Touching the Void (16 page)

I stumbled through the chaotic maze of boulders and scree. When at last I looked back at the glacier, Siula Grande was no longer visible. I sagged wearily against a boulder, letting my mind run haphazardly over my pain and sorrow. The thirst had become unbearable. My mouth was dry and I swallowed. What little saliva it produced failed to ease the discomfort. The descent had become a confused blur of endless boulder fields, burning midday sun, and the thirst. My legs felt weighted down and so weakened I fell repeatedly among the rocks. When loose rocks slipped suddenly under my feet, I found that I had no strength to prevent myself falling. I used the axe to steady myself, and occasionally flung a hand out for support. Fingers slapped unfeeling against sharp boulders. The sun had failed to revive any sensation in them, and they remained numb and cold. After an hour I saw the rounded boulder, with water glistening as it ran over its flank. I quickened my pace, feeling a burst of energy come through me at the thought of water.

When I reached the hollow at the base of the boulder, and dropped my rucksack on the wet scree, I saw that there was not enough flow to satisfy my craving thirst. Carefully I built a catchment area in the gravel at the base of the rock. It filled with tantalising slowness and, after sucking a gritty mouthful, was empty again. I crouched at the rock drinking and waiting, and drinking again. There seemed no end to the amount I could drink. A sudden clatter from above made me duck away to the side. A handful of rocks thumped into the scree beside me. I hesitated before returning to the water pool. We had rested and drunk from here on the way up. Rocks had also fallen on us then, and we had jumped away laughing at our fright. Joe had called it ‘Bomb Alley’. The melting snow above the boulder released regular bombardments of small rocks as the day heated up. I sat on my sack spitting bits of grit from my mouth. There were footprints in the soft muddy scree and gravel of the hollow, the only trace left of our attempt on the mountain. It was a lonely place to rest. In the huge chaos of the moraines I had sat down to rest at the one spot where I would be reminded. We had sat in the same spot six days earlier. All our keen excitement, and the healthy strong feel in our bodies, had become an empty memory. I glanced at the moraines which hid the lower lake. There was little time left for this loneliness. I would reach base camp in another hour, and then it would be finished.

I set off for the lakes, the water flooding a fresh strength into my limbs. I was worried now by the thought of meeting Richard, who would want to know what had happened. Everyone would want to know. I didn’t want to face the prospect of telling him. If I told him the truth I would be forced to tell the same story when I returned to home. All I could think about was the disbelief and criticism I was inevitably going to be confronted with. I couldn’t face it. I shouldn’t have to face it! Anger and guilt clashed in my arguments as to what I should do. I knew above everything that I had been right to do what I had done. Deep inside I would always know that I had nothing to be ashamed of. If I concealed, the truth it wouldn’t be so bad. I would be avoiding a lot of unnecessary pain and anguish.

Why tell them that you cut the rope? They’ll never know otherwise, so what difference does it make! Just say he fell down a crevasse when we were coming down the glacier, yeah! Tell them we were unroped. I know it’s a stupid thing to do, but damn it, loads of climbers die like that. He’s dead. How he died isn’t important. I didn’t kill. It’s lucky I’m here at all…so why make it worse. I can’t tell the truth.

God! I hardly believe it myself…they certainly won’t.

When I reached the lake I was still convincing myself that to tell the truth was stupid. I knew it would only cause me grief. I could scarcely bear to think what Joe’s parents would say. After drinking again at the lake I walked on towards camp more slowly. My mind kept telling me what I should say. It was reasonable and sensible. I couldn’t fault the logic. But something inside shied away from doing it. Perhaps it was guilt. However many times I persuaded myself that I had no choice but to cut the rope a nagging thought said otherwise. It seemed like a blasphemy to have done such a thing. It went against every instinct; even against self-preservation.

The time passed without notice. I had wrapped myself in tangled hurtful thoughts until I felt I must surely burst. I could listen to no rational arguments against the feelings of guilt and cowardice which insisted so painfully. With the same fatalism as before I resigned myself to punishment. It seemed right to be punished; to atone for leaving him dead as if simply surviving had been a crime in itself. My friends would believe me and understand. The others could choose to think what they wished, and if it hurt me, well perhaps I deserved it.

