At 2pm we slowly moved up to the Polish camp at ABC for the
funeral service. It was a strange, almost surreal affair. We helped carefully wrap the body in a blue tarpaulin and then carried it in last night's makeshift stretcher to a beautiful spot at the edge of the glacier.
Here the Polish team had prepared a simple, rocky grave and carved a headstone amongst the moraine. A very simple Catholic service followed and his teammates made a few touching speeches. Meanwhile, a solitary raven swooped down from the heights, as if to pay his own respects. It was very moving for all of us and we were all a bit choked up.
We had been pushed into an almost terrible and brief friendship with this complete stranger. I had fed him, talked constantly, and compelled this man to fight for his own life for over nine hours, while as a team we desperately struggled in freezing temperatures to carry him down Cho Oyu's treacherous moonlit moraines.
My first aid skills seemed wholly inadequate, and we all felt powerless; it was only after talking to the doctor that we realized that only an immediate helicopter evacuation to very low altitude may have helped.
