Touching the Void (26 page)

I felt sad to have dropped out of the summit attempt. The leg had worked so well, but then the pain had started. I knew that to climb here only ten weeks after the last operation was inviting fresh injury but I was glad I had tried, and there was always next year.

Six days earlier we had reached the col beneath the shoulder of our mountain, and dug a snow cave. We had sat outside gazing silently at the Himalayas stretching away from us. The sun had burnt down from an endless blue sky, and the sea of snow summits was etched sharply in the crystal clear air. This was what I had come to see. Pristine, untouchable. Lofting into the sky, perfectly beautiful. The sun glittered diamante reflections off frozen snow crystals. Karun Koh loomed above, only five miles distant. I fancied I could see the curve of the earth in the limitless horizon of peaks set before me. I tried to believe I” could see Everest despite knowing it was 1,000 miles from here. The names of the ranges rolled through my mind: the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, Tibet and the Karakorams. Everest, goddess mother of the snows, Nanda Devi, K2, Nanga Parbat, Kanchenjunga; so much history in those names. And of all those who had climbed on them. Suddenly they were real to me, as they never would have been had I chosen not to return. Somewhere out in those serried peaks lay the bodies of two of my friends, alone, buried in the snows on different mountains. That was the dark side of this beauty which for this moment, I could close from my mind.

I packed my rucksack, shouldered it and, after one last look towards where they had disappeared, turned away and began the walk back to camp.

Ten years on…

In his book about another climb in the Andes, Against the Wall (published in 1997), Simon Yates was kind enough to acknowledge that I had told his side of the Siula Grande story ‘faithfully and truly’ in Touching the Void, and he ruminated on the questions of conscience that might have remained a decade or so after the event. I am so relieved to hear him say that his conscience is clear, for he did what I would have done in his place, the only sensible course open to him at the end of an heroic attempt to rescue me. He wrote:

Some would argue that there was no decision to be made; that cutting the rope and the powerful symbol of trust and friendship it represents should never have entered my mind. Others say that it was simply a matter of survival, something I was forced to do.

As it happened, for a long time I simply hung on, hoping that Joe would be able to take his weight off the rope and relieve my position. By the time I remembered I had a knife in the top of my rucksack I was at the end of my tether, unable to hold him for much longer. I knew I had done all that could reasonably be expected of me to save Joe, and now both our lives were being threatened, I had reached a point where I had to look after myself. Although I knew my action might result in his death, I took the decision intuitively in a split second. It simply felt the right thing to do, like so many critical decisions I had taken during the climb. Without hesitation, I removed the knife from the rucksack and cut the rope.

Such moments of intuition always seem to feel the same—impersonal, as if the decision has not come from my own mind. Only with hindsight could I see there had been a build-up to that moment. During the days before, we had made many errors of judgement. We had not eaten or drunk enough and carried on climbing long after nightfall. By doing so, we had allowed ourselves to become cold, exhausted and dehydrated. One evening I became so cold waiting outside for Joe to finish digging a snow-hole that some of my fingers became frostbitten. In short, we had not looked after ourselves…

I can see now that Simon is right, though I didn’t always view it this way, as a matter of neglect. Analysing after a climb what you did correctly or incorrectly is as important as being fit or talented. So it was natural that for several years I too mulled over what had happened and tried to work out where we had gone wrong and what vital mistakes we had made. At first I was convinced we had done nothing wrong. I would still have back-climbed the ice cliff in the way I did, although perhaps with a little more care about the quality of the ice. We would still have climbed Alpine-style, used snow-caves instead of tents and carried the same equipment and food. It was Simon who eventually pointed out to me where we had made our fatal mistake, and it happened before we left base camp. Gas.

We hadn’t allowed ourselves enough gas to keep us adequately hydrated. One small canister between the two of us per day was simply insufficient. So as to save weight, we had pared everything down to the minimum. It left us no room to manoeuvre when things started to go so drastically wrong. When Simon lowered me to near the Santa Rosa col, and before we committed ourselves to descending the West Face in a gathering storm and imminent darkness, we had considered digging a snow-cave and sitting the storm out. If we had done that we could have made the lowers on a bright and sunny day. “We would have seen and avoided the ice cliff, and remained in control.

Instead, as the storm cloud gathered over the col, we were painfully aware that we had run out of food and gas the previous night. Already dangerously dehydrated, we couldn’t risk the possibility of being trapped by a prolonged storm with no way of producing fluid. I was already suffering the dehydrating and weakening effect of a traumatic fracture of a major bone and the consequent internal bleeding. We had no choice. For the sake of a canister of gas to melt ice and snow for warm drinks, we had to carry on. And so we lost control, and nearly our lives.

In his book Simon continues his analysis:

All my agonising after cutting the rope had not changed anything. My decision had been right; we had both survived. In subsequent years, I have overheard numerous heated debates about the ethics of my decision and many ‘what if scenarios. I have met people who are understanding of my actions and others who are openly hostile. Their secondhand opinions mean nothing compared to the words Joe uttered to me in the tent that night in Peru. With the greater mountaineering skills and experience I now possess, I do not believe that I would get into such a situation again, but if somehow I did, I know that my decision would be the same. In just one respect I feel I was neglectful. In the extreme stress of my predicament I came to the conclusion without a close inspection that any attempt at rescue in the crevasse was impossible. On reflection, I can see that it would probably have done more harm than good to have tried, but it simply did not occur to me to go to the edge and look carefully into the depths.

Ultimately, we all have to look after ourselves, whether on mountains or in day to day life. In my view that is not a licence to be selfish, for only by taking good care of ourselves are we able to help others. Away from the mountains, in the complexity of everyday life, the price of neglecting this responsibility might be a marriage breaking down, a disruptive child, a business failing or a house repossessed. In the mountains the penalty for neglect can often be death.

‘Secondhand opinions’, as Simon puts it, were never something I paid much attention to after the accident. We knew exactly what had happened between us and were quite happy with it. I wrote this book in the hope that, by telling the story ‘straight’, it might nip in the bud any harsh or unfair criticism of Simon. The rope cutting had clearly touched a nerve, transgressed some unwritten rule, and people seemed to be drawn to that element of the story—until I wrote it down as honestly as I could.

Even so, the misinformed opinions of some armchair adventurers were never going to worry either of us for long. Recovering from my injuries and getting back to the mountains were my priorities, not vague speculation by others on what we should or should not have done. Ninety per cent of accidents are down to human error. We are fallible, and accidents will happen. I suppose the trick is to anticipate all the possible consequences of what you set out to do so that, if things do go wrong, you are better able to stay in control.

I can add only that however painful readers may think our experiences were, for me this book still falls short of articulating just how dreadful were some of those lonely days. I simply could not find the words to express the utter desolation of the experience.

Joe Simpson August 1997

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