Prose and wriggled into their sleeping bags. Next morning, at a.m. on May , they began to get ready for the climb. .
We started up our cooker and drank large quantities of lemon juice and sugar, and followed this with our last tin of sardines on biscuits. I dragged our oxygen sets into the tent, cleaned the ice off them, and then rechecked and tested them. . I had removed my boots, which had become wet the day before, and they were now frozen solid.
So I cooked them over the fierce flame of the Primus and managed to soften them up. Over our down clothing we donned our windproof and on to our hands we pulled three pairs of gloves – silk, woollen, and windproof. 12th - - Page . At .
a.m. we crawled out of that tent into the snow, hoisted our lb . of oxygen gear on to our backs, connected up our masks and turned on the valves to bring life-giving oxygen into our lungs. A few good deep breaths and we were ready to go.
Still a little worried about my cold feet, I asked Tenzing to move off. . Tenzing kicked steps in a long traverse back towards the ridge, and we reached its crest where it forms a great snow bump at about 28000 feet. From here the ridge narrowed to a knife-edge and, as my feet were now warm, I took over the lead.
. The soft snow made a route on top of the ridge both difficult and dangerous, which sometimes held my weight but often gave way suddenly. After several hundred feet, we came to a tiny hollow, and found there the two oxygen bottles left on the earlier attempt by Evans and Bourdillon. I scraped the ice off the gauges and was relieved to find that they still contained several hundred litres of oxygen – enough to get us down to the South Col if used sparingly.
Col depression in a mountain chain; a pass . I continued making the trail on