Fall

EXT.  BELOW THE SUMMIT OF EVEREST - CONTINUOUS
GEORGE and SANDY plod down the northern part of the summit pyramid, towards the head of the Norton Couloir through the thick lying snow as the sun starts to set.  The two are roped together on ten feet of rope, the unused length coiled round GEORGE's shoulders.  SANDY leads the way, GEORGE holding his rope from behind and above in case he slips. 
They near the bottom of the steep snow slope of the summit pyramid.  SANDY stops and removes his mask, panting.
SANDY
George, which way should we go?
GEORGE removes his mask, a little clumsily.
GEORGE
Eh?
SANDY
Which way? The Second Step is too much in the dark, surely?
GEORGE
Yes.
(beat)
Quite right.
(coughing)
We'll go down the couloir.
SANDY
Is it safe?
GEORGE pauses.  His eyes flicker a little, and betray his disquiet.
GEORGE
Yes.
He nods the way on, turning down to the left a little.  They put their masks back on and continue down.  They come to a stop at the head of the couloir and remove their goggles.  Though bright, the twilight is gathering.
GEORGE nods, indicating that SANDY should go down first.  SANDY looks at him uncertainly.  GEORGE nods again, and picks up the rope, holding it strongly before him.  SANDY begins to downclimb and we see him from GEORGE's POV.  There is a small ledge about twelve feet down, on which SANDY pauses, looking up, and then back down again.  His eyes show the verge of panic.
GEORGE's POV: He nods and begins to downclimb. 
SERIES OF SHOTS:
1) We are between GEORGE and the rock. 
2) GEORGE's POV.  His head is aching, his heart pounding violently, but his movements are clean and automatic.  Half way down to the ledge, there is a violent burst of pain, the wrenching headache has become an intense explosion of searing colour and palpitations seize in a moment of dizzying sickness and darkness.
3) A dark, shadow world, hearing voices from far away: a woman's voice, his mother's when he was a little boy.  There is a long panelled corridor of the rectory at Mobberley.  His sister Mary calls to him from the nursery.  He is running down the dark hall to the stairs, hurtling down the stair rail in the dark night. 
4) A woman's voice again, not his mother's - an Eastern voice, enchanting, murmuring his name.  Violent sickness and a nightmare quality.  The darkness turns an electric blue
5) Suddenly GEORGE is back on the Norton Couloir, clinging nimbly to the rock.  He is sick and pale and drenched.  He has made it to the ledge, but is utterly spent.  It is a tremendous effort to take off his mask.  He speaks as if drunk, leaning against the rock to support himself.
GEORGE
This is not a go.
SANDY pulls off his mask.
SANDY
What do you mean?
GEORGE
It's too dark.  Too late.  Too snowy.
SANDY looks down the couloir.  There is very little snow, except down at the bottom.  The rock is almost totally clear.
GEORGE closes his eyes. 
SHOT:
1)GEORGE is in Cambridge, at the boat launch beside the Cam with his team mates, in a jersey and shorts, laughing with them, young and astonishingly beautiful.
SANDY
Are you sure?
GEORGE snaps back to present, a little surprised to find himself standing on a ledge with SANDY.
GEORGE
Of what?
SANDY
That it's not safe?
GEORGE
Ab.  Sol.  Yes.  Bad day.  For it.
GEORGE closes his eyes again. 
SERIES OF SHOTS:
1) He is in the Alps, on the Moine Ridge on a day of the worst weather in twenty years, traversing through an almost complete whiteout. 
2) There is another blinding burst of pain in the head, and lurching halt from the heart.  He is tumbled back to the present.
GEORGE
Yes.  Damn.
He looks at SANDY, trying to remember who he is.
SANDY
George, all you all right?
GEORGE
(beat)
Yes.
Slowly GEORGE pulls himself out of his fog and looks about.
GEORGE
We need to climb back.  Up.  Try the tra.  Verse.  I'll go.
Turning, he pulls on his mask again and makes one sweeping reach for a hold far above his left hand, pulling himself up, finding hand- and footholds by instinct.  He is at the top of the couloir again in a few moments, and looks out over the vastness of the North Face before them, and the setting sun turning the nearby mountain tops rose and violet.
GEORGE
What a glory, this world, and a bloody terror.  I had no hope of getting us down, by any means.  Everything was now reliant on Sandy's strength and endurance.
Wearily, he makes his belay, mechanically hauling in rope as SANDY ascends the few feet they have downclimbed.  Pointing out over the Face, he nods to SANDY who leads down over the slabs of the Grey then the Yellow Band.
EXT.  YELLOW BAND - 8.15 PM
The two men stop, sitting to the west of where SOMERVELL stopped a few days before.  The oxygen frames are beside them, the now empty canisters lying about the rocks.  It is falling full dark now.
