost every new bit of information she receives from the higher camps. Her method appears chaotic. Marie dubs her the “Mad Mahdi,” and scoffs at the constant changes in plans; but she obeys them, and they work: Every night they are scattered in two or three camps up and down the cliff, with everything that they need to survive the night and get them higher the next day; and every new day they leapfrog up, pulling out the lowest camp, finding a place to establish a new high camp. The bitter winds continue. Everything is difficult. They lose track of camp numbers, and name them only high, middle, and low.
Naturally, three-quarters of everyone's work is portering. Roger begins to feel that he is surviving the rigors of the weather and altitude better than most of the rest; he can carry more faster, and even though most days end in that state where each step up is ten breaths' agony, he finds he can take on more the next day. His digestion returns to normal, which is a blessing—a great physical pleasure, in fact. Perhaps improvement in this area masks the effects of altitude, or perhaps the altitude isn't bothering Roger yet; it is certainly true that high altitude affects people differently, for reasons unconnected with basic strength—in fact, for reasons not yet fully understood.
So Roger becomes the chief porter; Dougal calls him Roger Sherpa, and Arthur calls him Tenzing. The day's challenge becomes to do all one's myriad activities as efficiently as possible, without frostnip, excessive discomfort, hunger, thirst, or exhaustion. He hums to himself little snatches of music. His favorite is the eight-note phrase repeated by the basses near the end of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth: six notes down, two notes up, over and over and over. And each evening in the sleeping bag, warm, well fed, and prone, is a little victory.
One night he wakes up to darkness and silence, fully awake in an instant, heart pounding. Confused, he thinks he may have dreamed of the Thank God Ledge. But then he notices the silence again and realizes his oxygen bottle has run out. It happens every week or so. He uncouples the bottle from the regulator, finds another bottle in the dark, and clips it into place. When he tells Arthur about it next morning, Arthur laughs. “That happened to me a couple of nights ago. I don't think anybody could sleep through their oxygen bottle running out—I mean you wake up very awake, don't you?"
In the hard rock band Roger porters up a pitch that leaves him whistling into his mask: The gullies have disappeared, above is a nearly vertical black wall, and breaking it is one lightning-bolt crack, now marked by a fixed rope with slings attached, making it a sort of rope ladder. Fine for him, but the lead climb! “Must have been Dougal at it again."
And the next day he is out in the lead himself with Arthur, on a continuation of the same face. Leading is very unlike portering. Suddenly the dogged, repetitious, almost mindless work of carrying loads is replaced by the anxious attentiveness of the lead. Arthur takes the first pitch and finishes it bubbling over with enthusiasm. Only his oxygen mask keeps him from carrying on a long conversation as Roger takes over the lead. Then Roger is up there himself, above the last belay on empty rock, looking for the best way. The lure of the lead returns, the pleasure of the problem solved fills him with energy. Fully back in lead mode, he collaborates with Arthur—who turns out to be an ingenious and resourceful technical climber—on the best storm day yet: five hundred meters of fixed rope, their entire supply, nailed up in one day. They hurry back down to camp and find Eileen and Marie still there, dumping food for the next few days.
“By God we are a team!” Arthur cries as they describe the day's work. “Eileen, you should put us together more often. Don't you agree, Roger?”
Roger grins, nods at Eileen. “That was fun.”