PULMONARY oedema is no picnic. The victim is usually higher up a mountain than he should be, and the blood-gas barrier in his lungs begins to fracture in the thin air. Bloody spittle oozes from his mouth. He gasps for breath. A gurgle emanates from deep below his trachea. Soon the poor chap (and this story is about a chap) starts drowning in his blood.
Cerebral oedema is even less jolly. Falling atmospheric pressure is, again, the problem. The brain swells and is crushed against the skull. Splitting headaches, vomiting and slurred speech are among the warning signs. Death follows quickly if they are not heeded. Oedema of any kind can get especially ugly on Mount Everest because even base camp is beyond the reach of all but the most daring helicopter pilots. But there is a reasonably reliable prevention strategy: be incredibly, inhumanly fit.
A good way of seeing if you meet this standard is to climb a series of successively higher “training” mountains in a short time. This is what was demanded of Sir Ranulph Fiennes by the guiding company that he hopes will take him up Everest next year, and this is why, lean, tanned and distinctly chuffed, he returned the other day from a fortnight cantering around Ecuador’s volcanic uplands.
Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes is 60. He’s famous for enduring epic pain in freezing places, and for doing all this burdened by his triple-barrelled surname and the expectations of dozens of generations of semi-noble ancestors. The Fiennes caricature, in other words, is of an old-school toff, a chip off the Shackleton block, achieving obscure and masochistic firsts through grit and bloody-mindedness for the sake of honour and his sponsors, not necessarily in that order.
Here are some things he’s less well known for: he used to be a heavy smoker and butter-eater (whole 8oz packs washed down with tea as a quick way of absorbing calories) who even before running seven marathons in seven days last year had earned a top spot in the sport of adventure racing, which involves running for several days through rugged terrain in the knowledge that if you collapse you’ll be a grievous let-down for your team.
Before those marathons Fiennes had a severe heart attack and double bypass surgery. Since then he’s conquered Ecuador, climbing six of the seven volcanoes he attempted over two weeks. He turned back on the third highest, but only because of fog. The highest, Chimborazo, defeats 95 per cent of those who attempt it.
Fiennes may yet fail on Everest. Indeed, he may die on it — a prospect that seems to intrigue rather than frighten him. But his quixotic foray into mountaineering so late in life, after avoiding the world’s high places because of vertigo, already looks less like a mere stunt than a nigh-on unprecedented achievement for the human body. On his return from the volcanoes I found myself wondering: is this the fittest man alive?
Er, no. First of all, Ecuador wasn’t effortless. Chimborazo, he says, was “a nightmare struggle”. Slogging up the summit cone through soft, thigh-deep snow shortly after sunrise, he was “utterly exhausted. I just kept saying to myself, ‘If you can’t do this, you can’t do Everest’. It was much more demanding and difficult than any marathon I’ve run.”
This is saying something. He ran the fourth of his seven marathons, in the searing heat of Singapore, with pain etched on his face and his head hanging so far forward that it looked as if it might fall off.
The fact that he finished, though, speaks volumes. “In terms of fitness he’s at an exceptional level for anyone, never mind a 60-year-old with heart trouble,” says his friend Steven Seaton, the editor of Runner’s World.
And in terms of endurance he’s probably unique. “The more difficult the terrain, the better he does. In mountain marathons he always wants conditions to be bad because he knows if people fall and get bloodied others might pull out but he can just keep going.”
So he’s in good shape. He can also be relied on not to complain. But Everest could still kill him. He handed me a copy of Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind, which he had been reading. The following passage was heavily underlined:
“There are many ways to die in the mountains; there is death by freezing, death by falling, death by avalanche, death by starvation, death by exhaustion, death by rock-fall, death by ice-fall and death by the invisible aggression of altitude sickness . . . Falling is, of course, the ever-present option. Gravity doesn’t ever forget itself or go temporarily off duty.”
On Chimborazo there had also been death by lightning. The evening before their attempt on the summit Fiennes’s guide told him about an ex-colleague and client caught on the summit by an electric storm in 1993. When their bodies were found, one had a perfectly cauterised hole in his skull. The other had been struck in the shoulder. Their plastic boots were melted and their ice axes and crampons had dissolved like solder.
“You do get the feeling there’s someone up there throwing darts at you,” Fiennes says, smiling a little, and points to another sentence in the book. It deals with “the messy details of death — the horrifying seconds of frictionless plummet, the bones and organs turned into a mass of jelly by the impact . . .” Fiennes is now raising his eyebrows. “Horrifying? Not necessarily. Jellied organs? So what? Death itself is really nothing to worry about. What interests is the idea of trying to control one’s thoughts in those seconds of freefall. If you could, what would you think?”
When we last talked about death, in a hut in the Alps three months ago, Fiennes became too choked up to talk. My question had been about whether his wife’s death earlier this year had somehow freed him to accept or even welcome the idea of his own. He now seems to have got his thoughts in order. Being a God-fearing man has helped; he believes in the hereafter. But losing his mother may have done so too. She died after a long illness in August, leaving him with neither dependents nor next of kin: he has no children, and his father died before he was born.
All that is left of Sir Ranulph now is his own life as an explorer, and the suggestion that risking his neck on Everest might be seen as irresponsible riles him considerably.
“When people are irresponsible, their irresponsibility lies in the fact that they’ve got dependents. I have none, and I didn’t climb when I did. As for petulant attacks on people who need rescuing in out-of-the-way places, that’s a journalistic ploy one has been putting up with and getting used to for 30 years. All those guides going up all those mountains know that any of their clients could become immobile or dead in the higher reaches. That ’s what they’re paid for.”
No dependents, then. No inhibitions either. What’s it like on the top of Everest? What’s it like falling off? Fiennes may find answers to both, either or neither, but this much is clear: he is now insured, and going there.