At the end of the second small lake I climbed the final rise of the moraines and looked down on the two tents at base camp. The thought of food and drink and medication for my frostbite made me hurry down the cactus-covered hillside above the tents. I had forgotten about the dilemma of what to say to Richard and was almost running in my haste to get down. I slowed down to scramble over a small hillock, from the top of which I saw Richard walking slowly towards me. He was carrying a small rucksack and was bent over looking at the ground. He hadn’t heard me. I stood still, shocked by his sudden appearance, and waited for him to come to me. An awful weariness rushed through me as I waited silently. It was all over, and the relief flooding me deepened the sense of exhaustion. I felt as if I were going to cry but my eyes remained stubbornly dry.

Richard looked up from the path and saw me. His anxious expression changed to surprise, and then he grinned broadly, his eyes alight with pleasure as he hurried to me:

‘Simon! It’s good to see you. I was worried.’

I could think of nothing to say and stared blankly at him. He looked confused and searched behind me for some sign of Joe. Perhaps my face told him, or he had been expecting something bad! ‘Joe?…’

‘Joe’s dead.’

‘Dead?’

I nodded. We fell silent. We couldn’t look at each other. I dropped my sack to the ground and sat heavily on it, feeling as if I would never be able to stand up again.

‘You look terrible!’

I didn’t reply. I was thinking about what to say to him. My plan to lie was all very well but I couldn’t summon enough energy to tell it. I stared at my blackened fingers helplessly. ‘Here, eat this.’ He handed me a bar of chocolate. ‘I’ve got a stove, I’ll get some tea going. I was just coming up to look for you. I thought you were lying hurt somewhere…Did Joe fall? What’s happened?’

‘Yeah, he fell,’ I said flatly. ‘There was nothing I could do.’

He chattered on nervously. I think he sensed that I needed time to adjust. I watched him preparing the tea, passing me more food, and searching in the medicine bag he had brought up. Eventually he gave it to me and I took it without saying anything. I felt a sudden deep affection and gratitude to hint for being there. I knew he would have killed himself in the crevasses on the glacier if he had managed to get that far. I wondered whether he had been aware of the danger. He glanced up and saw me watching him. We smiled at each other.

It was warm sitting on the hillock. Without realising I was doing it I told Richard exactly what had happened. I could have done nothing else. He sat silently listening to all that I had been through, not once questioning me, nor looking surprised at what I was saying to him. I was glad I was telling him the truth. Not to have done so might have saved me hurt, but I knew as I told him that there was so much more we had managed to do that should be told. The rescue in the storm, the way we had worked together, the way we fought to get down alive. I couldn’t say Joe had fallen into a crevasse when stupidly walking unroped on the glacier, not after he had been through so much trying to survive. I couldn’t do him the injustice of lying, and my feeling of having failed him made it an impossibility to lie. When I had finished Richard looked at me:

I knew something terrible had happened. I’m just glad you managed to get down.’ We packed away the remains of his provisions, and he put them in my big sack and then shouldered both sacks. We walked quietly down to the tents.

For me the rest of the day passed in a sluggish haze. I lay wearily in the sun outside the dome tent with my gear scattered around me drying in the sun. We talked no more of joe. Richard busied himself producing a hot meal and endless cups of tea. Then he sat near me and talked of the long wait he had endured, gradually accepting that some disaster had overtaken us until he could bear the uncertainty no longer and had set out to find us. For six or seven hours I did nothing but doze and eat in the sun. It was difficult to adjust to the luxury of camp. I could feel my strength returning and lay in half sleep feeling my body mending itself.

Towards early evening the clouds massed in from the east, and the first heavy raindrops spattered us. There was a heavy roll of thunder and we retreated to the big dome tent which up until then I had been reluctant to enter. Richard brought his sleeping bag over from his tent and began cooking another meal on two gas stoves in the entrance. By the time we had finished eating the rain had turned to snow and a strong wind was shaking the tent. It was freezing outside.

