About three hours later, the Sherpas said, the group had traveled no more than about 300 feet down from the summit. Exhausted and woozy, Antezana nearly fell off the side of the mountain. The Sherpas steadied him, carefully placing his feet on the narrow ridges. As they struggled, it was getting colder and darker. Now it was clear that it would be nighttime at the earliest before they arrived back at Camp Four, and only if they could drag Antezana most of the way.
Later, Lisi would claim in the taped discussion that it was about there and then on Everest's South Summit, as Antezana foundered again, that Dorjee told Lisi to go down the mountain to lift the fixed ropes from the snow and clear them of any ice, so they wouldn't become unusable. Damian Benegas says that Dorjee later denied that he ordered or suggested that Lisi do anything, insisting that Lisi began descending on his own, without discussion. What is undisputed is that for the next several hours, Dorjee and Mingmar alone helped the stumbling, sometimes babbling Antezana, picking him up whenever he fell, eventually supporting him as he tried to put one foot in front of another.
Nils Antezana wears an oxygen mask during one of the last phases of his summit.
(Photograph Courtesy Antezana Family)
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Lisi stayed ahead of them by 50 to 110 yards, he said later, within sight but out of touch, until finally, sapped of energy and temporarily unable to continue, he dug a bivouac in the snow and climbed into a sleeping bag to nap.
The Sherpas were spent themselves by late afternoon. High on the mountain, Antezana collapsed again. According to the accounts, the Sherpas tried giving him water, but he could not even drink now. He was having difficulty putting words together. He seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness and babbling nonsensically, thought the Sherpas, who had spent the day worrying about this very possibility.
Now, according to accounts from Lhawang Dhondup and Falvey, the Sherpas thought they were all in trouble. They rested the stricken man against a block of snow and ice, an alcove of sorts above a thin promontory on the mountain known as the Balcony, a point about 1,600 vertical feet above Camp Four. Sixteen hundred feet does not sound like a long way -- a little more than a quarter-mile in altitude from their goal -- but, because of the doctor's condition and the need to support him, it would take them hours to make the descent over twisting terrain bedeviled in spots by ice and upon which the correct path to the camp is not always discernible at night, even to climbers wearing headlamps. There was the understanding that, given the cold, the darkness and their own deteriorating condition, none of them might make it back that night if they continued moving so slowly -- and that the night might turn into forever.
When the Sherpas bent to put two oxygen bottles next to Antezana in the snow, it was a signal. Even in his stupor, the doctor seemed to understand it, they later said: They had decided to leave him. One of the Sherpas told Falvey and Damian Benegas that he removed his down jacket and laid it upon Antezana, to give him an extra layer of warmth -- and an extra chance against the thing that none of them talked about. By then any assumptions about unbreakable loyalty had crumbled, as they sometimes do on Everest. The instinct for self-preservation had kicked in.
Antezana was drifting in and out of consciousness, though now almost entirely out, the Sherpas thought. "I'm going to stay here, and you stay here with me," the fallen man said, according to accounts that Falvey and Damian Benegas reported from the Sherpas. "The mountain is my home. Don't leave me. We should all die together."
The Sherpas made sure the oxygen bottles were within the doctor's reach and checked a last time to make sure the extra down jacket was securely around him. Then they turned to walk away. In this last instant, Antezana pleaded in the only way he had left. He grabbed at the legs of one of the Sherpas and tried to hold on. The Sherpa pulled his leg free, and the two men strode down, hurrying toward the mountain's highest refuge.
THE FOURTH AND LAST MAN IN THEIR FRACTURED PARTY, the guide who had been away for several hours by then, was still in his sleeping bag down the mountain. Within the next hour or so, the two Sherpas discovered Lisi nestled in his makeshift bivouac in the snow. To the Sherpas, he appeared asleep. If Lisi didn't wake up, he'd likely freeze to death during the night. The Sherpas shook him hard until he stirred, and continued down the mountain toward Everest's Camp Four, but not before Lisi asked what had happened to the doctor.
He is dead, Lisi would say the Sherpas told him. Later, in a taped conversation, he changed that characterization, saying that he was told the doctor was unconscious.
The three men set out toward camp, the weary Lisi trailing. A few hours later, with night having fallen, a British party of climbers on their way toward the summit passed within a few yards of Lisi. The guide of the British team, Victor Saunders, exchanged glances with Lisi. It was the first real opportunity for Lisi to summon help for Antezana.
To Saunders, Lisi looked awful, bent over and stumbling. Saunders also noticed that Lisi had the thermal material known as down coming out of a hole in the back of his pants, seeming evidence that he had fallen somewhere. Rough climb, thought Saunders.
Ahead of Lisi, Saunders saw his own hired Sherpas talking to the two Sherpas from Lisi's group. When the groups of Sherpas parted, Saunders recollects overhearing a couple of his group's Sherpas say, "Bad Sherpas."
What was all that about? Saunders asked them.
One of the Sherpas explained that Lisi's Sherpas had gone off while one of their climbers was high on the mountain, atop the Balcony.
Saunders says he didn't take this complaint to mean that the climber was abandoned or stranded, simply that the unknown person was lagging perhaps, in need of a brief rest. He and his team resumed their ascent, while Lisi and the two Sherpas continued down. One of the Sherpas was in dire need of quickly reaching the camp. Having placed his down jacket upon the fallen Antezana, he was shivering, on the verge of hypothermia and collapse himself. The two Sherpas hurried, leaving behind Lisi, who at some point fell and lost his climber's headlamp. Descending alone under a dying light, he finally stopped on a patch of ice because he could not see, he would later explain.
