Friday 28th May, 7am

There's no news of the expedition. Or nearly…

Since last Sunday, news coming from the North Face of Everest has been in short supply. Or to be frank: non-existent.
Neither at the expedition HQ here in Brussels - and therefore on our antarctica.org website - nor on the other Internet sites devoted to the Himalayas, nor even at Kathmandu itself. We got in touch with the agency that Alain Hubert always deals with for his expeditions, even if this time he was part of a commercial expedition, only to learn that they didn't have any news either. We also contacted Elizabeth Hawley, the New Zealand journalist based in the Nepalese capital, who for some thirty years has been converting the giant into facts and figures, but she too had heard nothing. In a word, in political terms it would be called a black-out.
The men had left the ABC camp on Monday for the summit that they wanted to reach during the night of the following day - that is to say Tuesday evening. Hubert had made a final phone call to us Saturday evening to tell us what he was intending to do. Since then, nothing… Yesterday, we were telling ourselves that this lack of news was quite normal - progress a bit slower than hoped, some tiredness during the descent, the radio aerial playing up, perhaps a failure that they didn't in any way want to broadcast to the press straightaway…
This morning, Friday, and entirely without panicking of course, because the native prudence of old man Hubert in such circumstances is legendary, we have begun to ask ourselves what's going on up there… When we talk of no news, we exaggerate a little. Yesterday morning, the everestnews.com site (which is the hallmark site for Himalayan expeditions that is now known by everybody), announced that two members of the Everest International Expedition had successfully reached the summit on Wednesday, 26 May at 11am local time, but they were unable to publish the names. We jumped on these few lines to tell ourselves that basically the Everest International Expedition is indeed Pascal Debrouwer's expedition, and that the two men who had just set foot on the roof of the world could only be Hubert and Manram (see the news bulletin published on yesterday's site, reproduced on Thursday at the end of this text *). And then this morning, disillusion; pressed to disclose the identity of these two mysterious summit-men, everestnews.com has said that there were in fact three expeditions listed in their records under the heading "Everest International Expedition", that all three were in the process of climbing the Northeast ridge, and that it knew neither which expedition nor which men were involved. Back to square one, therefore : yesterday we were limiting the number of possible conquerors (excluding the Hubert/Manram pair) to three. This morning, the candidates are much more numerous than we had thought. Faced with this muddle, the only thing we could do was to concentrate on the few certainties.

So why this silence?
It's obviously hard to say. But we have decided to suggest some explanatory clues here, without presuming that they are in fact correct. According to Hubert, the unencumbered round trip ABC/Summit/ABC would take about three days, which are briefly recapitulated as follows: departure from 6400 (ABC) on the first day, arrival at 7100 (North Pass) in the afternoon, make camp at 7100, leave on the second day to reach 7800 (Camp 2) at about 17.00 on the same day, brief rest and continuation of the ascent to 8300, altitude to be reached at midnight, advancing at night towards the summit which is to be reached on the morning of the third day. Descent to ABC the same day.

That is what would happen in ideal conditions. But the hiccup this week is the tourists who have undertaken an assault on the giant. When one is on the other side of Everest, this is of no great consequence, because from that side of the mountain there is only one genuine, technically feasible passage, the Hillary shelf. But on the North Face there are three! The two steps (first and second), small cliffs of 4 to 5 on the climbing scale, then the last, just below the summit, which is called the cathedral. One can easily imagine a scene showing those incompetent tourists (remember that their leader, Russel Brice, had to show them how to fix their crampons to their boots) lining up at the foot of these difficulties - both the ascent and the descent incidentally - and the Hubert / Manram pair being obliged to come to terms with this surrealistic situation. Add to that the fact Brice and Hubert don't get on very well (see Hubert's bulletins on the net about him, especially the one of 7 May) and that the former could take advantage of the situation to "get his own back" on the latter (Join the queue like everybody else, Mr Hubert, you don't own Everest, you know …), we have here, we believe, a possible reason for the silence; it could well be that instead of taking three days for the round trip, they are taking five or six, and at the time of writing this bulletin, they are still on the North Pass, for example.
We are however convinced that there are other reasons. Just as we are convinced that within 24 hours from now old man Hubert will surface again, and Manram with him.