GEORGE has his head in one hand on his knee.
GEORGE
We need to move.  I know we need to move, but I cannot.  The body will not obey.  I can't see clearly.  What is wrong with me? Is this snow-blindness? How shall we get down? I must rouse myself.  He's saying something.  What?
SANDY has been doing calculations on a bit of paper with GEORGE's pencil.
SANDY
So that will put us at Camp VI at about 3.30.
GEORGE
A.M.
(beat)
Twelve hours.
(beat)
Damn.
SANDY
(apologetically)
Yes.
GEORGE looks out over the Face.
GEORGE
I think we
(beat)
should try for
(beat)
Five
SANDY
There's no stove there.
SERIES OF SHOTS:
1) GEORGE is at Charterhouse, before the Christmas Hols, in the house he shares with the other Masters.  There is a roaring fire in the grate.  Outside, through the window, the boys are playing in the rare early snow.  The room is dark and strewn with books and comfortable cast-off Victorian furniture.  There is a knock on the door
2) GEORGE is back on the North Face, in the encroaching darkness with SANDY.
GEORGE
We must go.
Wearily and unsteadily, he gets up, looking without enthusiasm over the Yellow Band and the expanse of the Face.  The traverse is over a mile to the North Ridge and 2,000 feet beyond that to Camp Five.  Faint, flickering lights are visible at Camp IV on  the North Col.  The night is clear and very cold.
GEORGE nods, and picks up his ice-axe.
EXT.  YELLOW BAND TO SNOW TERRACE - LATER
GEORGE's POV: The two men start off, SANDY leading down, with GEORGE belaying behind.  They are ten feet apart, but as the night progresses, GEORGE lets out more and more rope, until there is some twenty slack feet between them.  GEORGE steps slowly, carefully, mechanically.
SERIES OF SHOTS:
1) GEORGE in a grey haze of the shadow world.
2) A little dark woman appears in his vision.  She is wearing ancient Nepali dress, with painted eyes and a strange hungry smile.  She murmurs his name and sings a low haunting song in Sanskrit:

"The fire blazing from your heart symbolises that the warm and blissful wisdom of Dumo-heat will melt the ice of wandering thoughts.  The Sun and moon shining from your heart presage your e'er remaining in the never-coming, never-going Realm of Great Light." 
FADE TO:
3) A red-black haze of pain, the heart skipping, no mind.  GEORGE is stumbling and drifting in the shadowland
4) SANDY and GEORGE out on the Face, a quarter of the way across the Band.
5) GEORGE is with RUTH in a meadow in Tuscany, knee-deep in flax in flower.  Rhe has armfuls of it, and is laughing ahead of him, in a pale blue dress, the colour of the flowers, the colour of her eyes.
GEORGE
I shall always think of you in springtime.
RUTH
It shall always be our time.
FADE TO:
6) The words echo into the grey fog.  Far off, we hear the deep sound of Tibetan long horns, and the faint low rumble of chant.  It builds to the clash of cymbals and the red-black pain.  GEORGE is stumbling through the snow.
GEORGE
I cannot go on.  I shall never leave this place.  This hell will never end.  It is my karma, for the porters.  I have displeased my little goddess.
EXT.  SNOW TERRACE - LATER
The moon has now set and the brilliant light with it.  Now only the stars guide the two men.  They are half way across the Face, at the edge of the Snow Terrace.  SANDY is far ahead now, twenty feet or more.  GEORGE is now belaying the rope with his ice axe at every step, mechanically, an instinctive gesture.  The snow is not very deep. 
SERIES OF SHOTS:
1) GEORGE's POV: He is on a narrow path in an uncharted part of the Himalayas.  In the distance to the right we see the Everest massif. 
2) Immediately ahead of him is the top of a pass, and a snow-cave.  We see only the path before him, feet in Tibetan boots, occasionally his hands swinging out on dark clothes, brown with sunburn. 
3) In this white world there is a woman singing, the daikini, singing the same song as before, and, more distantly, chant and bells and horns, which grow steadily louder - as does sound of his breath and heart pounding.
4) The North Face, SANDY and GEORGE moving diagonally downwards.
5) The daikini, singing and the chant and bells and horns grow steadily louder - as does sound of his breath and heart pounding.
6) The North Face, SANDY and GEORGE moving diagonally downwards.  GEORGE forgets to belay.
7) Back in the Himalaya, with the woman before him, leading him on with an enticing, ghastly smile.
8) North Face.  Step.  Breathe.  Step.  Pause.  The singing and chanting and heart sounds grow louder, the heart racing wildly.  In his own vision he is ascending.