He was only about 220 yards above the tents of Camp Four, but it might as well have been 200 miles: He had no way of knowing where he was, and a wrong step on the ice might be disastrous. He was stuck. The weather was turning bad. Dying was a possibility now, especially as his oxygen had run out. Stranded men and women had perished even closer to Camp Four during nightfall, discovered at daylight as frozen corpses. Lisi started screaming.
He howled a long time, as he remembered, until two Sherpas with Pat Falvey's Irish expedition team heard his cries, climbed in the direction of the shouts and, after about a half-hour, found him and guided him down. Although tired and stumbling, Lisi was conscious and alert as the three men arrived at Camp Four, but conscious and alert are relative terms high on Everest. It was somewhere between 10 p.m. and midnight, a moment that those close to Antezana would thereafter struggle to comprehend. Having been rescued, Lisi made no mention of his client. Besides Lisi's Sherpas, the camp's residents at that moment included the sleeping Falvey and Clare O'Leary. Instead of rousing them, Lisi walked past their tents. He accepted oxygen bottles from his two rescuers, found a tent of his own, and promptly went to sleep.
Having been starved for bottled oxygen for several hours, perhaps Gustavo Lisi had nothing left but an instinct for survival, some climbers would reason later. Some saw the possibility that, despite his screams, Lisi was semi-comatose, his brain cells numbed by air he couldn't breathe. "This was a man who'd been climbing up over [25,000 feet] for 25, 26, 27 hours by then, and a lot of that time without [bottled] supplemental oxygen," said Victor Saunders, who, after passing Lisi, was heading up the mountain on a summit path that would have taken him directly toward the spot above the Balcony where Antezana had been left. But he turned back after a storm hit high on the mountain, relieved that he hadn't needed to make part of the trek without oxygen like Lisi. "You're woozy [without oxygen], and it's not always obvious. I'd like to think I would have done things a lot differently than [Lisi]. After all, he was conscious, he was able to talk, and he could have talked, certainly. But I don't know what was going on in his mind. Passing judgment is hard in a place that extreme."
For his part, Lisi insisted in the taped conversation that he would have been with Antezana every step during that last day, but for his own struggles. That he needed to climb into his sleeping bag only underscored the magnitude of his horrendous fatigue, he said.
When Lisi awakened, it was morning. He called his mother and then his Web site manager on a satellite phone, to tell them that he had reached the summit. His Web site soon reported his accomplishment -- GUSTAVO LISI CONQUERS EVEREST -- without mentioning Antezana at all.
Lisi had yet to contact the Antezana family. At Camp Four, members of the Irish team say, they listened as he made his phone calls. Before Lisi said a word to any of them about the crisis up the mountain, they already had deduced that something was terribly awry: A man from the Lisi party was missing. Pat Falvey says he approached Lisi, who finally acknowledged that he had a client stranded near the Balcony. That point was within sight of Camp Four, achingly close. But with the new storm hitting high on Everest, Antezana was hidden and all but impossible to reach.
Climbers stranded overnight had been saved before. But the next morning at Camp Four, with the storm only growing worse, Pat Falvey and Victor Saunders decided that a rescue attempt was futile and dangerous. By then, Gustavo Lisi had headed down the mountain, escorted by two of Falvey's Sherpas. By day's end, nearly everyone on the mountain concluded that Antezana was certainly dead. The following evening, as the weather cleared, other expeditions started up toward the summit. They passed the spot where Antezana had been left. He was gone. Saunders and others guessed that Antezana had risen or crawled briefly before falling off a ledge or down a face of Everest. After almost 83 years of known expeditions, the mountain is littered with unrecovered bodies.
FABIOLA ANTEZANA IS, IN ALL WAYS, HER FATHER'S DAUGHTER -- relentless and resourceful. Her bond with her father was so tight that her brother, David, viewed them as alter egos. "I was never able to get into my father's head like my sister did," he says. "She got in so deep that they would know what each other was dreaming."
She grew up in Washington, for the most part. But because her family had the means and her father wanted her to learn languages early, she has studied and worked all over the world -- in Paris, Madrid, Moscow and London, to name a few places. The result is that, at 35, she has one of those accents described in another era as continental, which invests her tone with an upper-crust moral certainty.
She had decided to conduct her own investigation, at least in part because she had heard of no Nepalese officials questioning Lisi. Rather than ask Lisi to provide a statement, the authorities in Nepal's Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation had accepted a report on Nils Antezana's death from the official leader of his expedition, Alejandro Ochoa, who never climbed with the Antezana party and who had had no association with Antezana since the two men jointly purchased a climbing permit. According to ministry official Purna Bhakta Tankukar, Ochoa stated that Antezana died of "high-altitude sickness," providing no additional information.
That wasn't nearly enough for Fabiola Antezana, who had flown to Katmandu with her husband, Davide Percipalle, and Damian Benegas, whom Fabiola had hired to look into her father's death. Fabiola came to Nepal to build a case, though she understood there was no history of Nepalese authorities charging Everest climbers with criminal or civil negligence. Instead, she says, she wanted to blacklist Lisi in the alpine community. For this to happen, she decided she needed an audiotape of any conversation she might have with him, and for her to get him on tape she believed she had no other choice but to sneak a cassette recorder into her backpack for when they met.
She faced Lisi at a table in the lounge of a Katmandu hotel. Her backpack, with the tape recorder running inside, was on the table. She stayed silent for a long while. Her husband sat alongside her, as Lisi listened to Damian Benegas, who had been questioning and sometimes lecturing Lisi. Everyone at the table spoke in Spanish. On the tape, Lisi did not dispute references to himself as Antezana's guide. "Gustavo, from a professional point of view, certain things you did, morally, ethically, were incorrect," Benegas said.