We lay side by side in our sleeping bags listening to the storm. The candlelight flickered red and green off the tent walls, and by it I saw Joe’s possessions shoved untidily to the back of the tent. I thought of the storm the previous night and shuddered. The picture remained in my head as I fell asleep. I knew how bad it would be up there. The avalanches would be pouring down, filling the crevasse at the ice cliff, burying him. I fell into an exhausted dreamless sleep.

In the Far Distance

The snow made soft rustling noises as it slithered into the depths below. I stared at the ice screw far above me, watching it getting smaller. The ice bridge which had stopped my fall stood out clearly. Behind it the open cavern of the crevasse faded into shadows. I gripped the rope gently, and let it slide through the belay plate at a smooth constant rate.

The desire to stop abseiling was almost unbearable. I had no idea what lay below me, and I was certain only of two things: Simon had gone and would not return. This meant that to stay on the ice bridge would finish me. There was no escape upwards, and the drop on the other side was nothing more than an invitation to end it all quickly. I had been tempted, but even in my despair I found that I didn’t have the courage for suicide. It would be a long time before cold and exhaustion overtook me on the ice bridge, and the idea of waiting alone and maddened for so long had forced me to this choice: abseil until I could find a way out, or die in the process. I would meet it rather than wait for it to come to me. There was no going back now, yet inside I was screaming to stop. I could not bring myself to look down to see what lay below. I dared not risk turning to discover just another deep hole. If I saw that I would stop immediately, and then what? A desperate struggle to remain on the rope fighting against the steep pull of the slope, unable to regain the ice bridge, but frantically trying to hang on as long as possible…No! I couldn’t look down. I wasn’t that brave. In fact I was having enough difficulty staving off the dread which swamped through me as I descended. It was this, or nothing…I had decided that on the bridge, and now I was committed. If it was to end here then I wanted it to be sudden and unexpected, so I kept my eyes fixed on the ice screw far above me.

The slope became steeper. When I was about fifty feet below the ice screw I felt my legs swing suddenly beneath me into open space. My grip stopped the rope involuntarily. This was the drop I had seen from the bridge! I stared up at the bridge trying to make myself release the rope again. I had experienced the sensation in the past, standing on the edge of a high diving board watching the water drops falling free from my hair to the pool below as I waged a mental battle to convince myself that there was nothing to it, daring myself to do it, and then off into space with a heartstopping swoop, and laughter as I plunged safely into the water below. The knowledge that I could abseil until the rope ran out, and then fall into space as its unknotted end whipped through the belay plate, made me clench the rope even harder with my frozen hand. At last I released it and the old feeling—that the pool might suddenly move to one side, or the water empty as soon as I dived returned once more, though I didn’t know this time if there was a pool to aim for. I abseiled slowly over the drop until I was hanging vertically on the rope. The wall of the drop was hard, clear, water ice. I could no longer see the ice screw, so I stared into the ice as I continued to lower myself past the wall. For a short while it held my attention, but as the light around me grew fainter the dread spilled over and I could contain myself no longer. I stopped.

I wanted to cry but couldn’t. I felt paralysed, incapable of thinking, as waves of panic swept through me. The torment of anticipating something unknown and terribly frightening broke free, and for a helpless immeasurable time I hung shaking on the rope with my helmet pressed to the ice wall and my eyes tightly closed. I had to see what was beneath me because, for all my convictions, I didn’t have the courage to do it blind. Surely it could not make me any more frightened. I glanced at the rope stretched tautly above me. It ran up the wall and disappeared on to the slope above. There was no possibility of getting back to that slope some twenty feet above me. I looked at the wall of the crevasse close by my shoulder. On the other side another wall of ice towered up ten feet away. I was hanging in a shaft of water ice. The decision to look down came as I was in the process of turning. I swung round quickly, catching my smashed knee on the ice wall and howling in a frenzy of pain and fright. Instead of seeing the rope twisting loosely in a void beneath me, I stared blankly at the snow below my feet not fully believing what I was seeing. A floor! There was a wide snow-covered floor fifteen feet below me. There was no emptiness, and no black void. I swore softly, and heard it whisper off the walls around me. Then I let out a cry of delight and relief which boomed round the crevasse. I yelled again and again, listening to the echoes, and laughed between the yells. I was at the bottom of the crevasse.