9) Himalyas/North Face.  The daikini is now before him on the Snow Terrace, between him and SANDY.  The horns become deafening, the chanting intense, the cymbals overwhelming, the heart racing until it can race no more.  There is suddenly stillness and total silence.
10) North Face.  GEORGE stops, but SANDY still trudges on through the snow of the terrace, unaware that GEORGE has stopped, as the rope is slack.
EXT.  TOP OF SNOW TERRACE - CONTINUOUS
The rope grows less slack and becomes taut.  We can see the slightly frayed area from the abrasion at the Second Step.  SANDY takes another step, and is abruptly jerked off his feet by the taut rope.  As he begins to slide, SANDY utters a strangled cry and manages to catch himself on a small, projecting piece of rock with his outstretched arm. 
Suddenly, with horror, he realises that GEORGE has also fallen, and is sliding away below him with accelerating speed.  At first he hears GEORGE's urgent cry, but it turns into a gasp and a shout and then fades as GEORGE falls from sight.
Still gripping the jutting rock, SANDY instinctively grasps the rope with his other hand - and realises that it has broken about five feet from his body: precisely where the rope had frayed slightly over the edge of the Second Step much earlier in the day.  GEORGE has fallen from sight down the shadows of the North Face into the night.
EXT.  MIDDLE OF SNOW TERRACE - CONTINUOUS
GEORGE's axe is knocked from his hand.  He slides and tumbles with increasing speed down a snow slope under the moonlight, knocking against shadowy islands of rock, which injure and wind him, on the way to a final resting place about a hundred feet below where the slope shallows out very slightly.
He crashes his head against a large rock at the foot of the slope, incurring a fatal head wound.  But he is still alive.  His lower leg is broken.  He is losing consciousness quickly as his life ebbs away.  He is lying prone, with both arms outstretched in their final position, finally having arrested his fall.  He crosses his uninjured leg over the other.  He closes his eyes and grimaces with pain.
EXT.  TOP OF SNOW TERRACE - CONTINUOUS
SANDY, unhurt, picks himself up and scrambles as fast as he can down the dangerous slope, slipping and sliding but somehow staying in control.  He is shouting in panic and despair.
SANDY
GEORGE! GEORGE!!
EXT.  BOTTOM OF SNOW TERRACE - CONTINUOUS
SANDY reaches GEORGE's body and kneels down beside him.
SANDY
Geo...
GEORGE
(whispering)
I'm so sorry.
GEORGE slumps into lifelessness.
Tears stream from SANDY's face.
SANDY
GEORGE! NO!! NO!!
SANDY weeps openly.
SANDY
NO!! NO!! NO!! PLEASE GOD, NO!!
The tears stop flowing and SANDY, now still, stares at GEORGE's body for a long time.  He shakes his head over and over again.
SANDY
I would not wish any man to experience my plight at that moment.  I had killed my friend, my mentor, my guide.  I, a clumsy tyro, ending the life of this the greatest of mountaineers, the greatest of men.
(beat)
What was I to do now?
SANDY stares at GEORGE's body for a few more moments, then reaches into GEORGE's breast pocket and lifts out the camera with the precious images.  He slips it into his jacket side pocket, and rolls GEORGE back over.
SANDY slowly struggles to his feet and, wobbling slightly, looks around.  Disoriented by the fall, he is no longer at all clear where he is.  Unsteadily, he picks a way towards where he believes Camp IV is situated, where ODELL is sleeping.  He stumbles across the slope for about two hundred yards, going more and more slowly, then slumps to his knees.
SANDY
It is impossible for any man who has never been in my position to know my great distress.  Sandy Irvine: the man who killed George Mallory.
SANDY, still on his knees as if in supplication, raises his eyes to the night sky.
SANDY
How was I to cope with this?  With the accusations? With the gossip? With the cruel comments?
(beat)
And the kind words?
SANDY's head is spinning.  He weeps again, briefly, then is still and silent.  He pulls the camera out of his pocket and regards it.
EXT.  SUMMIT - FLASHBACK
SANDY is taking three photographs of GEORGE on the summit.
EXT.  BOTTOM OF SNOW TERRACE - CONTINUOUS
SANDY is still looking at the camera in his hand.
SANDY
(slowly, as in a trance)
I shall ensure the camera is found.  ODELL will find us both.  He will find us in the morning.
(beat)
Then the world will soon know that George Mallory climbed Everest this day.
SANDY holds the camera in both hands briefly, then places it carefully back in his pocket.  Still on his knees, he looks around and spies a final resting place for himself.  He staggers up unsteadily, and settles down in a crevice between two rocks.  He draws his knees up to his chest and hugs them tightly.  He is shivering violently, and we see his tear-stained cheeks in the moonlight.  He closes his eyes and angles his head forwards so his chin is resting on his chest.  The scene fades.