The man seated in the dark night, on the edge of the trace, around 8,500 meters above sea level. His companion films his gray face, taken from fatigue, framed by two arms knotted around his neck. Behind, in the dark, a woman clings to her back like a shipwrecked, her eyes closed, her face hidden under an oxygen mask. In the morning, at 6:30 a.m., this Chinese client collapsed, half-inconstience, when she was only a few dozen meters from the Everest summit. At this height, the bodies are attracted to the pea like an asteroid by a giant planet. The Chinese client did not resist the attraction. She should have died there.
Its two Sherpas guides revived it, then, throughout the day and part of the night, took turns to pull it or wear it on their backs, in the descent along the tapered edge. They do not have an oxygen mask. They keep the latest reserves for their client.
On the video, filmed on the night of May 18 to 19, we see the Sherpa getting up, readjust his burden with a back of the kidneys and starting an energetic step. His companion follows him, we hear his breathless voice: “It’s really hard, a new chapter for sherpas and things we wear …”
He sits: “It’s really difficult and it will be even worse if it is worse … So we get up. Only one mistake, game over… We cannot let her die, we wear her to go back down to camp IV. It’s so hard, so hard … but we’re not going to give up. »»
He leaves, there are fifty steps before he sits again. A fair colossus would make the spectacle by walking fifty steps by the sea, a soft mass of 50 kilos on his back. But in crampons on dizzying slopes, the highest in the world, where the air is three times lighter and the bodies three times heavier?
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